La Santa Market ... shopping by moonlight ...

There's something about open-air shopping in the moonlight on a balmy summer night that really appeals. And when the venue is as pretty as the Santa Market in Santa Cristina d'Aro you'd be crazy not to trot along and try it out. It's being held at the riding stables just outside the village, and they've got a great line-up of music and gastronomy to tempt all the senses after a hard day on the beach.

We pottered along the other night with some good friends who ride at the stables.

Santa Market, Santa Cristina d'Aro, Costa Brava, Catalonia

Lazy summer days ...

I LOVE summer. Totally, utterly and absolutely! It's the best time of the year by far.

 We've got into the rhythm of summer living. Emi is having a ball on the high seas, sailing every day in his little Open Bic, which is really a surf board with a sail and a boom. We play lots of tennis at the tennis club. In my case I play Padel, which is a variation on lawn tennis played on a smaller, walled court with a hard racket. I have classes with a lovely coach, who has more patience than the prophet Job. The WonderDog is out and about all the time. In truth he enjoys more walks than he really wants to go on. He's developed a strong preference for snoozing on the cold marble floor under the sofa on especially hot afternoons.

El Celler de Can Roca

Last week we had a special dinner date, a very special dinner date indeed. All the planets aligned and we were offered a table at the celebrated Celler de Can Roca in Girona. We've been trying to get a reservation there for ages. Normally you have to book 11 months in advance. Yes, that's right. Almost a full year ahead of when you want to go out for dinner. Mr B has been trying each month, on the first day of the month, when they open the bookings for 11 months down the line, to wrangle a table. But here's the thing: they open the booking line at midnight on the allocated date, and within ten minutes all the tables for the entire month on offer are gone.

As we knew we were going to be on the Costa Brava for all of August we put our names down for a cancellation - any cancellation. And last week, when our besties, P and A were in town, we lucked out with a table for four.

So what's so special about this Celler de Can Roca? you may well ask.

Well, they've got 3 Michelin Stars for starters, and if you check out the World's 50 Best Restaurants you'll see that they're up there - right up there at the very top. In 2013 Celler de Can Roca was voted the world's Number 1 restaurant, in 2014 it fell to number 2, 2015 saw it return to the number 1 spot, in 2016 it was number 2 and this year, 2017, it's number 3. In anyone's gastronomy it's a very special eatery.

High Summer in Sunny Sant Feliu

We've finally made it home to Sant Feliu. It was an epic adventure getting here via the Panzer Museum in Munster: 3 days in the car, more traffic jams than I've suffered in years on the M6, a couple of audio books and a lot of lively discussion in between times.

Our town beach here in sunny Sant Feliu de Guíxols

And it's high summer. The place is full of people. We've got the Porta Ferrada Music Festival in full swing, parking is nigh on impossible and the weather is sunny and bright.

Sant Feliu de Guíxols: the port

Emi is beside himself as all his local friends are in town, and he's got a full compliment of amigos down at the pool. In addition he's had some good friends from London staying with us this week.

How do you like his new snorkel mask? He thinks it's the business, especially given how he can hang his go-pro on the front.

He's already had several sessions filming the sand on the sea bed 👀 and the fish darting around in the depths. He's always had a tendency to gild the lily when it's come to recounting all the amazing things he's seen in the water, which is now catching up with him as we review his video footage. It's amazing how elusive those huge lobsters and mean scorpion fish have become since he's started filming ... They used to be two-a-penny, every day sights 😜.

Walking the WonderDog in the cool of the evening has its own special charms. I enjoy being out and about when the heat of the day is spent, and the tourists are drifting off to change for dinner.

Sant Feliu de Guíxols in the evening sunshine

All the best for now,

Bonny x

Fibre East: Thank you!

A big thank you! to all the lovely people who stopped by to say Hello! and buy wool at Fibre East. The weather was a bit of off-putting, but inside the big tents, summer reigned unchallenged, and the mood was warm and sunny.

Fibre East Tomorrow ... see you there!

We're off to Fibre East tomorrow. You can find us in the Leicester Marquee. We've got our fingers crossed for nice weather.

Emi's made a Lego sewing machine to bring me luck and celebrate all the sewing I've been doing recently.

Hope to see you there!

Bonny x

The White Lough on a sparkling summer evening ...

When we're back home in Ireland our default dog-walking venue is the White Lough, which is just a hop, a skip and a jump away from my parents' home. It's a firm favourite for an after-dinner romp on bright summer evenings when we need to walk off a few calories.

Evening Daisy ...

I happened to be in the garden last night at the bewitching hour when the sun was setting and the garden was filled with the most amazing golden light. Here in Northern Ireland, at this time of the year the days are longer than they are back in London, and it's a joy on a sunny summer evening to sit outside and admire the play of light and shadow under the foliage canopy.

