Blindingly obvious Flanders and Swann quotes

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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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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…

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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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So much for not starting anything else

Do you remember I said I had a load of stuff to finish before I started anything? Well I did finish a couple of them and then realised I should get on with two different new baby presents so rather than the big pile of too much yarn diminishing it now has grown by several colours. They are lovely colours and I did think about putting on photo of a heap of wool but I thought that would spoil the surprise so you’ll just have to wait until I’ve finished those to see them.

I had a plan in the back of my head for a stripy jumper for Tiny a while ago but I was being good and not buying any more wool for a while and then a friend who was having a tidy up of her stash gave me some bright blue aran that she said wasn’t enough for a whole jumper for her grandchildren but it might do one for one of mine (children not grandchildren). When I suggested to Tiny that perhaps she might like a blue jumper she had clearly remembered the conversation from a month or two ago about stripes and was quite insistent about it and Small seems quite keen on the bright blue. I had a think about it and realised that I have several ends of balls of aran left from various jumpers so I could do her the striped jumper out of those and probably have enough left for a blue one for Small if it had a different coloured pattern on the yoke or maybe blue and green stripes because I have most of a 400g ball of green left as well.

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So here is the beginning of a stripy jumper which I started at the weekend. I had forgotten how fast children’s clothes are, especially in big yarn, I haven’t made any for at least six months! I’m not sure why I am knitting it now because I am having to guess how much she will grow before it gets cold again but we are going camping in the holidays so perhaps she will need it then – August, cold and dank and wet, brings more rain than any yet. The pattern is called Fiver and is a free one on the Love Knitting blog. There isn’t a really clear picture of a child standing up wearing it so I’m not sure if it is meant to be short but the length they gave for the 4 year old size wouldn’t reach down to Tiny’s belly button even the size she is now so I have added about five inches to the given length in an attempt to cover up the almost permanent builder’s bum. I’m not too sure whether the colours really go together but she seems to like it and we’ll be able to see her coming a mile off – on a scale of one to Smarties-before-they-changed-to-natural-colours it is really a notch or two brighter than it looks in the photo!

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In which the photos take up more space than the words

This is just a quick update on a couple of things because I haven’t posted anything for a little while, I got all the photos ready and then didn’t do anything with them.

I finished the fruit for the tree over the weekend, it’s a little less baked bean can shaped than it was and I think it’s slightly less knobbly. I did enough layers of paper that I could sand it off a little bit so at any rate it is less wrinkly even if still has big knobbles. I’ve just noticed in the photo that most of them have the red side facing out but they are greener on the back. Hopefully they look ok from a distance although I don’t think the little green fellow there will be seen except from on the stage.

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The crocheted something or other is coming along nicely and just needs a head. Have you worked out what it is yet? There is a song about it if that helps, some people think the title of this song is irrelevant…

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The other thing that I promise I will tell you about next time is the bed jacket, which is finished, it is blocking at the moment. I thought that seeing as I have put off writing about it (because it would take a little while to explain and I didn’t want to tack it on the end of something else) for so long that is is finished then I might as well write about the whole thing in one go. Here is a peep of it until then:

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In which the glue is out again

Most of Small’s class seem to have birthdays in May (well, at least a fifth of them so far that I know of) and he wanted to be Spiderman at one of the birthday parties, a friend very kindly found us a costume but Small was adamant that he should have a mask to go with it. After failing to persuade him that face paints would be fine and then failing to find any face paints anyway we resorted to making a mask. Fortunately Spiderman has a more or less ballon shaped head and not too many colours on his face so I did a very hasty couple of coats of papier mâché and dug out some left over acrylic dragon paint. It’s a little bit bendy because I didn’t have time to do more layers of paper and his eyes aren’t quite symmetrical but whose are? And he doesn’t stand still long enough for anyone to notice anyway!IMG_0941

While I had the glue out that finally motivated me to get on with the fruit for the tree. (You can read about it here if you don’t know what I’m talking about because it’s too complicated to explain it all again.) That and the kids need to practice with it soon. I know fruit is all different shapes and sizes but this bunch has to be the most knobbly, misshapen collection of not-quite-apples that I have seen for a while. There are a couple of nice, fat, round ones, a few that look a bit too square that I really must do something about and one that looks like one of those weird peach things with no stone that seem to have collapsed in the middle and I can’t remember the proper name for. What are the chances that the tree in the Garden of Eden was actually covered with crab apples?IMG_0942

There are a couple of golden ones there at the end but the rest need a few more coats of paper first. They are hanging up on the kitchen ceiling at the moment along with various small (and not so small) people’s drawings and the washing.

