Cheated by Summer...

This picture was taken on a rare half decent day (note the dark clouds to the left, it rained about an hour later). There have been so few days where it hasn't rained!




Truth is I feel really cheated by summer this year.  I seem to have spent the whole summer waiting for it to happen and now suddenly it will be September tomorrow... 

Also my little big girl starts school tomorrow and boy has that crept up on me, especially as I got most of the supplies for when she starts at the beginning of the holidays.  I just cannot believe she is old enough to go to school! 

Anyway here's hoping for at least an "Indian" summer and the hope of at least visiting the beach before the really cold weather sets in....

Hand Winding a Skein of Wool Tip

Here's a handy tip if you have to wind a skein of wool by hand and like me, you don't own a fancy ball winder. When you wind the ball of wool in your hand make sure you wind over your fingers instead of just winding around and around into a tight ball.  It makes the ball of wool softer and squishier and avoids stretching the fibres.

I also sit on my chair in the lounge, feet up on a stool with the skein wrapped around my knees and I find that position for me avoids nasty tangles and knots. Strangely I do remember my mum have me hold out my hands to hold skeins of wool for her when I was a child and can recall how much it made my arms ache! I remember dipping my arms from side to side to help her wind the wool off my hands. Oddly enough I don't really remember her knitting anything!!!

Muffins!

I decided to have a go at making muffins.  After having a browse on the net for suitable recipes I sort of half followed one, adding or subtracting as I saw fit for a blueberry muffin recipe. I'm not very good at following recipes.  I couldn't see the point in adding oil and melted butter.  I only had self raising flour so I used that and added a little extra baking powder and put in a whole egg instead of just the white the recipe called for. I also used frozen blueberries instead of fresh. They turned out beautifully, a surprise really as I'd chopped and changed the recipe...

Then I decided to have a go at double chocolate chip, using the same basic recipe with my changes...

I mixed all the wet ingredients together, all the dry in a separate bowl then combined the two together. Urgh!  It was stiff and dry!  I assumed I must have weighed out too much flour so to compensate I added an extra egg and some more milk (goats lol) and the consistency was better but now I worried I'd overworked the batter.  My eldest daughter helped me to spoon it into the cases which was fun, then I got a little mixture on my finger and couldn't resist tasting it. Double URGH! I'd forgotten the sugar! Following some drastic scrapping the mixture back into the bowl out of the paper cases and adding the forgotten sugar we tried again....

This is never going to work I thought, not with all the messing around with the ingredients and the overworking of the whole thing. Do you know what though? They were gorgeous!  Even Daddy had one (I think he forgot there might have been goats milk in there...) and he thoroughly enjoyed his too! Just goes to show that you can wing it and still get great results!

Let's Go Fly a Kite!

We had a lovely day at the beach not long ago and decided to have a go at flying a kite. It wasn't a very windy day though but still much fun was had trying to get it up into the air!

Yay! Up in the air!

All other attempts after the first one resulted in the kite coming quickly back down to Earth though.



We hope to go back to the beach soon and have another go at flying our kite but the weather hasn't been too good.  I'm hard pressed to remember a day where it hasn't rained or been overcast! I do have very good memories of this day though with building sandcastles and sand tunnels and all of us including the littlest member of our family paddling our feet in the sea and managing to avoid the jelly fish....