This is very quick to make and adaptable. If you’re not keen on smoked fish, add more cheese. If you love smoked fish either reduce the cheese or just eat the fish as is.
Mrs S did the camerawork, thanks to her for helping!
Ingredients
2 smoked mackerel fillets
100g cream cheese (Philadelphia or other)
Horseradish sauce or fresh horseradish (optional)
Cayenne pepper (half a teaspoon or so)
Fresh parsley
Crackers to serve
Butter, if you’re going to keep it for a while.
Simply add the ingredients to a food processor and whizz up to the desired consistency. You can keep a few flakes back if you want a few lumps.
I’m not keen on horseradish, but Mrs S loves it. So there are two versions of this, one with and one without.
If you want to keep the pâté for a while, put some in a ramekin. If you’re like us you may have a cupboard full of empty Gü pots – these make excellent ramekins for pâté. Melt some butter in a pan and pour a thin layer over the pâté. This should keep for three days, though it never lasts quite that long in our house.
You can get smoked mackerel with black peppercorns on – this can also be used but will obviously add pepper to the flavour. And you can add black pepper instead of cayenne or paprika if you want that sharpness that black pepper brings.
The crackers are Tesco’s own salt and pepper crackers. These are some of the best I’ve ever had, they bring out cheese flavours in a way that few other crackers do. They aren’t as good a Peter’s Yard sourdough crackers, but also not quite as expensive.
An experiment with bourbon may explain the high reputation of Japan’s whiskies
During my research for an earlier chemistry of whisky article, I came across an account of an experiment on how transporting barrels impacts the flavour of bourbon. Bourbon barrels are commonly used to age whisky not only in Scotland, but in England, Ireland, Japan and India.
Whisky in Glencairn glasses. These glasses were developed in the early 2000s, inspired by the shape of the whisky blender’s glass.
I’d been looking at how the flavours of charred oak affect the character of bourbon. This article in Wine Enthusiast drew my interest. It described a fascinating experiment by Trey Zoeller, the founder of Jefferson’s bourbon distillery in Kentucky, USA. I originally put it in a footnote, but the whole thing became a bit extended and so I decided to convert it into an article.
Barrel aging bourbon
The usual practice when aging whisky/ whiskey1 is to have the barrels stacked in a warehouse holding maybe 60,000 barrels with 200 litres in each and let nature take its course.
Since 2012 Jefferson’s, based in Kentucky, has offered a limited ‘Ocean Cask’ expression. They send the barrels on six-month voyages at sea, where they are heated, chilled and shaken about before coming back to Kentucky to be bottled. Exact numbers of barrels aren’t available, but multiple shipping containers with 200 barrels each are now sent on these voyages. The 200-300 bottles that are filled from each barrel retail at $83 (about £60)2 for a 750 ml bottle, more than double their standard bourbon ($31).
Without good roads, the best option was for distillers to send barrels down the Mississippi with the spring flood, then by ship from New Orleans to New York for bottling. In 2022, Jefferson’s sent two barrels of bourbon on a replica journey down the Mississippi and then to New York to see if this process was the source of Kentucky bourbon’s high reputation.
A barge on the Mississippi.
The agitation of the spirit in the barrel during transit did change the flavour, both chemical analysis and blind tasting showed a distinct variation. This could explain the good reputation that Kentucky bourbon enjoyed in New York.
Relevance to whisky
Bourbon is similar to whisky, in that you take a grain-derived spirit and age it in wooden barrels until it has absorbed flavours from the barrels and the environment. The difference is the type of grain you use. Malt whisky is made using barley. By law, bourbon must contain over 51% corn grain spirit. Anything else is grain whisky3.
As my previous blog discussed, a lot of whisky is aged in used bourbon barrels. The environment in which the whisky aging takes place influences the flavours extracted from the wood. Bourbon is produced in the generally temperate continental climate of Kentucky, so the mix of grains (the ‘mash bill’), the type of still used and the cut of the spirit are more important in determining the particular flavour4 of the bourbon.
