Unseasonally warm blankets and feelings

Hello all, today I am very pleased to show you a completed project, a nice warm, toasty, crocheted blanket.

It's a bit unseasonal to be working on a blanket, after all, it is still officially summer (for another 10 hours or so). However, most of the work on this blanket was done last winter, when it sat on my lap keeping me cosy through nights and nights of serious tv viewing (Game of Thrones, if I remember rightly, and what a lovely contrast it was to be doing something so incredibly sweet and wholesome to the soundtrack of extreme violence and 'adult themes').
I had almost finished the blanket when suddenly, inexplicably, I ran out of puff. I didn't much like the colours any more. I was kind of disspointed that I'd wasted all that effort on something so 'meh', and I cast it aside, rather unkindly. Well a summer of doing other things can soften a person, and when I was fossicking around for a project to take away on holiday with me last weekend, I saw this blanket with new eyes. Suddenly, I loved it again. I loved the colours and the Granny-ness of it, and I was inspired to finish it. So, that's what I did. I just had the shell border to finish and some ends to sew in, and that was it. I was finished in an hour or four. Best of all, I gave it to little Sylvie, and she said with big, wide, honest, 6-year-old eyes, "Mum, I just want to tell you that this is my favourite blanket ever."

I will end this post with a sandal party, to mark the last day of the Southern Hemisphere summer.

See you in Autumn!

Fruit salad, in pink

It's that time of the year when I bring out all the jars I've had in hiding in every cupboard around the house, and fill them with bottled fruit, jam, salsa, and pasta sauce. My husband is tormented by my self-congratulating exclamations, "It's a good thing I kept all those jars, isn't it!" and the kids can't get me to do anything because I'm always at a crucial moment with fruit and hot syrup. Ah, good times, good times.

I've done the usual stuff: bottled apricots, boysenberry jam, tomato salsa, plum jam. However, this year I also had  a hankering to do a few jars of that unlikely fruit dish, "bottled fruit salad". The recipes I see in old recipe books call for bananas as an ingredient. The idea of a bottled banana both amuses and disgusts me, so that part I left out. Instead, my bottled fruit salad became a mixture of equal parts of pineapple, pears, plums, peaches, and apricots, cooked in a light sugar syrup (1 part sugar, 4 parts water). I thought the mixture of colours would be rather pretty. It's pretty alright. Pretty damn pink. But still pretty.

And the tea towel underneath is pretty and pink also.
And here is something else pretty. It's something pretty funny, which we spotted in Mitre 10 on Sunday.

Because what else would you use, if yours needs dusting?