Happy International Women’s Day with A Bushel of Hops!
International Women’s Day was established to celebrate our steps towards equality. While I believe it is important to celebrate those achievements, today I want to celebrate Women’s Day a little differently. I want to celebrate and appreciate the fact that we have each other and that we excel at lifting each other up! This is my second Women’s Day since I started Brew Flowers and the community of women I have found continues to blow me away. I have connected with some of the most amazing and supportive women. While our love of beer may be the catalyst for our conversations, beer tends to be the tip of the iceberg in what us brew ladies share. I have no words to fully express my appreciation for these connections, but they have helped me weather many storms.
Today I wanted to focus on one connection that found me on Saint Nicholas Day (December 6th) of 2022. I received the kindest note on Instagram from a fellow beer, craft, fabric, and flower enthusiast! A Bushel of Hops, who I now know as Dorothy, has been a complete joy to get to know. Dorothy, like me enjoys beer, nature, and designs fabrics! What Dorothy has given me however, besides a wonderful friendship, is a new appreciation for hops! Along with her many other skills and talents, Dorothy works on her family’s hop farm in the UK, where they grow over 50 hop varieties including heritage varieties and a mixed orchard! If I’m being completely honest, I would enjoy IPAs, but I never fully appreciated the significance and depth hops can play in the flavor profile of a beer until I started talking to Dorothy. Now I look for what hops are used in beers, and I am learning which ones I enjoy, and which ones aren’t for me. I absolutely love it when breweries include the hop varieties they use in their brews. For example, one the best IPAs I’ve tried was the Hyperbolic Expressions of Wholly Embellished Hypothesis (yes, that’s the name of the beer), form Burial Beer Co. This fantastically named beer was a Double New England IPA brewed with Citra Incognito, Cryo, Riwaka, and Idaho 7 hops. As you can imagine, the flavors in that beer were beyond dynamic!
To celebrate International Women's Day, Dorothy and I thought it would be fun to collaborate and post together. Last month I paired my mother’s quilts with beers in anticipation of us attending QuiltCon. Inspired by QuiltCon and Dorothy’s fabrics I wanted to come up with a simple craft that I could share.
Fully recognizing that not all of my readers would have access to a sewing machine, I decided to use some of Dorothy’s fabric to decorate a tray. I often have a lot to carry outside with me when I take beer photos and I thought having a specific tray for the process would be helpful. Even better if it was pretty! I chose a blue and white toile that depicts the hop growing processes on a hop farm!
In the past I have used Mod Podge for adhering fabric to wood. It works great, but the type I had on hand wasn’t waterproof and given how my tray would be used I opted to try a new to me product. My mother had OdiCoat, which is a waterproof glue you can use on fabric!
I started by painting my tray white making it a blank canvas for Dorothy’s toile fabric. I gave my tray plenty of time to dry. Then I simply cut a piece of fabric to fit into the base of my tray. In doing so, I was careful to cut an area of the fabric with an image I wanted to feature. Once I had my fabric piece, I coated the area of the tray I was covering with the OdiCoat glue. I used a sponge brush to apply the glue, but I believe any brush may work. Just be sure to wash your brush right away if you hope to use it again. I then carefully placed my fabric down and coated the top of the fabric with OdiCoat to create a topcoat/seal. I allowed my tray to dry for more than twenty-four hours before I tried it out.
It just so happened to storm the entire week I planned on taking photos for this post. I decided it was fitting however, because as women, we always weather the storm if something is important to us. Despite the wind and the rain, my tray held up beautifully!
I decided to pair my beautiful try with the daffodils that just popped up and the AVL IPA from Highland Brewing. I chose an IPA as it is Dorothy’s favorite style of beer. I chose one from Highland Brewing, as it is now a woman owned brewery as Oscar Wong (the founder) passed it one to his daughter, Leah Wong Ashburn. I had to put this brew in a stemmed glass, yet another nod to my hop growing friend, as Dorothy enjoys her beers in a stemmed glass.
As we kick off Women’s History Month with International Women's Day, I would like to thank all the women, like Dorothy, who have reached out to me (even in the smallest of ways) and made my life so much richer for it. Let’s keep it going, as we continue to make today into tomorrow’s history. The impacts of the connections we share is what will keep us strong through the storms.
