Turns out that while I can whip up a straight seam or two, small, precise baby shoes were completely beyond me. 

Hopeless.

Not the fault of the pattern. (Yep, I was not even getting close to that.)

She did say something about a seam allowance which I may have disregarded.

At my peril.

Because I am at heart a valiant optimist I'll give these another go. After I finish all my Christmas sewing. And Ivy's feet will not go cold. 

I may have mentioned my epic failure to my friend Jo, and she left a little bag of these on my doorstep; handmade and outgrown by her smallies:

She is officially my sewing hero. 

And so to assuage my lingering sense of failure, I baked these. My first recipe from Good To The Grain. 

They're good, of course they're good, they are chocolate chunk cookies, but I was a little bit horrified at the amount of butter (250g) and sugar (2 cups) in them. I actually prefer the good old visitor biscuit, made on wholegrain flour, with the two things I learnt from this recipe:

1. don't use choc chips – break up a block of chocolate. (I may be behind the eight ball but I thought this was genius) and

2. add a good pinch of salt. Also genius. Lifted it beautifully.

Hope your day has been a fair balance of success and failure!

xxx