With one lousy pair of socks.

I'm just about to head out of the door for a week of friends and culture in London, followed by a weekend of children and more friendliness in Kent. Probably followed by a further week of sleeping while I recover from the excitement.

I've been lying low, gathering my energies and getting a new haircut, ( a fringe! a fringe! ) Not much to report then except some very tasty eating and my puny contribution to Soctoberfest. I do have another pair on the go and have packed some sock possibilities to knit along with the culture. I'm planning to sit in the BFI cafe knitting and people watching. I can't wait.

The peanut that tasted like Halloween.

I ate a peanut this week and was immediately reminded of the taste of the nuts that we would eat from their shells on Halloween evening as we wandered around the neighbourhood. Scottish kids of my generation didn't know anything about the dangerous sounding Trick or Treat activities of children across the pond. We went guising instead and tried the patience of those we visited with half remembered rhymes and bad Knock Knock jokes.

I have a terrible memory for dates, names, places but give me a taste or a smell and I'm transported to another time. And if that wasn't Proustian enough, on Saturday I made madeleines.

Long shadows.

It's getting dark at around 6.30pm and that's before the clocks go back. Time to settle in with the instructions for my new sewing machine - it's a Janome something or other. Sewing seems a lot more complicated than knitting even before I get down to thinking about patterns and fabrics. Even the Beginners guide I took out of the library today jumps stright into seams and interfacing and all manner of fiddly things. I think I may have to sit down with the machine and just practice going in a straight line for a while. That's a lot harder than you might think.

One good thing about the new machine is that it gives me a great excuse to go to the charity shops hunting for cotton and prints. I bought the most amazing dress yesterday that can only be described as a muumuu. I have plans to turn it into a skirt and use the rest for patchwork. I would take a photo but, as I said, it is already growing dark.

Sewing is dangerous.

I've been trying to coax my grandmother's old sewing machine out of retirement but after days of fiddling around I have decided that it is beyond me. Some essential parts are broken and if I knew more about sewing machines I might be able to work around them but as a novice, I fear it may be time to give up and buy a new one.

Not that I haven't had fun trying. I made a bag out of a lovely old apron that I bought from a charity shop and it is now the holding bay for socks awaiting handwashing. And this lovely pin cushion rectangle that should have been a square had I followed the directions properly. I've been trying to improve on my hand sewing too with the result that I now have about four squares of crazy patchwork that I don't know what to do with. Maybe when my new sewing machine arrives I'll have learned enough to make them into some semblance of a quilt.

Its dangerous stuff this sewing. I've kitted myself out with a special quilters' ruler, a cutting mat and a rotary cutter. I was warned to be very careful of the rotary cutter on account of the deadly accuracy of the blade. No-one warned me to be careful of the packaging and I still managed to cut myself - on the box.

This is what I sound like!

My mother, the unflagging competition enterer has won me a tiny little video/dvd camera. I had no trouble finding a subject to focus on.

A last hurrah.

Summer is fading wrote Phillip Larkin in September 1959. Its fading here too fifty years on. The swallows have made their arrangements and left after a week of checking their plumage on the telephone line outside my window. At the front door this morning the air smells colder than yesterday.

The garden is hanging on to the colours of summer, the french beans and mange tout are refusing to give up hope, still producing enough to turn into soup. Me? I've started wearing cardigans and spinning thicker yarns.

The Grantchester Walnuts.

One of my fellow Pilgrims has a tree in her garden. It's a walnut tree and it sheds many nuts. Now walnut hulls - the fleshy green outside part which decomposes gently into black mush if you leave it alone long enough, makes the most beautiful natural dye. You can imagine my glee when I came home one night last week after a long and tiring day, to find a box at the top of my stairs. I shook the box, the box rattled with a satifying walnut-like rattle. Sheer bliss.

I have commenced my dye experiments with this bounty and so far have discovered that walnuts dye skin a light brown, (bad idea) latex gloves go bright bright yellow, ( much safer ) and alum mordanted white fleece turns a glorious multi-layered dark brown, like a glamorous brunette.

Thank you Elspeth - I'll post photos of the yarn when the sun cooperates.