Rainbows

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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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Tree by numbers

I was trying to do a new post every couple of weeks but I blinked and seven went by at high speed. Part of the whooshing sound they made on the way past included finishing off some stuff, putting off other stuff, making some random stuff out of the ordinary completely on a whim and a birthday with a rainbow cake (what else would she have?!)

The practice cake was less correct colours and had more interesting decoration (Tiny decorated that one herself) and the official one was only hampered slightly by the whole of the Shire (well the bits of it I looked in) suddenly not stocking food colouring anymore in between the time when I bought the stuff for the first one, used twice as much as I thought I would need and then went to look for more. I resorted to eBay and it turned out ok in the end. By the way, in case you were wondering, yes, my choice of where to live was entirely based on the name of the area with no consideration of the suitability and yes, it was just so that I could pretend to be a Hobbit for two years. Don’t tell the Man in the Shed, I don’t think he has noticed yet.

Here is the secret thing I was making for her, it matches the blanket pattern but has different colours. It’s a bit huge but she really likes it and it is in her rocking chair now.

The finished thing is the grey cardigan with the pockets. I have worn it quite a lot (about six and a half weeks worth) already although it is starting to get colder now (note the woolly socks) so I might not wear it so much for a while. I added in some lace ribbing round the bottom, partly because I was convinced the thing was going to roll up all the time and partly to make it a bit longer because I wasn’t sure about the length and it has turned out about right. I am really pleased with it although I think I would do the next size up another time. Mental note: don’t eat all the biscuits.

The random thing was that I saw a dream-catcher with a tree on it when I was looking for some craft to do with the Joeys and it got me thinking about Fibonacci numbers again so I started collecting some bits and pieces together while I thought about how to make it work.

If you don’t know about the Fibonacci sequence then The Rabbit Problem by Emily Gravett is a very good place to start. The short version is you start with two ones and add the two previous numbers together to get the next one – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on. I started to wonder whether you could make a tree that has a trunk with 55 strings that splits into two branches, one with 34 strings in and one with 21 strings in and then carries on splitting all the branches into smaller Fibonacci numbers until you get down to 55 branches that are all made of a single string. I did some scribbling. I thought I took a picture of my notes somewhere but they’ve been tidied up or recycled or something. There were a lot of notes though. And some circular graph paper.

And then I thought to do some research (if you count believing random things you read on the internet without checking them) and it turns out that real trees already had the same sort of idea. I love how much maths there is in nature, it’s almost as if someone made it that way on purpose… Some trees show the Fibonacci sequence in the number of branches that they have at any given point – suppose that when a tree puts out a new branch, that branch has to grow two months before it is strong enough to support a new branch itself. In  the first month you will have 1 branch, at the end of the second month that branch will split and you will have 2 branches, the new branch has to grow for a bit so the next month the original branch will split again but the new branch will not – 3 branches, the next month the first and second branch will split but not the newest one – 5 branches etc.

My tree has the sequence in the thickness of the branches going from the top down to the trunk and in the number of branches going up from the trunk out to the twigs. I’d be interested to see whether real plants follow some kind of tree equivalent of Kirchhoff’s Law (what goes in must come out) in terms of maybe the cross-sectional area of a given branch being equal to the sum of the cross-sectional area of that branch at a thinner point higher up plus any new branches that it has sprouted on the way but I suspect it might be a lot more difficult to measure.

I put one bead on each string (carefully planned for which size to put where, there were a lot of notes, remember?) and arranged them so that one bead is on each branch (except the single thickness ones) and also discovered that rather satisfyingly there are 21 branches with a thickness of 2 strings, 13 branches with a thickness of 3, 8 with a thickness of 5, 5 with a thickness of 8, 3 with a thickness of 13, 2 with a thickness of 21, 1 with a thickness of 34 and 1 with a thickness of 55.

If you are clever you might have noticed that that only makes 54 so there is one bead over which would be carried on to the next branch if my 55 thick branch were going to join into an 89 thick one.

I put the last bead down in the roots to look like a seed that this strange tree might have grown from. The roots are less orderly, I suppose I should have done the sequence going the opposite direction if I had been thinking about it properly but I didn’t. Also I definitely wasn’t trying to get it roughly symmetrical, that pleasing wonkiness is definitely a deliberate attempt to make it look more like a real tree. Definitely.

 

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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!

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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?

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Plum soup, roast plum, steamed plum, braised plum in plum sauce, plum in the basket with sauted plums, plum meringue pie, plum sorbet…

We have plums.

