A lovely informal evening of cocktail making with Rob Jones, founder and editer of 'Blasus' Magazine. 'Blasus' is a bilingual, independent magazine, which aims to explore the stories, people and creativity behind the welsh food scene.

On the menu were the cocktails Cosmopoliton, Gin or Ange Crush and The Gin Fizz. The cocktails included vodka (five) from Penderyn, Blood orange and Rosemary Gin from Treganna Gin and a Welsh Sisters Gin.

I am not a cocktail connoisseur and I was a bit daunted that the cocktails would be complicated to make and that I would need an endless list of equipment and ingredients! This was farther from the truth, in fact the cocktails were easy to make and all I needed equipment wise was a knife, measurer, chopping board and if I didn’t have a cocktail shaker, I could use a flask! All three were in fact delicious and easy to make!

The concentration of the evening was of course on using Welsh produce and speaking directly to those who produced them. It was fabulous to hear about the various processes of distillation, the products themselves and of course about the people behind the products, especially as I do not have a lot of knowledge about the processes of making spirits! In fact, one of the facts I learnt was that all gins must contain juniper berries otherwise the drink can not  be defined as gin by law.

First up was Penderyn Whisky and spirits. Penderyn whisky is of course well known In Wales, but it is also well known all over the world and is available in 45 countries! On its way it has picked up over 70 double Gold/Gold/Masters awards! Such has been the success of their whisky and spirits, a new distillery opened in Llandudno in May 2021 and there are plans for a further distillery to be built in Swansea in 2022! Although it all began with whisky, they also do a fabulous selection of gin, rum, and vodka which was used in The Gin Fizz cocktail.

The succsess of Penderyn Whisky is impressive stuff considering it began with an idea by a group of friends in a pub in Hirwaun!  I suppose the pub is where most great ideas are dreamt up!  Whisky distilling in Wales was a lost art in the 1990's and this group of friends dreamed of creating a pure and precious Welsh whisky. They chose the village of Penderyn for its creation because of the supply of fresh natural spring water there.

We were told that one of the keys to Penderyn's success was the use of a single copper pot which enabled the all female distillery team to create a clean and flavourful spirit at an industry high of 92% ABV. This is very high in comparison to other distilleries who use the three pot lantern system which produces a spirit that comes off at a industry standard of 67% ABV.

At Penderyn, Whisky is aged and charred in the finest bourbon casts to remove any undesirable  chemical compounds and then is married with the water from the Brecon Beacons! A fabulous combination indeed!

Despite its amazing achievements, the Penderyn brand was no overnight success, it took over 12 years for Penderyn whisky to make profit! I guess good things do come to those who wait!

Next up was Mark Flanagan from Treganna Gin. A one man band with his wife helping with the "admin side" in a distillery in the surburban area of Canton, Cardiff where the gin is  distilled in small batches using copper alembic sills.

Mark was an actor and while finding that work was drying up decided in 2018 to embark on a gin making enterprise. He confessed that gin making was far quicker and a far less complicated process than whisky making!

All was going well with the business plan done, equipment bought and a website established. Then disaster struck- the pandemic! Instead of wallowing though, Mark decided to make hand sanitizer for the local community, seeing as he had the equipment to make it! This in turn gave him some positive exposure, which in turn helped him build his successful brand of gin.

Whilst thinking and experimenting with flavours he came up with the delicious combination of blood orange and rosemary gin. He went about to source the best oranges from Sicily, but again disaster struck when a volcano eruped in Sicily! Mark thought that this was the end of his Sicily orange dream! However, the oranges made it over even though his supplier did admit that they did initially "have some ash on them"!

From what began as a home project producing 20 bottles of gin at a time, a change of location and upgrade in equipment has meant that he is now producing 200 bottles in one go and even sells his gin at the St Ffagans National Museum History shop. You can also buy direct from his website with free delivery and free hand delivery in Cardiff! Mark admits that he prefers if you buy from him direct as he gets more profit this way!

Finally, Welsh Sisters gin, two sisters (Becky and Tania) originally from Cardiff, now create and sell award winning dry gin in a old draper's shop called Manchester House at the top of the town of New Quay in Ceredigion. Beginning in 2019, they now sell gin all over the world and their gin 'Morwyn' was awarded Best Contemporary Gin at the Welsh Gin Awards 2021.

