Procrastination

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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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Busy doing nothing

I thought it must be about time to write a post, we seem to have been very busy the last few weeks but when I tried to remember what we have done I’m struggling to have come up with anything to write about, it has all been very ordinary things but there have been a lot of them. I’ve got an earworm of the song now, I only know the chorus really, I just looked up the rest of it and I like the line, ‘I must rehearse the songbirds, To see that they sing in key.’ I’ll have to learn the rest of it next time I have nothing to do.

Tiny was sick a couple of weeks ago. A week after that the Man in the Shed took Small and Tiny off on family camp with the Scouts, I still haven’t managed to remove all the mud from the strange places it has found its way into. I got out of camp by going on a training weekend for Joey Scout leaders (Joeys are the equivalent of Beavers in the UK) and it felt very odd to have a night to myself with nobody else in the house but I did enjoy the quiet. This week, when home was being hit by a bout of freezing weather just when it should be warming up, we got hit by a 39°C day just when I was getting used to it being in the 20s again and my body said, ‘No, too hot!’ and promptly sent me to sleep on the sofa all afternoon.

I got all my squares joined together, it didn’t take as long as I thought it might. I had to hold the yarn in my left hand to make the join work because you had to keep the working yarn under the bits you were joining and I usually hold it in my right hand, (I was going to say I hold it the wrong way but then I decided it isn’t wrong, just different and it works perfectly well most of the time) so I had the option of putting the yarn round to the underneath after every stitch or holding it in my other hand. The first couple of squares were slow going but once I had done a few it was quicker. The border wasn’t very interesting to do, most of the rounds have a spike stitch every fourth stitch which messed up my rhythm and slowed me down a little and the last round has 1408 stitches so it was a bit of a slog but I really like the way it looks. It fits nicely on the bed too but if I took a photo if it there then I would have to tidy up the rest of the room for you so here it is on the floor. You can click on the photo if you want to make it bigger.

The pretty cardigan with the pockets is coming along nicely. I got to the end of the body and because it is stocking stitch all the way down with an i-cord cast off it is a bit curly at the moment, I am really hoping that once it is blocked it won’t curl up so much but I am not sure. Maybe I’ll have to weigh down the pockets with all my pocket detritus, that ought to do the job.

The pockets made a lot of ends to sew in because you have to cut and rejoin the yarn in various places and I thought I would sew those ends in before I start the sleeves so instead of doing that I got distracted making a secret thing for Tiny’s birthday. The pattern matches her blanket but it is in different colours, here is how far I have got with it so far. I had to redo the back because I did the number of rows in the pattern and it was humongous (is that how you spell that? It doesn’t look right whatever letters I put) and when I checked the size of the squares for the front from the blanket I realised there was no way they would ever fit together and I unravelled a load of it and redid it smaller. The Man in the Shed earned himself a look by suggesting I could have measured it before I had done the whole square and made it the right size in the first place. He’s right really but don’t tell him or he will be smug about it.

The only other exciting news I can think of is that my mending and sewing pile has reached the critical mass where I decided I really should do something about it. At the moment it consists of a sleeping bag with a ripped seam, a pair of Small’s shorts with a hole in the bum, one of Tiny’s skirts which looks like it has been through a shredder (I’m not really sure it is mendable, maybe a patch will have to do), a hermit crab which I can see nothing wrong with but apparently is coming apart at the seams and has holes in, and a pile of Scout badges. A couple of them are Small’s and the rest are mine – having sent me on my training weekend to make my Gilwell woggle our group remembered that they ought to invest me and give me a scarf to put in the woggle and some badges to sew on. So now I’ve told you I am going to do the mending pile, I’ll have to get on and do it, won’t I?

We’re busy doing nothing,
Working the whole day through.
Trying to find lots of things not to do.
We’re busy going nowhere,
Isn’t it just a crime?
We’d like to be unhappy, but
We never do have the time.

In which there is a missing year
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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!

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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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In which there is woollies, decorating and long division

I am still putting off showing you stuff that I made for Christmas. It wouldn’t take very long but the thought of actually working out where the few photos are that I remembered to take and trying to think of something to write about them has sent me scurrying off to do the gloss paint which is what I was putting off the week before (the queen of procrastination, remember?). This week I have mostly been dangling over the bannisters with a paint brush (don’t tell my mother, she’ll have forty fits) like some sort of trapeze act with added mess. (It’s ok, Mum, I’ve done all the high bits now.)

