Oh Wow!! Our Fudge Order Arrived!! Come and Get It!!

  I'd just finished quite a serious post about Feline Care, near Thetford in Norfolk, who are giving wonderful care to over 140 cats and is now facing closure unless they can buy their premises for £70,000 by the end of September (www.felinecare.org.uk if you can help in any way) when there was a knock at the door at VegaNation and a very nice man delivered a huge box of FUDGE!!! This is the stuff to make non-vegans jealous (only joking- they are allowed to buy it too, of course!) - it is absolutely sublime fudge, rich and creamy and completely...fudge-licious!! It is dairy free, with no hydrogenated fats, artificial colours or preservatives and all ingredients are GM free..what's not to LOVE?

  We also have some new kinds of chocolate, more vegan jelly (hard to believe, isn't it, that non-V's actually eat jelly made with boiled up hooves (sp.? hoofs?) and urgh..skin..) and some bottles of that delicious humane alternative to honey Sweet Freedom. If you choose not to eat the fruits of bees' labours, (a.k.a. bee vomit..) then enjoy Sweet Freedom  on toast, drizzled over porridge, in marinades, or baked in cakes and biscuits If your toast seems a bit dull and ..savoury?? then give marmite the boot and slather your toast with Sweet Freedom- do it for the bees!
  We are at www.veganation.co.uk and if you don't eat it, we will!
 

We Donated to Help Save Wonderful Feline Care!

Lovely Poppy waits for a special home.

  We heard from Feline Care near Thetford yesterday, that Ruben, one of our favourite cats, has gone to a new home. We're very pleased for him as he's a very sweet cat who'd obviously been down on his luck before he arrived at Feline Care. Molly had to remove most of his matted coat and get him castrated before he was ready for his fresh start. It sounds like a lovely home for him where he'll get lots of love and attention, but we'll miss cuddling him when we visit Feline Care! There are so many cats who come in to Feline Care like that, needing help after being abandoned or neglected, ill treated or simply no longer wanted and Molly and Paul take them all in and look after them until they can be found new caring homes.This all takes a lot of time and money and at the moment, it is all taking place against a background of incredible fund raising by Molly and Paul and their helpers and supporters; Feline Care which provides so much love and support for the unloved and unwanted cats of the Thetford area, is facing closure unless they can raise £70,000 before the end of September, in order to buy the land on which the charity stands.

Millie is 19 and needs a home!

  They have been doing an amazing job and have already managed to raise over £30,000 in a few weeks, but they still have £40,000 to go and only a few weeks to do that. Please visit their website www.felinecare.org.uk and see what good work they do and if there is any way you can help. They desperately need further donations to help them meet their target of £70,000 by October, so please give what you can so Molly and Paul can secure the future of Feline Care and continue to help the cats of Norfolk. We really want to see Feline Care saved so we made a donation through their website last night- now we have a warm glow about it- you could too!
  If you like the sound of a shop run by really nice vegans then visit us and support us too! We are at www.veganation.co.uk and we now have a fantastic selection of vegan groceries, snacks, treats and chocolate, gifts, alternative health care, perfumes and a brilliant selection of second hand vegan-friendly books.

The Search for Vegan Sock Yarn and Lemon Jammy Dodgers are Vegan!

 Our friend Paula, of quirky knitting blog, Purple Cricket fame, has promised to knit us socks if we were able to lay our hands on some vegan sock yarn.  Sock yarn is typically wool with about 25% nylon for durability, but we have found this lovely yarn in 75% bamboo, and 25% nylon. Job done!

  We discovered lemon jammy dodgers today; who'd have thought it?! No, we're not going to stock them in the cutest little vegan shop in the world (that would be www.veganation.co.uk : please stop by and buy something!!) but if we sell loads of stuff in our shop this week we will definitely buy some more 'Lemmy Dodgers'!!

We listed loads of new things, saved a life AND made three dormice!!!

  Today was the long-put off day that we were supposed to be making dormice soft toys. We'd seen some toy dormice that cost over £30.00 each, so obviously we weren't going to be buying those and I had the bright idea of making the children each a dormouse instead. We'd put it off for several weeks, tho' and so when I was ready to start 'mousing up', I couldn't find all the stuff I'd bought to make the dormice with so I listed several more things in our vegan shop www.veganation.co.uk - some really lovely natural handmade incenses (Vanilla Orange, Coconut, Sandalwood and Frankincense..mmm!) and handmade incense holders, and some little candle and incense gift sets- all fairly traded and all absolutely gorgeous- gifts that anyone would be happy to receive!

