Try something new challenge: Making socks from an old cardigan

Susie has posted a challenge, for herself and whoever feels like joining in, to try something new. This may sound like a pointless challenge for me, as I'm trying new things all the time, but the idea is to pick something that's not, I'm really looking forward to trying that, but, I'd love to try that, but...

I promised enthusiastically to try something for this challenge, and came up with a list of projects including making a solar panel and converting my sewing machine to run on treadle-power, both of which I've been meaning to do for ages but not getting round to because they sound difficult, so exactly what this challenge is about. However, time ticked past and I didn't get round to the first stages of either of these, so I turned to my fall-back project of making socks.

I understand that socks are very difficult to knit...

I won't pinch the entire cartoon, but click the picture to see the rest of it on Gingerbread Lady's blog. It's very funny.

... but even knowing that, I had to add another element to challenge. I specifically wanted to knit socks out of wool salvaged from from an old cardigan. Whatever Susie might think, I'm not convinced it's worth spending £15 on yarn for a pair of socks, especially when I don't even know whether I'll succeed in making them. So... old jumper desctruction was in order.

I identified a sacrificial cardigan...

Rather frumpy cardigan. I quite like it, but Ian hates it, so I never wear it. Pebble doesn't think much of it, either

... and set to work with the quick-unpick dismantling the seams. When I eventually got a corner unfolded I made a discovery.

Cut edges of fabric

It turns out that this isn't a knitted garment as such, but a garment made out of knitted fabric. I should have guessed from the way it was stitched together, I suppose. That means that the yarn will be cut at each edge of piece, so I won't get a continuous thread. I unravelled a few pieces anyway, as I might as well, having got so far.

Pieces of cardigan-yarn. Not only short, but very crinkly

I had a go at knooking with one piece, and it was a @*&! not very nice thing to work with.

Attempting to knook with very crinkly yarn

That means I've ruined a perfectly good frumpy, old, slightly tea-stained cardigan for nothing. It also means that I haven't even got to the starting line in the challenge of making socks. I'm not sure I want to learn this skill enough to fork out on expensive yarn, so unless I come across some unexpectedly cheap sock yarn, I'll be leaving this challenge unmet.

Ice cream

I'd spotted in a recipe book that the best way of using up breadcrumbs is brown bread ice cream. This sounds very odd, but intriguing, and the other day I happened to have a lot of brown breadcrumbs needing a home...

The first thing I did was to prepare the breadcrumbs. This involved mixing them with an equal quantity of sugar, spreading on a baking tray and baking until the sugar has melted and the crumbs have caramelised. I didn't have the demerara sugar called for in the recipe, but never one to let a lack of ingredients put me off, I used a mixture of white granulated and soft dark brown sugars. Spreading it on a baking tray was a bit of a challenge - it ended up about half a centimetre thick, and in serious danger of falling off the edge whenever I stirred it, which I did because I didn't want the top to burn while the rest stayed uncooked. A fair bit ended up on the floor. What didn't go on the floor went in a pot for use the next day, as I had yet to obtain the cream.

Rather more than a pint of double cream was duly procured (metric measures - the big pots are now 600 ml) and most of it whipped, eggs were separated and beaten, and the whole lot combined.

Ingredients for brown bread ice cream

The recipe said it would make a pint of ice cream, but the ingredients were about a pint and looking at the amount of air in that recipe, I reckoned it would make a lot more than that. Sure enough, it nearly filled a one-litre tub.

I kept back some of the beaten egg white because I had an idea for another recipe. When I made rhubarb fool I thought it might be nice frozen, so I decided to try some as ice cream. I'd frozen the stewed rhubarb, so had to take some out of the freezer for this. It didn't seem very efficient thawing it out only to refreeze it, so I let it soften just enough for me to scrape it into mush with a knife and fork. I then mixed in sugar, the egg white, and enough cream to make it look the right sort of colour. It actually ended up looking pinkish, rather than sludge coloured like the fool.

I stirred both of them once when they were half frozen, then tested a scoop of each later in the day. I was surprised that the brown bread one wasn't fully frozen, as I'd started it earlier, but it was in a bigger tub.

