Mootthings

C'est chouette.*

2011-11-11T10:25:00.000Z

*When I was a kid and was learning French at school we were always led to believe that the usual Gallic exclamation of approval was "c'est chouette!" which apparently translates as "that's owl". I don't recall ever having heard an actual French person use this phrase. Though I did once meet someone whose favourite way of expressing surprise was to exclaim "Oh la vache!". Whether P and R will these are "owl" remains to be seen, but they were fun to knit.

Show home.

2011-10-14T10:37:00.011+01:00

C and I bought our house about 6 years ago just before we got married, and until recently it's suited us very well. However, now its two bedrooms and one "reception" room are beginning to creak at the seams. Every piece of furniture has something stored under and/or behind it, it is physically impossible to clear the kitchen drainer because we don't have enough cupboard space to put all the sippy cups etc. away, and with four people squeezed round our little folding dining table it is proving increasingly impossible to position hot dishes out of reach of two small children with arms like Mr Tickle and no apparent sense of self preservation.

So, we're trying to sell. Which is fine, but showing the house to prospective buyers does require a certain degree of housekeeping. And these days that's easier said than done with a toddler intent on throwing every article in the house onto the floor and a mobile baby with a domestic appliance fetish and a fascination with filth. So, a morning which starts with a plan just to do the washing up, run the hoover round, and then go out and do something interesting, generally ends up going something like this:

7am: Get up - shower and dress - make beds quickly while C takes kids downstairs and makes breakfast [make mental note to go to the loo before C leaves for work].
8am: breakfast. [So far so good].
8.30am: C leaves for work. [Damn, never went to the loo!].
Clear the table - wipe the table/baby - pick up bits of food from floor/walls/hair - attempt to sweep floor in spite of baby clinging to and trying to chew the end of the brush. Meanwhile toddler empties toybox into middle of floor. Consider going to the loo but think it's too much effort to drag everyone upstairs and then come down again and I daren't leave them alone downstairs.
9am: Replace brush in kitchen and close gate to keep baby out. Place baby at far end of living-room and attempt to beat him back to the kitchen, get washing out of machine and shut gate again before he can get at the damned brush.
Realise baby has gone quiet. Discover this is because he has puked milk all over the floor and is happily paddling about in it and smearing it around with his hands. Retrieve baby and wipe up worst of sick with baby-wipe adding "wash floor" to the list of things to do before viewing.
9.30am: Leave toddler engaged in posting things into the stereo cabinet (which, in spite of the child lock, will open just enough to allow entry to a toy car/wooden brick etc.) and baby sorting through remaining toys in search of something small enough to choke on. Go into garden to hang out washing keeping watchful eye on kids through the patio windows.
*Return to house after having pegged only one item to sort out baby who has been sick again/ pulled himself up on the toy kitchen and got stuck/ fallen down the side of the sofa and got wedged/ is being ridden like a horse by the toddler/ is eating shoes or electrical cables or chalk that he has been supplied with by his helpful brother who reached it down from the high shelf for him.* [delete as applicable and repeat from * for as many items of clothing as are in the washing basket.
Return to house where baby is now standing up leaning against the back door howling, smearing it with sick/snot and won't move. After several minutes trying to tempt him to move to one side by tapping on the glass and pulling faces, give up and open the door very slowly in order to catch him as he falls out onto the patio.
Add "wash windows" to list of things to do before viewing.
10.30am: Attempt to get both children upstairs in order to change nappies and dress them (and go to the loo). Leave toddler pulling cushions and throw* off sofa (apparently in order to construct a rocket) and carry baby up.
Shut stairgate and return to retrieve recalcitrant toddler who won't come up of his own accord but is wittering about having found "a funny thingy" down the back of the sofa. Establish that said thingy is a) a vital part of some treasured toy that one or other of them has somehow snapped off; b) an equally vital piece of some item of furniture; c) something expensive and electrical that C has left within reach; d) something completely unidentifiable but which looks suspiciously as though it might have a bit missing which may have been eaten/posted.
Musing over identity of "thingy" is interrupted by ominous crash and wailing from above. Return upstairs with toddler to find baby has pulled the clothes airer down on himself and is trapped underneath.
Free baby and start to collect clothes together. Meanwhile toddler has swept a pile of Mr Men books onto the floor and is engaged in throwing handfuls down the stairs. Engage in brief tussle to get remaining books off him and put out of reach.
11am: Notice baby has disappeared. Go into bathroom to discover he has pulled himself up on the changing box, acquired and unravelled the loo roll and is now engaged in eating it.
Put loo roll on high shelf out of reach and prize soggy bits from between protesting jaws.
Change baby's nappy (despite screaming and struggling) and take him to toddler's bedroom to find clothes where he promptly throws up milk and half chewed toilet paper all over the carpet.
Try and to clean worst of mess off carpet with another baby-wipe which promptly disintegrates and adds to mess. Fetch hoover in desperate (and vain) attempt to improve situation causing toddler to run screaming from the room and baby to launch himself at it and begin chewing the nozzle.
Add "shampoo carpet" to list of things to do before viewing.
Distracted by loud hooting from our bedroom. Go in to discover toddler has pulled all bedding off our bed and used it to construct a train, wiping snot across most of it in the process.
Add "change beds" to list of things to do before viewing.
Sudden loud crash. Discover baby has crawled back into the bathroom and upended nappy bucket all over himself and the floor. Before have time to do anything about this toddler enters dragging the covers from his bed which he has decided to use as a cloak.
12 o'clock: Trap baby in cot and take toddler back downstairs and park him in front of Postman Pat.
Return to bathroom and finally sit down on loo to survey damage.

At 7am the beds were made, the washing up done, the floors swept and the toys tidy. It is now going on for lunchtime. The bedding is on the floor and liberally covered in snot. There are no cushions on the sofa. The floors are covered in books/toys/sick/crumbs and in the case of the bathroom unwashed nappies and soggy paper. I haven't even thought about the washing up which is piled in the sink. The toddler is still not even dressed, and what is more, I can't reach the bloody toilet roll!

* A throw which we have put on expressly in order to prevent him wiping his hands/nose on the sofa so that it still looks relatively respectable when we have viewings.

Last of the Summer Pants

2011-09-07T22:03:00.005+01:00

This summer, after literally years of not quite getting round to it, I finally bought and used the Big Butt Baby Pants pattern that so many of my friends have raved about. And (unsurprisingly) I love it. That said it has taken me the whole summer to succeed in making three pairs of light summer trousers for each of the boys.

However, in spite of increasing interference from a small boy with a fascination for electrical cables, especially that attached to my sewing machine foot control, I finally finished the last pair this week, just in time for the weather to go cold. Better start on some winter ones I guess.*

*My attempts at photography were not helped by the lousy weather and the aforementioned small boy!

Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside.

2011-07-07T21:06:00.004+01:00

Recently we have been reading Mr Men books with P at bedtime, his particular favourite being Mr Bump.* In the course of the story Mr Bump takes the train and goes to the seaside, and P became determined that we should do the same. So, finding ourselves at a loose end on a suitably sunny Sunday, off we duly went to Weston-super-Mare where we had a lovely time building (and demolishing) sandcastles, splashing in tidal pools under the pier, having donkey rides, and going on the big wheel. And fortunately, unlike Mr Bump, no one fell off a boat into the sea, got their foot stuck in a bucket, or had to spend the night in a hole in the sand.**

*Sadly, P's devotion to Mr Bump extends to emulating his behaviour in other ways too. We recently booked to have some family photos taken, something we've been meaning to do since P was tiny, but even as I was inside making the appointment, P was outside with daddy falling head-first into the wall of the shop and getting himself a nice shiny purple lump on his forehead. He subsequently fell off his scooter onto the same spot - twice - and added a variety of minor cuts and scrapes to other parts of his face in the remaining few days before the sitting itself. He and his brother then also contrived to contract a cough-til-you-vomit style cold, so we must have presented the photographer with something of a challenge, variously covered in cuts, bruises, snot, and dribble, and all with huge bags under our eyes from a sleepless night!

** On the other hand, I suspect Mr Bump didn't have to travel with First Great Western, and that his train therefore wouldn't have been delayed owing to a problem with the track, causing him to miss his connection and spend lunchtime on Bristol station instead of by the sea. He probably also didn't have to stand in the corridor of an unairconditioned carriage just outside the disabled loo all the way back, or carry two buggies, plus children and assorted accoutrements over the footbridge at Weston station, where there is no lift. Still, you can't have everything.

Snips and snails and puppy-dog tails.

2011-05-27T20:51:00.003+01:00

I don't know whether it is really true that little girls tend to be cleaner, tidier, and more fastidious than their male counterparts, but in many respects P does appear to be an archetypal little boy. Careering around the house in a seemingly perpetual fog of snot, dribble, and toast crumbs, he is never happier than when causing havoc of one sort or another. Every box must be emptied, anything that can be climbed on must be scaled, and anything squishable or smearable squished and smeared.

This week he brought his inevitable boyness to bear on what is usually considered to be a more feminine pastime - baking. Trying to keep him entertained my mum and I decided we would make some gingerbread men together and get him to decorate them with currants for the eyes, and buttons - or so we thought. P however had other ideas. Having ignored our explanation of what the currants were intended for he scoffed the vast majority of his and then set about very carefully placing the few remaining ones between each gingerbread man's legs. Why? They were all doing a poo, obviously. Appetizing, eh?

Having your cake and not eating it.

2011-05-26T22:29:00.002+01:00

Last week P turned two. Since his birthday was on a weekday we had a shop-bought cake on the day itself, which went to nursery with him so he could celebrate with his friends, and a family party the following Saturday. For this second second birthday celebration my brother manfully took on the challenge of helping me make a cake in the shape of Postman Pat's van.

Aiming for a fairly solid loaf cake to use as a base, we hit upon the idea of banana cake. Sadly, the resulting van was not perhaps as tall as it might have been since it took 20 minutes longer to cook than the recipe suggested, and once you have opened my oven door and established that a cake is not done, the only way to shut it again is to slam it hard. However, once it was jammed and marzipanned, and covered in brightly coloured royal icing and then repainted with yet more food colouring*, it began to be fairly recognizably a red van, even if it did look as though someone had slashed the tyres.

Postman Pat himself presented more of a challenge. Unable to buy or create convincingly flesh-coloured royal icing my brother constructed his face and hands from marzipan. This left him looking rather as though he had had a nasty shock,** but we decided it would do. We had reckoned without the effect of holding the party outside on a sunny day, however.

Shortly after being put in pride of place on the table in the sunshine, Pat's already pallid features acquired a sweaty sheen, as if he was suffering from the effects of a really bad hangover. An ill-advised attempt to draw on his glasses with black icing added to the effect by making him look as though he'd put his shades on. An hour or so later and Pat's condition was clearly terminal. Shortly after the lighting of the candle his head lolled to one side and his right hand dropped off.

However P seemed to be pleased with his cake, even if by this time it did appear to be decorated with the decomposing corpse of Greendale's favourite postie. Mercifully he didn't ask to eat any of it.

* Given the less-than-buoyant texture of the central cake, and the alarming number of E numbers in the icing, we established fairly early on that this was to be a cake for looking at and blowing out candles on, and commissioned my mum to make another one that was actually edible.
** Coming out to find his tyres slashed, perhaps.

Round and round the garden.

2011-05-13T21:04:00.002+01:00

This time of year always reminds me how much I love having a garden. A few days of sun and the odd shower and suddenly everywhere is full of colour and bees. At the moment the alliums are in full bloom, as are five of my six clematis, the flag iris is out in the pond, and the poppies are ready to pop any minute.

And this year I had an extra surprise. The enormous number of straggly wallflowers my mum gave me a couple of years ago that never came to anything and I had pretty much forgotten about, turned out to be an enormous number of beautiful crimson sweet william, and they're now flowering merrily all over the garden. Just as well I never got round to pulling them out!

Time for bed.

2011-05-02T10:15:00.003+01:00

Some time ago P decided he was too old to sleep in a baby sleeping bag any more so we splashed out and got him a cot duvet. However both of us baulked at paying £30+ for a cover with a design we didn't particularly like, so it was decided I would make some instead.

This week (thanks largely to the Royals and their extra bank holiday which meant C was at home and could take both boys out for a long walk) I finally finished the second one, so at last I can change the sheets on P's bed without having to make sure I get them all washed, dried, ironed and back on the bed in the same day.

A bit of fluff.

2011-04-27T22:32:00.003+01:00

Our neighbours have a tree in their garden which at this time of year produces clouds of fluffy seeds which collect in great drifts in undisturbed corners of the garden and greenhouse, and indeed in the house if the weather is good enough to have the back door open. This year it has been more than usually productive. The greenhouse, in particular, looks like it's been filled with cotton wool and I have spent a lot more time than I'd have liked chasing fluff round the living-room with the hoover.

Add to this the remarkable number of dandelions that the warm weather has brought out and it's difficult to go anywhere at the moment without coming back covered in fluff.

It also takes an inordinately long time to get anywhere if you have a dedicated dandelion-clock aficionado in tow!

Having a smashing time.

2011-04-27T22:13:00.002+01:00

This year Greek Easter was the same day as it was here, and unusually the temperature was five degrees higher than it was in Athens (as my dad gleefully told all our Greek relations who called to wish us happy Easter). So we had a lovely family Easter in my mum and dad's big new garden, with delicious food including lamb souvlakia and tzoureki* cooked by my mum and my youngest brother.

We also introduced P to the traditional hard-boiled egg-cracking contest, a practice he took to with great enthusiasm.**

* A sort of Easter bread/cake. My brother also made a marathopita ('fennel pie'), which was delicious but caused P much consternation since he was convinced there was grass in his bread!
**Strictly speaking the eggs should all be red, but the packet of dye I had included 5 colours and it seems churlish not to use them all.

Gar-den-ing

2011-04-13T13:21:00.004+01:00

Last Sunday was [probably*] my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. Since they both enjoy making things, and since they have recently moved to a new house with a large, but currently fairly featureless garden, my siblings and I hit on the idea of buying them a weekend away in Derbyshire learning to make willow garden sculpture. It was a great success, not least because the weather was gorgeous, and they came back with the car packed to the gunnels with creations and with more willow for future projects. P in particular is very impressed with their handiwork.

* I asked my dad which year they got married and he replied confidently "1972, because it was two years before you were born, and that was November 17th 1974". I pointed out that I have always been under the impression that I was born on November 18th 1973, and my birth certificate appears to agree with me, so we finally decided it must have been 1971 that they married, making it their ruby anniversary this year.

In the nick of time.

2011-04-13T07:20:00.005+01:00

This is R. He arrived in the middle of January, in the middle of the night, two weeks earlier than expected and caught us all on the hop rather, especially since my parents weren't due to arrive to be on hand for the birth until the following day. However, thanks to the lovely Katie of Oxford Kitchen Yarns, who not only happened to be awake at 3am to be in receipt of frantic text messages, but also agreed to remain awake and to take delivery of a sleepy and slightly startled P while C and I were at the hospital, everything went swimmingly.

*

Katie also gave us this beautiful tractor/tow-truck vest for R which I have been waiting impatiently to put him in. As it has short sleeves and it seems that makers of baby clothes in this country consider it unseemly for a <3month-old baby boy to wear anything other than pastel blue, light brown, or white (preferably emblazoned with vomit-inducingly cutsie critters/slogans), I immediately set about knitting him a navy cardigan to go with it. The pattern is the Lazy Daisy Baby Jacket, which is a pleasingly straightforward knit, and thinking it would be the work of a moment I started on the newborn size. Unfortunately R had other ideas: two months later it's finally finished. Luckily R is quite a dinky little chap and it should fit for at least another two weeks!

* At least two member of R's close family have remarked (somewhat unfairly in my view) that in this photo R looks like Hitler without the moustache. Personally I thought it was quite a nice one and one of the few in which his hair actually looks vaguely presentable, since usually it stands straight up on the top of his head giving him rather the aspect of a startled radish.

Asking for the moon.

2010-08-13T21:21:00.005+01:00

Sadly for quite a lot of this summer P has been under the weather with one thing or another. This, we are assured by the doctor, is simply a result of his having started nursery after Easter and will eventually give him the constitution of an ox. In the meantime, however, we have been treated to long stretches of sleepless nights, rivers of snot, and the occasional torrent of vomit.

The most recent lurgy to assail him took the form of some sort of flu-like bug, which gave him a raging temperature and completely took away his appetite, to the extent that he wouldn't even eat bananas, previously his all-time favourite food.* After about four days in which he ate half a yoghurt and virtually nothing else, I discovered he could be persuaded to nibble on a dry biscuit and decided any nourishment was better than none.

This proved to be my undoing: as a result he appears to have developed an addiction to "Moon biscuits" and to believe, now that he is well again, that he should be able to have as many as he likes. Consequently he now spends large portions of each day clinging to the side of the fridge, looking hopefully at the top, where he knows the biscuits reside, and shouting. Refusal to give in and let him have one** results in anguished howling, sobbing, and theatrical displays of despair/apparently fainting from hunger owing to the cruelty of his heartless parents. This all miraculously stops of course as soon as he actually gets a biscuit, the receipt of which is greeted with a cheerful (and slightly self-satisfied) "ta!" before he beetles off nomming happily, not infrequently with the whole crescent-shaped thing wedged sideways in his mouth.

Thus far "ta" and "hiya" seem to be about the only recognizable words in P's vocabulary (and ones which he must presumably have learned at nursery), though he's getting pretty close with lots of others. Indeed, not infrequently he does manage to say something quite clearly, but he's not very reliable and can seldom be persuaded to do it again, especially in company. Last week he seemed to be practising the letter B and, after a fair amount of coaxing, managed to say "bird", "bubble", "banana" and of course "biscuit",*** but the minute I proudly relayed this information to anyone, he stopped. This week seems to be being brought to us by the letter M, so all the bubbles have mysteriously become mumles instead.

In the absence of comprehensible vocabulary we have been trying to teach him to imitate animals and make the appropriate noise for the appropriate critter. After much quacking, clucking, miaowing, and barking, he finally pointed at a picture of a duck in his book of animals and, in reply to the question "What noise does the duck make?" said "'Ack".

His proud parents were thrilled with this, until we discovered that according to P, dogs, cats, all birds, some sheep, and in one case a hippopotamus all also say "quack". Every encounter with a cat or dog in the street is now accompanied by pointing and a volley of frantic quacking.

The only animals, it appears, that do not say "ack", are bees. These he knows say bzzzzzzzz (or in P's version bvvvvvvv). Even this achievement, however, has been slightly tempered by the possibility of misunderstanding. The other day I realised whilst giving him his lunch that he was buzzing as he normally does when he sees a bee. Looking about to see if one had got into the house I drew a blank, but finally realised that what he was actually doing was buzzing every time I said to him "Eat your beans", raising the interesting possibility, not only that he thinks we've been feeding him bees on toast, but also that he considers the lavender hedge to be infested by bumble-beans.

* Indeed he pretty much mugged an old lady for hers at Blenheim Palace the week before and had to be carried off kicking and screaming.

** On the flimsy grounds, for instance, that it's 8am, he's only been up for 20 minutes and we're just about to have breakfast.

*** Oh, and (owing to me dropping a tin on my foot) "bollocks", which needless to say was the only word he imitated spontaneously without hours of repetition.

Little ?Boy Blue

2010-07-29T20:28:00.005+01:00

Back in the spring, when P was still fairly little, and the weather was gradually getting warmer, but not that warm yet, I started a basic blue top-down raglan cardigan in baby bamboo, intending to have it finished in a couple of weeks so that P would have something to wear over a t-shirt. The knitting part of it was fairly straightforward and I made reasonable progress, until that is I hit the button bands. Try as I might they came out looking wibbly, curly, and insubstantial and I decided I didn't like them at all. So, after some degree of fiddling, I finally hit on the idea of copying the neckband from the Tangled Yoke cardigan, by knitting them double width and then folding them over with a three-needle bind-off. I could then sew on a zip and have neat, zip-fastened cardigan. I even got as far as buying the zip, and all that remained was to block it and do the sewing.

