Year: 2014

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The oranges are up

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The oranges are interesting. Either they dried out a bit more and stopped smelling so bad or I got used to the smell. I’ve put some across the windows where they are pretty colours when the sun is out and brown when it is dark (from inside) and just brown all the time from the outside. I put the left over ones on the tree and they look ok – if you can line them up with the fairy lights then they look like little bits of stained glass. The oranges, lemons and limes made the most even and round slices, the grapefruits were much harder to slice thinly and came out a bit thick and lumpy. The ruby grapefruits were good for a bit of colour but I probably wouldn’t bother with the ordinary grapefruits again and the limes look more brown than green. So on the whole it was an interesting experiment. Maybe they would look more Christmassy with some holly and mistletoe.

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I am supposed to be tidying up but I had a request on the way to school this morning and I am a sucker for small people with knitting requests (and large people with knitting requests. And large people with strange requests for Christmas backdrops and collapsable trees, now I come to think of it). Small asked if I could please make him some of those flippy-top gloves that are sort of like gloves and sort of like mittens in red and orange and black and blue and with stripes but ones that go that way not ones that go that way. I said ok apart from the vertical stripes because I didn’t think that would work and how about some little squares and we did some hasty hand measuring in the playground. (Four of his fingers are as wide as three of mine.) So far I have this:

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which is made up out of my head somehow, I’m not too fussed on the colours but then they aren’t my gloves. I didn’t know I knew how to make gloves and then I thought I had made rather a lot of them recently and I probably did so I guessed how many stitches to cast on and off I went! I decided I’d better stop there and make sure it fits before I do the flippy-top bit or start the second one and plus I am supposed to be cleaning or ironing or generally not knitting. I hope I don’t forget what I did before I make the second one…

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More puddings and paws

The paws are finished. I still don’t have long enough arms to get a decent photo and I would have waited for some bigger hands but I wanted to get the paws into the post. It’s as cold as a witch’s wotsit here (by my standards anyway. Standards of tolerance to the cold, I hasten to add, not standards of coldness of wotsits…) and the paws need to be sent to the Wild North where it must be even colder so I thought the Bear might appreciate having his paws sooner rather than later.

I’m really pleased with how they turned out because it was only a vague idea and I thought there would be more patterns already written for bear paws but they all just looked like mittens with pads on which didn’t seem quite right. In the end I used this one which I think is supposed to be a webbed foot but it looks like a paw to me, it has sort of fingers but they don’t come right down as far as fingers on a normal glove do. I added some extra stitches to make a bigger size and the cuff seemed really tight so I did the increases slightly differently. The Man in the Shed tested them out for me because he has almost the same size hands as the Bear (just a little thicker) and he said the paws were enormous. I thought they looked ok and he doesn’t like the way his fingers rattle around inside mittens anyway but I thought I would humour him and have a go a making some linings to take up some of the slack – I had some offcuts of fleece left from something else (me, a hoarder?! No!) which I used for the pads so I cut some hand shapes out which I thought would be plenty big enough but by the time I had sewn them together they were pretty snug even on my twiggy fingers. The second attempt was much more bear sized so now they have cosy linings which help keep your fingers in the right place a lot better and they are lovely and snug and warm and going in the post this afternoon.

 

 

The puddings look reasonable although one of them crunched up the plate it was cooking on and they formed a really thick skin which we weren’t sure whether you were supposed to take on or leave off when you changed the cloth. When it came down to it half the skin had welded itself to the cloth anyway so we peeled off the rest to even it up and are munching our way through rubbery, floury Christmas pudding skin (like Victoria Wood eating tofu, I was going to put a link to a video of it but I can’t find one so you’ll have to use your imagination) because it tastes ok and it seems a shame to throw it out. We put clean cloths on them with less flour this time and hung them back up in the cupboard where, for some reason, out of the corner of my eye I keep seeing them as a nice brace of pheasants lurking in the corner, must be something to do with ancient memories pootling about in the back of my brain somewhere. This picture is before we changed the cloths so they are about half an inch smaller all round now.

