Dinosaur Day Out

Three generations and some dinosaurs.

The sister, brother in law and offspring are visiting from Brighton (that’s why I’m always going there), and we went for a family day out with our parents to the Eden Project. A day isn’t actually enough time to do the whole thing which means you can keep going back. They’re very good as they offer local’s passes and season tickets too. 

Whenever we are there I take loads of photographs: usually of plants and views, but with the new camera and lens I found other things to take and I’m pretty pleased with the results.

We visited the tropical rainforest in the largest Biome

Part of the joy of the visit was finding small creatures living in the rainforest… I have to say I would have missed them but there were some eagle eyed members of the public staring into the undergrowth giving large hints where to look.

There was a well camouflaged female and young near this spectacular bird

Three of these tiny birds were hopping around the branches above our heads.

The camera has also opened up the possibility of taking half decent family pics.

My sister’s new profile pic?

Well, almost. Let’s try that again

And our visit into the temperate Biome required a short rest.

It’s completely unheard of for me to get good pics of folks so I’m a bit delighted with this crop especially of Mum and Dad as I don’t normally carry the camera while I visit them. 

One of the summer highlights at Eden is the dinosaur visits. There are more this year and we managed to catch a couple in their enclosure.

They are pretty big and loud too. Small kids appeared to love them and there were suitable amounts of screaming and mooing. (Herbivore is a herd animal and feels most comfortable amongst other mooers)

One of the things we didn’t have time for was a mooch around the Eden shop. A place where sustainability is of prime concern. One day I’m going to have enough courage to approach them with some of my upcycled textile and coffee sack products. 

Leave only footprints

Sun, sand, sea, surfers, seaweed, gulls, wrecks and rubbish. 

We leave the beach taking more than we arrived with #2minutebeachclean

Lifeguard having to leave the main lifeguarded area to ‘supervise’ these folks who chose to ignore the patrolled area.

This is why there are designated safe swim and surf areas

Solid rusty metal remains of ship

The other end of the ship wreck.

You don’t even know it’s there when it’s submerged.

Even at the far end of the beach a gul swoops in with a pasty crust

Evidence of history

Leave only footprints

A bag full of plastic rubbish we collected on the beach: pieces of broken rubber off lobster pots, plastic bottle fragments etc

It doesn’t always goes to plan

Sometimes we have great intentions, but a penchant for over extending ourselves with regards to time, and things don’t always go to plan.

One case in point happened this summer. We got an email from a company offering us a chance to receive a box of goodies for free; paint and stencils from Ronseal.

Of course we said yes… a good blogging opportunity and a chance to get the mancave painted. It catches a lot of the prevailing weather and the damp.

The parcel arrived in August and it was splendid.  Paint for the shed, a contrasting colour paint for stencils, and a stencil of flowerpots. Paint brushes and a tray with rollers. And as a bonus some bunting and pins to celebrate completion, and a mug for the tea breaks we would inevitably need. On top of that there’s a box to keep it all in.

We planned a painting the shed party.  Then time happened.

Work got in the way, weather became an issue and then some family commitments were thrown in for good measure.

It wasn’t only the shed that didn’t get painted.  The back garden hasn’t had a grass cutting for weeks.  We are suggesting that we’ve had a fallow year by design, but it’s just one of those things we haven’t managed to fit in. The slugs and snails have loved it… so has the hedgehog and a number of frogs and toads.

It’s good that we are so busy, but we are going to have to improve time management. My very organised sister has sent me a cloud based management tool.  I’m going to test it out and see if it makes a difference.

Life doesn’t always go to plan, but at least we already have the equipment to get the shed painted when the opportunity appears.  Thankyou Ronseal. If it’s dry over the winter there’s a chance we can get it done before next summer.

It’s fallow!

It’s not being lazy, it’s having a fallow year!

This year, gardening has taken a back seat.  We have a path cut through to the shed but other than that the grass hasn’t been cut.  We haven’t been weeding or crop growing, other than the perennial soft fruits and some horseradish and herbs that have done it all themselves.

The bonus of this is we have a wildlife garden.

We have a Buddleia bush attracting butterflies, nettles for caterpillars, brambles for blackberries, teasels for seeds later in the season which attract flocks of goldfinches and we have undergrowth for slugs snails and minibeasts. We have bats each evening swooping after clouds of insects, frogs are regularly seen heading towards the ponds and the cats are enjoying hunting for rodents.

