Miscellaneous makey things

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The too early worm is the one that gets caught by the bird

I’ve been hibernating, it is winter. The Man in the Shed bought me a hot water bottle, chiefly to stop me from whinging and putting my cold feet on him. (The title of this post is a quote from a song by Flanders and Swann which features a hot water bottle and people with cold feet so I thought it was fitting.) The smalls promptly nicked it so we sent him back to the shop for two more and I get brownie points for using up some of my stash to make some covers. The pattern is by Lucy Neatby who has written a book of holey stuff.

Here is some other stuff I have been doing during hibernation:

Putting off sewing on lots of scout badges and eventually sewing them on this week.

 

Making a new Joey for Mathilda because she lost hers somewhere along the way and I thought she looked a bit sad without him. I did use a pattern but I can’t remember which one and I changed it a lot because it wasn’t really the right size or shape to match Mathilda.

 

I made a couple of these pop up cards just for fun to see if it worked. Hopefully there is an only-ever-so-slightly-wobbly video filmed by Small if I can figure out how to put it in the post.

 

I made some more bookmarks to put away for Christmas, I think they have forgotten about them now. Ooh, and I did some other super secret Christmas stuff that I can’t show you yet until after Mikulás has visited but it was lots of fun to make.

 

I finally thought of something to do with this yarn, it is a really slow colour gradient, I bought some to make a baby blanket (the baby is 3 ½ now) and I bought an extra ball for me because I loved the colours so much but then I couldn’t think what to make with it. This is a linen stitch scarf – the front looks almost woven and the back is a bit like seed stitch. I’m really pleased with how it is turning out although I suspect it might be a bit itchy. I found the end of a ball from the blanket so that I didn’t have to start with yellow (I don’t know why, just didn’t want to have yellow on the edge), it almost joined up so there is just a slight discontinuity between the yellow and the green. There is a worse one between the red and the purple because my ball of yarn had a join in the middle which I didn’t know about until I got there but I don’t think it is too bad. I’m just over halfway through, there is one more repeat of the colours up to blue again.

Oh yes, nearly forgot – things to be thankful for number …hmm… don’t know where I got up to: we are more than halfway through our time away so it is downhill from here (downhill in the sense of getting easier rather than downhill in the sense of getting worse). That is probably cheating because choosing a thing that is about going home doesn’t really count as a thing that is good about being here. Let’s try again – things to be thankful for number whatever it was: wallabies are brilliant – we went to the wildlife park in the school holidays and you could feed the kangaroos and the wallabies. The kangaroos couldn’t care less but the wallabies were acting like they hadn’t been fed for three months and they would hold your hand to get at the food better, it was lovely, they are really soft like cats and they have really warm paws. I definitely need to give my cats quadruple cuddles when we get home, I’ve got some catching up to do.

 

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Tree by numbers

I was trying to do a new post every couple of weeks but I blinked and seven went by at high speed. Part of the whooshing sound they made on the way past included finishing off some stuff, putting off other stuff, making some random stuff out of the ordinary completely on a whim and a birthday with a rainbow cake (what else would she have?!)

The practice cake was less correct colours and had more interesting decoration (Tiny decorated that one herself) and the official one was only hampered slightly by the whole of the Shire (well the bits of it I looked in) suddenly not stocking food colouring anymore in between the time when I bought the stuff for the first one, used twice as much as I thought I would need and then went to look for more. I resorted to eBay and it turned out ok in the end. By the way, in case you were wondering, yes, my choice of where to live was entirely based on the name of the area with no consideration of the suitability and yes, it was just so that I could pretend to be a Hobbit for two years. Don’t tell the Man in the Shed, I don’t think he has noticed yet.

Here is the secret thing I was making for her, it matches the blanket pattern but has different colours. It’s a bit huge but she really likes it and it is in her rocking chair now.

The finished thing is the grey cardigan with the pockets. I have worn it quite a lot (about six and a half weeks worth) already although it is starting to get colder now (note the woolly socks) so I might not wear it so much for a while. I added in some lace ribbing round the bottom, partly because I was convinced the thing was going to roll up all the time and partly to make it a bit longer because I wasn’t sure about the length and it has turned out about right. I am really pleased with it although I think I would do the next size up another time. Mental note: don’t eat all the biscuits.

