Cricket, lovely cricket...

Monty, lovely Monty.

Kevin Pietersen may have won Man of the Match, technically, but 11 wickets is just stunning.

And here he is again, fielding at Hove in August 2011...

This post has no fibre-related content whatsoever.  But a 10-wicket victory over India, in India, should tell its own story...

Indian-ish

Got up early this morning to make the most of the (rather marvellous) cricket on Test match special - not quite at 4am, but during the lunch-break, so around 6:30am.  It was horribly blustery and still very, very dark...

It was definitely a morning which demanded a nice pot of tea, in fact.  Somehow, a cup just won't do in these circumstances.  I've been really remiss with using leaf tea this year, though, and wasn't even really sure what there was in all the caddies - so a lot of sniffing and labelling went on while the first pot was brewing, and now the caddies are organised.  Had to be Assam for a first brew, and to fit in with the Mumbai Test.  Assam is currently masquerading as mélange Hédiard, as I haven't visited a Hediard in several years...



While I was looking at the spice cabinet, I gave it a bit of a sort-out and realphabetised it.  I used to buy spices at Daily Bread, but since I've not had access to a car, I get them at Al-Amin's "rice and spice den".  The spice cabinet was something of an afterthought when we redesigned the kitchen; some of the advantages of wall cabinets without the "wall of furniture" feel.  The designer worked from a back-of-the-envelope drawing and this is the result.

 

Also did a bit of weaving.  I'm not sure whether this is "tartan".  Or, to continue the theme, "madras", which would have been more apt if the Test had been in Chennai...

I think I'm calling it "mad plaid" as a compromise.  Fun to do, anyway, even if some of the feltier yarns are making getting a clean shed for the weaving stick a little bit difficult...



Off out soon to Winter Wordfest.  Tony and Melissa Benn followed by Rose Tremain.

POTW: 5 August 2012

Things I've liked this week:

The Olympics: the buildup


I used to be someone who described herself as not keen on sport.  I've always liked cricket, and used to watch tennis at Wimbledon and the world snooker championships, but really, until I started following the Tour de France a couple of years ago I'd have described myself as a non-sports-fan with a strange fondness for cricket...

However, as a family we always watched the Olympics, and obviously the buildup in London has been quite fierce.  I took most of this week off, but was wandering around last week taking some pictures:

The Jubilee Line signage gearing up for the sheer number of Olympics venues along its length (and, although I didn't get a clear photo due to the ban on using flash in the station, I'm loving following signs to Lord's cricket ground to get onto the Tube!)



The Games cars are quite swish, here seen in front of the Treasury Building in a dedicated Games lane...



A couple of hours before the Torch procession came down Whitehall, the (presumably-non-sponsor) Blimp going past Big Ben over the towers of Portcullis House



At King's Cross, the students of St Martins (which has just moved up there) have put together a Songwall, which consists of thousands of rotating balls, each half black and half yellow, to be manipulated by passers by.  (I don't know what the song connection is as it doesn't seem to make a sound...)



Also at King's Cross, rainbows inside



and out



and some rather stunning graphics across the front of the German Gymnasium.



One of the more alarming features of the Olympics is the scary monocular mascots - but these strange Cyclopses are currently clutched, in fluffy form, in many small hands.  Presumably small children don't feel as worried by their strange, police-state CCTV stares...  Here's an example of a Wenlock (for the Olympics; the Paralympics one is Mandeville), outside a church in Bishopsgate near Liverpool Street station.



And just by accident, I happened to arrive early on Friday morning last week, as Big Ben was striking 40 for the beginning of the Games, 12 hours before 20:12 when the opening ceremony started...  And there were so many people who turned up to watch.  It was really quite moving...  Here they all are:



The Olympics: the events

I absolutely loved the opening ceremony - listened to it all on the Friday evening, and then watched it on the Saturday evening to see if the pictures in reality were as good as the pictures in my head (just for a change, they were).  I loved its quirkiness, and its Britishness, and its willingness to send itself up.  And I thought the "cauldron" made up of all the petals was fabulous.  I gather each nation will be given its petal to take home and the cauldron will cease to exist, which is both a nice bit of symbolism and saves someone the bother of wondering where on earth to put the thing afterwards...