Rhubarb and brown bread ice creams. Can you tell which is which?

Ian hasn't tried the rhubarb yet, and says the brown bread one tastes a bit like cookie dough ice cream, but he doesn't like the texture. The crumbs aren't as hard as toast crumbs, but they're certainly not soft. Oh well, all the more for me, then!

Elderflower champagne

It's now a year since my first experiments with homebrew and it feels that things have come full circle (for some reason, harvesting this year's dandelions didn't have the same impact on me). As soon as our elder tree started flowering, a couple of weeks ago, I got very excited about picking some flowers to start the next batch of elderflower champagne. There was just one problem...

Elder flowers playing hard to get

Actually, there were two problems. Not only were the flowers a long way from the ground, but the ground had a good covering of nettles and brambles. The second problem was tractable, though, and after a lot of careful work with the secateurs, I'd cleared a space around the tree. This didn't get me much closer to the flowers, though - more tools were needed. With the aid of the branch loppers (six foot long secateurs - effective, but difficult) and a step ladder (not to be recommended) I managed to pick a few heads of flowers.

I didn't really have as much as I would have liked, though, so I supplemented them with a few roses and three very small, unripe strawberries. The resulting mix was very pretty in the wine bucket.

Pretty flowers for making champagne

After last year's explosion, I've played safe and put it in plastic bottles, which are far less attractive than glass wine bottles. They're also bigger. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. One advantage of plastic is that you can judge whether the drink's getting fizzy by squeezing the bottle. I did, and the first one - the last one filled, that is, with less liquid and more yeast because it has the dregs from the bottom of the bucket - was getting very tight, so I opened it for testing.

First glass of elderflower champagne

It was most delicious! I then got carried away and opened a second bottle, which was still very sweet, but tasty nonetheless. I think I'm going to have to find a way of harvesting more flowers to make a second batch of this.

"How can I justify my lifestyle?"

I made this comment in a conversation with EcoCatLady about why I feel a lot of pressure for the garden to produce food, and she pulled me up short:

OK... just playing devil's advocate here, but I personally think that no one should have to "justify" a lifestyle of "pottering* around the garden and playing in the kitchen." at least not in a moral or ethical sense.

This has prompted a great deal of thought on my part, and I've already attempted and deleted one post on the subject (I rambled on and didn't get anywhere). After sleeping on it, I think I've worked out what I meant by that comment, and why I was wrong.

Although at the time I wrote it I did indeed mean it in a moral sense, I don't think that's actually where the pressure (in me) is coming from. It matters to me a lot that the garden produces food, but why?

My last job was quite a high-status position, as was the one before that. People asked my opinion and listened to what I said, and whatever I may think about the system in which that status mattered, that was how it was. What I do for a living has always been a big part of my identity – my own image of who I am – so having status inevitably ended up being part of my self-image, too.

I was very happy to give that up in exchange for a better life, but when I take a long, hard look at myself, I realise that my sense of self-worth may have taken a bit of a battering. In place of that status, I feel the need to have something to show for what I've done. I've put a lot of work into the garden, and I want it to give me something back so I can say, Look what I've done! Look at all these veg - I did that!

Now, I'm well aware of the things that can go wrong in a garden, and allowing my sense of self-worth to depend on the vagaries of weather, slugs, caterpillars and tomato blight is obviously not a good idea. More to the point, focusing on outcomes is generally not a good way to engage with life. Learning from EcoCatLady's recent, inspirational blog post, if we spend all our time focusing on what we've done, we miss out on the experience of doing it in the first place (read her post - she says it better). By getting too hung up on what the garden produces, I'm in danger of forgetting that the point of this new life is that I get to spend my time doing gardening.

I need to learn to value the doing, and give less weight to what I can acheive.

... I'm trying to compose a suitable conclusion here, but struggling. I think this is because this issue is something I need to give a lot more thought to. Maybe I'll come back to it when I have something more to say.

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* I looked it up and yes, puttering is American for pottering, or vice versa if you must ;-)

Rhubarb cordial and things to do with the leftovers

A friend we visited the other day, having noticed from my blog that my rhubarb is rubbish this year, gave me a big bag full of hers. How kind!