The flavours extracted from used bourbon barrels by the maturing whisky will be representative of the original spirit. The mix of flavour molecules extracted will also vary depending on several factors including the ethanol content of the whisky, temperature, humidity, and time.
Scotland is a cool, damp country and produces characteristic whisky. By law whisky must be aged for at least three years to be sold as Scottish whisky. Age adds to the flavour, smoothness and cost of a whisky. The oldest whisky I’ve ever has is a 20 year old Highland Park – a slightly peaty but incredibly smooth drink that cost about £25 for a double5.
Japan and the getting back to the point
All this is fine, but what does the Jefferson bourbon experiment have to do with whisky? After all, shipping or moving thousands of heavy barrels isn’t a commercially viable option unless you’re going to add a premium to an already expensive product.
Japan has a well-established whisky manufacturing culture, with the first whisky distillery – Suntory – opening near Kyoto in 1923. Following a disagreement between the founders, a second distillery, Nikka, was opened near Sapporo on the north island of Hokkaido. This site was chosen because the climate was more like Scotland than the sub-tropical Kyoto.
The Nikka distillery near Sapporo. A new place I want to visit, it looks lovely.
Japan’s whisky industry was established after thoroughly researching the Scottish methods and equipment, even buying old stills from distilleries and, in places, a climate that mimics that of Scottish. From those beginning decades ago, Japanese distilleries have developed the craft to produce a distinct drink that has its own place in the world of whisky.
What is perhaps unique in Japan is that is a whisky-producing country that also sits on a tectonically active region, at the junction of at least three active geological faults. Low intensity tremors are frequent throughout the islands with major quakes occurring annually.
So, while shipping thousands of barrels by sea to enhance the extraction of flavours isn’t economically feasible, it could be that the character of Japanese whisky is changed through frequent shaking by earthquakes. It could be that, in their quest to create a Scottish whisky with a Japanese feel, the geology of their country has gifted the Japanese whisky industry an added influence that the distillers of other countries will find it difficult to emulate.
Traditionally, whisky is from Scotland, whiskey isn’t. Though some Japanese distilleries use ‘whisky’. ↩︎
I had to enter an address in the USA to get this price. I picked 1060 West Addison St, Chicago. ↩︎
Quinoa can be used to make whisky, even though it’s not technically a grain. ↩︎
The main event in the year I was born was something that I consider the crowning achievement of humanity: man landing on the moon.
Neil Armstrong on the moon. Not much else to say about it.
Thousands of genius engineers and scientists worked with one aim: to get people to the moon and back again safely.
Other events
The first Jumbo Jet flew in January and the first Concorde flight took place in March. So as far as getting people off the ground, it was quite a good year.
In music, the Woodstock festival and the first Isle of Wight festival took place. Black Sabbath recorded their first album in October, though it wasn’t released until 1970. The Beatles split up and the disastrous Altamont Free Concert put a lid on the flower power era.
Moon Landing
Over the years there have been a lot of crazies who insist that the moon landings didn’t happen. Some of these range from the reasonable – we didn’t have the technology so it must have been faked somehow – to the frankly bonkers.
A lot of issues from the reasonable end of the spectrum are down to a poor understanding of how cameras work and physics. There are no stars in the pictures because cameras have limited dynamic range. And if they wanted to fake it, wouldn’t they have put stars on the roof of the studio? The flag does act weird, it wobbles for a long time. This has been ascribed to the ventilation in the studio moving the flag. The same ventilation doesn’t affect the dust on the floor, though.
The bonkers end is more fun, though. We never went to the moon because the moon is a NASA hologram or a government hoax. We know this because spheres can’t reflect light so the moon is flat, if it is real at all.
The moon is a space station and an artificial satellite brought here 13000 years ago by The Reptilians – the Draco Empire and grey aliens.
The Moon was made by scooping out the Grand Canyon and filling it with helium.
The astronauts would have been killed by the van Allen (or van Halen, the name changes) belt radiation. And they can’t live in space anyway because there is no magnetic field for their hearts to work off of.
