Advent Calendars

Well, happy first day of winter.  And did you have your advent calendar ready?  Or, like me, where you up to the wee small hours sticking chocolates into little packages.  

I say Advent Calendars (plural) as I have made a number of them this year.  My Little Foxes school's Christmas Bazaar was on the weekend and I was in charge of the craft stall.  As a result I have made 6 advent calendars, 5 for sale (and they sold - Phew!) and one for Little Una and Little Louis Fox. 

The picture above is not my children's calendar, but one that was sold.  I really thought that this one turned out well, so, I thought I would share how I made it.

YOU WILL NEED:

A piece of wood, approx 1m long

24 or 25 pegs

24 or 25 envelopes

garden twine, approx 120cm

2 screws

coloured paper 

glue gun, scissors, numbers

I used a piece of architrave left over from decorating the back sitting room, but you could use any piece of wood at least 10cm or so wide and approx 100cm long.  First paint the architrave, I used pale green emulsion left over from decorating the boot room.  I like to re-cycle as you know.

Then I glued thin strips of paper, the same width, onto each of the pegs.  While these were drying I turned my attention to the envelopes.  

I printed out a set of FREE advent tags from the lovely Rebecca's blog simpleasthat, she has more FREE printables and beautiful and inspiring family photography ideas.  Envelopes were decorated with the same paper used on the pegs, and a number added to each. 

Once dry the pegs were stuck onto the architrave, equally spaced apart, using my hot glue gun.  I added two screws to the back of the wood and tied on the garden twine.

I filled each envelope with chocolate.  You could of course put a little gift in there instead, but I don't give my kid's sweets as a rule so I let them indulge a little at Christmas.  Then, starting with the last number in your advent I pegged each envelope to the wood. Ta Da - Done!

My friend Ann and I have debated if there should be 24 or 25 treats on the advent calendar.  Advent is after all the countdown to Christmas, you get your presents on Christmas day.  What do you think?
And below is the advent calendar I made for my Little Foxes, with Brian the Elf who always arrives along with the calendar.

As Chief Craft Elf for our school's Christmas Bazaar, I looked at a fair few ideas for advent calendars, here are some of my favourites.

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The Last Autumn Weekend

It's been so mild that last weekend we cleared the veg patch and planted more onions and garlic to over winter.  In clearing, I realised that considering we had decided to buy no new veg seeds for the garden, we did quite well this year.

The Herb patch

Green Tomatoes for chutney

Chillies

Tumbling Toms

Greengages - A revelation to me

Nigella has seeded all over the place from the Roydon Road garden

Apple Trees are not really ready to fruit yet, but give it a year or two

Another herb I'm encouraging to self seed all over the garden

Not grown by me, but I'll be planting a quince tree in the garden next year without fail.

And of course, what else does one do with all this bounty, but eat, eat...

So, I am very excited for next year, when we are officially getting stuck in on the garden.  I've already planted native bluebells and wild garlic along the fence by the river for the bees.   I've not included the bees in the list of this year's bounty - but then we didn't get any honey this year.  The chickens, have been great though, 4 eggs a day and I'd like to increase their number and add ducks and grouse or quail to our menagerie.

Much of the fruit we planted this year was left to get established so, there is some pruning to do before next year when I'm hoping we might get more of a harvest.  The tomatoes did well in the greenhouse, but not so well in the veg plot itself.  So, our old greenhouse from the allotment needs to go up for them next year.  With two greenhouses I'll be able to germinate and raise young plants whilst also allowing tomatoes, chillies and aubergines to thrive under glass.

And we also had a fabulous crop of potatoes this year.  We broke our rule and bought seed potatoes as they were to help us to turn the soil on the new plot.  They were quite neglected, so I am impressed with how well we've done, 4 sack loads.

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Kid's Christmas Craft Party

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The Door - A Navel Gazing Post

In Ash cottage there is only one door that usually remains closed.  It is my workroom, Mrs Fox's Workshop.  Not only is it shut, but it has a key in the lock.  

Before moving I wrote a post called A Room of Ones Own: The Studio. I looked forward to how my new work space would be integrated into my home rather than a shed in the garden.  As it is, my work space has become a junk room and the door remains closed.  It's a mess in there, and I just don't want to look at it.

This last month I've had a bit of a creative break through and I'm starting to work again.  The door is slowly opening, but, the key is still there in the door. 

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Halloween

This year we had our first Mrs Fox's Craft Day at our new Little Hadham HQ, just east of Bishop's Stortford, in rural East Hertfordshire.  The children signed in to the craft party with a white hand print that we later used to make a spooky ghost bunting.

Paper Jack O'Lanterns

We had loads of fun creating paper Jack O'Lanterns, which we lit with little battery operated tea-lights.  They looked beautiful, all hung in the shop window as they dried.

Paper Bat Sweetie Cones

With children ranging in age from 5 - 8 years old we were soon having great fun making a mess of the old butchers shop where Mrs Fox now resides.  We had only 8 children in the session so we were able to allow children to go at their own speed.

The children seemed to enjoy the crafts as they explored their own creativity, developed simple crafting skills, learning to use templates, cutting round simple shapes, gluing and colouring.

I learnt something too; I need to get some children's left handed scissors and I think I will try and do multiple examples of some of the crafts to give the children more confidence to do their own thing and be even more expressive and creative.

There was quite a bit of creativity demonstrated in some of the costumes, I have to admit Finlay's was my favourite.

I will also admit to being exhausted by the end of our hour and a half crafting, but, I had a great time and I hope all the children did too.

