Chocolate strawberries

Chocolate dipped strawberries are a special favourite of mine – we had a big pile of them instead of a cake at our wedding reception which was great fun! I think they look lovely and they are very simple and easy to make. In this photo I have displayed them on little tiny doilys which I made by using a Cheery Lynn die through my Grand Calibur – it’s the one called Sophia’s Heart – very sweet!

To make the strawberries, choose the chocolate you like best – plain, milk, white whatever and melt in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Take this stage slowly and you will get a better result. It is quicker to melt in the microwave if you are in a hurry but do be endlessly careful and not overheat/overcook the chocolate or it will be ruined.

Once you have the chocolate just melted (not too runny) then using a cocktail stick pressed in through the centre of the strawberry top, dip and swirl in the chocolate. Keep twirling slowly to give the chocolate a chance to stop dripping and then lay gently on greaseproof paper or a non stick baking sheet (very handy). Once they are set, place them in the fridge until needed.

A few extra pointers about these. Do not make more than 24 hours in advance and don’t get the chocolate too runny or it all gets very messy, just melt the chocolate enough and no more. Finally you can dip in melted chocolate as above and then as an extra, dip into finely chopped nuts – which makes an interesting change.

Butterflies flitting by…

Butterflies are one of the loveliest things in a garden, fleeting, delicate and beautiful. True, their caterpillars can decimate plants, and a cabbage white munching its way through your veg patch is a very unwelcome sight… but I try to forgive them all that for their sheer beauty.

Larger varieties can live for up to a month, but many of the smaller varieties only live a week. All that beauty gone in such a short space of time…

The orange tip is one of my favourite butterflies and it is on the wing from April through to June. The males, predictably, are the show offs with orange flashes on their wings! Their caterpillars feed on cuckoo flower and hedge mustard while the adults often feed from plants such as bluebells.

Other favourites include the red admiral, the tortoiseshell and the very lovely peacock with its stunning ‘eyes’ on its wings. The buddleia in my garden is a huge draw for butterflies and, in a good summer, is absolutely covered in many varieties.

If you want to attract more butterflies to your garden, plant nectar producing flowers. Butterflies visit flowers searching for nectar, the sweet fluid produced by the flower as a reward for pollinating insects like bees and butterflies. Many British butterflies seem to prefer purple, pink and yellow coloured blossoms while clusters of short, tubular flowers or flat topped blossoms provide ideal shapes for butterflies to land on and feed.

No matter how hard we try to encourage butterflies, sadly we are all at the mercy of the weather. Statistics tell us that fewer butterflies flew in British skies in the miserable summer of 2012 than for thousands of years, leaving several species in danger of extinction from parts of the country.

Intensive efforts to conserve our rarest species mean that no butterfly has become extinct in Britain since 1979 but conservationists – as well as butterflies – are now struggling to adapt to climate change.

My little flower garden

I love giving people flower arrangements, or just a bunch of flowers as a present. This was a different idea I came up with when I saw some pretty flowering pots of bits and pieces at the garden centre.

I like this basket idea as it’s pretty, but practical too. You can give it to people to enjoy in the house for a while, then they can plant the pots out in the garden and they’ll live on for years.

You can either line the basket with plastic, then plant the pots in earth almost as if they are in a real flower bed, or you can cluster the plants in the basket still in their little pots. I have added a bunch of pussy willow, some moss and some pebbles and polished marble lumps that I have collected – but ordinary gravel would be fine!

It’s simple to do, even if you aren’t a keen flower arranger and makes a lovely and different present. It would work well with masses of different ingredients – there’s always something in flower amongst the little pots at the garden centre – pansies come to mind!

My life in colour…

I was in Exeter recently in a pretty area on the outskirts of the town where there is a small parade of shops. There’s a couple of cafés, a jewellers, a clothes shop and more – all of them independent and slightly quirky – just my sort of place for a browse among lots of pretty bits and pieces! None of them sold ‘essentials’ but hey - you never know what you might discover for use in a project or to spark some creative idea… so I felt justified having a good rummage!

I spotted some lovely old buttons in one shop window and went inside where they had an amazing collection of old ‘recycled’ buttons of every shape, colour and design you could imagine! They also had a small selection of dress fabrics hanging up. Now I am no dressmaker, but these were lovely and reminded me of frocks my mother had worn. They even had dress patterns – remember the ‘Simplicity’ and ‘Butterick’ brands? – with shirt-waisters and 1960s shift dresses.

Everything seemed terribly familiar and ‘comfortable’ and I started chatting to the shop owner. It was then I discovered I was in a ‘retro’ shop! It seems my childhood era is now on the verge of being ‘antique’ and is classed as retro and therefore very ‘on trend’!

I have to say this didn’t do much for my ego, but rather than feel huffy about it, I just found it fascinating. Looking round this little shop was like stepping back in time and I felt about 12 again, and it was really rather lovely and comforting.

They had games and puzzles that I hadn’t seen for years. Remember how we all used to do jigsaws or play Ludo in the days before playstations and ipads? They also had lots of old cream and pale blue enamel kitchen bits and pieces - now called ‘kitchenalia’ apparently – and all carrying impressive price tags despite being chipped! 

What struck me most of all was how the colours then were so different from now. Not exactly more muted, just different shades. One big change is in the quality of print and packaging. Today we can print photos and patterns and pretty much anything on our home printers – look at all the lovely things we print out everyday for our card and craft projects – but back in the 1950s and 60s, most designs were drawn illustrations involving little photography, and the colours were much less ‘natural’ that we expect today.

While I wouldn’t swap our multicoloured hi-tech modern world for the 1960s, it was wonderfully nostalgic, and a little bit sad, to feel I was back in time to an era when life seemed slower and more innocent and it brought back lots of happy memories.

So tell us... What iconic images bring your childhood back to life?

Special Holly Pond Hill Notes

This is such a pretty present to give someone and apart from your time (that is priceless obviously) it is really inexpensive and would be oh so treasured!

The base and lid are made using a Grand Nestabilities die – Grand Labels One, but remember you can tweak the project to use any suitable die that you have. Layered onto the cream 300gsm card used on the base are some smaller sized labels one – these are made from backing papers from the Holly Pond Hill CD that have been stuck onto plain grey board that you would get on the back of pads of paper or in your orders if you order card or paper from us!

The little topper is made from the CD too and layered onto some cream card that has been embossed with a Swiss Dots embossing folder – but again it could be any that you own.

Assemble the ‘box’ by taking the base and the lid – cut a long strip of card about an inch deep and score it so that it makes a square shape. Decorate (and disguise the overlap where you sealed it) with swiss dot embossed paper. Glue this onto the base allowing two pieces of ribbon to stick under this square, they will be the hinges.

Remember to add the loop of ribbon between the cream lid and the smaller backing paper piece of the lid and hide the ends of the ribbon hinges between these layers too.

Finally cut a stack of paper/thin card to fill the box and add a ribbon and a pen or pencil.