Karoo Moment

I am currently sitting in a stop-and-go in the middle of the Karoo. Having spent the last week chasing around at full capacity in preparation for two shows back to back, Innibos in Nelspruit and a Gem exhibition in Menlyn in Pretoria, it’s quite a relief to just sit and be driven across the country!

I’m not completely off-hire (a term my civil engineer father uses to denote chill out time), with a lap full of gemstone beads, I intend to catch up on beading all the way from Plettenberg Bay to Gauteng.

Another task I have set for myself is to create a sensory collage for you, see if I can place you squarely in my seat in this vast expanse of land where, if you listen, in between the sparse birdsong and back to back heaving of 

Van Schalkwyk’s Vervoer trucks, you can hear the ghostly whisper of the slow steady role of voortrekkers’ ossewaens crunch their heritage into the hot Karoo ground. You can hear them loud and clear in town names like Vergenoeg (far enough), Moetverloor (given up will), Goliatskraal (as in Goliath), Agtertang (um… pliers in the back/derogatory name for someone on the opposite side of the tracks!).

 We careen past these places to a Sunday soundtrack of Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and something I can only describe as Baltic-dub-step-maybe! The sharp morning sun casts pink shadows underneath pink tourmaline beads in the tray before me and slowly thaws my frosty Garden Route hands! The everlasting highlight on the steel barrier along the N10 races us to Graaff-Reinet. I can almost hear it singing on the steel. Secretary birds, monkeys, baboons, meerkats watch. 

It’s so very open here, we are so very outnumbered by sky and clouds and succulents and space. I’m picking tomatoes big-time! Inside our moving cocoon its popcorn and home-made lentils burgers and Audio books and Onion, the hamster, charging around like an excited country mouse on her way to the big city! Makes the prospect of spending the next ten hours in a car all the more bearable!

Gauteng here we come!         

Olives and Childbirth

Every year when the Prince Albert Olive Festival breezes by we think, Next year…we’re there! And every year we miss it. We missed it this year too but received a box of fresh raw olives from family members who did get their ducks in a row in time to go. If you’ve every plucked a fresh sumptuous olive from the tree and popped it expectantly into your mouth, you’d know it tastes revolting and it takes a couple of weeks of soaking in salt water to get the bitterness out of it. It’s a little easier to dry them in salt than to pickle them, but they won’t keep as long. We did a bit of both and this is the result!

My kids even pickled their own, I have reservations about how my son’s will turn out, he decided to put a bit of everything in.…ginger, Seschuan pepper, Stevia, Rosemary….still beats supermarket olives!

And P.S: I experienced the great joy of removing my orange ribbon this morning! While I was pickling olives my friend was giving birth to a healthy baby boy, in the comfort of her own home with a doula and a midwife. And no drugs in sight! Woohoo!! What an awesome warrior mama she is!

Eeck, there's a rock in my drinking water!

I think it’s safe to say that I believe in the healing properties of stones. Having owned a Crystal shop for seven years means that I’ve gotten to hear the most incredible stories from people. Some of the stories that have crawled through our doors have been totally unbelievable but it’s always interesting for me to hear how others perceive the stones in their lives and their experiences with those stones. Whether you believe that they have a capacity to heal or if you just like how they look, they enhance your current state of affairs just by being in the room!

I’ve started putting a stone in my drinking water recently, and I can taste the difference, so I thought I’d chat about it for a bit. Try it out, and let me know what happens.

Stones all vibrate at a certain frequency which is beneficial to us as human beings. When you put them into water, the water takes on the vibrations of the stones. It’s important to note that many stones are toxic so it’s best to stick with quartz, there are many to choose from and are hard enough to not dissolve into the water. I use Amethyst, Citrine and Rose Quartz and I can taste the difference! And I’ve had so many people in my shop who swear that putting Rose quartz in their dogs’ drinking water staves off fleas! Give it a try!

Honey, Bees, and Yoghurt!