However, things in our house being what they are these days, blocking is not as easy as it once was. For a start there's the problem of finding enough free and uninterrupted time to wash and pin out a garment. Secondly there's the small matter of finding somewhere to put it to dry where small hands (or feet) can't get at the pins. So, as usual it remained in the cupboard and every week I promised myself 'I really will find time to block it this weekend'. Last weekend I got it out and looked at it and realised that it's never going to fit P now, or at least (even if it stretches when blocked) not for more than a couple of weeks.

However, all is not lost, since somewhat to our surprise, it appears that the cardigan may have another taker before too long (some time around the end of January in fact - though presumably it will be a little while before it actually fits him/her*). I guess I better get round to blocking it before then, though, since it seems doubly unlikely I'll have chance afterwards!

*At least I damn well hope so given it was meant to fit a 10-12 month-old!

Has beans.

2010-07-18T21:41:00.002+01:00

We finally have lovely purple "Blauhilde" beans on the allotment. No idea what they taste like, but they look lovely.

As a result of last week's mixture of sunshine and showers we also have courgettes - rather a lot of them -

and (owing to a bumper crop of blackfly on the broad beans) ladybirds.

Learning Curve.

2010-06-30T11:01:00.002+01:00

This week P has finally mastered the art of catching fish with the little wooden fishing rod in the magnetic fishing game his grandparents gave him. This produced rapturous applause from both his doting parents, and he now spends every spare minute picking up the fish (and occasional other metallic objects) one by one with the magnet on the end of the string and then clapping himself.

Unfortunately, however, not all his new skills are quite so entertaining, at least for us.

Last week he learned to climb the stairs. After weeks of only wanting to walk up them like an adult (and hence trying to raise his foot nearly to shoulder height trying to get it onto the next step) he suddenly realised he could crawl up them, and that was that. Unfortunately his approach to getting down again is still to walk blithely off the top and hope for the best, so this new discovery means ever greater vigilance on our parts, to make sure he doesn't get the opportunity.

This week he learned to climb other things. Primarily the changing box in the bathroom (from which he seems to think he can get onto the toilet lid and hence probably out of the window), and our bed. The latter wouldn't be too much of a problem if it wasn't for the fact that, once there, he has learned to stand up and bounce up and down on the mattress - a fine game until he bounces off the end and onto the floor head-first.

And then, to cap it all he has learned how to turn switches on and off. Mostly off. Mostly the switch on the socket where I have the hoover plugged in when I am using it. Apparently nothing is as hilarious as watching me sprint from one end of the room to the other and frantically try to hoover a couple of inches of floor before the thing dies again. Hours of fun!

Hanging about.

2010-06-29T11:27:00.002+01:00

After a year of having this lovely swing (given to P by my sister) and lamenting the fact that we didn't have a tree in the back garden to hang it from, we suddenly twigged (if you'll pardon the pun) this week that there is the perfect tree right opposite the front door.

Problem solved!

Orange Squash (FO)

2010-06-29T10:38:00.006+01:00

About 200 years ago I accepted a small commission from my sister to knit a pumpkin-shaped hat for the offspring of a friend of hers, expected this summer. I don't usually agree to commissions, but this seemed like such a dinky little project that I thought it would be the work of but a moment.

However, what with one thing and another there hasn't been much time for knitting in the evenings recently (one thing being that, now I'm back at work, as soon as P is in bed C and I have a list of chores as long as your arm to get through in preparation for the next day, and the other being that P's erratic sleeping means that, once we finally get to sit down, I can only keep my eyes open for about 10 minutes). So the hat became my train-knitting project, and given that I only commute into work two days a week now, and the commute is barely 15 minutes long, it managed to take me almost a month to complete.

However, completed it finally is, and only awaiting the addition of some matching booties, which no doubt will take me just as long.

In spite of its slow germination, this squash is doing rather better than any of my others this year. In a fit of optimism I bought a packet of six varieties of edible and ornamental squash with the intention of letting them roam free on the allotment and fill up otherwise empty space (being in Geneva during key sowing time has meant that we are a bit depleted on the veg front this year). I planted one of each sort, confident that they grow quickly and take up a lot of space. Only three of them germinated and two of those were immediately demolished by slugs the minute I put them outside to harden off. The remaining plant (and of course I have no idea which sort it is - no doubt the dullest, ugliest, and most inedible of the selection) is now cowering sadly in the end of a raised bed, looking distinctly as though it is thinking of throwing in the towel and following its compatriots to the great vegetable garden in the sky.

But despite this, and the patchiness of the potatoes (which couldn't be planted until we got back from Geneva and, as a result, were the dregs of the garden centre remaindered bucket), and despite the fact that the current warm weather requires us to carry something between a quarter and half a metric tonne of water almost every night, the allotment is redeeming itself for us at the moment by supplying us with about half a punnet of fresh strawberries every day or two, and the promise of broad beans in a week or so. And there's something very pleasing about wandering back from the allotment in the evening sun with P toddling alongside munching on homegrown strawberries and happily turning his clothes a soggy shade of pink.

Full circle.

2010-03-30T17:06:00.012+01:00

Well, as ever, it has been some time since my last post, and many things have happened in the meantime, most of which I vowed to chronicle on here, some of which even made it as far as my ever growing collection of half-written draft posts, but none of which actually made it as far as getting published. Such is life these days.

First there was Christmas, when P discovered the delights of wrapping-paper

encountered his first snow

and received the traditional present of two front teeth. These chose New Year's Eve to make their entrance, so everyone saw the dawn on the first day of 2010, though not for the reasons we might have hoped.

And then, suddenly, it was the end of January and we were packing up the car ready to move to Geneva for two months while C applied himself in person to bringing about the end of the world.

Over the years I've visited Geneva a fair few times and always found it to be a very pleasant place, if a trifle pricey, so the idea of living there for a little while was not unappealing. Unfortunately however, all my visits had been in the summer months, whereas we were to be there in February and March, and I soon realised that I had rather unrealistic expectations of life at that time of year. I had pictured us strolling by the lake and walking in the botanical gardens or playing in the park. But while it is certainly possible to stroll by Lac Leman in February, the wind makes it really rather obvious that there's not much between you and the Alps. And that's when it's not raining.

We did, of course, have a few nice days (especially towards the end of the stay), and a few trips out and about, all of which I singularly failed to post about. There was a little jaunt to Nyon on the lake (admittedly slightly spoiled by the fact that C left the changing bag on the train in the morning and so a substantial proportion of the day was spent in a large supermarket trying to replace all the things that we needed from it).*

There was a much more successful trip to Lausanne, an amazing place built on slopes so precipitous that you occasionally have the impression of walking through an M.C. Escher drawing (this did rather give me palpitations when pushing P about in the pram in case either of us tripped up and let go!).

And there was a ride on the Télépherique du Saleve which, though really rather chilly at the top (and a week too early in the season for the cafe to be open) gave us the chance to see a great many mad people throwing themselves off the side of a sheer cliff, which was distinctly entertaining.

On the whole however, while C was off doing exciting physics, P and I spent rather more time than either of us really liked sitting in our apartment in a 60s concrete tower-block watching the rain/sleet/snow on the windows. However, this gave P plenty of time to practice getting about the place.

So, while we arrived with a baby who could sit up and shuffle a few feet if he really put his mind to it, we left with a crawling, cruising toddler with a fascination for opening cupboards and drawers and a pathological dislike of finding them full of neatly stacked or folded things.

This transformation was accelerated by the fact that the furniture in the Geneva flat was the perfect height and layout to encourage cruising. By the end of the first week he was shuffling up and down one side of the coffee table. A week later he'd gained enough confidence to make it across to the sofa, and by the middle of the stay I heard someone knocking on the front door and came out of the kitchen to find that it was P, who had made his way round the table, down one sofa, then down the other, along the arm, across the wall, and was trying to escape.

Finally, about a week before we left it suddenly seemed to occur to him that if he actually applied himself to mastering this crawling business he would be able to get to the furniture in order to pull himself up and walk. And that was the end of any sort of peace and quiet in our house.

As a result, the trip back from Geneva was a rather different kettle of fish to the trip out. When we stopped in Dijon overnight and tried to take P to the hotel restaurant for dinner, we were somewhat dismayed to find a distinctly posh-looking establishment, sporting long, crisp, cream, cotton tablecloths, and silver cutlery. Confronted with such an exciting environment and not content with merely smearing as much food as possible all over us and the table, P set out to terrorize the other diners as well, crawling under the tables to grab their ankles, trying to walk from table to table by holding onto the aforementioned tablecloths, and endeavouring to scale the stems of the wine coolers. Eventually we bolted our dinner and took him back upstairs to eat fruit sitting on the floor of the ensuite bathroom - that being the only place he could make as much mess as he liked with impunity.

Arriving home was similarly something of a culture shock. P's newly acquired mobility, and a penchant for opening any accessible cupboard and carrying off the contents as booty**, meant that we spent the first two or three weeks hastily removing or hiding electrical cables, reorganizing drawers, and fitting stairgates and cupboard locks.

But before long we got used to the new reality and learned not to leave anything important (or wet) on any surface lower than three feet, even if we did eventually end up replacing half the furniture so as to be able to put things like the TV and stereo out of reach. And now we suddenly find we've come full circle. In the last few weeks P has had his first birthday and started going to nursery, and I have started back at work where I am frantically trying to clear the cobwebs off my brain with so far only limited success.

And once again I find myself vowing to return to blogging on a more regular basis though since the new reality is even more hectic than the old one, we shall see!

* I tend to find it does not bode well for a visit to somewhere if the first words spoken on arrival are "oh, shit!"
** During the first week home, I was presented with a constant stream of objects abstracted from forgotten drawers and cupboards around the house. A single day's haul consisted of a novelty rugby ball, a green yoyo with an exceptionally long string, some worry beads, a raw onion, and a (mercifully unopened) packet of hayfever tablets, all (apart, I hope, from the onion) snaffled from his father's bedside cabinet.

Who killed cock robin?

2009-11-10T10:26:00.014Z

For my mum and me, one of the particular thrills of visiting "The House", especially in the spring or autumn, is seeing what is growing. Over the years my mum has patiently worked away at our little bit of hillside, terracing, composting, and planting, so that we now have something which might actually be called a garden.* Admittedly, as with so much else, this is something of a three-steps-forward; two-steps-back undertaking, since anything planted in the spring is lucky to survive the heat of summer, and about 80% of what survives the summer gets trampled by builders over the winter.**

However, in spite of this, mum's efforts are finally beginning to bear fruit, in many cases literally. Alongside oleander and rosemary we now have quite well-established orange, lemon, apricot, peach, and plum trees. The plum in particular can be quite prolific. One year it was so heavily laden with fruit the branches were in danger of breaking, and my mum and sister spent virtually the whole of their visit making plum jam and a variety of plum-based dishes in a vain attempt not to let it go to waste. Unfortunately the all-plum diet gave everyone a raging case of the squirts the very day that the man came to knock down and rebuild the wall of the bathroom. Never has a builder been invited - nay implored - to take so many tea-breaks.

Anyway, since in the summer everything is so arid, it's lovely to have the chance to spot some of the bulbs and other plants that you would otherwise never know were there, and also to hear birdsong rather than the incessant scraping of cicadas. This year when we went everywhere was carpeted with cyclamen, autumn crocus, and arums. There were ferns sprouting out of hitherto barren corners, the rosemary in the garden seemed to be attracting an enormous number of butterflies and the trees were full of small birds, especially robins.

Unfortunately, however, autumn is also the time of the year when pretty much every able-bodied male on the island dons camouflage, grabs a gun, and heads for the hills to murder any unsuspecting wee birdie rash enough to call in for a bit of a sit down on its long journey south. So, every morning at sunrise the valley echoed to the sound of gunfire and we were repeatedly warned by friends and neighbours that, if we must persist in this peculiar habit of walking places for fun, we should be sure to wear bright clothing and talk loudly so as to avoid being mistaken for something which could be made into soup.

It came as little surprise then, when one day, walking along the road after having had lunch by the sea, my dad came across the sorry little corpse of one of the robins. It didn't appear to have been shot, but had quite possibly been startled by gunfire and died of fright. For reasons best known to himself he picked it up, wrapped it in a hanky, and gave it to my mum to put in her handbag.***

The same day we went to visit the local olive press. This is a long, low, concrete building by the side of the road. It has been there as long as I can remember and never seems to have changed in 30-odd years, but because I'd never been there at the right time of year I'd never seen it in action. This time there were sacks of olives piled up at the front and the place was a hive of activity as numerous men stood around chatting, sipping wine, and "supervising", and one small boy (someone's nephew apparently) ferried endless bags of olives up the ramp and tipped them into a hopper at one end of a long and complicated piece of machinery.

Having been shown around the machine itself we were invited to taste some of the freshly processed oil. A rather raffish-looking man with a huge handlebar mustache seized the top part of P's pram - only just giving me chance to detach it from the wheels - and lifted it up into the press, and we were all ushered inside to a table by the end of the machine on which was a bowl of bright green oil, and a loaf of brown bread. Having handed both mum and me a huge hunk of bread absolutely dripping with oil, mustache-man then turned back to the table and, with a flourish like a conjurer doing a magic trick, whisked aside a napkin to reveal a dead fish.

Quite what sort of fish it had once been was hard to tell - mackerel possibly. It was certainly oily and had apparently been salted and smoked whole, entrails and all. Mercifully, as he handed me
a slice the innards fell out onto the floor saving me from having to decide what to do with them. Although I am generally quite a fan of both salty things and oily fish, I have no hesitation in pronouncing it to be one of the most revolting things I've ever eaten. Fortunately my mum happened to have bag containing leftovers from lunch that we were taking home for the cat, so the fish surreptitiously disappeared into that.

However, at that point P - disconcerted by the noise of the machinery and the large number of strange shouty people - began to look a bit tearful. This gave me a bit of a dilemma as I had olive oil and fish oil running down both arms as far as the elbow and my hankies, muslins, etc. were all in the pram outside. Mum started rifling in her handbag in search of her handkerchief, but suddenly realized -thankfully before she produced it in public - that it contained a dead robin. This realization reduced both of us to fits of giggles, but at least that had the effect of distracting P from his woes. I was just beginning to think I would have to wipe my hands on the baby when someone kindly produced some napkins from somewhere and we were able to restore ourselves to some degree of cleanliness and make our excuses.

The robin was taken home and given a decent burial.

*Previously we had what was no doubt a wild flower meadow in the spring, but in the summer was a forest of hideous spikes. Three sorts always seemed to predominate: the tall ones with the 2-inch spikes that slashed at your legs as you passed; the ones with the little balls of spikes that get inside your clothing and can't be got out, so that even after you think you've extracted them some of the thorns are still left; and the round flat ones, with spikes all the way along the edge, especially adapted for getting into sandals.
**Of the eight stock plants my aunt gave us last spring, only one was still alive when we got there this autumn, the others having made the mistake of trying to grow in a flowerbed occupying a handy position for dumping bags of sand.
*** This habit of collecting dead animals seems to be a peculiarity of the men in our family. I fondly recall being stopped at customs on one occasion so that the official could investigate a suspicious-looking box, which on inspection proved to contain the discarded skins of a snake and a cicada, three sea-shells, an interesting pebble, and a flattened, desiccated frog that one of my brothers had scraped up off a road somewhere.

A place in the sun.

2009-11-03T13:58:00.015Z

A couple of months ago C announced that he was going to have to work away from home for a week at the end of October, so rather than staying at home on our own P and I decided to go and stay with my parents. However, as luck would have it, they were spending the week in question at our "place" in Greece, rather than in Manchester, so our week away turned out to be a bit more adventurous than originally envisaged.

"The House" as it is universally (and somewhat ironically) known amongst our family is essentially a shed with ideas above its station. It started life as a field that my parents bought when they were first married. In the early days, when I was very small, we used just to spend our summers camping there on the side of the hill, surrounded by thistles, drawing our drinking water from the well at the top of the hill, and washing our clothes in the river at the bottom. Then, some time in the early 80s, my dad decided to construct some permanent form of sunshade, and so began his 25+ year love-affair with cement.

Over the years walls and roofs have come and gone and "The House" has gradually evolved into something resembling a dwelling. But until recently all the work was done by us, and since no one in the family is a qualified builder, plumber, joiner, etc. this meant progress was slow to say the least. For one thing we only ever got to work on it in the summer holidays, and for another bits sometimes fell down again or got eaten by things in the intervening period. Most of my summer holidays as a child and young adult involved camping in a building site and taking part in entertaining holiday activities such as building walls, climbing on the roof in search of cracked tiles, or having competitions with my sister as to who could carry the most cement-blocks. On one notable occasion, the truck delivering the two tonnes of sand my dad had ordered failed to make it up the steep unmade road, and so, in the absence of a donkey, my mum and I spent the whole holiday taking it in turns to be harnessed to a wheelbarrow until we had finally hauled the whole lot up the hill.

Until relatively recently we had no electricity and no running water and even once the latter was acquired the only way to heat it was by boiling a kettle on the gas stove. Returning from swimming and trailing up the 1 in 3 hill in 35 degree heat to be rewarded by an ice-cold shower in freezing water which had spent the night in a concrete tank became something of a holiday ritual, and the locals must have known when we were in residence by the screams echoing across the valley.

So, previously the idea of taking a small baby there in late October would have worried me.* But mercifully, in recent years, with retirement beckoning, my dad has finally come round to the idea that he should get someone who knows what they're doing to help him and so, largely thanks to M., a German builder living in Greece, "The House" has suddenly become a great deal more habitable and is now beginning finally to live up to its name. M. is remarkable for his painstaking attention to detail (which drives my dad - who is of the ply-wood and gaffer tape school of DIY** - round the bend, but does mean that what he builds stays up) and also for the fact that, although he speaks both English and Greek well enough to run a business, whatever language he is speaking he remains steadfastly faithful to his mother tongue when it comes to conjunctions.***

Assisting M. has been a progression of incredibly hard working (mostly Albanian) odd-job men, the latest of whom (another M.) is a mild-mannered, barrel-chested chap, capable of strolling up the forty or so steps from the gate carrying a 50kg bag of cement on his shoulder as if it were just a large, rather dusty pillow. Progress has also been massively expedited by the invention of the mobile phone which allows us to ring up and order stuff without having to trek down to the local shop to borrow their telephone or pass messages with random people who happen to be passing the builders' merchant. It also allows people to ring us, which is both useful, and has the added bonus of providing us with entertainment as several times a day we are treated to the sight of my dad scampering about the place accompanied by a tinny rendition of "The Flight of the Bumblebee", frantically trying to find his mobile.

Anyway, the upshot is that we now have a roof which contains neither holes nor termites (no longer do we lie in bed at night listening to the faint but ominous sound of munching, neither do we have to leap out of bed at the first patter of raindrops to gather all our possessions together on a table in middle of the floor and then sit huddled together in the one dry patch surrounded by buckets). The bathroom finally has a wall and a door (for several years it had one or the other, but not both), and the fireplace and wood-burning stove send the heat into the house and the smoke out of it, and not the other way around. Add to this a proper solar water heater (installed in the nick of time the morning we arrived) to replace the ad hoc one built by my brother last year and it has finally become possible to be relatively comfortable there at other times of the year than the height of summer (provided there are at least a couple of hours of sunshine during the day). Ok, it still lacks a few of the finer luxuries, like floor tiles and furniture, but P and the rest of us were able to spend a thoroughly comfortable week (relatively speaking) enjoying a bit of late autumn sunshine.

to be continued (hopefully)...

* Although my parents would be quick to point out that it never did any of us any harm.
** As witnessed by the fact that nearly 30 years after we started the project we're still concerned with minor details like flooring and plumbing.
*** For instance, "These are good rawl-plugs you bring from England, aber unfortunately it is a Greek wall".

Playing ketchup.

2009-09-22T12:19:00.003+01:00

Like the allotment, the knitting has taken a bit of a knock recently, at least where progress is concerned. However, I am still managing to get the odd few rows done of an evening, and I did finally get to the end of the Mitred Square blanket.

In fact, this has been finished for a while now but has been waiting to be blocked. It still isn't blocked, but I finally decided just to blog it anyway as who knows when I'll get round to it! I'm fairly pleased with it though I slightly regret my decision knit it as separate squares and sew it together rather than picking up stitches. Try as I might, I couldn't get the seaming neat enough on the back for me to be entirely happy with it so now I'm toying with the idea of backing it with some cotton. But that can't be done until after it's blocked so at the moment it's still in limbo.

