End of an era

This should really have been posted earlier - as it happened last Friday - but I'm on holiday this week between jobs and it's making me even more inclined to procrastination than usual...


About a month ago, when I first gave notice, I made the mistake of telling another cake-maker at work, Leah, that I'd thought of making a fairy-cake for each month I'd been working for the company, but then realised that would be 165 fairy-cakes which might defeat even our workplace's phenomenal appetite for cake... At which point Leah said it was her birthday the day I was leaving so she'd share the work... and a Plan was Hatched.



This slightly strange photo (taken without flash, so blurred - it looked as if the cakes were in a cave with the flash on!) is a first and last one of my former office with five of the eight plates of cake in situ... Maddy, on the left, is taking photos of the other three plates... From the front - poppyseed and apple-pie spice with lemon glace icing and choc sprinkles; coconut with coconut icing; cherry with rose icing and Barbie sprinkles; unadorned choc chip; vanilla with vanilla icing (Leah used a recipe from here, which was absolutely delicious...) By 4pm when my leaving presentation took place, there were a couple of dozen cakes left, and people were swooping in with sandwich-boxes to take some home to their families...


The speechifying and so on went better than I'd feared - nobody dredged up anything too horrendously embarrassing, I didn't burst into tears (just as well I left reading the very sweet comments in the card till the next day) or say something inappropriate. The colleague who did the gift-choosing was pretty inspired too... raiding my Amazon wishlist for this and this; when it gets to me, one of these; and then finding this lovely mini chest of drawers...





I'm still not sure whether he's seen me vanishing into The Pier every week and looking at their pretty things, but this is great. And I realised when I put it up there that it really reminds me of The Luggage, which I've always thought was more like a merchants' chest than the pirates' treasure chest in the Wikipedia illustration... I'm choosing to believe it has the rest of its legs retracted. Cadet is enjoying lounging around on the top of it for the moment, anyway...



Even the Bug got presents - Whittard now do a Catnip tea. Theoretically, you make the tea and give it to the cat to drink once it's cooled. But I couldn't resist just giving her one of the bags and seeing how long it lasted as a cat toy. Quite a long time, as it turns out. Here's a picture no dignified cat could be proud of...

... she is indeed pushing the bag as far up to her nose as possible using both front paws, and giving herself Mickey Mouse whiskers into the bargain... She still hasn't managed to destroy the first one though!

After work went to the pub, where lots of present and a couple of past colleagues came along... I know a few people from work read this, so thanks, guys, for everything...

We have a winner...

The name out of the brown paper lunch sack this morning is...

Sue, let me know if you'd like something already in the shop, or what colours you'd like in a custom dye job!

Thanks to everyone who commented - it was really interesting following links to blogs, too, some of them familiar and some not!

To answer some questions:

I'm very unlikely to make it to Stitch 'n Bitch Day - I'll have done my first week's long-distance commuting just before then, so I imagine I'll be asleep!

Likewise, I don't think I'll get to Harrogate this year... I'm hoping that by Christmas I'll be more used to the new rhythm of life and will feel like doing things; but I'm anticipating being pretty wiped out for the first couple of months!

And also - the bus company finally reunited me with my purse!!! the driver who'd been handed it was then on holiday for a week, so I only got it back on Tuesday... but I'm very glad to see it!

Right. Need to buy something smartish to wear to meet my new boss on Tuesday, and then there's a KTog this afternoon... I'll try and remember to take the camera!

Compare and contrast...

Two lace projects. On the left, the Unbloggable Project making its only appearance before it's rehomed; on the right the Hemlock Ring Blanket. The only similarity between the two, other than both being knitting-with-holes, is the wonderful Entrelac stitch markers. I was going to do this Hemlock Ring on larger needles, but the stitch markers didn't slip over the needles nicely; and I'm so sadly addicted to these things that I took it down a needle size... No affiliation, just a fan. Unfortunately the most recent consignment is still in the postal backlog... I didn't get the HRB started on Thursday night as planned; Emily Ocker's cast-on was just too complicated even with this great tutorial, given that I kept forgetting how to do garter-stitch for the baby jacket edging!

