fishskin leather

home made line caught pollock skin leather.

I've been playing with making leather from fish skin. This is the first piece I made, tanned with birch twig tannin. The whole process was surprisingly much less smelly than I anticipated, though softening (scruching) the dried leather was hard work. Still haven't decided what to do with it yet, making a notebook cover is most likely, though its very pretty with the light coming through it, so maybe using panels in a light shade is a possibility.

The fish ended up in thai fishcakes.

new baskets for old

3 years hard labour as a storage basket in our living room had left this painted cardboard basket looking a bit the worse for wear. It took a lot of retensioning and replacing broken strips to return it to almost pristine condition. The basket is an asymmetric twill and tabby weave with a hinged lid. The JRT is called Hex.

summer is here and it is hot

Rainy days and Washdays

I hate drying wet washing in the house. We're short of space anyway and have a bit of a mould problem as it is, so the last thing we need is to add extra moisture. Using the tumble dryer is just too environmentally unfriendly. Enter the new wet weather solar laundry dehydrator.

AKA drying the washing in our better than averagely ventilated green house. It's been used a lot this summer but even in the depths of winter it does a fairly good job. There's ventilation down low at the front, and up high at the back so it has a bit a solar chimney effect. And there's still room to grow salad stuff underneath. This was just a temporary solution quickly thrown together last year. I plan to lift the lines a bit higher to claim back a bit more growing space, but I'll get round to that when it stops raining.

Christmas Deco's in July

I've been making a Christmas bauble over the weekend. Not that I'm starting to get ready for mid-winter this early (I'm still hoping summer will arrive) but I've been asked to teach a workshop on coiling with recycled materials in the late autumn so I'm checking out roughly how long it would take to make one of these. Finished to this stage (slightly more than half done) it represents about two hours of steady work. To finish it I'll need some more wrappers so more sweeties and toffees to eat. Still who doesn't have to make some sacrifices for their art?

playing with psp

Take one not very good photo.

select an interesting corner (top left) and cut out the rest. Play with some effects and colour changes, add noise, blur a bit, deepen the colours and change to brush strokes.et voila -

much better.

Hay Box Cooker

I promised Uncle James a Hay Box Cooker post.

My hay box cooker, also known as the slow cooker, is just an old Coolbox stuffed with shredded paper that lives under the stairs (loads of extra insulation from all the junk in there).

First get the food bubbling hot

Then load it into the hay box and completely surround with shreddings to continue cooking.

This arrangement will keep food hot over night. I use it for stews, curries and pasta sauces and anything else that benefits from long slow cooking. It also makes perfect rice using the absorption method, something I can't manage any other way.

I did take it camping once, where I found it didn't retain enough heat to cook anything, thus proving how much extra insulation a house and an under the stairs cupboard provide.