The Tangled Yoke cardigan is still on its needles (though fast approaching its first birthday). It has made it as far as the tangle, but then stalled again as this requires rather more concentration than I can usually muster of an evening.

Instead I've been playing about making things for P now that the weather's getting cooler and he might actually get some use from his woolies. I managed to rustle up this little red raglan cardigan for him whilst on holiday in Norfolk. Top-down seamless raglans are just so satisfying I find, and when they're this size they progress with gratifying speed. Having been left with the best part of a ball of the cotton I was then overcome by a fit of silliness and couldn't resist making the hat to match. I was originally thinking red pepper, but I think it's definitely tomatoesque now it's done.

The fruit (and vegetable) of our labours.

2009-09-21T16:41:00.004+01:00

All in all the allotment hasn't perhaps had quite the amount of care and attention it could have had this year. Early planting was somewhat hampered by the fact that I couldn't bend down, and P's arrival coincided pretty closely with the time we should have been thinning and planting out those crops we did manage to sow. Once here, he also swiftly put paid to my fond ideas of pottering over to the allotment with the pram on balmy summer afternoons to do a bit of weeding/watering, etc. For one thing, it is virtually impossible to get the pram onto our plot on your own without tipping the poor little blighter out of it and into nextdoor's raspberry canes. For another, P has a very limited amount of patience when it comes to lying in his pram and being ignored, and soon starts shouting if you try to go off and do things which don't involve him. For a while the sling seemed to be the answer, but he soon reached a weight which made my knees buckle even if I wasn't trying to haul watering-cans about at the same time, and the bigger he gets the more difficult it is to see/reach past him to do anything. These days too, small hands shoot out to grab anything that comes within reach and convey it inexorably towards his mouth, whether the thing in question is edible or not.

So, gone are the days of spending all Sunday morning working away together while listening to the Archers omnibus, and these days allotmenting tends to be the odd half hour here and there, as a result of which a few things have gone a bit awry. The carrots, for instance, tasted ok, but since I never got chance to thin them out, quite a few took on interesting corkscrew forms where they had been pressing against one another. For the same reason we ended up with one raised bed which was wall-to-wall lettuce, all of which bolted much faster than we could eat it. The greatest disappointment, however, has been the cabbages. Unfortunately our homemade protective nets rather had the opposite effect to that intended, since they seem to have trapped a butterfly on the inside. As a result we ended up with skeletal cabbages and a bumper crop of caterpillars.

But nevertheless, all things considered our first proper season hasn't been too bad. As well as the lettuce and carrots we've had spring onions, radishes, and strawberries. Admittedly some of the radishes got forgotten and ended up the size of small turnips, but what the heck. Our unintentionally patriotic potatoes (three sorts: red, white, and blue) produced a reasonable crop, though they would no doubt have done better if we'd been more conscientious about earthing them up, and we have three little bags* of shallots hanging in the garage - plenty for our purposes. A summer of "sunshine and showers" also meant we spent most of July and August knee-deep in courgettes and runner beans and this week we harvested most of the borlotti beans which are now drying and waiting for me to find out precisely what one does with them.

Not too bad all things considered. Time to start thinking about next year now.

*For "bags" read "fishnet pop-socks". Well, where are you supposed to get little string bags from?

A delightful week in the country.

2009-09-18T15:51:00.005+01:00

Last week we had our first holiday "en famille" - a week in a rented cottage in Norfolk - and it was great.

Owing to the fact that we went to a wedding on the morning we left and drove to Norfolk after the wedding breakfast, stopping halfway for a brief visit to P's uncle, we arrived at "The Barn" rather late on the Sunday night. But in spite of the inconvenient timing of our arrival, we were greeted by a roaring fire left for us by the owners along with croissants, butter and milk for breakfast, not to mention fresh eggs and a note encouraging to help ourselves to any more that appeared in the hen house during the week and to apples from the trees in the garden.

Having contrived through sheer good fortune to hit upon one of the best periods of weather in the whole summer we spent a happy week pottering, exploring the countryside, and enjoying the peace and quiet. P saw his first Norman castle,

went on his first steam train

got sand between his toes and saw the sea for the first time, though it wasn't really warm enough to get any closer.

And the weather was perfect. Warm and sunny though not hot, but cool enough in the evenings for us to make good use of the wood burning stove. I even managed to do a bit of knitting. Bliss!

Parentcraft

2009-06-16T17:07:00.005+01:00

For one reason and another my crafting (and indeed blogging) activities have been somewhat curtailed recently. Obviously, the main reason is the arrival of our son. However, even before he was born the knitting took a bit of a knock. To begin with this was because of the urgent need to devote all spare time to getting the house into some sort of habitable shape for an infant. So my cheerful plans of spending my early maternity leave sitting in the rocking-chair knitting were replaced with seemingly interminable days spent frantically sanding and painting skirting-boards, window-ledges etc. Then, just when all the decorating was done, and I could finally settle down to some yarn-related nesting, I developed carpal tunnel syndrome and found I could no longer hold the needles.

This was a bit of a blow because up to this point, in my few spare moments, I had been concentrating on making presents for several friends and relations also expecting babies around the same time as me* and though projects these were all very enjoyable to knit, it would have been nice to have something for P. when he arrived. Unfortunately, however, the combination of the carpal tunnel, and my somewhat misplaced conviction that P. would be late, meant that the blanket I was making for him remains a sorry little pile of mitred-squares with no real prospect of completion any time soon.**

In spite of this, though, P. hasn't had to go without...

First we received a crocheted cotton blanket, originally made for me when I was born by my Yia yia and re-worked and re-edged for P. by his Yia yia - lovely and cool and perfect for the long promised "barbecue summer" should it materialize.

My mum also passed on to me this beautiful lace-knit shawl which was made for me by my Great Great Aunty Nell when I was a baby.

From P's other grandma we received a lovely pram blanket made to her own design from Debbie Bliss Cathay, which is just the right combination of warm and cool for going out and about in the slightly undecided English summer weather.

Katie presented us with a gorgeous Hemlock Ring Blanket which is light as a feather but still warm enough to cover up a little one when there's a chilly breeze.

And from the Bluestockings came a colourful and wonderfully smooshy Garter Squares blanket, perfect for lying on in the sunshine and watching the ceiling gnomes.***

So, in spite of my incompetence, P. now has the most wonderful array of blankets, all in different styles, weights, and yarns: something for every occasion and climatic possibility, and all much more lovely than anything I would have produced.

Not only that, but, thanks to Liz he has a very smart stripy cardi to wear, and a beautiful quilt and sampler brightening his nursery courtesy of Sara and his Great Aunt Alison respectively.

Isn't it great to have crafty friends!

* All girls, surprisingly. I mean all the babies were girls, not that all the people having them were girls, which is something of a biological inevitability. Projects Ravelled here, here, and here.
** Thus far my one successfully completed post-baby project is an ipod sock and that took me the best part of two weeks!
*** I am reliably informed that there is a species of gnome whose job it is to dance about on the ceiling and entertain small babies, which is why they always appear to be fascinated by something just behind your shoulder.

We apologise for the break in transmission.

2009-06-03T12:40:00.001+01:00

This is due to circumstances beyond our control. (Nearly) normal service will be resumed at the first possible opportunity (i.e. probably in about 16 years!).

Tiddly-pom.

2009-02-08T10:52:00.000Z

This week we've had what is, by my standards, quite a lot of snow. I say 'by my standards' since snow is not something I'm really very familiar with. I grew up in south-west Manchester where a combination of the Gulf Stream and the Pennines means that snow is relatively rare and any weather system of that sort has usually deposited most of its load on Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and higher-lying parts of Manchester* long before it reaches us. In fact, in the whole of my childhood I only really remember one substantial snowfall, which must have been some time in the early 80s.

That occasion was notable for two reasons. Firstly, there was enough snow for my dad, my sister and I to roll a snowball all the way down the hill from near the church to our house, a distance of several hundred yards. In my memory this snowball was the size of a small car, though since I was even shorter then than I am now, I suspect this is something of an exaggeration. It was certainly very heavy and we had to enlist the help of several passers-by to move it the last few yards. I think the original plan was to make a snowman, but by the time we'd got it home we'd all rather lost interest, so it just sat outside the house for a remarkably long time, slowly dwindling and (owing to the interest of passing dogs) taking on a disturbingly yellow tinge towards the bottom.

Secondly, it was the one occasion when we were permitted to break the embargo on playing on the nearby golf course. We spent the afternoon happily sliding down the slope at one end on our newly acquired (and soon to be abandoned) yellow plastic sledge, along with several other kids, the only one of whom I now remember was a lad called Colin, famous for having once addressed the most ferocious dinner-lady in the school using an interesting combination of four-letter words, the existence of which the rest of us had only heard vaguely hinted at.** Again, in my memory this slope included an immense drop worthy of an olympic ski-jump, though given the fact that the place is on the Mersey flood-plain, this can't really have been the case. What I do remember for certain, however, is that the fun came to an abrupt end for me when some sort of aerodynamic instability resulted in my reaching the bottom of said slope with me on the bottom and the sledge on the top, and a large quantity of what was by then very hard, compacted ice went up my jumper and severely grazed my back.

Anyway, this week I have for the first time in my life experienced being effectively snowed in, but not quite for the reasons I'd have expected. In my mind being "snowed in" has always conjured up the tales a Norwegian friend used to tell of only being able to get out of the bedroom windows, but in our case it wasn't getting out of the house that caused the problem so much as getting anywhere else once one was out.

On Monday despite the fact that there was only a relatively paltry inch or two here, London - if accounts on the radio were to be believed - was completely buried in a single 40-foot drift. As a result most of the trains to Oxford (at least all those originating in London) weren't running. A fairly short sojourn in the freezing cold at the station, where there was no information on when, or even if, a train might be expected, convinced both me and my manager that my time could be spent more productively working from home, so back I went. On Thursday by contrast we awoke to a fluffy white blanket 4 or 5 inches deep, but I made it into work with only a fairly mild amount of inconvenience and back with no trouble at all. Friday, however, was a different story.

Again we got up to find that in the night another few inches had been added to the not inconsiderable snow that remained from the day before, and again, with cries of 'Call that snow? That's not snow - I used to live in Chicago!' from C, we set off as normal. However, it soon became apparent that there are some significant differences between Chicago and Didcot when it comes to snow. First of all, Chicago has snowploughs. Secondly, people who live in Chicago know about driving in snow even on uncleared roads.

We made our way towards the station, C adeptly rescuing us from the slight skid that resulted from turning out on to the refrozen sheet-ice that was the ungritted main road and negotiating both the enormous potholes which seem to have opened up in the road surface where it had been mended with what was presumably snow-soluble tarmac, and the imbecile 4x4 drivers still smugly belting about the place at 40mph. On the slight incline which is the closest Didcot has to a hill people were frantically spinning their wheels and cursing and the roundabout at the end of the road resembled a curling rink. It was packed with cars gingerly inching forwards and the occasional impatient idiot sailing inexorably past their desired exit, sideways, at speed, with a look of slight bewilderment.

Having mercifully negotiated the roundabout without incident, however, we then discovered that the queue of traffic on the road to the station did not result, as it usually does, from some kid having pressed all the pelican-crossing buttons, but was in fact nose-to-tail as far as the eye could see with an ominous siren noise emanating from somewhere towards the A34. At this point it started snowing heavily again and we decided that a "snow day" might be in order after all and went back home.

Under other circumstances I would simply have walked to the station, but given that increasing bumpage means that I am considerably less steady on my feet than usual at the moment, this didn't seem like a particularly good idea. It's not that I have entirely lost my sense of balance or become incapable of normal exercise, but the unaccustomed weight/girth means that I am apt to over-compensate if I feel myself start to slide. The day before I only completed the walk from the station to work by a) walking in the road where it had been gritted or b) clinging to fences, railings, and the wall of Worcester college. And aside from the obvious disadvantages of falling on one's face when pregnant, the prospect of being plunged into the grey-brown semi-frozen slurry that was two inches deep on all the pavements - particularly when I only have two pairs of trousers that fit and the other ones were in the wash - was not an attractive one. Added to which there was the distinct possibility that once down on such a slippery surface I would be unable to get up again unassisted, and would be left flapping and floundering in the stuff like some small woolly cetacean.

So, I called in and opted to take the day as leave and we sat around the house doing the sort of thing that seemed appropriate to being snowbound, which in my case was mostly knitting and eating hot buttered crumpets. C worked from home on his laptop except for a brief interlude when in a fit of Chicago-inspired nostalgia he went out to "shovel the sidewalk". Since he is in fact British, however, he drew the line at doing any more than the bit immediately in line with our property, and since neither of our neighbours even cuts their grass or opens their curtains on a regular basis, this made very little difference. In fact the only effect was that periodically an unpleasant gritty sound accompanied by muttering emanated from outside the front door as a parent who was happily towing their small child on a sledge hit the snowless section and started spraying up sparks.

Nevertheless, it's secretly always good to have an excuse for an unexpected day of idleness, particularly when it's not accompanied by illness and is accompanied by tea and crumpets. And it meant that I finally reached the end of my bootee-knitting marathon and made some serious progress on the second Mingus sock which has been languishing since before Christmas. Today the temperature finally made it above zero, most of the roads are clear, and an increasing number of the pavements, and even in the garden the occasional thing is beginning to poke its head back up above the (now rock-hard) snow. Now there's just the small matter of the "severe winter storm" they're forecasting for tomorrow...

*Like Liz's house.
** As I recall there were extenuating circumstances: in a bizarre accident the dinner-lady in question had just inadvertently sliced off the tip of his finger while opening the gate onto the playing-field.

A Good Read?

2009-02-06T13:05:00.005Z

One of the small perks of a job like mine is coming across books you'd never encounter otherwise, particularly those with weird and wonderful titles, and the last few weeks have been a particularly productive period in this respect. Usually I don't get to read enough of the book in question to establish what it's about, so, for instance, I never did get to find out what was so impossible about Babs the Impossible (1901) or who or what the "Nobbles" of Me and Nobbles (1908) was. Neither was I able to take the time to discover precisely what sort of climatic conditions the author might have had in mind when he entitled his 1944 book The Incredible Year: An Australian sees Europe in 'Adolf Hitler Weather'.

Sometimes, however, ignorance on the point of subject matter is to be preferred, as the book itself turns out to be nowhere near as interesting as the title might lead one to expected. Imagine my disappointment, for instance, when one of my all-time favourite eighteenth-century titles - The Coal-Heaver's Cousin Rescued from the Bats; and his Incomparable Cordials Recovered (1788) - turned out to be a rather dull religious tract and not a rollicking tale of derring-do at all. Likewise The Mental Accountant (also 1788) proved to be a self-help guide to doing long-division, rather than, as I'd hoped, an early novel about a young man driven to insanity by the exigencies of double-entry book-keeping.

One work which does sound as though it might be a good read, however is The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew the noted Devonshire Stroller and Dog-Stealer (1745) which purports to be the autobiography of one 'Gypsie Carew'. Described by the Oxford DNB as 'Carew, Bampfylde-Moore (1693-1759), impostor', he was apparently the son of a Devonshire rector who ran away from home to take up a career in swindling and general blackguardry. At various times this included eloping with (and later abandoning) the daughter of a Newcastle apothecary (goodness knows how since his portrait suggests he was a remarkably ugly man with an even uglier dog - presumably stolen), being transported to Maryland as an 'idle vagrant', managing not to be press-ganged on the way back by pretending to have smallpox, being elected 'King or Chief of the Gypsies', and travelling the country with the Young Pretender.

Carew seems to have got away with quite a lot of his nefarious undertakings. Not so another unsavoury character I recently came across in Lloyd's Weekly London Newspaper for Sunday, February 27, 1848. W. Johnson, alias Montroe, alias 'Jim the Greek' and his accomplices J. Flower and J. Bunton were apparently involved in arranging and executing a number of burglaries in and around Woolwich. According to the newspaper, on this occasion they approached a Mr Duffill to see whether he would help them set up another job and the following (rather comical) exchange took place:

'Bunton said, "Would a thick one or two be convenient this cold weather?" Duffill said "I do not understand"- when Bunton rejoined, "Can you tumble?", meaning, understand, Duffill said no, and Bunton said, "Do you know of any one that has any dust?" Duffill said, "I know not what you mean."'

and who can blame him!

You'd have thought that this would have been enough to indicate to the gang that this Duffill chap wasn't perhaps a dyed-in-the-wool crook of their own caliber, but they apparently explained to him in words he could understand that they would "go regulars in" (i.e. give him a share in the proceeds from) any job he could put them up to. At which point Duffill agreed and then promptly went off and told the police, who arranged a set up and caught them in the act. When Flower's house was searched "skeleton keys and various burglarious instruments most ingeniously concealed, were found". And that, as they say, was that.

Now why don't you get crime reports like that in the papers these days?

A New Year's Revolution

2008-12-31T13:21:00.011Z

Yet again the first day of the Christmas holidays was greeted in our house with the traditional cry - 'I don't feel very well'. Faced with the prospect of a half-day at work followed by the long drive to Manchester, C. manfully struggled out of bed looking like a wet rag and, insisting he would be fine, went downstairs and poured his coffee onto his breakfast cereal, at which point it was decided that maybe we'd go up the following day after all, when hopefully he'd be a bit better. By the next day he did indeed feel a bit better, and I felt a lot worse. So we passed Christmas Eve in the time-honoured fashion, listening to the Nine Lessons and Carols in heavy traffic on the M6 whilst I sucked cough lozenges and frantically knitted last minute Christmas presents, and Christmas morning found me with a festive tea-towel on my head humming Dink Donk Berrily on High into a steaming bowl of Vicks VapoRub.

In spite of this inauspicious start, however, Christmas itself was a very merry affair with two-thirds of the family gathered together to eat too much, drink too much, and wear silly paper hats (the remainder being condemned to an antipodean Christmas consisting of lying on the beach with temperatures in the high thirties centigrade, poor things). After some initial trepidation and a prolongued spell of chestnut-wrestling, we successfully cooked our goose (once we'd finally pursuaded it into the largest roasting tin we could find) and used the resulting fat to produce some very fine roast potatoes and (as a result of an impromptue game of hunt-the-table-mat) a small skating rink in the middle of the kitchen floor*.

Everyone seemed happy with their presents, though since we bought my parents a dishwasher and they gave us half a shed, not everything was actually wrapped up. My brother and his partner had gone to considerably trouble to wrap up our present from them, though we didn't have much trouble guessing what it was nevertheless (it's a large spade).

Getting it out of the wrapping was another matter, however. Alongside a lot of other lovely booty I also received a gratifyingly large number of exciting knitting-related presents, including the lovely gold-plated Harmony needles set from C.

The Christmas knitting was a bit of a wash-out however. My cunning plan to order yarn to arrive whilst C. was away at a conference so I could knit him a hat and scarf in secret fell at the first hurdle when it failed to arrive until the day after he came back. Abandoning all attempts at secrecy I decided to start with the scarf which was supposed to be made from Rowan Purelife organic wool (in colourway tannin), but so much of the dye came out that after simply casting on my hands looked like I'd been knitting with newspaper, so that went back into the basket to be experimented with at a later date.

Instead I turned to the hat, which had by now become two hats, since my mum had also requested one for my dad. His existing favoured headgear was one of those ribbed acrylic affairs that ought to be rolled at the bottom and worn as a sort of beanie with a big rolled brim, but my dad prefers to leave it unrolled and only pull it down as far as the tops of his ears, leaving the remainder standing up on the top of his head like a black woolly nipple and causing my mum great consternation, particularly when they have to go out in public together. So, all the way up the motorway I frantically plugged away at Turn a Square, but despite having got gauge and produced a very nearly finished hat by the time we reached our destination, it soon became apparent that even on C's capacious dome the thing looked like a pillowcase, so it had to be frogged and reknit on smaller needles. Neither was done in time for Christmas, but they did both get done over the "festive period", and seem to have been hits, in the recent cold weather, so all's well that ends well.

In fact, this Christmas knitting has followed the pattern of most of the autumn which has been a singularly unproductive period knitting-wise for me. I still have only one Mingus sock, and the Tangled Yoke, though it has edged forward a little in the last few days, has largely languished unattended. In part this was because I had to break off to make other things, such as the Felix cardigan and more recently large numbers of Christmas-card stockings.