Rhubarb, cleaned and resting on the big mixing bowl. It's huge!

I'd had my eye on the rhubarb cordial recipe over at Colour it Green, so that was what I planned to do first. I started by chopping all the rhubarb into the jamming kettle, which took a while, then cooked it without water (I was surprised it didn't need any water, but it didn't). It really did need an hour for all of it to squish down, and it needed stirring fairly frequently, too.

Having stewed all the fruit*, I then needed to hang it up overnight to strain the juice out. The tricky bit is finding something to hang it from. Our kitchen is the old fashioned kind that has cup hooks everywhere. It also has a wooden beam running along the middle of the ceiling, so I thought there was a fair chance the two might come together. Sure enough, when I looked for it, there it was!

Cup hook in beam in the kitchen

Having found that, I had to get the stuff up there. I didn't have a jelly bag, but I do have a big piece of muslin, which just about went round the fruit as I had it folded. Several scalded fingers later, I had the bundle tied up with string and stood on a stool to tie it to the hook. Thankfully, the hook was strong enough to take the weight.

Bundle of stewed rhubarb hanging over a bowl

It was amazing that such an uninspiring brown sludge produced such pretty pink juice. The next morning it was still dripping slowly, so I left it until I'd done various other jobs, then took it down, drips or no. I was surprised to find that the juice was already quite syrupy at this stage. Then it was just a matter of adding sugar (to taste - I can't be bothered with measuring and weighing) and drinking some - to test it, of course ;-)

Green isn't the best colour of bottle for such a pretty pink drink,
but it's what I had

So what about the leftovers? I still had a huge quantity of stewed (if unsweetened - important not to forget that bit) rhubarb sitting in a bowl. Crumble is the obvious answer, but Ian doesn't like it. I fancied having a go at fool, with a vague memory of a gooseberry fool recipe that was basically just fruit and cream. I though I'd better check this, though, and consulted Delia. She said that there were various ways to make fool, but this was the best, and proceeded with a complicated recipe involving egg custard. I ignored Delia and tried Rose Elliot, who said that fool can be made with custard, cream or yoghurt. That's more like it, and I didn't really need a recipe.

I did need cream though, which I didn't have... as such. I'd read on the 'ish forum that it's possible to return butter to its original state (i.e. cream) by melting it in milk and whizzing up in a food processor. The proportions vary from half as much butter as milk for single cream to equal quantities for double. With this in mind, I'd bought some unsalted butter last time we went to the supermarket, about three weeks ago (the usual salted would be OK for savoury things, but not sweet) as they don't sell cream in the local shop. This unexpected rhubarb bonanza entirely justified this decision!

I whizzed up the warm milk and butter in the food processor** then added the stewed fruit and some sugar. The machine didn't mix it very well as it was too gloopy, but with a bit of poking it got there in the end.

Rhubarb fool. Don't comment, please.

It's really not pretty, but it is very tasty. Even Ian liked it :-)


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* No, not technically fruit, it's stems, but it's used as fruit, OK?

** In the interests of reducing electricity usage, I would mix up the cream with a whisk - which works, but probably not as well as the blender - and putting up with lumps from the stewed fruit. Ian, on the other hand, doesn't like bits in his yoghurt and as he hasn't tried fool before, I didn't want to take any chances with the texture.

First harvest: new potatoes

This afternoon I decided that I can't wait any longer - I'm going to dig up new potatoes and eat them for dinner, even if they're so small that I have to dig up half a row to get enough for a meal.

I identified my victim:

I didn't choose this one just because that's where I'd left the fork, honest

I dug it up...

Yep, there are definitely potatoes in there

... and harvested several actual potatoes! After I'd forced Ian to be impressed, then washed them, I weighed them to see how much I'd got from one plant.

Eleven ounces of very white new potatoes

I'm not sure whether or not I'll keep this up, but I would like to have a record of what yield I get from all the veg in the garden. In the meantime, this is the first harvest of a crop I've planted in this garden, and I'm very excited about it! I'm also very much looking forward to eating my fresh new potatoes for dinner. Yipee!!!

