Peaches, passion fruits and the Great Recipe Archive

We're pretty sure you liked our peaches and passion fruits recipe last time round, so it’s back by popular demand. Not only is it top of the list of recipes that you ask to be returned, it’s also spreading the word about a brand new campaign, dressed up in a fancy new pack. This peachy new smoothie should be adding a bit of passion to the shelves in your local supermarket this month and into the new year.

The campaign in question is called the Great Recipe Archive. With the help of our friends at We Are What We Do, we’re hunting out lots of proper wholesome recipes – the ones that get passed down through the family. And we thought it would be good if you could find all of these recipes in one place, submitted by people from far and wide. So if you have such a recipe, be it your gran's coddle from Dublin, your aunty's famous bacon and cabbage or your dad's special cheese on toast, upload it here for all to see. And check out the site to see what’s up there so far. Every week from November 1st, we'll choose a 'Recipe of the Month' and the recipe author will win a case of smoothies (to be that winner, just get all your friends to vote for your recipe). Get involved here and then get cooking.

 

Off with your hats

Hats glorious hats. We're literally swimming in them lately. Really, they're everywhere. We've spent all day packing up loads them for posting to our smoothie factory so they can be put on the tops of little smoothie bottles. Our first batch, 40,000 hats, was shipped off today. We're still counting all your wonderful hats and we'll be shipping the rest off next week. We still can't get over the generousity of all the knitters out there who have dedicated their time and effort to the innoncent Big Knit to raise money for Age Action. We also still get blown away by the knitting talent out there. It takes forever to pack little hats when we spend half of the time oggling and admiring some of the amazing creations you've sent in.

These pictures say it all. Here's Ali, Helen, and JP getting ready to load the hats into JP's van.

Here's Helen about to brave the wind and make a dash for JP's van.

Final countdown

November the 10th is finally here and we thought we'd give everyone a friendly reminder that innocent Big Knit deadline is today. We're literally falling over bags of wonderful hats here in fruit towers. If you still haven't had a chance to post in your hats, stick them in the post as soon as you can so we can make sure they end up on the caps of our little smoothie bottles and on the shop shelves.

Even though we've been getting thousands of hats in the last few days, we still like going through them all and picking out our favourites.

We'd also like to give a special thanks to epic knitter extraordinaire superstar Eileen Gibbons who knit a whopping 1000 hats and dropped them all off yesterday.

Check back tomorrow when we'll post up more pictures of the bags and bags of hats we've been getting in the post and from people dropping into fruit towers personally.

Here's a lovely box of hats fom the the "innocent smoothies hat design centre"

 

Here's Ali trying to help with the packing.

 These lovely hats came neatly packed in an egg carton.

 

And who says lunch shouldn't be followed by dessert? Debbie sent in some delicious buns along with her hats. Thanks a mil Debbie.

 

Here's Bill from Age Action who just dropped off two huge bags full of hats. Thanks a million Bill.

 

"Guess how many hats" competition winner

We asked you last week if you could guess how many hats were in the Big Knit hat drop off box that was filled at our stall at the RDS Knitting and Stitching show.

The actual number of hats is a whopping 1956.

A few people came close and we had some nail biting moments, but the nearest guess was 2010 which was made by Linda.

There's an email on its way to her along with some innocent smootie goodies.

Thanks again to everyone who entered the competition.

Hat of the week

Something fishy came in the post for this week's innocent Big Knit hat of the week. When we opened a package we had to break out our emergency aqaurium to make sure these guys got a good home.

Thanks to Carole Pappin from Dublin who knit these lovely hats. There are some innocent goodies on their way to you.

Want to be the next illustrious winner and stake your place on the wall of knitting fame and win some innocent goodies too? Find out how to send in your hats on the innocent Big Knit homepage

Knitting and fruit at the RDS

We're still recovering from four days of epic knitting at the Knitting and Stitching Show last weekend in the RDS. With the innocent Big Knit making us obsessed with kniting, it was great to meet a bunch of likeminded people to share knitting stories and tell the odd yarn or two (we couldn't resist that one) over a few delicious smoothies. To celebrate, there's a chance to win an innocent smoothie hamper below.

We met some awesome people and had an amazing amount of hats knitted on the spot or dropped off. We'll let the pictures tell the story.

What's better than a load of little hats? A load of little hats inside a big hat of course. Thanks to Kemberlee Shortland for this. For the pattern, she simply multiplied the small hat pattern by three, and shazam, hats inside a hat.

We also met Stephaine MacFarland who did some on the spot knitting for us and knit this lovely purple hat.

Carmel Rushe, in the picture below, brought along 160 hats that were knit by her pupils in Feevagh National School, Dysart, Co Roscommon, Ballyforan National School, Ballinasloe, Co Roscommon, and Mount Talbot National School, Mount Talbot, Co Roscommon. Thanks to all of the students to took part and to Carmel for rallying them.

Last but not least, it's competition time. We received so many hats and we'd like to give something back in return. We're about to start counting the number of hats we received over the weekend in the Big Knit drop off box. If you can guess, to the the nearest number, how many hats are inside this box, we'll send an innocent smoothies hamper your way. Post your answers in the comments section below.