I always feel like this is a difficult part of the year, emotionally. On the one hand I start to look forward to the autumn colours that abound and which is my very favourite time of the year.  I long for cold days to make the change in the leaves ever brighter and allow the glorious reds and golds to come forward in a blaze of glory.  And yet on the other hand some of the summer plants are only just beginning to realise that their job is done and one can see how they dance so brightly in the first whisps of an autumn breeze and I feel just a little bit sad that another summer is just about to be gone.

These photo’s were all taken on the same day, within steps of each other.

We can see the brambles and the berries,

ripening up and some are drying up.

Yet still flowering, all to give sustenance to those that look for it.

We can see brightly coloured flowers bobbing in the wind with the bumble bees still hard at work

gathering pollen and nectar to store for the hard winter ahead.

And yet when we look closely we can see that this is a time of transition and soon both feet will be firmly locked into Autumn, rescuing hand knit socks and woollen jumpers to keep the the shivers at bay.  It will be like seeing old friends again, with them being just a little bit more bobbly and careworn.

When I went to see the Tall Ships I came across these sculptures.  I think I audibly gasped when I saw them, they are in a very Victorian Industrial setting and I got the quivers thinking the Martians were invading.  This is not the first time my Martian feeling has happened in London, I blame my older brothers watching War of the Worlds and playing the album constantly, I grew up believing Martians were a distinct possibility.  But even so, I find them really eerie and really interesting, but they send a shiver down my spine.

There are sixteen figures made in cast iron by the sculptor Peter Burke.  Having researched for this blog post I can tell you that they are made to reflect the community, military and industrial history of the site, where munitions factories once employed thousands of workers.

I love how they vary with which piece is missing and how I felt desperately in need of being able to crawl into one of them, but of course that was not possible from the way they are designed.  And I also think, if there was ever a place that needed a bit of yarn bombing, this would be it.  Wouldn’t they look wonderful with some gaily coloured scarfs and warm bobble hats..  – or is that just me.

Left to my own devices its become pretty clear to me that cooking big family meals is not high on my agenda.  I am quite happy to make a vegetable stir fry with rice or cheesy mash or any number of things that require very little in the way of ingredients and very little in the way of effort.  And the other thing that strikes me very clearly, especially when I start to feel very tired, is that I haven’t eaten any type of red meat for at least six weeks.  Which if your a fully confirmed vegetarian and your making sure your getting your green leafy veg on a nearly every day basis its probably not a problem, but if your not making any sort of effort to eat any iron, then maybe it should be worth noting.   When feeding a family, mince has been high on the agenda as a nutritious means of getting a good source of protein, high in iron,  into a hungry growing family as cheaply as possible.  And it seems to have worked because our boys are strapping lads.  We would probably have mince in its many different forms at least twice a week and a piece of beef brisket that would last for at least two meals, probably twice a month, so they never went short.

Mince – It was the first thing I gave up when coming to live on my own.  I just needed a complete break from it.  And as I couldn’t afford steak on my limited student budget and I don’t like beefburgers (which are basically another type of mince) I just sort of gave up beef.

So, about a month ago I fancied buying some beef mince and as my student loan, how shall we put this, I’ve sent the same paperwork in three times and I’ve still not been paid and won’t be for at least another week, and that’s if it goes well this time, the mince has come to the top of the freezer.  And whilst I still have potatoes, I thought a family cottage pie was called for. 

I fried some onions with garlic, added the mince and browned that off and added two tins of tomatoes, a beef stock cube and the rest of the frozen peas.  Simmered it all down for a while.

Made a big pan of mash

and dolloped (such a great word) it on.  One tip worth passing on, if you fancy dolloping your mash in a similar style, use a wooden spoon.  Seriously the mash doesn’t stick to it like it does a metal spoon.

Made pretty patterns to aid the making of the crunchy tasty titbits.

And cooked in the oven for an hour and a quarter.

And served with freshly boiled carrots.  The rest was portioned up and placed back in the freezer for nights when only some comfort food will do.

As you can see my Hinksey Mittens are still not finished.  This is what comes of producing a quilt top at the weekend and starting to gather steam for the year ahead.  Although I have very much enjoyed posting every day, I can see that that probably won’t be possible in the near future.  I’ll try, mainly because I enjoy writing and exploring my world in photography and descriptive prose, not that I am a brilliant writer, I just enjoy the tinkering along of it. I  also think that because I didn’t post as much as I would have liked last year, I will some how miss out when I reread all about my time at University and what I got up to in London.   So to that end I am going to try and post as much as possible, even if you all do get a tad bored by another recipe or blurry shot of something that is being produced in the studio, I’ll know what it means and it will take me back instantly to that time, and that is one of my main reasons why I write this blog.   For when I’m grey – oh sorry, thats not going to happen! – and old and wrinkly and am sat knitting with my pussy cat, whoever that might be, on my lap, with my ipad to hand, just drifting back over the wondrous times I am having at the moment!

