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!

Big irritation

I pay good money to McAfee for virus protection... and you'd think that would give you protection? Hmmnnn... Turns out, not so much. Spent most of yesterday researching something called XP Defender, which had sent a little message-thingy out onto my computer which was popping up every 90 seconds or so to convince me I needed to download a programme to check for viruses... So did a little bit of research and found out it was malware, made sure my McAfee was up to date, and got it to do a complete virus check, and after 4 hours it came back and said "shiny! all clear!"...

Managed to find a detailed set of instructions for removal, but this did involve editing the registry, which isn't something a non-techy person attempts without Extreme Trepidation. Thankfully, I used to be married to someone who is a techy person, and who very kindly came over yesterday evening and sorted it out. But I do wonder why McAfee didn't spot it.

In a continuation of foolishness, managed to set out this morning and got halfway to the station before I realised I'd left my season ticket in my other bag. So I have a few minutes to rant about viruses before the next train!

Also, a couple of pictures. I should really have chopped this japonica and this berberis before now, but it'll have to wait until the flowers-and-leaves combination is less breathtaking.

And in a Bug update... Outside, therefore happy...

Great start!

Well - I managed the daily blogging thing for 2 days... Oops.

It was a busier weekend than I'd anticipated - on Saturday I was working in the library, went knitting at the Devonshire Arms (lovely venue!) and had a friend over for dinner. On Sunday I had other friends for lunch (which ended at 5:30pm or so) and then spent the evening tidying the place up... Today, the same friends picked me up and we wandered around Ely. One of the things I picked up was a fearsome pruning saw to replace the one I borrowed last year and really need to return. When I went out to the garden to use it this afternoon, I found a wonderful thing - the dwarf tulips are flowering! (I have done nothing at all to this photo - they really are that bright!)


I totally hadn't expected the yellow centres - the picture on the bulb packet was the same as the one I linked to above; absolutely gorgeous... If you click to embiggen, there's a very happy and almost entirely pollen-encrusted ladybird in the top one...

I also have some narcissi flowering, and I hope that the others I planted in the same area, Professor Einstein, will be following suit soon... these are February Gold. The tulips were also meant to be February-March flowering, but it's been a cold winter, and I only planted them on 9th December! (And thankfully I took photos, because I can't find the packets, and had no memory of what they were!)

Inside, some knitting has been done - this is a test-knit for a friend... I'm not sure how secret this is so I'll refrain from giving the details. This was the first attempt...

in Helen's Lace, in the Get Knitted colourway. It's lovely stuff to knit - but with this pattern, it pooled horribly, so after the first 30 rows I ripped it out and have just got to that point again with a new yarn. This is Cherry Tree Hill Merino Lace in Peacock and it seems to be responding nicely...

BEST achievement of last year...

... was definitely taking the garden in hand. I went out there today, and although it's pretty desolate at the moment (and covered in the thin layer of snow which stopped me getting into work this morning*), at least parts of it will come back in the spring, and it won't make me feel guilty and ashamed, as it would have at this time last year.

Over the last couple of days, mainly clad in many, many knitted layers while waiting for the house to warm up, I've put together a Flickr slide show of all the versions of this shot in date order - some of them turned up on the blog but not all...

So if you don't have any paint you could be watching dry (or just want to have some reassurance that warmer days will come), or you're trapped under something heavy while reading this, do have a look.

While looking for all the versions, I found the photo below, which I made last year but never posted. It also makes a change from the current state of my small resentful house-mate, who is spending 22 hours a day sleeping next to a radiator in the bedroom at the moment, emerging only to eat or dive briefly into the garden to answer the call of nature...

Keep warm, all.

*Bet you were wondering why I was more positive. I'm not the most disciplined worker-from-home, but after yesterday, only wasting 90 minutes of my day dealing with trains, with the knowledge I was only 10 minutes from home at any time, was just fine and I got a fair amount done.

3:15 project - six month update

Kathleen C. in her comment on Sunday's post suggested I show a "before and after" photo. This is definitely in the nature of a "before and during" photo; there's still a lot to do; but a recent conversation with a friend about different ways of working reminded me that generally, I'm really quite bad at living in the moment (yesterday afternoon's lovely couple of hours knitting and cat-wrangling-for-my-pattern was an exception), and also quite bad at looking back on a job and thinking about it as a whole; so I thought it might be a nice idea.

I also realised that Sunday's general photo (the one I started out calling the Abomination of Desolation shot) had been taken from a different angle to previous ones - I'd been standing on the patio, rather then next to it, so you didn't get the whole of the patio table - which is a much better idea from a photographic point of view, but wasn't what I started off doing, because the patio was way too slimy to enjoy standing on.

So I went out when I got home tonight and took a picture from as near the same angle I could, given that the first few weeks were taken with the little camera which has a slightly different picture ratio...

Here's where it was on March 1...

and this is the view on September 1. Some of the difference is obviously that it's summer; but a lot of it is hard graft.

And it's anyone's guess how dreadful it might have looked next March if I'd just let it go again this year... I hope the one-year shot will be even more dramatic.

And speaking of dramatic, this is what it looked like at the other side of the house 20 minutes after taking the photo above...

It's showering a little bit... All a bit film noir... Completely unadulterated by Photoshop etc., but I have a gold voile curtain instead of traditional lace/nets, which helps...

On a completely different tack, I heard an item on the news this evening about the service at St Paul's commemorating WW2 evacuees - all those people just a little bit older than my parents (who grew up in relatively rural areas) wearing their labels and gas-masks... Seeing someone like Michael Aspel with his luggage-label pinned to the lapel of his smart suit was almost unbearably moving. I wonder if anyone's ever done any mass research on those 3.5 million children to see how much the experience of evacuation changed their lives.

