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,

Legacy

Yesterday evening I watched the last few minutes of the Antiques Roadshow, I recalled they used to have a spot where each week one of the experts would bring in a treasured item that would be the one thing they would save if they had a fire. It got me thinking about what I would save, obviously family comes first but after that I decided it would be this ..

 

 

This is a sampler worked by my great great grandmother! she finished it when she was THIRTEEN years old in 1831. It is absolutely beautiful, wonderful colours and the needlework is very accomplished for someone so young - methinks she might have had some help! There was no electricity then so it must have been worked by candlelight in the evenings. It has been carefully looked after by family through the generations since then. It was given to me by my elderly aunt who had spent some effort in getting it restored by the Royal School of Needlework, who dyed threads to match and repair. I have it hanging in the house but in a darkish corner where the light won't fade it. Hardly anyone does work of this nature now and I wonder what our legacy will be to our own children? in my case lots of (probably tatty by then!) crochet blankets!

 

My First Blog!

 

I have spent the last couple of years following lots of lovely blogs and have decided to start my own! My intention is to use the blog to record 'All Things Nice' - which in my world means family, food, my secondhand bookshop, allotment, knitting and crochet. I don't know how often I wll blog or whether anyone will follow me. I will wait and see. Bye for now xx