Last day of the summer holidays

I usually try to something fun and interesting on the last day of the school holidays, but we've done so many fun and interesting things this year that we had a lazy last day instead. Miss M was happy spending most of the day playing with her best friend over the road and the Boy was happy just pottering around, bouncing on the trampoline or playing on the Wii (actually alternating between them).   This afternoon the Boy and I decided to go for a walk and see what stage the brambles are at. The answer is, developing and green (bottom left of the photo). The bees were loving the flowers though.

 We found some nice raspberries too.

And also, by careful listening and even more careful looking, a grasshopper. Actually several grasshoppers but this was the one that was most willing to be photographed. I do also have several pictures of empty leaves, vacated a nano-second previously.

This evening has been spent watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (season 2) and sewing name labels onto school clothes. I'm pretty useless at proper sewing but I find small amounts of hand-sewing quite therapeutic. Most years I sew a couple of labels on, then resort to biro on the washing instruction tags for the rest, lazy as I am. But this year I've done loads! Yay me :-D.

Why don't my clothes have cute flower buttons on them?

A burst of colour (contains spider!)

Just because!

It was our wedding anniversary last week and my mother-in-law gave us a bunch of colourful roses. Roses are so much fun to photograph:

They're a cheerful bunch of flowers on my kitchen windowsill but when you zoom in they become all romance-novelly and exotic-looking!

We're well into autumn now and the rain continues to be frequent but we're getting the odd day or few hours of sunshine and blue sky. I love sunny days in autumn, I love the cool brightness - today was such a day and I went out foraging. The brambles are far from ready yet, but I got some rowan berries yesterday and hoped to get some more today so I can make rowan berry jelly, but there aren't that many rowans near us and the berries on the one I found, though plentiful were not ripe enough. I'll try again next week. It was nice to get out for a walk though and to get a few pictures of the colours:

Meet my spider. Almost every day there is a spider's web between the trampoline and the washing-line - it's a spectacular feat of engineering and art, and yet very often I forget and blunder through it, and the poor old spider has to start again.

I was quite impressed when I looked at this photo and noticed how many patterns the spider has used - see the flattened hexagons that look like chicken wire? I love the details that come out in photographs which I just don't pick up on in at the time.

Still in the garden, the insects are feasting:

The mint is flowering (pics above and below)

And my very small buddleia-in-a-pot (Buddleia Buzz) has flowered! I planted it last year so this should have been its first year flowering but it's been so wet and murky I wasn't sure it actually would manage it - then finally the flowers appeared..

..and so did the butterflies! All of my butterfly photos manage to look fake, as if badly photoshopped, but they're really real!

I don't know if anyone noticed the splash of yellow in the background of the first mint-flower picture, but that's my anthemis tinctoria (dyer's chamomile) which has given the most colour in the garden this summer - it's been brilliant, completely unstoppable and the hoverflies love it.  As there's so much of it I finally got round to doing another dye with the flowers:

Once again though I can't get a photograph that reflects the colour accurately - it looks quite buttery there but is actually a stronger, slightly harsher yellow (almost with a hint of mustard?) - but the pictures make me so happy even if they're not accurate. The one with the sun on the wool is when I'd just rinsed it and had hung it over the kitchen tap to drip dry for a few minutes. I've got a very sunny sink obviously..

I'll finish with a poppy just for a bit of red!

Pink

Just before we went up north I did another quick elderberry dye, and this time let it stay pink. Pretty, isn't it? It's a bit paler in real life but nice nevertheless. I tried an acid (vinegar) modifier but to be honest I don't think it made much difference to the colour. It was still damp and smelling faintly of vinegar when we set off up the A9 so I took it with me and dried it at my parents' house. I just had a sniff to see if it still smells vinegary but it just smells of their house! Isn't it odd how houses have a distinct smell? I dread to think knows what ours smells of...

Here's the elderberry pink with the elderberry green from a few weeks ago:

Ah serene!

I was out for a walk yesterday, getting more blackberries for the crumble, and saw lots of serene muted shades, like this:


and this:


and then:

Woah! Colour!

Making Monday - ssh, it's a secret

What I'm making on this Making Monday is a birthday present for my daughter - it's alright, she can't read yet, so I can hide it in the middle of this post and she won't spot it if this tab happens to be open (I am the tab queen - my husband laughs at how many tabs I have open at a time) .

This week I had foraging-and-dyeing success and foraging-and-baking success.

Foraging-and-dyeing was with elderberries. Now I'm ashamed to admit this but I'm rubbish at recognising trees, shrubs and wildflowers, so I take photos of plants I'm curious about, email them to my dad and get him to do the identification. It's not urban ignorance, I do have reason for this - most of those plants don't grow in Shetland or not in my bit anyway so I just didn't grow up knowing them. I did introduce my mother-in-law to the joys of popping seaweed à la bubble-wrap though so I have my own incredibly useful plant skills!

Anyway, using the 'ask Dad' methodology I've learned to identify elderberries (yay! go me!) so went and gathered a small pot of the for dyeing purposes. I squished them up a bit (with a tattie masher) before simmering for an hour, cooled a bit, strained the mush out, added the alum-mordanted wool, simmered for another hour, then left to soak overnight. And this is what I had next morning:

But I was still after green, so pretty though the pink was, it was time for an alkaline modifier. This time, this time, I would be careful.

That's it a few minutes after it went into the soda-crystal solution. Initially it was quite a nice grey, then gradually turned greener. I warmed it (not even reaching simmering point really) for a few minutes, let it cool, then rinsed in a fresh soda-crystal solution. And here's the result:



Yay! Green! It doesn't photograph all that well but it's a soft sage green and I'm very happy with it. And as the majority of elderberries I've seen round here are still at the green stage I have plenty of time to try a pink dye too.

I was flicking through a dye-book while eating my dinner last night (pitta-bread pizza, my new default quick and easy dinner) and it said that alkaline modifiers shouldn't be heated when using animal fibres so I'll have to try without heat another time, maybe when I try the red cabbage again. It would certainly take the stress out of it.

And now, I'll just sneak my daughter's birthday present in here:


Yes, a 'Noro' stripe scarf using Mochi Plus in 'bright rainbow' or some such name. I'm knitting it only when she's not around so it's a proper surprise, but I've only got a few days to get it done. Over the weekend I've obviously been knitting only in the evenings once she was in bed, so today was the first time I've seen it in daylight - very zingy!

And now after that colourful interlude, back to my foraging adventures, this time foraging-and-baking. Miss Mouse and I went out brambling yesterday and yesterday evening I made apple and blackberry crumble. Crumble is another of those things I've never made before but Mum emailed me her recipe so I had a go and oh my! - it was lovely. I mean droolingly delicious, perfect comfort food for a cold wet evening.

I think I'll be making it again.