I decorated a couple of eggs as gifts over the easter weekend. I have to say it took a lot longer than I anticipated and quite a few coats of acrylic paint to cover the brown shell. Heres how they worked out…
Apr
2012
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Feb
2012
Snowy Sunday!
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This morning I woke up to several inches of snow. Here are a few pics of from my walk in the park 
Jan
2012
Facebook like button – Display the images and content you want.
When a user likes your site using the facebook like button. Facebook posts an image, a link and a description to their wall. But how do you get facebook to show the image and text you want it to display? Afterall this is a good way to advertise and an opportunity not to be missed.
By inserting a couple of metatags (open graph tags) into the head of your page you can select the content you wish to display really easily. You can find comprehensive information on how to do this on the facebook developer site.
However I am going to give you a quick summary of my interpretation of this information.
The header of your site should contain the following:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Your Page Title</title>
<meta property="og:title" content="Site Page Title Goes Here"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="article"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="http://yoursite.com"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://yoursite.com/images/thumbnail.jpg">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Site Title"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="A description of your site"/>
<meta property="admins" content="12345"/>
</head>Notes on the above code:
- Ensure you have all the extra information required after
- og:title should be your page title
- og:type should be set to article. There is a wide range of types available however article seems to be the most relevant for a page that is transient. eg a blog post or marketing landing page. Article also seems the most reliable option and produced the least amout of errors for me in facebook lint.
- og:url This should be your website url and the page you have this code on. This may sound stupid but the url must be url of the page with this code on! Modifying this to the live url (before the page is live) will mean facebook cannot find the correct image path.
- og:image This should be the path to a thumbnail image of your choice.
- og:description A short description of your page.
- admins Despite facebook suggesting you use “fb:admins” I found this to be buggy. “admins” seems to be more reliable. You can find out your facebook admin by clicking on an image within your photo album and looking at the url for the numbers proceeding ?fbid= e.g http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=NUMBERHERE&set=t.11111&type=1&theater
Verifying your code
You can check your code by using Facebook Lint Tool. This will let you know any mistakes and also make facebook aware of your page.
Hopefully the above code helps! More information on Open Graph Tags or the like button can be found on the facebook developer website.
Dec
2011
Christmas Markets in Vienna
To get in the festive spirit, we spent the weekend in Vienna sightseeing and exploring the numerous christmas markets.
There were plenty of markets to explore and being crafty I wanted to see all of them. There were some really nice stools with unique hand crafted items although I have to say I was slightly disappointed to see similar items across all the markets. It seemed a shame that there wasn’t more hand crafted items and less mass produced. Having said that I enjoyed every minute of it. Below are a few pictures of my favourite stools.
Decorated biscuits
More yummy biscuits
Marzipan balls
Cheeses and Hams
Christmas decorations
Pretzel pastries
Candle holders
The largest of all the markets – Rathaus
Nov
2011
Grape Jam
What do you do with 4+ kilos of home grown and slightly undersized grapes? Make jam of course!
Well that was the plan. It possibly wasnt the best idea we had ever had. A grape cake or dessert may have been a bit quicker. However the final product was well worth it. It turns out Grape jam is really delicious if you are prepared to put in the time. (1 weekend and 3 evenings it took us)
For every kilo of grapes you will need 500g of jam sugar (with pectin). We made our jam in 1 kilo batches because I read somewhere it makes setting easier.
The first step of making the jam is to remove the seeds. The best way of doing this is to peel the grapes and boil the skins and flesh in separate saucepans, adding 500ml of water to the skins. After a little while the flesh will seperate from the seeds and then you will be able to sieve them to remove them. Our type of grapes popped out of their skins with a little pinch. This was by far the most time consuming part.
Next mix the flesh and the skins (you may wish to blend the skins a little to make them smaller) back together and bring to the boil. Remove from the heat and add the sugar. Once it has all disolved bring the mixture back to the boil.
The hardest part is getting the right thickness. Keep boiling the jam until it reaches the right consistency. This can be checked by placing a little of the mixture on a cold plate and placing it in the freezer for a minute. If its done it will gather up when you push your finger into it. Out of the 4 batches I only managed to get this right once. The other batches had to be reboiled the next day or became a little too thick!
And here is the final product. 24 jars of jam in total (15 jars below). I still to need to make some pretty labels but other wise we are really pleased with how they turned out.
Oct
2011
Knitting Window Installation
I was shopping in Oxford Street one evening last week when I spotted this…
Claire Nixon is the lovely lady knitting away in this live installation at Oasis. As it says in the first picture. “By the end of this week, Claire will have been lovingly hand knitting for 7 days and will have made a giant scarf over 5 metres in length!”
I think the window was a really nice idea. It looked great and certainly drew my attention to Oasis. Claire’s work is also fascinating, you can read more about her on her website and admire her chunky knitting.
