Post ﹟72 – In which I lament the fact that 72 is not a square number (but at least it is twice 36)

Here is a post to show you the rest of the squares, I was really hoping it would serendipitously turn out to be a square numbered post but it was not to be.  There isn’t much else to say about squares apart from here they are so I thought I would witter a little bit about some other stuff in between in case you are fed up of looking at squares.

Fantastic by Julie Yeager

The camera is playing silly wotsits so I took these pictures on my phone but I seem to have not framed these very well, I’m sure they all fitted on when I took the photo but I deleted it off the phone when I imported them to the computer so I can’t check and the squares are all organised in piles now which took me ages to decide so I’m not moving them again to redo the pictures. A bad workman and his tools and all that…

Fall Blossom by Aurora Suominen

This week I have mostly been listening to Jingle Bells (played somewhat inexpertly but improving rapidly) on the clarinet. Normally that would drive me insane what with it being only February and having a tendency to acquire earworms but when it is Small playing somehow it just makes me grin and turn into that really annoying parent who tells everyone how wonderful their child is. I think it is because I have been trying to get him to learn an instrument for years, we did a little bit of piano but it doesn’t really work when your mother is your teacher. I think he finally agreed to have lessons at school chiefly to shut me up about it but so far (one week in!) he is really enjoying it and I love hearing him play something he has worked out from the music himself even if it is not very seasonal.

In Like a Lamb, Out Like a Lion by Margaret MacInnes

In an effort to try and sort out the chronic grumpiness before it becomes terminal I thought maybe I should try to think of some things that I am grateful for or that are positive about being here so as a brief interlude from the squares here is the view from the rock pool (translation for the people at home – a swimming pool made of sea near some rocks, not a rock pool full of crabs and seaweed and small children with fishing nets) that is walking distance from school where I can sit with my knitting or a book and throw the children in to play, (I have even been known to get in myself on special occasions) and is somewhere that I can’t imagine ever going after school at home.

There are bits of purple shells on the bottom and sometimes fish and it is quite nice there especially if you can find a time without too many other people! There, enough being positive back to the squares:

Lise by Polly Plum

There are only two of Cat’s Claw, I thought about making a third one to get thirty-six squares but it was probably the least interesting one to make because you have to do a big plain square for the middle and then do the claw bits over the top afterwards so I decided to do something different for my extra one.

Cat’s Claw my Margaret MacInnes

These are the odd squares, I’m glad there was only one Tropical Delight because it was really fiddly, I had to keep rewinding Hercule Poirot in my headphones because I missed a bit while I was reading the instructions, I do like the spiralling petals near the middle though. Eternal Braid is not in the original instructions but I wanted to add an extra square to make the blanket a square, 6×6 overall instead of a rectangle, 5×7. It looks a bit like an eye, it’s not meant to particularly in the pattern but I’ve been reading A Series of Unfortunate Events with Tiny and kept thinking about the VFD eyes so the colours sort of came out in that order.

Tropical Delight by Susan Stevens, Sweet and Fair by Julie Yeager, Moroccan Window by Heather Gibbs and Eternal Braid by Chris Simon

This is the suggested layout of the thirty-five squares. I have been messing around with them and they definitely fit the bed better with thirty-six but I also realised I will probably have to do a couple of extra rounds on each one to make it fit properly otherwise it will be a little bit short of the right size.

I spread them all out on the floor and proceeded to try to do an insane sudoku kind of thing where the rules are arbitrarily defined and also a bit fluid – I didn’t want any in the same row or column that are the same pattern and I didn’t want any next to each other that are too similar in colour. This is what I finally came up with. I put the four odd squares in the middle (that is why I needed an extra one instead of another Cat’s Claw) and then listed the others as more-or-less-round, approximately-square and vaguely-X-shaped, the X-shaped category is the loosest one because I need to borrow one from each of the other categories to make up the numbers. They are in diagonal rows by category, except for the ones in the middle and except for the two I borrowed which are on two of the corners. I think I have managed to follow the rules about rows and columns. I know the Cat’s Claws are diagonally opposite the other way but I couldn’t make it work otherwise.  Oh bum, I have just noticed that some of the other X-shaped ones are in the same diagonal row where they shouldn’t be. I’ll have to swap those!