 

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The other Christmassy experiment I am doing is I dried out a bunch of slices of all the different coloured citrus fruits I could get my hands on. The idea is when they dry out they are less sticky and a bit translucent so you can hang them up on a string and they catch the light and look pretty. I only burned a couple (oops!) and I am waiting for them to air dry the last bit before I try and hang them up but at them moment the all look a bit brown and the room smells vaguely of festering oranges so I’m not quite sure how it’s going to turn out yet…

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Stirring and paws

Sorry for the dearth of posts, I’ve been knitting secret Christmas things and haven’t got good enough at arty farty close up shots to show you anything without giving away what things are and also we’ve had a house full of plasterers followed by damp and black mould so I’ve been alternately too busy painting/too busy moping about the damp to feel like writing anything.

I have no idea when stir up Sunday was this year because our church doesn’t do the collect, (Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord…) but we thought it must be about time to make the Christmas cake and puddings. I usually make a couple of puddings in basins, we eat one at Christmas and the second one has variously been given away, eaten at the next big family do, eaten at Easter or once eaten the following Christmas when we found it lurking in the back of the cupboard. Last year the small people had an advent calendar thing on the computer about an Edwardian house at Christmas with animations and interesting stuff and Small asked if we could make a round pudding like they did in that house. My first reaction was, ‘No!’ thinking of the mess but they did some research with the Man in the Shed and they persuaded me to have a go. We boiled a couple of old muslins up for some Tuesdays before tying up the puddings and they are currently being boiled (for even more Tuesdays than the cloths were) as I type. The photo was taken by my small assistant at about eight o’clock this morning from a height of four feet.

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The other thing I’ve been doing is knitting some bear paws for a friend who has acquired a bear hat for his birthday, he seems quite pleased with his hat and excited to have ears (despite his wife pointing out that he did already have ears) and I suggested that he needed paws to go with it. Here is the first one, I’m hoping it will look a bit better with the right sized hand in it. I have also discovered I don’t possess long enough arms to take photos of my own hands. It’s not quite finished, I need to dig out some grey fleece that I have got in a box somewhere and then I can sew on some pads but it’s not looking too bad.

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Possibly the most spoilt bears in Wales

They have their own bunk bed. The blankets are finished, the boys have glued the other bed together and they have pillows and mattresses made from some spare calico that has been lurking in a box from when I made a practice wedding dress out of it.
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The blankets are done with entrelac knitting which is where you knit a little square at a time, you pick up some stitches along the side of a previous square and work back and forth just across those stitches whilst decreasing on the other edge to join it to the square at the other side. There are loads of online tutorials or patterns if you search for them by people who can explain it far more eloquently than me! It’s a bit fiddly so I wouldn’t recommend it for knitting big things but it looks interesting. It also taught me a new skill – I got thoroughly fed up of turning the knitting round every six stitches so I worked out how to do a knit stitch going from right to left rather than left to right and then not long afterwards Sarah on Crafts from the Cwtch did a tutorial on exactly that which you can look at if you are interested because I am too lazy to take a load of pictures to explain something when someone else has already done a better job of it.

The knitting part of the secret thing is finished so I had to take a deep breath and do the steek. A steek is where you put a few extra stitches into your knitting so that you can cut it later. It means you can knit things in the round which end up flat or which need an opening later on, for example you could knit a cardigan as though you were doing a jumper in the round (which is much better for trying to do fair isle because you are always looking at the front of the pattern) and then you cut it up the middle, tidy up the edges and do the button band and stuff.

