The view from the knitting...

... on a lovely sunny afternoon in summer.

Just as well I didn't need that pattern, then - I was still garter-stitching on the Wool Peddler Shawl at that point while reading Michael Connolly's The Scarecrow... It all got a bit ugly when I started in on the lace...

3:15 project, update 20

or, the end is in sight - quite literally...

On Tuesday, it'll be 6 months since I decided to take the garden in hand. It's a bit of a testament to the kind of spring/summer we've been having here that there hasn't been a single weekend where I've not been able to get out into the garden at all...


Most of the work this week was done by an enthusiastic friend who got more accomplished in just over an hour than I probably would have in several weekends; so the least I could do was getting the photos up on time for a change!


Photos 1 and 2, no real change...


Photo 3, quite a dramatic change if you look down the right hand side of the garden - yes, that's a fence at the bottom - bet you didn't know that was there! (I'd almost forgotten that myself). More pictures of that further down this post...

Picture 4, everything blooming nicely. Including the Bug who was determined to get into all the photos today.

Picture 5 with one of the current projects - I'm gradually edging the vegetable bed with empty wine bottles. A raw material which is never in short supply in the neighbourhood (neighbours on both sides have had parties in the last couple of weeks) and I hope reasonably decorative when it's done...

And here's that cleared area. That pot was behind the ivy - I'd sort of remembered it was here... It's a fairly remarkable transformation!

It also allowed me to get at the greenhouse door, which I'd noticed some time ago was broken - one of the bolts at the bottom had slipped which meant it wouldn't close, and the subsequent gap had let a lot of ivy in.

The only way to repair it was to dissasemble the lot. Once I'd done that, I had to strip ivy out of all the frame pieces, along with some very disgruntled spiders who were breeding in there...

.

and remember how it all went together. Having done most of the assembly of the greenhouse in the first place, this went OK - making up flatpack furniture is my idea of a good time, so it was quite enjoyable once I'd evicted the various arachnids...

Done.

The fuchsia in the pot is a bit of a cheat - it's just in a small pot perched on top of the big one. It used to be in one of the hanging baskets, and this is its third year - when it came back again this year I thought it deserved a pot of its own and it's responded beautifully... I need to find a pot that's a lot taller than it's wide, I think, as it's a trailing one...

I also discovered that the crocosmia I planted - oh, must have been 8 years or so ago now - have flowered for the first time. Only one flower so far, but better than nothing, and after all this time it feels like free flowers!

London tourism, part 1

On Tuesday of the week I was on holiday, I went down to London for the day to be a tourist. I started off at Piccadilly Circus tube station...


and walked down Piccadilly, past Fortnums with its wonderfully strange lamps
to the Royal Academy of Arts which was looking very pretty in the sunlight.

On the way into the courtyard, a brief pilgrim stop at the society for the secular patron saint of classifiers.
Sir Joshua Reynolds appeared to be in fine fig, complete with garland...

I went to the J W Waterhouse exhibition, which was rather wonderful - 'mysterious females with ambiguous intentions', in the main (that was taken from one of the bits of blurb on the walls)... All but one or two of his most famous paintings were there, most of which I'd only seen in books. Lots of people doing textile-type things in the paintings - the Lady of Shalott with her tapestry, of course, but also Penelope with her loom - I love the way she's using her teeth, there... Circe poisoning the waters was a new one on me, as were many of the earlier history paintings. It was a reasonably sized exhibition, and there was enough to see without it being overpowering.

I headed south, via Jermyn Street where the traditional tailors seem still to be going strong

and down to Pall Mall heading for St James's Park; this is part of St James's Palace.

The view across the lake was, as ever, spectacular - although the pelicans were obviously a bit too hot to be bothered and were slumped on their rocks like untidy heaps of feather dusters.

This squirrel was eating pieces of sandwich people passed to him - he'd come over and take the stuff out of their hands...

And another piece of fauna from Lower Marsh, where I headed next - the cat belonging to what the butler wore squidged against the front window in the sun...

No explanation needed for why I might be in Lower Marsh...

And then it was lunchtime... More photos later when I get them cropped and uploaded...

Glorious

I was doing one of those new "staycation" thingies this week - had a week off, and not many plans, and it's been absolutely delightful.

I finished and blocked two pieces of knitting (see previous post) and got a long way with a third.

I finished some spinning and its recipient likes it. Which gives me an excuse to post a random photo of her cat...

The weather was beautiful except briefly on a day I was staying at home anyway; it's been a perfect British summer week; warm and sunny, rarely too hot, with a nice breeze.