Desperately sorry for Cav and the rest of the road race team on Saturday afternoon (and great kudos to him for turning up to commentate cheerfully on the track events this week when he could have retreated to lick his wounds); and many congrats to Bradley Wiggins for a majestic win in the time trial (quite literally majestic given the ridiculous gold thrones at Hampton Court...)

Some support was given from here...



And I think the Guardian's  headline was just about perfect...




Like Cavendish, Wiggins is looking like a man who doesn't want to leave the party and go home - having used his victory interview with Radio 5 to pitch for an invite to A Question of Sport on the grounds they hadn't asked him for ages, he then popped up to commentate on the track cycling on Thursday...

I've also been enjoying the frankly incomprehensible rules of the track cycling events, and the fact that UK competitors turn out to be good at things you only hear about every few years, like trap-shooting...

(And there's been Test cricket, too - we're not doing stunningly against South Africa, but it's wonderful listening to TMS - Blowers yesterday afternoon lamenting his inability to tell the difference between men and women, and there was that time in Saõ Paolo... sadly we never heard the rest of the story...)

Holidays and friends


I was on leave from Monday afternoon to Friday this week, and managed to catch up with some people...

On Saturday Sue and I went to the Tickell Arms at Whittlesford for a very belated birthday celebration (Sue's, not mine)!  Excellent food and a lovely atmosphere.  We got back to Sue's just too late to see the road cyclists come in...


One of the benefits of the Olympics is that out-of-towners were visiting London for the events.  Nic, of Yarns from the Plain, was one - we met for the first time at That Knitting Event Neither of Us Travelled To two summers ago; and it was really nice to see her again and meet her husband on Monday afternoon after they'd been to watch the archery at Lord's.

On Tuesday night we had a small impromptu get-together at the Devonshire Arms, just four of us; and on Friday lunchtime I met Sarah for lunch... and then there was knitting on Saturday afternoon, during which we watched tennis (mostly; once the stroppy man who comes in and changes the TV channel in front of the people sitting there watching it and then stalks out again had gone, and I'd ambled over to security to get the guard to change the channel back again)...

Oh, and some crafty things


We shall not speak of my Ravellenic Games knitting project.  Put it this way, making a cardi in 4-ply in my size was already very ambitious.  It turns out I knit a lot more when I'm travelling back and forth to work than I ever do if I'm on holiday.  And it also turns out that despite many attempts while joining both fronts to the back at the armholes (this is a top-down cardi), I managed to twist one armhole once and the other one twice in the joining, necessitating the ripping of over a day's work.  Gah.  I'll put it down at the end of the week and take it up again during the Paralympics, I think...

Still, a pair of socks was finished... this is the Lindsay pattern from Cookie A. and the yarn is Yarnscape's Footsie-HT in colour Wisteriosis (a club special):



I can now show the shawl I made Sue for her birthday (or at least a blocking shot as I forgot to photograph it once the pins came out) - seemed to be popular though as she wore it for lunch...



And so was a scarf, the first of two woven ones for the Ravellenics...



The weft yarn for this one was also from Alison at Yarnscape; Dance in the Moor colourway.

My second Ravellenics weaving is a present for my Mam's 75th later in the month; warp in merino from KnitPicks, weft in 100% cashmere from KnitWitches.  Beautifully soft, even before washing...  This is where I's got to at the end of the time-trial on Wednesday; there's another couple of feet done now and some more due later...  This is the first time I've done weaving in laceweight and used my 12.5 dpi heddle - really enjoying it so far...



Two other things arrived through the post on Tuesday; a new book, and more lovely club yarn (for Lammas).  I did some test-knitting for Woolly's latest book, and also copy-editing; there's something about an actual book rather than a PDF, even though the PDF is excellent for printing out and moving around with!



This post is reaching War and Peace length, so I'll stop now.  It was a nice week.  Hope you had a good one too.

