treasure

In the post this rainy autumn afternoon are these three pieces of treasure, bought on Etsy the other day. The seller tells me they are cut from a civil war patchwork from the late 1800s and I love imagining where and by whom they were sewn, where the fabrics were bought, where the fabrics were printed. The little half square triangles of this vintage quilt are only about an inch high and are hand pieced on the reverse side with the most even tiny stitches.

I've been poring over the fabrics looking the different styles up in my wonderful Textile Designs reference book which I bought last year at Kinokuniya. The patchwork includes madder prints - dyed with the madder plant, neats - simple small scale florals, and maybe some Cinnamon pinks and Half-mourning prints.

pirate, flashy and fluoro

Sounds a bit like an eighties band but actually the names of some new friends to our gang, joining the fat tadpoles in our new pond this rainy Saturday afternoon.

The cold and rain saw us holed up at home with a hearty minestrone for dinner (based on Pip from Meet Me at Mike's recipe).  And the alfabeto pasta shapes meant we could write love letters in our dinner - 'i love soup'.

It was also the perfect weekend to start this knitting project, my first every baby knitting project. It's for a young friend's first baby, due this month. And its also my first go at cables, albeit baby cables. It seems all the nicest people are knitting hats this weekend, so I'm in good company :-)

my creative space

Oh dear, every week I see so many fantastic creative spaces and I always mean to join in but I'm not organised. Anyway, so I'm posting this in a bit of a rush. Luckily I have photos on hand of my latest finished knitting project. Its a pattern from Ravelry from a blog called A Friend to Knit with and its called Toast, though actually this one with the thumbs is called Toasty.
After the sock knitting these were such a cinch. I made them in a couple of days all up.
I made them special for Miss A who is obviously headed for an illustrious career as a hand model!

Speaking of Miss A, here is some food photography I did of her Food Tech assignment to design and package a new biscuit recipe. These are BANANA biscuits, they're great. She loves to cook and she's a great baker. The chocolate is an added perk that makes them just perfect. We are going to experiment a bit with putting it on better!
I promise to share the finished recipe once we get that far.
As always there are loads more fabulous creative spaces at Kootoyoo, and this week I have one of them!