Clarification... and some AP extras

Was listening to the podcast by Lixie earlier - not just because she said she was going to mention the blog and the shop, you understand, but that did get me listening to it when it came out this afternoon, rather than sometime in the following week as I usually do! I liked her comments on the Garnstudio/DROPS people particularly (they were absolutely besieged when I got there, and although I could see they had lovely stuff and the prices looked good, I just registered that and moved on, so a review was great... Have bookmarked their website not just for the free patterns...) but it was interesting to hear someone else's impressions of the same show on the same day, particularly when it's someone you've bought yarn with....

One clarification: a couple of people (including Lixie but she wasn't the first) have said there was a lot more stitching than knitting... And I realise that every time I go to Ally Pally, I'm comparing it with the first few times I went (I think the first time was 1996 or 1997, the year before I started City and Guilds Embroidery). As a new stitcher and inveterate knitter, I had genuinely thought that something called a Knitting and Stitching Show would have some, you know, knitting in it. I believe there were about FIVE, or possibly SEVEN suppliers that year - Colinette, the Wensleydale people (from whom I scored my first pair of Brittany needles and felt very guilty about spending £5.50 on a pair of needles), 21st Century Yarns (when they were still 20th Century Yarns; oh dear... I bought yarn, and also 125g of embroidery silk from them which I'm still using...), Black Sheep, and Uppingham Yarns. Shilasdair may also have been there, I'm not entirely sure. Elizabeth Gash was selling her beautiful knitwear and there were one or two places doing quite exciting machine-knitted garments. Texere were there, but catering exclusively to embroiderers. And there was the Handweavers' Studio (notably MIA this year), but as a strictly knit-from-the-pattern-and-shut-up sort of girl at that point, I was a bit intimidated by their off-piste-ness... At the time I was actually grateful for the lack of knitting, as well as fazed by it - the list of supplies needed for the C&G was so extensive and consisted mainly of non-fibre-related articles like sketchpads, paints, brushes and so on, that Art Van Go got most of my cash that year, with a sideline for Oliver Twists (sadly and incomprehensibly still without a website) and Stef Francis (someone in their wisdom put those two stands opposite each other this year! Your two major independent, long-established, family-run, British hand-dyers for embroiderers and you put them head to head? what on earth? Surely you need to give people time for creative justification and amnesia between stands?). OK, that's the folksingerish bit where I go on about the old times; but it's a kind of Show of Hands folksingerish thing where I can also acknowledge that the olden days had their entirely crap elements, and certainly the total absence of acknowledgement of knitting through most of the 1990s was one of those...

So I was just completely stunned by what was available this year. There was qiviut (once fondled, never forgotten! and you have to love a yarn which doesn't put a u after a q); there was yak (from a supplier who'd run out of cards...); there was a lovely bamboo/wool/cotton blend from Teo's handspun... I did miss Pavi Yarns, but I don't know whether I'm thinking about the Harrogate show, having been to that the last several years as well; they may never have done Ally Pally... The two suppliers which were completely new to me were Knit n Caboodle, who were very good fun to talk to (as described in previous post); and Socktopus. Both the people on the stand were talking on their mobiles while I was there, so I can't comment on their general friendliness otherwise, but they had several of the sock yarns you see regularly on Knitty or Ravelry. None of them felt quite as nice to me as the sock yarns I already had in my bag, so I passed, but took a card anyway for future reference...

The photo at the top of the post is completely gratuitous (except that it's the colour Lixie mentions on the podcast, see link above). Not only can I not blog what I'm knitting at the moment, but I've spent four hours on it today and have knitted up 8g of yarn. That's EIGHT GRAMMES, or a smidgeon under a quarter of an ounce... I'm a reasonably speedy knitter, and I've sat down, at a table, with a decent light and a good audiobook, and I've knitted up about half of the grammes in yarn that I've consumed in sugar in my tea while knitting, which, given the name of the pattern, is ironic. Anyone on Ravelry, you'll be able to guess easily which of the WIPs this is (I'm greensideknits over there, the blog name doesn't fit into their name criteria)...

I suppose the overwhelming thing about all these shows is that great reassurance that You Are Not Alone. For the first several years I went to them, I was a member of RCTN (rec.crafts.textiles.needlework, for the young) but most of the members there were from the US; it was so immensely reassuring to realise that there are All These People Here Who Do Stuff. And in the wake of the recent Yarnstorming, it still is...

I came, I saw, I spent; I offer a prize...

Ally Pally again! Most of the summer was spent in job-limbo, so it's amazing to realise that it's autumn again... This was forcibly brought home to me as I left the village before it was properly light this morning...