I keep thinking of the quote from Arcadia – ‘In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing.’ If I try to lay them out randomly then I look at it and keep tweaking them until they follow some kind of rules again, I don’t think it’s quite what he meant but the words keep jostling in my brain. It’s a beautiful play, it has maths, fractals and chaos, landscape gardening, tortoises, a Broadwood piano, rice pudding and it is very funny. Tom Stoppard puts a lovely rhythm into his words, like Victoria Wood and John Finnemore. I think with clever writers it is as much the particular words they use as much as the sense of what they want to say that makes it a pleasure to listen to. Not sure what Mr Stoppard would think about being put in the same box as those other two though…

In other news, Tiny’s blanket is coming along nicely, I’m having the same sort of thing imposing rules on myself about the colours for the squares in this one even though they are supposed to be random. She loves it and keeps stealing it to play with which makes it a bit hard to carry on with. You can see from the selection of her artwork that is pinned to the end of my shelves why this particular pattern appealed to me to make for her. She does occasionally draw other things but I like these ones, they are nice and bright and remind me that God is watching out for us.

I told you before that I had trouble with startitis. I didn’t have any knitting on the go (except for a pair of socks but they don’t count and a couple of things that are hibernating and I will finish some time, they don’t count either) and this yarn was my birthday present last year which I have been itching to get going with, I will tell you about it properly next time. I managed to wait at least until I had finished the squares, I am pretending that doing the extra rounds and joining them all up and the border don’t count so that I am allowed to start a new thing, I mean the whole blanket is practically done, isn’t it?

In which there is a missing year

In which there is a missing year

It is well over a year since I posted anything, I have thought about writing something a lot of times this year – there were the really furry blue monster paw gloves for the monster who is friends with the bear and I failed to get a picture of, there was the Charlotte’s Dream blanket which kept me sane in the staffroom through the start of the year and while stuff was crazy at home (although I had to arrange the colours more in a more orderly manner than the pattern to satisfy that bit of my brain), there were baby clothes for a friend that needed finishing before we moved away in June and the baby is now two and a half months old, there was a big cross stitch which I started before I had the Smalls and which I finished in the eight weeks after we moved and had no furniture of our own, there was the Hygge shawl that I just fancied making and took to do on the plane but ended up watching lots of films instead (the Tom Stoppard Anna Karenina one is really good if you like that sort of thing – kind of a condensed theatrical version) and finished afterwards.

Every time I thought about writing something I couldn’t work out how to explain what was going on at home without getting really grumpy or sad and I thought that wouldn’t be nice to read. After more than a year of getting used to the idea I finally worked out that anybody who reads this probably knows what has been going on, where we are living and how I feel about it anyway so I have resorted to just carrying on without explaining and if you don’t know then a) tough titties, b) you’ll probably work it out as we go along and c) thank you for reading but I’m not sure why you are…

This is the view from my garden this afternoon – it is nearly 30°C, normally the sky is relentlessly blue but I hung my washing out and wanted to take a picture outside so it decided to be grey:

 

I had planned to come home for Christmas and left all the Christmas stuff behind but flights cost silly money so we are still here and last month I realised that we would need some Christmas stockings, they have been a bit slow because I am notoriously bad at knitting the same pattern more than once so making the same thing four times was a bit of a challenge but finally here are four stockings just in time:

 

And I get bonus points for using up lots of odds and ends out of the stash.

Mine has got my real name on the other side but since joining the Scouts here and needing a new name I have been reminded that when Tiny was more tiny than she is now she used to call me ‘Mouse’ so I added that too, this is my favourite bit:

Happy Christmas and I will try to write a bit more frequently now I have got past the not-writing-at-all bit!

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.

img_5562

Aren’t they nice?

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.

More puddings and paws

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

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

 

 

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

 

IMG_2501

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

A garden for my Grandad

Every time I see my Grandad he asks what I am growing and how the garden is so I thought I would put up some pictures here for him to see what is going on. (I expect a couple of other nosy parkers might like to have a look too!)