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You can either machine sew over the steek before you cut it or crochet over the extra stitches, I decided to machine this one because it is going to have some binding sewn along the edge afterwards anyway.
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Hold your breath! It hasn’t unravelled so far…

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The Secret Thing, which is a bit bigger than I had planned (meaning I didn’t really plan it or work out what the finished size would be from the tension and just started it, oops) is blocking at the moment (blocking is when you wash it and lay it flat in the right shape to even up the stitches and make it look even better – the Yarn Harlot has written a nice thing here). After some considerable thinking I decided it would have to be pinned to the rug because it won’t fit anywhere else sensible but the rug is on the table because I was paranoid about the water soaking through and marking the floor, I did think about stripping the bed, pinning the Secret Thing to that and sleeping somewhere else until it is dry but I thought it wouldn’t go down too well with the other occupant of the bed, long suffering though he is, I imagine that would be a step too far. Although he only has himself to blame – it was him who taught me how to knit in the first place.

On a completely different note I currently have the ear worm of the suffragette song from Mary Poppins – “Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid!’ which whilst this isn’t a view I particularly agree with (unless applied to the human race as a whole, regardless of gender – I prefer individual people to large mobs) I don’t see why I should have to suffer Glynis Johns being Mrs. Banks marching up and down singing about Missus Pankhurst being clapped in irons if nobody else does. Ready? One, two, three, go: “We’re clearly soldiers in petticoats”…

 

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An unusual classification system

What a frightful looking beast –
Half an inch across at least…

Firstly, I apologise – things seem to be a bit spidery recently and I know not everybody likes them but they are rather a feature of this house so it is difficult to avoid them completely. Secondly, no pictures because the camera has gone away with the Man in the Shed until tomorrow (Hooray! Tomato pasta for tea, pass the rice pudding!) but perhaps that is better for the subject matter anyway…

I think the spiders can tell when there isn’t a caveman around to sort them out (see Cave Baby by J. Donaldson and E. Gravett – it’s a mouse but same principle applies) and double their troops just to make a point. I came downstairs this morning to find an enormous Fred sitting in the dining room doorway and had to evict him myself. I can catch them but I always worry I am going to squish their legs with the glass and then I worry they are going to escape just at the moment you have to lift the glass slightly to get it onto the piece of card and then when you look at them through the glass they look three times as big and then you have to carry them to the garden and the back door suddenly seems miles and miles away and then you have to do the bit where you shake the glass out and I worry the Fred is going still be in the glass when I look at it (or worse still – jump sideways and land on me) and then I run very fast back into the house and slam the door and turn round to double check that the Fred didn’t run faster than I did and beat me back inside.

There is a classification system for spiders that has been developing for around twenty five years so far, it isn’t complete yet but I thought I would tell you about it and try to increase its usage because then I won’t be the only one talking nonsense and I might get some help to fill in the missing categories… The system works by giving a name to each class of spider, they are proper names but are used in sentences as ordinary nouns e.g. ‘I don’t like the look of that Boris up there.’ or ‘I saw a Reggie hiding in that corner.’ which means I’m not really sure whether they should qualify for capital letters or not.

So in vague order of size, with descriptions and etymologies we have

Teeny tiny spiders smaller than 1/8″ – Unnamed as yet because really they are no bother and you could mistake them for an ant. How about ‘Mitch’? That sounds about right.

Emma – Larger than a Mitch but no bigger than 1/2″ absolute maximum – Earliest named class (circa. 1988 but needs verification) ordinary unscary spider so called because when I was little there was one on the wall low down near my bed and I got in a big panic and my mum tried to make it ok by saying she wasn’t scary and her name was Emma (it didn’t really work very well but I appreciate the sentiment) which probably means you can blame my mother for this particular lot of nonsense I am subjecting you to.

Reggie – Sub class – A particularly small and spindly Boris (See Boris) less than 1/2″ across with extremely fine legs that are very difficult to see. Named by a member of our Sunday school class (in approximately 2006 or thereabouts) who is now grown up and whose wife may well be reading this.

Boris – Daddy-long-legs/cellar spider – I don’t know when these were named but pre 1998 – when I was at secondary school my friend’s mum said she called them Borises because they are annoying and Boris Becker is annoying (could equally be applied to Boris Johnson).

Harvestmen – Unnamed – Similar to but definitely a separate class from Borises – Borises have a head and a body and harvestmen only have one lump with all the bits and pieces in (and legs of course).