How not to get eaten alive

I've never been much bothered by midges and other biting, flying things before. I think I've usually managed to hang around people who are tastier than me, so get off lightly. Here, though, we have Welsh monster midges, and I tend to be out in the garden in the evenings, so my arms have ended up covered in itchy spots. Time for action!

We have a huge wormwood bush in the garden, which, apart from providing absinthe with its mystique*, is reputed to repell insects. It was the latter property that I intended to use.

I cut a bundle of branches of wormwood and stripped the leaves off into a basin (pudding basin, not the kind you wash your hands in). This was very tedious. I then added enough olive oil to coat all the leaves, mashed it about a bit, and left it to infuse, poking it from time to time. The next day, I separated the oil from the leaves with the help of a bit of old net curtain, i.e. I bundled the mixture into the net and squeezed all the oil out. The last bits were very dark brown, but I reckoned they'd probably have most of the scent in. I also added a couple of drops of lavender essence, as I happened to have a bottle.

I could have left it at that, and just applied the oil to my skin, but I fancied something a bit nicer, so I made it into moisturiser. This required first heating the oil. I had some chicken stock on the go, so rather than heat another pan, I stuck the basin in the top of the stock. A bit sticky, but effective!

Scented oil and beeswax stealing heat from chicken stock

The reason for heating the oil is that beeswax must be melted into it, so I added a bit. Once that was melted, I took it off the heat and whisked while it cooled down. Here I discovered the difference doing this in summer rather than winter. In cold weather, it very quickly reached the creamy stage and I had to act quickly before the whole lot went solid. That didn't happen this time. In fact, it didn't reach the creamy stage at all. I was aiming for body butter but got cold gravy.

More beeswax needed, then. I repeated the process, adding a bit more wax then whisking as it cooled. I also added a bit of water when it started to thicken, which it did this time. I'm not particularly fussed about the moisturising properties of this - the water was mainly to help reduce the resemblance to gravy. In this it was successful, and once it was in a nice glass pot, the finished cream didn't look too bad at all.

Insect repellant cream

The important question, though, is does it work? I tested it this evening, applying it to face, neck and arms, and going out to brave the midges. I did a bit of weeding round the onions and carrots, from where I've been driven indoors on other occasions, and... I didn't get bitten! It's possible that with today being a bit cooler and windier than other days there weren't so many of them around, so it's not a definitive test, but so far so good! I'll keep using it and let you know whether it's any good.

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*Wormwood is used to flavour absinthe. It contains a chemical called thujone which is hallucinogenic, which did much to bolster absinthe's reputation as a dangerous drink. In fact, if you drank enough absinthe to get hallucinations, you'd be dead from the alcohol.

How does my garden grow?

I keep telling myself not to be complacent about the garden. Yes, things seem to be growing well, but there are all manner of catastrophes that might befall it yet. Things could die of drought, or be drowned by too much rain, or be flattened by high winds. They could be eaten by slugs or snails or caterpillars or aphids or birds or one of many other pests out there. They could catch one or many of various deadly diseases. And let's not forget the potential for destruction by one small, lunatic cat.

It was only when I was showing my neighbour round the garden and said, Of course, it might all die, that her startled look brought me up short. Is this pessimism really warranted? More to the point, why am I being so pessimistic? It's completely out of character. Maybe it's because it's so important.

I'm giving myself a year's trial. If, at the end of a year, the new lifestyle isn't working, I'll have to abandon the dream and go back to my old life (by which I mean, try to get a job). A lot hangs on whether the garden produces a good harvest or not. It might also be that I've been very stressed about other things recently, so less inclined to optimism generally. Either way, it's time to stop being so negative about it all and appreciate what's actually going on in the garden.

The potato plants are huge...

Potatoes. Beans in the foreground.

... and flowering...

Flowers on the first early potatoes. The maincrop aren't flowering yet.

... as are the tomatoes (just)...

I had several goes at getting this tomato flower in focus. It's not quite there, but you get the idea.

... and the broad beans...

I think all of the broad beans have flowers on them now.

... and the earliest of the peas (the ones I sowed directly outside, then thought they'd died of cold).

This is the second pea flower I've found. I don't mind so much that the sweet peas didn't germinate when the edible pea flowers are so pretty.

