Showing posts with label Home and Garden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Home and Garden. Show all posts

Friday, 14 June 2013

The Garden : After the Storm

It rained, it poured, it pissed it down.

My god did it rain! I have never seen rain like it before, apart from a few years ago but that was the volcanoes fault and there aint been no volcano recently.

Anywho, thought you might like to see some photographs of my poor garden after the rain monsoon...











Hope you enjoyed... please leave a comment!


Friday, 7 June 2013

Free Macro Spider and Hoverfly Backgrounds for Widescreen or Standard

Yesterday I went up the woods with BF and took some shots of the insects up there, you would be surprised at just how many insects there are!

Anyway, as a big thank you to you dear reader, I offer you two images available as a free download you can use as desktop wallpaper...

All you need to do is click the word below the image you would like to download, this will take you to the filedropper website, just follow their instructions and you will have downloaded the image.

To install: Just find the image on your hard-drive, right click and then choose 'Set as Desktop Wallpaper' - Simple!

WideScreen
Normal
WideScreen
Normal
Hope you like them, let me know if you download one and how it looks :)

Thursday, 6 June 2013

Shabby Chic Embellishments... With a Great Idea to use Them.

Shabby Chic Vintage Mobile
Well it's taken a couple of days but I finally got around to finishing my vintage mobile.

I had thought of this while in a lot of pain, waiting at the hospital for a doctor to have a look at my toe, turns out that dropping an iron on your toe will indeed break it.

I made a video of the process of making this mobile (not breaking my toe...) so please watch & enjoy!



Saturday, 25 May 2013

Craft: Upcycle Tin Cans. Shabby Chic on the Cheap.

Time: 25mins
Skill: Easy
Cost: 20p - £2.00 (depending on if you buy the tin)
Awesome: Pretty Cool


So I got a bit bored and decided to play around. I had an old long hot dog tin from the other day's barbecue which I thought would make a good holder for my incense sticks. Problem was, it looked naff, so I took the label off and gave it a good wash.

Once dried, I spray painted inside a bit with white gloss paint just to give it a nice finish and then using superglue and jute garden twine, I went to town. The actual wrapping took about half an hour to do, mainly because I'm a bit of a perfectionist, it wouldn't take as long with a smaller can. 



My main tips from this are to use wet (not gel) superglue, that way you can simply squirt a bit onto the wrapping you have already done and it will seep through and attach the twine to the tin. I did this every inch or so of the wrapping and it's very solid.

The flower embellishment was from an old crochet doily which I gather up, tied with a short thread and cut off the excess. I used fabric glue to attach it to the twine. 


Please let me know if you would like to see a tutorial on how I made this!

Wednesday, 15 May 2013

More Macros!

Christus in the storm on the lake; Rembrandt (...Well, the weather is bloody awful, I am tired of this rain... I want to get outside and take some pics! I could use a plastic cover but with the sky being so cloudy and the extension tubes reducing the light even further, it is simply way too dark to get good shots. 

Why not use a tripod? Well let's put it this way, the bloody wind is blowing so epic motion blur...


However, I did manage to nip up the local woods with my BF and grab a couple of good shots before the light disappeared and the rain came tumbling down. Enjoy!



Rye Grass in Flower.

Lupin with water.
Wild Strawberry Blossom
The Unfurling of Wild Bracken
Flowering Gorse
If you would like to purhase any of these photographs as a print, please go to: http://ludlowphotographer.smugmug.com/Flowers/Macro-Flowers/

Thursday, 21 March 2013

Onions and Radish - Mid March 2013

Radish Seedlings
I noticed that my Radish seedlings are starting to come up. I planted them at the beginning of March and they are now just popping up. I have put them underneath a cloche for now, as our British weather is drunk and doesn't know what it is doing.

I have been checking Metcheck.com  quite a lot recently, I love this site as it is one of the most accurate that I have found so far, that actually updates roughly hourly using local weather stations, it's awesome.

Metcheck is good as it gives you a good idea for the night-time temperatures for your area and just looking at mine, I can see that it's still pretty cold at night.

My beautiful pumpkin starts were hit really bad by the hard frost we had the other week, and even though they were under cover in a mini greenhouse, they have still died, so I think I will have to plant the seed direct into the SFG ( Square Foot Garden). I have had a look at the seed packet and it said to plant out in March, but I think I'll leave it till the end of March as the weather is still taking tequila shots.



The onion sets have survived, although they haven't grown much the past couple of weeks. (By the way, the grid you can see, it's to stop the cats digging in the garden)

You can see them all bending to the light which tells me that there aint much of it at the moment.

I'm probably going to plant out at the end of march, everything that needs to go out. I reckon that with the way everything is going, the seeds will no doubt take a while to send up shoots but the bed should be warm and well-drained enough to keep the seeds viable.


Sunday, 10 March 2013

Over Wintered Snap Dragon

Well, for some reason, my Snap Dragon plants in the hanging basket have over wintered and are starting to flower?


This is what the flower looks like in summer...

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Antirrhinum aka Snap dragon from Lalbagh Garde...

Friday, 15 February 2013

Bubblewrap for Seedlings

Bubblewrap for Seedlings

Bubblewrap is a free (or at least cheap) way to protect your seedlings from a cold tile windowsill.

The garden - Mid February 2013

So I begin my blog, I am normally awful at writing for others, but I'm very proud of my garden.
I know it looks a mess at the moment but it will get a lot better. I know the photo is a bit crap too but it was taken on a blackberry so there you go. If I ever get an Iphone then I'll be laughing!

As I'm using my phone to do this blog, I should be able to keep up with it, the PC is so cumbersome and I like the handheld nature of the phone so Hopefully I have finally found a good avenue.