The sea and the inspiring tales of women in their community is a huge influence and theme in their gin creations leading to gins named 'Morwyn', Portside and The Captain's Wife. Each gin has its own distinctive flavour and a unique story of women and their experiences of the sea.

The gin name 'Morwyn' was inspired by a sea goddess called 'Morwyn' who loved Rhysen a fisherman who dwelt in Ceredigion during ancient times. The gin Portside is in homage to the captain's wife who when pulled into port seeked her other sea sisters and spent time with them on portside. Whilst the gin The Captains wife is in reference to those Welsh woman from New Quay who sailed the world and who were even accomplished enough to take the ships wheel in the eye of a storm.

Their passion of the sea comes of course partly from growing up on the coast and from the experiences of their parents of the sea. Their father was a captain of square-riggs and windjammers in the West Indies. Whilst their mother was a descendant of the Kidwelly "wreckers" who looted ship wrecks.

In fact, such is their passion for the sea, they donate 1% of the sale each of 'Morwyn' and The Captain's Wife gin to the whale and dolphin conservation. Along with producing great gins these two sisters are leaving a wonderful legacy to the future of their beloved ocean.

And just like that it was the end of the session. An enjoyable, informative and relaxed evening with the added bonus of some lovely drinks! Next time you are after some spirits, please consider these Welsh made gems.

Hi Bulb Buddies, 

I hope that planting day went well and that you are enjoying documenting weather data for our investigation. 

I want to say a big thank you to you all for your hard work on planting day. Together we planted over 10,000 bulbs across the UK! Your fantastic planting day photos show that you had a great time.  

Weather records started on 1 November. There is a resource on the website with more information on keeping weather records. I’ve attached this here in case you haven’t already seen it. This resource helps you to answer important questions, such as why rainfall and temperature readings are important to our investigation into the effects of climate on the flowering dates of spring bulbs.  

Use your Weather Chart to log the rainfall and temperature every day that you are in school. At the end of each week, log into your Spring Bulbs account on the Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales website to enter your weekly readings. You can also leave comments or ask questions for me to answer in my next Blog. 

Let me know how you get on and remember that you can share photos via email or Twitter. 

Keep up the good work Bulb Buddies, 

Professor Plant 

Comments shared with the first week of weather data:

Stanford in the Vale Primary School: This week was frosty and we had some frost in the morning. We’re looking forward to seeing the weather changes.

Oaklands Primary: Hi Professor Plant - it's been a dry but cold week here in Aberaman. Our first frosty day on Monday, lovely sunshine after a very rainy Hallowe'en which washed away all our labels. Luckily, we know which way round our bulbs were planted and we decided as a class that we'd make sure we look after everyone's pots so it doesn't matter that they are not individually named at the moment. Phew! See you next week!

Ysgol Penalltau: Diolch am y bylbiau, ond dim glaw yr wythnos yma!

Pil Primary School: It has been very cold and dry this week.

Darran Park Primary: The weather is a lot colder and drier this week

St Josephs Cathedral Primary: No rain records as rain gauge was lost. We have found this now so will take records from next Monday.

Ysgol Gymraeg Dewi Sant: Roedd y glawiad yn uchel dydd Llun oherwydd fod llawer o law wedi syrthio dros hanner tymor.

With levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global temperatures rising, tackling climate change is more important than ever.

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) takes place in Glasgow this week, uniting the world to tackle climate change, we’re taking a look at what we’re doing to make our museums greener.

In September 2019 we joined others in declaring a global climate and ecological emergency. Over the next 10 years and beyond, we’ll be reducing our carbon footprint and impact on the environment.

Our training

We’ve developed a training course on carbon literacy, accredited by the Carbon Literacy Project. Over 100 staff are now certified carbon literate, and we’re looking forward to rolling out the training to the rest of our staff over the next year.

