Monday, August 29, 2011

Making Monday - A Wolves Scarf

It is football time again, and my team are sitting at the dizzy heights of 5th in the Premier League (we were top for a short time on Saturday).
This scarf, made for the Stephen West KAL, is my new football scarf. I am hoping it is lucky.
Stephen West KAL - Wolves Scarf
This was a mystery knit along and after much deliberation I decided on Wolves colours and I am very glad I did. I am not sure any of my other choices from the previous post would have looked as good. I was hoping the pattern would be more like his stripey shawls such as daybreak - however this helped me overcome my intarsia fear and I quite like the end result.
Stephen West KAL - Wolves Scarf
The yarn is The Yarn Yard Clan in Saffron, Soot and Tanzelope. The Tanzelope was a club colourway, the Saffron was a recent purchase and I got the soot from someone destashing on Ravelry.
Clan isn't my favourite sock yarn, it isn't hard wearing enough for me. However it is perfect yarn for a shawl; lightweight, warm and soft.
Stephen West KAL - Wolves Scarf
I used the whole skein of Saffron, bar a few metres. However I have about 1/3 of a skein of Soot and over half a skein of Tanzelope left. Socks for Thomas maybe?

Monday, August 15, 2011

Making Monday - Fruit time

This week has seen me starting to collect the fruit from the gardens and allotment.
I came home from the allotment with a few blackberries and a handful of tiny yellow plums. These were joined by some damsons and a couple of pears from my FIL; and some raspberries from the canes at the bottom of my garden.

Now, what to do with this random assortment of fruit. There wasn't enough of any one thing to do anything useful; so I stewed it all together with a tiny bit of sugar and ended up with some kind of tart fridge jam

IMAG0049.jpg

It seemed like it would be the perfect filling for a cake. So I spent yesterday perfecting my sponge recipe. I have 8" cake tins, and a normal sponge recipe is never enough. Yesterday I used 4 eggs which weighed 270g. I used the same amount of butter, sugar and flour and it seemed to work perfectly.

Anyone for cake?

Now to find some friends to eat it.

Monday, August 08, 2011

Making Monday. Too many courgettes.

I have ten courgettes plants at the allotment. This, I have discovered is probably eight (or maybe even nine) too many. It is not possible for one family of three, their relatives and friends to eat the volume of courgettes produced by ten plants. It is courgettes with every meal here. I have even resorted to baking and can tell you that the Green & Blacks recipe for courgettes loaf is very good indeed. This is of course due entirely to the courgettes and has nothing at all to do with the bar of dark chocolate it contains.