I have a file of various conspiracy theories. Whenever I’m feeling down and a bit stupid, I look at these and realise I’m not so daft after all.
One year ago – Tuesday 17th December 2024 – I was in full-time employment at the company I’d been with since it started in the summer of 2005.
On Wednesday 18th, the CEO came to our labs with the news that the company was going to be refocussing and that all R&D function was being stopped. This meant half the company was being made redundant, including me.
To say that it was kick in the guts would be right.
The news didn’t make for a very festive Christmas, though I had three months gardening leave to get my head together. Things could have been a lot worse – I know at least one person in our town was laid off with no notice, no money and no wages for the previous month.
Thinking things over
Over the previous years, Mrs S and I had talked about what we would do if I lost my job1. The talk had turned to setting up businesses doing something or other, buying a 3D printer and selling stuff, starting a consultancy… but we didn’t really think that we would have to do this.
I kept my work laptop and phone, so that was a good start. To begin with I kept track of the courses I did and tried a few things that ultimately didn’t work out. I tried making books to sell on Amazon (sales = 0), an Etsy shop (sales = 0), and other things that went nowhere.
Still, we went to Australia in the summer, having paid for this already and had a great time in Sydney (I was best man at my brother’s wedding), Melbourne (a revisit, we lived there from 2003-05) and Perth.
Part of the Perth City art trail, this design is by Spanish artist Hyuro, I liked the kinetic energy of the women and empty dresses tumbling across the side of the building.
Where are we now?
One the positive, I learned how to use the 3D software Blender using my WP blog as a portfolio. I set up another shop on RedBubble (Heath Way Prints), started doing a food blog both on WordPress and paralleled on a separate site Cheese & Garlic and a TikTok channel with Excel tips. And I even managed a bit of consultancy work, though I’ve yet to set up a website for that.
One of the models I made in Blender as part of a course. This is Steve the orc, moonlighting at the Mordor Improv.
I’ve also learned how to use CapCut for video editing – my Yorkshire Pudding video was my first attempt at a ‘how to’ recipe video. And I also did a four week social media marketing course that taught me a lot about how to use social media for business. I set up the Cheese & Garlic site during the course – I’d never have known how to do that without the course.
After a year, I’m feeling more positive about the potential for the various businesses. Let’s see where we are in December 2026.
There’s a British expression: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. ↩︎
I don’t think of myself as a whisky aficionado or expert in any way. As far as I’m concerned, I know what sort of whisky I like but I don’t think I have sensitive enough taste buds to distinguish and separate different flavours within a drink. The divide in whisky for me is between peated and unpeated. I find that peat in whisky overwhelms any other flavour; I know others disagree (having had a few discussions on this topic at work) but if we all liked the same thing then it would always be sold out.
But where does the flavour of peat in whisky come from?
Why write this article if you don’t like peaty whisky?
Good question. This article was stimulated by an email I got from Wolfburn Distillery1. They were advertising new, peated expressions of their whiskies. Not much to interest me there; as I said I’m not a fan of peaty whiskies. I prefer the floral and fruity whiskies of Speyside and I’m also partial to Old Pulteney’s (Wick, Caithness) slightly salty ‘Maritime Malt’ output. What triggered my interest and sent me down a rabbithole was that they included a ‘ppm’ in the description of the peatiness.
With a career in science, I knew that ppm means ‘parts per million’ and is a unit of concentration. But concentration of what? A quick Google revealed that this is the level of cresols in the barley. Since ‘cresols’ covers a wide range of chemicals and there aren’t normally cresols in barley, the further questions were – what cresols are there in the barley, and how do they get there?
Peat and whisky
To answer the questions we need to understand how and where whisky is produced. The ‘how’ is not a mystery, though there is a lot of chemistry and craftsmanship involved. You start with barley and several years later, you have whisky. The ‘where’ is Scotland for the purposes of this article. But where in Scotland?