OMG OMG OMG a hedgehog has just had its scrunchy-snail-lunch next to me as I hung out the washing. Haven’t had a hedgehog here in years. Very pleased. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Mr Sprig and youth think I’m slightly bonkers. Never mind! IT WAS A HEDGEHOG!

(No pic though as it was under the nettles and my commitment to you doesn’t extend to nettle rash!)

Trust me, next year I will be on top of crop growing and everything, but will plan in all overgrown edges to keep the wildlife happy. This year we are enjoying the fallow aspect and seeing what turns up next. An owl would be nice. Or a buzzard.

#notforlandfill – new homes for old stuff

It’s #notforlandfill – we have an issue with waste. It seems that we can’t get rid of something if it’s likely to go to landfill without trying to find an alternative use for it first. It seems that we are also quite adept at stopping other people’s discarded things from going to landfill too. We have had 40 windbreak poles, a box of shop fittings, a box of flexible polystyrene ornament packaging and a box of plates appear recently.. We are determined to get 100% success this time finding new homes for old stuff.

The old plates came from a clear out in a shared house and were heading for a bin when daughter number one grabbed them and brought them to me.  Not really good for adding to my overstocked kitchen cupboard they hung around for a time while I contemplated breaking them up for crocks in the bottom of planting containers, they stayed in the corner of the hall getting kicked about for a good month.

After a beach outing with the visiting cousins we had gone back to ours for cups of tea and a selection of dry clothes for the various children who had had way too much fun running in the river and jumping waves in their clothes. it didn’t seem like board games were in order and something easy and arty was the order of the day.

Finally a use for the plates and a large box of sharpie pens.

It turns out you can have great fun whatever your age when decorating a plate.  It suited the eldest of us (which happens to be me) and the youngest who is 8years old and he was very delighted to be drawing as many pictures as he wanted as we weren’t paying pottery cafe prices to have the pictures immortalised for ever. We could scrub the patterns off the plates afterwards.

The plates are great – but way too nice to smash up now as they are so artistic. After a search on a well known photo sharing page we have discovered that cooking the plate should make the ink fast and so the designs will last. The picture came from this article.

Apparently baking the plates at 150 degrees for 30 minutes will do the trick.

We took photos of the plates before baking in case it all went wrong, and this is the result after.  What do you think?

I actually think the colours have been dulled, and I’m not really sure the plates are any more colour fast than before.  Oh well.

If you have any foolproof way of fixing the pattern of a sharpie pen on glazed pottery please let me know.

As for the rest of the items – the packaging has gone to Excitabauble – a local designer who has stock in the same shop I do in Wadebridge – Winfred and Mabel (17 Cornish designers and makers under one roof). (You can find us here and now have a virtual look around the shop too)

The shop fittings have also gone to Winifred and Mabel to be used at the upcoming Royal Cornwall Show in the Wadebridge Chamber of Commerce ‘Wadebridge Street’ area.

And the windbreak poles? We are not planning on burning them, or cutting them up. We have an upcycling plan for leading a workshop at the end of June at Coastal Valley – A textile upcycling workshop to include preloved fabrics, buttons and ribbons, lace, beads and sequins. I’m really looking forward to it, but also very slightly petrified!

All in all a very satisfying pat on the back finding new homes for old stuff and shouting that it’s #notforlandfill!

The biggest and littlest.

Proud parent time.  We attended the graduation of the eldest offspring last week.

He didn’t go to uni straight from school, it was a while before he knew what he wanted to study.  Having made that decision he then chose a mostly local uni so he could continue to work, then took the accelerated course; so no summer break, 3 years study crammed into just 2 years solid work.

We are impressed, and obviously chuffed.

He now has this: BA (Hons) Outdoor Adventure Education from the University of St Mark and St John.

The boy did good

pretty chuffed parents

the offspring group

The smallest one is the original Sprigasaurus (we already had 2 sprogs and she was something of a surprise and too diddy to be another sprog, so became the sprig).

She has entertained me tonight while she baked cookies to share for someone’s birthday at college tomorrow. I have been subjected to music from at least 3 decades and many genres.  She knows the words to all of them; from Ozzy and AC/DC through to Disney princess songs and then a selection of drum and bass.  She has made excellent use of spatulas and wooden spoons as microphones and has serenaded me.  She even managed a duet with herself. Not sure why she is doing a tech course and not drama after this evenings entertaining performance.