What is the problem with wax crayon stains?

Wax crayon can be difficult to remove because the components are oils or fats in combination with very sticky binders like paraffin wax or similar substances.
In addition to those components there are of course the pigments and filliers like clay or talc.

http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-remove-wax-crayon

http://www.elfwood.com/farp/oilpastel/

At home here we have a silver tray which was presented to the family over 50 years ago.  I have been thinking what to do with it for many months and have just seen the idea of attaching it to the wall and using it as a magnetic pin board.


http://pinterest.com/pin/258112622363156139/

 . . . and look who suggested it: the multi-talented Susan Mitchell, what a surprise!


Here's a link to her page: http://pinterest.com/sweetpea/

Reality Check

Never let anyone tell you that you are not a real woman. NEVER. Not even another woman who seems wiser or more worldly or prouder or louder or prettier or sexier or stronger than you. No one can take your realness from you.

No one except yourself.

And don’t you dare.

http://www.alreadypretty.com/2010/08/repost-reality-check.html

Christmas Quiz Answers

1. When was the first Christmas card produced? As recently at 1846, when the Victorian concept of Christmas was being created.
2. Who was responsible for the introduction of the Christmas tree to Britain? Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort, who brought the German custom to England by installing a tree at Windsor Castle during Christmas.
3. What are Cornish Fairings?  In the week after Christmas a 'maid-hiring' fair used to be held in Launceston, Cornwall, when ginger biscuits, sweetened with honey and coloured with saffron, were sold.
4. When did the turkey become traditional fare for Christmas dinner?  An old jingle tells us that Turkeys, heresy, hops and beer,/Come into England all in one year. Not strictly true but by 1530 the bird was known in England.
5. Where do turkeys originate?  In North America, where they exist in the wild.
6. What fare was traditionally eaten on Christmas Day before the advent of turkey?  A boar's head, brought to the table with much ceremony. Swans and cranes also featured.
7. What were the original ingredients of Christmas pudding?   Dating back to the Norman Conquest, the Christmas pudding, or girout as it was known, contained meat, herbs and plums.
8. Why is mistletoe so much in evidence at Christmas time?  Sacred to the Druids and Scandinavians, it was believed to protect a house from lightning during the year to come.
9. When was the Glastonbury thorn said to bloom?  The Glastonbury thorn, by legend grown from the staff of St Joseph of Arimathea which he set in the ground at the Somerset, was said to blossom each year at midnight on Twelfth Night.
10. What is the origin of Boxing Day?  Servants and apprentices were allowed to collect money from the employers and these were put in a Christmas box, a name transferred to the gratuities given to postmen etc at Christmas time.
11. When is the traditional time to make Seville orange marmalade?  The true Seville orange has a short season in January.
12. Who said: 'He was a bold man who first ate an oyster'?  The Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin, Dr Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745).
13. What are elvers?  The young of eels which are caught in the spring in vast quantities along the Severn and its tributaries.  Today, they are sold for immense sums.
14. Did Elvis Presley ever visit Britain?  Yes, he spent two hours at Prestwick Airport, Scotland, in 1960.
15. Why might huffcap, mad dog, angel's food and dragon's milk be considered bad for you?  They were all 16th century double strength beers which the London authorities tried to ban.
16. What were dredge, maslin, berevechicorn and bollymong used for?  Cooking.  They were all crops grown in medieval England.
17. What do King Canute and Jane Austin have in common?  They're both buried in Winchester Cathedral.
18. How many magpies must be seen for a wedding?  One for anger, two for mirth, three for a wedding, four for a birth.
19. When were bees supposed to hum the Hundredth Psalm?  On Christmas Eve in their hive in the same hour that cattle fell to their knees in the byre to adore the Child Jesus.
20. Which bird is most closely associated with the Christmas Festival? The robin redbreast, one bird which has absolute trust in man and which, in winter, will even venture into houses in search of food.  

