End of an era

I am savouring my final cup of tea. 

Not really. There will be more tea, but it won't be quite the same.

I have been drinking this lovely Fair Trade Tanzanian tea for about thirty years now, but Traidcraft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to discontinue it.

I am bereft.

Unicorn has a huge selection of teas, but most are not real tea, so I came home with this Clipper Organic Assam. Doing a little research I came across this report from Ethical Consumer into the wages and conditions of tea workers. It is pretty damning, including of tea labelled 'fair trade'; it does add that the report focusses solely on plantations and does not cover tea grown by small farmers and cooperatives, which is how Traidcraft source their tea. Clipper state on their website that their tea comes from 'the finest estates across East Africa and India' ... so I'm guessing the search for an alternative will continue.

Fair Trade Fortnight

It is currently Fair Trade Fortnight, from 24th February to 9th March, aimed at encouraging people to think about their shopping choices and the consequences of artificially cheap food prices. This year the campaign is focussing on the banana trade where large scale producers paying low wages are driving smaller farmers out of business. They point out that the price of bananas has halved in real terms over the last ten years, pressure from large supermarkets for cheaper supplies means poverty level wages for the workers on the plantations. It is an issue that affects many 'cash crops'; where land in developing countries is transferred from producing food for locals to growing crops to be sold to western markets, making people very dependent on the vagaries of the market and putting the power and control of prices in the hands of the buyers. Buying goods that are fair trade guarantees that the producers are paid a fair living wage for their products. The structures set up by fair trade organisations and cooperatives give the growers a guaranteed market and more long term security for their livelihoods. Many supermarkets do stock these products nowadays, from fresh food like bananas, to tea and coffee, chocolate and sugar, and even cotton clothing. Alternatively you can shop online at the Traidcraft website, for foods, housewares, clothing and jewellery. People Tree do a lovely range of clothing, for people concerned that all fair trade stuff is for hippies. Fair Corp sells fairtrade trainers, clothing and underwear. For chocolate you can't beat Green and Black's; Maya Gold has always been my favourite, it's so dark you can't eat much so it lasts ages, though I was a little disappointed with the  new lemon, which was not lemony enough for me. The Traidcraft website has a pretty comprehensive list of places that sell a variety of fair trade products. 

The Guardian yesterday ran this article  that adds emphasis to the issue by highlighting the very real consequences of poverty wages in developing countries. I buy my tea by the case every couple of months, it costs me £16 with postage and a small 'round up' donation, and I just worked out that it comes to about 18p for my (average) four/five cups per day, it's a small price to pay.

Fibre Arts Friday

Yes, I know it's not Friday. I'm guessing that other people browse blogs a little like me, visiting your favourites and then going down their sidebar to their list of favourites and seeing where it takes you. I ended up yesterday at Wisdom Begins in Wonder (here's a hint, I will mostly visit if the blog title is a little ambiguous.) The anonymous owner runs Fibre Arts Friday, a meme-thingy where people share their fibre projects, nice because it is all inclusive and it can be any kind of craft that you like. Do pop over if you like that kind of thing and see the shares. 

So, this week I have mostly been playing with Araucania Azapa, a wonderful blend of merino, alpaca and silk. I like buying both Araucania and Mirasol yarns because the companies are Fair Trade and support the local communities they work within. This bright pink was bought on a whim from Aileeens on Ebay. It is so soft you just want to cuddle it and now I've thought that I want to make a whole blanket from it (I only used two of the three hanks so I need to find a use for the last one.)

I used a pattern called Celtic Vest (this is a link to the PDF which is a freebie from the Fleece Artist website. ) It is most peculiar knitting, something I have never done before, knitting with two balls at the same time, and I don't mean held together. You do this weird cast on; knot them together then making a loop with one ball and knitting the stitch with the other, so at the other end you have two yarns waiting to be knitted with. Then you take one yarn and knit across (I marked the second yarn with a safety pin so I would remember which was which). It didn't say use a circular needle but you have to because you then slide the work back to the beginning and using the second yarn you do K1 P1 across. Then you do the same thing back the other way.