The random thing was that I saw a dream-catcher with a tree on it when I was looking for some craft to do with the Joeys and it got me thinking about Fibonacci numbers again so I started collecting some bits and pieces together while I thought about how to make it work.

If you don’t know about the Fibonacci sequence then The Rabbit Problem by Emily Gravett is a very good place to start. The short version is you start with two ones and add the two previous numbers together to get the next one – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on. I started to wonder whether you could make a tree that has a trunk with 55 strings that splits into two branches, one with 34 strings in and one with 21 strings in and then carries on splitting all the branches into smaller Fibonacci numbers until you get down to 55 branches that are all made of a single string. I did some scribbling. I thought I took a picture of my notes somewhere but they’ve been tidied up or recycled or something. There were a lot of notes though. And some circular graph paper.

And then I thought to do some research (if you count believing random things you read on the internet without checking them) and it turns out that real trees already had the same sort of idea. I love how much maths there is in nature, it’s almost as if someone made it that way on purpose… Some trees show the Fibonacci sequence in the number of branches that they have at any given point – suppose that when a tree puts out a new branch, that branch has to grow two months before it is strong enough to support a new branch itself. In  the first month you will have 1 branch, at the end of the second month that branch will split and you will have 2 branches, the new branch has to grow for a bit so the next month the original branch will split again but the new branch will not – 3 branches, the next month the first and second branch will split but not the newest one – 5 branches etc.

My tree has the sequence in the thickness of the branches going from the top down to the trunk and in the number of branches going up from the trunk out to the twigs. I’d be interested to see whether real plants follow some kind of tree equivalent of Kirchhoff’s Law (what goes in must come out) in terms of maybe the cross-sectional area of a given branch being equal to the sum of the cross-sectional area of that branch at a thinner point higher up plus any new branches that it has sprouted on the way but I suspect it might be a lot more difficult to measure.

I put one bead on each string (carefully planned for which size to put where, there were a lot of notes, remember?) and arranged them so that one bead is on each branch (except the single thickness ones) and also discovered that rather satisfyingly there are 21 branches with a thickness of 2 strings, 13 branches with a thickness of 3, 8 with a thickness of 5, 5 with a thickness of 8, 3 with a thickness of 13, 2 with a thickness of 21, 1 with a thickness of 34 and 1 with a thickness of 55.

If you are clever you might have noticed that that only makes 54 so there is one bead over which would be carried on to the next branch if my 55 thick branch were going to join into an 89 thick one.

I put the last bead down in the roots to look like a seed that this strange tree might have grown from. The roots are less orderly, I suppose I should have done the sequence going the opposite direction if I had been thinking about it properly but I didn’t. Also I definitely wasn’t trying to get it roughly symmetrical, that pleasing wonkiness is definitely a deliberate attempt to make it look more like a real tree. Definitely.

 

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In which there is a lot of catching up to do

I remembered my WordPress login, I updated all the stuff that I haven’t updated since March and I tried to upload some pictures but they are all bigger than 2MB and the silly thing won’t let me so now I have resorted to writing the words and hopefully the Man in the Shed will fix it for me later…*EDIT – He fixed it because he’s clever like that. Yay!*

Oops, I was going to write a new post in half term and it whooshed by like all the other weeks and I didn’t. This term has mostly been blankets, there was this one for a soon to be new baby which started off ok and then got ridiculously huge until there almost was no room for my lunch in my bag because it was full of blanket.

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There was this one which was a Stylecraft Crochet Along thing which just had to be made because it is so pretty, you can still get the pattern on their website but I’m too lazy to look up the links, I’m just going for speed and actually getting round to posting something. That was a much more sensible size for my work bag because it is made of small hexagons. It has since been commandeered by Tiny for a bedspread although it isn’t really big enough. I added a couple of rows to the border because I had quite a bit of yarn left over and why would you end with a red and pink row if you could end with purple and blue?

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There was this one which I started before the first blanket (but it isn’t a blanket) and then it got postponed in the middle to start the flowery one which in turn got put aside to do the rainbow one but they are all done now except the pockets on this. It isn’t meant to have pockets but I am incapable of leaving my phone in my bag and people tell me off if I keep it in my bra. It has got some nice cables on the back but you can’t see them because I put it up this way to dry.