All the best for now,

Bonny x

Who needs Carcasonne when you've got Caernarfon?

Now I have to 'fess up to having driven past this place dozens of times, dashing back and forth from the Dublin ferry, without ever stopping to have a proper look. I've gasped and sighed over other medieval citadels here and there and further afield, but I've never given Caernarfon a second thought. I'm a numpty! And that's official.

Just stop and take a look at what I've been missing. Isn't it magnificent?

Caernarfon Castle, Caernarfon, Wales 

Hay-on Wye ... a Welsh Timbuktu ... sort of ...

I love Hay-on-Wye. It's totally my kind of town. Mr B and I are in the habit of going there on a fairly regular basis to shop, shop, shop. We love it.

Friends will be puzzled by this shop, shop, shop business because neither of us is the type to hang around aimlessly in shopping malls, or to partake of retail therapy with any kind of glee or gladness, but Hay-on-Wye is different. It's the Timbuktu of Mid Wales: a town that's totally devoted to books!

Hay-on-Wye Castle

School's out ... and it's officially summer ...

It's been a long time coming, but, finally, Emi's got his summer hols. Not having to get up at the crack of dawn this morning was blissful. And today is quite possibly the best day of the year: this first day of the summer holidays, when we can wind down from all the day-to-day stuff that usually has us rushing around trying to keep up, and savour the several weeks that lie ahead of not having to do very much at all. Call me lazy, but from where I'm sitting right now, that's a sweet, sweet prospect.

My black hollyhock -  summer on a stem ...

Ode to June ... and TGI Friday ...

Crumbs it's way too hot down here in the Big Smoke. It's been like this for ages, and for some reason all this hot, hot weather has inspired me to sew. Perhaps it's because I've felt the need of some relaxed summer dresses - the kind that fit loosely, and help keep you cool when the mercury's way up. This is what I've been up to this week:

I rustled up these summer dresses over the course of the last few days. They're all pretty easy, and made from wonderful summer cottons that I bought on the Goldhawk Road. The red one was cobbled together when I discovered that I didn't have enough of either the red or the green flowery cottons to make the entire dress, and I have to say, necessity being the mother of invention and all that, I'm really glad that my erratic fabric buying forced my hand. I'm rather pleased with the not-so-matchy contrast.

My purple dress just involved following a pattern. And, whilst it's perfect for hot, dusty summer days in Spain, it doesn't enthuse me as much as my improvised dress does.

It's sewn from a fabulous Liberty Cotton that I bought on my favourite shopping street last year. And it's an absolute delight to wear: really light and floaty. I know I'll wear it to death from here on in.

As I've sewn, and ripped, and pressed out seams and tacked up hems I've listened to the wonderful alternative version of world history that I mentioned last week. It's an epic read (or listen in my case) that runs from the days of the mighty Persian Empire to the fall of Saddam Hussein. Maybe I got so much sewing done because I was totally engrossed in the narrative.

It's been a busy old week all things told, and I didn't get around to much restrospection on what I got up to during June. I've been trying to take a review of the month just gone as each new month of the year kicks off. It went really well for January through March, but then my wagon came off the tracks as other demands on my time left little energy for retrospection of any kind.

But June deserves to be treated differently. June was a big month for me. You see Mr B, my husband, had surgery to replace the ligament of his left knee in June. It wasn't a huge deal: it was never going to kill him. But it could have turned out badly. He could have been left with a long, painful recovery, or a permanent limp. As things went he's made a splendid recovery, and I'm feeling really blessed that he will be restored to full health and will be able to do all the things that he used to do. We're tennis buddies for one thing. We both play a really rotten game of tennis: he's a bit portly and I'm as blind as a fruit bat. But that doesn't matter because we play as badly as one another, which means that we're perfectly matched. We have epic battles on court. Any decent player would destroy either or both of us in the flash of an eye, but pitted against one another we're stiff competition for each other, and every victory is hard won.

Together we ski, cycle, hike and swim. None of it is done to any great athletic level, but it's fun and it's life-affirming. It would have been sad to have lost all of this from our lives. So I'm feeling very grateful.

And I'm also feeling grateful for long summer days with nothing very pressing to do. For lazy walks in the park, the locomotive panting of the WonderDog who invariably finds the coolest, darkest corner of every room we enter, the semi-meditative delights of cross stitching, the soft berries ripening in my garden and the long stemmed beauty of my hollyhocks - I can't tell you how much I love my hollyhocks. Summer totally rocks!

All the best for a fabulous weekend,


Bonny x

T-shirt Up-cycle - a patternless pattern ...