Getting back to the mittens,

I don’t knit cable very often, I love the pattern made with cable,  I just don’t do it, I find it takes more of a strain and sometimes I just want to knit plain socks.  So it takes a lot longer, although when I do knit cable, I do find that I can read the chart more easily and am able to knit faster after ten hours or so.  So there is hope, if I just stuck with cable knitting for six months it would all come good.

But so far I haven’t made any terrible errors, and haven’t had to frog a mitten, which is all good.

And they are very pretty.  (can you see who never leaves my side in the top right hand corner of this photograph?)

So just because she is always by my side, Toile, looking very cute at 5 and a half months.

Sometimes she has that look of kitten hood and sometimes she has that ‘hey missus, I’m a fully grown cat’ look.  So cute.

It doesn’t take much to start me off onto journeys new.  A whisper on the wind can jolt me into a new adventure just as quickly as can a blog post in glorious technicolor.  And so it was, I was minding my own business on Saturday afternoon, tootling along I was, not a care in the world when I came across a blog post which essentially took my breath away by my good friend Carie.  In it she describes the wonderous nature of the Lasagne Quilt, so I just thought I would have a little google and found this… Video by Missouri quilt company and that was it, I was lost and gone.  You see, I had these Jelly Rolls in my stash and I used to sit there some nights thinking, I wish you could just sew them up and it would look nice and then I could see all of those lovely fabrics.  And then I used to say to myself, ‘nah, it would just look horrible, you know you need to put time into a quilt’ and then I would sigh deeply, bemoan my lack of time and promise myself that I would make that quilt for myself,,, one day.

Firstly there was maths, I needed to know if I could make an approximation of a superking sized quilt with 2 jelly rolls.  It didn’t have to have lots of fabric hanging over, (although that would have been nice,) but it did need to look like it fitted the bed.  The basic maths comprises of width in inches by 32 rows (which would be 64″) divided by length of strip after sewing, which in my case was 43″ as I’d decided to do a square end to my strip rather than a mitre, for two reasons, I fancied it and secondly I need to maximise every square inch.  And this then gives you the number of strips you need.  So that when you multiply the strips and cut them in half and go from 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to 32, you get the width you want.   After that you need to add the strips to make the length you want.  I needed ten more strips to make the length, but I needed to get the width right first.  

Nope that didn’t work, it needed too many strips., I only have eighty strips.

And nor did that.

And this leaves me with eight strips spare.  So I need to do more maths and then I thought, bearing in mind its meant to be a speedy quilt.

But I carried on. 

And success was mine.  I tried it with 80″ wide and adding 9 rows to make it 82″ long and realised I could make it 84″ long..  Yippee, now in an ideal world I would have liked it just a bit wider, but it would still work.

And then I found my strips and counted my strips and there was one missing!  I had 79 strips..  lets hope this maths is right.

And then I found my fat quarters that matched for the binding.

I sewed the 32 rows starting with sewing 60 of the strips end to end and not forgetting to cut off approx 18″ off the first strip of fabric to allow the pattern to stagger, then sewing the full length of the stripe together, hint: watch the video and cutting and repeating.  With some trepidation I placed it on the bed to see if I had indeed got the right width and did a very happy, happy dance.   Yes, it was going to be fine… yay.   Now I wondered if I would get my ten strips added before running out of stripes.  And I added these 5 rows to each end and sewn them backwards and forwards starting at the same end that I had finished on and alternating the end of the big long strip so that the patterns always mismatched (well as much as possible)

Sorry gratuitous pussy cat photos.

Yes, I managed to get all ten stripes added.  May I present, one glorious, stunningly beautiful quilt top, of which I will long admire and now can at long last see the beautiful fabrics that I was so drawn to and that have been sat in my stash for such along time. .  (when it gets finished remains to be seen)  It probably took about 4 hours maybe longer….  I know I went to bed and then did  35 minutes to finish it today.   And what was the fabric?  It was Fabric Freedom, Spice Trail.

