Adamanda's blog

A couple of weeks ago I finished a brilliant, but thoroughly unenjoyable, book - "Not On The Label" by Felicity Lawrence. One by one, it examines how common foods get to the supermarket shelf, and details the horrors that have taken place on the way. Sometimes what shocked me most was what's done to the farmer or the environment in the name of efficiency, but for most it was the adulteration of the food itself. As a consequence, I vowed to be more organised about my shopping and to buy from a much wider range of suppliers than supermarkets. I did do this when I first stopped working full time, but I'm afraid I've got a bit lazy recently.

Luckily we still have a proper butcher, deli and greengrocer in our local town, and this is my third week of using them. It does take a bit longer than trudging with a trolley, but I don't end up with a bin full of packaging, I do get a walk, and, as I have to carry everything I buy, I don't end up with so much veg that it goes runny before I get round to eating it. I can also point to anything in the shop and get information on it, like voice-activated googling, but without the adverts.

Here's what I learned today:

+ The piggies who provided my bacon spend their days outdoors and go to sleep with taped music in their shed.

+ My tomatoes were grown in greenhouses heated by composted waste

+ Cauliflowers keep better with their leaves on

+ My lettuce was grown by an 85 year old in a nearby village

+ Health & safety regulations don't allow egg boxes to be reused

Admittedly, none of these facts will change my life, but I enjoyed finding them out!

Today, Sparkle & I took a leap of faith by cooking doughnuts with the Rainbows. Despite some unexpected ingredients (yoghurt!), and the vagueness of the village hall cooker, they were a great success! The girls loved making the dough, and we used a step ladder as a viewing platform, so they could see the dough puff up and rise to the surface without getting too near the boiling oil. By the end of the evening we had flour on almost everything and a huge pile of fab doughnuts - so many in fact that I had to eat one I cycled home extra fast to make up for it though

Phew wot a scorcher! as the Sun would say

Today's demo was in a very busy (and very hot!) garden centre. Sadly, on such a sunny day, most people appeared to be thinking more about their gardens than their crafting. Still, it was a fun day, with quite a few customers I recognised, and it's always a pleasure to demo at that store, as the staff are friendly and the manager is a very passionate crafter. Although no part of the day could have been called busy, there was a reeeeeaaaaally quiet spell at lunchtime - I suspect pubs with gardens were not empty!

Happily, today's commute was only 40mins, so it wasn't long before I was in my shorts in the garden with a nice cold beer.

This week was pilot training week at the Shuttleworth Collection, where the display pilots get to renew their display licences and the ground crews brush up on their plane pushing skills.


Last year's training week was a week of perfect airshow days - glorious sunshine, light winds and lovely and warm, where the biggest concern was what factor sunblock would be enough. This year's was limited by strong, gusty winds, cold, and rain - not much falling on us, but so much waterlogging the airfield that there was no chance to fly 'heavies' like the Gladiator and the Sea Hurricane.



This year, Adam is going to be IC barnstorming ground crew, so he spent a lot of the week playing with ribbons and very long metal poles for the ribbon pick-up and limbo. My job in barnstorming is the balloons - quite a challenge in the strong winds!

The pilots are all flying gods, and their skills are both seen and appreciated by many. One of the most stunning displays of aircraft handling is rarely seen by the public though - if you ever visit one of the shows, try to hang about to see one of the full-time engineers manoeuvring the aircraft around in the hangars, it's one of my favourite things to watch


I've been seriously neglecting my workshop duties - I haven't made time to go in all year and the SE5a has been finished in my absence. It looks very fab, and I'd hoped to see it fly this week, but sadly she wouldn't start. It is a lovely feeling to look at the finished you've done though

We finished a day early because of the weather, and now my feet have almost stopped hurting, so I'm all ready for the first show on 4th May

This weekend was brought to you by the letter 'F'.

Fun things to do were like buses this weekend - they all came at once. We were already double booked for the weekend when we received a surprise invitation (not an 'invite' - I'm not American) to a Gala Dinner near Southampton to celebrate 25 years of Dyalog APL. APL stands for "A Programming Language", and it's a very concise and mathematical way of telling a computer what to do. Dyadic, the company responsible for Dyalog APL gave Adam his first job, and sponsored him (and so indirectly, me!) through university - it really was very lovely to be invited to the celebration.