I have no idea what I did to make it look as if there's ectoplasm in this picture, but it's quite creepy, anyway. I had to leave this early because the rail maintenance people are Fiddling with the Track every weekend till the end of the year, and Ally Pally became a train, a bus, a train, another train and another bus each way...


Undeterred, I got there just after 9:30 and found to my delight that they were letting people in to the box office and the Palm Court; don't think I've ever been there before the doors opened before! Talked to a nice lady from Toronto in the queue - she was here on business but had decided to come all four days... Did my usual with the catalogue and ringed the suppliers I wanted to see. There were an amazing number of yarn places again - I thought this was the best selection yet although I know opinions have differed...


I bumped into several people on the way round, including Debbie, who used to teach pottery at Chesterton, and who I seem to bump into every year without fail despite us both varying our days, and despite our living only a few miles apart the rest of the time and never meeting... Also Emily, from the KTog group, at the very first stand... And more expectedly, Gill, who had Cheryl Potter with her on the Cherry Tree Hill stand; and an extremely elegant haircut...

At the Relax and Knit area, Yvonne had just been given a birthday present by Sue - the most gorgeous velvet bag with a hinge closure...




I meant to go back and say hi-and-goodbye, but ran out of energy after about four hours and made my way home! Having been the other side of the counter, exhibiting with Fibrefusion or volunteering on Relax and Knit, for the last few years, I'd forgotten how tiring shopping (which I generally avoid like the plague these days, unless there's yarn involved) and chatting, and things, actually are when there are so few places to sit down and take stock!

So - the damage...

As ever, the first stall I saw was Colinette, next to the doors to the corridor; this skein of Jitterbug whined to come home with me, so I let it. The colour is Slate, and it's actually quite a lot greyer and less lilac than this - while being a lot more attractive than the colour on the Colinette site... I think I'm probably going to turn it into these which appeared on Mim's blog last night...

There were some other delightfully squooshy yarns around, too; this, for instance, from the extremely nice lady at Touch Yarns - I was looking for yarn for Anne at the time and this hopped into the bag with it... It's 100% merino 4-ply, and I think it's probably not robust enough for socks; I'm thinking about a scarf or small shawl in a simple lace pattern (there's 455 yards)...

I went by RKM Wools - I see Rosie has some Lang Mille Colori on her blog so they must have had some somewhere, but I didn't spot it (although I only saw two of their stalls and they had three last year); I did, however, pick up this for the princely sum of £2.50 a ball. Silver Thaw, this is (colour 13)...

Surprisingly, this is the only really purple thing I got this year. I did fondle quite a lot of purply things, though.. And had a lovely conversation with the ladies at Knit n Caboodle about knitters and their involvement with the colour purple. They tried to entice me to buy purple needles, but I have a very similar set from Jan... They were great, though. And have purple carrier bags...

I picked up this DK sock yarn for the next Baby Surprise Jacket (they were also doing the pattern); and these, which may be useful once I start commuting with my sock projects! I saw something similar on the Yarn Harlot's blog last year but I think that one was metal... as I may have to put my bag through an X-Ray on the way into work in the morning, these reinforced cardboard ones look like a better idea... Once I've got something on DPNs I'll try them out and take photos...

There were also needles. Pretty, pretty needles. Lantern Moon needles... Rosewood Lantern Moon needles... Ickle baby 2mm, 5" Lantern Moon needles... This isn't the first time I've bought needles from LM, just the first time I've bought them for me... It'a a ridiculous sum for five cocktail sticks, but they're delightful... And will live in the little bag when not in use - I learned my lesson with the tiny Brittany ones...

And roving! I see all this pretty spinning on people's blogs done with pre-dyed roving... Fyberspates had some lovely stuff...

And so did these people from Finland - yes; it really is that bright... If it's too eye-watering, I have large quantities of plain Jacob fleece and some dark brown fleece to tone it down; but I have a feeling I'll be using it as is. Any hints and tips from the spinners are welcome...

And now to the prize.

My first post was about Ally Pally two years ago, and the blog's birthday is on Friday. I know there are people who read this and don't comment, and I'd love to know who you are; so as encouragement, leave me a comment about anything at all between now and the end of Friday (midnight BST), and I'll pull a name out of the hat - the winner gets a 100g skein of hand-dyed sock yarn (base yarn is undyed Trekking) in a colour of her/his choosing, either custom-dyed or a colourway from the shop.