Garden spiders – Unnamed – The ones with the pretty patterns on the back and the bottoms that are too big for their heads. The class is unnamed but the three specific ones  who build webs parallel to the path behind the greenhouse sometimes get called Enid, Ethel and Edith or similar. When they build their webs perpendicular to the path they just get sworn at. The ones inside the greenhouse don’t have a name yet.

Fred – Large house spider – the sort that is normally at least 1″ and you can hear their footsteps when they scuttle around the floor doing their nightly patrol circuit round the house. Named in 2003 – there were several who lived in the outside cupboard in Bristol and they have a very good sense of direction/homing instinct, I speak from experience… Also good at jumping, or at least deliberately falling (again from experience).

Dennis – One particular Fred who previously used to jump out at me from the storage box in the garden (Subconsciously Dennis the Menace?) but who hasn’t been seen since I posted his photo on this blog, perhaps the fame and the paparazzi got too much for him.

The rusty, metal spider who lives under the hydrangea in the front garden – Unnamed. He should have a name he’s been there several years now, he is about 10″ across and I bought him in the garden centre because he was reduced – people had bought all the other random metal animals but clearly nobody fancied the spiders and there was still a crate of them left looking sorry for themselves and being marked down so I liberated one of them.

That’s all the categories I can think of at the moment but I’m sure there are some beasties who don’t fit into one of these. By the way, don’t look at the ceiling just above you…

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Eleven things I learnt this week

Okay, they may not all have been this week but ‘Eleven things I learnt over the last three and a half weeks’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

1. I am the queen of procrastination. I have spent two weeks telling myself to write a new post before deciding I really must do it today and then two hours shortening curtains, twenty minutes playing the clarinet badly (very sorry people who live next door I am still rubbish at the high notes, the low notes and all the ones in between) and then some minutes doing bookkeeping and updating WordPress rather than sitting down to write this post, hopefully this will give you an idea what we have been up to the last few weeks.

2. Cucumbers are ridiculously easy to grow. This is the first year I have tried cucumbers and I plonked three plants in a grow bag and haven’t touched them since and we’ve had more cucumbers than we can eat.

3. You can have too many plums. I made four pounds of plum jam each day for six days running. And then some more. And then we bought a small chest freezer to put the rest of them in. And then made something like thirty-six pounds of damson jam in a day and a half because the Man in the Shed was a bit more thorough at collecting damsons from next door (when I sent him round with a bag of plums to swap with them) than I was expecting and the damsons were all going a bit splatty. Which reminds me, I must give them some jam…

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4. It is possible for School uniform to reappear out of the black hole that it frequently vanishes into. Three weeks before the end of the summer term, on sports day, Small lost his jumper, the school claimed not to have seen it, to have looked everywhere for it and we put it down as dropped somewhere between school and the field that sports day was held in. Yesterday it reappeared in his bag without a word or a clue as to where it had been. Maybe there is still hope for the dinner money purse that never came back on the last day of term or the coat that evaporated yesterday.

5. Boxes are always more fun than the things that came in them.

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6. Walking up and down hills makes me hungry. At the moment I have to go up a hill, down a hill and up another hill to school at half past eight and then back down the hill, up a hill and down the other hill to go back home, back up to school at half past twelve for the start of the nursery class and back home again and then back up the hill for the end of school at three o’clock and home again. Next Monday the after school clubs start and I have to pick up one of them at three fifteen and the other at four. I have eaten an inordinate quantity of biscuits and am still hungry. Might have to start eating frozen plums instead.

7. Not talking to anyone in the playground for six weeks has made my never particularly competent ability to make small talk become completely non-existent. People have been asking me if I had a nice summer and my vocal chords seize up along with my mind and I mutter something incomprehensible at them and hope they will leave me alone until I remember what it is you are supposed to say.