We’ve also received Bronze Level Carbon Literate Organisation status for our training and we’re taking part in the first Carbon Literacy Action Day on the 1 November. As part of the training, staff made pledges to reduce their carbon footprint and you can find out more in this short video:

Our staff

To help us become carbon neutral, we’re in the process of recruiting a Sustainable Development Co-ordinator. They will shape our response to the climate crisis by developing our carbon management action plan, as well as our carbon reduction and green land management projects. We’re looking forward to sharing more with you soon!

Our ways of working

All our museums are currently undergoing a Carbon Audit, carried out by an Environmental Consultancy, GEP Environmental. The audit will tell us what our current carbon footprint is and identify new opportunities to reduce our carbon across our work. It will also help support the delivery of the Welsh Government’s ambition of achieving a carbon neutral public sector by 2030.

Our exhibitions and outreach
Climate change and sustainability will be incorporated into our public programming for exhibitions and learning. The upcoming Mining for Mobiles exhibition will look at the environmental impact of everyday objects such as mobile phones.

Our events
We’re always looking at ways that we can make our activities more sustainable. We’ll be again hosting our sustainability event Olion to empower others to take action.

Our engagement

Through our 700 volunteers and 100 young creatives (Amgueddfa Cymru Producers) we’re promoting carbon literacy through partnership working with young people. By working with communities we hope to create a greener Wales and make sure that everything we do is better for the environment.

What is the Youth Forum?

So what is the youth forum? We have a Youth Forum at each of our Museums across Wales. Young people aged 14-25 are encouraged to be partners in decision making and organising activities. The forums explore the views of young people and will address issues they think are important. At the moment we meet online, but are looking forward to getting back together in real life once restrictions ease.

An example of 'scratch out poetry,' created during a workshop facilitated by one of our members

What do we do?

Amgueddfa Cymru’s Youth Forums have been involved in lots of exhibitions and activities, such as:

• Kids in Museums Takeover Day and Teen Twitter Takeover Day
• Writing blogs
• Writing an alternative interpretation booklet [PDF] for the exhibition Fragile? at National Museum Cardiff (Funded by Colwinston Charitable Trust)
• Producing a cartoon map, Our Cardiff, to coincide with Treasures on display in National Museum Cardiff with artist Huw Aaron.
• Building a bread oven at Bryn Eryr, Iron Age farmstead, St Fagans National Museum of History.
• Delivering and displaying an Ethnic Youth Support Team project, Chips, Curry and Cappuccino (Funded by Heritage Lottery Fund), National Waterfront Museum.

Instagram stories on the Mabinogion for Kids in Museums Digital Takeover

Our 'Dippy About Nature' exhibition, created from recycled materials

A page from Smashed, our guide to the Fragile? exhibition at National Museum Cardiff

About us

There are currently over 20 of us in the Youth Forum, and we are always looking for new members! Meet a few of our members below to get to know us better:

What are we going to be doing?

Over the coming months we’ll be sharing updates on projects that we’re working on plus some of our favourite things from the museum.

How to join us

We’re always open to new members, so if you’re aged 14-25 and would like to join us, please email volunteering@museumwales.ac.uk or follow this link Youth Forums (14-25) | National Museum Wales 

The Craft group of volunteers had been “coasting” for some time waiting for our next assignment from the museum. We’d made rag rugs for the houses at Rhyd y Car, we made mediaeval costumes for the children visiting Llys Llewellyn and we’d used the lavender grown in the castle gardens to make lavender bags to sell in the shops. For a few other meetings we’d been doing our own crafting projects in Gweithdy, talking to visitors, showing them how we made our various quilts, rugs, throws, and tapestries, but we were ready for a new project.

None of us had been familiar with the term Tip Girls, or the work they did in the mining industry when Noreen and Ceri from Big Pit visited us to ask for help in setting up a new temporary exhibition at the big pit Museum.

We were asked to design and make an outfit suitable for a Tip girl as would have been worn in the Welsh coal fields. Little research has been done on these girls in Wales but some records were kept of those girls working in the coal fields of Nottinghamshire and Durham. There were similarities between the two but also some distinct differences; most notably the names: Tip Girls in Wales and Pit Girls in the north of England

We obviously needed to research these Tip Girls and the period in which they were working, to find out the type of clothes they wore in order to undertake our task.

Until 1842 women and children had regularly worked underground, but after a dreadful mining disaster in Barnsley, Queen Victoria demanded an enquiry. This resulted in the Mines and Collieries Act banning women, girls, and boys under 10 from working underground.

