Beads, seeds, berries and buns

I sold some of the (no longer sticky) beads on Saturday!  Hooray.  I didn't, however, sell any of these little beaded chaps:

(hard to photograph to show the humbug shape)

which is a shame, because I liked the idea, but then again I now have a new key-ring! I hit upon the idea of making them because I found a stash of little pieces like this, left over from making books in the summer:

I added a few beads on twisted cords:

and stitched them up, but twisted, to make a humbug shape:

Maybe I should put them in the neglected etsy shop...But the thing that puts me off sorting out things for etsy? Working out how to package and post things for a reasonable sum of money...and fat things cost more to post than thin things, even if they are tiny.  How ridiculous is that?  The postage would cost more than the little humbug key-ring.

In other news, I've also been making (or rather, eating) far too many of these blackberry bakewell tarts:

I don't bother with the fiddle of arranging the berries on top, I just mix them all in.

and then of course I have to ice them (not in the recipe) otherwise I'd be lynched:

The other day I was side-tracked from my otherwise obsessive blackberry picking by thistledown, of all things...

I intend to "do something" with it, something more than "putting it in a little jar" (have you every tried to get thistledown in a jar?).  Same as I intend to "do something" with these bits:

polyester shreds from the fabric I'm preparing for class:

We're going to be playing with leaves and transfer paints, and I think the thistledown is going to feature somewhere in my autumnal layers...I think!

And if that's not beautiful enough

Perhaps a tray of these little beauties will do the trick.

Blackberry muffins.

300g SR flour
150g soft brown sugar
150g blackberries
mix together in a bowl

180ml milk
120ml vegetable oil
2 tsp cream of tartar
1 egg
all in a jug

mix wet with dry

22 fairy cake cases (ran out of muffin cases)

170C fan oven, 22 minutes

Winner of the Mutant Vegetable Championships

 Did some gardening on Sunday, and tidied up the vegetable patch.  Found a couple of courgettes lurking around (despite early fears of a glut, due to mismanagement, neglect, drought then floods, we've only had a handful), lots of green tomatoes, lots of slugs and snails,

and THIS!

 Lawks.

However, the hedgerows have been making up for our own incompetence.  We've picked kilos of blackberries, having discovered the Mother Lode on our favourite walk with the Whippet.  Luckily the boy likes picking his own, so he's happy to guzzle while we pick.  We've also found a wild plum tree, cob nuts, have bags of sloes in the freezer ready for steeping in gin, and have played field mushroom roulette a handful of times...