8. Vests are loads quicker than jumpers. They are twice as quick and use half the wool. This one is Angostura by Ysolda and I like it so much I might have to make some more. (I have already had an order for a Christmas present). Sorry, haven’t got a proper mug shot of it, (does it count as a mug shot if it is for showing off your jumper instead of your mug?) but here are some of the gorgeous cables.

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9. Beech trees on tarmac make a fantastic noise. There is one on the way to school about four storeys high (four modern pokey storeys – it is a bit taller than the three storey flats it is next to) and when there is a breeze you can stand underneath it and be showered continuously with beech nuts which make a sort of pitter-patter noise, tapping a bit like rain but lighter and more hollow sounding. I keep slowing down under the tree just to listen to it.

10. Kay don’t read this one. British garden spiders can get really big. You know the ones with the big bottoms and thin legs with the speckly brown and white pattern on their bottoms? I normally feel reasonably kindly towards those ones, they live in the greenhouse and so far this year have been remarkably well behaved about not building webs across the path but I went in there the other day and there was one with a bottom the size of a small grape and I totally freaked out and got a stick to chase it out and then threw the stick out of the window when she started crawling along it towards my hand, I hope she found somewhere nice and dark to hide where I won’t find her again!

11. Beetroot is not always pink.

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Plum soup, roast plum, steamed plum, braised plum in plum sauce, plum in the basket with sauted plums, plum meringue pie, plum sorbet…

We have plums.

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So far we have eaten loads of them just as they are, the caterpillars have eaten a fair proportion too, I have made at least ten pounds of plum jam, a huge plum crumble and a large soggy plum cake. And the tree still looks like this. And that is only one side of it. If anybody would like a bag a of plums and a cup of tea just invite yourself round so I can inflict some on you too.

I have been learning to take deliberately blurry pictures so I can show you this without giving too much away:

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That’s my excuse anyway. It’s the secret baby knitting for my friend. I am nearly halfway through it which means I have to work out how to make the colours match going the other way soon. I don’t know whether they will like it but I love the colours, I’m really enjoying knitting it, I’ve got a thing for rainbow colours and the wool is gorgeous. The sheepy smell is starting to wear off now too which is good, either that or I’ve got immune to it. I would be getting on quicker with it except I keep stopping to make other things in between. I did finally finish these socks which I began in March.

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The single best thing that I am finally getting better at after twelve years of knitting is unravelling (although I still haven’t worked out how to get a decent picture of my own socks). I restarted these at least twice and had to do various bits of serious tinking (to tink is to knit backwards i.e. unknit, if you haven’t come across that word before) and drop various sections of stitches to fix cables that were the wrong way round but the result is socks that fit me properly. I did get past the heel at one point being in complete denial that they were too small before I caved in and ripped them back but I did it rather than wear them wrong so that is definitely progress. The next thing I need to learn is that stripy wool doesn’t really show off cool cables properly. The pattern is Circinus (except I worked out how to do it backwards so I could make them from the toe up) it has loads of little twisty cables that made me think of waves on a beach and the colour of the wool made me think of the sea which is why I put them together.

Right. Back to the secret knitting. Although I have just seen this on Ravelry. Oooh!

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In which there is mostly woodwork

It’s the summer holidays!

“It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in “It’s a nice day,” or “You’re very tall,” or “So this is it, we’re going to die.” His first theory was that if human beings didn’t keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this–“If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.” (Mr. Adams)

We have been to visit the Man in the Shed’s parents.  Last year he told them he was going to build a tree house in their hazel tree, I’m not sure if he got their permission first but they haven’t dismantled it yet. We didn’t quite finish it before the weather got soggy again and mostly ignored it all winter (except for the bit when it might have been going to snow and they added extra reinforcing to allow for heavy snow on the roof) so last month we finally got around to put some finishing touches on it and learnt how to tie net knots to that we don’t have to get the big ladders out every time someone wants to go up there.

Click on the pictures to enbiggificate.