I’ve managed not to kill the sweet peas you gave me in the autumn despite ignoring them all winter in the greenhouse, they are just starting to flower and I’ve got a little bunch of them in a rather nice jug in my kitchen (the photo of it is not in my kitchen but that is where they are now).IMG_0971

I found some seeds the other day which I had been saving to plant at about half past May and when I found them again I realised most of them said you should plant them in April, so I threw them all in and they are sprouting already to make up for being late.

IMG_0967

There are some purple dwarf beans (Small chose those), some runners that I saved from last year, some red cabbages and multicoloured courgettes hiding at the back, some tomatoes that need to go into the grow bags, some bonsai tomatoes that desperately need to go in bigger pots and to a new home (does anybody want some small tomato plants?) and some miscellaneous flowers that I can’t remember what they are now (Small chose those as well). There’s some broccoli off to the side where you can’t see it that is going outside tomorrow and some morning glories and sunflowers lurking in the corner next to the lemon tree (also invisible) which produced two lemons this year.

IMG_0975

This is the organised bit of the garden which has garlic, red and white onions, Duke of Yorks (or should that be Dukes of York?), Charlottes, some miserable slug eaten beetroot, far too many parsnips and some carrots (hopefully if they start growing sometime soon).

IMG_0974

This is the jungle, the wisteria is holding up the back wall, there is a damson (looking a little swamped) and some lupins and foxgloves somewhere in there which I put in last year and seem to have survived, the rest is mostly aquilegias which I have never planted any of (oh, no, wait I lie, I planted some yellow ones over the other side but not any of these ones) in shades of bluey-purple, purpley-purple, pinky-purple, purpley-pink, pale pink and white. They grow everywhere and I love them because of the colours – every now and then they jumble themselves up for no reason and at the moment there is a very dark purple one, almost black like an aubergine, which has pale yellow edges on the bell and then there is one white one which is so beautiful it shouldn’t be called white – if you look a bit closer it is extremely pale yellow, the next time it looks just pink, the next time the palest blue- it is almost pearlescent, the colour of princesses’ wedding dresses in fairy tales or maybe fairies’ pyjamas. And they just grow there with no help.

This one’s not an aquilegia, I can’t remember what it is. It could be a geum that I planted last year.

IMG_0964

This one is a ridiculous poppy that I don’t understand how it works. I mean how did all that stuff fit into that bud? Who has the job of folding up all the petals like butterflies’ wings crammed in a chrysalis?

IMG_0959

Speaking of chrysalises, Kit (short for Christopher the Chrysalis but really that just sounds silly) is starting to look a bit brown so either he is going rotten or he is going to hatch soon…

In which there is a lot of winding up

There is a bedroom in our house with all the stuff in it. If something doesn’t have a place to live it goes in that room, if we don’t know what to do with something it goes in there or if it is something that really should be thrown out or given away because nobody has used it for ten years but we can’t quite bear to part with it then it goes in that room. There is a big box of wool in there and no matter how tidily I put it away, it gets up and dances a jig when I am not looking and all the colours wrap themselves around each other and make a nice big nest which looks very comfy for someone but is not good for knitting from and stops the lid from shutting.

We are supposed to be getting on with decorating the house and are always saying we are going to tidy up in there so I said if someone got me a wool winder for Christmas then I would tidy up my wool. So they did. So I did. I tried out making a couple of balls with it from a couple of the least tangly bits of mess, I thought this would be really boring and I didn’t want to give myself RSI so I planned to wind a couple of balls a day until they were done. However, it is magic,

it turns this:                                                                                      into this:

IMG_9934

IMG_9935

 

 

 

 

 

 

(which takes up less space and you can pull the wool out of the middle when you want to use it without making a big horrible knot that collapses in on itself after you have used a third of it) and it is strangely addictive.

I re-wound the entire box in under thirty six hours and it is all beautiful and tidy. Although, I might be busy for a while longer – that was just the double knit; there is a bag of 4 ply and several ends of 400g aran balls that aren’t enough for a whole jumper and that I have a plan for which I will tell you about later…

Here is a silly thing, just for fun, if I can get it to work. Click on the picture  and give it a minute to load properly to see the silly thing.

Winding