It all started when the yoghurt flopped. I make my own yoghurt you see. It’s so enjoyable; it’s like being an alchemist. You start with this thing and then overnight it becomes something else! It transpired out of necessity though, as I am not prepared to eat Gelatin (often obtained from pig skin and cattle bones) or Pimarison (an anti-fungal additive implicated in various allergic reactions) so I got into the habit of making our own from raw milk or hormone free milk. If you’d like, I can explain how to make it?

And it always works, except on one very cold night when I left it to cool and it got too cool and I decided to not reheat it to see what happened. The next day it was still milk, not surprising really! Same same only a little bit creamier.

So I thought to turn it into ice-lollies for the kids. Add honey, some vanilla, freeze it and everyone’s happy. Except we’d just run out of honey. And I had been forbade to buy any honey as we have our own beehive and there was still a full frame of honey in the freezer from the last time we’d harvested.

So, in order to do this little thing, I had to strain and bottle the last frame of honey first.

A bee hive frame, if you’ve never seen one, is a moveable wooden element that holds the honeycomb in the hive. Once the bees have filled it with honey, you just lift it out, leaving some full frames behind for them!

Bee farmers use spinners to extract the honey from honeycombs, leaving them intact so that bees fill them up faster as they don’t have to rebuild the combs first. We don’t have a spinner so we scrape the honey and honeycomb off the wax, press it all though a fine strainer in a messy delicious process which results in bottles of clean raw honey and some sticky kitchen items which I usually leave out for the bees to clean the next day.

It’s a fun process to watch; first one curious little bee flies past, stops mid-flight and checks out this stash of honey. He fills up, leaves, and returns with ten buddies who then return with a hundred buddies and so it goes until you have an entire hive’s worth of bees on your porch having the time of their lives!

It was all going well, until I noticed that the dew had watered the honey down in the night and the bees were drowning in it! Now, when bees are out harvesting, they have nothing to protect and are therefore passive, this is very important to understand, it is also very important to believe when you and your daughter undertake the task of rescuing hundreds of drowning bees! The idea was to lift the frame, spoons and strainer out of the bowl full of watered-down honey and tip the bowl over so that the bees could crawl out of the puddles of honey on their own. Suffice to say, we were covered with bees, but it was fine, as long as we worked slowly and didn’t get honey on us.

To be surrounded by a swarm of bees all frantically trying to have their fill was an awesome experience. My daughter insisted that she had to stay and help until every last bee was dry! They were drunk and delirious you see! 

We didn’t get stung!  

Please forgive the camera shake in the images; you try hold still with bees crawling all over you!

Oh, and the yoghurt lollies were a raging success!

Ps. Do not try this at home! The bee part I mean, try the lolly part at home. with any kind of milk or yoghurt. You’ll be very popular! 

Girl time!

Girl time is magical! There are very few things that replenish my soul like an evening of good food and the company of women. It’s an essential connectedness that binds us as a community. I call it ‘walking to the water’, like tribes women walking kilometers to the well to fill up, chattering all the way there and all the way back. Lots of issues get resolved ‘walking to the water’.

 This weekend we celebrated the imminent birth of a new being into this world and with that great big moon overhead, the evening felt truly mystical!

As a gift I made up a ‘Stones for your birthing day’ survival pack with Rose Quartz, Aventurine, Jasper, Chrysocola and Moonstone from my shop.

And I took the time to make the card myself.

We weave ourselves into the things we make; it’s more than just a card!

We all brought a bead along and whispered blessings into it as we each threaded our bead onto a necklace that she can wear during the birth, or, in my case, tear off, mid-labour, in a fit of wild craziness! And we all tied orange ribbons around our wrists as a reminder to keep her in our hearts. This is something we’ve done a few times now and it’s so cool when you get the good news that you can take it off, especially since, by then, it’s manky and grimy from living on your wrist for weeks!

I think the resurgence of ceremony is so very crucial in our lives and today I am so so grateful for it! But then again, it could just be the Moon!