Some crazy person (can’t imagine who) suggested to Small that he could sleep up there if he liked so the Man in the Shed and I spent one night up there each with him (mental note: bring camping mat next time), after first sweeping very thoroughly and checking and double checking that we had swept out all our eight legged friends with the dustpan and brush.

Both Small and Tiny managed to climb up there ok with a bit of help and had loads of fun playing with the bucket and pulley. I should probably explain that the Man in the Shed’s Dad is the person out of all the people I know who has the most sheds with the most useful things in them like spare (until he wants to use them for something) pulleys, rope and buckets, oh, and most of the materials and tools to build a tree house.

It also means that when Small says, ‘Can you make me a bed for Fred?’ (Fred is a small and furry creature of ursine nature who is living up to his name by being not as fluffy as he used to be) they can vanish into the shed for half a day and return with this:

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Two things you should know: One, it is not finished (Fred has lots of abilities but he has not yet mastered levitation) – they ran out of time and two, there is another one but it hasn’t been assembled yet – they decided to make it bunk beds. Oh and somebody probably needs to knit him a bedspread. Three things you should know: it is not finished, is bunk beds, needs some bedding and  has nice red uniforms…ah, no, wait, that’s something else.

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In which there is some catching up to do

Sorry I haven’t posted anything all week, I meant to do one on Monday and now it is almost next Monday.  The trouble with not posting things very often is there is too much to fit in and I don’t know which things to write about so then I put it off even longer and it gets worse and worse… (By the way it is almost the summer holidays so apologies in advance – I suspect the frequency of posts may become even more erratic than it is at the moment for a few weeks.)

This week I learnt to do Tunisian crochet which is interesting but probably needs its own post to explain it.

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The secret stash of Christmas presents is growing: there is a robot

and also a mouse. At Bible study the other day were talking about being made in the image of God the other week and what that meant; I am unlikely to ever breathe life into anything but I do love the moment when a pile of pieces turns into a little creature with some character.

The garden is full of life as well. I have been told I must prune the fruit trees once we have the fruit off them as they are impeding progress across the garden. The greenhouse is looking a bit jungly as well and we have had various vegetables (mainly purple, although not really intentionally) to eat from the veg bed and caterpillars (mainly green and definitely not intentionally, but did you know they go white when you cook them?) from the purple sprouting broccoli.

The morning glories have been looking glorious in the sun, they are more bedraggled this morning but I did notice this one lurking in at the bottom. I’m not sure where it came from because all the others are dark purple or pink.

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It doesn’t quite match the colour of my bottom after I fell down the stairs on Thursday but it’s not far off. I won’t show you a picture of that one, you’ll just have to use your imagination…

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In which there is the rest of the too much knitting

Having made a jumper for Tiny a few weeks ago I had to also make one for Small to keep things fair. He had his eye on the rest of the very blue wool given to me by a friend who was having a clear out so I made him this:

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Sorry about the apple, it was just easier to take the photo with it! The pattern was quite fun to do, it is called Jens and is a free one but it is in Danish. Google translate didn’t do too bad a job on it and I could work out most of it with a bit of lateral thinking – cast off two stitches rather than close two stitches and things like that (it is knit bottom up, in the round and joined for the yoke if you are interested in that sort of thing). When he first saw it he said, ‘But I didn’t want green on it!’ but by the time it was finished he was so excited about it having a zip that he seems to have forgotten his aversion to green.

I was going to give the knitting a rest as my hands were getting a bit achey but this sort of fell off my needles over the weekend:

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It’s a free pattern for another Sarah’s blog and it happened to suggest the same wool as I used for the mad cardigan so I’m doing pretty well at using up left over bits and pieces at the moment. I was going to put a picture up of her in bits as well but a man came to knock down the bathroom wall on Monday so I retreated into my cave and sewed her up without taking a photo of the parts. It’s going to be a stocking filler for Tiny which does seem stupidly early but I am mostly just putting off housework. Plus last year I was finishing a frog at about midnight not much before Christmas so I decided I would get a head start this year.

Now I’m off to crochet a robot. As you do.