However, overall my lack of progress has mostly been due to a rather different sort of WIP.

Between the middle of September and late November I was suffering terribly from what is commonly, and in my case completely erroneously, known as morning sickness. For me this struck virtually every day from about 5.30pm onwards, putting a serious crimp on my social life and turning me into what I recently saw described as a 'bog ostrich'.** As a result, instead of passing my evenings knitting, blogging and in various other gainful practices, I spent the majority of them lying on the bathroom floor. Mercifully, however, this has now finally passed and so normal knitting service should be resumed presently, though how long it will last is another question, since all being well, the major production of 2009 should be a little boy, due sometime in mid-May.

*It's a long story... Basically the table-mat was put under the roast potatoes when they were removed from the oven for stirring and then seemingly vanished. After much searching we all became convinced it had been put back into the oven with the potatoes, so my brother took them out again and held the tray in the air so that we could inspect the bottom of it. Only he didn't manage to keep it quite level... Needless to say the mat turned up later somewhere else but despite much scrubbing the kitchen floor retained its ice-like quality for the rest of the evening, being only slightly improved by the addition of several ounces of flour during a gravy-making escapade later on.

** A person who ends every evening with their head down the lavatory.

FFOs, FPOs, and FSOs

2008-11-16T20:55:00.003Z

In the absence of anything more exciting to report, here are a couple of Finally Finished Objects, Finally Posted, and couple of Finally Started Objects too.

Firstly a Very Belated Baby Blanket for Katie and Will (and more to the point baby W).

This is a fairly simple crochet blanket in Patons 2ply Baby Pure Wool, but for all that I was quite pleased with it. I started off following a Sirdar pattern my mum bought years ago, but after the central panel decided I didn't like the stitch for the side panels and so modified it slightly. Despite being quite a straightforward crochet, however, it took me an absolute eternity to finish it, for which I am eternally embarrassed. It was supposed to take me two weeks and in the end it took more like six (plus a bit of time at the end to get round to blocking and posting it). But it has finally reached its destination at last, albeit somewhat later than its intended recipent.

Secondly a pair of Baby Moc-a-Socs for Iestyn. I love this pattern and have been meaning to make it for someone for ages. These didn't take very long and were great fun to knit (though I think I might make some mods the next time round to reduce the amount of seaming which I hate - not that there was exactly a lot of it in the first place).

And so to the Finally Started Objects. I've managed to get my train knitting back on track (haha) and have slowly but surely been making my way along a Mingus sock in Jitterbug velvet plum from my stash. I've had the yarn for absolutely ages but have been dithering over what to use it for. It has been earmarked for any number of pairs of socks in the past, but never made it as far a the needles before. However, I finally bit the bullet and it's working very nicely for Mingus: the stitch definition is good and the twisted stitch pattern shows up well.

There have so far only been two small flies in the ointment. The first materialized when in an attempt to be sensible I decided to divide the yarn in half before starting to knit. I carefully weighed and re-wound it into two balls, but didn't notice until after I'd cut it that one 'half' was rather larger that the other. It turns out that the the fact that I got the same weight when I weighed each ball actually reflected the fact that the scales were malfunctioning rather than that they weighed the same! The next few days should see whether I can actually make it to the toe of the first sock with the smaller 'half'. The second fly was the snapping of one of my 2.25mm Brittany needles whilst trying to execute a sssk on the train on the way home. However, as ever Liz came to the rescue and picked up another pack for me from Iknit a couple of days later, so I now have 10 2.25 dpns, which should be enough to get me to the end, even if the large number of ssks and k3togs the pattern involves means I arrive there in a shower of splinters.

And finally, I have succeeded in casting on for the Tangled Yoke, which is supposed to be my "home" project for the time being. This too got off to a bit of a bumpy start. Having supplemented my pre-stashed 4 balls of felted tweed with some more of a different dyelot in order to get enough for the project, extensive swatching proved beyond doubt that I would have to knit from two balls at once since the difference in the two lots was clearly visible. So I cast on and knit a row or so. Then I realised I'd cast on for the wrong size so I frogged and cast on again and knit a few more rows. Then I realised that at some point I'd become confused about which ball I was knitting with and in which direction and had started at the wrong end and with the wrong ball so that I now had wonky ribs. So I frogged again, cast on again, and knit a bit more. At the moment that's as far as it's got, but I'm hopeful that I'm over the worst. At least for the time being.

Knitting and Not

2008-10-26T07:56:00.007Z

Once again, it has been a ridiculously long time since my last post. In part this is because, for much of September at least, C. and I were off enjoying a long and luxurious holiday. I came back with grand plans of blogging it all in detail, but once back, a series of very busy weekends, and work, and various other more pressing things pushed it out of my mind, and somehow it never happened. For similar reasons my knitting has also been at something of a low ebb, and I haven't had much to report on that front either, but finally I thought I should devote my extra hour this weekend to catching up a bit, albeit in a slightly potted version.

So, the holiday... We started off, (like a large number of other rather more newsworthy people this summer) in Corfu. I hadn't been to Corfu before except to change ferries (well my mum tells me I had but I was about 3 at the time and don't remember it, so it doesn't really count). On reflection, arriving at 7am on a Sunday after an overnight flight when we couldn't check in until 1 might have been a mistake. It did give us the chance to look around the old town whilst it was quiet and empty, but by the time we'd spent 6 hours wandering around in the increasing heat we were wilting slightly. Our cunning plan only to sleep for an hour in order to avoid getting out of sync and not being able to sleep later also came to grief, as we returned to the hotel in the evening to find that the Greek Communist Party were holding some sort of festival in the park outside the window. Not that it kept us awake for very long, mind.

However, the following day proved to be much more successful. We knew that it was possible to cross from Corfu to Albania and take a day trip to the ancient site of Butrint, but we weren't quite sure how. At breakfast in the morning, though, we bumped into a chap who was working in Albania (though actually from Kidlington!), and who not only allowed us to share his taxi to the port (and blagged us onto the hydrofoil in spite of the fact that we hadn't got tickets in advance as we should have), but also put us in touch with a retired school teacher in Saranda, who, for a small consideration, hired a taxi-driver and acted as our guide for the day. As a result, we not only made it to Butrint,

but also to the Ottoman town (and UNESCO World Heritage Site) of Gjirokaster,

and most importantly for me, into the mountains along the Greek border to the village of Sotira, where both my dad's parents were born.

Driving in Albania was a bit of an experience, but the driver was very good and, since every car in Albania seems to be a Mercedes, it was accomplished in relative comfort (and with the temperature at 39 we were definitely glad of the air con). Perhaps the weirdest thing about the whole experience, though, was the landscape: incredibly high mountains either side of a completely flat plain, and hundreds and hundreds of concrete bunkers everywhere. Across the plain they were strung out in lines barely 100m apart (the lines of little white dots in this photo are all pillboxes).

The only downside to this packed schedule was that, with the boat back at 5pm we had to do everything at a bit of a run, with the result that we didn't really get to see anything in detail. We basically sprinted around Butrint and Gjirocaster before leaping back in the car and setting off down increasingly tiny roads to Sotira, which according to Vangel, the guide, is locally known as the village that only has sun for 6 hours a day even in the summer, because the mountains on either side are so high. Despite having quite an impressive church and school-house (both we were told built with money sent back by people who had left the village to work abroad) Sotira is tiny and almost entirely empty these days. The few locals who were around were very friendly, Greek-speaking and happy to talk to me, but unfortunately, the aforementioned mountains meant that when I texted my dad to tell him where we were going, his message telling me which relatives to ask after and where the house Papou used to live in was, only reached me as we cleared the mountains on leaving. Nevertheless, finally getting there was definitely the highlight of the holiday to me, and having discovered that it really wasn't all that hard, perhaps one day we can go back for a bit longer.

Back on Corfu we spent another couple of days trying to see a bit more of the island. Unfortunately we spent rather more time than we'd bargained for looking for the place we'd booked to stay on the Tuesday, until finally, having established that the contact phone number had been cut off, the fax number indicated it was in a different part of the island to where the address said it was, and no one in the area it was supposed to be had ever heard of it, we gave up and found somewhere else. We spent a fair bit of time exploring the villages up in the mountains most of which still seemed to be quiet and picturesque, with some lovely traditional buildings (a novelty for us since we're use to Zakynthos where the 1953 earthquake flattened pretty much anything earlier), but although the landscape around the coast was beautiful, the amount of development and tourism meant that I couldn't help finding myself continually thinking "it must have been so much nicer when mum and dad came 30-odd years ago". On the other hand as the 4-wheel drive hire car struggled to drag us up the (really quite impressive) Pantokratoras mountain I was quite glad that we weren't doing it, as my parents did, on an unmade road in a Wartburg estate with a 900cc 2-stroke engine and 5 people in the back! Not all change is necessarily for the worse.

Finally, having packed as much as possible into five days we hoped on a little jolly plane with propellers and flew down the Ionian, via Preveza and Kefalonia, to Zakynthos, where we spent a week and a bit at The House* doing the exact opposite - i.e. practically nothing. We pottered about doing a few odd gardening and diy jobs - putting up some guttering, planting some plants, and creating a compost bin out of an old water barrel (on my mum's insistance I tried to decorate it using some acrylic spray paint left over from some other job but the result looks rather like a floral dalek) - mostly, however, we went swimming twice a day and lay around reading and sleeping. Most enjoyable.

The new extension makes a big difference to the general aspect of The House, especially from the outside, though inside it is still a little on the "basic" side since the floors need retiling and the walls replastering. But at least this year the bathroom had both a door and a wall, which is better than the last time we were there, when rather weirdly it only had the door. We also got to take advantage of the "solar water heater" my brother had rigged up when he was there the month before, which meant warm showers after swimming for the first time ever. Sadly however, autumn arrived in the form of a Biblical-style deluge towards the end of the week and there was no longer enough sun to make it work, so we were once more reduced to begging warm showers from family friend Christina down the road. The cascading rain also washed away all my carefully planted seeds, rushed off the roof so fast that it completely bypassed the newly installed gutters, and came up through the floor in the back room having been successfully thwarted by the new roof and retaining wall from taking any of its more traditional routes into the house. Ho-hum.

The change in the weather did finally spur me to do some knitting though, since up to then the many projects I had brought with me had been languishing in my bag untouched, being altogether too woolly for handling in warm weather. Concentrated knitting in the last couple of days on Zakynthos, on the 6 hour bus journey to Athens, and on the flight on the way home allowed me finally to finish the Bluestockings for my mum, though not quite in time for her birthday.

So far, however, I'm ashamed to admit that that remains my last FO. At least my last knitted one. Part of the reason for not immediately starting something else is that, the weekend after we got back I went on a mosaic-making course and started making a name-plate for The House. The original plan was to complete it in the weekend, but it soon became apparent that that wasn't going to happen. As a result quite a lot of weekends and evenings were subsequently devoted to cutting and sticking tiny bits of tile. But I'm quite pleased with the result.

Since then I have been faffing about trying to decide what to make next and casting things on and then frogging them in a desultory manner. Hopefully sooner or later normal knitting services will be resumed. Must do better.

*For some reason, amongst our family, the small and (until recently at any rate) slightly decrepit building on Zakynthos where we tend to spend only a few weeks a year is generally known as 'The House', despite the fact that a) it is it much less like a house than any of the other houses that we actually live in all the time, and b) it already has a name, albeit one based on a gratuitous pun (see above).

Space, Time, and Probability

2008-08-25T21:47:00.005+01:00

We have a slight problem with space in our house: it is a very small house and, in spite of the fact that there are only two of us, we have a lot of stuff. However, we also have a minor problem with time: we both work full time and so weekends tend to get eaten up by all sorts of dull but necessary activities like housework.

This weekend being a long weekend however, we should in theory have had ample time to do something about the space issue and still have a bit of relaxation. Specifically we decided that we would finally get round to boarding the loft, making extra storage space for some of the stuff currently residing in what is rather grandiosely known as "the study". This is something we've been meaning to do for absolutely ages, but somehow never got around to.

So the plan was as follows:

Saturday - go out and buy loft panels; board the loft; have a relaxing evening.
Sunday - (am) reorganise spare room shunting things which take up a lot of space but are hardly ever used (like my thesis) into the loft and creating lots of luxurious space; (pm) do various small jobs - C. to cut lawn, me to finish and block the "probably jumper" which I've been working on for ages.
Monday- go out for the day and do something nice and have dinner to celebrate my finally passing my driving test.

That was the theory. In practice it went more like this:

Saturday - Oversleep. Think about doing the loft but then decide that the weather is really quite nice and we should take advantage of it. Reschedule loft for the following day. Drive (with me at the wheel) to South Stoke just south of Bath, setting satnav to avoid motorways since I don't feel ready to attempt them just yet.

Satnav extracts revenge for the snubbing of its beloved motorways by sending me down several single track roads on 15% hills. Arrive white and shaking at destination. Have quite a pleasant 9 mile walk taking in part of the Foss Way, marred only slightly by a small amount of rain, being set upon by cows, and me falling into a ditch halfway round. Have the best pub food of the year at the Packhorse. Return home.

Sunday - Oversleep. Extract assorted detritus (our own and the previous occupier's) from loft, including mystery items 1

and 2

along with 7 vol. set of 1970s DIY manuals giving instructions on how to do everything from macrame to marquetry. Spend some time debating which of the fantastic bathroom designs to follow next time we redecorate.

Deposit assorted detritus (not including manuals which far too much fun to part with) at tip and drive to Abingdon to purchase loft boarding. Discover shop in question only has boarding for lofts with joists closer together than ours. Scour Abingdon for alternative boarding and draw a blank. Realise that it is now 3.30 and I am supposed to be meeting a friend at 5 to go to see the Garden Opera Company (arranged a month before). Revise plans for following day to include boarding the loft in the morning and various gardening/knitting tasks in the afternoon followed by slap-up dinner.

Monday - Wake up at 6. Decide it's too early to get up. Oversleep. Rush to Oxford and purchase appropriate boards then do excessively extravagant supermarket shop in preparation for gourmet bank holiday dinner later. Return home. C. disappears into loft; I decide I'll have to cut the grass myself as C won't have time to do it. C. comes out of loft to announce that the gap between the roof trusses isn't the same all the way along and boards will have to be cut to size. Realise have no C-clamps to hold boards onto cutting bench and it is now too late to go and buy any. Spend the rest of the afternoon impersonating a C-clamp by twisting into various bizarre contortions in order to hold bits of wood still while C saws through them with a handsaw having tried and discarded any number of promising-looking power tools. 6pm, still cutting; give up all hope of making complex dinner and decide to have simple baked fish instead. 7pm, second-to-last board; realise we've cut it upsidedown. Recut board with great difficulty since what is left is a funny shape and almost impossible to get a grip on without C. accidentally cutting my arm off. 9pm, loft is now covered in boards; everything else is covered in sawdust. Abandon all hope of dinner and set about clearing up. C. puts assorted detritus back in loft while I fail the basic IQ test which is "put the power tool back in the correctly shaped dent in the box". 10.30pm pizza and pink fizz for supper. Too tired to knit.

Where does the time go?

Brrrm... brrrm... brrrm....

2008-08-22T20:05:00.002+01:00

Today, a mere 17 years after I got my provisional license, I finally got round to taking (and passing) my driving test.

So you'll all know to stay off the roads from now on.

brrrm...brrrm...brrrrm....

In the dock

2008-08-19T21:08:00.005+01:00

I keep hearing how the miserable, wretched, soggy so-called summer weather this year is, "good for the garden" and in particular is producing bumper crops of massive vegetables. Well not in my garden it isn't. All I have to show for it is about 200 small, sour, unrelentingly green tomatoes with not even the slightest suggestion of turning yellow, let alone red, and a greenhouse full of minuscule peppers and aubergines, barely a fruit between them, shivering and dreaming of warmer climes. Not only that but all my courgettes have got brewer's droop. The plants are big and strong and look as though they're going to be impressive performers, but just when the fruits reach about three inches long and everything seems to be going well suddenly go all limp and squashy and then fade away to nothing.* And it's not just the vegetables either: my nasturtiums have been reduced to the finest Shetland lace by caterpillars, although my hops are finally flowering, they are looking distinctly sad and autumnal, and unsurprisingly given the complete and total absence of sun, I have the most pathetically tiny sunflowers ever - about the size of a ten pence piece.

However, there are plants that don't seem to object to the weather: the docks on the allotment for one are going from strength to strength springing up as fast as we can cut them down, as unfortunately is the creeping buttercup. Taking advantage of a brief interlude in the deluge this weekend C. and I set about trying to stem the tide a little bit, digging up something in the region of 180 dock plants in the course of the two days, with roots varying in length between a couple of inches and a couple of feet.** When everyone else is busy taking in the harvest it was a little demoralising to be leaving with nothing but a bucket of rubbish and a bad back, but we also installed two more raised beds and a couple of enormous compost bins, so we're a little closer to having something recognisably allotment.

I did bring back a couple of rather splendid gladioli, a legacy of whoever had the plot before us, which helped to brighten the place up a bit even if they're not actually edible, and we have finally this week tasted the first fruits (or at least salad vegetables) of our labours in the form of two very hearty little lettuces, which the wet weather hasn't done any harm at all (though it's a fair measure of just how wet it has been that I've only had to water the things once since I planted them in July).

At the risk of coming over all Uncle Monty, I do have a soft spot for vegetables as things of beauty in themselves, and there's something very gratifying about such shiny green lusciousness. (They did also taste quite nice). But for the time being, in the absence of other produce I've been having to content myself with admiring illustrations in books and seed catalogues and dreaming of next year (when the weather will hopefully confound expectations and be perfect). If it's not, however, perhaps I can take a leaf out of Felix's book, or indeed this book half-inched from my mum's bookshelf at home, and knit myself a harvest. It's probably easier on the back and definitely less likely to result in nettle-rash.

* And they can't even claim this has never happened to them before either: it happened last year as well, though to be fair the weather was equally rubbish then.
** One of the larger variety did for my garden fork. Well, C. did for my garden fork by putting all his weight on it in an attempt to lever the thing out of the ground, and it was only a "ladies'" fork, but the result is the same. Splinters all round.

Tubas in the Moonlight

2008-08-11T23:03:00.003+01:00

Actually there aren't really any tubas in this post*, but there are some tubers and quite a lot of knitting for once.

The tubers are these - Shetland Black potatoes - which we originally bought to eat, but some of them started sprouting so I planted them, and now have slightly more than I did to start with. It wasn't a very substantial crop, but not bad considering they were growing in a bucket round the back of the greenhouse, and they do scrub up to a rather striking purple colour which it turns out fades to blue when they're cooked, but can be made pink again by the addition of lemon juice.

The weather having reverted to type and gone back to being miserable, cold and wet, however, I've been spending more time indoors knitting than out amongst the plants and have finally managed to produce a few FOs.

First the Moonlight Sonata shawl which I started back in late May. Gratifyingly it used up exactly two of the three skeins of Jitterbug I bought for it, leaving the whole of the third for me to do something else with. I'm not sure that I blocked it quite to the right shape, as I found it a bit difficult to work out exactly how much to stretch the shaping around the shoulders. It doesn't quite do what it looks as though it ought to from the pictures on Ravelry, so perhaps I'll reblock it at some point, but on the whole I'm pleased and it promises to be very cosy. Needless to say, the lousy weather does nothing for the colour of the photos.

Mostly, though I've been fighting to complete two projects as presents for my sister (who was in the UK for a couple of weeks) before she left to go back to Australia again. She is a marine biologist and so coming across various knitted sea creatures on Ravelry I felt I had to have a go at making some of them. The first thing I attempted was Hansi Singh's Octopus. I decided to use some of the Debbie Bliss cotton I had left from Enfys, which turned out not to be the wisest choice since the inelasticity was once again a definite disadvantage when it came to doing lots of increases and decreases. However, I finally produced something which looked vaguely octopus-like (admittedly on the second attempt, the first having come to a sticky end when I came across a stray leg at the bottom of my knitting bag, and discovered to my dismay that I'd inadvertently made a Heptapus instead).

