First flowers of the year.

This is the first bunch of flowers of the year - a bit on the small side perhaps but lovely in its way. The narcissi are Tete a Tete and are a bit of a cheat as they spent part of their early life in the tunnel and have been in a sheltered spot since.

A few warm days and they have decided to flower.

Mad weather.

Unlike practically everyone else I know, I really like February as you can actually see things growing - every day a few more shoots appear. My clematis armandii is posed to flower as is a daphne by the front door. And once they are out we are away on the race through spring to summer.

Lavender dilemmas

This is the time of year when there is no money coming in but it is hemorrhaging out of my account. Dahlia tubers, cardboard boxes, and today an order to put in for dried lavender.

I only buy organic lavender - I feel that if I am committed to growing everything here using organic methods then I should be equally committed to buying organic despite the price differential.








I have contacted my supplier and I have 2 different lavenders to chose from.

Lavandula ssp - this is a grey purple, the buds are sharply pointed and the scent is herby, quite mentholy in many ways. It is grown in Spain and is strong. I have had a lavender bag with this in it for over 2 years and it is still as scented as ever.

The alternative is Lavandula angustifolia - more purple in colour with soft almost fluffy bulbs. The scent is very soft and sweet with no herby kick. It is a mixed crop grown in France and Bulgaria. It is approximately twice the price of the lavandula ssp.

But it isn't just a question of price - if I was chosing lavender to put in an open bowl I would chose the angustifolia without any hesitation. It would scent a room without any of that invasive lavenderiness you get with room sprays.

At the moment though I am buying lavender though to put into bags, hearts, doorstops - some of it will be mixed with wheat so that it can be warmed to disperse the scent. Will the augustifolia be too subtle?

Oh I just don't know what to do.

Another use for buttons . . .

I don't usually copy ideas directly - usually original inspiration bubbles away in my brain for so long that it turns into something completely different.

I have to admit, however, that these button fridge magnets that I have made are a direct steal from Kaari Meng's beautiful book The French-Inspired Home.

The book is based on Meng's Hollywood based shop French General and it is full of the kind of photographs that make you want to move right in. It has a number of craft projects - I would say that the patterns are probably for someone who knows what they are doing as the directions are very basic - but more than anything it made me wish that I had the type of house where a 'gift wrapping station' with spools of ribbon, baskets of silk flowers and SHARP scissors would be a possibility.

Our house is more a "Who has moved the Sellotape now?" kind of place. But now I have no excuse for losing all the drawings that come back from school - they are firmly buttoned to the fridge.

I'm in a Country Living Kind of Mood (Board)

Well it is another boring CL post! I find it rather tragic that a 4 day show in March is taking up so much of my mind.

Last year - our first year exhibiting - we took the H-van with us and the idea was that the stall would look a bit like a Provencal market. There were pots of spring bulbs, dahlia tubers wrapped in tissue and all sorts of things made up in all types of materials. Everything was jumbled together in baskets and in the context it worked very well. (we won best stand & get to go back this year for free)

This time we are not taking the van (been there, done that) and the stand is smaller. The complete mix and match is not going to work. I love pattern, I love flowers, I love colour, I love patchwork. How do I resolve the need for some kind of order and theme on a small stall with my love of excess.

So I decided to cut wee bits of the materials I am using and stick them to a bit of card to check that they vaguely go together. And I think they do - obviously you wouldn't normally put them all in the same room but there is nothing screaming "get me out of here" either. You might put them all together in a patchwork (if they weren't all different weights).

I am now wafting around the house "moodboard" in hand choosing a colour for the paintwork - sugar bag light or cooking apple green ?

I also got around to loading up photos for the CL public relations people to another blog www.snapdragonphotos.blogspot.com

A busy fool . . . .

When I began to think about starting my own business, about 6 years ago now, I used to attend a lot of networking events run by Scottish Enterprise and the like.

One of the co-ordinators was a lovely woman who had once worked for Scottish Enterprise and had then left, wangling herself a freelance consultancy job for Scottish enterprise, working her own hours, being her own boss and earning a lot more money. She gave me a lot of very good advice the most important piece of which was to resist becoming a busy fool.

As I rush about painting mood boards for weddings and sewing up glazed cotton hearts I'm not sure that I have followed that advice.

I am also a great fan of Michael Gerber and his book The E-myth Revisited which looks at the way in which skilled workers - gardeners, shopkeepers, knitters, florists - begin their own businesses and keep on doing the type of skilled craft that they feel comfortable with - become busier and busier until it isn't sustainable and they become exhausted. They become busy fools.