For the purposes of answering the question of ‘how do cresols get into the barley?’, the processes of malting and kilning are the important parts. Malting involves soaking the barley for three days to start germination and trigger the enzymatic conversion of starches into sugars for later fermentation. Kilning heats the barley, stops the germination and dries the grain before the milling stage. It’s the kilning that introduces the cresols.
The fuel used in the kilning is where the peatiness is added. Traditionally2, if you’re producing whisky in the Lowlands or your distillery is near a railway line, then the fuel of choice would be coal. It’s cheap, efficient and doesn’t alter the flavour of your product. If you’re producing whisky on an island off the coast of Scotland, you don’t have coal. What you do have is peat, and this is a useful resource for heating homes and kilning your barley. This, then, is the reason why island whiskies such as Laphroaig (Islay, Inner Hebrides), Torabhaig (Skye) and Highland Park (Orkney) tend to have a characteristic peatiness.
The cresols from the peat adsorb onto the barley, and the grain acts as a vehicle to carry these alcohol-soluble chemicals into the next stage and ensure they remain until the drink is drunk.
Cresols
Cresols as a group are based around phenol (hydroxy benzene). Chemically, they are all classed as ‘aromatic’, a name that was applied to a range of chemicals that were strong smelling, often coloured, had some unique chemistry and were sometimes carcinogenic.
The main cresols in peated whisky are guaiacol and the ortho-, meta- and paracresols. The tarry and smoky characteristics are given by these molecules. Other cresols add different flavours. How such similar molecules can give such different flavours is still not fully understood3.
Two of the main cresols in whisky. Orthocresol (left), as well as the isomers meta- and paracresol, and guaiacol (right) are the most common. These add smoky and tarry flavours to whisky.
The cresols found in peats have a range of boiling points which means that they are carried over and separated at different times. Higher molecular weight cresols tends to be distilled off later and these are the strongest tasting chemicals.
The concentration of cresols in the barley is what whisky producers quote. This isn’t necessarily the level in the final whisky, though. As previously said, the cut taken will affect the range and type of cresols in the final whisky. The ‘cut’ of the distillate will capture different cresols, giving the final whisky a variety of flavours derived from the peat.
A good example of how the cut affects the flavour is to compare the Islay whiskies Lagavulin, an exemplar of peaty whiskies, and Caol Ila, a lighter, peppery whisky, used as part of the Johnny Walker Black Label blended whisky. Both start with about 35 ppm phenols (including cresols) in the barley they source from the same maltings in Port Ellen. However, the Caol Ila distillation is an early cut using a reflux still, taking in the lower boiling-point cresols and fewer total cresols. Lagavulin uses a more traditional still and a longer, slower distillation which captures more of the high molecular weight cresols and gives the whisky its celebrated medicinal character.
Other flavours – barrel aging
The spirit that comes out of the still at the end of the distillation process is a sharp, barely palatable liquid with a 70% ethanol content. Pure ethanol isn’t pleasant, as I know from getting some splashed in my face when I was a chemistry student. So this liquid needs to have flavour, and the flavour needs to be developed. This is done by barrel-aging the spirit to get whisky.
Barrel-aging can be envisaged as a very slow extraction process where the alcohol absorbs the chemicals in the wood over three to fifty or more years. As industrial processes go it’s not very speedy, but the end product is fantastic.
History of barrel-aging
In the 15th century, there was a need to store and transport whisky and used wooden barrels were handy. As a side effect it was found that the stored spirit had a more pleasant flavour as the flavours of the wood and the liquid previously stored were absorbed into the whisky.
By the mid-19th century the standard practice was to age whisky in used sherry barrels. Sherry was transported to the British market in barrels and bottled locally to save money on the transport of glass and reduce the risk of breakage. These used barrels could be bought cheaply by the distilleries since the Spanish sherry makers didn’t want them back.
In the 1950s the opportunity to buy used bourbon barrels from the USA meant that there was an alternative to sherry casks. Bourbon barrels can only be used once; by law bourbon must be matured in first-use charred American oak. The flavours of the bourbon and the charring as well as notes from the oak wood itself impart flavours to whisky during the aging.
