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In which there is a UFO (and a flying saucer)

Here is the flying saucer:img_5566-copy

The UFO being the Un-Finished Object:img_5565-copy

Complete with purple boots because why not? This one is for Small after Tiny nicked the flowery one. I’m not too sure about it – the tension is very loose, it is coming up the size it’s meant to I think but it’s a bit gappy, the overall effect is better than the individual pieces so it’s a sort of impressionist space blanket. He’s pleased with it anyway and he has inherited his father’s lawn sprinklery sweatiness so maybe a lightweight blanket is better… Us chilly people, however, need a monster like this to snuggle up with (excuse the cat, she is a law unto herself and wouldn’t be in the picture if I asked her to but insisted on being there when I didn’t want her):img_5567-copy

Having almost finished covering all the beds in the house with crochet I’d better start some Christmas knitting if people don’t distract me with things like this, (thanks Pip!), they’d need testing first before I made any for Christmas presents, wouldn’t they? And my slippers are always broken (except when they’re not). And these would be much easier to fix when they wore out. Plus there’s a small person who I promised a birthday jumper to last year and he has doubled in size now so I’d better do it quick before he grows any more! Time to cwtch up with a big blanket and Ravelry this evening and do some planning.

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In which there is nothing much happening

I have been really bad at taking photos of things: Grandad’s jumper is finished, maybe he’ll have worked out how to work his new camera and send me a picture by the time it is cold enough to wear it. The grey cardigan is properly finished, it is cold enough to wear that but am not capable of taking a photo of myself whilst wearing it.  A blanket for Small (because Tiny nicked my pretty flowery one and he said it wasn’t fair) is started but I haven’t taken any photos of that yet either. Here is an obsessive photo of some beans.

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Aren’t they nice?

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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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In which I got slightly carried away making hats

I haven’t posted anything since half term. My life is now ruled by the school calendar more completely than ever. Counting terms it is a difficult habit to break when you leave school having spent three quarters of your life there, it was just about wearing off when my own children started school and it started to tighten its grip again but now, working in school, I am back to counting down the days of term until the next break. The Easter holiday starts tomorrow and I have time to catch my breath again for a little while.

This term I have mostly been making hats (and a green jumper that I started three times but I’ll tell you about that another day). One of the teachers at school is starting her maternity leave today and she asked me if I could make her some baby hats (I mostly sit in the staff room with my knitting to give me an excuse for avoiding eye contact), she said her mum would do jumpers and stuff but hats were too fiddly.

I have found though that the trouble with teeny hats is they don’t take very long and there are millions of patterns so it is very easy to get carried away and think, ‘That’s a nice pattern, I’ll just do one more…’, on the other hand the good thing about teeny hats is they don’t take very long, are very small and portable and good for knitting in the staff room without having to hide an enormous ball of green aran in the bottom of your handbag just to avoid accidentally giving someone a withering look when they are the fifth person that day to say, “Wow, that’s a big ball of wool!” (For the record it is 400g and a perfectly normal size for a 400g skein of acrylic aran.)IMG_4126

Anyway, I made a lot of hats and thoroughly enjoyed it and I even potted them up before I gave them to her. I haven’t done anything in the garden yet this year, is it showing? Sorting out the veg patch is on my list of things to do in the Easter holidays and I am hoping that BBC weather has got the forecast very wrong otherwise I won’t get far down the list.IMG_4128

My next mission which I had no choice but to accept (the enormous ball of green aran is on hold for a minute, at least for away from home knitting as it is a bit unruly but it was five pounds in Aldi and it is the sort of green that makes me think of Grandad so it had to be done) went something like this:

Me: What would you like for your birthday?

Tiny: A big teddy turtle.

Me: Oh. Right. Where are you expecting me to get you a big teddy turtle from?

Tiny: You can knit one.

Me: Yes. I could knit one.

Pause

Me: How big is a big teddy turtle?

Tiny: About this big. (Indicates about eight inches with hands)

Me: (Breathing a sigh of relief at how big ‘big’ is) Oh. Right. If I did knit one that is quite a small present, what would you like for your main present?

Tiny: (Looks around room for inspiration) A chair. I don’t like that one any more.

Me: Right. What sort of chair? Would you like a rocking chair?

Tiny: Yes, a rocking chair.

Me: Really? You’d like a rocking chair for your big birthday present?

Tiny: Yes.

Me: Right.