I scored major bargains in charity shops and tkmaxx in King's Lynn - three skirts and two tops for £16...

I knitted on several trains, in a café and garden in Cambridge, on a boat in London, in a pub in King's Lynn with caughtknitting, and in various places in Hove, including at a birthday party in a very swish ice-cream parlour with members of the dog, chicken and aardvark safari knitters (Ravelry link) and on a bench overlooking the incoming tide, with Wibbo. Not bad for a week without one of the usual knitting group meetings... And probably best, given that food was shared with friends on several occasions, that it was a week without a Slimming World meeting, too.

And then there's the cricket, of course. I've had two days listening to that wonderful scary/comforting roar from the Oval (or the Brit Oval as I gather we're meant to call it now; sigh...), and even a dodgy wicket's an actual one at this point... Once I'd got used to the idea of Harry and Draco ambling round the cricket together, Daniel Radcliffe and Tom Felton made very good lunchtime guests today (similarity between Quidditch and cricket - both are "needlessly complex" in a good way; and Dan made a spirited bid for Aggers's job); and Stephen Fry was both delightful and wonderfully knowledgeable at teatime on Thursday...

More photos of the London trip coming soon; I loved being a tourist in the areas I'm usually going to for work...

Two FOs!

A fair amount of knitting has been done, but both of the main pieces have been stealth projects (as is the current one...) I handed both over this week, though, so here are some pictures and details.

This is Mam's birthday stole, the Melon scarf/shawl from the cover of Victorian Lace Today

It's worked in GGH Kid Mélange - the yardage on this stuff is even better than KidSilk Haze (which I really dislike). It was fiddly to do, and I should have known that a 6 row pattern with the instruction "repeat 62 times" might drive me batty a few times, but the result is rather beautiful, and it was much appreciated...

The second project is rather different. I’ve loved the damask flower motif from Kaffe Fassett for ages and knitted the peplum jacket from the cover of Glorious Knitting when it came out. But then I saw sew200’s cushion and thought ‘I want one of those’, and thought Jan probably would, too.

I used the charts from Kaffe Fassett's pattern library - the Small Damask flower repeated twice on the front,

and the Large Damask flower on the back, with a made-up chequerboard pattern as an edging as I wanted it to be a mass of pattern (the symbol at the corner means M1,K1,M1 in the same stitch).
The cast-off is a three-needle-I-cord-bind-off, with the yarn doubled and right sides out. Cast on 4 sts, slip one stitch from the left needle containing the stitches from the back to the left needle containing the stitches from the front, knit 3, k3tog, slip the 4 I-cord stitches back to the right hand needle and repeat the instruction in italics to the end.

I was enjoying this one so much it was frustrating not to be able to post it on Ravelry, or Flickr; thankfully I was able to e-mail in-progress shots to a patient and encouraging knitter friend... And here it is in situ in its new home...

Meet Teddy

This is Teddy Harvey (named so, because he had a near-identical-twin called Teddy Robson who belonged to my cousin... maybe he's still around too... I meant to ask this afternoon when I phoned his family but forgot...)

Teddy isn't the oldest piece of knitting I own - I have a blanket grandma knitted before I was born - but it's the oldest thing I have which was knitted for me, for my very first Christmas. I'm starting to think about Christmas knitting this week (yes, I know...) and also tidying in the bedroom - and spotted Teddy sitting on his bookcase. I had a lot of soft toys as a child, and have accumulated a couple (sheep and Clangers) as an adult, but Teddy's the only one I've kept from early childhood.

Teddy is, as far as I can guess, 100% aran-weight nylon. He was knitted by Grandma Christie, and I think the story was that he was made out of yarn recycled from a cardigan Grandma'd been given by the sister of the ward she was nursing in. Given that Grandma, as people did, gave up work when she married in the early 1930s, I'm not sure how that coincides with the development of nylon, when she acquired the cardigan or whether it was new when she was given it; but Teddy's definitely synthetic and definitely recycled because I remember seeing some of the yarn when I was a child (it will have been called 'wool' because everything was) and being told that was what Teddy was made of... I'll have to ask next time I phone home. Mam knitted Teddy's trousers with the fetching owl buttons, so he's a product of two generations of knitters. Mam did knit, and made all sorts of things for me including some wonderful Sindy clothes in 1970s styles, but it wasn't something she necessarily enjoyed all that much (but does mean she and Dad know how much work goes into knitted presents so they're great recipients of knitting)...