Before the guilt about not writing anything and the decorating set in I finished this jumper and have mostly been wearing it ever since (except for the parts when I was painting). I have been very pleased to have it this week as it is lovely and warm. I should have taken a picture of it before I wore it though  – it is going bobbly already.

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I nearly stuck to the pattern (also, chronic tweaker) – I added in a bit of shaping at the waist and a few short rows above and below the yoke to raise the back slightly and lower the front; it should be one of those that doesn’t have a front or back but I don’t like having a tickly neck. The yoke is a bit interesting, it’s got a few purl stitches thrown in here and there so it is a tad lumpy. I haven’t decided whether I like it yet or whether it just looks inside out but it is very warm so I think I’ll live with it.IMG_2762

I also seem to have produced a few body parts for another wee critter, this is as far as it’s got. It reminds me of the Griffle from Puddle Lane at the moment.

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I have run out of decorating for the time being and the only reason I am writing this is that I am really supposed to be working out how to do long division. I have somehow survived thirty one  years and a month or so on this planet and a maths degree without ever knowing how to do long division properly and I should really work out how to do it before I try to explain it to someone else…

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The oranges are up

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The oranges are interesting. Either they dried out a bit more and stopped smelling so bad or I got used to the smell. I’ve put some across the windows where they are pretty colours when the sun is out and brown when it is dark (from inside) and just brown all the time from the outside. I put the left over ones on the tree and they look ok – if you can line them up with the fairy lights then they look like little bits of stained glass. The oranges, lemons and limes made the most even and round slices, the grapefruits were much harder to slice thinly and came out a bit thick and lumpy. The ruby grapefruits were good for a bit of colour but I probably wouldn’t bother with the ordinary grapefruits again and the limes look more brown than green. So on the whole it was an interesting experiment. Maybe they would look more Christmassy with some holly and mistletoe.

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I am supposed to be tidying up but I had a request on the way to school this morning and I am a sucker for small people with knitting requests (and large people with knitting requests. And large people with strange requests for Christmas backdrops and collapsable trees, now I come to think of it). Small asked if I could please make him some of those flippy-top gloves that are sort of like gloves and sort of like mittens in red and orange and black and blue and with stripes but ones that go that way not ones that go that way. I said ok apart from the vertical stripes because I didn’t think that would work and how about some little squares and we did some hasty hand measuring in the playground. (Four of his fingers are as wide as three of mine.) So far I have this:

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which is made up out of my head somehow, I’m not too fussed on the colours but then they aren’t my gloves. I didn’t know I knew how to make gloves and then I thought I had made rather a lot of them recently and I probably did so I guessed how many stitches to cast on and off I went! I decided I’d better stop there and make sure it fits before I do the flippy-top bit or start the second one and plus I am supposed to be cleaning or ironing or generally not knitting. I hope I don’t forget what I did before I make the second one…

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Eleven things I learnt this week

Okay, they may not all have been this week but ‘Eleven things I learnt over the last three and a half weeks’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

1. I am the queen of procrastination. I have spent two weeks telling myself to write a new post before deciding I really must do it today and then two hours shortening curtains, twenty minutes playing the clarinet badly (very sorry people who live next door I am still rubbish at the high notes, the low notes and all the ones in between) and then some minutes doing bookkeeping and updating WordPress rather than sitting down to write this post, hopefully this will give you an idea what we have been up to the last few weeks.

2. Cucumbers are ridiculously easy to grow. This is the first year I have tried cucumbers and I plonked three plants in a grow bag and haven’t touched them since and we’ve had more cucumbers than we can eat.

3. You can have too many plums. I made four pounds of plum jam each day for six days running. And then some more. And then we bought a small chest freezer to put the rest of them in. And then made something like thirty-six pounds of damson jam in a day and a half because the Man in the Shed was a bit more thorough at collecting damsons from next door (when I sent him round with a bag of plums to swap with them) than I was expecting and the damsons were all going a bit splatty. Which reminds me, I must give them some jam…

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4. It is possible for School uniform to reappear out of the black hole that it frequently vanishes into. Three weeks before the end of the summer term, on sports day, Small lost his jumper, the school claimed not to have seen it, to have looked everywhere for it and we put it down as dropped somewhere between school and the field that sports day was held in. Yesterday it reappeared in his bag without a word or a clue as to where it had been. Maybe there is still hope for the dinner money purse that never came back on the last day of term or the coat that evaporated yesterday.