Working in a craft based field, it is very difficult to avoid the trap. Initially I was so worried that no-one would buy anything that I pitched prices low - then when people did buy I felt that I had set a price level and couldn't raise it much. It has taken 5 years to get prices - both flowers and crafts - up to a sensible level. My worst habit is forgetting all the extras that go into making things - not the ribbons and so on, but the time spent buying materials, the petrol for delivery, the stall costs, the sandwiches and so on.

How does everyone else solve this? There are obviously a number of crafters who are even more foolish than I am if the e-bay prices are to be believed (* I put this bit in for Lisa whose doorstops are 100% nicer than the copies on ebay) and then there are those Chinese imports.

This year I am hoping to be just as busy but a little less foolish.

Signs of spring

While many fellow bloggers are celebrating their first snow of the season, I am rejoicing in the first signs of spring.

It is a much better day today in so many ways, the sun is shining and I have finished off a whole heap of half finished hearts and bags and boxed them up.

The reason that I am celebrating though is that my hares are back.

My computer is on a table facing out over a small smooth green hill, it is the terminal morain of Loch Lomond, a marker of where the loch came up to in the ice age. Now it is the morning habitat of the brown hares.

Every morning from now until April I shall be able to check my morning e-mails while hare watching. Come March they will spend hours boxing - this morning they were simply chasing each other around.

Hares and buzzards, are now the essence of the spring to me.

I wasn't quick enough to get a photo of the hares this morning so it is a basket of half finished lavender hearts with their labels ready to be stitched on.

There is a photo there honest!

Today has been a pretty rubbish day - I stupidly let myself go too long between my vitamin B12 injections and today I have had the intellect of a donut and the energy of a slug.

I only mention this to explain the absense of a photograph here - if you click the red cross you do get a beautiful photograph of hellebores floating in a black square bowl. (@GrahamRice/GardenPhotos.com). This is the first time that I have tried to upload an image from the web - hmmmmm.

I have begun to miss plants - there is absolutely nothing in our garden at the moment - the need to concentrate on growing things to sell means that all our cultivated ground is given over to things that flower March till October.

So when I saw this bowl of hellebores on Graham Rice's site http://www.transatlanticplantsman.com I immediately ran out to see whether any of our hellebores are showing signs of life - well the corsican hellebores are up but looking sad in the frost but there are no signs at all of the beautiful orientals.

They will arrive - the beauties in the photo have been coddled into bloom at Pine Knot Farms - and when they do I shall find a shiny black bowl and recreate this display on my table.

Fabulous fabrics

My parents and my brother all have antique shops so antique fairs and house sales were an important part of my childhood.

For as long as I can remember I have loved and collected fabrics, hats, buttons, buckles lace and thread - until fairly recently I had a ridiculously large collection of vintage costumes (Now I have a Citroen H-van).

What has always attracted me to vintage fabrics is the quality, the high thread count, the beautiful screen printing. When I began to make the textile range I used a lot of vintage fabrics but as the business has grown the need for continuity, the difficulty of finding mint vintage fabrics in any size and then the difficulty in actually making myself cut them up all caused problems. This led me to move mainly onto using high end furnishing fabrics - particularly linens - which have the same high printing standards without the worry about material suddenly shredding.

Today I am making up things in this beautiful Sanderson linen which has painterly parrot tulips all over it- I love bold things, figurative designs which move beyond the edge of the notebook or bag. It is beautiful to sew and is a lovely weight - good body but a bit slouchy (now this sounds like a personal ad!) so that it still looks like a fabric and not like cardboard.

I've been tagged...

I have been rather dreading this tag arriving - I knew it was bound to.

This is not because I have problems with thinking of wierd things about myself but because I have problem with chain letters. Written down that sounds horribly pompous.

I am quite happy to write list of 6 wierd things about me but I shall not be tagging anyone else - sorry.

Here goes

1. I am so bad at sport that a school team once decided to play one person short rather than risk having me on the pitch

2. I crammed for my art history finals in the University of Aberdeen's anatomy museum - so now the smell of formadlehyde brings back the dates of Mantegna's frescoes!

3. I am addicted to licorice.

4. I must always have the widest mug available to drink my coffee out of - I hate expresso cups.

5. The only sport I can win at is croquet.

6. I didn't ever finish a school needlework project - it was all that being sent back to re-pin, re-tack, re-sew.

All the best (obviously not a team player)

Jane

The homeworker and playing hooky

Since I began working from home I have found the most difficult thing is organising my time.

