Topic
Autumn, Halloween and the makes that belong to a particular time of year.
The stringy handful you scoop out and bin is sweet, gelatinous and full of flavour. It makes a better stock than the flesh does — and the seeds in it only crisp properly if you boil them first.
4 min read
Fresh pumpkin puree holds far more water than tinned. Drain it, cut the liquid elsewhere in the recipe, and you get a loaf that is moist rather than wet in the middle.
3 min read
Fresh pumpkin is wetter and milder than the tinned kind, which changes every recipe it goes into. Roast it first, drain it properly, and the rest follows.
4 min read
Stretched wadding, hot glue strings, a spinning drill and a hairspray-and-cotton trick. Which one to use depends on whether the web needs to hang, stick or survive rain.
3 min read Beginner
A tree does not lose its leaves — it drops them, deliberately, by building a layer of cells that cuts each leaf off at the stem. Day length starts it, and weather decides how it looks.
4 min read
Spider silk is a protein, not a venom. What is in an old cobweb that can affect you is everything else it has caught — and for a small number of people, that matters.
3 min read
They come from the same animal. One is in use, the other has been abandoned and has collected dust. That is the whole distinction — plus one older meaning of the word almost nobody uses now.
3 min read
Two complete patterns from one eleven-stitch leaf repeat — a straight scarf you can start tonight, and a top-down triangular shawl with a leaf border.
4 min read Intermediate
One eleven-stitch repeat, one right-side row to remember, and every wrong-side row purled. It makes columns of leaves — or, with four plain rows between, leaves scattered across the fabric.
3 min read Beginner
A knitted leaf is a triangle worked twice — increase to the widest point, decrease back to a tip. Twenty-one rows, three stitches to start, and it works in any yarn you have.
4 min read Beginner
