More Rosey Goodness

The garden has started to fill with roses again. On a recent expedition to trim off the blown flowers, I ended up with three bowls full of flowers and decided to make rose beads. There were still lots of roses left, and more coming, so I searched the web for recipes. The Rose Water or Orange Blossom Pancakes, made from the water leftover from bead-making turned out very well.

The recipe that had me most interested, though, was the Rose Petal Bread which I finally made today. Mostly made--I used some whole wheat flour & cut down on the butter and eggs; it would be a much softer bread with the full amount of butter and with white flour, but much less nutritious. In any case, it's delicious.

The bread dough rose nicely.

See the lovely little flecks in there? Rosemary, rose petal (red and orange), and raisins. Yum!

You may care too much about your crafting if

you steal your dog's dish.


The easiest way to make black rose beads is too cook them in a cast iron pot.

We don't have a cast iron pot, but we do have old nails, so I've been using those. It's a bit of a nuisance keeping track of them, though, and they never really seem to get the beads truly black. Still, we don't have a cast iron pan.

But our dog does. She's been eating out of it for the last thirteen years.

Nah. I'll just keep using the nails. It is the dog's dish, after all, and who steals from their dog?

The best way to get a really crisp loaf of bread that rises just that extra bit is to steam the bread. The best way to do that is to put ice in a cast iron pan in the oven just as you put the bread in.

Still, we don't have a cast iron pan, and it's not that big a deal.

But Cinder has a cast iron pan.

It's dirty.

I can clean it, boil it, run it through the diswasher.

But what kind of a person steals her dog's dish?

The roses all bloomed this week, probably one of the last big shows they'll put on before fall sets in and I prune them.

I just started a new batch of sourdough starter. In a week, I can try some of those lovely recipes in the book I checked out of the library Monday.

The dog used to have a cast iron pan.

Rose Beads Again

Another finished project: A necklace for my sister, all rose beads! The reddish-pink ones are from red & pink beads, just ground with no cooking; the yellow-brown ones are from mixed colors, cooked in a non-reactive pot and the black-brown ones are from cooking them with iron.

The rough look is kind of neat, making it more homemade in appearance, but I'd still like to know how to get them polished, since it's always good to be able to make these choices consciously.


Oh--the secret to keeping them from molding in a humid climate seems to be to keep a fan on them on low at all times while they dry.

Rose Beads--An Illustrated Guide

A few people have asked me about making rose beads. I found out about it by searching for something else entirely on google (I cannot even remember what), so there are other sites, but, hey, I feel like writing up the instructions anyway.

1) Plant lots of roses. Grow them without systemic pesticide (do you want to give your friends poison-laced necklaces? I thought not). Alternatively, you can beg petals off of environmentally minded friends or relations, but that isn't nearly as much fun.

Or, you can ask total strangers, but they tend to give you funny looks when you start inquiring about the amount of poison they use.







2) Gather roses off of the bushes and from vases around the house. You do have some in the house, right? If not--why not? Leave some roses for the bees (they've had a rough few years), add some to the vases. I'm told the best time to gather the roses is in the morning when they are at their most scented; I haven't done a comparison.





3) Spread the roses out and admire them. Notice how the patterns on the petals vary and how many colors there are. Do not omit this important step.4) Start taking the petals off the roses so you can grind them. I've used a food processor in the past; a mortar and pestle is quieter but takes much longer. These days, I'm using the blender which grinds more finely but takes more water. Both blender and food processor require some water in order to grind, something the sites I visited did not mention. Please to note: I have a super-strong blender and it does strain sometimes. It's a good idea to keep a close eye (or rather ear) on the motor to make sure you don't kill it. After all, you'll want it for smoothies later.


5) Grind them very, very fine--much finer than in the picture. Store them in a jar in the fridge until you are ready for step 6.






[Interlude:

After you have ground the roses, use some of the rose water to make something tasty. Rose cookies are good--you can follow an official recipe or you can make sugar cookies & substitute rose water for the vanilla and some of the liquid.

I like to leave a bit of the ground rose petals in the blender, add some rose water, and make a smoothie. Chocolate and roses are a perfect pair, but I should imagine citrus and rose would work as well.

Sit out in the shade, preferably under a tree with rustling leaves, with the smoothie and a good book and enjoy a few minutes of peace.]

6) Here's where there starts to be options.

a) You can heat them on the stove; keep them at a very, very low temperature so that they don't boil. Apparently, the Victorians did this for days.

The modern method is to put them on for an hour every now and again and store the mush in the fridge between times. If you want black beads, add some rusty iron--nails work fine--to the mix. Otherwise, you'll get brown beads, no matter what color the roses were to start with. One possible exception is red--theoretically, red petals ground and heated in a non-reactive pan will dry red-black. I haven't had enough red roses to try this so far.




b) The other way, the way I'm trying now, is to grind the petals very find, put the mush in the fridge, and then grind them again the next day, adding any new petals. Do this for a few days in a row, then drain the petal-clay. The beads still come out brown, but it is a slightly warmer brown, and there is more scent left.

c) You may want to add salt to your final mix to help preserve them and to keep them from growing mold before they dry--I had to throw away one batch because they did not dry fast enough. Leaving them out in the sunshine each day seems to help. Probably they could be dried in an oven at a low temperature, too.



7) Drain the bead/clay in a fine sieve. Lining it with a double layer of paper towel helps. The mush in the picture is iron-laced; it does produce nice beads, but it also makes the rosewater unusable, which is a shame.






8) Shape the beads.


9) Cover a piece of cardboard with wax paper; pin the beads to the paper.

10) Leave them somewhere to dry. Here, where it is humid, it's important to get them out into the sun (see 5c for the reason).

11) Once they're dry, they'll be nice and hard and ready for making into jewelry. So far, I've only made bracelets, but then, I discovered rose beads in the late fall--not the best time for gathering rose petals. They'll keep some of their smell, too. Rumor has it that the smell lasts for centuries, but I have no way of testing that.

A Rosy Day

Yesterday was a rose-filled day.

I started by stripping all the fully-open roses from the bushes to make beads.

But, before I ground them up, I had to stop and admire the way the Fourth of July roses are all different. Hundreds of flowers on one bush, all streaked, speckled, and spotted in unique ways.

After admiring them--and dragging in family members to also admire them--I took a picture.

Then, I got busy and ground them up, simmered them for a few hours, and drained them while I shaped beads from the previous batch & put them out to dry.

I also used the rose-water from the bead-making to scent some soap.

While the rest of the rose-water was used to make a rose-apple crumble (yummy!).

Incidentally, gathering large batches of roses at once confuses the bees, or so I judge from their behavior around the fourth of July bush. All day long, they had been coming to the bushes, gathering nectar, and going home to dance their dances, assuring others of flowers and food. All of the sudden, there was nothing there, save the bees, flying around where the flowers ought to be, bumbling into the buds hopefully, and then flying off with disgruntled looks on their little faces.

There are also plenty of roses left around the house, floating in bowls or standing in vases.

Not all of the bushes are even blooming yet--some of the bare-root roses have only just started to discover that they are bushes at all.

I may eventually run out of things to do with roses--beyond admiring them, that is.