The availability of bourbon casks was fortunate – in 1986 the supply of sherry casks dried up when the Spanish government decreed that all sherry must be bottled in Spain.
Alternative barrels
Other casks have been used for a different flavour profile: rum, cognac, red wine and white wine. One of my favourites is a port-casked whisky (Tamnavulin Port Cask, a Speyside distillery). This is somewhat ironic, since port and all red wine make me ill; clearly whatever I react to is not present in the barrels to be extracted by the whisky.
Barrel aging means that alcohol is lost to the atmosphere and the local air also imparts its character. The above-mentioned Old Pulteney has a slight saltiness, in part due to the warehouses being situated by the sea. This isn’t a unique occurrence – many of the island distilleries have seaside warehousing. I don’t know why Old Pulteney has this consistent saltiness that other malts lack.
In summary
This was an interesting rabbithole to dive down. I’ve ignored the chemistry of peated whiskies, mainly because my tastes are not for these drinks. But to learn how the flavours are built in to the whisky and also how the barrel storage adds the main characteristic flavours of my own preferred whiskies has been fascinating.
Wolfburn (Thurso, Caithness, where I was born) isn’t the only distillery to offer peaty expressions. Aerstone (Ayrshire) have a ‘legacy’ expression with peaty notes to complement the ‘sea cask’ that is one of my favourites. It’s similar to the Old Pulteney I mentioned in the Introduction. ↩︎
Modern distilleries use oil or gas to kiln the malt. ↩︎
If I do a post on the quantum biological explanation of the sense of smell, I’ll try to remember to link back to this article. ↩︎
I’ve performed on stage several times, though not for many years. Last time was in 1988, I think, when I was at 6th Form and in the Drama club.
Giving speeches and presentations was part of my job when I was a scientist. I found that, as long as I was prepared I wasn’t nervous.
The last time I gave a speech was in August ’25. I was Best Man at my brother’s wedding, and so I was duty-bound to give a speech. I was the last of four to speak. First was the bride’s mother, then my brother (who speaks for a living – he’s a university lecturer), then one of the maids of honour (who also gives speeches a lot), then me.
I was a bit nervous, but the whole atmosphere was convivial. I’d stayed sober, I’d prepared, and my one joke landed.
I’ve no idea when I’ll next be called on to speak in public. But it’s not something I dread any more.
This is a combination of two tutorials from YouTube. The first was making a twisted vase, the second was making a laser effect and slicing a cube. The ‘problem ‘goes wrong’ stems, once again, from the director rushing through without checking everything is safe.
One of the things people do with 3D printers is print vases. They aren’t normally useful as vases since the prints are difficult to make waterproof, but they can be decorative.
So a simple twisted vase was a thing I made a month or so ago. I used a deform modifier and multiple twisting modifiers to make the vase into an interesting shape.
Model of a twisted vase. This might be suitable for 3D printing.
Laser cube cutting
The cube cutting was a more complex proposal. Although the instructional video by “Blender Made Easy” was about 30 minutes long, it took me rather longer than that to finish.
However, this tutor is one of the good ones. There’s no ‘rest of the owl’ here, the tricky parts are gone through and exactly recreating the cube cutting can be done even by a bear of little brain.
The animation is a bit of smoke and mirrors. The first thing to do is slice a cube. Then give the pieces physics (rigid body physics in this case) and animate when they become active parts of the scene. Once they are active, they obey gravity and fall to the floor.
Then you make a path for the laser cutter to follow before modelling a laser pencil and the laser beam itself, which follow the path. This is the cutting of the cube and is the most basic version that could be used as an animation.
Raw setup of the cutting video. The vase is in place, floating in air. The dark lines that criss-cross each other is a continuous path that the laser pen follows and cuts the cube and the vase.
The use of ‘dynamic paint’ added an extra layer. Here, the laser beam is made to act like a brush and ‘paint’ a red glow on the cut surfaces of the cube. This is made to fade over a short time but it looks like the pieces are heated up by the laser then cool down.