The trip there took us very close to two of my friends and co-designers from Do Crafts - Liz & Becky. Liz was demoing just half a mile off our route to the fancy do, so Becky & I met there for tea and chat. It was lovely to see them both again and a treat to watch Liz demo - she had some really beautiful projects in her samples, and I feel a bit of homage work coming on! Thanks to Liz for not minding me bundling in with a camera, and thanks too to Becky for taking time out of her busy weekend of DIY to come and meet me. I did take a piccy of us, but didn't notice that I should have had the flash on, so we're a bit blurry

The gala do was great - nice to have a chance to dress up, and to see that it is possible to feed so many people with very good food all at once, but of course the main thing was that it was so nice to see people we haven't seen for such a long time. The only snag with driving home from a do that's a couple of hours away, is that you ought to go home a couple of hours before you're tired, and I tend to go from bouncy Tigger mode to power saving mode in the space of about 5 minutes. I hit critical tiredness on the M25, so I did a bit of a creative route to keep me awake. To bed finally at 2:15, and even washing my make-up off didn't stop me falling asleep as soon as I laid down.

Going to bed that late (or early) isn't that unusual for us, but getting picked up at 8:30 the next day definitely is. Adam was still in bed when I set out for Sandy to do my First Response course for my Rainbow Guider warrant. I now know that CPR is easier if you know 'Nellie the Elephant' and have a whole new repertoire of icky stories that I won't share, other than to say that if you have a nipple or belly-button piercing, you'd better be sure you never need a defibrilator. There's now only my own laziness of writing up my book of evidence between me and my warrant. Oh, and the sticky problem of how someone rabidly opposed to organised religion gets round a promise that includes the 'G' word of course...

Today was the Birthday We Don't Enumerate of the first friend I made on my first day at primary school. In other words, it's just the kind of special person/event combo that drove me to start making cards in the first place, so I should be delerious making her card. However, Wendy is a crafter too and, while I did classically tedious maths/physics/chemistry A levels, she did a more eclectic mix that included art. Not only can she make or paint anything she wants, but the two of us meet regularly to share ideas, so she sees almost all my creations.


All this has meant that, although I've known about her birthday forever, I've been avoiding making her card, as I struggled for a theme/technique she may not have seen. At 1pm yesterday, 4 hours before Postman Pat would empty the box, I still had no idea what to make. In desperation, I opened all the stamp drawers and stared disconsolately at their contents. What caught my eye was a stamp I'd bought on eBay a couple of years ago but had never used. I combined this with some glimmer chalks and a cool teabag fold shared by fellow designer 'Gill with a G', and I'm pretty pleased with the result. As Wendy was very kind with the card she made me last month, you won't see any numbers on this card!

How very organised of the weather, for the first going-out-without-a-coat day to be the first day of British Summer Time

It was a perfect day for a walk around Wrest Park and a sunset flight in the microlight. The statues in the park looked fab in the sunlight, particularly as many of them have been cleaned over the winter. There was plenty of wildlife entertainment too - swans, ducks, twittering songbirds, and even a bat flying around in the middle of the day. And I'm always excited to see the fresh new leaf buds on the trees.

Here's to many more going-out-without-a-coat days!

When you're normally the one explaining techniques and deciding what to make, it can be a real pleasure to go and learn something new, and concentrate just on what you're making. I'm especially glad to have spent this morning doing just that with my friend Dawn, as the lovely Bonnie McGough gave the best class I've ever attended. And I now have no excuse to continue to neglect the Quality Street tin of clay that I've had for ages!

Another great busy demo yesterday - non stop all day, friendly staff and customers, and plenty of cups of tea. The only fly in the ointment was the state of the roads on the way home. When I left the store, I had 45mins in hand before needing to be at a restaurant for a friend's birthday - plenty of time to go to his house, get changed and restraighten my hair! In the end I had to go to the restaurant direct and change in the loos.

Yesterday's demo was super busy. People were outside waiting for the store to open, and the goody bags sold out at lunchtime. I couldn't believe it when the manager said she was down to 5 bags - it felt to me as though we'd only just started. If only all demos were like that!

Until a week or so ago, it had been so long since I played with fantasy fibre and fantasy film, that I'd forgotten how much fun they are. Today I did a brief demo on how to use them to a retirement club in Essex, and I think this is the most fun demo prep I've ever done. The ladies really seemed to enjoy the demo, and several were very keen to have a go. It's all helped to decide what I'm demoing at the school's pamper evening in February!

I have been doing quite a bit of shopping lately - well, play to your strengths I say! I've been tempted by many special offers, the shop my Dad works at is having a closing down sale, and I've just joined forces with one of my fellow demonstrators to start running Craft Robo parties. It's an exciting time and I'm very behind in my recreational crafting (I've spent all my time reorganising my storage!). I have so many scrapbook pages to do, and my new Imagepac has sat unused for weeks. I'm hoping to use it to make a stamp of Carly, my parents' first doggy, in time for my Mum's birthday in January though.

Apart from the Robo and the Imagepac, I've been really spoiling myself with papers. They are my first love, and I've bought a huge pile of Papermania, DCWV, HOTP, Creative Expressions, K&Co, American Traditional Designs, and Twelveby12. I think the Twelveby12 flower papers are my absolute faves, and I'm sure I'll never be able to cut a couple of them up - a good excuse to buy two of everything I reckon