Unless I am actively working all hours I feel as though I am playing hooky. I think that this may be a relic from my office working past where there was a terrible culture of presenteeism. Latterly I worked part-time 8.00 - 12.00 but I still got raised eyebrows and tutting when I packed up my bag at 1.00! Or perhaps it is the natural Calvinism of the Scot.

Yesterday appealed to my skiving tendencies. It doesn't take much snow to make me declare that we are snowed in. The children may have been picked up by the school bus but for me it was a special kind of day - Jasmine got 2 walks (one in the snow, one in the thaw) and when a friend popped round for coffee because she couldn't get into her work in Glasgow I nattered my way through a couple of refills. Work was fitted in between these distractions in small pockets of time.

Yet when I look at the amount actually sewn - there doesn't seem to be much of a difference from a normal day- I managed a box of linen doorstops and a prototype fabric lined litter bin. Perhaps I should play hooky every day.

We have snow . . .

We woke up this morning to the first proper snow of the year - it is actually quite mushy snow and will probably be gone by tonight, but at the moment it is spectacular.
Jasmine and I went out for a walk - she loves the snow and bounces through it, but her fur is the type that snow sticks to, so she quickly turned into a shivery snowball and we came home.
Now we are cosy inside - still busy with a glue gun - this time with individual allium florets which are making delicate starry hearts.
I am listening to one of the Eie Flud podcasts
- I really like these, they are a great advert for children growing up within a family business, and I find it really interesting to hear people talking about their passions. The podcast I have just been listening to was about a perfume inspired by watery sun illuminating frost on a meadow and it made me think that perfumes, like flowers, should really be seasonal.

Hearts for sale

Today I am busy making up flower and honesty hearts for the Country Living Fair - I originally made these hearts as elegant and very special Christmas decorations but decided that they are worth keeping around all year.

A friend bought a couple of the hydrangea hearts at Christmas - I was quite surprised as she has a very calm house with beautiful furniture and art but absolutely no clutter. I had somehow thought of the hearts as fitting into a chintzy kitchen with collections of flowery jugs and egg cups on a dresser.

I was at her house over New Year and she had them pinned to a column in her living room where they looked stunning - very textural, very modern country. So it goes to show that I should look at things in a different way more often.

My only worry about them at Christmas was that they are fairly fragile to transport - you can't just chuck them in a basket. I bit the bullet and invested in some boxes which have arrived this morning - they fit beautifully and will be snug as a bug on their trip to the SECC.

London trip

We had a great time eating our way round London and managed to fit in the Top Drawer Trade show and a trip round a load of small shops.

The trade fair was lovely - MUCH nicer than Harrogate - but it really made me aware of how difficult it is for buyers to get something different from everyone else.

The Grand Illusions stand - which you have to visit personally as they don't seem to take on new customers by mail - was particularly interesting as you could see exactly where all the nice zinc stuff on country type websites comes from.

The trip around shops was also very useful - I have always harboured the dream of opening a shop in Glasgow or Edinburgh - high footfall area, beautiful window, a chance to get my flowers into the city. Over the weekend I talked to some owners about the economic realities and now I no longer harbour any shop owing ambitions!

The photo is of a very nice flower shop - Absolute Flowers in Great Portland Street - which was selling bulbs in enamel trays and hellebore plants in glass vases. We later saw the same pots in other flower shops so they are obviously coming in already planted, but Absolute Flowers had the best window display. You see I would love a proper window to arrange.

Dying to have a go . . .

Sometimes my desire to experiment with new things threatens to make the business too amorphous, too messy, and too time consuming and I have to rein myself in and decide what Snapdragon is actually meant to be about.

I have been wittering on to friends for a year or so about wanting to try dying antique linen with plant material and to be honest I did nothing about it as I suspected that it would fit into the category of things that don't fit properly into business life. I based these suspicions on the amount of plant material I would need to grow, just to provide the dye, and the fact that I don't even have enough planting space for my flowers.

Then I got a copy of Rita Buchanan's book A Dyers Garden and found that you can dye with dahlia flowers and you need flowers that are just passed their prime (and therefore unsaleable) and that you can freeze the flowers until you have enough for a dye bath.

Well that seems core business enough for me! Roll on the summer and dahlia dyed linen.