In order to allow her to use the octopus as a paperweight I struck on the idea of stuffing it with a balloon filled with fine gravel (the sort you use to mulch cacti). Getting the gravel into the balloon was a bit of a challenge. A certain amount went in fairly easily with the help of a kitchen funnel, but I soon reached the point at which I needed to stretch the balloon in order to get any more in. Ever resourceful, C. got around this problem for me by inserting his chin into the funnel up to the nose and blowing down it to inflate the balloon whilst simultaneous waggling his head from side to side to shake the gravel down into the balloon. This presented a very entertaining spectacle, not least when the waggling inadvertently moved his face away from the edge of the funnel on one side, allowing the balloon to deflate and leaving C. with a surprised expression and a mouthful of gravel.

However, the gravel balloon idea seemed to work relatively well, so having successfully completed the octopus I then moved on to something more challenging - the hermit crab. This is without doubt the most fiddly thing I have ever made and I won't be in a hurry to make another (certainly not in cotton). That's not to say that there's anything wrong with the pattern, which is a masterpiece of yarn-meets-mathematics which I find truly amazing. Grafting the shell together and watching it curl itself into a tight little helix was tremendously satisfying. However, it does require an awful lot of grafting - not least on each of four legs and two pincers, and consequently I overran rather in terms of completion time. Most of yesterday was spent frantically knitting and grafting together crustacean legs (and almost completely ignoring my sister as a result), and it finally got sewn together a mere 10 minutes before she had to leave for the airport.

So, what to knit next is the question now. I have sworn off creatures for a while, and will be returning to socks for the train. To this end I have already started on a pair of Hopscotch socks, which in this case really are Oxford Bluestockings, being not only blue, and knitted in (or around) Oxford, but made to Liz's pattern from Katie's yarn.

For home I have high hopes of conquering the infuriating River Stole which has been languishing in my stash for ages, but then what? Currently burning the biggest hole in my stash are 10 balls of grey Jaeger Matchmaker Merino 4ply...any suggestions?

*For anyone who's wondering, it's just the title of one of my favourite Bonzo Dog songs.

Bedtime

2008-07-28T23:36:00.003+01:00

This weekend we acquired some sturdy 6 x 1 in. planks courtesy of the nice people at Oxford Wood Recycling and we have our first proper raised bed. What's more, as of this evening it has plants in it (transplanted from two very overcrowded tubs in the garden).

Whether they'll still be there in the morning is another matter. I reckon there's a fair chance they'll have been reduced to stumps by every slug and snail in the district (I think I can hear the munching from here) or beaten flat by the torrential rain we've had this evening, or possibly just washed away altogether. However, for this evening I'm enjoying having one corner that does look a bit like a genuine allotment with actual plants, even if it does only consist of 24 rather bedraggled lettuce.

Quite allot of work*

2008-07-20T20:32:00.011+01:00

So, this week I've acquire yet another pastime to distract me from blogging and knitting (and housework), because C and I finally made it to the top of the council waiting-list for an allotment. Mysteriously this happened the very week that we finally decided to ring them up and ask whether they'd forgotten us, having sent the application off in March and not heard anything since...but that's probably just coincidence. Mysteriously too, although there is a waiting-list, when I went down to the council offices on my day off, I was told we could have a choice of three different plots.**

The allotments are only about two minutes walk from our house so, armed with the key and a (rather idealised) map I pottered off to have a look at the possibilities. After wandering around for some time peering hopefully between rows of beans, I finally found someone else who happened to be there at 3pm on a Thursday to help me get my bearings and we established that the plot I was looking for was the one next to his. So here it is...

No - actually that's a lie: this is ours:

The others were worse, honest - you couldn't even tell where one started and the other ended and they were all covered in the dreaded bindweed. And at least this one has well kept plots on three sides and a fence on the other. Plus we have already met several of the neighbours, and they seem very nice. One offered to lend us a hand with the clearing/heavy digging if we happen to be there at the same time, while the lady on the other side plied us with courgettes to make up for the fact that this season all we have to look forward to is lots of hard work and very little produce.

Owing to 'financial pressures' the council no longer offers to strim allotments which have been abandoned for a while*** (though the lady at the council offices kindly lent us her very own scythe), so, very little knitting this weekend, but quite a lot of what might be described as 'horticultural archaeology' as we struggled to clear away some of the weeds revealing what had clearly been beds of potatoes, cabbages, onions, leeks, and strawberries in the not too incredibly distant past, along with some mint, oregano and chives, a couple of rather miserable gladioli, a soggy lump of old carpet, and about two-thirds of a collapsed shed. Quite a lot of hacking, chopping, digging, getting stung/bitten/scratched by things, and two trips to the tip later this is what it looks like. You can see the floor and everything - there's even one bit that could almost be called a bed (though as C pointed out it does look a bit more like a freshly dug grave at the moment). Not bad for a weekend's work I feel! Now if I can still move my arms enough to grasp my knitting needles...

* I know, I know, sorry...
**Although on reflection after seeing the plots in question, that might not be so surprising.
*** Unfortunately the same 'financial pressures' have also done for the trailer which used to come once a month to take uncompostable stuff to the tip, so our car is now full of a substantial quantity of dock seed and an even larger number of spiders.

Anyone for tennis?

2008-07-13T11:17:00.007+01:00

So, one of the reasons I haven't been blogging or knitting as much as usual recently is that I've been spending some of the time that I'd usually have been doing that tracing my family tree on my mum's side. This started because sadly, my Great Auntie Eileen died at the end of May. She was my Nan's younger sister, and the last person of her generation in our immediate family.

After the funeral a few of us were sitting round looking at one of the several photograph albums that have been passed down from that side of the family. They are full of photos of very stern and impressive-looking Victorian gentlemen, their stern and substantial wives (including this lady, whom my mum originally suggested might be Mary Lambert, originator of the infamous 'Lambert bottom', a family affliction which I fear I have not escaped*), and their slightly less stern-looking Edwardian progeny.

However, we gradually realised that Auntie Ei (as she was universally known) was the last person who might have been able to identify quite a lot of the people in the photographs for us for certain. So my mum and I set about trying to work backwards from the people we could name to work out who some of the others must have been, and where and when the photos were taken.

Amongst the identifiable people is the rather formidable figure of great great auntie Nellie Maunder, born in 1893 and seen here as a young gell in her fantastic tennis outfit.* According to my mum, after Nellie lost her fiance in the 1st World War she never married but devoted herself to religion and good works. A redoubtable lady, she served as a Red Cross nurse in the field in both the 1st and 2nd World Wars, amassing quite a collection of medals for service overseas, including the 1939-45 Star, the France and Germany star, the Defence Medal, the Voluntary Medical Services Medal, and several Red Cross long service medals, which must have looked very impressive festooning her rather considerable bosom. By the time my mum knew her as a child after the war, she had become the matron of one of the colleges at Durham University, driving a convertible and lecturing the youth of the day on the dangers of STDs.

Nellie's older brother was my great grandfather, Harry Maunder. Apparently something of a contrast to his sister both physically and temperamentally, Harry was 'on the stage': a 'soft shoe dancer' according to my mum. Quite what his Civil Engineer father, Robert, made of this I can't imagine.

In November 1916 Harry married another dancer, Nellie Magee (second from the left, while Harry is third from the right), and my Nan was born er...8 months later.

Nellie Maunder (nee Magee)'s antecedents are something of a mystery. According to family legend she was the illegitimate daughter of a theatrical boarding-house landlady (if true, I can't think that went down very well with her more upright namesake, either!). Her mother certainly seems to have been called Theresa (or Teresa) Magee, but where she came from or whether there was ever a Mr Magee seems to have been lost in the mists of time, so at least for the time being the trail on that particular branch of the tree has gone cold.

* In actual fact, I don't think the date of this photograph is consistent with it being Mary Lambert, but whoever's the bottom is, it is not to be aspired to in my view!
**I can only assume that the get-up was meant to represent the game of tennis at some party or fancy dress parade or something, since surely you couldn't actually have played in it!

Bisy, Backson

2008-07-01T23:05:00.006+01:00

I know, I know - it has been a ridiculously long time since I last posted. I just seem to have been insanely busy recently and a hundred different things - work, rehearsals, concerts, trips hither and thither, new hobbies, more concerts, old hobbies, the occasional bout of sleeping - have intervened to eat up my blogging time.

In fact, I've been so busy I haven't even had much time for knitting! Mainly because I wasn't organised enough to start the baby knitting (discussed below) much before the baby in question was imminent, May consisted of the Attack of the UFOs for me. At one stage I had seven projects on the needles at once, which is a record. However, inevitably the only knitting I was actually making any progress on was mostly un-bloggable (being destined as a surprise for someone who occasionally reads my blog).

Nevertheless, I have been thinking about blogging quite a lot, and taking photos with the full intention of posting. I intended to tell everyone about the nice walk on the Ridgeway one weekend back in late May. You can tell how long ago it was from the fact that the wisteria in Streatley was still flowering in such a spectacular fashion.

Then there was a trip to Anglesey to see Sara and Tim and Iestyn, who at that stage was still bump.

And there's been a fair amount of gardening which (when a work in progress) was going to be a Messy Tuesday post, but that never happened and eventually the mess disappeared (well not really, but I quite like vegetative mess, so tangles of plants don't count in my book).

In fact there have been any number of Messy Tuesdays (and other days), the most memorable of which being the one that produced this unusual scene on the drainer. This came about as a result of a close encounter between C's laptop and the best part of a pint of Old Hooky, when a cunning plan to move the table without removing either of the aforementioned articles from it in advance went horribly wrong.*

There was a Sunday spent mooching about the Cotswolds in pursuit of my brother and his friends who were taking part in the annual cycling Tour of the Cotswolds. Unsurprisingly we opted to do the 102 miles by car rather than bike. Unfortunately, however, since ours was being serviced, the car in question was a mint green Nissan Micra which cornered like a wardrobe on roller-skates and made a noise like a maddened kitten when asked to climb any sort of wold whatsoever. But the trip resulted in a good pub lunch and an enjoyable afternoon spent following the route of a Saltway on the OS map (even if the car was so small that we had to pull over at one point and open both the doors in order to be able to unfold the OS map sufficiently).

And then finally, last weekend, a concert on the Saturday in Deddington, just north of Oxford gave us the perfect opportunity for a night in a B&B followed by a pleasant walk in the country on which we saw some of this

(which doesn't look that impressive until you realise it's quite big)

and some of these

and some of those

and a fox.

On the knitting front, as Ravelers amongst you may have seen, I finished the sheep yoke cardigan

and on the theme of all things oviform**, the sheep toy that I was knitting on WWKIP day, when various people may have seen me struggling to figure out which way round the head went.

Ovine anatomy finally conquered I then progressed to Enfys the Elephant

and having eventually managed to dispatch the whole lot to Iestyn slightly later than planned when he was 1-and-a-bit weeks old (elephants are hard to knit on the train), I returned to the poor languishing Twisted Flower Socks, which have been on the needles since goodness knows when, and finished them off yesterday!

So now I just have the unfinished, hibernating Probably Jumper (probably not at this rate), the infuriating River Stole, and the Moonlight Sonata Shawl which I cast on at the "cast on day" back in late May, and haven't touched since.

Still things should be a bit quieter now, so I'll have more time...probably...

*His cunning plan I hasten to add, not mine. Though since the whole butter-radiator fiasco I should probably refrain from commenting.
** I was delighted to discover (courtesy of Liz) a while ago that oviform not only means "egg-shaped", but (oviform adj.2) "sheep-shaped". This is one of my all-time favourite unexpected other meanings, the other being emboss vb.2, which essentially means "to go and hide in a wood" - "The police are after me; I must emboss at once!"

At Geneva

2008-05-05T10:30:00.003+01:00

According to Jonathan Green's Slang Dictionary, to say someone has "been at Geneva" means they have got drunk.* Well, last weekend C and I were both a Geneva for several days, but only in the literal sense, taking advantage of a meeting that C had to attend to have what I supposed could be called a "minibreak".

C lived in Geneva for 6 months as a student about 12 years ago, so it was a bit of a nostalgia trip for us, as well as giving us the opportunity to catch up with some friends who moved out there about a year and a half ago. Unfortunately it is also about twelve years since I last spent any amount of time in a French-speaking country, and to my considerable embarrassment I found that, though I could still read signs etc., I could no longer conjure up the words fast enough to speak to anyone, or at least when I thought I could, half the words that came out turned out to be Greek, so that I ended up speaking a sort of generic "Foreign" which confused everybody, including myself. However, that aside, we had a very pleasant weekend.

On the Friday whilst C was in his meeting I spent a pleasant morning wandering the shores of Lac Leman admiring the Jet d'Eau (which owing to the imminent arrival of Euro 2008 currently has an enormous inflatable football flying above it), and taking pictures of random things which appealed to me.

In the afternoon I strolled through the Old Town and across the River, past where C used to live, to the suburb of Carouge, where I sought out Tricolaine (discovered via Ravelry), and it's very lovely owner Annelis took me in, made me tea, and allowed me to stay most of the afternoon, chatting and knitting (not that I got much done), and also sold me some Debbie Bliss cotton at a very reasonable price (more of this anon when it actually starts to look like something).

The Saturday morning was spent wandering around the Botanical gardens in glorious sunshine looking at lots of lovely flowers blooming away merrily, and trying to photograph the wildlife with varying degrees of success.

The Botanical gardens also contains the most amazing carousel, with huge creatures to ride in most of which have ropes that can be pulled to make their wings flap or their legs waggle. Unfortunately, being sadly lacking in small children I didn't have an excuse to have a go on it, but we did end up coming back in the afternoon with our friends and their two year old so that she and her dad could have a ride on a very splendid-looking tortoise.

Anna is the recipient of the cardigan of many colours which some people may remember me knitting a while ago. At the time I remember being worried that by the time I finished it it would be too small. As is the way with these things, by the time I actually got to the end it was apparent that this was not going to be the case - indeed if I had missed a few meals I might well have been able to wear it myself. Still, the advantage of knitting for children is that you can be fairly sure that they will at some point pass through the size of the garment, albeit perhaps fairly briefly, and so it should get some wear sometime.** So, a good six months after it was posted, I finally got to see the cardigan in action. Still a bit on the big side, but I'm sure she'll grow into it.

Unfortunately however, all this unaccustomed hanging about in bright sunshine caused C to take on a distinctly madder hue, and so the following day, when he was still experiencing la vie en rose, we were forced to scurry from one patch of shadow to the next like a couple of holidaying vampires. Spending a large part of the morning in the (very extensive) archaeological site under the cathedral solved a lot of this problem though, and then, after lunch in the park and a brief visit to the longest park bench in the word for old times' sake, it was back to rainy Oxfordshire, having once again contrived to miss what was probably the only sunny weekend of the year in England.

*This presumably has less to do with the place than it does with GENEVA n.1: A spirit distilled from grain, and flavoured with the juice of juniper berries (i.e. gin, the name being a corruption of Dutch genever < the Old French word for juniper).

**Unless of course the child in question turns out to be 19 before reaching the requisite size for their pale blue sailor suit - but even my sizing discrepancies have yet to reach quite that order of magnitude.

A Small and [Un]orthodox Mess

2008-04-22T22:55:00.002+01:00

This week - C being away - the house is uncharacteristically tidy so I have had to create some mess for Messy Tuesday. However, fortunately I had the perfect excuse having just received an Easter card from my cousin. Orthodox Easter is on Sunday, and once again, despite my best intentions, I failed to buy any Easter cards when it was Easter here. I even went into a shop and looked at them thinking "I really must go back and buy those before Easter is over and they take them all away", and I still didn't get round to it.

Needless to say I didn't have enough time to create anything to compete with Dina's meticulously cross-stitched Easter egg, so instead I spent a happy evening cutting up little bits of brightly coloured paper, sticking them to cards (and myself, and the table), and leaving trails of Uhu around the place like some sort of weird solvent-based snail.

Still this was a fairly cheerful occupation and greatly improved by the fact that, for the first time this year, it was actually light enough, and warm enough, when I got home from work for me to sit at the kitchen table with the back door open. Thank goodness for a bit of sunshine at last. Things in the garden are beginning to wake up. Lazarus* the fuchsia is getting his first few tentative leaves and the fern, which three weeks ago I was on the point of digging up because I was sure it was dead, has turned out not to be.

I also finally plucked up the courage to plant my sweet peas out into their new willow basket-cum-obelisk. I bought it months ago, but it's been so cold I haven't dared try it out for fear of frost. It's not the easiest thing to plant access-wise and I got myself tangled in it on a few occasions and found myself contemplating a week spent on my hands and knees in the garden waiting, either for someone at work to remark upon my non-appearance, or for C to come back and find me kneeling like some demented dog with its head trapped in the railings. However I did manage to extricate myself eventually and was mercifully spared the indignity of having to go round to the neighbours with an overgrown lobster pot on my head and plead for help. I think it should look quite pretty if they grow, and it means I can have sweet peas on the patio, thus saving valuable border space for something else.

*So called because despite severe (if unintentional) maltreatment every winter [i.e. being left out in the frost, being put in the greenhouse because its warmer and then forgotten about and left to die of drought, being confined to the same pot and the same (by this time) nutriant-free compost for the best part of five years...] so that I am always convinced that this time I must have killed it, it always comes back to life in the spring.

Playing catch-up.

2008-04-15T22:50:00.003+01:00

I have been somewhat remiss in writing Messy Tuesday posts recently. Needless to say this has nothing to do with any lack of mess and much more to do with lack of time and opportunity to photograph mess. Indeed, the tide of mess has been gradually engulfing us despite our best efforts to keep it at bay.

The original plan for last Tuesday was to post the tremendous mess which is our loft, full of abandoned boxes, badly stacked suitcases and the previous owner's enormous collection of early 80s DIY magazines (they explain a lot), and then to follow it with the impressively tidy space which would replace it once we had sorted through all the clutter, re-lagged and boarded the usable part, and converted it into a sensible, useful storage space.

Unfortunately this didn't quite happen. The first step in the plan was to buy the "dissipation units" for the downlighters set into the hall ceiling. I know that a dissipation unit sounds like an small but organized body dedicated to encouraging hitherto upstanding people to get pissed and hang about with bad company, but actually its a thing to dissipate the heat from the light so that you can put insulation over the top without running the risk of the whole lot going up in flames. We saw them in B&Q in Manchester and so assumed they'd be readily available, but no. After several days trying every hardware and electric store in the district we drew a complete blank so the loft continues to be unboarded and full of junk. And having abandoned all hope of sorting it out I couldn't in fact be bothered to go up there to photograph it for Messy Tuesday.

Anyway, this week we decided to tackle the mess which is the hollow wall at the bottom of the garden. This is designed to be a planter, but it has always had one end missing and we've always said that one day we'll rebuild it while, for the past two years, simply living with a plant-pot wedged into the end in a forlorn attempt to camouflage the crumbly bit.

Once again things didn't go according to plan. For a start, when we started to dig the contents out to make some room it turned out that only the top 5 inches actually contained soil. The rest was made up of bits of old carpet, a large quantity of electrical cable, some rubble, a plastic water pistol, a shelf bracket... We didn't look any further than that.

Secondly, removing the three broken bricks from the end of the wall resulted in the rest of it coming away in large chunks - not the intended result. So, we gave up with this too, stacked the bits back up, replaced the pot, and continue to live with the mess. Still, at least it gives me a messy Tuesday post.

Pin Money

2008-04-12T22:08:00.003+01:00

This week I have spent a grand total of £4.40 on sewing pins, and this is the reason for it.

I finally got round to finishing the incredibly frilly Greek doily last Sunday when this happened.

The snow was very pretty and we spent a cheerful morning wandering the fields behind the house taking pictures of things which aren't really supposed to have snow on them. But picturesque though it was (and good fun for trying out the lens on the new camera) it did rather put a crimp on my plans to spend the day gardening.

Still, every cloud, as they say: instead I spent most of the afternoon sitting in bed, chatting on the phone, drinking tea, and crocheting, which meant after weeks of only working on it in 15 minute bursts on the train, I was finally able to make some serious progress with the doily and produce a FO.