When Christmastide comes in like a bride,

With holly and ivy clad,

Twelve days in the year, much mirth and good Cheer,

In every household is had.

little purses/card holders

Recently made, these are small for credit cards, or perhaps something even smaller.  They can also be made bigger as book covers, the sky's the limit.
Add instructions ***

The Twelve Myths of Christmas

1. Prince Albert invented the Christmas tree.  Almost. The tree that Queen Victoria and he set up for their five children in 1848 was depicted in the Illustrated London News and the custom, still seen then as a Germanic importation, was taken up by the prosperous classes. But another royal consort, George III's wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, had made the Christmas tree a feature of life at Court from 1761.

2. Mistletoe was banned from Churches.  As Steve Roud points out in his learned The English Year, there is no evidence of mistletoe being banished by law from Churches, nor even that it was used in 'pagan' customs in England.  Pliny (in the first century AD) describes Druids harvesting mistletoe with a golden sickle, but that was in Gaul centuries before the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain.

3. Decorations should come down on January 6.  Until the 19th Century, people would keep the decorations of holly, ivy, box, yew, laurel and mistletoe up until February 2nd, Candlemas Day, the end of the Christmas season, 40 days after the birth of Jesus.  Robert Herrick, in his poem Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve writes, 

     Down with the rosemary and bays,

     Down with the mistletoe;

     Instead of holly, now up-raise

     The greener box, for show.

In the reign of Victoria decorations came down on Twelfth Night, January 6th, and generally were burnt.

4. 6th January is the Orthodox Christmas. The Orthodox celebrate Christmas on 7th January by our calendar because their calendar does not incorporate the Gregorian reforms of the the 16th Century.  For some years their calendar was only 12 days adrift, and their 25th December fell on our 6th January.  This is when, in the West, the Epiphany falls, the feast of the discovery of the child Jesus by the three wise men or magi.  This feast is important to the Orthodox, usually being called the Theophany.  But they will be celebrating it on 19th January.

5. We Three Kings of Orient Are.  They are not called kings in the Bible but 'Wise men from the east' (Matthew 2:1). They are taken to be kings because in the prophet Isaiah (60:3), it says, 'And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising'.  

They are taken to be three because of their three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  The incense signifies the divinity of Christ, since it was burnt in divine worship among the Jews and in the pagan world, too.  Gold stands for royalty and myrrh for the future sufferings of Christ, who was offered wine mixed with myrrh to drink on the Cross, and whose body was anointed with myrrh and aloes before his burial.  Their names came later: Casper, Melchoir and Balthazar (the last usually represented as black) are the names su-pplied in the six-century mosaic in the church of Sant-Apollinare Nuovo.

6. It is illegal to eat mince pies on Christmas Day.  An Act of 8th June 1647 declared that 'forasmuch as the Feasts of the Nativity of Christ, Easter, and Whitsuntide, and other Festivals commonly called Holy Days, have been heretofore superstitiously used and observed, be it Ordained, by the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, that the said Holy Days be no longer observed' (what a long sentence, you can breath again now!).  Mince pies were not singled out.  In 1657, the diarist John Evelyn was arrested at a forbidden Holy Communion service on Christmas Day and interrogated as to why he 'durst offend, & particularly be at Common prayers, which they told me was but the Masse in English'.  The anti-Christmas laws of interregnum lapsed at the restoration.

7.  Santa Claus is American.  St Nicholas was Bishop of Myrna, in what is now Turkey.  But his transmogrification into Santa Claus was indeed accomplished in America, largely through the popularity of a poem: The Visit of St Nicholas, usually known from the first line as The Night before Christmas, published anonymously in 1822 by Clement C Moore, an Episcopal clergyman from New York, until then better known as a Hebrew scholar.  He incorporated customs connected by the Dutch with the feast of St Nicholas, 6th December. (for the words to 'The Visit of St Nicholas', see: http://holyjoe.org/poetry/moore.htm)

8.  Santa Claus is the same as Father Christmas.  There were personifications of Christmas hundreds of years ago, Sir Christmas or Father Christmas.  In a 16th century manuscript there is a carol beginnning "Nowell, nowell, nowell, nowell."  "Who is there that singest so, Nowell, nowell, nowell?"  "I am here, Sir Christesmasse."  "Welcome my lord, Sir Christesmasse."