Prototype bag

One thing that I would like to make this year is a shopping bag.
A couple of years ago I looked into getting jute bags printed with the Snapdragon logo - I had intended to sell them at cost at the farmers markets instead of using carrier bags. With one thing and another we stopped doing the markets and I didn't pursue the idea.
Now everyone seems to be producing these bags - Sainsburys, Tescos, Greenpeace, the RSPB - and, happily, people are using them instead of plastic.
I still like the idea of a bag though so before Christmas, when we did a couple of markets, Sally and I spent our time quizzing people about the jute bags, did they like them, how useful were they, was there anything they didn't like, anything that could be improved on? The thing that people felt could be improved on was their bulk - the jute bags can't be stuffed into another bag. So I began thinking about making a bag that folds into a pocket. There are a few of those about but they are all in thin material that tends to fold out into very saggy ugly bags which squash all the shopping together.

I spent last night making up bags in different materials, trying to get a compromise between stability and foldability. This is the result and I am pretty chuffed.

The bag is made of linen and canvas with a lining of a printed satin cotton and it all folds up into an integral pocket less than 20cm square.
I am going to make some up to take to the Country Living Scottish Fair to see how they go.

Biting the bullet

It has continued to rain - this morning when I went out to the field my flower beds were still under water - the tulips were still snug in their paper bags in the ambulance.

I decided that I had to do something.

I dug up the two long beds in the tunnel - where we usually grow our early salad - and have crammed in some of the tulips bulbs.

1000 bulbs , 100 each of 10 varieties, are now planted.

I don't normally grow any of my flowers in the tunnel - it is really there for starting off and overwintering seedlings - I am a bit worried that mice might eat the bulbs or that there will be an aphid problem when they flower. Still there doesn't seem to be much of an option.

Very poor crop management!

Now I am off to sort out a list of products for the Country Living Fair - it is creeping up quickly and I have no stock left over from Christmas.

Quirky shops in London - suggestions please . . .

Next weekend Euan and I are going for a weekend to London - it is really to have a look at the Top Drawer trade fair at Earls Court (I am on the lookout for quality vases and planters) - but I would also like to have a look round some offbeat type shops while we are there without the children.
I want to visit shops which are the result of someone's dream, quirky, bootstrapped and full of things that the owner cares about. Shops to be passionate about. Things rather than fashion.
But . . .I don't know London that well and these are not the type of shops that can afford big advertising campaigns that reach Stirlingshire.
Can anyone suggest candidates?

Scrapbooks

Though we have all now thrown off the lurgy, I am still feeling a bit under the weather, so I decided to do one of those lovely indoor pottering jobs that get ignored when I am busy. All morning I have been cutting up magazines and pasting them into my scrap books.

My name is Jane and I am a magazine addict - the ones with pretty pictures, not the ones with celebrity gossip - and I justify the resulting heaps of paper by claiming that they are essential work tools. Which they are.

I cut out everything that I like the look of - pots of bulbs, beachcomber mobiles, swimming ponds, topiary, zinc topped tables, etc. - and paste them into my books as they come - there are no fancy sections, no captions.

Then when I am looking for ideas I can flick through my pics (some now 12 years old) and be inspired to create something new.

Deer - again

Every year at about this time we get deer back in the garden - we never see them and I think that we must be on their regular January route. They always leave again by the end of February.

My suspicion is that they walk up the road and jump the gate rather than coming up from the woods.

Last night's dinner for them was the flat leafed parsley - they have nibbled the leaves off very delicately, leaving raggedy stalks. I didn't have time to sort it out properly so I have just plonked some cloches over the remnants in the hope that it will regrow.

This is my first photo with the new camera - as Euan said - "Did you not think to move the canes?". Or mow the grass? Or weed the parsley bed? At least most of the mud is blurry!

Happy New Year .

Before Christmas was such a rush that we didn't get around to doing anything about decorating the house except for putting up a tree. This didn't really matter as we were away for Christmas anyway and, to be hones,t the family were all probably a bit fed up with the Christmas stuff that has been cluttering up the house since October.
We were the venue for New Years Day lunch - 14 friends and family for venison stew and mash followed by stripey jelly and icecream - so the girls and I decided that we needed some New Years decoration. They have been nagging at me to make a heart shaped door wreath - we finally got round to it and this was the result made with dogwood, rosemary and chilli peppers. We also made up some tea-light holders - a straight steal from Paula Pryke - glass cups covered with double sided sticky tape and rosemary.