I think I may have mentioned (more than once!) that autumn may well be my favourite time of year. I love the changing colours, ordering a whole winter’s supply of logs for the woodburner and foraging for mushrooms and berries. This seems to be a pleasure little Florence has inherited – I posted last week about her love of collecting conkers from our garden, without realising that not everybody would know what these are …..
Conkers are in fact the fruit of the horse chestnut tree – round shiny nuts enclosed in green spiky cases. Here in England schoolchildren hold – or certainly used to in my own childhood – conker fights. The idea is that you wait for your conker to harden – if they’re left in a warm place they become hard and slightly wizened – then get a parent to make a hole to thread string right the way through. You then challenge friends to conker fights, each taking turns to smash the other’s conker with their own until one shatters and a winner is declared!
Autumn also seems to find me in a particularly creative frame of mind, inspiring the above patterns all taken from autumn issues of the Bustle & Sew Magazine. A conker also features in the middle design, “Autumn Treasures” which also includes some of my other seasonal favourite – toadstools, richly coloured leaves and autumn fruits. If you’d like a free copy of the Autumn Treasures pattern, then please do CLICK HERE to visit an earlier blog post where you’ll discover how to download your own copy. (If you’re a newsletter reader you can find the pattern in your online library)
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