Harvest day 2016

Let me start by saying I'm flabbergasted by this...

Considering I spent much of June worrying about my bees and even considering feeding them - because how could they possibly be finding enough to eat when it rains for 28 of 30 days? Never mind find a surplus for me to steal!

They really made up for it in July.  

I have eight - yes Eight -that's 8 supers to extract!!

No time for lollygagging - need to get everything clean and ready for a marathon of stickiness...

There's buckets and a settling tank to wash and dry...

 




The kitchen gets covered by old shower curtains and the extractor plugged in...

Then its just a case of uncapping each frame in turn...

 

 




and with the help of my glamorous assistant...

I can get a small stack of frames waiting for their turn in the extractor...

I LOVE  the actual extraction.  Watching the honey start to sparkle on the inside of the tank as it gets flung out of each cell.  The air feels almost heavy with the smell of honey.  Surely this is the BEST kind of candyfloss?

Gently does it at first...

 

Then with a bit of speed it floods out...

Meanwhile,  at the bottom of the extractor... nothing is happening - this year's honey is super thick!!!

...and then gradually,.....ever ....so....slowly....it starts to flow through the filters...

 

 

Glamorous assistant proves his worth again by decanting the bucket into the settling tank... 

Its amazing how many little flakes of beeswax come off the frames.... 

 Note to self:  NEVER forget Honey flows silently...the filter can only deal with so much at a time...

After a very long evening and a morning to finish off I have a great harvest.  Interestingly 2 very different types coming off the hives this year. A very golden runny honey and a really dark (looks like treacle) dark honey.

Winter breakfasts are going to be tasty!!!

The Hive at Kew Gardens

"Lets take a day off work and go and go and do something completely different...." 'im indoors said

"How does looking at 170,000 pieces humming, glowing aluminium grab you?" I asked...

" Er ...okay...." said the rest of the family....

So off we went to see The Hive at Kew.  There is no missing it...

It is surrounded by a bee friendly meadow so it rises up between the gaps in the trees and peeks at you from all different directions...

 

 

Underneath it you can connect to the vibrations through the wonder of a wooden coffee stirrer, well its one way to give a human a proboscis!

 

and inside the main structure you can feel the vibrations through your feet ( just like a real bee!) as it hums all around you...

It really does pulse and hum with the activity of the hive it is connected to...

At first I was a bit blue that it wasn't the sunniest day but somehow the dramatic sky made it even more interesting...

It was a terrific day out and great experience for a very happy beekeeper...

I'm just wondering if I can get back there again and see it at sundown...when the lights would really be glowing!!

Ripple cupcakes

Its not often that I'm drawn to pastel colourways..... but I saw this cupcake coloured blanket and this blanket edging in the same week.. and a little acorn of an idea started to germinate in my head...just as an invite arrived to a party for a friend who was shortly about to reach a special age...

Better start by getting the wool... Woop! lets hear it for internet shopping!

A really ordinary looking plastic bag contains...

 

15 balls of divine squishy-ness

They look even better out of the bag...



Now not being one to do things EXACTLY like the original pattern I decided to follow the colours but not the design....to me this cupcake design was just screaming to be made into a ripple blanket. So a simple row of chains started to ripple up and down.  There are terrific instructions here and I followed Lucy's advice to the letter...

It looks even better when the second colour gets added....

in no time at all.....well a couple of 6 nations rugby matches actually the first 7 rows were done...

...and then the first 15, thats one row of each colour right there...

I do seriously think this may be the nicest, quickest pattern in the crochet world to hook together, a third done in a matter of weeks...

That's what happens when your project is super portable and you can spend an afternoon on the garden swing seat....

Soon it was full size and crying out for that edging...

It is all in Dutch - but thanks to good photography on the part of whoever was videoing the crocheter its quite easy to follow...
A row of purple foundation trebles.... then the cake is Tr2,Tr,Tr2 skip 1,  the pink icing edging is single crochet into the the back loop only,  and the white icing is Tr5 tog...

 

Now try as I might I couldn't get the beads for the cherry on top onto the yarn to crochet in as I went along - so they had to be sewn on afterwards....

 

and a final edge of trebles...

I think they edge it perfectly...

nearly too big to get it all in the shot.... 

one final finishing touch...

Just in time for a special birthday for a special friend.  (phew!)