Sparks add a further layer. This is done by generating particles and turning those particles into small yellow spheres. Adding motion blur to the animation means that the sparks don’t look like spheres in the final version.
Sparks added to the cube cutting. On the left, motion blur has been added to hide the fact that the sparks are small spheres. One the right, without motion blur the sparks look more like spheres. You also get to see the details I added to the laser pen, which is a bonus.
To make the thing more my own, I changed a few things. First, the path that the laser takes is changed to go above the cube. Second, a vase is positioned and cut by the laser. Then background bits – a marble slab for the vase to sit on and a few more vases to fill out the scene.
The wall is modelled on many walls I have seen in various labs. Bumpy green plastic panels separated by smooth plastic joints gives a workshop feel to the animation. They also help give a scale to the whole animation.
Finally, sounds to make the whole thing come alive. Sound effect of the laser cut, metal sliding on metal and the vase shattering were all available on Pixabay. There’s a background of ‘workshop noise’ that fills in the soundscape. It was a matter of getting the timing right before rendering the whole thing and putting it on YouTube.
Something a bit different – a recipe video! Yorkshire puddings are a great accompaniment to any roast, most traditionally with roast beef.
Mrs S did the camerawork, thanks to her for helping!
Ingredients
45 g plain flour
A pinch of salt
One egg
Water and/ or milk
Fat or oil for cooking
Add the flour, salt and egg to a mixing bowl and mix well. You can add other ingredients here – I often add black pepper or chilli flakes to add some interest to the puddings.
Add water or milk to make a batter. I’ve used water here because I like crispy puddings, you can add milk or 50/50 milk and water to get fluffier puddings if you prefer.
Allow the batter to rest for at least an hour, longer if possible. This gives the starches in the flour a chance to absorb all the moisture and gives you a smooth batter.
Pre-heat the oven to at least 220 °C, gas mark 8. Turn the fan off, if you can; this stops the puddings getting blown out of shape as they rise. Put fat or oil into a suitable dish and heat this through. I used beef fat here; I’d just roasted a beef joint and there was plenty of basting fat. Normally I use vegetable oil or peanut oil. The fat needs to be able to withstand high temperatures, so avoid olive oil.
Add the batter to the hot fat. Bake for 15 minutes – don’t open the oven! Our oven has a glass door, yours may not, but don’t peek or the puddings might collapse!
When they’re done, serve with your roast dinner.
You can also make huge Yorkshires and serve a dinner inside them. Or, once they’re cooled, some people like to have jam or honey on the puddings as a dessert.
The modelling of the sheep was the main challenge here. I decided to go for a ‘low poly’ design, similar to the fearsome dinosaur I made as part of the course I did in March ’25.
Returning to the University of YouTube, I followed a video by Ryan King, who is a reliable tutor and another one who doesn’t skip the fiddly bits. He made a duck, a shark and a dog in this tutorial, the dog was the best one to follow for the sheep, what with having four legs and all.
Making a low poly sheep is an exercise in making a tube and shaping it to match a sheep (I used a photo of a sheep as a guide) and then adding legs and ears.
The start of the sheep construction process. Using a side-on view of a sheep, a tube is extended and squidged to make a sheepish body. Legs are added by extruding from the sides.
Shading
The shading was the complex bit. I wanted to have a cartoon look to the sheep because that’s an aesthetic I like and also makes the final print a bit clearer.
I’ve done quite a lot of cartoon shading over the last couple of months, the tricky part was getting more than one colour onto a cartoon.
The basic cartoon shader. It converts the original colour to RGB (not sure why), then the colour ramp restricts the colours to two shades, dark and light. This gives a cartoon shading effect that I’ve grown fond of.
Doing one colour is easy enough, it’s two shader nodes. Adding a striped pattern and getting the stripes to mimic a humbug was a bit of a thinker. In the end, I found a way of doing it using various shader nodes.
