Easter weekend

It’s Easter weekend in the Christian calendar and our lovely (and sadly, late) Rector here in Winwick used to tell me that it was the busiest and most joyful time of the year for her.  Happy Easter to you if it’s a busy and joyful time for you in your religious activities, and happy Saturday to you if it’s not!

I can remember when everything seemed to shut down on Good Friday and Easter Monday but that doesn’t seem to be the case nowadays (I had to hurtle outside yesterday when the bin men arrived to empty the garden waste bins and they were all over the garden and not where they were supposed to be for collection); I think for a good many people it’s just a four-day holiday weekend with added chocolate, and I’ve got to be honest and tell you that I spent a lot of yesterday catching up on stuff instead of embracing a restful weekend.  There are still two days to go, though, and I intend to be a lot more restful for those!

As is tradition on Good Friday, however, we did eat hot cross buns and for the first time ever, after promising myself for years that I was going to make them, I did actually make my own!

The crosses are a bit dodgy (I didn’t have a piping bag) but the buns taste really good and were much easier to make than I expected.  I used this recipe from the mill where I buy my bread flour (I am still baking our bread using this recipe) and I was delighted with the results!  They are slightly different to bought ones in texture (bought ones are a bit squishier than mine) which might be down to baking time or ingredients as I know there are often ingredients in bought items to make them last longer, but they still taste really good and have been a toasted treat this weekend.  I think they would be really good as toasted teacakes without the cross at other times of the year so I’m definitely going to make them again.

This was another baking success this week … jam buns!

I can remember my Mum making jam buns when I was little – it’s basically a scone with jam in the middle – and it occurred to me to look for a recipe as I can’t find the one my Mum used..  I found this one on the BBC Good Food website which looked like it might be the same as the one my Mum’s so I thought I’d give it a go.  Some of the comments about this recipe are that the buns turned out a bit dry (which is why I thought they sounded familiar 🤣) so I put an egg in as well and they turned out like this.  More like scones, perhaps, than the jam buns I remember but they were not dry and straight out of the oven, they were very moreish!  I will definitely be making these again!

The weather has been a bit changeable this week which is a shame as most of the schools are off on Easter holidays so depending on where you live, you’ve had one sunny week and one wetter one, or one wetter week and another one to come after this weekend.  Not so small daughter is also off uni on her Easter holidays but she was only home last weekend and is coming back later today as she’s got herself a job and has been picking up extra shifts while she has no lectures.  She has really put the effort into saving up for her trip to climb Mount Kilimanjaro later this year and is making good progress towards her total.

As you can see from these photos, we’ve had some moody skies this week!  I do like this first one where you can see the remaining cooling towers of the decommissioned power station and the bright yellow oilseed rape flowers in the foreground.  I love the yellow against the grey!

You can’t miss those yellow flowers, can you?  It smells amazing in that field at the moment as well!  The dog really enjoys walking through there as the flowers grow high on either side and you can only follow the footpath so there are lots of smells.  I should really take a photo to show you before the plants get cut down – they’re as tall as me!

On the one sunny day we had this week, I finally got round to soaking and blocking my Kate Davies shawl, The Goff Place Mystery (Ravelry link).  This was the mystery knit-along that I took part in around this time last year, and it took me most of the year to get it finished!  It’s a very big shawl, now lovely and soft and even bigger than it was after it’s been hung from the washing line.  I saw this trick in the Winwick Mum Knit n Natter Facebook group and it’s a good one if you have a project bigger than the towels or blocking mats you have.  There weren’t any peg marks along the top because I used so many of them, and the pegs at the bottom helped to pull the shawl down and into shape without overstretching it.  The yarn is Yarnsmiths Merino Sock yarn and I’m really glad that I made the shawl with this as it wasn’t as expensive as it would have been in the Kate Davies yarn that I could have bought – I’m not entirely sure when I will wear this, so I won’t feel guilty about it not having too many outings if I haven’t paid a fortune for the yarn!

In other news, we said goodbye to big daughter’s ducks this week.  We originally had three of them and one of them died unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago, so we made the hard decision to re-home the other two rather than risk leaving one on her own.  We were lucky enough to find some people locally through a Facebook group who already had a large flock of ducks (I did look up the collective noun for a group of ducks and could have used “plump”, “paddling”, “raft” and “skein” amongst others 🙂 ), plenty of space for them to move about in and best of all, a big pond.

We arranged to take the ducks over to them and they were confident that putting them straight in with their other ducks was the right thing to do.

And it seemed like it was!

One of our ducks headed straight for the water (the drake headed straight for her which was a nerve-wracking moment) and the other paused only long enough to try to assert herself as the new head of the flock (it didn’t work) before going for a swim herself.  We spent a long time watching them and chatting to their new owners who were very concerned that we should feel happy with leaving our ducks with them, but finally it was time to say good bye and drive home.  We’ve spoken to the new owners since and they’ve assured us that the leadership challenge has stopped and our ducks have settled in well.  It’s a little bit strange not to go outside the front door and hear them quacking any more, but we know that they will be much better off in a bigger group now so that outweighs the strange feelings.

Right, time to change the subject and talk about socks!

There are two weeks to go until the Winwick Mum Sockalong 10th birthday!  If you’re new to the blog and have no idea what the Winwick Mum Sockalong is and why I’m making such a fuss, then I’ll tell you!

Back in 2015, after being told by too many people that socks were too hard for anybody to knit, I decided to write a series of tutorials to show them that sock knitting is really not as hard as you think. I was delighted to welcome more people than I expected to the blog to read my tutorials – but I’ll be honest, if you’d told me at the time that I’d be celebrating 10 years of helping people to knit socks, along with having written three books, designed over 70 sock patterns and would be working with my favourite yarn company, West Yorkshire Spinners, to create sock yarns and designs, I would not have believed you!

I am thrilled that in just two weeks’ time, we’ll have reached this incredible milestone – and I couldn’t have done it without you! The Winwick Mum Sockalong community is amazing and makes me smile every day as I see new pairs of socks starting and being finished. There’s nothing I like better than that moment when someone realises that sock knitting really isn’t difficult – and that’s why I want you to celebrate with me!

This year, there will be more giveaways, a new pattern to come later in the month – and I’m encouraging everyone to start a new pair of socks on the Sockalong birthday, whether you’re brand new to socks or an old hand.

Brand new to socks? This is your call to be bold and cast on! I know there are lots of people here who have been thinking about it but haven’t plucked up the nerve to start … this is your chance! You’ve got just under two weeks to have a look at the getting started posts in the Winwick Mum Sockalong tutorials which will give you all the info you need to choose yarn and needles, and to get to grips with the Sock Stitch Calculation which is what will give you the perfect fit for your feet.  If you’re a Facebook user, you might want to join the Winwick Mum Sockalong Facebook group for real-time help (I’m usually around in the group but there are lots of people from every time zone always there so you never have to feel stuck) – don’t forget to answer the questions to join the group, though, as it’s how I keep spammers out!

Perhaps you’re already a sock knitting old hand? Join in anyway! It’ll be brilliant to know that so many people are knitting socks at the same time … this is how we help to make the world a better place, as once you can knit socks, you can do anything! 🙂  Or would you rather wait for the new pattern?  That’ll be out later in May … more on that later!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, I’ll see you again soon! xx