Thursday 6 December 2012

With a little help from Mumma

My daughter has a friend who is expecting a baby in January and she decided to crochet a blanket for the baby. Mum-to-be requested green. I started off the foundation row and my daughter crocheted up some stripes really quickly.


aren't the colours nice? bit different than normal baby colours and I really like them. The the blanket came back to me for a quick border...


Not a great pic I'm afraid, but here it is, very sweet and just in time for the baby shower on Sunday!

Luscious jam

In the late summer and early autumn I picked lots of raspberries from my allotment, they are an autumn fruiting variety and produce fruit over a really long period of time. I need to pick 2 or 3 times a week - needless to say this doesn't happen and I think a lot of birds and insects enjoy them as well!

Anyway some of the fruit made its way into the freezer and last week I turned them into jam. The smell of raspberries beginning to warm up is delicious, it transports me back to summer.

This year I  decided to use preserving sugar rather than caster.

I stuck a couple of small plates in the freezer for a few minutes so that I could test the jam.

Ta-dah! I made six jars of jam - one jar disappeared before I had a chance to photo it ! it has turned out better than normal, nicely set with the seeds evenly distributed throughout, rather than jelly at the bottom and seeds on top which is normally what happens!

So nice to have raspberry jam throughout the winter,