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Showing posts from April, 2012

Sparkling rose petal drink - Something different!

Since the ginger beer that I made a few weeks ago was a great hit, I thought I'd have a go at the 'Sparkling Rose Petal' drink that Sally Wise has included in her book - A year in a bottle. The family did the 'Why on earth would you want to drink rose petals?' thing on me but as I pointed out to them, they don't have to drink it - just humour me while I have a go at making it... Here's what happened! The biggest problem I had was where to get rose petals. I had thought of neighbours and relatives that grow them but collecting them all at once in lrge enough quanities was proving to be a stumbling block... So when I came across a stall at the markets that sold big bags of rose petals for $3, I had to give it a go!! So first I gave all the petals a quick soak and a shake to make sure that I had washed off any bugs and/or chemicals that they may have been sprayed with (even though the lady assured me they didn't spray...) The recipe called for

Revamping/fixing a Rice Paper Lantern lampshade

We sit out side a lot, well between floods and blazing sunshine that is, and over the years our pergola has become just like another room.  We have even put in a sink and shelving and have a set of crockery, a jug, tea and coffee and all that sort of stuff so we don't have to go back upstairs if we want a cuppa... Basically we are lazy! We have a table there as well with a light hanging quite low over it that I put one of those really cheap paper ball like light shades over quite some time ago. I was looking at it last night thinking I really should replace that -its getting a bit grotty. The spiders like getting into it as all the bugs go for it at night. The wire is a little rusty, leaving little orange marks on the white paper - and theres a few holes from when I glued bats to it for Halloween... I decided that instead of replacing it - I would tizzy it up a bit until the universe presents me with a cheap (or even better - free) replacement...  Here's what I did...

Making your own home made Ginger Beer! Mmmm!

Many Many moons ago, a Landlord left  a laundry shelf of home made ginger beer for us to drink when we moved into the house. It only took a few nights of glass bottle ginger beer explosions to work out why he decided to leave them for us rather than attempt to transport them to his new house! We enjoyed drinking them much more than we enjoyed cleaning up the glass bottle fragments I can tell you! Fast forward quite a few more years and a neighbour gives us a Ginger Beer Bug so we could make our own home made ginger beer - and we did! And it was great fun! And we used plastic 1.25 litre bottles and never cleaned up a single shard of glass - although we did have to mop down a few walls and even the ceiling on odd occasions - Don't shake your ginger beer before opening it, unless you like gingery sugary walls!  Making ginger beer at home is not hard at all and a nice change from cordials (or soft drink if that's your thing!) and can be the basis for a few mock-tails and even a c

Hanging tomato plants: Revamping some hanging baskets!

I have a whole bunch of hanging baskets that over the years have managed to end up with those spider plants in them - as not much else can survive endless days of sun followed by floods - gotta love that Queensland weather! After re potting my hanging baskets on the front of the house from spider plants to flowers a week ago, I looked to the ones on the back of the house. I could have gone more green  or flowers - both would have been nice, but in the end I opted to have a go at transplanting some 'wild self sown rouge' tomato plants into the baskets and having go number 3469,788 at growing something to eat! When I pulled the mostly dead spider plants out of the basket - I decided the baskets probably needed a bit of a re-vamp them selves...  Here's what I did...  First, I simply ripped all the grassy coverings of them to leave the bare wire skeleton. Like this! Then I used the base of a dead palm frond cut into 1.5 inch strips to wind in and o

Cleaning your toilet - the green way!

I have been slowly moving my way to greener cleaners around the house and last week the loo came under scrutiny. I have no trouble keeping the outside clean nor the seat and cistern. The inside of the bowl is no real problem but there is this horrible buildup of, well who wants to contemplate that really, right at the bottom - almost out of sight on the bendy bit. (in the spirit of sparing your delicate senses - I have not included photos in this post!) I have had numerous scrubs at it, used a number of proprietary cleaners on it but nothing seems to shift it. I was looking through a book called Express House Cleaning and it reckoned that denture tablets were the way to go. Not having any of them in the house I moved onto the next suggestion and Voila - it worked! Here's what I did... Its almost too easy for words... I dumped a big handful of Bi-carb into the bottom of the loo after everyone had left the house for the day, gave it a bit of a scrub, added a big slash of whi

Slowing down - the Slow Living Essentials way. March 2012

I have been following Christine at Slow Living Essentials for a while and in January she set a challenge to record on our blog, monthly, how we have "slowed down" under nine categories - I did this for January and February and really got a lot out of it. This is my March reflection on Slowing Down - the Slow Living Essentials way! Here's what I did... NOURISH: Make and bake as much as possible from scratch. Ditch over packaged, over processed convenience foods and opt for 'real' food instead. I have decided to try baking again. I'm not much of a baker but really want to move away from buying store bought cakes with all those preservatives that make them last for months without growing any mould. The banana loaf I made in the weekend seemed to go down all right and I have an apple, walnut and raisin loaf in the oven right now, with bread ready go in as soon as its out and then some homemade gourmet sausage rolls after that!   I had to try a piece - w
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