This was a blow to many women who earned their living, or supplemented their household income from working underground, but women who needed to work adapted. They worked at loading wagons or hauling tubs up from the pithead and some became Tip Girls, sorting rocks and stones from the coal when it had been brought up from the mines below ground.

In our research we found that Tip girls developed a distinctive style of dress and different areas develop their own distinctive styles

The work was cold and wet and very dirty and the girls’ dresses catered for this.  In Wales, W. Clayton had taken photographs of these women; although they were posed and in a studio setting we still get a good idea of how they were dressed.  They wore long flannel skirts or frocks covered by leather aprons. Some wore breeches under their skirts, but this was frowned on in some mines, although it was commonplace in the mines in the north of England. They clothed their heads in hats and scarves, ensuring all of their heads were completely covered to prevent the coal dust saturating their hair.

Several members of the Craft group luckily have experience in costume design and they shared their expertise with us, helping us to design the costume.

We needed to decide what fabric we could use for the costumes, and we were lucky to be allowed the opportunity to see the museum exhibits in storage that would help us in designing the costume. We saw skirts, aprons, petticoats, stockings, socks and even boots that were all being carefully conserved by the museum.

We had been given a shop-window mannequin to use as the Tip Girl and were expected to dress her. However, her solid hands and feet posed a problem in that we needed to give her gloves and boots, and her elegant pose made making her resemble the Tip Girl very difficult.                                                                 

It took some time to work out that she couldn’t be used and something else had to be sorted out. There was no other mannequin available from the museum, so our resourceful team got together and manufactured one from various sources. (It does help having costume designers in the group!)

We used the original mannequin as the basis to design the clothes and even used our own members as models.  The tip girls hats seem to have been of special interest to the girls. They were all decorated quite lavishly with beads, ribbons, bows, flowers, and even birds and cherries and other fruit.  This seems to have been their gesture to glamour in the midst of the grime of the pit head.

We were getting on nicely with the manufacture of the clothes when Covid hit and we were locked down. We carried on our monthly meetings over Zoom but the Tip Girl project was side-lined for a while, while we made masks and protective clothing for the NHS. Edwina however was still working on our model and when a year later we resumed, we were nearly there with our very own Tip Girl, who we had nicknamed Brenda, for some unknown reason!

In discussion with a friend who is also doing research on the Tip Girls of the Welsh mines, I discovered that these girls were not the lowly workers they seem to be from their photos. In fact, they were quite well-paid and regarded themselves as better off than girls who had to go into service at the local “big houses”. Photographers also wanted to take their photographs and make them into postcards to sell to the public which made some of the tip girls into minor celebrities.

During lockdown we have made headscarf, skirt, chemise and socks. We’d made hands (ready for gloves) hats, bloomers and a bodice.  On returning to face-to-face volunteering, we collected what we had been working on and found we had been quite productive during lockdown.

The home-made mannequin was coming along at pace and caused some hilarity when we first assembled the legs and body as they weren’t quite compatible. Caroline, our expert in period costume, had knitted a wonderful pair of stockings that fitted the homemade legs perfectly.

The figure of the mannequin at the beginning caused much hilarity, and the arms and legs both had to be considerably altered. Having it made by different people in different places had its difficulties!

Our next meeting was at Big Pit, when we collected the disparate pieces of the costume and put them on the model. Our home-made model was not in use, and the museum was using another mannequin that was being altered to fit the brief. It was rather tall for the display case, but the staff intended shortening it discreetly.

The main reason for visiting Big Pit was to make the costume look as realistic as possible for the exhibition. They all looked newly made and pristinely clean, and we had to make them look as grubby and dirty as possible. So, after dressing up the model, we then undressed her again, and took the clothes over to the Forge where we had a good time rubbing them into the dirtiest and most filthy parts of the machinery.

It’s finished now, and we are waiting eagerly for the opening of the exhibition. We’ve left the clothes with the museum, along with both models, and it depends on which model best suits the display cabinet. When we visit the exhibition we will be very interested to find out more about the Tip Girls, and proud to see the small contribution we made to the exhibition on display.