People on holiday, four day week, a little bit of summer hibernation. It’s pretty quiet round here. But that won’t stop us from delivering some top quality news, extreme cycling action and a lady who has issues with maps straight into your inbox. It’s what we were born to do.

Feeling the needle for speed

Look, we know it’s August, but we’d love a few more woolly hats. There are about 9 weeks to go before the little hats go onto the bottles and The Big Knit goes live. Our hat-o-meter shows how we’re doing, and we need that little thing to rocket skywards before we can relax and stick the kettle on. Of course, we feel this way every year, right at the start, slightly nervous that no hats will get knitted. And then every year we’re amazed when thousands of hats arrive in the post. We’re not doubting you. We’d never do that. But we’d love to see some hats soon, so we can start raising good money for people who need it more than us. Get your needles out, sign up for a Big Knit group pack to organize your own little knit-in, and if you’re just plain stuck, email Big Knit Charlotte for some wise words.

I want to ride my bicycle

Bikes are good. Good for getting to work, good for pulling wheelies or even the odd cherry-picker. But our Nick takes this stuff seriously. He’s just finished the TransRockies Challenge, a 7 day mountain bike race in the Canadian Rockies. Racing in team of two (he rode with a fellow Kiwi), they covered 600km over the seven days with about 10,000m of vertical ascent on rocky off-road trails. After all of this bum-numbing stuff, Nick and friend claimed 7th place overall, beating a load of professional riders in the process, which is just plain special. Nick’s highlights were “... seeing a black bear, beating professional riders, having to jump over a tree that some wayward beavers had chopped down over the track instead of the nearby creek and cruising through the Rockies.” To use extreme sports parlance, we believe this to be an awesome achievement by big Nick, and we are righteously stoked on behalf of him and his bike. Check out a pic of smiling Nick here and some people crossing a river here.

A chance to win a load of drinks

We realised that we haven’t given away a load of drinks for a while. Cruel. So here you go – ten cases of our finest drinks, each accompanied by a copy of our recipe book, for the simple reason that we like to give you stuff. We were struggling to think of a topical question to ask you, and in our haste have come up with something that’s a bit easy. So if you don't get it right, you should have a good long chat with yourself and try to figure out where it all went wrong. Good luck.

And finally...

How to split a log with an axe
Before they were famous
It’s all about the money
Innovations in sleepwear

Hello. What a glorious day. The sun is shining, the birds are singing and it’s so hot you could fry an egg on the patio. If you’re in Sardinia. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in London in August. Chilly, wet and a bit grey. Still, Christmas will be here soon.

Knit's a group thing

Things are better when you do them in groups. Camping. Climbing mountains. Eating family size bags of Korn Puffz whilst watching Young Guns 2. All better when you've got company. And we don't think knitting is any different. To celebrate the groupness of knitting, we've made special Big Knit packs to help you organise a little knit-in with your nearest and dearest this year. As well as some patterns to get you started, you'll get some all-important invitations and a poster. Perfect for sticking up in the office, or maybe on your front door if you want to get to know the weird bloke opposite. To get one of these packs, just click here, pop in your details and we'll send one out to you. And if you've got a really big group of people and need some help organising a Knit-In, email Big Knit Charlotte and she'll try her best to help get you started.

We're dealing with a higher force

The human tongue has about 10,000 taste buds. And weirdly, about 10,000 of you signed up last week to become one of our Taste Buds. The word spooky doesn't even come close to describing how much of a coincidence this is. It's like some higher force appeared in a blaze of light, riding a winged chariot and said in a booming voice “Make it 10,000, just like your tongue, or the fat guy gets it.” Anyway, we'd like to say thanks to everyone who signed up to become a Taste Bud to help us test how great our drinks are tasting. We'll be contacting some of you very soon and setting you your first assignment. Watch your inbox.

Know anyone famous?

We once saw Tom Selleck doing some shopping, and Peter Kay nipped into Fruit Towers last year. But we desperately need to find more celebs who can design a woolly hat for this year's Big Knit. So if you once went out with Les Dennis or know the ginger one out of Girls Aloud's nan's butcher's postman, then we'd love to hear from you, especially if you can ask them to design a hat for us. Email Big Knit Charlotte with your tales of famous people who are your friends (please note – hanging around outside their house without them knowing doesn't count).

Where your money's going

Our Claire gave us an update on an innocent foundation project this week. We're supporting an NGO called FARM-Africa who are using our money in projects in Southern Sudan. Our donations are supporting projects to teach local farmers sound animal husbandry and to provide them with access veterinary services. We're also providing them with some quick maturing mango trees to see if these will help provide a living. We say it every time, but thanks for buying our drinks. More drinks sold = more money to the foundation = something that makes running our business worthwhile.

A brief note about fetes

Just to say that our touring fete won't be visiting Prince St Gardens in Edinburgh anymore (some thing to do with the council), so we'll be replacing this with a visit to the Metro Centre in Newcastle from 31st August - 2nd September. See you there.

And finally...

Welcome to the innocent news. This week it’s mainly about you, which is how it should be. We’d like you to help us make our drinks even better, we’d love you to knit us a hat or two and we’re thinking of asking you to marry us, seeing as how we’ve known each other such a long time. Just a small ceremony, with close friends and family.

Needles at the ready

Regular readers will know about the Big Knit. Every winter, we ask you to knit little hats for our smoothies, and these behatted smoothies are then sold in Sainsbury’s. For every smoothie-with-a-hat sold, innocent and Sainsbury’s give 50p to Age Concern, who use this money to help keep older people warm during the winter. It’s a noble cause, and last year we were staggered when 230,000 little hats made it to Fruit Towers, raising over £100,000. This time around we’re hoping for 400,000 hats (partly because we’re wondering what they’d all look like in one big pile), so if you fancy knitting a few, we’d be very grateful. All of the details are on our updated Big Knit site and we’ve provided you with a few patterns to get you started. Happy knitting.

