Birth Band Happy Dance

Here's a photo of the newly-pressed Birth Band, which I finished on Friday:


Birth Band by The Drawn Thread, stitched in Needlepoint Inc Silks on Edinburgh linen

I have to say I really enjoyed this - even though it's the second time I've stitched it this year!! Amanda said how much she liked it when I stitched it for Monty, so it was an obvious choice when Hugh was born!! I hope they like it as much in the flesh!

Dani asked about our pumpkins - we did all use the same seeds - we bought a pack and split it 3-ways (and also scanned and printed off all of the growing info on the packet) - so it was a fair contest. Except we were rather late planting everything this year, as we didn't build the veggie patches until Easter... plus quite a few seedlings were eaten by magpies and slugs this year... I can't quite remember what happened to the pumpkins, but we were pretty certain we wouldn't win! We fed it with bottled organic plant food and home-made compost. And we took all the smaller pumpkins off the one plant, so it focused all it's growth energy into our largest pumpkin. I'll have a good web search for feeding techniques if we repeat the competition!!! Diane and Nial have won twice now!

Last night we tried out this recipe for pumpkin tart - after a search on the BBC food web page we decided this one sounded lovely, and wasn't too tricky. We served it with ice cream, not the ginger cream in the recipe, and it was delicious... we gave half the tart to our neighbours, who hadn't had a pumpkin tart/pie before - I've not seen them yet to see if they enjoyed it.

Yesterday and today I did a little bit of Fantasy Triptych, but the frame was a little wide with us both sat on the sofa, so I switched back to Dracolair's Gaelic Banner, which I am really enjoying.

I hope everyone else is having a lovely weekend!