OK, that's it

I should have anticipated this, really - although most of the people I work with have been aware that I was offered a new job on July 7, and have just been waiting for various clearances to come through ever since, I gave in my notice last week so everyone in the world is coming out of the woodwork with things they absolutely need me to do before I leave... By the end of today I was ready to leap tall buildings in a single bound (if that would get me out of there)...

And I've finished a couple of things this week (or got them to the stage where I have to start measuring linings etc.), leaving me with the Unbloggable Project which is way too complicated to be knitting in this sort of mood - every-row-lace in sewing-thread, basically...


So tonight I'm going to do the border of this baby jacket, and cast on the blanket I'm knitting for ME... I'm using Mackenzie silk and wool tweed which was a bargain because it's been discontinued by Classic Elite, in a tweedy dark grey which should match my living-room (this is not a good picture, but welcome to the Season of All Photos Being Taken with Flash). This'll be the second of these (I can't show you the first one yet, but it was lovely to do). I got some Quills needles to do it with (didn't have the right size, and these are made by the Bryspun people who make my favourite straights), and they were marvellous - really light for 6mm needles, and grabby enough not to slide all over the place when starting with an 8-stitch Emily Ocker cast-on...

So I'm drawing the curtains, switching off the phone and getting Stephen Fry to read me something Harry Potterish. Not in person, sadly, but the cassettes will do... I'm calmer already, even thinking about it...

Ain't knitting wonderful.

Back to my knitting...

... which is all pretty baby-centric at the moment. Mainly because I still don't have this year's measurements for the older children I knit for!



This is (a bad photo of) an Elizabeth Zimmerman two-needle-nearly-seamless-baby-sweater - except that this one is totally seamless because I bunged the arms onto DPNs to do the sleeves, which was really nice to do... I never quite get the cuff seams to match up, so being able to knit the thing in the round was much more satisfying. I'm not quite sure which baby this is for, but it's so much fun to knit that I think I'll be casting straight on for the next one... The yarn is Click DK with wool - only 30% wool, but it's really reminiscent of the Phildar yarns I used to knit with all the time; soft, but it keeps its shape and the stitch definition is nice. And it's pretty economical; and machine-washable, of course... (And why don't Sirdar have any information on yarns on their site?! weird...)



And here's some yarn eye-candy - need to list this for the shop tonight... I'm toying with this being called Rainbow in the Dark, which shows my heavy-metal roots...


No sign of the purse yet... but the guy at the bus company said it was possible the driver hadn't got back to the bus depot (which is miles away from the bus station...) yet. I live in hope.

Domesticity

I'm in a state of enforced domesticity this evening - discovered as I was heading out to the KTog that I no longer had a purse. . So I've had a jolly evening cancelling cards... Thankfully I'd put my one and only credit card in a secret place; and was even able to remember which secret place; and even more fortuitously the PIN hadn't changed with the new card. So I'm OK for cash, and so on; but GAH!!! It's also made me re-think going to Ally Pally this weekend...

I'm just hoping someone does actually hand the purse in - the rest of the stuff in it is useless, but there are so many library cards, and passes, and people's business cards... And then the stupid things you end up carrying around in your purse, like your favourite needle for running-in-ends, and cute foreign coins... Anyway, by the time I'd got it all sorted out, it was way past time I could get any form of transport to KTog... so DOUBLEGAH!!!

I was already in an irate frame of mind, having listened to the segment of Woman's Hour where Jenny Murray and Kate Saunders apparently attempted to pin Yarnstorm against the wall and beat the crap out of her. Fortunately, she's made of sterner stuff and acquitted herself beautifully... and evidently things seemed friendlier right up close given her post today...

I'd be the first to say that although I'm an avid reader of her blog, Yarnstorm's particular form of domesticity isn't for me - if I baked cakes a couple of times a week, my house would look like Miss Haversham's wedding feast, because I don't like eating them; but oh; the tulips... And her photos are gorgeous, and doubtless the book is, too... I haven't seen a copy, but I'll seek one out now.

It's interesting how much of a nerve she touched on Woman's Hour, though. And what a degree of prejudice she unleashed... from the idea of the breadwinner coming home and, finding out his wife (italics mine) had spent the day embroidering, would say 'get a job'; to the repeated use of the word "insidious" to describe Yarnstorm's book...