However, having completed the actual crochet I have been struggling unsuccessfully to block it all week for the simple reason that it has so many frills and furbelows that needed pinning out, that I ran out of pins on three separate occasions. Having raided my "reserve" pin box and then been to buy more on two consecutive lunchtimes, I eventually finished pinning it out on Thursday night. It took a grand total of 314 pins and after pulling them all out this morning my fingernails will never be the same again. But it is finished and considerably more successful than my last doily-related effort I think.

Going to pot

2008-03-25T21:23:00.003Z

This week's Tuesday mess comes courtesy of the greenhouse and my ever-expanding plastic plant-pot collection.

When I first took possession of the greenhouse I cleared it all out with great gusto muttering disgustedly at the mess that had been left behind and protesting that I would never let it get into such a dreadful state. For the first few months everything was in its own place and order reigned.

Then gradually and inevitably the situation started to slip. Things didn't get put back where they came from. Plants which had died off got dumped on the side and left to be dealt with later. Plastic detritus that couldn't go into the compost but was too big for the kitchen bin started to collect in little piles awaiting the long-promised trip to the tip, only to be forgotten by the time we actually went. And the windows got green and smeary, and moss started to grow in the joints of the frame. And somewhere, in the in dark corners behind the paraffin-heater that I have never used because on those nights when it's cold enough to need a heater in the greenhouse it is, lets face it, far too cold to go outside and start fiddling about with paraffin-heaters, there in the damp half-light, the plant-pots began to breed.

Large pots, small pots, hundreds of little thumb-pots, tall dark clematis pots, multibuy inter-linked pots, huge great tree pots, buy-one-get-one-free pots, square pots, round pots, green pots, brown pots, pots in every shade of black, pots which just never quite stack...neatly

Eventually I could hardly get into the greenhouse. So today C and I carried out a cull, keeping only two or three hundred of the most useful-looking pots and putting all the others on one side to go to the tip. We also braved the monstrous spiders (big as your hand with great big pointy teeth) and the clammy horror which is the embrace of the unexpected slug, to drag all the contents of the greenhouse out onto the lawn, wash the windows, sweep and generally reorganise.

So, the mess is now somewhat subdued, although the fact that we didn't actually get to the tip and so had to put all the junk back in (admittedly in a different place) rather spoiled the effect. The rejected plant-pots are now languishing in a black sack (from which they will no doubt be trying to escape), along with the old wooden lawn-edging which was the occasion for the last trip to the tip, but which had become so buried by the time we eventually got round to going, that it was actually left behind!

Messy Tuesday - 18/03

2008-03-18T20:54:00.003Z

Sad to say, our house has a terrible case of piles. So, tonight, for your delectation and in honour of Messy Tuesday, I present the notable feature of our house which is the Pile of Junk that accumulates on the corner of the sideboard no matter how much I try to keep it clear.

Remarkably small at the moment since it has only just started to creep back into existence after being banished when we had visitors a few days ago, a large portion of this comprises unopened mail, fully 80% of which is for a) the person who used to live here before us and who seemingly signed up for every useless free catalogue and special offer in the world; b) someone we've never heard of who has never lived here as far as we know; c) someone who lives several streets away but the postman couldn't be bothered to walk all the way round there. The remainder consists of things C got out and didn't put away again (putting things away is against his religion, along with closing cupboard doors and turning off lights), things that were on the table when we wanted to use it and so had to be moved somewhere else, and things that have no home and are sitting there until I can figure out what to do with them. Today, to add a little je ne sais quoi I have included a vase of decaying tulips in the foreground, while behind can be glimpsed the edifying spectacle of Pile of Half-done Ironing.

However, the piece de resistance for this Tuesday has to be the kitchen wall, still undecorated as it has been ever since the removal of the old gas boiler last summer.

For particular effect the grubby curling paper and chipped plaster is presented juxtaposed against Pile of Yesterday's Washing-up. Unfortunately without a wide angle lens I was unable to complete the composition by capturing the mess on the floor where, while making apple and rhubarb crumble, I inadvertently created a new technique for rubbing butter and flour together, which consisted of throwing handfuls of the mixture in my own face. Maybe next week.

Froggy went a-courting

2008-03-15T21:15:00.004Z

To quote the inimitable Tom Lehrer:

Spring is here, spring is here,
Life is skittles and life is beer.
I think the loveliest time of the year is the Spring...

OK, well I'm not so sure about the skittles and beer.* Come to think of it I'm not that sure about the spring now it's been p---ing it down all afternoon. However, this morning spring certainly seemed to be in the air when I toddled out into the back garden to dump the veg clippings into the compost. The weather was mild with occasional bursts of sunshine and all sorts of spring flowers and bulbs finally putting in an appearance to brighten the place up a bit, and the trees coming into leaf (and/or flower), and the many amphibious denizens of the garden frantically shagging all over the place and turning the pond into one gelatinous wobbly mass.

Of course by the time I was actually free to go out into the garden and play, the heavens had opened and all the flowers were bent double and dripping. The frogs haven't been put off at all by the rain though; indeed they have been positively frolicking in it. Our garden is frog central at the moment. As soon as you open the back door the whole garden hops and you are treated to a pleasantly mellifluous frrrrrp, frrrrrp, frrrrrp sound emanating from the bottom (the bottom of the garden that is). Gardening at this time of year can be quite disconcerting as resting your hand on the ground in any place are liable to find that the earth squirms and wriggles under your fingers and then (depending on how much weight you've rested on said hand) hops off looking irritated.

Anyway, whilst the weather was fine, and in the spirit of "hurrah it's spring" I rushed off into the garden with the camera hoping to cheer up the old blog with some pretty pictures. This is to compensate for the fact that once again I have no knitting-related pictures to post. The Twisted Flower pattern didn't not turn up, so I will have to buy it again before I can resume knitting. In its absence I have been working on a Διακοσμητικο πετσετακι (decorative doily) on the train, but haven't got round to taking a photo of it yet as it's still only coaster-sized and looking a bit like an old dishcloth.

The Probably jumper is now almost certainly a jumper but much further from being one than it was because, after trying it on, I decided the colour change fell in an unfortunately emphatic location and ripped back about a quarter of what I had knitted. I bought some buttons for it this afternoon, but I don't think that really counts as progress. The River Stole is just stalled because every time I pick it up I lose my place in the pattern, drift onto the wrong line (they are all nearly but not quite the same and the repeat's too long for me to memorize), and then spend twice as long unknitting and cursing, so for the sake of my blood pressure I haven't touched it for a while.

So for the time being here are some pretty spring flowers. As with much of our house (and indeed my life in general) viewed in tight enough close-up, or indeed from far enough away, the garden can sometime look quite good. When you're in the middle of it, however, you realize the extent to which it's fraying round the edges. However, the fraying sections can wait for Messy Tuesday. I'll continue to pretend a bit longer.

* And tomorrow won't be spent poisoning pigeons in the park either.

Lavenders Blue

2008-03-09T20:13:00.005Z

Saturday this week saw me in the Sheldonian singing about sheep along with about 150 other people. As this coincided with several meetings my dad had in and around Oxford on Friday, he and mum came down for the weekend arriving on Thursday night, and C and I took Friday off to spend with mum. The plan was to do some serious gardening with my mum acting as consultant whilst we put in a new bed at the front of the house to differentiate our front garden from the (shall we say) somewhat unkempt front lawn of our neighbours.

In spite of a wet start most of Friday was beautiful gardening weather and we made good progress so that the path to the front door is now lined with a proto-hedge of lavender mulched with gravel. Lots of digging which was pretty tiring* but we were pleased with the result.

Egged on by mother, from whom I have inherited my gardening philosophy of "Oh what the hell, try it; if it dies you can always plant something else", we also finally plucked up the courage to split the flag iris that has been threatening to engulf our little pond completely. It is no doubt completely the wrong time of year to do this, but it seemed like the only practical alternative, since later in the season the wretched plant is so big it's practically impossible to get the spade into it. This is it last summer (at the end of the garden in front of the shed). It was as tall as me (probably taller) and filled fully half the pond. After the flowers finished it all fell over sideways and filled the rest of the pond as well.

This is it today in its considerably reduced condition. Fingers crossed that it doesn't turn up its toes! I did feet a bit sorry for the large family of frogs we had to evict in order to do this. They all took refuge next-door, from where we could hear them croaking reproachfully as we attacked their erstwhile home.

Gardening aside, my weekend was mostly taken up with singing. The concert went well, although once again it confirmed the Sheldonian's right to the title of "Most Uncomfortable Arts Venue in Britain" which it was awarded a few years ago. Two people fainted in the first half; there may have been a third but opinion was divided as to whether he was just lying on the floor because he could no longer bear sitting on the narrow planks which pass for seats. Still it's a good place for a standing ovation - everyone's always so glad to have an excuse to get up!

Unfortunately for me the unsuitability of Wren's masterpiece for concerts had dire consequences. Conditions for the performers are not much better than they are for the audience. There are only two dressing-rooms - long, narrow, corridor-like affairs in the basement, each about two metres wide and 12 long. In this space all the members of the 150+-strong choir and most of the orchestra are supposed to change and leave belongings. Needless to say the place is like rugby scrum after the concert with people trying to get in and out and others trying to change at the same time.

I left my bag as close to the door as possible in the hope that I would be able stick my hand round the door and grab it, but when I got there I found someone had knocked it over and half the stuff had fallen out. One lady had her foot caught in the strap of my knitting bag and was dragging it along behind her. Terrified that she would trip and hurt herself I crawled in on my hands and knees, extricated her feet, collected everything (or so I thought) and scarpered, but when I got home, alas and alack, I found that my Twisted Flower Sock pattern, of which I had done no more than 20 rows, was no longer to be found :o(

* C tried manfully to get out of it by finding excuses to be called into work on on two separate occasions, spending a good 3.5 hours of his day off in the office, but he finally relented and came back to help us with the serious digging.

Counter-daffodils and disclaimers

2008-03-03T18:39:00.003Z

After reading Liz's post honouring Wordsworth and his daffodils, I couldn't resist posting this version which I heard as an undergraduate years ago. No doubt I'm a terrible philistine, but I think I actually prefer it.

The disclaimer is that I'm not 100% sure who wrote it. I think it was a bloke I knew in one of the University clubs called Phil (the bloke, not the club). I can't now remember his surname. It was certainly from him that I heard it and I've never forgotten it, even though he only recited it once. If only my brain was so retentive of useful information!

I wandered, miserable as sin
Through smelly fields and muddy hills,
When all at once I trod right in
A pile of rotting daffodils.
I tried to wipe them off my shoe,
But they it seemed were truly stuck,
And so the fields I wandered through
All smelled of this revolting muck.
I soon espied an arty type,
Gazing at where some live ones stood
And spouting some appalling tripe
About how they made him feel good.
I remonstrated forcibly.
I thumped his head and poked his eye
Demanding he explain to me
Just why these things got him so high.
Said he, "Why Sir, a poet I
Employed in cloudlike wanderings,
When all at once I did espy
This clump of jolly yellow things!".
For giving such an awful quote
I cracked his head against a bough
And shoved the flowers down his throat.
Oh bard, what are your words worth now?

Sorry Liz!

Knit like the wind!

2008-03-02T23:56:00.005Z

A couple of weeks ago I went to my friend's Hen Party and over dinner her cousin was regaling us with stories of how, when they were young, K (whose parents kept a smallholding) had a sheep by the name of Pottle which was convinced it was a dog. Every time they went out for a walk with the dog, the sheep would insist on tagging along, but its stumpy little legs couldn't keep up, and so she was frequently reduced to carrying it. The picture she painted of K (who is only about 4ft 11) staggering along under the weight of a fully grown Jacob sheep had us all in stitches.

When I got home and saw the pictures of the sheep teacosy Lara's mum had made her I couldn't resist making one for her as a wedding present. Unfortunately however, various complications and mis-timings meant that I didn't get the pattern until last week so it was a close-run thing. But thanks to Felix kindly typing the whole thing out and emailing it to me I finally managed to start it on Tuesday night. I knit one half of the fleece on Wednesday and the other half on Thursday, nearly crippling my fingers on the loop stitch in the process.

The whole thing nearly came to grief after I failed to find any black aran for the head in Oxford, but once again Bluestockings came to the rescue and Ellen kindly supplied me with some ex-dalek which did the trick very nicely. I managed to complete the head and ears on Friday (largely courtesy of a very nice hairdresser who let me knit all the time she was cutting my hair and still only charged me £13!).

I was particularly pleased with the eyes which I managed to pick up from the little knitting shop in Didcot on my way back from the hairdressers (in the process I suspect slightly disconcerting my visiting vegetarian friends by telling them I just had to nip round the corner and buy some sheep's eyes). The little brown eyes give him a suitably sheepish look I think. The lady in the shop offered me larger ones but they were orange which I think might have had an undesirably Satanic effect. Having successfully managed to acquire everything I needed, I just had time to assemble it on Friday evening in time to take to the wedding on the Saturday.

In fact the other part of the present proved far more problematic in the end. The fair trade football we bought them from their wedding list repeatedly demonstrated the cartographer's conundrum - it really is physically impossible to cover a sphere with a flat sheet of paper! It finally ended up looking like some sort of mutant Ferrero Rocher.

All we like sheep.

2008-02-24T22:59:00.006Z

I haven't heard whether the fabric has reached its destination, but if it hasn't yet it should soon, so I think it's probably safe to post the pictures now.

I found this sheep fabric in the random fat quarters basket at masons and got the "meadow" one cut to match. The whole thing conjured up visions of a pleasingly pastoral quilt to me. If only they'd had some cloudy sky material too. Anyway, I hope it will be a success where it's gone.*

I finally finished and blocked the Swan Symphony doily this week, having completed the edging sitting at the back of W's brewing meeting on Wednesday receiving curious glances from the (male) regulars in the group while they discussed mashing, hops, etc. I only blocked it this weekend though as I then decided to go back and decapitate three of the four swans in the hope that crocheting the necks a little more carefully and less speedily would help reduce the spiral effect. It seems to have worked and after blocking they are more or less uniform so I think that was a good decision.

On the whole it's just as well that I finished this at the end of the week though, since after a weekend of long overdue garden maintenance my hands are now in no fit state to cope with anything more complex than stocking stitch.

This weekend we finally bit the bullet and replaced the section of fence which blew down last year and which we had just patched up on the basis that it would be better to replace it when the four clematis that climb up it had died back. The immediate problem was how to get the fence panels in the first place. They clearly weren't going to fit in the car which left us with the options of a) hiring a van for £50+ for the sake of transporting £40 worth of fence about half a mile or, b) walking the half a mile to the builders merchant and carrying them back.

We opted for the latter but though they didn't seem all that bad when we first picked them up, by the time we'd got across the road my arms were already screaming and threatening to snap off at the wrists. The whole thing wasn't helped by the fact that the 6ft square fence panels (which we had to carry laid flat) took up the whole of the pavement and a bit more besides, so that every time we passed a parked car, a bushy hedge etc. they had to be maneuvered so as not to get stuck. Also my fingers are only just long enough to get a proper purchase on the edge when carrying two panels together. As a result as soon as we started the walk the jogging motion meant they gradually slithered out of my grip taking most of my skin with them.

It took us about half an hour to make it half the way home, a walk that under normal circumstances takes about 4 minutes. Mercifully having finally turned the corner onto the estate and paused to catch our breath after negotiating a particularly traumatic cycle-path barrier, we spied the abandoned shopping-trolley of salvation, with whose help we made it home with comparative ease.

So today was spent painstakingly extracting bits of clematis from the old trellis, wrenching our the old fence, and (for C at least) hammering a huge metal spike into the floor with a 14lb sledge-hammer. As a result both C and I are now wandering the house wincing with every move and unable to lift so much as a glass of water without howls of protest from our aching muscles. The skin on my hands is so rough that I found I couldn't put down the grey tanktop (aka the probably jumper) because the yarn was sticking to my fingers. Still we do have a new fence. Fingers crossed that there aren't any more gales for a few weeks.

* Gratuitous plug. For anyone who is especially fond of Handel's sheep, the Oxford Bach Choir will we performing them (along with the rest of the Messiah) on March 8th at the Sheldonian.

On reflection

2008-02-18T18:51:00.005Z

On Saturday afternoon, with jubilant cries of "Oh, bother the clutch", C. and I went out and spent my proofreading money on a digital SLR. On Sunday late afternoon we put on our wellies and some thick socks* and set off down the Thames at Clifton Hampden to try it out on the winter landscape it being a fabulously sunny day, though freezing cold. Much fun was had focusing on different things and playing with reflections in the river which was like a mirror.

A fair amount of fun was also had sinking into deep mud and struggling to get out again without losing a welly, dropping the camera, or falling over. Inevitably we both came away convinced that we now need to save up for the very expensive zoom lens which would have enabled us to photograph the carpet of snowdrops on the other bank. The clutch may have to wait a little longer.

In between playing with the camera I found time to go to Masons where I picked up some quilting fabric to send to a friend (I don't know whether she reads this, but in case she does I won't post pictures until after it's arrived), and some for myself which I couldn't resist, even though I don't quilt, have never quilted, suspect I never will take it up, and have promised on numerous occasions to stop hoarding likely-looking bits of fabric. But it's so pretty...

Sadly I suspect it's destined to languish in my stash for some considerable time, since I don't seem to be able to find time for my more usual knitting and crochet projects at the moment, never mind taking up an entirely new craft.

The "Grey Tank Top" is currently suffering an identity crisis since I discovered that a single ball was enough to knit 25cms up from the hem, i.e. nearly to the split for the arms. I have four and a half balls, so this means that I ought to have enough yarn to turn it into a smallish jumper, which may well be a better use of my time and would certainly be a more effective stash bust. Unfortunately however, even after blocking, the knitted section (which was originally intended to be a fairly fitted vest and has waist shaping) is a trifle too snug for my liking if transmogrified into a jumper, so I fear frogging and reknitting is the only way forward.

I haven't yet summoned up the energy to do this and have instead been concentrating on the crochet front, where, having thrown out the star-shaped doily and promised to do better next time, I have been working on the Swan Symphony Doily as a present for my auntie (who likes this sort of thing).

With the exception of the swans themselves the pattern is actually pretty straightforward, and it is progressing fairly speedily, at least now that I've managed to get the damn beaks on. That was a real fiddle. Unfortunately three of my four swans are less well behaved than the one pictured here and seem to have an irresistible urge to look over their shoulders. I am hoping this can be corrected with blocking, because otherwise I fear the effect may rather be lost. One of them in particular looks more like a strangulated flamingo at the moment. I guess I could always dye it pink...

*Or rather I put on some thick socks. C. discovered that all the (six) socks he had put in the boot of the car were in fact mine and probably wouldn't have fitted on his hands, let alone his feet, so he just had cold feet.

Twinkle, twinkle...

2008-02-11T23:25:00.000Z

The "Asteraki" is finished, and this what it looks like blocking.

OK, so it's not great. Didn't really manage to get the hang of the border until the last quarter and it's not terribly even which is a bit frustrating. I didn't try too hard to pin it out evenly, since it was obvious that it wasn't going to be a great work of art no matter what I did, but I think it served its main purpose in giving me a test project to see whether I could work out the instructions from the Greek pattern. It also taught me another useful thing - not to try this pattern again. It's far too fiddly to be worth the effort and all you get for your trouble is small mishapen doilly!

Maths and meditation

2008-02-07T23:39:00.000Z

According to one of the 7000 or so free magazines that drop through our door every week "Recent research proves that knitting..has incredible therapeutic benefits and that the act of knitting actually changes your brainwave patterns producing a higher Alpha-wave output than yoga or meditation". This is great news for me, though I do feel the need a add a footnote to this - it probably depends on what you're making.

At the moment I am making the River Stole, which (esp. made in kid silk haze) seems to have the capacity to be frustratingly fiddly without being especially interesting. The pattern repeats are different enought that I can't quite memorize them, but similar enough that I can easily skip from one line of the pattern to the next mid-row not find out until two rows later when the numbers don't add up.

I am also wrestling with the Greek crochet having figured out (more or less) what the names of the stitches are and how to read the diagrams. Stupidly, in an attempt to start with something short, I picked a doilly with relatively few lines of instruction. From the "Greek-reading" point of view this was a good thing. It still took me a fair amount of time with a dictionary to decipher the instructions, hampered considerably by the fact that, like all knitting/crochet patterns it is full of abbreviations and typos (particularly frustrating in an inflected language!).