  Then, I found the dormouse bits and pieces: pieces of grey and white fur fabric, pink and grey acrylic felt and safety eyes, and we were in business. It took us about three hours but at the end of that time we had three dormice ready to be photographed realistically outdoors, just the way the Kosen soft toys are displayed so effectively in their promotional photos. One of these pictures is a dormouse made by Kosen which costs over £30.00 and the other three are our dormice which cost about £10.00 to make the three!
  We were just about to have our supper (jacket potatoes and home made baked beans!) when we spotted that one of the VegaNation cats had caught something; we all piled out into the garden as quickly as we could and were able to rescue the little creature which turned out to be a vole. Our experience of voles is that they are very, very susceptible to shock and find even quite short periods of captivity very difficult to cope with. We've rescued a lot of voles and also a lot of woodmice and they seem to react so differently from each other- and why shouldn't they, I suppose, they are completely different kinds of creature. If woodmice survive the first hour or so, almost no matter what their injuries, then they usually survive, whereas the same doesn't seem to be true at all of voles. Even when they seem to have made a full recovery they sometimes seem to 'crash' and die, so we always feel most stressed when we have a vole that has been caught as we really need to get it back out into the wild as quickly as possible.This one seemed ok, was very keen to have some homeopathic Arnica in water and then we took it to a safe release site and let it go.

  If I've whetted your appetite for shopping at our adorable little vegan online shop or you just think we sound lovely, then please come and look at all our lovely stuff at www.veganation.co.uk.. If you haven't hugged a vegan today, at least buy one a Pacifica bath gift set!!

Wow! Vegan Gifts Galore!

 We had a delivery today of some new stock for our darling little shop- over 100 products listed in total now and about another twenty five still to list! We love our little shop and and it's very exciting to see it grow from being a very tiny shop indeed into a slightly less tiny shop!

Today, we listed some absolutely lovely Pacifica gift sets in 4 absolutely amazing fragrances, with stunning packaging; a really special gift for anyone. We have three different kinds of Pacifica perfume- we've been looking for ages for a really good vegan perfume to stock so we are very pleased to have found these. We've got some beautiful tisanieres and tea sets listed and some loose teas for the tisanieres. There are lots of other lovely things that we haven't yet had time to list.
  I'm not sure if we'll get them all listed tomorrow as we have seventy (yes, you did read that right- seventy!) tomato plants to re-pot and tomorrow was also going to be the day that we could no longer put off making two dormice - it's a long story..but the main point is dormice soft toys are a bit..er..aspirational..in price, so I decided to make them myself!
   Anyway, if several really lovely kinds of incense and very beautiful incense holders appear in our shop tomorrow then you'll know that I had lots of help with the mammoth re-potting task and that dormice turned out to be REALLY easy to make..
   We are at www.veganation.co.uk and we have loads and loads of lovely animal-friendly gifts and treats to choose from.
  So, if you haven't hugged a vegan today then at the very least buy them a present to show you care!!

 
 

We went to a Vegan Ice Cream Sundae Party!

  One of the other mothers in our Home Education Group had the brilliant idea of holding a vegan 'Summer Sundae' event this afternoon. She's not actually vegan but is very 'vegan friendly' so this was a lovely opportunity for another works outing for VegaNation!

  We arrived with empty (turquoise and magenta!) sundae glasses and soon had them filled up with jelly and  Booja Booja and Swedish Glace dairy free ice cream in a range of flavours: chocolate, vanilla, pecan and maple syrup, neopolitan, ginger and coconut. We had roasted chopped hazelnuts and slivered almonds, raspberries, enormous black cherries, strawberries and blueberries to go and top, and custard and chocolate sauce to pour over the top. We had so much stuff that some chocolate buttons got overlooked and had to be passed around afterwards!
  It was an amazing treat for the children and they really loved their sundaes. We have an ice cream maker at home- vegan children love ice cream just as much as non-vegan children and the supply of vegan ice cream in supermarkets is often very patchy, and there's usually not much choice, so we rarely buy ice cream now as we mostly make our own. We've made all sorts of ice cream, including lots of inventions but we normally only have one kind at a time so this ice cream extravaganza was a lot of fun for us. I thought the Booja Booja chocolate ice cream was the nicest, and didn't bother with the Swedish Glace neopolitan which I consider to be 'jack of all trades' ice cream!  We were the only vegans but everyone who was there seemed to really love the vegan ice cream; it was a lovely event and everyone enjoyed themselves so much that we're thinking of holding another one before Christmas.
  When we came back from the ice cream fest we'd had an order for some Dinochews children's vegan vitamins from our vegan shop and also a sweet message from a little girl who'd read my blog entry about the bee and has decided not to eat honey any more!!  
  We got some news of Chrissy's twin squabs today; she reports that the babies are looking much more grown up and are spending time sitting on the edge of their hanging basket nest! Chrissy did so brilliantly and it's lovely to hear that the twins are doing so well.
  If you'd like some vegan vitamins for your little dinosaurs, or would like to try some delicious vegan chocolate or sweets, please support the loveliest little vegan shop in the world and visit us at www.veganation.co.uk. x
 

Voucher Code for Shopping at www.veganation.co.uk

   If you want to come to our beloved vegan shop then come now because we are offering 10% off orders over £10.00: use voucher code VEG! and you're sorted!
   Come and shop at  www.veganation.co.uk.

      Fergus the Highland Bull would be very moo-ved if you come and shop because Hillside Animal Sanctuary will get 2% of the profits!