At our next kid's crafting day will be making Christmas crafts.   If you are local and interested in joining us go along to the Facebook page and sign up, or if you can't make 5th December but would like to know when our next event is, sign up to the newsletter below to keep up with all our news.

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Autumn Harvest - Greengages

In any new home your garden starts as something of a mystery.  I always think it is best to leave a garden for the first year and see how it works, where the sun goes, what grows well, what secrets it has to reveal. We moved on 26th September 2015 and celebrated our first year in Little Hadham with a bottle of organic cider at the village music festival.

One rather lovely surprise from the Ash Cottage garden has been the greengage trees.  There are 6 of them.  A little over kill I thought, never having tasted a greengage in my life.  However, over the last month they have gradually unburdened themselves of their fruit.  Little green goblets of sharp, golden, green nectar in firm skins of bright green.  They are delicious.  

They are delicious picked straight from the tree, they are delicious in jam, they are delicious in clafoutis, they are delicious stewed with yoghurt, over ice-cream or in crumbles, they are delicious in chutney they are delicious in jam, we will see if they are delicious in gin!

Greengage Clafoutis

They are a revelation that I can’t recommend enough.  Despite gorging ourselves on them, freezing them, preserving them in jam and chutneys and giving them away to friends and family, teachers and mums at the school gate, we still have more...

Next year I will save up the soft fruit punnets from the grocers, and the little foxes can earn pocket money picking them and batching them up into saleable quantities to dispose of at the garden gate.

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Getting Ready for Halloween

I'm looking forward to some crafting with some of the local children to celebrate Halloween.  The materials for our crafts have arrived, and Bea the dog is looking like she's interested.

The crafts are all designed, a paper Jack O'lantern, a bat sweetie cone, a black cat badge, and I think we'll make some communal halloween bunting too.

It will be the first time we've used the shop for one of our craft events, so I've started a bit of clearing and tidying in there too, much to the Little Foxes annoyance, it's their play room at the moment.

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New Foxes

I'm working on some new foxes for the Folksy store in time for Christmas.

With a fine wire armature, this sculpture stands unaided and can be posed.

Textiledermy or faux taxidermy - a felted fox head mounted on a wooden disc to hang on the wall. Wood sourced from the garden at Ash Cottage.

What do you think?

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Una's First Felted Fox

I've been working on some new foxes for the Folksy Handmade shop.   Little Una Fox asked if she could try felting too.  Here is her first attempt.  Brilliant isn't it?

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And How are the Bees Doing?

Well, there is a long answer and a short answer to that question:

Short is: I still have a colony of bees that I am readying for winter.  No, honey for us this year, but lots of other bee keepers say that is no surprise in the first year.  The long answer is below, here are some pictures of me with my little bee-keeper assistants to ready you for it.

Little Louis Fox & Mrs Fox ready for an inspection     Photo by Una

Little Louis Fox ready to check his bees    Photo by Una

Little Una Fox puts the queen guard back on the hive   Photo by Louis

So, long story is:  I got more relaxed with inspections and things seemed to be chugging along ok. The colony built up in size and so I added my supers to the brood box and waited for the bees to do something.  They didn't take much interest, so after speaking with my 'bee guru' (Malcolm) I added some frames of drawn comb because, apparently, bees can sometimes be a bit uninterested in the hard work of making the wax honeycomb to store the honey in.  Lazy bees!

By the time I had collected the drawn comb from Malcolm my bees had made a start on drawing the frames of foundation that I had given them in the super. Clever bees!

Bees on the brood frames    Photo by Una

They were soon busily storing honey in the new super.  And I thought I was well on my way to a successful first year of honey production.  I checked them weekly through June and July, tore down any queen cells I found to prevent them swarming.  We had a couple of episodes of bearding. Bearding is when the bees all come out and hang around on the side of the hive, making you panic and think they are going to swarm.  But they didn't.

I was a very happy, excited, quietly confident beginner bee-keeper, when I went down to the hive one sunny morning and I immediately knew there was something wrong.  There were very few bees outside the hive despite it being past 11 on a sunny morning.  I couldn't check them until later that day when I discovered there were very few bees inside the hive either.  After a bit of panic and calling a few experienced bee keepers for advice I had to accept my lovely gentle queen had left me.

A fellow bee keeper popped over with a frame of brood (baby bees) in case I needed to rear a new queen.  How nice is that?  Friday evening, just pop over to some woman I don't know's house, give a stuttering wreck of a bee keeper a frame of precious brood in case she needs to re-queen a colony of bees!

Fortunately there was a new young queen in the hive.  I didn't find her straight away, but once I had seen her, I then had to leave the hive undisturbed for a few weeks to give her the chance to fly off, mate and (hopefully) return to the hive ready to spend the rest of her life laying eggs.  This has all seemed to happen in order.

But my new queen is not so chilled and calm as my old queen and the mood of my colony is very different.  They are quicker to become agitated when you inspect them, louder, the guard bees quicker to try and see you off and a lot more persistent in their job.  The difference in the nature of my two colonies is huge and I miss my old queen.

Since then my new young colony have eaten all the honey stores that were in the super, hence no honey for me.  They've also had to fight off marauding wasps that tried to eat their honey stores.  This they have done admirably, but then considering their temperament I'm not surprised.

I'm undaunted.  I'm getting this lovely lot ready for winter and planning to get a new colony next year and maybe try re-queening.  I've already got my name down for another bee keeping course, Bee Improvement for All, this in the hope of better swarm management and a gentler colony.  The next big challenge is getting this colony through the winter.  I'm treating them for varroa to get them as healthy as possible and starting to feed them so they can make enough honey to store through the lean winter months.  Wish me luck

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