As well as being knitted out of old-fashioned nylon (in 17 separate pieces, beautifully sewn together), Teddy is stuffed with nylon stockings - thick, brown, old-lady ones - so he's pretty weighty. And of course his eyes wouldn't meet modern scrutiny - I suspect they're on rusting metal wires which have been wrapped together somewhere inside his head, rather than safety eyes... Nevertheless, and despite being dragged around the house by one limb or other for much of my childhood, he's in remarkably great shape for a 41 year old. Much better shape than I am, at 8 months older! He has a small hole behind his right knee, caused by an overenthusiastic kitten in 1994/5 (not quite sure which one, but I still have my suspicions), but is otherwise unscathed.

The reason he's ventured downstairs for the first time since 1993 is that when I started tidying around I did notice that he and his trousers are rather dusty. The weather is so beautiful this weekend that I think he's about to have minor knee surgery and then his first bath for around 25 years; let's hope it's not too much of a shock to the old boy...

3:15 photos will be taken tomorrow. Just because I'm on holiday; so I can...! Was originally intending to go to London tomorrow, and then turned over a page in the diary and remembered I'd volunteered for another library shift in the morning, so I'll go on Tuesday... I also have some crabapple jelly to make this evening, and maybe some rhubarb and ginger jam - the crabapples and rhubarb both come from Sue's allotment and we had a lovely dinner last night after knitting group and allotment-picking, mostly made with things she'd grown, with a tiny amount of things I'd grown (and in the interests of full disclosure, a few things from the supermarket...), and we both cooked, and ate out in her really pretty garden....

And as I was typing that last word - a neighbour came round with a newspaper of runner beans and a milk-carton of greengages (he very often does their distribution-of-gluts-of-produce at the same time on a Sunday so I wasn't as surprised as the previous two weeks), and I was able to give him the dishcloth and potholder I'd made for them as partial recompense... It all feels incredibly rural and domestic round here at the moment; and that feels like a good thing and reminds me of why I do the commute (although I really don't mind that, either)...

(I'll rant about the tomato-blight tomorrow...)(and apologies for the many parentheses).

Another one...

I believe this is the female of the same species as the male in the previous post, the Migrant Hawker... This one landed on the top of a wisteria twig, high above the garden... embiggen for context.


I can completely see why the period of decorative art I love most adopted dragonflies as a motif - Lalique did it here in jewellery, in a piece which was the centrepiece of the V&A's exhibition a few years ago... Gallé did it here in furniture but I've also seen him use it in marquetry and glass design... and of course Tiffany did it in glass - this is a repro lamp but I have seen an original, probably in the same V&A exhibition... What I love about art nouveau is the combination of engineering and fluidity, hard substances and soft shapes, strength and elegance; looking at a dragonfly is like observing art on the wing.

Some interesting stuff about dragonflies and culture at Wikipedia's page. (While I'm your typical sniffy librarian on taking Wikipedia as your one and only source for academic research, I use it all the time for general interest...)

Dragonfly day

Perfect art nouveau moment out in the garden this morning - dragonfly and wisteria... Click to embiggen...

Looking it up, I think this is a Migrant Hawker (Aeshna mixta). I love the sheer quantity of natural history information there is on the web, most of it from keen amateurs. Apparently this is one of the species which is on the rise; I hope so. There were three flying around the garden this morning, anyway, the light glinting off them. (Ladybird included for scale...)

I was reminded of when I was at Loughborough, and occasionally we drove out to a country pub with a pond which had a mass of Banded Demoiselles (Calopteryx splendens) flying around it. They were quite spectacular; the black spots on the wings really showed the flight motion...

There were no 3:15 photos last week - all too similar to the previous week's despite lots of weeding having been done! Hope to have some up this afternoon - I'm on holiday this week...

Oh dear

Alternating an audio-book with Test Match Special this afternoon...

I knew when I turned the radio back on just now that things weren't doing well - when Aggers is invoking Ambrose and Garner, you know there's not a lot of good bowling going on on the pitch... And then the second commentator turned out to be Geoff Boycott; who went off on an extended rant about how awful the England team had been. Poor old Aggers was just left to hum and mutter without actually agreeing, as you might if an embarrassing elderly relative went off on a loud diatribe in a quiet teashop, about people who might be listening; thankfully after about three minutes of "and another thing..." Boycott got up and wandered off somewhere, to Aggers' evident relief...

At least apple cake has been delivered to the TMS box; some things stay the same...

2009 books, #26-#43

I haven't been reading all that much, by my standards, recently; and I haven't blogged books since the middle of May; so here's a big splurge of them... I seem to have started reading again in the last few days, though...