Anyway, having figured out what I was supposed to do I then set about doing it with the specified 1mm hook and fine white crochet thread. This was mistake number two. It has turned out to be probably the most fiddly pattern I could have selected and definitely designed for making in bright Aegean sunshine rather than in the miserable grey half-light of a British winter. Half the time I can't see where I'm putting the needle, and most of the time that is under my own fingernail! I have managed to produce a sort of screwed up wonky greying thing, which I'm hoping, when washed and blocked to within an inch of its life, will be recognisably crochet. But first I have to finish the incredibly irritating border, and I couldn't face that on the train or after a long day at work, so it will have to wait.

So, by way of something more akin to relaxing meditation I have cast on for a straightforward tank top to use up some Rowanspun a friend gave me. After a degree of consternation over sizing this is coming along ok thank goodness. I'm basing it on the pattern for this Rowan slipover I made last year but without the stripes/fairisle, and in the round, which should make it considerably less of a pain in the neck.
Last time I made the medium, which is supposed to have a 36 inch bust but turned out "roomy" to say the least. Swatching with the yarn and needles I decided on revealed that my version should be 85% the size of the original and I would therefore need to make a larger size this time in order to get something that would fit. I cast on the number of stitches for the size I thought I would need to make in order to get the right measurement and you could have held a small seance in the circle it made. After trying various permutations with fewer and fewer stitches I eventually ended up with the number for the small - a size below the one I made last time. By rights this should have a 28 inch bust given the needles I'm using, but put onto a piece of spare yarn after 10 rows (before the increases) it seems to fit all the way round comfortably at the widest point, so that clearly isn't true. So much for maths! Nothing for it but to carry on and see what happens I guess.

At least it gives me something I can knit in the evenings while watching telly, rather than having only to listen to the dialogue while squinting at tiny stitches, stabbing myself in the palm, and cursing.*

*Mind you, knitting without watching the pictures coupled with our Freeview box's 30 sec. skip function can be quite entertaining. This creates the most fantastic "cut-and-shut" advert slogans such as the slatternly housewife's mantra "Use Detol surface spray..at least twice a year", and my particular favourite "Where does Posh get her amazing fashions? B&Q!"

This is the end.

2008-02-02T17:17:00.000Z

Well, the never-ending socks of doom are finally done. Actually they've been done for a while as I manage to finish the last few rounds of ribbing when we got back from the Bluestockings' annual wind-off and yarn-swap last week, but I just haven't had time to blog them. C seems pleased, though whether he'll actually wear them is another matter. Mind you it has gone quite parky out, so who knows.*

This lack of time largely results from the fact that for the past couple of weeks I've been doing some extra work in the evenings, with the intention of saving up for a decent digital camera (though as is the way of such things, it rather looks like it might end up being spent on a new clutch). This has been substantially eating into my regular knitting time (except on the train), but in the few minutes between work of one sort or another this week I have managed to make the first learning sock from the New Pathways book. My intention (and the reason that I came away from the yarn-swap with lots of little balls of leftover merino etc.) was to make a pair of each of the little test socks in the book to send to the two-year-old daughter of a friend of mine. However, though this sock was quite interesting as an exercise in knitting, I can't say I'm all that enamoured of the FO - it seems to have a very flabby gusset and a very pointy toe - so this is it pre-frogging and turning into something else.

Having completed both sock projects and hence finally run out of things to knit on the train this week, I briefly returned to my first love - crochet - to make myself a colourful coaster for my desk at work (it's not quite as vivid as it appears in the photo - that's because I had to have the flash on even though it was 10am when I took the picture). The pattern is I think originally from Magknits, though I can't find it now. I made some for my sister a while ago. I don't think they're intended as coasters, but they work.

This mini project made me realise how much I enjoy crochet and how long it is since I last did any, so now I'm contemplating what to start. At Christmas my cousin sent me two Greek crochet magazines with loads of pretty, frilly things in it. Admittedly, I have bit of a love-hate relationship with doillies really - they're fun to make, but I don't necessarily want to use them afterwards. However, I can probably find an aunt or two who would appreciate them, so now there's just the small matter of reading the patterns. According to my dictionary the first sort of stitch is called "a maypole dance in the air"... This could take a while...

*Fellow Bluestockings who watched me fighting with that recalcitrant skein of Live2Knit Mae Bamboo, which simply wouldn't be wound last Saturday may be relieved to know that C finally beat it into submission with the help of the swift, a chair and about an hour of patiently passing the ball through and over the unwound yarn.

Hats, Boots, and Oopsydaisy (or the perils of non-communication in the human male).

2008-01-23T21:03:00.001Z

Recently I seem to have been knitting a lot of baby stuff. I finished off the Debbie Bliss cardigan and I still had a ball and a half of yarn left, so I decided to use them up on a matching hat and bootees. The hat took a few attempts to get the decreases right - the first attempt was a bit pointy, like a sort of woolly medieval pikeman's helmet, but I was fairly pleased with it in the end and C even joined in and made the bobble.

Then I got an email from an old friend I hadn't spoken to in ages saying his wife had had a baby on New Year's Eve, so I used up a few oddments to rustle up a couple more pairs of bootees, which were duly dispatched and seem to have gone down well (at least with the parents).

No doubt the bootee theme will continue presently, as I know at least two other people expecting soon, but for the time being I've gone back to C's seemingly never-ending socks. I'm hoping to finish them soon, not only because they're boring me stiff but in the hope that a Finished Object might in some way make up for my accidentally scalping him at the weekend. Mind you it was his own fault.

A while ago he bought an electric razor-clipper thing for me to use in cutting his hair (since he has so little of it these days it seems ridiculous to go to an expensive hairdresser). I was trimming his hair with it at the weekend and said to Chris I thought it could do with going a shade shorter at the bottom. Without speaking he handed me what I assumed was the fitting for the next grade down and it was only after I'd laid into the back of his hair with it that I realised it was in fact the shortest possible. So he has a little bit of a chunk missing on one side...only a little one...it's barely noticeable unless you know where to look...well it's more noticeable in the daylight...but it's going to be cold for the next few days, so he can just wear a scarf while it grows back...

However, the socks are progressing rather slowly as I've only really had knitting time on the train recently, and not a lot of that yesterday and today since my dad was visiting for a conference. He got the train down in the afternoon and we arranged to meet at the front of work about 5.* This resulted in a short game of hunt-the-woozle: I went out the side entrance (the one at the front) and turned right expecting to meet him coming the other way. He meanwhile approached the same entrance from the left. When I didn't find him I walked back, while he went round to the main entrance (the one at the side) thinking this must be what I'd meant by the "front". I then phoned him and we each established where the other was. I set off round to the main entrance thinking I'd find him coming back, and he persuaded the man on reception to let him go through the building to get out the other entrance... Round and round they go. Anyway, we finally found one another and made it to the train, but I didn't think it was really very friendly to then produce socks and spend all night knitting, so C will have to wait a little longer.

I soon will have finished them though and will be in need of another train project, so I've also been to trying to find something to make out of this ball of Shetland yarn my brother gave me a while ago. It's 100% Jacob sheep but other than that it doesn't give any information on the label. Since I only have one ball I have been thinking about a hat and I had guessed that it would be about aran weight, so I started knitting swatches for Gretel by Ysolda, but it soon became apparent that it's more chunky than aran, and although the gauge was ok, the knitted fabric was far too stiff and itchy to be comfortable, so back to the drawing board on that one.

On the subject of hats and brothers however, A has sent me pictures of his latest creation. Not sure why he's knitting woolly hats when he's in Oz where the temperature's about 30 degrees, but I'm glad to see he's still knitting (though it does mean I won't get to keep the 8 balls of Rowan Scottish Tweed Chunky I'm looking after for him). I think the hat is probably a variation on the theme of a knitty pattern. Can't help feeling it should be called "Beagle".

* By which time he had been to the Oxfam bookshop and managed to acquire four Odysseys and an Iliad.

'Twas the season to be jolly.

2008-01-04T18:49:00.000Z

Well not in our house; 'twas more the season to be achy, shivery, and grey in the face with a persistent cough and a slight temperature.

On the Thursday before Christmas I cheerfully returned from singing carols to find C sitting on the sofa wrapped in a blanket and trembling. This did not bode well. C does not malinger as a rule. If he's ill a typical conversation goes along the following lines:
Me - You're never going into work.
C (manfully) - Oh, I'll be ok.
Me - But your arm's off!
C - No it isn't; it's just a flesh wound. I've had worse.
etc...

Needless to say two days later I woke up feeling and looking like the last turkey in the shop. We managed to drag ourselves out of bed long enough to stagger up the road and buy a Christmas tree (which looked very much like we felt), dump it in the back garden and go back to bed. The following day we just about made it to the supermarket, and then back to bed. On Christmas Eve, in between fits of coughing and bouts of shivering, we had to do all the housework and put the tree up. We just about managed to get the place straight before my brother arrived. "Sorry if I'm not very festive," he said as he came in, "only I've got flu".

So the three of us sat about feeling sorry for ourselves while my brother's partner (who is a doctor) tutted and told us to take more drugs (mind you it might have been more worrying if she'd expressed any great interest: she's training to be a pathologist!).

However, the lurgy did mean I got a fair amount of knitting done as it was about all I felt up to doing. The River Stole languished rather as I didn't think my concentration/patience was up to it and from experience, knitting with kid silk haze while coughing and sneezing is a dangerous occupation resulting in a great many dropped stitches. However, I did manage to finish the Brown monkey socks:

and (following Liz's example) to start a mini-version of the Debbie Bliss Classic Baby Cardigan, knitted on smaller needles so as to come out newborn size.

This is for some friends of ours in the U.S. who are expecting imminently. The other part of this gift - requested by C - is to be "Extermaknit" which I haven't yet started. It might have to be sent on later, but I thought the baby jacket was probably the bit to concentrate on getting finished. I'm not quite sure what a newborn is going to make of a knitted Dalek...

I also finally relented and in response to C's piteous cries of "Aren't you going to make me something soon?" bought some yarn to make him the stripy socks he wanted. They are fairly dull but good train and TV knitting. However, as predicted they do seem to be going on forever. I can never quite believe how big men's feet are and spent a lot of the time grabbing C's foot in the knitting equivalent of "are we nearly there yet?". I've finally turned the heel but they may end up as trainer liners as I don't know that there's all that much yarn left to do any leg. I strongly suspect that we will find them far too warm to be comfortable anyway, so it probably doesn't matter.

Today we have also been to JL in Reading and identified a cabled aran cardigan pattern which a) doesn't have to be ordered from the U.S. b) does not involve terrifying amounts of steeking and I might actually be able to knit c) (much to C's chargrin) doesn't have leather elbow patches, horn toggles, or cause the wearer to age by 40 years as soon as it is donned, so if we can agree on some yarn he may yet get the long-coveted cardigan too - possibly even before the end of the year.

Star knitting-related present this year was this Cath Kidston knitting bag from the lovely mother-in-law.

It's happily swallowed up the rather unwieldy collection of needles that's been preventing my stash box from shutting, thereby restoring marital harmony by allowing me to close the lid and put the box under the table out of sight. C also bought me the "New Pathways" sock book from Socktopus but (owing I suspect to Liz's dad snaffling the last available copy) it hasn't arrived yet - grrr.

Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?

2007-12-15T16:28:00.000Z

This morning we were meant to get up early to go Christmas shopping.

At 11 o'clock I say to C (who is lying in bed reading), "Aren't you going to get up and get ready to go shopping?"

"Yeah, in a minute", says C, "I'm just reading this article on procrastination".

Kiri in action

2007-12-08T08:10:00.000Z

Well, we're back and Kiri has had it's day in the sun. And a very nice day it was too despite dawning overcast and stiflingly humid and then proceeding to rain torrentially for the best part of the morning. Brisbane has been having an unseasonably damp spell so we were all a bit concerned that the outdoor ceremony might end up taking place in a hastily erected marquee, but fortunately the weather pulled itself together in the afternoon and was beautifully warm and sunny so the wedding was held around the fountain as intended.

O - who definitely won the looks section of the genetic lottery in our family - looked absolutely stunning as is her wont, the groom and his entourage were splendidly bekilted, and the ceremony proceeded without a hitch (apart, obviously, from the one it was celebrating).* There was a slight issue with bagpipes and Amazing Grace, but we won't go into that...

The champagne flowed freely, large quantities of exceedingly good food were consumed, speeches were speeched (it seemed a little unusual that they came before the meal to begin with, but since the first speaker began by detailing the time that D waxed his b*llocks for a bet, we were actually quite thankful not to have eaten!), cake was cut, and generally good time had by all.

Owing to the inevitable preponderance of wedding-related activities we didn't get an awful lot of time for standard sight-seeing and tourist activities during our ten days** - all the more reason to go back - but we did manage to get to the botanical gardens and the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane where we encountered a variety of antipodean critters, including lots of surprisingly docile and deer-like kangaroos/wallabies which would happily take food from your hand.

We didn't get round to seeing the red kangaroos, but since they will apparently eviscerate you soon as look at you I wasn't too upset by that. We did however see a wombat. A surprisingly solid sort of creature it sat and regarded us from the top of a hollow log with an air of mild exasperation, as if we were the ones in the cage and it was waiting for us to do something amusing.

We also, naturally saw a lot of koalas which were quite unreasonably cute, especially the little ones, though how a species that lives in such tall trees can be quite so bad at climbing and still survive is beyond me. We watched while a baby koala tried to climb onto its mother's back, missed, and with a series of increasingly desperate "eeeps" gradually lost its grip until it was hanging by one claw from her fur while she frantically scrabbled at the branch they had been sitting on. At this point the mother seemed to decide something had to give and shrugged the baby off. It spent the next twenty minutes or so eeping and scampering about the bottom of the cage hopelessly trying to shin up all the trunks and poles it could find. Unfortunately the place closed at 5.30 so we never did find out if it made it.

For the last couple of days we left O and D to recover and decamped up the coast to the seaside resort of Noosa, spending an enjoyable time playing in the sea and the sand and working out too late which bits we'd missed with the factor 50. Swimming was fun since, as there's pretty much nothing between there and South America, the waves are fairly substantial, so the whole experience was a bit like being in the washing machine. Not a very strong swimmer at the best of times it was all I could do to stand up and keep hold of my swimming costume most of the time. Sand everywhere. My brothers and I had a go at recreating James Murray's Sand Grendle, but since we only had about an hour before the tide came in, we didn't have anything to dig with, and the sand was considerably drier and more friable than it probably is in North Wales, it didn't really measure up.

Murray's version:

Our attempt:
So, O is now Mrs Whyte and we are back in blighty with only jetlag, two weeks' worth of dirty washing, and occasional patches of sunburn as reminders that we've ever been away. Not to mention the sudden realisation that it's Christmas in a fortnight and we haven't done anything about it. The trip back was long and dull, but fairly uneventful. Needless to say the last 3.5 hours were the worst. That's the time it took us to get the 40 miles from Heathrow by train having previously covered the c. 4000 miles from Sydney to Singapore in only twice that. Ho hum.

* More photos on flickr for anyone who's interested.
** I finally managed to overcome the bootee curse though, and got a matching pair made the first day we were there in between making wedding favours. Though since the yarn was originally Australian, was posted to me, then taken back to Australia, in order to be posted back here with Christmas presents, they have quite a disproportionate number of airmiles on them now!

Sisyphus knits

2007-11-24T11:04:00.000Z

The problem with knitting on the train (apart from the blue fingers when the train doesn't turn up) is that it is prone to interruption and distraction. This is fine if you're knitting mindless miles of stocking stitch, or something with clear repeats where you can easily figure out where you're up to, but less so with anything remotely fiddly.

For the last month or so (it seems like more), I have been trying to knit a pair of bootees for a friend of my sister's who was expecting a baby. Note the "was" - baby has now arrived. The father is a childhood friend of both of ours though closer to my sister, so the deal was she would buy nice Australian merino and I would knit them. The work of a moment or so I thought. However...

First I tried to find a pattern to work with the fine 3ply yarn but couldn't find anything that wasn't ugly or excessively girly (at this stage we didn't know the sex of the baby so I was trying for something unisex - a slightly tall order given the amount of pink in the yarn). I was also instructed that they should ideally be bootees and not socks. I tried various patterns and versions of patterns but they all produced miserable little curled up things because the yarn wasn't thick enough. I knitted, I crocheted, I frogged and frogged again; it would not cooperate.

Finally baby appears on the scene (still booteeless) and is a girl. Hurrah, think I - Saartje's bootees. I knit one in record time throwing in a little bit of kidsilk spray (vino) to give a nice pink fuzz and am very pleased with it.

I embark on the second and run out of kidsilk spray before I reach the appropriate point. Nuts! I spend my lunch hours scouring every yarn shop in the district (all two of them) to no avail. It is now less than a week before the bootees are expected and I don't have time to order yarn from elsewhere or go further afield to buy any. No one I know has any spare kidsilk in the right colour.

I decide I will just have to start again and make a matching pair without the kidsilk spray. In the remaining two days of the week I frantically knit one bootee each day on the train to and from work because it is the only free time I have. Come to sew them up last night and the bootee curse strikes again; I find I have made two (different) mistakes, one on each bootee so they don't match.

I now have about a third of the ball of yarn left and 4 different bootees, only one of which (the one I can't reproduce) is really presentable, and I have run out of time to make them. Grr.....might as well throw my sticks in the bin, give my stash away to the needy, and give up knitting for good!

Round and round they go

2007-11-19T00:43:00.000Z

Happy Birthday to me... a very happy birthday indeed since I spent most of it happily playing with my new yarn swift and ball winder (not to mention the generous quantities of new yarn C's mum kindly sent me by way of presentage).

I have been very good because the swift etc. actually arrived early last week (from the Handweavers Studio who were very helpful and got it to me the day after I ordered it) but by dint of will-power and the simple expedient of hardly having any free time at all, I managed not to open it until this morning. C of course couldn't resist the lure of something vaguely technical (either that or he feared my poor little brain would overheat with the excitement) and was soon happily winding away. It was skein number 6 before I even got to have a go!

We started by balling a variety of things I've been saving especially, including the lovely Oxford Kitchen Yarns "Storm" sock yarn (hand-dyed with woad) that I bought at the IKnit Stitch and Bitch day

and the equally lovely Italian mulberry-coloured lace weight that I also bought there.

Then I basically spent the rest of the afternoon working my way through my whole stash, reducing what had been a horrid tangle in a variety of unseemly plastic bags to a stack of gratifyingly neat little cakes.

And they fit in the box and the lid shuts for the first time in months! A Sunday well-spent say I.

Here Kiri, Kiri, Kiri!

2007-11-06T23:26:00.000Z

Well, after a weekend of concerted knitting, all three are finally done. Still the odd end to sew in, but that doesn't really count.

On the whole I'm very pleased with them, and I hope my sister will be too. She is marrying a New Zealander and will be having New Zealand ferns in her bouquet, hence the original choice of pattern. I haven't got a New Zealand fern, so my asparagus fern will have to do for the purposes of comparison, but it seems fairly ferny to me.

For the third one I used, what I can't help thinking of as "Liz's accidental bind-off" (a method which apparently resulted from a slight misunderstanding, but in fact turned out to be much more successful than the original) and the edge gave me no trouble at all and came out nice and pointy. I am still trying to decide whether I dare try to tink the already-blocked Kiri No. 1 and tweak it to be the same. Not sure that my nerves are strong enough for it really, but I would like them to match. I'll think about it. If I attempt it fairly soon I suppose at a pinch I still have time to make a fourth...

Now all I have to do is get the rest of my outfit together. I have the majority of it but am still on the look-out for what I am told is called a "fascinator" (I reckon it'll be too hot for hats and anyway it's got to be packable). While visiting my mum last week I had a quick look in various likely-looking shops, but without much success. Really what I want is something the same sort of iridescent green as my shirt, but since this isn't one of "this season's" colours I couldn't find anything that matched. In fact the whole selection was somewhat uninspiring and surprisingly pricey. In one shop C proudly presented me with something that looked like the result of an unfortunate encounter between a pheasant and a lawnmower and I was rather taken aback to realize the price ticket said £265! Perhaps I'll get myself a bull-dog clip and some ribbon and then go out and mug a pigeon...