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The holidays so far have mostly been making hats, very good stash busting hats. There is a pattern somewhere, I can look it up if anyone wants to know but I am being lazy, as I said, this is also why the photos are wonky and not cropped and well, never mind, at least there is a post. The rainbow one is mine, the striped one is Tiny’s, the scary red one is Small’s and the white one that isn’t finished is for a friend who ordered a lacy one. The Man in the Shed declined to have one made for him, not sure why…

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The Man in the Shed has been busy making an outside box (he didn’t do the bricks but he did do the cat proofing) for the So-Called Tortoise (so-called because she does appear to be a tortoise, I keep checking in case I’ve been mistaken and she is really a cocker spaniel or a greyhound but she remains stubbornly tortoise shaped) after only sixteen months stuck inside, poor thing, she is thoroughly enjoying it and I am deliberately planting weeds which goes against the grain a bit. She has been happily stumping around and sitting in the sun enjoying the flowers, I am starting to wonder if I am secretly a tortoise, we have a lot in common.

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I’m nearly up to date now, I had about nine months of housework to catch up on so the first week and a half of the holidays was mostly cleaning and getting haircuts (Tiny is very pleased with hers and mine is at least tidier than it has been, I’ve only been psyching myself up to get it cut again for three years this time…) The place is nowhere near pristine but I made enough of a dent in it to show willing, both the small people’s carpets have been visible enough to hoover this month and there isn’t that much washing left.

The second week was swimming, tiling the utility room and waiting for the rain to stop among other things and I managed to sort out some new uniform before the week before school starts this year. When I say ‘sort out’ you realise I mean that there is uniform that fits in the house, I still have a thousand and thirteen iron on name tags to do… Ooh and we accidentally managed to sort out school shoes on a day out in Cheltenham which means I don’t have to drag the Smalls into Cardiff, hurrah! I just hope they don’t grow now.

Now it is the third week, it is the first and only week on the calendar with nothing on it, the sun is shining and the garden is calling, it’s a jungle and the vegetables have all gone to pot, mainly because I left them in the pots and didn’t have time to plant them out – the tomatoes have just about recovered but the brassicas didn’t make it out of the greenhouse thanks to a bumper harvest of slugs and snails despite the slug pellets and going out in the dark with a bin bag to catch them (that was a lot of slimy creatures in one night), I forgot to dig up any potatoes while they were growing and had to harvest the whole lot in one go yesterday (ooh, that hurt!)

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I have finally managed to do some weeding (not very much yet but I managed to hack a path to the compost bin so that’s a start, I’m going back out as soon as I have written this) aided and abetted by my lovely and extremely thorough dad who started it off last week for me – there is one border which seems to have been all weeds and no shrubs by the look of it after he had finished but it is full of So-Called Tortoise friendly plants now: pansies, snapdragons, sow thistle and I’m trying to persuade some honesty to grow which I pinched from my grandparents in Hampshire but the soil is very different so I don’t know whether it will work. A couple of weeks ago he attacked a mountain of bindweed for me as well but I’m making him a jumper so I think we’re square.

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A swift report from the abyss

Sorry. I have been atrociously bad at writing any posts recently. I realised as well that I showed you lots of started things and didn’t write anything when they were finished. It has been a busy couple of months.

The treasure chest got finished, complete with added sea creatures by Small and Tiny inside.

Tiny Clanger got finished in time for the birthday and finally got to meet Small Clanger.

The Man in the Shed tidied his shed.

The aquilegias and all the colour in the garden came and went and I forgot to take a picture, now it is a green jungle again.

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I unraveled a cardigan which I knitted for my mum when I was less good at knitting and re-knitted it into a vest which I made up as I went along, was much better and I completely failed to take a photo of.

The Man in the Shed finished the bathroom so I can have a bath again. Hurrah!

I painted a backdrop of a cottage for a thing where it has to sometimes belong to the seven dwarves and sometimes to the three bears – spot the difference (and the mouse, don’t look Grandma!).

I rescued a swift with a damaged wing which has been passed on to the vets who might have a better idea what to do with it than me.