These peas are quite big and already flowering (I just said that, didn't I?) and I also have medium-sized, just-germinated, and only-just-sown peas. I finally got the last of them in the ground a few days ago, which I believe is the very latest you can get away with. It remains to be seen whether I have, in fact, got away with it.

The runner beans my neighbours gave me last weekend (I must take some plants round in exchange!) are climbing:

Runner beans, just starting to wrap themselves round the canes

The carrots and onions are looking quite convincing:

Carrot and onion seedlings. And the odd stray potato.

Several red cabbages have so far survived slug attacks:

Young red cabbage. Small stones have been gathered from the surrounding flower bed to deter slugs.

There are many strawberries, taunting us with their pale greenness:

We wait with eager anticipation for these to turn red.

and the blackcurrants are rapidly ripening:

Soon I'll be making blackcurrant jam and cordial and wine. Possibly not all of those, and possibly not in that order of priority.

When I look at it, there are many things to be happy about in the garden.

Cutting down on waste, one thing at a time

I've been reading a few blogs recently in which people record all the rubbish, particularly plastic rubbish, that they dispose of in a week, or maybe in a day. I thought about doing this myself, then wondered what the value of such an exercise would be to me. I could pile up all my rubbish, document and photograph it, and think, Whoa! That's a lot of rubbish! or alternatively feel smug and think, That's not as bad as I thought it would be. Either way, what do I acheive?

If I ended up feeling smug, that obviously wouldn't be a very constructive outcome, but the other alternative is far more likely, and presumably this is the point of doing it. Would I then be motivated to cut down on how much stuff I throw away? Ignoring for a moment the fact that my main problem is bringing myself to throw anything away, ever, I'm not sure it would make that much difference. I'm already aware of the issues of excess packaging and I already have an almost pathological aversion to waste. However, we do still buy things that have some packaging, and a lot of this gets thrown away.

I think that rather than looking at packaging as a whole, a more productive approach for me is to pick on one item at a time and find an alternative way of doing things that doesn't involve throwing that thing away regularly. A little while ago, I switched from disposable sponge scourers for the washing up to homemade, washable discloths.

I make my own bread and I've been bothered by the piece of oiled cling film I use to cover the dough while it's rising, which gets thrown away with each loaf. I've long been aware of what they did in the days before cling film - they used a damp cloth - but I was a bit nervous about this method. What if I couldn't dry it out quickly - wouldn't it get smelly? What if it stuck to the dough - wouldn't it be horrendous to get the sticky dough out of the cloth? Recently I decided to get over these worries and just try it.

Rising bread dough under damp cloth

It actually sticks less than the oiled cling film, and when it does stick it's easier to peel off, so that's an improvement. As for drying it out, whenever I need to dry it, I have the oven on, almost by definition, so I can always hang it over the warm air vent at the top of the oven and it always dries. No doubt this is the way it's always been done.

Liquid soap for cheats

It is possible to make liquid soap from scratch, using potassium hydroxide instead of sodium hydroxide, and I intend to try it someday. In the meantime, we've run out of shower gel and I have no potassium hydroxide. It's pretty easy to make solid soap into liquid; just grate it into hot water and stir.

Soap in hot water

You can stop there if you like, or you can add glycerine if you feel like it, and anything else that seems appropriate. For the first attempt, I added a very small amount of glycerine, because that was all I had, and a bit of shampoo, which turned it pink and scented it surprisingly strongly. This shower gel was rather drying on the skin, probably also due to the shampoo. That one went into a handwash bottle and a second batch attempted. This time I just added glycerine, but quite a lot of it (having bought some more in the meantime*) - probably about one fifth of the total quantity.

This soap-in-water is most peculiar stuff. After it's cooled it remains the consistency of water for some time. It's only about 24 hours later that it becomes a gel.

Yes, this picture is supposed to be this way round. I'm showing you the jelly-nature of the shower gel.

This one is much less drying, though I did get complaints of 'tackiness' on the skin. Maybe not quite so much glycerine next time.

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*Glycerine is sold in Boots as budget cough medicine, at £1.69 for 200ml. It is also sold in supermarket home baking sections, from 65p for 38ml, which is twice the price and much more packaging.