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So far we have eaten loads of them just as they are, the caterpillars have eaten a fair proportion too, I have made at least ten pounds of plum jam, a huge plum crumble and a large soggy plum cake. And the tree still looks like this. And that is only one side of it. If anybody would like a bag a of plums and a cup of tea just invite yourself round so I can inflict some on you too.

I have been learning to take deliberately blurry pictures so I can show you this without giving too much away:

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That’s my excuse anyway. It’s the secret baby knitting for my friend. I am nearly halfway through it which means I have to work out how to make the colours match going the other way soon. I don’t know whether they will like it but I love the colours, I’m really enjoying knitting it, I’ve got a thing for rainbow colours and the wool is gorgeous. The sheepy smell is starting to wear off now too which is good, either that or I’ve got immune to it. I would be getting on quicker with it except I keep stopping to make other things in between. I did finally finish these socks which I began in March.

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The single best thing that I am finally getting better at after twelve years of knitting is unravelling (although I still haven’t worked out how to get a decent picture of my own socks). I restarted these at least twice and had to do various bits of serious tinking (to tink is to knit backwards i.e. unknit, if you haven’t come across that word before) and drop various sections of stitches to fix cables that were the wrong way round but the result is socks that fit me properly. I did get past the heel at one point being in complete denial that they were too small before I caved in and ripped them back but I did it rather than wear them wrong so that is definitely progress. The next thing I need to learn is that stripy wool doesn’t really show off cool cables properly. The pattern is Circinus (except I worked out how to do it backwards so I could make them from the toe up) it has loads of little twisty cables that made me think of waves on a beach and the colour of the wool made me think of the sea which is why I put them together.

Right. Back to the secret knitting. Although I have just seen this on Ravelry. Oooh!

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In which there is some semi-secret baby knitting

Sorry for going so long without posting anything, I have mostly been knitting instead of writing.

I’m going to be an auntie again in the autumn (for some reason being given the title ‘auntie’ makes me feel an awful lot older than being labelled as a mother) so I’ve been knitting baby stuff. I’m not big on babies, my own were rather nice, I quite like the ones that I know well and I don’t mind having a cuddle with other people’s (as long as I can give them back when they puke on me) but I’m not one for making a big, noisy fuss or thinking they are terribly cute – to me one pink, wrinkly baby looks more or less like all the other pink, wrinkly babies (my own included). Nevertheless I thought I should probably make something for the new one before it arrives, I wasn’t going to post anything about it on here but I have no reason to think that my brother will read this so I decided it didn’t really matter and even if he does then it won’t fit him… Based on past evidence my brother and his partner appear to produce immaculately presented, delicate, pink, frilly creatures (unlike my own clodhopping ragamuffins) so I looked up some suitably delicate, pink, frilly patterns, gritted my teeth and acquired some pink wool (if you know me then you will know I’m not a great fan of pink). Behold the results:

This one is a pattern called Olinda which is a lacy, reversible cardigan (I think I like the first side better), it was interesting to make because I don’t do much lace. I found the hardest part was sewing in the ends so they didn’t show on either side.  The pattern was ok once I got going with it but I found it pretty confusing to start with, it is all colour coded for the different sizes which I found difficult, it’s just a style thing but I struggled with it and I found it quite long winded – you would read all the way through one group of instructions and then at the end it would say things like, ‘As you work these rows be aware of the length required to knit to, listed on the next page, and stop when you reach that length.’ So I read a load of instructions I didn’t need to. Also it called the sizes by their sizes rather than ages all the way through, I know children aren’t all the same size so what fits one at three months might fit another at six months so maybe it is fair enough but I know I am aiming for a roughly three month sized cardigan whilst I don’t have a clue that it should measure 16 inches around which meant I kept having to double check what size I was doing. That said I am just grumpy and it is a nice cardigan.

This one is a pattern called Elsie’s Petal Dress which I think is gorgeous, the pattern is really well written – the instructions are written out in full as well as charted for the lace, the sizes go from a prem up to six years and you can do a regular skirt or a full skirt (this is the full one). The bodice went really quickly and then the skirt seemed to go on for ever but it’s done now and for once I am looking at baby clothes and thinking how cute they look, I must be going soft in my old age. Just got to wait for the beautiful baby to put in it to complete the effect, I really hope this one doesn’t turn out out be a tomboy now!

The other baby knitting I have been doing which is staying a secret (just because it will wind her up) is for my friend’s baby. It is made out of this wool (aren’t those colours fantastic?) I don’t think she believed me when I said it was all the colours, and a week or two ago it looked like this (this is the inside of it because the outside of it is still a secret and it has more colours now) just to prove I am really knitting it when she isn’t looking.

I have been doing so much knitting and so little writing that I now have a backlog of knitting to show you, I’ll save the rest for later in the week.