I Dream of Iced Tea

Now that it's starting to be consistently warm I'm finding myself pining for cool, refreshing drinks - and every time I walk past the stone fruit at the supermarket the smell makes my mouth water. I'm not a huge fan of their taste but the scent is irresistible. So while the garden responds to the shift in the weather by bolting... I'm making iced tea.

These strange little blossoms are cuter than the iced tea, though.

It turns out that it's really easy to make! And quite a lot of fun, since you can customise what fruits you want in there, how strong the tea is, and the amount of sugar. That last part I think is especially important, as I know that commercial versions tend to be pretty heavy on the sugar, and while I'm not especially vigilant about my diet I do want to cut down on those things.

I followed directions from The Scrumptious Pumpkin, although with fresh mango (MISTAKE - I'm terrible at working with those and ended up with a bunch of mango mush!). I'll leave the specifics behind the link, because I want to give credit where it's due, but the process is simple - boil a bunch of tea, chop up your chosen fruits, and combine. I don't know what sort of shelf life the finished product has, but I had mine for around a week. I didn't measure out my sugar (oops) but just sprinkled some in, tasting until it seemed about right. It didn't take too much, especially since there is sugar on (and in!) the fruit, which for me was mango and nectarine.

Once the tea has cooled down and had some time for the fruit flavours to soak in - it was definitely better after a couple days - it was really delicious, and I'm looking forward to making it again throughout the summer.

Summer Fruit Iced Tea: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Simple and delicious, this refreshing drink is easily customised to your favourite fruits and desired sweetness. A summer favourite for sure!

In the garden it's clearly approaching berry season, with the blueberries getting their colour, strawberries ripening as fast as the blackbird can eat them (for real I need some netting or something - he's beaten me to every one so far) and raspberries appearing in the secret spots beneath the leaves (where the blackbird can't see them, I guess!). The plums are also beginning to ripen, and it looks like it's going to be a massive crop again this year.

The sudden shift in weather has the onions sending out flowers, and I'm still a little uncertain about when they should be harvested. The general info seems to be "once the leaves start to flop over" which is great, but - until you've got experience, it's hard to say when that point is reached! I've been told that cutting the flowers off will help prolong their season a little, and that either way they'll still be fine (I guess onions are more forgiving on this than some other plants?) but I have quite a lot there so I'm going to need them to be storable.

I'm also thrilled every day by the crop of sweet peas that have filled the bed outside my kitchen. They're one of my all-time favourite flowers and their scent is so lovely that all I want to do is shove my face in them every time I go outside. Although I'm sure I bought mixed packets, so far all but literally two of the flowers have been a dark red colour (the other two were light purple), so I'm not sure if there's more to come or if that's just what I'm getting this year. Weird!

And, inside the house, NaNoWriMo is over. The book is finished and despite all of the plot holes, contradictions and outright chapters that I skipped over - it's pretty great (not literally, but in the "I made this and I love it" sense). What that means even more is that it's time to get back into the knitting, and I decided that it's time for another attempt at the My Favourite Things scarf. What is this scarf, you might ask?

Based on the pattern (and by pattern I mean inspiration, as I'm providing my own charts, but you know what I mean) from Ravelry user Jill McGee, the scarf is a colourwork abomination of rainbow proportions. The original, made in January of 2014, ended up more than six feet long and about seven inches wide - ie, unwearable. It features charts representing a bunch of things that were (and mostly still are) important to me, mostly different tv shows and video games that I've loved over the years.

It had a lot of flaws (size not least among them) but I'm still fond of it, and it hangs in the study where I can at least look at it often, even if it's essentially functionally useless. For a long time I've wanted to remake it with finer yarn, and the time came when I caved and ordered a dozen skeins of Knit Picks' Palette.

It turns out that a dozen is not enough, since the final charts for MFT Scarf 2.0 just is lacking in something, and I think it's those pops of vibrant colour that gave the cheap acrylic of the giant original its real charm. I am in the process of negotiating with my budget about buying three or four more colours - probably bright pink, blue, purple and reds to pair with the more subdued tones of the original order. For now the scarf is half a dozen rows in and the joy of starting a new project hasn't worn off, though I'll have to set it aside while I wait for my decision on adding colours.

In the meantime, my new chart (which you can see on the project's Ravelry page, here) has, in light of its new, smaller row gauge, been expanded to around 800 rows, and now features space invaders, tetrominoes, turrets, a d20, logos from Mass Effect and the Elder Scrolls series, dragons, elephants, the spaceship Serenity and more (including a ball of yarn and some knitting needles because of course!). I'm really looking forward to working on this one and, hopefully by the time the cold weather comes back, being able to actually wear it!

Now it's time for me to go and make my first batch of Christmas gingerbread (which is the same as my normal gingerbread but in the shape of a snowflake) so I can bribe people into helping me put the decorations up. It's December, it's Christmas decoration time!