5. Boxes are always more fun than the things that came in them.

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6. Walking up and down hills makes me hungry. At the moment I have to go up a hill, down a hill and up another hill to school at half past eight and then back down the hill, up a hill and down the other hill to go back home, back up to school at half past twelve for the start of the nursery class and back home again and then back up the hill for the end of school at three o’clock and home again. Next Monday the after school clubs start and I have to pick up one of them at three fifteen and the other at four. I have eaten an inordinate quantity of biscuits and am still hungry. Might have to start eating frozen plums instead.

7. Not talking to anyone in the playground for six weeks has made my never particularly competent ability to make small talk become completely non-existent. People have been asking me if I had a nice summer and my vocal chords seize up along with my mind and I mutter something incomprehensible at them and hope they will leave me alone until I remember what it is you are supposed to say.

8. Vests are loads quicker than jumpers. They are twice as quick and use half the wool. This one is Angostura by Ysolda and I like it so much I might have to make some more. (I have already had an order for a Christmas present). Sorry, haven’t got a proper mug shot of it, (does it count as a mug shot if it is for showing off your jumper instead of your mug?) but here are some of the gorgeous cables.

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9. Beech trees on tarmac make a fantastic noise. There is one on the way to school about four storeys high (four modern pokey storeys – it is a bit taller than the three storey flats it is next to) and when there is a breeze you can stand underneath it and be showered continuously with beech nuts which make a sort of pitter-patter noise, tapping a bit like rain but lighter and more hollow sounding. I keep slowing down under the tree just to listen to it.

10. Kay don’t read this one. British garden spiders can get really big. You know the ones with the big bottoms and thin legs with the speckly brown and white pattern on their bottoms? I normally feel reasonably kindly towards those ones, they live in the greenhouse and so far this year have been remarkably well behaved about not building webs across the path but I went in there the other day and there was one with a bottom the size of a small grape and I totally freaked out and got a stick to chase it out and then threw the stick out of the window when she started crawling along it towards my hand, I hope she found somewhere nice and dark to hide where I won’t find her again!

11. Beetroot is not always pink.

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In which I am finally finished

Well here it is in all its mismatched glory, I seemed to be sewing it up forever but it’s finally done.  I went for all the different buttons with plants on that were a similar colour, it didn’t seem right to have matching ones on there.

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And here it is with some stuffing in it and me being as photogenic as always and standing like a lump and not really wanting to have my picture taken…

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Back to the socks then! (Otherwise known as putting off what I am really meant to be doing, i.e. making golden fruit for the tree, writing up a hat pattern that I have put off for so long that I have more or less forgotten what I did, finishing a bed jacket for my mum, doing the washing, getting children dressed…)

 

In which there are some useful instructions
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In which there are some useful instructions

Right, here is how to do a tubular cast on, I’ve been putting off writing it down because it involves a small amount of thinking but now I’m supposed to be doing some work updating the website so that is perfect motivation…

This cast on looks really nice – the knitting doesn’t really have an edge, it looks like it rolls underneath and goes up the back which is because you end up making a little hollow tube all the way along the bottom of the knitting. I think it looks really professional and since learning it I realised that most of my shop bought knitted clothes use this cast on and I never really noticed before. There are several ways to get the same effect and I reckon most of them look really complicated and fiddly but this method is really easy, it gives you 1×1 rib. (I think it may be possible to do something for a 2×2 rib but I haven’t tried that yet.)

Hopefully this is all ok, I’ve read it through a couple of times but if anybody spots any errors or needs any more clarification let me know.
You need a little piece of spare yarn, something thin and smooth like sock yarn is ideal and preferably in a colour that contrasts with what you are using for the knitting so you can see where it is to remove it afterwards. Also you should use needles that are two sizes smaller than you intend to use for the ribbing.
Casting on 005
In the round (even number of stitches)
With your waste yarn cast on half the number of stitches needed for your pattern plus one (e.g. if you need 90 stitches, cast on 46) using whatever method you like.
Turn. Change to your main yarn.
Round 1: *K1, yo, repeat from* to last st, K1 (e.g.91 sts)
Join in the round –  Make sure your stitches aren’t twisted and slip the first cast on stitch purlwise from the left to the right needle, place marker for beginning of round.
Round 2: * slip 1 purlwise with yarn in front, K1, repeat from * to last 2 sts K2tog (e.g. 90 sts)
Round 3: *P1, slip 1 purlwise with yarn in back, repeat from *
Round 4: * slip 1 purlwise with yarn in front, K1, repeat from *
Round 5: As round 3
Continue with larger needles in size for ribbing with P1, K1 rib for required number of rows.