C is for... Cricket

Not very impressive, getting two days into a month's blogging every day and then stalling, but I'd originally picked C for Colour, and got overwhelmed choosing photos. So I thought I'd go for something more manageable, and topical, on this 4th day of a murky Test at Lords after the umpires have just pulled the teams off for bad light yet again.

One of my first memories of family holidays is listening to Test Match Special (quietly, so as not to disturb the neighbours) on the beach. As most of the beaches we went to tended to be in Northumberland, there weren't many neighbours. I suppose the earliest one might have been the 1975 Ashes series; but I remember Botham, Gower et al against Richards, Holding and the fabulous West Indies side which is being commemorated in the new film Fire in Babylon (link to trailer).

I'm not that technically knowledgeable about cricket - I know where the fielding positions are, and the difference between the types of delivery. I'm a big fan of Test cricket as the purest form of the art; but the World Cup was pretty exciting this time round, and as someone who grew up about half a mile from the current Durham ground, following County cricket is pretty rewarding too. But mostly, I love the fact that a sometimes slow-paced game can give such excitement, that games which ought to go one way suddenly go another and that articulate people can be so utterly passionate about it. You could probably say most of these things about any sport, but mine's cricket.

To an extent, this is actually rather like knitting, or any form of craft. You graft on, sometimes without an end or any discernible result in sight, and then have the excitement of a finish; sometimes something you start very tentatively turns out to be exactly the right thing; and then sometimes you think you've picked the perfect yarn and needles for a project and it all goes horribly wrong. And knitters and cricketers all do seem to enjoy a good tea, with cake.

I really, really wish there was the knitting equivalent of Test Match Special. Even if there's no play, sometimes especially if there's no play, the commentators are wonderful. It's almost the original of blogging or podcasting - people sitting and talking about what they're passionate about. Oh, and then you get someone like Heston Blumenthal filling in the gap this morning with his recipe for roast potatoes. Or Imelda Staunton hoving into view at teatime with a home-made lemon drizzle cake. Or Scouting for Girls coming in to do a version of She's so lovely for Mrs Aggers because she has it has her ringtone...

Go England. At the moment, it looks as if we might be heading for an honourable draw and that'd be just fine...

Quick single

I have loads of things to blog. But for the moment, just posting this photo.

Square on the bottom, 22 sts, 44 rows, Peace Fleece 3.75mm needles, knitted while at Textiles in Focus yesterday.

Square on the top, 22 sts, 44 rows, Peace Fleece 3.75mm needles, knitted while listening to England's World Cup innings against India this afternoon...

I ought to be picking up stitches for a neckband. Don't dare though, in case of strangulation... This might be a good time to spin some laceweight...

Catching up...

It seems like an awful long time since I posted, and lots of things have happened!

Towards the end of April I had a birthday, which stretched over three weekends, one in Cambridge, one in Chester-le-Street and one in Hove. The Actual Weekend started with a trip to the V&A Quilts exhibition (highly recommended) with Yvonne (ditto, of course!), a showing of The Ghost and a visit to GBK with Sue, and finally some knitting over an extremely nice Sunday lunch in the pub, with Cath and Avril (both knitting lace, you can tell by the expressions...)

Jackie

Lorna (with mystery test knit which I'd just dyed and blocked the day before...)

and Lucinda.

Rosie was also there - you can see her elbow in the top picture but the photo I took of her was so comically, heroically bad that it seemed safest not to include it...

Many of the knitting-related gifts, oddly enough, were purple...

We had Dissolution, and the election, and then a very strange and extremely busy post-election period.

Summer has wondered, repeatedly, whether to arrive. Yesterday morning was absolutely beautiful; last weekend was really cold and miserable; and today can't work out what it wants to do, but Test Match Special is on the radio, cricket is happening and it's pretty exciting this afternoon as England demolishes Bangladesh's batsmen (could do with less Geoffrey Boycott and more everyone else, but you can't have everything - at least Blowers, Aggers and Tuffers are all on...) I've potted up my chili seedlings today and put them in the greenhouse as hostages to fortune, so I can get rid of the heated propagator I've been falling over in the kitchen for the last couple of months.