I started making a Sophie’s Universe blanket which I haven’t got a picture of yet. It’s a gorgeous free pattern which is available online and is really easy to follow as it has loads of photos. I’ve been printing the version without pictures but I did wonder whether it wouldn’t save some paper to follow it off a screen. That said it is not the thing I have printed recently that has used the most paper. But that’s another story, never mind, anyway, I paused in making Sophie’s Universe when I realised that the nursery teacher is about to pop and last time she was pregnant I made her a baby blanket and there are only a few of weeks left of term to make something. So I got on with it.

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It is blocking, it is pinned to the bed (which was the only sensible (debatable) place big enough to put it) with nearly six hundred pins to open up the lace edges which now means that a) I know I have well over six hundred pins (I thought I would run out when I started and there are more than half left) b) I have to keep the cats off it until it is dry (it is white and they are black) c) I have to get it dry before bedtime or explain to the Man in the Shed why the bed is slightly damp and d) I have to get nearly six hundred pins out of the bed before bedtime or explain to the Man in the Shed why the bed is slightly prickly…

 

UPDATE: 1303, 24 Jun 2015.

Slightly red faced update – despite having a maths degree I forgot to divide by two – * chain 3, cast off two, repeat from * gives half as many loops as stitches so there are nearly three hundred pins rather than nearly six hundred. But why let accuracy get in the way of a good story? Which is the principle employed, or so I am led to believe, by several of my forebears, well three of them anyway. Who’s been sleeping in my porridge…

A view from the shed

Before you start, this is not by your normal correspondent.

I have been meaning to write about a couple of things that have been made in the shed. Like most of the things in the shed, those best intentions never got past the design stage, but not today.

Like many young people, I had a set of Scalextric when I was small. As a teenager, it got a bit bigger with some that was left over from a school fair. A job lot on e-bay added a further wedge and a closing down sale at a local shop extended the car collection. All of this sat in several boxes for many years. The last time it came out was in 2006 and then it did not really work because a) we tried to build too big a track and b) it had not been used for about fifteen years and hence needed some TLC. It went back in the boxes and life went on.

Small saw the piles of boxes a while ago and asked several times if we could get out the electric cars. Well, could a dad refuse such an offer? No, so last week I made a simple layout which used the best bits of the track. After a little bit of fettling of the track, the new cars from the last purchase some years ago worked spectacularly well. The only real problem was that the track got in the way of the chairs from the dining table and some friends were coming to dinner (the maths tutoring would just have to work round it, but dinner would be a bit more awkward) and this meant it got “tidied away” (put in a pile in the corner) yesterday.

During the week, I had tried using the old F1 cars and the Mini Clubmans but the rubber on their tyres had dried out and had no grip. I found a dedicated bunch who supply tyres and brushes to revitalise the cars and I also ordered some of the pads to clean up the track.

One of the other items that I have from childhood is a book entitled “101 Circuits for Scalextric Drivers“. Small and Tiny looked through it today declaring “wow” for all of the layouts and they settled on one that they wanted me to build (SCX.1278 if you have the book). With a bit of modification for the fact that, while I have a lot of track, the only curve types are the same radius and hence where the layout wanted four bends with smaller radius, I had to improvise. We managed and got a layout that looked about right and had the advantage that it fitted at the end of the room, mostly out of the way of the dining table.

The kids helped out (surprisingly well) with cleaning the track. Their enthusiasm waned eventually but was rekindled a bit later when Small was asked to go and tidy up his Lego… We had a new layout and it worked quite well.

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That is all very fine, I hear you say, but what about making stuff in the shed? Well, some spare brush components, a new layout and thoughts of Lego. Surely there must be an opportunity to join the two toys up. I pottered for a bit to put together a very basic chassis and then disappeared to the shed to come up with a way of interfacing a brush unit with standard Lego pieces. I could always cut and drill things, but that would not be in the spirit of Lego, would it? In the end, the only extra that was needed was a washer to retain the spigot in the Lego brick that had a hole for a Technics joiner.

IMG_2993IMG_2994I used the 12v Lego motor which, in hindsight, has two drawbacks. 1) It has nowhere near enough torque so it is more of a tractor than a race car and 2) the orientation of the terminals on the motor mean that it travels the opposite direction round the track to a conventional Scalextric car. Ah well, I had fun doing it and seeing Small’s face light up when he saw a Lego car running round the track was worth several hours work. The picture below is a link to a short video if you want to see it in action.