9.  Nowell means 'good news'.  Nowell is a word fraught with misunderstanding.  It comes through Old French from the Latin natalem (accusative), 'birthday', referring to the birth of Christ.  It does not come from nouvelle, the French for 'new'.  

It was used centuries ago is English as an exclamation of joy, not just in carols (where it survives), but also in circumstances unconnected with Christmas (as in the welcoming home of Henry V from Agincourt).  Only in the 19th century did it come to be used (in the form noel) as a synonym for 'carol'.

10. Adeste Fidelis is an ancient carol.  Some medieval carols are in Latin but the words of Adeste Fidelis are found in a manuscript dating from only 1750, written by John Wad, a scholar of plainchant.  It is assumed that he invented them. The words were translated into English by Frederick Oakeley in 1841.  

'Carol' was at first the name for a dance, and the songs that went with the dance came to be called carols too.  They were not at all limited to Christmas subjects, touching on love, mortality, devotion to the Holy Trinity, war, lullabies and the Virgin Mary.  There are plenty of manuscripts from the 15th century.  The phrase 'Christmas carol' appears in an early printed book, sold by Wynkyn de Worde, the colleague of Caxton, in the early 16th century.

11. Good King Wenceslas looked out. The Feast of Stephen is Boxing Day, and Wenceslas did exist.  He was known as Vaclav to the 'Bohemians he ruled and he was murdered by his brother in 929AD. He is the patron saint of the Czech Republic, so there is no quarrel with the adjective 'good'. 

Much of the rest comes from the prolific pen of John Mason Neale, who published the lyrics in 1853 to go with a medieval tune he had come across that had originally fitted a song about the spring. Tempus adest floridum, which was printed in a collection called Piae Cantiones in 1582.  Though the historical basis is lacking, it is unkind, as some hymnologists have, to call Neale's verses 'doggerel'.

12 Christmas cards originally had religious themes: In 1843 John Calcott Horsley, a painter, designed a Christmas card for sale for Sir Henry Cole, the great designed and founder of the Victoria and Albert Museum.  The cards were lithographed by Joseph Cundall, were hand-coloured and sold at the high price of a shilling each.  The first card sold 1,000.  The picture was of family cheer, not a religious scene.

(For all the above, with thanks to Christopher Howse (see his pic below) from the Daily Telegraph)

Here's his quiz for 2008: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/3902917/Test-your-Christmas-knowledge-with-our-fiendish-quiz.html (and the answers)

Bricks n Birds

Is it a cushion cover - or a wall hanging?

Wrapping

I once watched Jamie Oliver cook a chicken.  He made some flour-and-water pastry and rolled it out.  He then stuffed the chicken with all sorts of tasty herbs, garlic, butter, onion and other ingredients, placed it on the pastry then folded the pastry around the chicken.  

After it had been cooked for about an hour Jamie removed the chicken from the oven, chopped off the corner of the pastry and poured out the wonderful cooking juices.  

He then placed the 'chicken pasty' on a huge serving dish and suggested that if we ever made this at home that we then carry it aloft to the dining table.  After being placed on the table we should bash the top of the pastry - which would shatter, revealing the yummy chicken underneath. 


We were all horrified at the thought of destroying the pastry.  But Jamie said that the whole point of the pastry was not to 'eat it' just as a wrapping to cook the chicken in!  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And so it is with wrapping Christmas presents, the wrapping is something that once the present is opened, gets thrown away.  


So now for some ideas for wrappings  which don't become redundant after the present is opened:


Make hampers: from old cardboard boxes, wooden pallets or apple crates.  Fill with biodegradable stuffing or old newspapers - and hide gifts inside.

Recycle: ribbons and bows, trawl through charity shops for old paste jewellery or fake precious stone necklaces, snip ribbons off old skirts and dresses, especially the ones which aid hanging up the garment.  Ribbons and similar also come from boxes of chocolates. 
Collect buttons and feathers. String them all together to make a vintage extravaganza.

Forage: fire cones, pine fronds and be-berried holly sprigs.

Gift tags: cut old Christmas cards into shapes, make hole in corner with punch and thread through string, twine or wool (could plait three colours together for fun). 

