appleturnover - homemade stories

painted bathtub

For months I’ve been casting sideways looks at the roll-top bathtub in the four-hundred-year-old cottage. The colour! That particular shade is dramatic on the inside of the craft cupboard, but I was searching for something else for the tub.

My wonderful, perceptive friend Heather visited us, and being a brilliant colour consultant and interior designer, she solved the problem immediately. The greys of the galvanised bucket. Oh yes!

Now, paint has a life of its own, and the same french linen chalk paint that I used on the daybed and the bellows turned rather a warmer dusty cocoa shade on the tub. I’m quite surprised by the hue. What do you think?

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elisa | 26/01/2012 | 2 comments | categories: winter, handcrafted
tags: annie sloan, bath, chalk paint, cottage, daybed, galvanised, painting

galvanised bucket

Having grown up in one rainy village and moved across the world to another, I’m quite fond of any object that can emerge with grace from a wet winter. The patina on a galvanised steel bucket only improves with weathering and age. The ones I’ve found around this old cottage, and picked up for a fiver at markets nearby, are thick with stories. I guiltlessly leave them out in the wet, forgotten between the compost and the greenhouse when we’ve headed out for a walk in the hills. A couple of them are understated in such an appealing manner, they’ve been invited inside. I keep one next to my treadle to catch threads and snippets, and another stands upstairs beside the tub. Their dull, perfect grey inspired the resolution of a long-considered project, which I hope to show you tomorrow.

There aren’t many materials that age so beautifully. The stone chimney pot looks better and better, and the deck chairs are growing a distinguished grey, the terracotta pots are patterned with lichen, but most other objects acquire a distressing coat of slippery green in this climate, or worse, they sport mushrooms.

In 1742, French chemist Paul Jacques Malouin described a method of coating iron by dipping it in molten zinc in a presentation to the French Royal Academy. In 1836, French chemist Stanislas Sorel obtained a patent for a method of coating iron with zinc, after first cleaning it with 9% sulfuric acid (H2SO4) and fluxing it with ammonium chloride (NH4Cl).

Zinc-coated. Endlessly useful object, the sort one might comfortably have around for generations without really noticing.

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baking powder

Being a bit sensitive to some ingredients has drawn me further into the pursuit of making things myself, from scratch. The curious world of store-bought may have been a brief history so far, but I’m regularly amazed to discover how rarely I know the source and process of foods, and only know the products. Many products I thought were complex can be simply made, often more economically, and of a better quality. Baking powder is a curiousity like this.

Baking powder, a rising agent, is extraordinarily easy to make. If you’d like to make a jarful to store til you’re next baking biscuits and cakes, you’ll need three ingredients: one part sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) to two parts cream of tartar to one part starch - I use rice or potato starch as a substitute for corn starch. Shake them very well. That last ingredient extends the life of the mixed powders, so if you just want to assemble what you need fresh, leave that part out. I’m not sure why adding aluminium to baking powder was a good idea, precisely, but if you’re determined to buy the stuff, there are aluminium-free versions. It’s unlikely I’ll make my own baking soda and cream of tartar from scratch, but you never know.

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elisa | 24/01/2012 | be the first to comment | categories: winter, kitchen garden
tags: baking, cream of tartar, food sensitivities, sodium bicarbonate, traditional