Your good taste is required

We had a thought the other day. A blinding flash of light. Some of you quite like our smoothies, and have been known to drink them often. And seeing as the only thing we really worry about is whether our smoothies taste good enough for you, why don’t we get the most important people (you) to let us know how our drinks are tasting? After all, you’re the most qualified folks in the world. So are you interested in becoming one of our Taste Buds? It would involve you drinking one of our drinks every now and then and letting us know what you think of it. We’ll send you a voucher so that you don’t end up out of pocket and we’re hoping to send out some special Taste Bud membership badges too (we’re cranking up the badge-making machine as we speak – no expense spared). It’ll be an online thing, so you can do it in the comfort of your own home.

Interested? Then click here (this link was only available to family members) and answer a couple of questions.

And the fete goes on

So our big fete may be over, but that doesn’t mean that the people of Britain aren’t still polishing their prize ferrets. Fetes are still blooming all over this damp and pleasant land, waiting for people like you to go along and chuck a coconut at the vicar. Our touring fete is in Exchange Square in Manchester from 17th-19th August, with Glasgow, Edinburgh and Leeds to follow (details here), and we’ll be at Bestival from 7th-9th September. Meanwhile, you can still find a fete near you by using our fete finder - get yourself to a fete before it’s time to get the winter duvet out again.

And finally...

Hello. We greet you this week in a post-fete haze, collapsed in a pile of leftover sun cream, bunting and cyder (with a ‘y’). Please allow us to come round in our own time.

Fete accompli

You will be pleased to hear that the above headline will be our final fete pun of the season. And we’re happy to say that it all went very well. The park was full of happy fete goers over the weekend, all slightly stunned by the appearance of sunshine, and enjoying the cheerleaders, the duck herding, the cream teas and the ballroom dancing. If you came, we’d just like to say thanks. We hope you had a great time. It wouldn’t have been the same without you.

If you have a moment, we’d love to know what you thought of it all – just fill out this little survey.

The best bits

It’s tough to say what the best bits of the fete were. It was all pretty good. But if we had to pick out some highlights, we’d opt for some of the stuff we’ve posted here and here. Definitely worth a look just to see Adem sing gently with his ukulele again.

If you took any good pictures, remember that you can post them to our flickr group and win yourself a year’s supply of smoothies to boot. Got to be worth a go.

We’d like to thank...

...a lot of people for helping make the fete work. The folks at the Royal Parks, Camden Council, The Guardian, The Observer and Capital 95.8. But a special mention should go to our charities – Friends of the Earth, WellChild and the Samaritans. So far we reckon they’ve raised about £150,000, via all of the proceeds from ticket sales. There’s more to come – we haven’t finished counting yet. So we guess that it’s thanks to you too, because if you hadn’t bought tickets, there would be no charity money. Figures.

Some news about trees

You might remember us talking about trees recently. Well, the very fine news is that a lot of you seem to like trees. The treeometer is currently standing at almost 10,000 trees registered, which exceeds expectations by a hefty margin, and it’s all down to you (and some people with spades). Thanks.

And finally...

Well stick a ferret down my trousers and bring me a pint of warm ale, if it isn't almost time for our big summer fete. And the sun's even started shining. Yes please.

Our fete in your hands

So it's finally here. After months of hard work and untold shameless plugs in this very newsletter, our fete is only days away. As we speak our Andrew is down the park looking after the final touches; putting up the bunting, assembling the alfresco ballroom, safety testing the dog agility course (he has the strength of a German Shepherd and the stealth of a Chihuahua). If you're coming down, please stop us for a chat (we'll be wearing t-shirts with "hello I work for innocent" on the back). You can still reserve tickets online here.

We'd also love it if you could take some pictures and upload them to our fete flickr group. We'll put the best ones in our newsletter and award the winners with loads of smoothies. See our village fete flickr group for all the details.

Fruit, punch, first of the month

With all this talk of fetes you may have forgotten that we also make drinks. That's right, real fruit smoothies with no rubbish. Remember? Anyway, we've got a new one that's hitting the shelves this week. It's our smoothie of the month for August and it's made from peaches and purple passion fruits. We chose the purple ones because they're sweeter and richer, making the recipe more refreshing and an even better accompaniment to summer. It's one of the best things ever to come out of our kitchen, so get it while you can.

Magimixed reviews

Our own Lucy and Nikki made it into the Money section of the Observer on Sunday. Sadly they weren't discussing the pros and cons of investing in guaranteed equity bonds, but instead looking at the best blenders around for making smoothies at home. Their recommendation was, unsurprisingly, by far the most expensive model around, the retro, easy to clean, Waring Waterfall blender. Read all the reviews here, including a nice intro claiming that at Fruit Towers, “it's summer all year round”. Think Center Parcs but with more desks and less crazy golf.

Winners

Everyone remembers where they were the night Turkey pipped Belgium to the 2003 Eurovision contest by just 2 points, and the results for last week’s kid’s colouring-in competition were similarly close. The eventual winner was Lauren (aged 4 ½) who wins a year’s supply of smoothies and a visit on her birthday from our Dancing Grass Van. For those of you thinking of entering any art prizes soon, we think the secret to her winning technique was drawing smiley faces on all the fruit.

The winners of the VIP fete tickets were; Toby W, Lennie T, Rees P, Madelene Y, Morgana F, Jennifer V, Helena T, Gigi B, Claire P and Gideon.

We’ll be in touch very soon – and see you this weekend.

And finally...