Unnatural justice, by Quintin Jardine. London: Headline, 2004.

Oz Blackstone is what PG Wodehouse would have called "a queer bird"... I don't know what to think about him; I've read four or five books featuring him, and I think I like him, and his various families; but he's still a bit of a cipher. The books are pretty compelling nevertheless. I feel this way about Jardine's other main character, Bob Skinner, too; don't think it's necessarily a bad thing...

The private patient, by P. D. James. London: Faber, 2008.

Oz makes Adam Dalgliesh look like an open book. This book is superbly plotted and paced, but somehow still, the dialogue doesn't really work. I think because sometimes the characters don't sound like anything anyone would say (and I am, you may recall, a fan of The West Wing, where multisyllabic dialogue is the norm). As an example:

Dalgliesh said "I'm prevaricating, but the question is hypothetical. It must depend on the importance and reasonableness of the law I would be breaking and whether the good to the mythical loved person, or indeed the public good, would in my judgement be greater than the harm of breaking the law."

The plot works, though.

The ritual bath, by Faye Kellerman. Oxford: Isis Audio, 2007 (originally published 1986); Sacred and profane, by Faye Kellerman. London: Hodder, 1989; Milk and honey, by Faye Kellerman. London: Hodder, 1990. Day of Atonement, by Faye Kellerman. London: Hodder, 1991. False prophet, by Faye Kellerman. London: Hodder, 1992. Grievous sin, by Faye Kellerman. London: Hodder, 1993. Sanctuary, by Faye Kellerman. London: Hodder, 1994. The forgotten, by Faye Kellerman. Oxford: Isis Audio, 2001. The burnt house, by Faye Kellerman. Oxford: Isis Audio, 2008 (originally published 2007). Cold case, by Faye Kellerman. Oxford: Isis Audio, 2009.

Yes; I've basically devoured about half of this series of books now... The first one I "read" was the latest one, on audiobook (because it was read by the wonderful Jeff Harding who could read the Yellow Pages and make it sound interesting); but then I went back and got the first one, and have been reading them more or less in order, except for occasional excursions into audio-book-land with Mr H. The plots in these are great; and I like Peter Becker who's a slightly less scary Harry-Bosch-type cop. But the main interest for me is what I'm learning about the different types of observant Judaism; Kellerman (and her husband, fellow crime-writer Jonathan Kellerman) are religious Jews and so it doesn't come over as an endearing quirk the writer has decided to give her detective so we remember who he is; it's very interesting to see religion being woven so tightly into the fabric of a crime novel and taken seriously. So many times, you'll get religion turning up in something like the Morse novels to explain sexual repression or Satanic behaviour as a plot device or curiosity, (or in other fiction and drama to explain fanaticism and terrorism) and it does usually just wind me up...

The poet, by Michael Connolly. London: Orion, 2005.

This is a very belated edition of a book which came out in hardback in 1996. It twists and turns in a way which is more reminiscent of Jeffery Deaver; and although it doesn't have any of my favourite Michael Connolly characters, it's still extraordinarily good, and kept me from my knitting for two days on the train...

What's going on? the meanderings of a comic mind in confusion, by Mark Steel. London: Simon and Schuster, 2008.


I love Mark Steel's books, and I've already mentioned the fact that I'd spent a chunk of my birthday listening to him. This book is a wonderful exploration of what it's like to suddenly be middle-aged, still radical, and have your life fall apart around you. He rants on everything from identikit shopping centres to the death of the Socialist Workers' Party, while talking movingly about the disintegration of his marriage; and it's all funny as well as making you want to cry out of sheer exasperation. Wonderful.


Restless, by William Boyd. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.


A very well-paced spy drama, set in the 1970s but with long flashbacks to the 1940s - a daughter discovers that her mother, Sally Gilmartin, is actually Eva Delectorskaya, a wartime spy. I wouldn't normally read spy dramas, but this one was well-told, and the device of setting it in two time-periods worked extremely well.


The city and the city, by China Miéville. London: Macmillan, 2009.


This is a wonderful book; I had started his Perdido Street Station several times and found it somewhat too rich and strange at the time; this is a noir crime novel set in an extremely unusual city. There's a double detection going on - the murder mystery investigated by Borlú and his colleagues, and the additional mystery for the readers of trying to figure out the workings of the city itself, which most of the characters in the drama know instinctively. It works brilliantly on both levels. China Miéville did a reading/Q&A at the Royal Festival Hall on Thursday night and said he'd written it partly to draw in crime readers and present them with some fantasy elements; certainly worked for me. I'll be going back to read his others.