The humbug shader. I used a photo of humbugs to get the right colours. This is a bit more complex than the single shader, since the system needs to be told where to put the brown and white colours.
So we can go from a plain white or brown sheep to a striped sheep. Then we need to add outlines.
From left to right, a plain white coat, a brown coat (colour for the humbug stripes), stripes added and then with outline and frown drawn in.
Outlines
I’d previously used the system’s grease pencil to add lines to cartoons and it works well. For the cartoon mech, I just thickened the lines a bit but otherwise didn’t adjust the grease pencil added by Blender.
Another variation of the two legged mech I made a few months ago. This cartoon version has ‘scene line art’ added, automatically adding lines to the model.
Well, most of the time it works well. But this time it didn’t, adding lines where I didn’t want them and missing out other lines. So I had to draw the lines myself. I’m part way through an 2D animation course so I had learned about adding lines and editing them already. I applied this new knowledge to the sheep, using a drawing tablet I bought a few months ago. This meant I actually learned how to use it.
My graphics tablet. This one cost £24, the ones professionals use can be in the hundreds of pounds, even over a grand. I’ve also just noticed that there are thumbprints on the left side where I hold it.
Once I’d drawn the lines I was able to adjust them. Because I’m not much of an artist and I’m not used to the graphics tablet, the lines weren’t perfect. However, because they are digital, the lines are editable, so I could move and stretch them until I was happy with the look. This is similar to the way I sculpted the virtual clay to make Bob the demon and Steve the orc. I didn’t want it to be too perfect, just believably hand-drawn.
Somehow, I managed to get the sheep looking really grumpy as well. A fortunate accident with the line I drew for the eye ridge.
Final design
I exported the final sheep into Canva to add the background and lettering. The font is IM Fell English, based on an 18th century script and so perfect for an olde worlde feel.
One version of the “baa humbug” design.
Because I’m using RedBubble rather than Etsy, I can offer the design on a variety of things. In RedBubble I can also specify the background colour to be used in the designs; I can do that in Canva, too, but the shape of the different products means that sometimes there can be white space at the sides or the design looks too small on the product.
At the suggestion of Mrs S, I added a sprig of holly to the design that goes on the apron. Not sure why, but it works for the apron but not for the other items such as t shirt and cards.
I think it took me about 20 minutes to do this, all in Canva. Deciding on the fonts to use was the tricky part. What I really wanted for the ‘Game Over’ part was the sort of font used in Rollerball1 and throughout the 1970s to indicate that a computer was involved. There is a font called Rollerball, though Westminster is also available for Word, but I couldn’t work out how to get that in to Canva. So I used Retropix for the Game over, and HK Modular for the Olives left. A nice neon green, reminiscent of the old green screens I spent my early computer years staring at completed the text design.
Example text for the Westminster font.
The olives were taken from a Canva catalogue of designs. There were plenty of olive designs to choose from, the three green and one black in a cartoon style was the best, and similar to what I might have designed myself.
Once I was happy with the design I downloaded it from Canva then uploaded it to RedBubble. Making sure the design looked right on all the products and writing the description and keywords still takes me some time, but I hope I’m getting better at this.
I finished a social media marketing course in November, this taught me several things I had hoped to learn. How to build a website, the importance of keywords and how to do search engine optimisation. I’m still a beginner, but I now understand why you need to spend time doing the SEO, though the rules change all the time.
Cryptic crosswords
The clue I had knocking around was:
Game over for oil producers? (6)
The answer is ‘OLIVES’, because when you have no lives left you finish a game, and olives produce oil. The O and the zero look similar, and that’s how cryptic crossword clues work. I sometimes struggle with cryptics, I attempt the Private Eye one and sometimes I can finish it, other times I can’t get more than two clues.
Another clue I made up a while ago:
Advances in fantastic trousers (5,7)
Comment if you know the answer.
A 1975 film starring James Caan, featuring the titular ultra-violent sport and a lot of moody electronic music, set in the far-off dystopian future of 2018. ↩︎
Grim up North Heath 