November's Making Winter: the beginning

So, it's here, or at least it's just up the road, lurking round the corner.

I have done rather well with embracing it so far. There have been several of those golden-tinged days with the whiff of woodsmoke and leaf litter - days when the dreich weeks of January seem afar off and I have an urge to gather twigs for the fire whilst whistling a bit of Vaughan Williams and making a necklace out of crabapples. Days that gave me an urge to come home and crochet some tiny acorns with a tiny hook (1.5mm).

I'm not fooled though. It is a brief coppery season. The shiny conker brown before the mouldy grey. The freshly ploughed field before the slushy puddle.

In recent weeks our girls have just had two grim coughs back to back, with accompanying feverish, exhausting nights (for them and us). The airbed for small poorly folk is permanently occupied in our room just now (we may buy shares in Calpol). And so it begins...

Despite the lyrical blue skies and bright lights of the autumn leaves the clocks going back last week burgled sunlight from the late afternoons. Dusk looms early and makes my heart droop like a woolly swimming costume after a dip in the North Sea.

So...

...tonight I'm starting the #making_winter hashtag on Instagram. If you went for a walk and a pheasant called across the fields and you found some lovely rosehips and it lifted your spirits

or you made some biscuits that helped you forget about the dishwater-isn skies outside,

or you mastered that quantum physics-like lace shawl,

...then you can post a picture, add the hashtag and enjoy the wintry glow. Others who may feel down in the knees in the coming months are bound to find it cheering. 

I've set up a bloghop linky below, which will remain here until the 1st December.....

If you've written about an emergency anti-drizzle cake (to cheer a day with incessant rain),

some therapeutic mittens,

the twigs you bent into a wreath to cheer the afternoon when you put your flip flops away,

or the blanket you're making that has helped you through the 'flu...

then you can share your post below, grab the code to pop the entire bloghop on your blog if you fancy.

My plan is for us to create a sort of electronic wintry crafting bee. A collection of heartening blogposts, a cosy instagram feed and a Twitter hashtag lined with quilts, yarn, hedgerow liqueurs, crochet cake and lovely twigs. A place of solace on the dreariest days. 

At the end of each month from now until March I'll be picking a favourite Instagram image or blogpost. I'm concocting four very lovely parcels of joy filled with things made by me, Mirta of Modern Botanics (see her work in my last blogpost) seeds for Spring from Benjamin at Higgledy Garden and OH all manner of treasure to cheer a winter's day.

We shall advance into winter armed with gargantuan cakes and crocheted guinea pigs and groaning nature tables and warming stews and frost-encrusted hedgerows. 

We shall not be defeated, and if all else fails there is always chocolate and youtube videos of teacup piglets. 

Onward....