Saturday 30 August 2008

Flower Shows, Wildlife Gardens and a Festival

We went to the Scottish Executive Flower and Craft Show today. (My partner works for the Executive). There were some impressive veg (especially the leeks) and flowers. Interesting crafts too, I'll need to make sure I pick up a copy of the categories so I can enter something next year.....

We then wandered through the Scottish Executive Wildlife Garden, which has a small pond and some nice meadow areas, with lots of flowers, bees, spiders etc. Apparently there are quite a lot of goldfinches round here though we didn't see any today.

We then went to the Mela, Scotland's leading celebration of cultural diversity through the arts, though while we were there, nothing much was happening. There was an interesting variety of food and crafts though, including a stall from Mzuribeads, an organisation in Uganda that makes beads from recycled magazines, which strikes me as a creative, though time consuming way to recycle! The resulting jewellery is very appealing. There was also a stall of crafts from Malawi, which made me feel a little nostalgic.

2 comments:

RG said...

Not sure if it's the same, but we have beads from the paper-bead making African ladies too. Where a person has a house party and a huge variety of the beads are sent and hopefully bought by the party goers!!! Very attractive and apparently helpful for the economy there.

Janice Thomson said...

Wow what fascinating jewelery and very beautiful too. I've never seen it before. Great link Juliet.