While I have been working out how to use WordPress, someone else has been getting closer to finishing off a Clanger that has been in the making for some years and really should get finished in time for Tiny’s birthday this year, so here is the obligatory picture of some knitting which is required as a fee for me getting my hands on the keyboard.

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In which we get down to brass tacks

I have been berated by several people for not having posted anything since February so here is one before it turns into April. Things happen and I think, ‘I should put that on the blog.’ and then real life takes over and I don’t. This month I have mostly been decorating the bathroom (it is within the realms of possibility that I may get to have a bath in my own house this year), being an emergency choir accompanist (that was hard, J.S. Bach is so much easier than Pharrell Williams) and just about managing to do all the normal things like drag my children up and down the hill three times a day.

We will be seeing the olds and the very-olds over Easter (shh, don’t tell them I call them that or I’ll be in big trouble next week! Hmm, oops, I think it’s too late anyway…) so I thought they would like to see this one before then. I finally got round to turning this:

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into this:

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The piano stool belonged to my great-grandma but the top she had made for it was worn out by so many bottoms and I was doing a new one to replace it. I’ve been making it for several years (Small was considerably smaller when I began it) and it stalled after I had done the interesting bit in the middle. In January I gritted my teeth and did the twenty or so rows of beige that were left and the border and then put off turning it into a finished thing for a bit. The best bit was when I eventually dug out the box of two thousand (minus a couple of hundred) 3mm brass nails that were left from something else (because it appears you can only buy small brass nails in boxes of two thousand) to put the bit of trim around the bottom and promptly tipped the entire box all over the floor with my usual style and panache. Tiny very graciously agreed to pick them all up and keep me company while I nailed the rest into the piano stool; her job took her nearly as long as mine did.

The tapestry is stretched around a piece of MDF which looks a bit boring inside so I lined the lid with some interesting paper which we got ages ago in Sheffield to do something with and didn’t. It is Roobarb and Custard doing funny things (with descriptions like ‘Running away’, ‘Sitting (worried)’ and ‘As if rolling up sleeves’) if you can’t make it out. You can click on it to embiggify it if it helps.

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The other thing we have been doing is this:

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There was a large box with only one flap that had lots of plumbing in it (thank you Mr. Screwfix) which was crying out to be made into a treasure chest. It is to put all the Octonauts in which no longer fit in the box that contained the world at Christmas (it is a globe, not really the whole world, there aren’t that many Octonauts) and is much more fun than buying another plastic tub.

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Apologies for the second picture, it was taken by an unsupervised small Photographer C-class who doesn’t know about the flash but I never took a decent one of it in that state so I thought it would have to do. In case you were wondering, because I know you want to know, there are eighty-five rivets each made out of a scrumpled up sheet of loo roll. I counted.

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It’s not quite finished yet, it needs a few finishing touches. Oh, and all of the inside still wants painting.

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Good job there’s no school this week.

 

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In which there are some things that are older than they look

This week I’ve been having a getting-things-finished campaign. I’ve been plodding on with the tapestry for the old piano stool which I started several years ago (when Small was smaller) and stalled with twenty rows of background to go and sixteen rows of border all the way around; there are four rows left to do now so I’ll show you that soon. The painting is all done on the landing and we put the doodah rails back up at the weekend (that is what they’re called, isn’t it?) so it looks a lot more finished. I thought it was a bit bare though, it is a big wall and I was having a tidy up and I remembered that my grandma gave me these a while ago:

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They are embroidery which was done by my great-grandma at least fifty years ago (according to my mum who has been racking her brain) and the frames had disintegrated. I never met her and don’t know much about her except she did a lot of knitting and sewing and when she got a bit older she used to go down to the greenhouse to drink sherry and sleep (which doesn’t sound like a bad idea some days). Grandma gave them to me ages ago (being the only person in our family who does very much with pointed sticks and string and who would appreciate them) and I think she said they would ‘go with our house’.

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They took longer to reframe than I expected – they looked like they were just taped to a piece of card but once I got the tape off I realised they were sewn to the card which must have been a tough job. I cautiously gave them a wash, stretched them round some new card and found some frames which are near enough the right size and they are finally up on the wall by our stairs. I don’t think they are looking too shabby. Now I wonder if I have any sherry…

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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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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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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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