Scrumping

Although, technically speaking, it's not actually scrumping when the apples are growing by the road side. We've taken to carrying receptacles for fruit picking on our walks at the moment as you never know what you'll find. This time it was a tree laden with red and green apples, ripe and edible (if a little thick skinned and sharp). The trunk of the tree was inaccessible due to nettles and close growing branches so we could only pick those we could reach on the outside but we still got a fair haul (about 2 kg).



We managed to get a few of the higher growing ones with the aid of a big stick which the boyfriend had picked up with the idea of pulling down some of the branches. He soon discovered, however, that my strategy of one of us using it to knock apples off the branches whilst the other stood well back and watched where they fell was much more effective!

Once home we looked through the new issue of Good Food which had arrived on Saturday morning and found a host of apple recipes including one for apple streusel (for which we happened to have all the ingredients).



It definitely getting more autumnal (although we've had great weather this Bank Holiday weekend). Even before we found the apples I'd already seen my first ripe conker and the corn in the field across the river has been harvested this weekend. I've therefore started swatching for my first autumn sweater to be knit from the Wensleydale Longwool which I picked up at I Knit London on our yarn crawl earlier this month.

I'm planning a top-down raglan with round neck, striped and knit in the round with tubular cast-off edgings. I'm quite excited as this will be the first adult size sweater that I've designed for myself. I'm also nervous but so long as I take all the correct measurements it should work out. It's taken a little time to pick the needle size (the ball band doesn't help you out with gauge alas) but I'm getting a nice looking fabric with 3mm needles and it should look even better once blocked.