I've been mulling over the idea of using a simple T-shirt as the beginnings of a summer dress.  I started off with a small, white vest-top from Primark for a little girl aged 3 - 4 years.  It cost me the princely sum of £1.30, and then I used bits of left-over lawn cottons from other projects to make the skirt, which cost me nothing. What do you think of the result?

Just read on for my pattern-less pattern:

Mid-Summer Meadow of Cornflower Blue ...

Last night I took a short-cut through Walpole Park on the way home. As I was steaming along I came across the most beautiful sight: a mid-summer meadow of cornflower blue. I was enchanted. All I needed to complete the scene was for Puck and Bottom to wander in stage left ...

Pink Clematis Pin Cushion ... how-to

I have to say these tapestry pin cushions have become a bit of a habit ...
This is my latest creation:

I've worked this design half cross-stitch on a 10 mesh interlock needlepoint canvas using 4 ply tapestry wool.

Here is my stitch-pattern:

I started from the black-lined square in the centre, and counted stitches from there to fill in the other colours. I finished off the white background in dark green thread.

When I'd finished the tapestry I trimmed the canvas to 1 cm of the stitch work, cut out a square of the same dimensions in short-pile velvet for the back. I found a dusty pink velvet at my local fabric store, Ealing Fabrics, that was perfect for the job. And, as luck would have it, the lovely lady behind the counter was able to pull out an upholstery trim that was a great match for the backing velvet.

Having overlocked the edges of the velvet I sewed it to the tapestry, right side to right side, around 3 of the sides of the square that they created. Then I turned the work so that the right sides were out, and the worked seams were inside. I stuffed the cushion with some toy stuffing and sewed up the final side of the square.

Now the only thing left to do was attach the upholstery trim around the edge. This type of trim is known as gimp braid, and it's got a marked tendency to unravel. I tried to end-stitch it, overlocking the ends to keep them intact, but my efforts were a bit of a failure. The only way in which I could keep this braid together was by securing the ends with a fabric glue. Using a paintbrush I dabbed some fabric glue, front and back, on the cut ends. The glue dried clear, so it wasn't very noticeable where the fabric had been treated. I sewed the braid around the cushion using an invisible stitch, taking small stitches from the wrong side of the braid, and sewing those to the cushion, pulling the thread taut after each stitch to pull the braid against the edge of the cushion. When I got right round to where I'd started I finished off the trim with a little bit of fabric glue so that it overlapped slightly, and sat snugly on top of where it started. 

All the best for now,

Bonny x

Loganberry & Lemongrass Jam ...

Yesterday I made some Loganberry & Lemongrass Jam, and it was a big hit with the troops, a really big hit. Just read on for my recipe:

Loganberry & Lemongrass Jam

Jam & Jerusalem

Well, Happy Friday folks!

How to knit perfect stripes

The problem with knitting stripes in the round ...

Have you found when you're knitting in the round that it's almost impossible to get your stripes to match up perfectly? 

I think the technical term for the problem is jogging. The stripes tend to jog on a little on their own, so that they never perfectly encircle the work. At the root of the problem is the fact that knitting in the round is really knitting in a spiral. You don't stop and join the first to the last stitch at the end of a row. No, you carry on, slipping effortlessly up onto the next row. It's a spiral that you're making, not a series of perfect circles.  This is all fine and dandy if you're knitting with one colour, but it is irksome if you're trying to do neat, clean stripes with a beginning and an end that meet tidily. Perfectly joined stripes never happen naturally, and it's impossible to make the issue disappear completely, but there are a couple of things you can do to mask the problem.

A stripe that "jogs" out of its proper alignment when knit in the round

It's too darn hot ...

To quote Cole Porter: It's Too Darn Hot 😤, and  Ella's lovely, deep velvet voice keeps singing those lines in my head these hot, hot days.

I don't know what's happened to our weather here in London, but every day the mercury seems to push its way north of 30º C, and I'm really struggling not to wilt. Mr B has been recovering nicely from his knee operation last Tuesday, so we've not had to take life too strenuously, which is just as well. If I had to do anything difficult right now I've got a feeling I'd fail miserably.

The other afternoon I was trying to calculate how many stitches I needed to cast-off to shape the neckline of a baby cardigan, and it took me four attempts - four! -before I managed to lose the necessary 8 stitches over 20 rows. I can only plead heat fatigue.

At least, looking on the positive side of all this heat, my Loganberry bush has produced a decent bucketful of fruit. I've picked the better part of 2 kg of berries, and it's still going strong. Because they don't all ripen at once I pick them, and freeze them each day as they're ready. When the weather cools down a bit, I'll make jam from the frozen berries. I'm not going anywhere near a hot stove and a steaming preserving pan in this weather!

How to save dropped stitches in stocking stitch ...

Back in May one of my guests asked if I could show her how to rectify the situation when a stitch gets dropped. The technique varies depending on what type of stitch you're working at the time.

