Hattie, Hetty and Bluebell

March 10, 2015April 30, 2026 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)56 Comments

Thanks so much for all of the kind comments about the blanket and all the great paint suggestions. I’m looking forward to changing the bedroom colour but I suspect it will take us while to get around to painting – the thought of having nice new grey walls is lovely but the reality of getting them is less lovely. In the meantime I have something else that is lovely and grey in my life. Meet Hattie, Hetty and Bluebell…

Come on girls, turn around and say hello. They are more interested in pecking the fence than having their photo taken, in fact they are more interested in pecking than doing anything else.

I collected them on Monday afternoon and they are slowly getting used to their new home. They’ve been very twitchy and nervous, jumping at every new sound – the lawnmower a few gardens away caused lots of consternation and when a plane went quite low overhead on it’s way to Stanstead airport they went completely to pieces – watching them reminds me of the story of Chicken Licken who thought the sky was falling.

They became a little calmer this afternoon. Earlier I spent a couple of hours outside with them, weeding the veg patch and all the while making warbling happy chicken sounds and cooing at them to get them used to me (the neighbours will now think I’m completely batty). They still need assisting in and out of the hen house, as the ladder clearly terrifies them right now but having had chickens before I know that they’ll be doing it on their own in a few days. It won’t take long before they’ll have settled enough for their individual personalities to emerge – they are already starting to size each other up and work out the pecking order.

They are all hybrid hens bred from Marans crossed with other breeds – Hattie is a Speckled Ranger

Hetty is a Speckled Humbug

and Bluebell is a Bluebell

They came from Handpecked which is a lovely family-run local business with a good range of hens and supplies.

It’s so nice to have chickens in the garden again. They are such fun to watch and having freshly laid poached eggs for lunch is delicious, though it will be a month or so before they begin laying so I’ll have to be patient. In the meantime I am enjoying being a chicken keeper again 🙂

autumn days

October 12, 2014April 30, 2026 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)73 Comments

The last few weeks have been much busier than anticipated, mostly due to the complications of family life. In the meantime Autumn has arrived here, bringing wet and windy weather, falling leaves and cooler temperatures which happily has meant I’ve not been told off for lighting the fire (H must run hotter than me as I’m always chilly and like nothing better than snuggling up by the fire on a windy autumn day, whereas he’s stripped off to a T-shirt and goes round opening windows). The biggest news is that I am now mum to two teenagers, with Toby turning 13 yesterday and Amy 15 last week! Doesn’t life whizz by at an alarming rate?

The other stuff that has kept us busy is neither newsworthy nor of any interest to anyone else, so I’ll not bore you with details but I am going to bore you with pictures of my homegrown red kuri squash, which I am rather proud of. I grew them as an experiment, fully expecting to have either no fruit at all or at best some the size of golfballs but in fact I managed to grow 3 whoppers – which leads me to the conclusion that they must be very easy to grow.

I’ve roasted them and made my usual spiced squash soup, which has such a lovely, warming autumny taste.

The colour of the soup has been featuring heavily in my autumny knitting too. In fact I’ve been just a bit obsessed with gorgeous mustardy-coloured yarn recently (as my friends who recently came yarn shopping with me might of heard me say once or twice).

Here, I’m using 2 skeins of MadelineTosh’s new yarn home to make a really thick and cosy cowl. Pattern: Gaptastic Cowl, Yarn: MadelineTosh Home in ‘candlewick’, needles: 8mm

I have made one change to the pattern – using double moss stitch instead of the single.

and I might have a few other little mustardy projects on the go too…

Well, it’s nice to be back here again and I’m looking forward to catching up with what everyone else has been blogging about recently – I feel horribly out of touch yet again. I plan to be back here later in the week with that giveaway that I promised weeks ago. And my work on the next patterns is going well – I’ll give you a glimpse of what is coming up before the end of the month.

Thanks as always for stopping by, J x

PS: here’s the birthday boy enjoying his helium balloon and laughing at his own reflection!

crafts & knitting · garden stuff · general stuff · summer

summery snippets

August 5, 2014April 30, 2026 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)37 Comments

Some moments from the first two weeks of our school break…

Amy’s summer hair, dip-dyed blue (which will hopefully wash out before she goes back to school or it will be time to get the scissors out!)
Days of absolutely torrential rain fall (with some local flooding) and others full of sun and red skies at dusk, all of which make for a lovely lush garden.
we’re having a good harvest of peas, lettuce and broccoli but the french beans have been rubbish thanks to the slugs back in spring. I’m rather excited about my kuri squash plant which is growing like stink and the squash themselves are like little balloons which get bigger each time I look at them. I’m looking forward to making squash soup if we get enough of them.
Toby is enjoying the garden too, kicking back in his swing with his lego and occasionally having a burst of energy on the trampoline. We’ve also been swimming a few times and had lots of walks in the cool woods which have been lovely on the hottest of days (no pictures yet as Toby doesn’t like me to stop – he likes to keep moving when we’re out walking.)
There’s even been a little knitting. This was taken at 10.15pm this evening when I was cowl knitting by candlelight in support of the #LightsOut campaign commemorating the start of the first world war 100 years ago. #LightsOut’s inspiration stems from the then foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey’s famous remark on the eve of the outbreak of the war. He said: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time”. Britain declared war on Germany at 11pm on 4 August 1914.

So with that sobering thought, I’m off to bed feeling grateful that those dark days of 1914-18 are long distant and hoping that we don’t see the like of them again.