This child is unique. So now I am knitting a turtle (whilst investigating rocking chairs). So far it (the turtle not the rocking chair) has two legs, a body, a tail, half a head and no shell. We compromised on the colour – she wanted it to be red and pink and purple but we found one with welly boots and a rain hat so it is going to be green with pink and purple boots and hat. I drew the line at knitting a pink and red turtle.

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In which I haven’t fallen into a black hole

IMG_4043No black holes, only that I got a job (a miraculous occurrence if you know anything about me and interviews) in October and haven’t been heard of since.

IMG_4044Time is precious, the last three months have wooshed by and there is little enough time to make things now, without stopping to write it down and take pictures.

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I just about managed to finish the Christmas knitting. There were Vikings, Lego man gloves, Red Riding Hood/wolf costumes and I got them done in time, the people with birthdays in December and January were probably breathing a sigh of relief that they didn’t have to work out how to be polite about being given knitting again.

IMG_4047Now it is half term and I have almost found the bottom of the washing basket.

IMG_4048Christmas didn’t really count as a break because it had Christmas in it and was still busy although we managed not to have flu this year which is always nice.

IMG_4049We are decorating Small’s room at the moment, he wanted it red and orange.

IMG_4050We compromised, I said he could have one wall red and one wall orange if the rest were a very light colour.

IMG_4051At the last minute he decided to have red and blue instead and we found some blackboard paint which gave us an idea to make the blue wall more interesting.IMG_4053I think I’ve earned a cup of tea now.

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A brief history of something or other

Time fascinates me – how we perceive time and the speed at which it moves, how a few years can go in a flash and how a few minutes can seem like an eternity when you are waiting for something. (Can you have ‘an eternity’? There must only be one if it is infinite.) I have alway loved stories about time travel – T. H White’s Merlyn (who lives backwards through time), Dirk Gently, Back to the Future, The Time Traveller’s Wife (not one for the fainthearted, I cried quite a lot) and the idea that maybe you could change things if you knew what would happen and whether you should.

I don’t know where the last three months went. It was nearly the end of term and I was flagging a bit, then both the Smalls got chicken pox which gave me a brief respite from the interminable slogs up and down the hill to school several times a day. I kept telling myself to just keep going to the end of term but then term ended and time kept going, it didn’t stop just because I made it there. Then it was the holidays and we had extra swimming lessons and church holiday club and I can’t remember what else but they were gone in far less time than six weeks, I’m sure. Then we had a couple of weeks of half days with Tiny starting in Reception and then we had a couple of weeks of children throwing up and they still haven’t both been at school for an entire week at the same time. I finished an enormous blanket, crocheted an anaconda, sewed a dress, produced an orange carrot and yellow corn costume, made six pineapples with lids for one of my friends who like to keep me busy with peculiar requests for unusual props, I have made a start on my List-of-things-I-have-been-putting-off-for-months-and-will-do-in-September (like the tax returns, I’ve done them now, may I have a trophy?) and writing a blog post, well, I’ve started that one at least and now it is very nearly October when last time I looked it was June. It is time for the Annual-slightly-obsessively-sorting-all-the-tomatoes-into-colour-and-size-order-ritual again, here is a pretty picture to break up all the waffle.

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Another thing about time that intrigues me is how as a very small child I can remember my grandparents saying at Christmas it seemed like we only just had the last one when to me it seemed like forever and now I am the one saying time has gone quickly. Does time get quicker and quicker the further through it we are? So is time faster for everyone now than it was thirty years ago or is it to do with your age? Does a six year old in 1915 experience time at the same rate a six year old in 2015 does and does every sixty year old in whatever year experience it at the same, albeit faster, rate?

I like the idea of time as a dimension, our changing perceptions of it make me think of how length and height and width can look different if you have to foreshorten something in a drawing to give the correct perspective. We were talking about dimensions the other day and how many we live in, three or four or more and somebody said it was three and a half because we can only go one way in time but I think four is good. One of my favourite teachers in sixth form college, Roger, (the other one was Eric and between them they somehow got me some A-levels even though I spent most of the time playing the piano loudly in the room right next to the maths department) liked to mischievously ask small children, ‘What do you get if you take seven away from three?’ expecting the answer, ‘You can’t take seven away from three.’ to which he would answer, ‘No, you can’t take seven away from three!’ I’m pretty sure time is a whole dimension, I just haven’t worked out how to go backwards yet. A pause button would be good too then I could sleep for a week without anybody noticing.

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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…