Flat (odd number of stitches)
With your waste yarn cast on half the number of stitches needed for your pattern rounded up to the nearest whole number (e.g. if you need 91 stitches, 91/2 = 45  ½, cast on 46) using whatever method you like.
Turn. Change to your main yarn.
Row 1: *K1, yo, repeat from* to last st, K1 (e.g.91 sts)
Row 2: * K1, slip 1 purlwise with yarn in front, repeat from * to last st K1
Row 3: With yarn in front slip first stitch purlwise *K1, slip 1 purlwise with yarn in front, repeat from *
Repeat rows 2 and 3 once
Continue with larger needles in size for ribbing with K1, P1 rib for required number of rows.

Flat (even number of stitches)
With your waste yarn cast on half the number of stitches needed for your pattern plus one (e.g. if you need 90 stitches cast on 46) using whatever method you like.
Turn. Change to your main yarn.
Row 1: K2 *yo, K1 repeat from* to last st, K1 (e.g.90 sts)
Row 2: * K1, slip 1 purlwise with yarn in front, repeat from *
Repeat row 2 three times
Continue with larger needles in size for ribbing with K1, P1 rib for required number of rows

What you are actually doing is working half the stitches on one row and the other half on the next row so although you have worked four rows at the end of the cast on you will have the equivalent of two rows of knitting with half the stitches on the front and half the stitches on the back
Casting on 006
Now either unpick the provisional cast on or cut it really carefully and remove it in sections, it is magic and the knitting won’t unravel. Scout’s honour.
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Now you should have a lovely stretchy edge and no visible cast on. Oh, and it will look tiny until you’ve done a few more rows but it is super stretchy and will loosen up a little as you go along.

And I promise it won’t unravel, not that I was ever a scout but it really won’t. One time I tried to unravel something from the bottom, I can’t even remember why, maybe that end of the wool was easier to find or something but knitting just doesn’t unravel from the bottom up. All my happy childhood memories of cartoons where people got a thread snagged on something and then walked around and carried on oblivious to the fact that their jumper was merrily getting shorter and shorter were shattered. Until I learnt you can knit jumpers from the top down, in the round, like this one:

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Hurrah for silly unravelly things! And I still have lots to learn about knitting.

The jumper is Julia Blake’s ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes‘ with a little added colour and extrapolated into a smaller size for Small (Hmmm, vague memory of GCSE statistics – extrapolation results are a bit hit and miss and not always a good idea – the sleeves are really too tight compared to the rest of the jumper, but never mind, he loves the spider…) Sorry the photos aren’t great, I didn’t know I was going to need a good one without pyjamas when I took it.

 

In which there are socks
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In which there are socks

I was going to explain how to do a tubular cast on (I’ve got the photos ready and everything) but actually writing it down would mean I had to stop and think for ten minutes and the garden is calling so I will do that later in the week when the rain comes back (I am only a fair weather gardener). I turned over an entire bin of compost yesterday which was hard work but sort of satisfying and I’m off to go and plant some stuff in a minute so this is just a quick post to prove I am really getting on with jumper number two.

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There you go, it’s coming along, there’s still quite a lot to do but it feels like I have broken the back of it now. There is some shaping for the waist so at least I know where I am in the stocking stitch and don’t have to keep counting all the rows to see if it is long enough and then the yoke is after that which is much more interesting.

And to give my thumb a rest from the continental knitting here is some normal knitting that I have been doing in between:

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Sorry about the legs, I’ve cut as much of them off as I could; I’m not really sure how you are supposed to photograph your own feet! I pinched the cables from Earl Grey by the Yarn Harlot (because I am incapable of doing that much plain stocking stitch without going mad) but I did the socks toe-up and two at a time. The toe up bit (I used Judy’s Magic Cast On which is brilliant – really easy and looks nice) was to make them as long as possible because I just kept going until I ran out of wool (I really did, I used Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind Off which is just the right amount of stretchy but it used about twice as much wool as I was expecting, note to self: read instructions first, so I had to unpick a whole row on each sock). The two at a time bit was to deal with SSS (well documented problem: Second Sock Syndrome – make one sock, cast on second sock, forget quite what you did for the first one or how many rows or are just not inspired to make two of the same thing, second sock sits on needles for months and months and you have one cold foot). Oh and they have a FLK (Fish Lips Kiss) heel which I haven’t tried before but I think looks nicer than a normal heel flap.

Right, I’m off to sort out some vegetable seeds. Hmm, I think the greenhouse needs washing before I put anything in it, maybe I’ll just cast on another pair of socks quickly first…