What you end up with is this deeply ridged texture:

It is knit side to side in one piece and then sewn at the shoulder. I fiddled with the pattern a  bit and added some random stripes of Araucania Patagonia, a cotton yarn in pale blue and pink, just for variety.

All in all I am pretty chuffed with it, and it is lovely to wear, which I have done every day. I can see it becoming the new favourite.

Trusty staple gun strikes again

I so hate living with other people's curtains, one of the downsides of rented housing. They are invariably old and nasty. The ones in our current living room were quite nice really, just cream patterned, and lined, so not that cheap when they were new. However the curtain rail had been the cause of some problems and, having come loose twice already, was wedged in place in a hole in the plasterwork at the corner of the bay window. When Tish was round for a visit the other day she went to close them and the whole thing came down. So today I decided to return to my favoured method of curtain fixing ... the staple gun. This is a great tip for people not keen on the whole palaver of having to buy rails to fit, and drill stuff and most of the time the plaster is all crumbly and you end up having to buy huge quantities of filler and kind of cement the whole thing in place. Just too much bother. So here they are. I then took the hooks that were in the wall on either side of the bay and screwed them into the window frame so I can tuck the curtains up during the day. It has the nice side effect that we are no longer overlooked by the neighbours when they come out to use the bin (which they seem to do on inordinately frequent occasions).

These 'curtains' were bought as sofa throws from Shared Earth many many years ago. One had been cut up and made into a cover for a futon, and then sewed back together into one piece when I used them as curtains in my house in Cecil Street. You can see the original colour on the left hand edge there (that's the bit that was cut off and so is not faded). I have always loved them because they were some of the very few non-functional items I ever bought for my home at a time when we were very hard up.

And I have also been doing cosmetic preparations for NaNoWriMo. This is my desk. It used to be Dunk's desk but the 'study' is too tiny for it so he has a table and lots of stuff in boxes instead. I cleaned it up the other week (it had become a bit of a dumping ground for washing and crafty stuff) and put up this hanging (also with the staple gun:-) that the girls bought for me (you might recognise it from the home made christmas tree post). I am sitting here now writing this, just to see what it feels like to write at a desk, and if the chair is ok, and if the light is good. It looks all very bare at the moment. I am thinking that, as I did with the christmas tree, I can pin things to the hanging like a notice board, maybe pictures or inspirational quotations to encourage me, stuff like that.

Cookies and ice cream

Tish has been trying to find a decent cookie recipe for ages now, with not much success. Then I went to my sister's house and she had made the most yummy chocolate chip cookies, which she found on the BBC site (so go there and try them). I was craving cookies again last night so invested in a bar of Green and Blacks this morning and made some myself. I had been reading in the New Internationalist recently about the use of child slave labour in cocoa bean production and have since been trying to only buy any chocolate that is fair trade. It is a subject very close to my heart. It seems an easy thing to do; to see a situation that is plainly exploitative and to be able to do something simple and direct about it. I have been drinking the same Tanzanian tea from Traidcraft for about 25 years now. I used to have to go specially to one of their shops to get it, now it is great to see fair trade products on supermarket shelves or to simply order a box online every couple of months.

Anyway the cookies have lasted about five minutes so there is some ice cream gently freezing ready for supper. We had some rhubarb given to us by Dunk's son Haydn last week, which was supposed to become a crumble, but instead has become some ice cream.

So here's what I did:

4/5 big stalks of rhubarb, stewed with a splash of water and a couple of spoonfuls of sugar, then cooled and whizzed in the liquidiser.

1/2 pint of custard, not too thick, cooled.

1/2 pint of double cream, whipped with a couple of teaspoons of castor sugar.

Stir it all together. Put in a nice clean old ice cream carton. Whack it in the freezer. I keep putting the timer on for 30 minutes and go back and stir it thoroughly (we don't have a fancy machine for doing this part) for the next few hours. I am guesssing it will probably be 4/5 hours until it is set.