Skinner's mission, by Quintin Jardine. London: Headline, 1997.


I've read these all out of order; and it's been both intriguing and frustrating. The plots work out just as well in any order, but Skinner's somewhat complicated personal life gets even more convused in random order; I'll be going back and reading the ones surrounding this one now...

A scandalous man, by Gavin Esler. London: Harper, 2008.

Yes, that Gavin Esler... who apparently, when I Googled him for this link, has been quite a scandalous man himself recently, although this is according to the Daily Mail, so, you know... I really enjoyed this book. One of the main narrators is a Thatcher-era former cabinet minister; the other his estranged, Blairite son. Sometimes the dialogue is a bit stilted - Esler's trying to educate us on the politics and history of the 80s and how it has affected life since, and while I occasionally found this irritatingly didactic as it's exactly my era, obviously it's not everybody's! Highly recommended. The Times reviews it here.

400

A random post; but the 400th one...

I got a new 50p coin in my change today; well, not a new one, obviously, but one I hadn't seen before: 100 years of the Scout movement... My coin was just the usual silver one, but the gold one is pretty... I really respect what the Scout and Guide movement are doing, and was a Brownie and then a Guide for 9 years; but I also love the Tom Lehrer version of this...



Another random thought. I've always sort of divided the world into people who are "givers" and "takers"; and in my experience, the vast majority of knitters are givers. But in the last 24 hours, I've twice heard the idea of "radiators" and "drains". In some ways, maybe it's the same idea; but to me, the notion of "givers" and "takers" is an instinctive thing, separate from the circumstances; and sometimes life tips up one way or another, and we end up in a situation where we're either radiators or drains for our friends/family. I'd be really interested to hear what anyone else thinks...

And finally, I was sent this by a friend recently and it's just so surreally funny. Shatner does Palin. So to speak. I'm not sure how long the link will last; but enjoy...

3:15, project 19

Quite a lot of stuff this week; you might be able to see the garden's a lot clearer from here...

Not necessarily from here; but it's lush and pretty...

And definitely from here.

Ripped out the rest of the ground-elder on the right; it'll come back, it always does; but I've found that like bindweed, if you weaken it progressively... I managed that a few years ago but then lost vigilance for a while... I also chopped down a lot of the box in the middle bed; I hope it'll come back like the rest, but at the moment it's alarmingly dead-looking...

And conversely - another thing which was a weed for my former-SIL (wrong colour), so she dug it out for me maybe 10 years ago, has spread all over the fence and I love it - perennial sweet pea... Soo pretty. As ever, click on the photos to embiggen.

The beauty of randomness...

My class last week spent a morning being random, based on Freddie Robins' piece How to make a piece of work when you're too tired to make decisions, which involved throwing dice to overcome the fear of starting to create something abstract; or the fear of starting to create anything at all. So I thought I'd try it with something more conventional. I had 6 yarns of roughly the same weight (the purple at the top is nearer an aran/chunky weight, the rest is broadly DK) and the same sort of colour palette.


I'm throwing one (6-sided) die to work out which colour to use next, and another (12-sided) to work out how many rows to work. I'm following the pattern for the Wool Peddler's Shawl (Ravelry link) from Folk Shawls; it's coming out pretty well so far.

I'm actually knitting like a mad thing at the moment - but the other three projects on the needles are presents/stealth-projects... This is so much fun particularly as knitting-while-reading-knitting, or DVD-knitting... Had a bit of a disappointment last night - was really looking forward to a steak, a good red wine, and watching 36 with Auteuil and Dépardieu; and then got 5 minutes into the film and realised it was something I must have got out of the library three or so years ago because I'd definitely seen it before... Gah! I normally have a fairly good memory for these things but I did have a total film binge when I first got the DVD player on my PC...

Folk festival funnies

A day at the folk festival yesterday - fabulous music, much better weather than I'd been fearing, bumped into some old friends and ex-colleagues... and found a completely new band, Genticorum.

The festival is usually good for a laugh too...

Here's the quite wonderful sculpture commission for this year - the devil playing the best tunes... People included for scale...

This year they'd also commissioned someone to do some retro-style cartoons on folkie themes... The world's least likely Superman

and a fab advert for the EFDSS...

May the Morris be with you.

It's also a great time for T-shirts. These two were probably joint runners up:


Yes, that's a heroically bad photo - it seemed so clear in the little window in the camera. The full text says "Give Blood. Play Rugby."

My favourite was one I didn't like to photograph (the text was on the front), but for those without delicate tolerance for swearing, it's here.