I think the perceived threat from Yarnstorm was her sheer existence, as a woman who has had fulfilling jobs but is able to enjoy this sort of domestic activity... But while dissing Yarnstorm, both Jenny Murray and Kate Saunders managed to express a lot of contempt towards all people who enjoy the activity of craft.

I am disappointed that we're still having to fight this battle. If what I did in my evenings was photography, or fine art, or fell-running, Woman's Hour would be interested in me.... If I were a woman in a less developed country spinning, knitting and running a small Internet shop while holding down a full-time job, Woman's Hour would be interested in me. If I do the latter in a developed country, Woman's Hour thinks of me as a dilettante who is, in some way, wasting her time while attempting to corrupt other people into the same mindset...

Way to go, Woman's Hour. We have battles to fight, still... It's a shame we seem to be squabbling among ourselves.

Magic

Gosh, it's been a long time; I hadn't realised...


And all of a sudden, it's autumn... My veg. box has started arriving with interesting squash in it; and while I was heading off to Sew Creative after work on Thursday, I found five beautiful shelled conkers under one of the horse-chestnut trees on Christ's Pieces. Either I was never that good a conker connoisseur (very probable) or I can feel very old and blame Kids These Days. Either way, I couldn't resist bringing them home... (Who shells conkers and then just leaves them there? someone more public-spirited than me, anyway...)


My Knitting from Your Stash ended at the end of September. I must confess here that I started falling a month or so before, but it's been a very trying summer, and towards the end I needed Treats... But they still had Apache in the £1 stand outside Sew Creative, so I picked up the last half dozen balls, and some Sirdar Click DK to make up something for my cousins' baby Oliver for Christmas.


The trying time is, however, over. I've never blogged much about my job, and I'm not intending to start now; just to say that I'm about to go back to actual Libraries, and more specifically the one here. So I will become a Commuter with a Proper Job, and with any luck I'll get some dedicated knitting/reading time on trains too... It'll be almost exactly 4 months from the offer date to the start date, and I've been living in limbo between the two all summer... I'm intending to take a week's holiday between jobs; I'm still trying to decide between a couple of days away on a cheap flight somewhere, and a week at home knitting, drinking tea, reminding the cat of who I am before I take off again...


I've knitted a couple of things I can display (I've knitted quite a lot of stuff, in fact, but either I've failed to photograph it or it's still secret): a BSJ for my ex-boss Sophie's baby Linus (I had a very beautiful blanket in the wings, but somehow, giving a blanket to a baby called Linus?...) This is a ball of the rainbow Trekking with a couple of strands of a very fine navy blue machine-knitting yarn from a cone; makes about a 19" chest measurement when combined, and I had the buttons in stash...




and tonight while watching The West Wing with Sue, who was finishing the curly edging on another beautiful scarf, I finished the main body of the knitting on Fiona's birthday bag (Gryffindor bag from here).

Completely addictive. I started this at about 9pm last night, and cast it off about 24 hours later. I think I've got a two-colour circular knitting thing going on. Endpaper mitts next, I think - they've been in the queue for some time and I can think of a giftee... And I may need to revise some of the kids' Christmas present ideas...

But the title of this post is because of this which I picked up at the miraculously-revived Cambridge Fopp on Thursday lunchtime - and which is, in my opinion, extraordinarily fine, even by the Boss's standards. I was a bit scared when january one was a little lukewarm about it; but there are only three artists whose CDs I'll buy sight unseen, and I'm glad I went with my instinct again this time. It's got a new Big Sound about it, to be sure, but it's also got a combination of the out-of-season-walking-the-boardwalk-looking-at girls element; the slightly-scary-guy-Nebraska element; the I-wish-I-were-Elvis element; the what-the-hell's-he-on-about-here-I-need-to-listen-to-the-interviews element; the religious-sexual-imagery element; and overarching everything, some beautiful melodies; and the E-Street Band... so you've got Clarence's sax floating across it all at just the point you hope for it; and the mad keyboards, and even the bloody sleigh-bells sound appropriate... Oh well. It's been on autorepeat here for two days. I'm not sure the cat's as keen on it as I am but maybe there's just a colony of endangered tiny rodents nearby she's intent on wiping out... that'd do it...

Anyone doing Ally Pally on Saturday?