Part A below deals with how to fix a dropped stitch on a knit row, and Part B deals with a purl row fix-up.

A: Knit row fix-up in stocking stitch

So here's what we start off with:

Dropped Knit Stitch working in Stocking Stitch

1. Slip a stitch-holder - or a safety pin - through the dropped stitch so that it won't unravel any further.


2. Slip stitches, without twisting them, from your right needle to your left needle until you get to the dropped stitch.

1. Save dropped stitch with a stitch-holder or safety pin
2. Slip stitches to get to the dropped stitch

3. Slip a spare needle that's slightly thinner than the needles you've been working on into the dropped stitch from front to back as shown in the photo below. I like to use a thinner needle than I've been working on as this tends to pull the tension of the repaired stitches slightly tighter. I find this to be helpful as repaired stitches are often a little looser in tension than the stitches around them.

4. Slip the back bar that corresponds with the dropped stitch onto the inserted needle as well. Make sure that you've got the correct back-bar, because if you use the one above or below by mistake the work will pucker.

4. Slip needle under back bar that corresponds with the dropped stitch

5. Using the left needle, draw the dropped stitch over the back bar on the inserted needle.

5. Slip dropped stitch over backbar using left needle

6. Slip the saved stitch back onto the left needle or carry on up the ladder of dropped stitches if there is more than one row of them, repeating steps 2 to 5 until all the dropped stitches have been saved up the row.

Work up the ladder of dropped stitches until you reach the top

B: Purl row fix-up working stocking stitch

Now I'll be totally honest here: if I find a dropped stitch on a purl row, I simply turn the work around and fix it as though it were a knit stitch. Fixing knit stitches is easier than fixing purl stitches, so why make life more difficult than you need to?

But if, for whatever reason, you want to fix it purl-wise, this is how to do it:

1. Stop your dropped stitch from unravelling any further by securing it with a stitch holder or a safety pin.

2. Slip stitches from the right needle to the left needle until you reach the dropped stitch.

 3. Make sure that the back bar that corresponds with the dropped stitch is sitting in front of the dropped stitch (see photo below). As was the case on our knit row fix-up, if you chose the wrong back bar the work will pucker.

4. Use a spare needle that is a size or two smaller than you're working on.  Insert the needle into the dropped stitch from the back to the front as shown below.

5. Insert the left needle into the dropped stitch from front to back, and draw it over the back bar.

6. Pull the back bar through the dropped stitch to replace the lost stitch that had previously been there.

7. Place the saved stitch back on the left needle, or work your way up the ladder of dropped stitches if there are rows of dropped stitches until you've saved them all. Between each step of the ladder you will have to slip the saved stitch off the inserted needle in order to move the corresponding back bar to the front it i.e. to the position shown in the photo below step 4 above.  Just slip the saved stitch off, hold it between your forefinger and thumb and lift the back bar over the top of the stitch so that it sits as shown in the photo.

You may find that the tension along the ladder of saved stitches is a little too loose when you're done. Don't worry too much about this. As you knit on it will automatically go some way towards correcting itself, and if it's still obvious by the time you're done you can wash your knitting and leave it to dry. When it's dry you'll find that the tension has sorted itself out. The process of washing and drying can correct any number of tension anomalies in your work.

All the best for now and happy knitting!

Bonny x

Stitching for stress-relief ...

Gosh it's been a strange old week. Emi has been away on his school trip to Picardy, leaving me with a lot of time on my hands to get on with other things. Mr B had got quite excited about the idea of a child-free spell when we could wine and dine and carry-on like people with no great amount of responsibility to tie them down. But then his surgeon telephoned to tell him that the clinic could take him in for his knee op yesterday - bang in the middle of our hedonistic plans. He ummed and ahed a bit, and wondered whether they could possibly do it on Friday instead (the child is due back tomorrow evening). But common sense caught up with him and he duly went under the knife yesterday afternoon.

And, happily, it looks like the surgery was a great success.

In the meantime I've spent a lot of time hanging around waiting for the next thing to happen: trying to jolly him along as he anxiously waited for his slot in theatre, sitting quietly with him whilst he slept off the after-affects of the anaesthetic, keeping him company when he had to over-night in the clinic and didn't have anyone else to talk to. And, as is my way, I brought along some cross-stitch to help with the stress of worrying and the boredom of waiting. In situations like this, when I can't concentrate on anything too involved, I find that the simple, colour-guided process of cross-stitch is hugely helpful. *Breathe and stitch. Stitch again. Take another breath*. Repeat from * to * for as long as the agony lasts. I can just about cope with hospitals, and waiting for a loved one in surgery downstairs, if I remember to breathe and stitch ...

So after all that angst, this is where I've got to:

All the best for now,

Bonny x