In love with linen teatowels!

Here are two of my linen teatowels. They are sitting on my purple spotted ironing board! Not the best background, but they have just been ironed!
I am new to the delights of linen tea towels! For a long time I lived in shared households and with hand me down tea towels. When I began buying my own I worked out very quickly I wanted to avoid any polyester in them, and looked for pure cotton.
I knew linen teatowles were cosidered high quality, but I didn't know why ~  I had gone off linen after being exasperated by such easily crumpled clothes.

Recently I have had one friend educating me about patience with linen clothing (which means finding second hand linen clothes is a boon!) and another enlightening me on the quality of linen tea towels. She has just been given a glorious pile of beautiful linen teatowels that are really works of art. And so she kindly passed on to me a couple of the lovely teatowels she had made, as well as a large brocade one.

Now I understand! SO absorbent! Resistant to dirt and stains! (And better for the environment).

I love them.

Well, I am never too old to learn, and how glad I am to learn this one before I begin my first YamDaisy marketing venture. I plan to get teatowels designed and printed with a yam daisy to promote and raise money for my YamDaisy Cafe project. Guess what! They will be pure linen!

Cheers for the Childless

We celebrate Mothers Day and Fathers Day because it is so important to appreciate their care and hard work in bringing up the children that are our future.

I would like to celebrate another group of people whose decisions, care and hard work also affect our future.

I know several people who have made the decision to be childless. Two very dear sisters are among them.

Thank goodness for those people who are not having children! 

Whether their decisions were easy or hard, simple or complicated, their decision means the pressure of populations on our dear Earth is that little bit lessened.

When I grew up the common view was that a woman without children was not ‘fulfilled’ not a ‘proper’ woman, not ‘complete’. No doubt men are maligned similarly. Hopefully we have come a long way from that point of view. But we need to go further. We need to say Hooray! We need to celebrate those people for the decision they have made that benefits every country, every continent, every ocean of our planet.

 And I want to include those men and woman who may not have chosen to be childless, but were made so by cruel fate or circumstance. After all, we celebrate Mothers and Fathers who may have had their children as a result of cruel fate or circumstance! Fair is fair!

I have been thinking about blogging this for a while, watching as Mothers’ Days and Fathers’ Days blossom and blink all over the world. What special day could I use to celebrate those childless men and women?

Well, today is the day. It is my birthday, (don't believe the date on the blog! It is Thursday here, and the day began with this lunar eclipse just before dawn!). 

I am dedicating it this way. I really hope that if you are childless you hear me cheering you, and if you know someone who has decided to be childless, please pass on a cheer from me, and give them a hooray yourself!

Thankyou for reading, and a special thankyou to you childless ones!

Producers

Our Melbourne paper. The Age, has a Tuesday Epicure section which was dedicated this week to small, specialist producers.
There are a lot of them!
Animal welfare, respect for the best quality, innovative marketing (eg buying a whole lamb at a time) and lots of specialising. Organic, Permaculture... There is even a new shop opening to cater to the needs of bee keepers!
It is nice to think this part of the food industry is growing up in time to be useful for the Yam Daisy Cafes! And, ofcourse, the YD Cafes will be very useful to them.
While the YamDaisy isn't a high budget enterprise, the idea is that it works like a family home. The economy of bulk cooking, avoiding waste, using what is in season, and in plentiful supply, means that there is room to buy beautiful produce.
And imagine what a difference it will make to such local producers when there are lots of YamDaisy Cafes, feeding lots of local families. Lovely!