Search: the beach for little pieces of drift wood, dry them and then hand-punch a hole in a corner. Using chalk or charcoal, inscribe a message, tie to gift with twine or old ribbon. 

Save: plastic coated wires (tie tags) from new kitchen utensils or children's toys for attaching tags and decorations.

Print: Potato-print wrapping paper and shoe boxes.  Cover shoe box with paper and print on top.  For paint could use poster paint or paint left over from decorating.

Ideas: could wrap presents in useful fabric, such as a gift for an avid cook inside a bottling jar, wrapped in a pretty drying-up cloth or vintage cake tin; gift for a gardener inside a flower pot; gift for a child inside a flannel or knitted hat; a gift of anyone wrapped in a vintage scarf or cushion cover.    Could put a home-made Christmas decoration on a wrapped present to make it look glam.


Reusable: If the paper is to be reused then the less sticky tape used the better. Beautiful pictures from magazines make wonderful wrapping paper too or you could wrap a present with newspaper of a date which is special to the recipient.


Of course, if you have a small child, kitten or a dog in the house, they just love to play with the wrappings, so everything is being recycled anyway!


Using imagination the list is endless ...

No Pressure Pottery

The Five Minute Rose, made whilst our excellent tutor was instructing us about something else, I really need to get into the habit of listening!  The idea is that that rose has just been picked and has been sat on a stone in the garden.

Clay with a leaf pressed into the top, then fired. The leaf burned off, leaving the wonderful leaf pattern underneath. Next time I'd like to try with a leaf on the top and one underneath:

Small version of a similar leaf:

Willow Bending

Yesterday a crowd of us went to Mary Newman's Cottage in Saltash ( http://www.museumsincornwall.org.uk/museums/mary-newmans-cottage).   This is where Sir Walter Raleigh's wife lived - where he was I don't know, perhaps off exploring or spending time at the Court of Queen Elizabeth and putting his cloak down on the damp ground to avoid the Sovereign's dainty feet from getting wet.  
The house gives an excellent insight into the way the majority of Elizabethans lived, well the comparatively prosperous ones, I should imagine.  This cottage is looked after by the Tamar Protection Society (http://www.tamarprotectionsociety.org.uk/) and  is a beautiful, compact house with an entrancing cottage garden out at the back, complete with Grade II listed privvy.
Why were we there? Well, firstly to look around the property and secondly to try our hands at learning to make willow Christmas decorations.   
Apparently willow has been used for hundreds of years to make decorations and useful pieces, presumably because of its ready availability and cheapness.  We had great fun out in the back garden encouraging the willow to bend (and trying not to be too hasty and break it!).  After about an hour or work, here is my finished result.  It isn't a great photo as it's difficult to see the willow itself but I did make another one which has yet to be decorated:

SLANG

Slang is language with its sleeves rolled up or its tie loosened and its most pungent forms are those connected with pleasure and contempt.
In English there is an especially lavish slang to do with sex, the sex organs and gender.  And, in part because before the second half of the 20th Century men were so socially politically dominant, there are - or have been - an extraordinary number of slang words for women. 
Fashions change with the times, in language as in all things.  
Yet some of the slang words for women have a remarkably long history.

One example is bird, which has been a term for a young woman for more than 700 years, and has been used for woman of all ages since the 19th Century.  By contrast, its obvious relative chick is a 20th Century import from America, a perennial source of modish new usage.
Some of the everyday terms we take for granted turn out to have an intriguing history. In Old English the words wer and wif denoted, respectively, male and female, whilst man simply meant 'a human being'.  
Wer has not survived to the present, except in werewolf, which has the literal meaning 'man wolf'. Wif has of course become wife - and woman, formed from wif and man, has replaced it.  

Perhaps more remarkably, girl originally meant a young person of either sex.  Only in the early part of the 16th Century did it come to mean 'young female*.
Slang has tended to prove far less durable.  Take quean, for instance.  The word, which originally seems just to have meant woman', was by the 13th Century a term of abuse.  Initially it conveyed the idea of a bold or impudent woman but from the 16th Century it was used chiefly of prostitutes.  
As if to confuse matters, Scottish speakers of English since that time have used it to mean little more than 'young woman' - occasionally with added implications not of lax morals but of good health.
Many words of this variety now appear laughably antique.  In the 17th Century quaedam was a disparaging term for a woman.  In the 15th Century she might have been called a motyhole or even a faggot.  Surprisingly, before the time of Shakespeare faggot was an unpleasant term for a woman and it survived into the 20th Century in Lancashire dialect.