And here is the progress on the crocheted something or other for the guess-the-name-of-the-something-or-other competition in the summer fair at church. Now isn’t that a cute little bum? Have you worked out what variety of wee beastie it is yet? I could give you a clue about gazing at bottoms but I’m not sure it would help…

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In which the house plants are confused

Generally I am death to pot plants, I either totally ignore them for months on end or drown them because I feel so guilty about having neglected them previously. I have one not-quite-an-orchid-thing in the bathroom (which has been quite happy there for the last few years and I haven’t managed to kill yet because I at least remember to water it on the odd occasion that I clean the bathroom) and one enormous Christmas cactus that after years in my parents’ kitchen got too big (not too big for the whole kitchen, just too big for the space it was in) and they gave to me so long ago that I can’t remember when. I neglect that as well but it is a camel and keeps going on its reserves. Last year it went really wrinkly and old and miserable looking because I forgot to water it for months and months and months so I gave it a shower every day for a week and it looks quite happy again now. But it is a little bit confused – it thinks it is Christmas this week rather than Easter.

IMG_0438Can old man cactuses have dementia? I think it needs a name, it has been around that long but I haven’t quite worked out what it is yet.

The other thing I was going to tell you about is the spiders. I haven’t got any pictures because Dennis didn’t go down too well last time with someone who shall remain nameless (Kay) but I am going to tell you about them so stop reading if you like.

We have an annual infestation of small yellow spiders in the greenhouse, they hatch out and most years I manage to see them before they disperse (unless they find a really good hiding place). There are hundreds of them, they are smaller than one millimetre, bright yellow with a brown triangle on their bum and given the number of garden spiders who inhabit the tomato plants later in the year I’m guessing that’s what they turn into. I’m not too keen on spiders normally but I like these ones, they are fantastic – the first year they were all suspended in a brown clump a couple of inches across and you couldn’t see the cobweb because it was so fine and I couldn’t work out what it was that was floating there until I accidentally brushed the web and they all exploded outwards into a big cloud of wriggly, baby spiders, after a few minutes they settled back down and went back to a clump in the middle. It was amazing though and it always makes me smile to see them (maybe because of reading Charlotte’s Web too many times).

This year they were hiding under a bag of compost, I’m glad I got to see them because I think I missed it last time. I might not be so pleased once I need to water the tomatoes without getting a face full of cobweb – I’ve told them they are welcome to live in the plants as long as they don’t make webs across the path but they always forget. I keep a stick by the door now and have an imaginary fencing match every time I walk in there, they normally remember again by the time the tomatoes are ripe and have rearranged themselves parallel to the path. Somebody remind me how much I like the baby ones when I am hopping up and down and cursing with a face full of spider web in August, will you?

Oh, and I’ve done about three fifths of the ends so far and I don’t think I am insane yet. Judge for yourself. Happy Christmas!

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In which there is almost no knitting and definitely no bees

This is a nice thing that we made as a Christmas present for the small people, someone else thought it up – the instructions are here, but isn’t it a good idea? The cover is an old patched up duvet cover that was in the back of the cupboard for emergencies, the wood cost a couple of quid because for once there wasn’t quite the right sized bit in stores, the nice man in the shed drilled the holes (although the specification I gave him wasn’t quite clear enough so we have extra holes for hanging things on) and varnished the wood without being asked because he is a Really Useful Engineer (apologies to the Rev. W. Awdry) and I sewed some elastic loops onto the corners of the duvet cover.

Apologies for the blurriness, my photographer has gone to work and I am clearly not competent to operate the camera.

Apologies for the blurriness, my photographer has gone to work and I am clearly not competent to operate the camera.

It can be tall and thin for being the highest room in the tallest tower or it can be wide and flat when a giant has stood on your cottage and squished it, it can be a tent for sleeping under and if you speak to the nice man in the shed in your best polite voice then he will cut you a little piece of wood with a hole in it and glue it to your periscope (also made in the shed) so that you can hang it off the end of the crossbar and use it as a submarine, or you can use it as a stable for your horses that I’ll tell you all about some other time.

Sorry for the proliferation of posts, I was aiming for one or two a week but I am putting off sorting out the shop on my website, (the Really Useful Engineer has taken it on himself to revamp my shop and has kindly installed some software on the website for having a proper checkout, it will still use Paypal but it won’t have to have the nasty yellow Paypal buttons that don’t match anything else and change character sets when you aren’t looking, it’s not live yet so don’t try looking for it.) finishing a jumper, knitting another hat from the pattern to see if I wrote it down properly, doing the ironing, looking up how much poster tubes cost to buy and to post and about a dozen other things which mostly involve cleaning…