Every home should have one...

Not a cat (although I think every home should have one of those too); she's come back from her holidays and sloped off to the bedroom to pretend to sulk. Actually, she's come back smelling of grooming powder and stuffed with biscuits, but she does like to have a moan for form's sake...

After a day's hard tidying up, the dining-room table was finally Ready for the Assemblage of the Big Christmas Present. It arrived in November, but I didn't want to make it up before Christmas...


What can it be? It's certainly in a big enough box! (The people at the post office were worried about how far I'd have to carry it... then they looked at the address and realised that 'about 50 yards' was the answer...)


And it came with a Christmas card...


I opened it when it first arrived just to make sure Customs hadn't done Bad Things to it on the way in, but all the little bits and bobbins were securely contained in a sealed bag, so I took out the card and left the rest alone...


When you get it out of the box, here are all the bits... The envelope in the foreground says "Assembly instructions. *Read first!!!*" (If only everything in life came in a flatpack, with instructions.... no, don't go there...) Look at all that oaky goodness, on my ash dining table...




Making it up was a doddle. I got out my box of 51 screwdrivers (I haven't actually counted them in and out, some of them are socket-set-type-things, but that's what it says on the label) despite only needing one #2 Philips; and it took only a short time to assemble the windmilly bit on the front (seen here sitting on top of the base with its rotation-counter)

wonder very briefly about which way round the main post went into the the base - before, you know, actually looking at it: this guy leaves nothing to chance:

sort out the bits which needed to go onto the main spindle [ditto]

and finally, wind a skein!

I had the idea of a 'can you guess what it is yet' series of photos, but I got carried away with the precision of the thing, and how it all made up so perfectly, and forgot to take photos of most of the assembly. But it's a skein winder from Ball and Skein, and it works brilliantly. Thanks to Mam and Dad for going with my somewhat strange idea of what I'd like for Christmas, and to Judy and Chris for the help with shipping info, different woods, etc.!

Dyeing day tomorrow, I think - better check the vinegar situation...

Home again

I'm back!

You know when you go away on holiday, and you think your house is a bit of a mess, but you get home and think, 'actually, where I live is quite nice'?

This time, not so much.

I had people round the last two nights I was home, was wrapping presents until 3:30am, had 3 hours' sleep and then finished a present and wrapped that, sort-of-did the washing up, packed in the last hour and flew out of the door for the train (sans hairbrush, moisturiser or stitch-markers); and the house looks like it. For my own sanity, I'm going to clear up before I sort out the photos of the Christmas knitting. But couldn't resist posting this; nephew Baby A in his Woolly Wormhead I-cord beanie (a free pattern!)

More later...

Finally festive

Long time, no blog... It's not that no knitting has gone on - some of it I can even show you - but the last couple of weeks have been full of small, hassling events like late trains and failed signals, and lost cameras, and mail containing replacement cameras getting lost en route, and so on... All sorted out now, I hope... The last of the Christmas shopping is done; the last of the Christmas knitting is still to be done - two little hats to go! - but it's under control...



At about 6 last night though, the house still looked as if a bomb had hit it, and was still tinsel-free and without a tree... So I thought whatever... and just put up the decorations in the middle of the mess anyway.



Happy Christmas everyone, from me and Tiny Clanger. She's back on top of the tree, her battery hasn't yet run down so she still shouts in Clanger as required... And this is the first photo with the new camera. At the moment, the memory card hasn't arrived, so won't before I set off North, but Dad has a spare, apparently... Still have wrapping and packing to do, and the Bug has just been borne off for her holiday, swearing all the way; maybe there will be photos of knitting later on; maybe not.

Happy 70th, Mr F.

After my extremely good lunchtime fish-and-chips (the benefit of working in a traditional institution on a Friday! And they home-make their tartare sauce, too...) I went off to read the papers; someone was already reading the Grauniad so I ended up with the Indy instead. Don't know about you, but if I'm knitting as well as reading, I tend to absorb more including the ads, because I'm loath to stop and turn the page - so I read the birthday column today, and found that the Grand Panjandrum of colour, Kaffe Fassett, is 70 today. Which has dragged me out of my long blog-silence.

Does anyone remember a series in the Times in about 1983-4 about knitting? They had contributions from Richard Rutt, and Elizabeth Zimmermann... And the pattern for the Toothed Stripe sweater which later appeared in Glorious Knitting; which blew my mind with its sheer simplicity - no 'you will not get the expected results if you do not use X-brand yarn', no 'blue with green should not be seen', just sheer, wild, rich colour. I was about 17 at the time and I haven't put down the needles since...

So, happy birthday, Mr F. I know there are many more universally revered figures in the knitting world, including Mrs Zimmermann, but that was my personal Knitting Can Alter the Way the World Spins on its Axis moment... And I don't give a damn which way you weave your ends in; or if you do.

So some colour. A very good excuse to show you the fabulously bright skeins I got at the Secret Santa exchange at the knitting group at Liberty last night... Handspun merino!

Not entirely sure how much there is in each skein, but it looks to be about 4-ply weight, so I think there's enough to do a really decent splash of colour against the background of some of the dourer (and we're talking Gordon Brown just after Prime Minister's Questions dour) colours in the stash... They're from Victoria; but I only know Victoria from a couple of evenings at Lib's so I don't know whether they're her handspun or not!

(Nic and baby Pete were also there, first time I'd met him, and he was lovely and they were both looking extremely well...)

And a bit more monotone, but this is why I've been AWOL for the last two weeks - steeling myself to do some stitch samples for a class tomorrow.

I've not done a lot of stitching over the last few months (and frankly for a while before that), but it's Christmas so something ornamenty for this four-hour workshop... These will become a 6-petalled poinsettia-like object (no, I haven't counted how many petals/leaves a poinsettia has; and no, I don't care...), once the final petal is complete...

My personal favourite is at the front of this photo... shame I managed to get my personal least favourite in focus at the back, but that's trying to do flash-free photography after a long, hard week for you (in the sense of there is so much to learn and I need to turn myself into some sort of sponge and just absorb all of this while coming up with some seriously good ideas every now and then to justify my existence, rather than actually difficult, in the former sense of I am mindblowingly bored and under-rated but I am still a professional so I will attempt to derive some satisfaction from the minutiae of the daily process; I still have the sense that someone wrote a job description for me and it would be crazy not to fill it!)

I'm off to write up the instructions for all those petals now...

Have other things to show - probably on Sunday as I'm off to view (as yet blogless) Sue's new, and hard-won flat tomorrow night after teaching; if I'm still sentient... Otherwise I'll go and see it anyway; I have a housewarming present and bottle of pink fizz to impart, after all...

(And if anyone's bothered reading this far, and has worked this out - is it just me, or is getting paragraph formatting to work in New Blogger a serious pain? Editing the HTML really doesn't seem to work all that well either!)