I've had three shifts at the village library, which is where I started this post; the morning was notable for a lovely ten-year-old boy who's only had his library card for a week; when I told him he could have up to 12 items out he beamed so widely you'd swear it was Christmas morning...

Knitting has been done. The main project I worked on between then and now was a wedding blanket for Katie and Neil, assembling squares produced by members of the Archers board on Ravely, from all over the UK and from Canada - Katie blogs about it here and it's great to know she loved it. I now have absolutely no fear of picking up stitches from edges, having picked up 24 from each edge of each square! It was lovely seeing everyone's squares and good wishes, and people were wickedly inventive with the Archers-themed blocks.

I also knitted a shawl (as yet unblocked) and a cardigan (can't decide whether I like it or not now it's finished!) which I'll blog another time.

Not much progress on the spinning, but thanks very much to Isabella for her comment on my April 12 post, which has narrowly averted disaster; in future I'll either dye the fleece or the finished yarn rather than trying to dye singles before plying. I really need to sit down and read the spinning book I bought last year to get these technical details right!

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...

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...

Warning... blueness ahead.

Last later night until the middle of October for me; the working week becomes a little shorter and we're able to breathe a bit. Well, that's the theory. In fact, the next couple of weeks are even busier than usual...

However - quick quiz - what sort of dangerous item do you think this belongs to? Obviously a bit of a hazard...

Yes, that's right - a pair of jeans.

I can't really identify the precise moment at which we became so stupid (or perhaps afraid of litigation) that we forgot that denim = indigo = fading = dye loss...

But in more blueness: the first skein of what I'm calling Blue Meanie.... This is 100% merino superwash from Wingham, for the Tour de Fleece, dyed by me in a couple of different intensities of ultramarine. Because of my lack of spinning skillz (and speed), this is the first week and a half's production at a whopping 167 grammes (try not to be too impressed, people who spin...); 422 metres though, which is the finest I've managed.

It turns out that when you put a skein of yarn onto a patio table at 5:30am, you get an audience...

... even if that audience is utterly unimpressed and really just wants breakfast.

I think I'll probably be knitting Sherbert/Sherbet from the last Yarn Forward (who knows, the magazine index says one thing, the pattern another, 'twas ever thus with YF), if I can get the tension to come out right.

Meanwhile Decimal is about 40 rows from cast-off, and then pick-up of the edging - but it's still just a big heap of cream stuff - it will not be cream when I start wearing it though... Next week I'm teaching at Cottenham Summer School which will be fun and exhausting at the same time...

Oh, also - no 3:15 update this week. I did do some work in the garden, but either I was out, or entertaining, or it rained, so most of what was done was after the photos. They look so alarmingly similar to last week's that I'm not going to bother... The rain did mean that I could sit in my kitchen on Sunday morning, spinning and listening to the cricket at Lords on the radio (and yay for Freddie who was magnificent throughout and thoroughly deserved Man of the Match), and watching the rain beat down on the roof above me, 60 miles north of the action... never a bad thing...

First in a while...

Posts (apart from last night's John Martyn one, anyway), and finished garments. I think that actually it might be about 4 years since I last finished a sweater for me. I knitted most of a sweater in this yarn in October 2007 - in fact, I knitted all of it, but it looked utterly catastrophic when worn... I like to think this one's better.

February Lady Sweater by Pamela Wynne. Yarn: Debbie Bliss Rialto DK (12 balls so far, probably 13 eventually - see below). Needles: 5mm. Cast on January 9, cast off January 29 - the quickest sweater I've knitted for a couple of decades...

I am probably, however, going to lengthen the sleeves - the "just above the wrist" measurement I thought I had when I tried it on (repeatedly) has retrenched to the dreaded fat-lady-three-quarter-sleeves in wear, now it's been washed and blocked... Thankfully as they're top down this is easy peasy. And let's have a closer luck at these buttons...

Yumm... Bloody expensive, but exactly The Right Thing.

And while I'm typing this, the news is on and another of the Good Guys has departed. Bearded Wonder, seriously funny man, cricket geek and statistician extraordinaire, Bill Frindall, you'll be missed...