And what was left of the 79 strips.  This was left, so its probably quite important to round your maths up, just to make sure, which is what I did.

If I am cooking rice, I often cook more than I need, sometimes by design, often by mistake.  But I am never sad about that mistake as if probably looked after cold rice can be a useful addition to the next meal.  What do I mean by probably looked after, well apparently cooked rice can allow nasty bugs to multiply quite quickly – I’ve had to look this up,  the NHS say that uncooked rice contain spores of the bacteria Bacillus Cereus  so the cooked rice should be cooled quickly, refrigerated and then used up within 24 hours, reheating thoroughly.  How those containers of cooked rice sat in my local supermarket for days on end get on I’ve no idea.

Anyway back to the storyline.  Having looked after your cooked rice properly, it makes a great basis for a meal.  I often cooked an egg fried rice with a vegetable in it, even if thats only an onion or a  handful of peas.  I quite like courgettes and mushrooms are great, peppers can be yummy and lightly boiled broccoli lends a lovely freshness to the dish and if your really lucky beansprouts are just simply divine.  I always start with the aromatics of garlic, ginger and onion by frying them, then stir fry the vegetable, next stir fry the rice with soy until its super hot , beat the egg with a dash of sesame oil.

Then add the egg at the side and scramble it, it will happen very quickly in a hot pan and then mix it all together and supper is served.

I returned to Hampton Court this week, the brief glimpse I had had last weekend just sent my imagination into overdrive.  I knew I had to go back and go back soon, so I tootled off for another adventure.  I wasn’t disappointed.  Although I spent many, many hours there, I still didn’t see it all.  This is just a snapshot of what I did see, enjoy.

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Long ago, before the advent of the internet, electronic toys and other expensive games we had to make our own entertainment, which often meant walking for miles.  I was allowed out from dawn until dusk or six p.m., whichever came first, at quite a young age. I can remember trolling around when I was about eight or nine years old.  As long as there was a group of you, or at least two, you could pretty much do what you like. And off course we  had no phone until I was twelve and went up to the big school at the other end of the town.  But everybody talked, if I went up the park or the castle, my mother would know where I was before I got home, seriously, people would knock the front door and say “I’ve seen your Mandy up so and so”.  (this is the bit I like about London, the anonymity, laughs to oneself) But I think I mainly got away with my wayward walkabouts because both Mum and Dad have both liked to ramble around, not in a big, lets go and do the peak district sort of way, more a ramble around town and the lanes and the neighbouring villages sort of way. And one of my favourite places was and still is The Abbey Fields.  So last time I was home, I dragged Mum and Dad down to the Top Park to see what we could see.  A beautiful morning, absolutely glorious.  And when the tree’s aren’t in leaf, you can see straight through to the Castle from here. My favourite bench, near the top of the hill which gave welcome respite to tired legs that had been on the go swimming in the then outdoor pool or climbing along tree roots on the banks of the brook, or other made up pursuits of the day.  There are other benches on this hill now, but this one is still the original and best and is certainly showing its age. They have made an area boggy, which I am not a hundred percent sure that one should be changing things like that,

but the bull rushes did look gorgeous and I got incredibly soggy feet getting that shot.

A quick shot of Dad.

And Dad took a quick shot of me and we tried to take one of Mum but she was pulling funny faces and it didn’t work.

There was feeding of ducks, which I still love to do, just so pretty.

It’s so nice to sit and admire the view.

And this is an image of my young childhood.  I’d always fall behind, having found something of interest and then I’d be yelling “Wait for me” and Mum would shout back that they were, but they weren’t really, they were still walking on, slightly slower. I suppose they had to get me out of the park somehow.

And this next series of photo’s are the best photo’s I’ve ever taken.  They show my Dad’s comedic side and their love for each other.

I have no idea what he was bantering on about, I could hear him joking away, I was just trying to get the shots.  Whatever he said, it obviously tickled Mother. It was a lovely, lovely morning at the park.

Tasty doesn’t necessarily mean lengthy cooking.  If your anything like me, good lengthy wholesome family cooking gets interspersed with quick, big bang for your buck flavour wise tasty suppers and there is nothing wrong with that if it stops you from dialing for a takeaway.  This one is quick, tasty and cheap and even has two vegetables in it, can’t be bad.

Fry off your leeks, then your bacon, add your mushrooms and when they are cooked crumble in your stilton (or other cheese lurking in the fridge) a splosh of milk to make a sauce and tumble over rice, pasta, noodles, potatos or toast and relax and enjoy.  Simples.