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!

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).

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.

3:15 project, update 18

aka the urticaria edition... Photos from last Sunday.

Some progress this week... Lots more growth in the hanging baskets...

... but still haven't planted out the sesame on the patio...

The lilies have gone, but everything else is growing away nicely...

And here's the progress. No, I haven't buried anyone (although there is a cat buried under each side bed); but I have unearthed what was once, and will be again, the veg bed, which had completely gone over to nettles. Shan't be planting anything in there this season - I know there are still significant chunks of root in there and I'll be waiting for them to show themselves again - but am wondering about putting a green manure in there over the winter. Anyone got any experience of these?

I didn't get too badly stung, although I had a bracelet of stings around each wrist where my top kept parting company from my gloves...

And I seem to have failed to kill the holly-bush as well; which is great. It's rallying nicely - now to keep it with enough light that it doesn't go straggly again...

This week I'm "on holiday". The inverted commas are because this is the only day I'm actually not doing anything very much - I taught three days of summer school at Cottenham Monday-Wednesday to a very nice group of ladies, and tomorrow I'm off to the folk festival... Still toying with the idea of knitting at Ely this evening... I think it's going to depend on the weather at 6:30 when I need to go for the bus. And what the soundtrack to the fair is - we get a small fun-fair on the Green each year, and this is its week.

3:15 project, update 17

A bit of a changeable weekend; spent several hours spinning, and a few hours doing a bit of work, but it was fine enough on Sunday to dry the laundry and do some work in the garden. The main effort went into the right-hand-side again, trying to uncover the door into the greenhouse which has been invaded by ivy...


Pictures 1 and 2, nothing to see. Pic 3 - not a great deal of change although all the lilies are now out... and the sesame plants on the left in the tray are going mad...


Picture 4: everything just growing away and becoming quite lush...

And new this week, picture 5: taken from the bottom of the garden by the greenhouse door, which I nearly unearthed last week! I got it clear enough to get into, anyway, and rescue a butterfly which had become trapped in there... As you can see, still quite a lot to do when viewed from this angle!

The herb bed has been attracting quite a lot of insect life because the marjoram and oregano are flowering;

They literally are heavy with bees...

and here's that rescue butterfly again - a Comma, or Polygonia c-album; one of the species which is making a comeback across England as the weather warms up; Dad spotted one in their garden in north Durham last year...

Some of the local fauna found alternative habitats.

Just as well I hadn't planted that up with anything this year, really...

Lots of spinning has been going on for the Tour de Fleece (Ravelry link), and a fair amount of knitting on Decimal - I've just been really lazy about formatting and uploading my pictures recently...!

3:15 project, update 16

Photos 1 and 2 have nothing to distinguish them this week; all "move away, nothing to see..." Here's pic 3. There are clearer areas down both sides...


And pic 4. Apart from the fennel and lilies on the left, there's the dyed tops for the Tour de Fleece [Ravelry link] on the right...

Lilies have happened! without being completely eaten by the utterly disgusting lily grubs...

And there are pretty things in pots...


A chunk of this week's progress - some ground elder pulled out...

Meanwhile, at the other side of the garden, the flowering currant I thought I'd killed is making a comeback. I'm not unhappy about this - as long as I can control it... I really like the smell, the look and the early flowering. And BoyNextDoor has removed all the dead stuff from the top of the fence, so there's a lot more light...

Self-satisfied cat is also making her appearance...



The other thing I've been doing today is boggling at the Boss's appearances at Glastonbury last night. Go to iPlayer for the main thing...; but I also loved his appearance with Gaslight Anthem

After all the Michael Jackson business over the last few days (I loved Thriller, and it's a very sad day for pop, but I was glad Springsteen's tribute was to Joe Strummer) it's so good to see someone a decade older looking cool, sharp, fit, healthy and totally enthusiastic about what he's doing... And love the leather wellies, Bruce...

3:15 project, updates 14 and in fact 15

I've got fed up at being a week behind; and the differences over the last couple of weeks have been largely invisible at my usual photographic angles; so here we go...

Additionally, I've discovered that my newly-installed IE8 (which everyone I've whined to about it also hates) doesn't play nicely with Blogger on the matter of photos at all; so I've switched to Firefox for editing. MSFail...

Pic 1, no change really; the limes are getting sticky and unpleasant, but they always do; and I don't have a car to get coated in their rather unpleasant juices and attract wasps, so why should I care?

Pic 2, the hanging baskets are growing in and getting pretty (and they're the miner's canary for the rest of the outdoor stuff... if they start wilting I know watering the other pots outside is urgent...)

Pic 3: the main difference - the loss of the huge holly bush - is at the far end of the garden and so unnoticed... you can see a chunk of it on the right-hand side of the patio though most of it is in the green bin...

And no 4: up the garden...

The lilies are preparing to bloom. So far no sign of lily beetles but I'm not holding my breath...

I put in a new edging on the bed under the rose-bush - it's not the straightest edging ever, but it will do the job, and I have another stretch of the same stuff (bamboo sticks fastened together with wire, from Wilkinson's) to carry on the work... I planted some bronze-leaved dahlias (which I have no great hopes of, the snails having feasted on them before they even made it to the flower-bed) and a perennial geranium (which might survive)...

And possibly the earliest ripening tomato I've ever had. This is from a very spindly plant I bought way too early and which sat on the kitchen windowsill for months growing upwards but never bushing outwards...