Mischief and Gunpowder Plot with a bit of Toffee and Parkin

When I was young, Hallowe'en hardly registered with us. We might have indulged in bobbing for apples if anyone had been out scrumping for wild crab apples, but taught from an early age that apples were food and on no account to be wasted, this was not considered a done thing. What we had instead was November 4th - Mischief Night or Plot Night - this was the night in 1603 when Guido (Guy) Fawkes and his co-conspirators smuggled gunpowder into the Houses of Parliament in order to blow up the King, James I. The night before Bonfire Night, the most mishief we got up to was setting off crackers or rip-raps in the street, or knocking on doors and running away into the foggy night. There were four treats greatly looked forward to at this time. The simplest was to beg or borrow a good sized spud to bury under the bonfire, to be retrieved when the bonfire was burning low, and eaten charred and piping hot in the hand. Kindly aunties (neighbours) would dish out bowls of mushy peas: dried peas soaked overnight with bicarbonate of soda tablets to soften them, and then boiled for as long as it took them to dissolve into a green mess to which a dash of salt and vinegar would be added. Next on the scale of delights was Plot Toffee - 1 pound of sugar, 4 ounces each of Black Treacle and Margarine, a good spoon of water, a pinch of salt - all boiled until a drop of the mixture went hard when dribbled in a saucer of cold water. If Golden Syrup instead of Black Treacle was used, then a dash of vinegar was called for to sour it up. But the best treat of all was our own Yorkshire Parkin : 8 ounces of Porridge Oats; 4 ounces each of flour, margarine (or butter), brown sugar, Black Treacle; 2 teaspoons of ground ginger, 1 teaspoon mixed spice and 1 teaspoon bicarb of soda. Just mix together all the dry ingredients, melt margarine and treacle and mix them into the dry ingredients with a knife, roll out on a tray to a thickness of about a quarter of an inch, mark into squares and bake at 170 C for 20 mins. Take the tray out and pass it around the bonfire for people to break off a bit.

Beaded Mr & Mrs from the Perpetually Engaging Diary

I was asked to show some of the gifts I receive - this is not always possible as, quite understandably, the senders don't necessarily want to have their work published for all to see. But here you can see some very special gifts sent to my husband and me for our birthdays - our birthdays are very close together, so we merited a matching pair! The designs come from the charts in the Perpetually Engaging Diary, and in this instance have been specially interpreted in beads. We are thrilled to have them - and now have them framed, so we can look at them every day - and every day they make me smile! (Yes, that is exactly how my hair looks in the mornings...)

Perhaps you can see the source for the beaded Mr & Mrs on the middle of the bottom row of these excerpts from the diary.

Who Are You Calling a Sardine Head!

As a teenager I spent many happy holiday hours cycling along the smugglers' and custom-men's paths which thread and sometimes hurtle along the rocky north coast of Brittany. Sometimes I was lucky to chance upon a pardon or a kermesse processing down by a small fishing quay, where a mass would be said and fishing boats blessed. Once I attended a spectacular wedding at Sainte-Anne-la-Palud where the guests processed over the sand dunes to the chapel. Even then the tradition of wearing the elaborately starched lace caps was beginning to fade. 'Of course they are beautiful,' I would be told, 'but very impractical!' And even back in the day, the very elaborate headdresses were kept safe for special church occasions, and simpler, smaller, though still decoratively needleworked caps worn for the business of the day, which was mostly to do with with a different sort of processing - that of fish and shellfish.
So it was that the working cap and the girl wearing it came to be called Penn Sardin - Penn being the Celtic word for head which we sometimes notice linked to headlands in the west of Britain - and Sardin being...well...sardine. Does anyone know if the traditional costumes of North Sea fisher folk has ever been the subject of a comparative study? I would be interested to hear.

Virginia's Progress with Sarah Harris

Virginia recently posted images of her Sarah Harris work in progress - and very well she is doing too! It is interesting to hear of how you allocate your time when stitching - do you stitch on and on with one project, rotate projects etc? Virginia's strategy has been to set herself easily achievable goals and this approach is paying dividends now by the look of what she has accomplished so far.

Virgina is a member of the Sarah Harris SAL and you are always more than welcome to pop in and see work in progress. Again we have set up a tabbed page just for SALs, just look at the tabs under the main Needleprint banner and click on SALs to see for yourself how this works. Virginia says she has really enjoyed seeing everyone's Sarah Harris progress.  "They are all so lovely." I couldn't agree more, Virginia!