One word which has only recently faded from view is spinster which for many years was the official term for an unmarried woman.  First recorded in the 14th Century, meaning 'wool-spinner' (a job usually performed by women), it was adopted as official language in the 17th Century.  It has lately been dropped from government parlance, though, along with bachelor, the preferred term for unmarried people, of either sex and any orientation, is now a neutral one: single.
Spinster is an example of the way women have often been represented as homely and maternal but there is also a long tradition of portraying females as edible (think of words like dish, honey and crumpet), as animals (bat, crow, shrew, pet pussy) and as witch-like figures (crone, vamp, siren, hag).
Some words of this type persist only among older users.  I'm pretty sure I heard my grandmother, who was born in 1909, use trollop and jezebel.  Whilst I'm not convinced she ever uttered the words baggage or floozy, I certainly heard her refer to a woman as a hussy - a word that has enjoyed several different applications.  
It was once a slang term for a housewife, and was used of thrifty homemakers.  It has also, in rural areas especially, been a fairly neutral term for a young woman, perhaps the equivalent of lass.

Initially, for the word to take on negative overtones it had to be paired with an adjective like brazen or bold. Yet increasingly, and certainly by the 18th Century, it could stand alone as a term of disrespect.
Other words have always been terms of abuse.  Slut, which appears to be German in origin, dates back to the early 15th Century, whilst the Biblical-sounding strumpet can be found as early as the 1320s (one of its first recorded users is Chaucer).  
The less sexually charged slattern seems to have entered the language about 250 years later, meaning from the outset 'a rude, ill-bred woman'.  As for bitch, it has been a form of abuse for some 600 years but until the 17th Century it was as often used of men as of women and wasn't considered especially offensive.

Many of the most disrespectful terms are comparatively recent coinages.  For instance, bint was adopted from Arabic (where is means 'daughter') by British servicemen in Egypt during the First World War.  
Slag is recorded in the second edition of Francis Grows's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1788; but, surprisingly, its meaning is given as 'a slack-mettled fellow, one not ready to resent an affront'.  The sense we most often encounter now, confined to women, and specifically criticising loose sexual behaviour, seems to be not much more than 50 years old.
The equally popular slapper has been current for barely 20 years.  It may derive from the Yiddish word schlepper, a fairly general term of abuse for a rackety women, although my mother for one thinks it has to do with the thick make-up slapped on by slatternly girls.

It's interesting how many of these words begin with an s and another consonant.  This sound is one of language's least wholesome: you have only to think of other words of this flavour - slimy, slither, sneaky, spittle, slang,  slug.  It's also worth noticing that the reproof most commonly aimed at women is that they are promiscuous, not much better than prostitutes.
Slang terms for prostitutes have long been used of women who, although clearly not prostitutes, are reckoned to be too liberal with their favours.  The word whore, which has existed in English for almost a millennium, has for centuries been used of women who are simply unpopular, and for most of its life it has been used by women as often as by men.
Yet, as more liberal attitudes to women's sexuality have developed over the past generation or two, terms of this kind have dropped out of favour. 
Words like trollop, doxey, hoyden and strumpet - all once widely used - are barely heard now and unlikely to be revived.
Even so, a few new words of this type have crept into the language: today many young men, who have grown up absorbing the sexist swagger of urban music, use the African-American ho (an altered form of whore) to refer to their conquests - or to snipe at women who have rejected them.

One of the most intriguing phenomena is the way slang words for the female genitalia become more general terms of abuse.  This pattern of usage should remind us that a lot of men are scared not just of women but of their sex organs too.  The language of abuse usually betrays deep-rooted fears, and the more abusive slang that has historically been used of women - mainly by men - reveals a galaxy of male insecurities.


Strong stuff from August 2006 WI Home & Country Magazine, which has since become WI Life)