Every cloud?

2007-10-30T20:40:00.000Z

The last week hasn't been a great one on several fronts. This is one reason for the absence of posts (the other is that my brother is currently colonizing the spare room which is where the computer resides - not that I'm complaining as he's currently cooking me dinner).

Anyway, firstly, I was struck down by the departmental cold and spent all week feeling lousy, though not ill enough to be off work (which is of course how it has established itself as the departmental cold in the first place, since no one feels they can justify being off sick, so we all go in and give it to someone else).

Then I had a series of minor knitting disasters the worst of which was that a combination of violent sneezing and watching Heroes caused me to drop several stitches on Kiri on Thursday night. Much F-ing and blinding ensued. Thank heavens I finally managed to track them all down and pick them up again, but only at the expense of what should have been another repeat.

On top of the cold I've also been suffering from a particularly bad case of trains. Perhaps in response to all the reports on the news about how fat everyone is getting these days, First Great Western seem to have decided it would be a good idea if we all start the day with a brisk run and some step aerobics. To this end they have taken to changing the platform repeatedly at the very last minute. Last Tuesday for instance we all duly trooped across to platform 4 in accordance with the announcement and then watched as our train pulled up to platform 3. About four of us, reasonably sprightly and fleet of foot made it back in time; everyone else got left behind. Since then they have tried the same trick a further four times but we're wise to it now and so everyone clusters at the top of the stairs ready for the last minute "haven't-a-hope-in-hell-if-you're-old-or-need-to-use-the-lift" platform alteration.

However, they did get me on the way back on Wednesday when I left the Bluestockings happily ensconced in the pub and instead spent 45 minutes sitting on the station trying to knit with increasingly blue fingers while the train I was waiting for gradually got later and later until it merged seamlessly into the next one. Meanwhile I listened to a variety of announcements including the old favourite "Please ignore the information screens, they are showing incorrect information" [i.e. we don't know how to work the bloody things and we can't override the automatic announcements which keep contradicting everything we say] and "We apologise for the delay this is due to mmmghf..nmm...rgh... clackety clackety clackety" [i.e. quick here comes a goods train, make the pretend information announcement now].

Nevertheless, as a result of enforced knitting time I did manage to complete the booties I've been making as my "on-train" project (I should probably be grateful to FGW really since their complete inability to run trains to schedule was one of the main motivating forces behind my taking up knitting in the first place). I also made unexpected progress on a Banff sleeve while stuck in traffic on the M6/M42/M40 at the weekend (I feel bound to add that I don't drive and was sitting in the back and not blithely purling along steering with my knees or anything), so all in all my travelling woes haven't been completely without consolation this week. And the cardigan of stripes is also blocked and ready for posting.

Now all I need to do is decide what to make for my sister's best-friend's imminent new baby using the Elizabeth merino 4ply she sent me. All suggestions welcome.

Who let the dogs out?

2007-10-20T11:02:00.000+01:00

Well, apparently no one.

The dogs in question belong to our neighbour. There are two of them and they've been barking incessantly since about 8 o'clock this morning (when, presumably he went out), so so much for the lie-in.

When we first moved here and I heard them barking and howling like this, I used to worry that they were doing it because something had happened, like the house was on fire, or he had been taken ill and was lying unconscious, or was trapped down an old mineshaft perhaps. Now I realise it's just because they're shut in on their own and it's the only think they can think of to do. I wish they'd find a quieter way to pass the time though - it drives me nuts! Perhaps I should try to teach them to knit.

Meet the ancestors

2007-10-19T23:17:00.000+01:00

Today I finally got my photos from my old yahoo account transferred across to flickr so I've been having fun rediscovering photos I'd forgotten about.

Amongst them are these pictures of (I am reliably informed) two of my great-grandfathers.

You can certainly see where my brother gets his facial hair from!

The remainder of the pictures are mostly from c.2000-2002 when C was living and working just outside Chicago and I went out to stay with him. Most of them were prints which I scanned in so that my parents et al could see them, which accounts for the somewhat grainy quality of some of them.

There are some from our train trip on the California Zephyr which takes two days to go from Chicago to San Francisco through the Rockie mountains. The scenery in the Rockies and the Utah and Nevada deserts was some of the most amazing I've ever seen, partly just because of the sheer scale.

This is the foothills of the Rockies. It doesn't look like much until you realize that the line just below half-way is a huge goods train.

We spent a few days in San Francisco at the end of this trip before flying back to Chicago. San Francisco was great, though it was surprisingly cold, especially down by the sea. Still the fog was very atmospheric, even if it did leave me wishing I'd brought a coat.

This one is of the Gateway Arch in St Louis. C and I drove there for a couple of days from Chicago on Memorial Day weekend (late May).

When we left Chicago it was 42 degrees F; when we got to St Louis it was 86. That day was spring. The temperature never dropped again until the autumn.

Mind you, it is a fair way south of Chicago even though it's only just in the next state. It was a terrifically dull drive as I recall and before my knitting epiphany, so I didn't have anything to do. If there's one thing you can say about Illinois it's that it's flat and there wasn't even any map-reading to keep me occupied. The Mapquest driving directions basically said: Turn left onto N. Joliet road. After 2 miles merge onto I55 south. After 258 miles turn right. You just don't get directions like that in Britain! About half-way we stopped for lunch in a place called Normal. Perhaps appropriately it was perfectly ok but entirely unmemorable. St Louis was nice though (as is Chicago).

Finally there were some pictures from a visit to Greece with my mum and dad in 2002. We went all over the place visiting family and friends that my parents have known since before they were married and mum finally got to go to Delos. She was on her way there (nearly 40 years ago) when she met my dad and got distracted.

I rather like this photo. Spotted on the quay at (I think maybe) Andros, it seems to me like fish-shop with delusions of grandeur!

One down...

2007-10-16T19:27:00.000+01:00

Well, Kiri mark one is finally finished.

I am still not 100% happy with the cast off. In the end I tinked back the whole of the cast off and the row before and did them again on much bigger needles. This was more successful - it produced a sort of open edging which I rather like - but it's still not as stretchy as I wanted and consequently the points aren't as pointy as they might be. However, 'tis done, and blocked I think it looks really quite nice.

So, number 1 is done; Liz is racing through number 2 (having completed the same number of repeats in one week that I did in about one month); number 3 is underway, and the deadline seems a bit more manageable now.

I've also finally managed to get to the end of the stupidly stripy stash-busting cardigan, which now just awaits blocking (and posting).

This is probably just as well as, in spite of having only got a small way into my planned stash-bust, at the Knitting and Stitching show on Sunday I managed to acquire ten balls of Jaeger Matchmaker 4 ply and some Colinette Jitterbug, both of which now await inspiration. C was very restrained (perhaps resigned is more the word) when I returned bearing yet more yarn, only asking in a hopefully voice "Is it to make me something?"

He took it manfully when I said no, poor thing. I've been promising to make him something for ages and still haven't quite managed it. It's not that I'm unwilling but he seems to have ideas above his station. No simple raglan jumpers for him. No, what he wants is the saddle-shouldered Elizabeth Zimmerman cabled aran cardigan, the prospect of which I find mildly terrifying. In a vague gesture towards starting it I bought him some buttons... Sadly I only got six and I now see it needs seven. They're very nice buttons though...

Pants

2007-10-12T23:41:00.000+01:00

Our new washing-machine finally arrived this week which was a great relief given that it was expected last Sunday and never turned up. Having put off doing any washing for ages in anticipation of its arrival, and having had to cut through one of the pipes of the old one while taking it out, we suddenly found ourselves with no washing machine and virtually no clean clothes. By the end of the week I was wondering which would be the most appropriate to wear to work, the ball gown or the pyjamas.

To be honest though it's the underwear that caused most consternation. I don't know about everyone else but I have definite grades of underwear and was beginning to worry that I would be thrown back on the "reserves". On the one hand there are the huge, voluminous unmentionables which I've either bought in a vain attempt to subdue bits of me enough to squeeze into something that's clearly much too small, or have picked up by mistake thinking they were a different size/style, but never quite get round to throwing out because after all they're still brand new (and will remain so because they come up to my chin). On the other hand there are the items reserved for "special occasions"; the sort of thing that's fine for a relatively (ahem) brief stint, but no good at all for running for the train or standing about on drafty station platforms. A sort of sub-section of these are those bras, bought in good faith, which one feels trading standard should require to be labelled "for display purposes only". You know the ones - they appear rather flattering whilst standing still in the shop changing room, but it soon becomes apparent that the slightest agitation causes an effect reminiscent of a trifle being driven over cobbles so that you spend the entire time terrified of making any sudden movement.

Anyway, the washing-machine finally came and the house is now festooned in damp washing, so my dignity should be able to remain more-or-less intact (at least as far as it's possible given I've just been discussing my underwear at length in public). It's nice and shiny (the washing-machine that is) and more importantly much quieter than the old one, the spin cycle of which gave the impression that a Chinook had just landed in the kitchen. However, there does seem to be one fly in the ointment: either it's incredibly badly designed or the dial has been put on upside-down. That is to say, when you turn the dial so that the 30 degree silk setting is next to the little blob, what you actually get is the 95 degree cotton wash directly opposite! Fortunately C spotted this before we entrusted it with all my machine-washable woollens which I have been saving especially to try out the new wool-mark approved setting. Can't help feeling this is something of a design flaw though.

Woe is me, for I am undone!

2007-10-10T20:48:00.000+01:00

Well, not me so much - Kiri.

And not completely undone, just the damn cast-off for the nth time.

I have made Kiri before (as you can see from the header picture) and I didn't have any trouble with the cast off. That time it was just for fun and it didn't really matter if it went wrong and eventually I gave the shawl away. Now I am making it for something important the wretched thing will NOT co-operate. The yarn is too slippery and every time I k2tog and put it back on the needle the stitch below pulls up tight and then there isn't enough give in the edging.

I thought I'd managed it the day before yesterday after 3 attempts with progressively larger needles. Last night I set about blocking but the points won't point, or at least not evenly, so I am slowly un-casting off again stitch by stitch. Grrr... I was supposed to be on shawl number 2 by now. Thank god the lovely Liz has offered to make number 3 for me or I might be heading for a Kiri-induced breakdown.

Perhaps what I need to help me get them finished is an American Family Knitting Machine for which I found an advert today in the Massillon Independent 29 Dec. 1869 sandwiched between ads for Allen's Lung Balsam, Miss Emma L. Walls Hair Dealer, Henry Bier & Co. Iron Cocks (I'm assuming this is some sort of piece of machinery) and the "Magic Comb" which "will change any colored hair to a permanent black or brown" and - reassuringly I feel - "contains no poison".

The amazing array of knitted items the American knitting machine is capable of producing does include shawls alongside "stockings..drawers, caps, hoods, sacks, comforts [oh for a knitted comfort], purses, muffs, fringe [fringe in general apparently], afghans, nubias [what is a nubia anyway?*], undersleeves [not sure I like the sound of them, they sound itchy, esp. knitted ones], mittens, skating caps, lamp wicks [can you imagine knitting a lamp wick by hand?!]..leggins [sic], suspenders, wristers, tidies, tippets, tuffed work, and in fact an endless variety of articles in every day use, as well as for ornament".

In spite of the name it doesn't, however, enable you to knit American families, which is a shame. I often think how much more interesting life would be if these things really did work that way. I see Sainsbury's is selling Pirate Bedding Sets, should you be thinking of bedding a pirate...

However, I digress. Back to the (un)knitting.

*I've just looked it up and it's a sort of scarf - not as exciting as it sounds.

Woohoo!

2007-10-08T08:58:00.000+01:00

Got my Ravelry invite!

Unfortunately as I was out until 11pm yesterday I haven't had chance to do anything with it yet. But I will.

It's all in the jeans

2007-10-03T23:35:00.000+01:00

Or not...

This isn't so much a post as a gripe.

Why is it so hard to buy jeans that fit?

In the last week a couple of pairs of my oldest and most faithful trousers have given up the ghost. As I don't really have the time to start sewing just at the moment I decided I'd just have to bite the bullet and buy myself some. But straight away I came up against the same problem I've been having for what seems like years - all of them are the same, and they're all hipsters, and none of them fit me.

Now, I freely admit to being a fraction on the short and dumpy side and no matter what the fashion world says, personally I don't think that having six inches of pallid white buttock extruding from the top of your trousers is a good look. In my opinion, the point of new trousers is not to have your arse hanging out. But the size that ought to fit me had a zip barely 2-inches long, and left me feeling like a baboon with exhibitionist tendencies. So I ended up opting for the next size up, which is much less revealing except that there's enough fabric in the back to get someone else in behind me if only the legs were a bit wider, and the minute I bend over or worse still, sit down, I end up unintentionally mooning people. I've had to rope them in with a belt which gathers the material into lumps across the back in a way which is distinctly uncomfortable.

Does anyone else have this problem, or am I really a freak as all the high street stores would have me believe?

Chocolate Fudge Cake and Gentleman's Relish

2007-09-30T16:58:00.000+01:00

Given that it was my mum's birthday on Friday and that she and my dad were calling in for tea on Sunday on the way back from London, it seemed like a good idea to plan on making a cake this weekend.

"What sort of cake shall I make?" say I to C on Saturday morning. "Chocolate fudge cake" says C. So I flick through my random collection of recipes, duly note down the ingredients, and off we go to the shops.

The following morning, food-mixer in hand, two things strike me about this cake:
1) It requires a whole block of butter, the best part of a bag of dark brown sugar, and very nearly all of a pot of cocoa powder.
2) Given the erratic spelling and instructions along the lines of "add flour and other things", this is almost certainly a recipe I have acquired at some point from my youngest brother, whose recipes are notoriously "experimental". Mercifully this one doesn't have any mystery ingredients that I can see (the chicken dessert of two Christmases ago has passed into family legend); neither am I instructed to "put it out in the sun to cook", or to grind the flour myself using a saddle quern made of stones recovered from the garden. Nevertheless, it was with a degree of trepidation that I embarked on the project.

However, in the end, the instructions seemed fairly sensible, the mixture very nearly fitted into my biggest, deepest cake tin, and it came out looking not all that bad. Unfortunately while trying to get it onto the cooling rack a slight miscalculation with an oven glove (i.e. it wasn't on my hand when I picked up the still-hot cake tin) resulted in a nasty fissure across the top but I struck on the idea of disguising this with icing sugar, first cutting out the letters of "Happy Birthday" in paper so as to leave a message on the top when the letters were removed. This (very nearly) worked well. The B of Birthday got a bit smudged trying to get the paper letter off and the a moved a bit so the over all effect was rather as though the message had been written by a small, semi-literate child, but it wasn't too bad. My mum seemed to like it anyway.

Only as the last notes of Happy Birthday died away and my mum took a deep breath did the drawback of this plan strike me. My mum blew out the candle and the three of us at that end of the table, most of the tablecloth, and a fair amount of the rest of the room turn white (and slightly sticky).

Still the cake was nice... If somewhat rich... There's a fair bit left...

Also in a spirit of culinary experiment this week C and I bought a pot of Gentleman's Relish (est. 1824). This is something I had often heard of but never before tried. The lid of the pot was emblazoned with a health warning along the lines of "to appreciate the fine flavour of this product to the full use VERY SPARINGLY". Accordingly we spread it thinly on hot buttered toast.

I can well imagine that to a Victorian gentleman, his palate hardened by quantities of mutton, port, and cigars this might have an interestingly piquant flavour, but to me it tastes like a mixture of crab paste, marmite and Vicks VapoRub. Pthah! C claims to like it and says that this demonstrates that he is in fact a true gentleman (in spite of all evidence to the contrary). I reckon this might have more to do with the fact that he burnt off all his tastebuds at an early age by consuming industrial quantities of kebab-van chilli sauce while an undergraduate, and now belongs to that category of people who believe that if something doesn't make your nose run (or better still bleed) it's not worth eating. I shan't be eating any more of it at any rate.

Happiness is fridge-shaped

2007-09-23T23:59:00.000+01:00

Hooray! Our new fridge finally arrived and it fits (just)!

This is the long-awaited replacement for the secondhand one we bought when we first moved out of a furnished flat. It was supposed to be reconditioned and frost-free, but the frost-free function never really worked properly, so instead of letting the moisture condense and drain away, it formed a sort of glacier at the back of the freezer. Every two months or so you'd go to get something from the freezer and the front of the drawer would come off in your hand because the rest of it was frozen to the back wall.

The new one is big, shiny, economically efficient (as far as these things ever are) and has three (yes three!) vegetable drawers. It's a sorry indication of just how old and sad I am these days that ownership of a double egg-rack should produce such paroxysms of joy, but there we are. It's a very very good new fridge.

When we finally get the new washing-machine and I no longer have to open the door with a screwdriver my joy will be complete.

MiniKiri

2007-09-22T13:45:00.000+01:00

Last night I blocked Kiri mark 1 to the size O requested. As predicted I think it is too small (more like an antimacassar than a shawl); even on a short-arse like me it barely covers the tops of my arms. But otherwise I'm quite pleased with it.

Provided I can get it back on the needles I reckon another 3 repeats or so (plus the edging) should do the trick. The silk is so fine it gives a very pleasing result when blocked.

I finally got round to photographing the socks I finished a while back which I've decided should be called Opal Fruit Socks. The colour of the Opal "Feelings 1705" yarn reminded me so powerfully of Opal Fruits (Starburst to all the youngsters out there) that I could practically taste them while knitting (particularly the orange bits for some reason). These were the ones I ripped about 20 times in a fruitless (pun intended) search for something wouldn't just give me great big stripes. In the end I divided the yarn and used two balls at once to give me lots and lots of stripes and I'm fairly pleased with the end result though equally glad to see the back of them after so many false starts.

Also today I managed to tidy up the garden a bit, including having a hack at the lunatic yellow clematis which is taking over the whole of one side of the garden. The problem is it's so tangled you can't really see where it comes from so you just have to chop things and hope for the best. I can only reach the low bits so I just cut them and wait for the bits further up to die.

The whole garden is looking rather fed-up and end-of-summer and quite a lot of things are suffering from blight/mildew/some other sort of lurgy as a result of the lousy weather we've had and the fact that, consequently, I've not been outside as much as I might. But at least the Virginia Creeper's looking nice.

If you can't beat 'em

2007-09-20T23:34:00.001+01:00

OK, I've finally caved. Everyone else seems to have a blog, and I was beginning to feel left out. So here I am. This blog is almost inevitably going to be mostly about knitting, since the only people I know who are likely to read it are other knitters and anyway, it's what I spend quite a lot of my time doing.

So...

Attack of the fifty-foot stash

2007-09-20T20:46:00.000+01:00

I have turned over a new leaf. I have decided that from now on I am only going to buy good quality yarn and then only when I have a specific pattern in mind (honest guv). However, the first step is to get rid of the vast quantity of stuff I already have which is spilling from the not-inconsiderable hamper in the living room - and the other box under the table which we don't talk about (that's crochet thread so it doesn't count - well most of it is...). Consequently I'm in the middle of a major stash-busting exercise.

The first thing is to get rid of the two MASSIVE balls of not-very-nice aran I acquired when I first started out, and have singularly failed to make anything from since. To this end I am making Banff from Knitty (this is going to be a gardening jumper I suspect). However the balls really are quite big. There were two when I started; I've knit the front, the back, and the cuff of one sleeve, and I only have one and a bit balls now... :os

I also started a madly-striped baby cardigan (the cardigan is striped not the baby) for the daughter of a friend in order to use up lots of merino/baby cashmerino leftovers. Kind of fell at the first hurdle there as I had to go and buy more yarn to eke out the oddments and get the colours to work. Hmm.

Finally, I'm knitting the first of three silk lace-weight Kiris for my sister's wedding (seen here languishing on top of the ever expanding pile of yarn and half-finished projects). Quite excited that I am now at the stage to do a test-block and see if it's big enough, though I suspect the answer will be no. That's my project for the weekend.

However, my cunning plan is being somewhat undermined by the fact that people keep giving me yarn, which is very nice of them, but it's not helping with the tottering pile which is threatening to engulf my end of the sofa. My latest acquisition is this rather lovely skein of 100% Jacob aran(ish) that my brother brought me back from Orkney. Now what shall I do with it I wonder...