Making Winter - 10 things

I love winter - it is my favourite season.  I savour the quiet, the peace, the cold and the thoughtfulness that comes with winter.  I am very happy to potter rather than do, which suits the colder months.  I discard my sewing and pick up my knitting instead.  I bake pies rather than make jam.  I wear warm tights and thick boots and read books.

Today in London it feels as if winter has very definitely come to an end.  The sun was up early, and shone all day.  I cleared the back garden - raking, digging, pruning, sweeping, weeding and tying back.  Then I tidied up the front garden - more weeding, more sweeping and more pruning.  I was outside in the garden for over four hours, and ended up with a warm, pink glow in my cheeks, and a mildly achey back.  As I worked I thought back over the winter and it seemed to me to have passed by in a flash. 



Gardening, today



Raking up the winter debris

Hard at work

These are my highlights.

• The arrival of a small, and very precious niece - my little sister is now a mother.  I feel pretty much as Soule Mama did in this post.
• Going to see three Olympic test events - the Handball, the Track Cycling and the Diving.
• Finding out about baked oatmeal.
• Making winter blankets.
• Mixed emotions when I paid a visit back to the village where I grew up.
• Meeting a lovely kitchenful of other bloggers for the first time, and finding out that they were in fact just like old friends.
• The return of G's drumming.
• So much knitting - a yellow hat, a green cowl, junior toast, my favourite shawl and two very slow knits which finally got finished.
• Making, and eating, loads of coleslaw. 
• Drinking cups of tea and coffee out in the garden, wrapped up in my woollens - not every day, but often.

It has been a very good one, but I'm looking forward to more days like today - outside, in the garden, turning my face to the spring sunshine.

Winter blankets

I want to share a really good project for December's Making Winter post.  For the past few days I've been making two sorts of winter blanket - the blankets sit piled up on the arm of the sofa, waiting for someone to curl up under them for some TV watching, or colouring, or knitting, or drumming.  In the summer they will come camping with us.  We all have quilts, but the quilts tend to just live on our beds - these blankets are more portable.

In an ideal world I would live in a place which is home to a choice selection of charity shops which sell old 100% wool blankets for just a few pounds.  The reality is that I live in a big city where the charity shops specialise in nasty poly-cotton duvet cases from 1988.  No vintage or thrifted wool blankets round here sadly.

So I raided my airing cupboard for old baby blankets instead.  I had two cotton aircell blankets bought for C over twelve years ago, and hardly used (I was a dedicated fan of Grobags when my children were babies).  To turn these baby blankets into something suitable for winter warming I simply added bias trim to them.  One in a selection of leftover pastel prints and the other in deep purpley pinks and dark blues. 

It is extraordinary how the trim changes the whole appearance of the blankets.  They are proving very popular.

The other blankets have been made from fleece.  Ikea sells plain fleece throws in a few different colours for just £1.59 each.  These throws are perfect for all kinds of sewing projects.  I've used them several times as both wadding and backing for quilts, I've used them as backing fabric for babies' bibs, and I've made cushions from them.  The simplest thing to do though, is to applique onto them.  For C's and O's Christmas stockings I've made them each a quick and easy blanket, using the Ikea fleeces as a base.

For C, who loves dogs, I cut out the pictures from a piece of dog fabric I had been hoarding, and simply stitched around the dogs onto the fabric with my machine.  For O, whose preferred colour of the moment is purple, I cut out long oval shapes from all my scraps of purple fabric and attached them as flower petals.

If you are lucky enough to have vintage 100% wool blankets in your airing cupboard or your local charity shop, then either of these methods would work very well with those.  Neither type of blanket takes very long to make - the whole point of these is that they can be whipped up in a couple of hours, unlike a quilt which can take weeks, months, or even years to complete. 

You don't want to hang around when people need to get cosy on the sofa as a matter of urgency.

Amish baked oatmeal

I can't remember where I first came across this idea, but it captivated me right away. 

