Well weekend was full of varied activities of all sorts, including fireworks and trying to repair front door of the house !
Manu used the kenwood blender to make some very nice almond butter. Essentially take fresh almonds, roast them for a few minutes, then put into the blender with a pinch of salt, run the blender until you get a smooth and creamy texture. This might require a few stops with pushing the almonds from the sides back towards the blades. Looking forward eating this on toast over the coming weeks…or is it week ?
I also cleared the vegetable raised bed garden during the weekend. The tomatoes will not go red as the temperature has dropped too much and the sun is now very weak. I tried to take a few tomatoes and make them turn red by putting them under the Phillips grow lights in my hydroponic setup in the garage but it did not work. Everything was taken down and cut in small pieces to go on the compost heap.
Took the opportunity to cut down the verbena plant and cleaned the leaves before setting them up to dry. I plan to use these leaves as a xmas gift of scented pouches. I need to design a small pouch and see how easy it is to keep the leaves in it. I will probably use a few pebbles of clay to go inside to help with the crushing of the leaves to release the nice smell of verbena.
The curry plant and the kaffir lime now have to live inside the house for the rest of the winter. I know they will not like it ! So I am looking closely at any signs of weakness. The curry looks ok but the kaffir lime tree is being attacked by bugs. At least one spider is still leaving here and there is a fair few xxx who are little buggers to kill. I am now on my 3rd round of spraying insecticides.
Finally, I manage at last to do some further embroidery work for a friend. She is making a gift for a new “mother”. I had to make a large “m” using a pre-defined font in adobe illustrator from the creative cloud. I then converted the adobe file into a jpeg, which I imported into a software to convert into stitches, called easy saw. I then transferred the file into the sewing machine and adjusted size and position. Loaded the material and press “start”. I had a couple of broken thread because it was a bit too fragile for the job. Still it all worked out ok at the end. This is another area of hobby “making” which could benefit greatly from open source and improvements in the overall workflow. The standards are very loose and the software is very clunky and expensive. When I look at the amount of time spent to essentially embroid a few stitches it is difficult to see how can small businesses survive on these jobs in the real world !
