Adams

by

In which there is a lot of sun

Nothing very much has happened this week. Small’s clarinet has progressed / regressed / digressed (choose a suitable verb) from Jingle Bells to Merrily We Roll Along with occasional bursts of Oh When the Saints (under protest) which if not more exciting are at least more seasonally appropriate and we’ve all been pootling about and slowly getting back into the term time routine. It’s an eleven week term this time, I think that might be a killer for us from the northern hemisphere who think eight weeks is a bit extreme!

The squares are slowly getting bigger, I have enlarged three quarters of them now, the pile on the right is the ones I have left to do. I think I am secretly just putting off the point where I have to join them together because the join in the pattern is a bit awkward. I could just do a different join but that would be cheating, wouldn’t it? I am looking at my pile of yarn and wondering whether I worked out the amounts I need properly, one of the colours that is finished now has a pleasingly small amount left over although it was a bit nerve-wracking while I was using it – I had to keep stopping to weigh the yarn and counting the squares left that needed that colour to see if I had done my calculations properly.

Things to be thankful for number two: The weather here means you can dry your washing (including big thick blankets, sleeping bags and children who fall in the sea) in hours rather than days and it is very good for blocking yarny things quickly. I finished Tiny’s blanket this morning and I am hopeful that it will be dry by bedtime.

The customer requested very firmly that the colours in the border should not go in the order stated in the pattern but in rainbow order with red on the outside and indigo in the middle. I explained that this would not quite be possible and we have settled for as close to rainbow order as we can get with ‘raspberry’ on the outside and ‘heather’ on the middle, it’s a bit heavy in the green section but I think it has more or less the desired effect.

Here is the knitting I promised to show you next time. My tension square came out exactly right first time on the size of needles listed in the pattern so I am a bit suspicious because that never happens and my tension squares always lie, I am not convinced that I won’t turn round one day and measure the cardigan and find out it is three times the size it should be. So far so good though. It is going to be a Luella cardigan by Suzie Sparkles, it’s quite slow because it is 4 ply yarn but it’s going a bit quicker now I have divided for the sleeves and don’t have 340 stitches to deal with. It has got a lace pattern on the yoke and is knit top down all in one piece, you go back and pick up the stitches for the sleeves later. It has got instructions for different length sleeves and pockets if you want them.

I have a thing about pockets, my favourite dress is the one with pockets and I have been known to buy men’s pyjamas just for the pockets. I like to have somewhere to shove my hands when I’m slouching along and to keep my useful bit of string, an interesting stone, a snotty tissue or two to mess up the load of washing and sometimes even knitting in (when it is small knitting and big pockets). I’m a bit ambivalent about the written pattern though, the lace part is written out very clearly but the rest of it could do with a bit more work, I don’t much like instructions like ‘Increase 13 stitches evenly along row’, whilst I am perfectly capable of working it out I sort of expect designers to do that bit for you especially if you are paying for the pattern. It is pretty though and it has pockets, did I mention that?

The pattern also doesn’t tell you the finished length and I normally add a couple of inches to things because of having a long back or a ‘low slung bum’, as my mum refers to it, (I think I have just got my body settings on a different aspect ratio to the one people use to design clothes) so I have been reading the pattern very slowly and scribbling numbers all way down the side to work out how many rows it has and how long it should turn out (assuming my tension square is not trying to deceive me) and where I could get away with adding a few rows without messing up the pockets.

It is one of those patterns that give you a load of instructions and then says ‘At the same time…’ and proceeds to give you a load more instructions so you have to remember which row you are up to with both lots of stuff. It usually involves lots of scribbled notes, swearing and unpicking the last seventeen rows to go back and put in the increase that you missed and wouldn’t, cosmically speaking, really matter if you left out but pride is at stake and it would be one stitch wider on the left than on the right and you would know, all the time you were wearing it that it wasn’t quite right. But it does have nice pockets and beautiful lace. I’m sure the best bit is the pockets. Or maybe the lace, I quite like that too.

I think there is a bit of a wobble near the end to do with how long it is by the time you reach the eleventh buttonhole but I think if you follow the instruction about the number of buttons and ignore the one about the length then it will end up being an inch or two longer than intended and with slightly deeper pockets so that suits me fine!

by

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.

IMG_3623

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.

by

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:

IMG_1808

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.

by

In which we have normality

I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.

IMG_0325

Well, here it is – dressed up for its first role as the Magic Tree, lots of leaves (not quite a billion but somewhere around a thousand by my reckoning) and some lovely fruit (you must particularly remember the pineapple and the bananas, Best Beloved) provided by the person whose tree it really is and who spent a very long time getting the pineapple and the bananas right.  And now it has been taken apart and taken away to be sung about and the space where it was looks enormous and empty and I have to get on with real life again which feels a bit sad, like the end of the holidays.

Maybe it’s time to get the knitting out again or cwtch up with a good book. I finally finished ‘Anna Karenina’ the other day, I have been reading it since August (which to put into perspective is longer than the time that I managed to keep Tiny inside me before she was born) and that is a long time to being reading a book! But I really enjoyed it despite reading it in snippets here and there or whilst being climbed on during other people’s swimming lessons or a sneaky couple of pages too early in the morning. It is about a load of people and how their lives are tangled up and what they think about things. I did write a pile of waffle about why I liked it but it was too waffley and boring and long and I remembered why I studied maths and not literature – I like books (once during reading week when I was leaving the college library with about eight novels under my arm the librarian said, ‘We’re revising hard, aren’t we?’ they shouldn’t call it reading week if it’s not…) but not dismantling them, so I deleted it all again. I thought it was a brilliant story and if you want to find out what it is about you’ll just have to read it.

A Cat, a Hat and a Piece of String

I’ve got something else for a complete contrast now which I picked up in the supermarket how-can-they-sell-books-that-cheap-that-doesn’t-cover-the-cost-of-the-paper-let-alone-pay-the-writers-anything section, it’s called ‘A Cat, a Hat and a Piece of String’ by Joanne Harris and it is a book of short stories.  I have no idea what they are about or what her writing is like, I just picked it up because I liked the title but hopefully it won’t take so long to read as the last one, I’ll let you know how I get on.

Not the End of the World

Ooh, that reminds me –  if you like short stories then try ‘Not the End of the World’ by Kate Atkinson, if I had to clear out all my books and only rescue a handful, this is one I would keep. I don’t know what it is about it (plus see paragraph above about being rubbish at describing books) but it doesn’t matter that I know what is going to happen, there is just something about the words and the rhythm of it that make me want to read it again. Although the stories are separate they all have little details which link them to the others in different ways which sort of joins it up and makes it into a whole thing (like you have to listen to a whole album in one go and not just download single tracks). And it has lots of lovely lists of words. And magic. And a tiger. Why wouldn’t you want to read it?