Baked oats and fruit - a sort of solid, fruity, spicy porridge.  Eaten for breakfast, but with echoes of pudding.  All the recipes I found for it are American, and most refer to it as Amish oatmeal. So the recipe has an old fashioned, healthy German-Swiss heritage to it, which really appeals to me.

Oats are mixed with eggs, milk, a little sugar and loads of fruit and then baked in a pie dish the oven.  My final recipe below is an amalgamation of loads of different ones I found online.  I reduced the sugar content to a fraction of the American versions, because I really don't like my food very sweet, and I upped the fruit content to compensate.

The whole family adore this, and what should feed about six people disappears between the four of us in about ten minutes flat.  G, C and I like ours with natural yogurt on top and O likes hers plain.  Yesterday both G and O had third helpings.

Amish baked oatmeal

Dry ingredients:

• 3 cups porridge oats
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 2 tsp cinnamon or mixed spice 
• 1 cup chopped fruit or berries (I used blueberries)

Wet ingredients:

• 1 cup stewed fruit (I used apple)
• 1 cup milk
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 100g butter, melted or vegetable oil

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a big mixing bowl.  Stir all the wet ingredients together in a large jug.  Pour the wet into the dry and mix together until thoroughly combined.  Pour into a large pie dish and bake in the centre of the oven at Gas 4 for 50 minutes to 1 hour.  Check that it is done as you would for a cake: poke the middle with a cocktail stick and make sure that there is no wet mixture left.

This is so easy to make that you could mix it all up while you are half-asleep and then go back to bed with a cup of tea and the new copy of Mollie Makes while it cooks.  For instance.  The smell while it cooks will drive you crazy with desire, and eventually force you out of bed and downstairs so that you can eat great, greedy bowlfuls of it for breakfast, washed down with another cup of tea.

I mean really.  What's not to like about winter when you've got this to get you going in the morning?

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This would be amazing with any combination of fruit.  I've seen many different permutations online:

• stewed rhubarb and chopped apple, with ground ginger in place of the cinnamon
• stewed blueberries and chopped peaches
• stewed apple and mixed frozen berries (no need to defrost them first)
• stewed plums and chopped apples
• stewed apple and chopped pears

You get the picture.

Winter and woollens

I've used Silverpebble's and Thrifty Household's excellent Making Winter project to start something I've been meaning to do for a while: taking time out of my day, every day, to stand or sit outside for ten minutes and drink a cup of tea or coffee.  I think even in the very depths of winter I would get enjoyment from wrapping up warmly, stepping out into the garden and watching what's going on around me as I sip a hot drink and think about what needs to be done with my day.

Today I looked at the lavender bush where I saw Mr Toad back in May.  The lavender bush did pretty well this year but I realised that I still need to cut off the dead flower stalks.

I checked that the hens were happy under their new rain cover.  They get a new one every winter, and I spend each spring and summer looking for perfectly clear shower curtains that I can use.  Gill found this one for me in the Habitat closing down sale.

I marvelled at the amount of cherry leaves that had fallen in just one day since I last cleared them all up.  I love how they look on the green grass, but if I leave them there, we will have no grass next summer...so every week or so I rake them up.

And I drank my cup of tea and rejoiced at my toasty warm shoulders and wrists.  As well as Making Winter, there's something else that has caught my eye this month: Wovember.  This is Kate Davies' and Felicity Ford's campaign and celebration of 100% wool.  I was as appalled as Kate was to discover, when I read her blog last month, that an item of clothing that contains no wool whatsoever can still legally use the word wool or woollen in its description.  Wovember has been set up as a way to highlight this issue, campaign to change it, and at the same time celebrate everything 100% wool.

My shawl is knitted from sock yarn, which is a wool blend of 75% wool and 25% polyamide.  This enables socks and shawls and anything else knitted with it to be subjected to lots of use and regularly chucked in the washing machine.  My armwarmers are 100% wool, from merino sheep, and I just love them to bits.  They are incredibly warm, and perfect for pulling over my hands as I clutch my early morning cup of tea.