Finished and partly done...

Contrary to the impression given in recent posts, some knitting has been going on... enhanced by having had a foul cold all week and no inclination to do things other than knit and sleep...



First a couple of squares for Grandmother Purl in cottons; patterns taken from Jan's 200 Knitted Blocks book and sized up for 8" squares. These were mailed off yesterday.

The Gryffindor scarf is also finished. It was a breathtakingly boring bit of knitting, but it's done and looks good... Here it is with the present I have yet to deliver to Baby M...

Here's a closer pic of the fringe, because there's an absurd amount of it...

And finally, the back of St Brigid is done! I've been working on this for about a year, but using 5 charts simultaneously doesn't make for portable knitting... However, the St Brigid KAL group picked up again at the beginning of the month, and I bought an Addi needle the right size... Two photos of this one - the first shows the colour but flattens the cables, the second has nice poppy cables but no idea of the colour... this is Jamieson's Soft Shetland in colour Pagan which was a special offer last year...

Feeling almost human again today, and am off to Stash with Jan... Am taking Icarus to start on the train...

Look! a shiny thing! And cats!

An attempt to distract from the lack of knitting content. A beautiful shawl pin from Chrissy at Scotts Mountain Crafts, my first Etsy purchase - I actually got an even prettier one but that's a present (I don't think the recipient reads this, but better safe than sorry...). The pin is 11.5cm long, as an idea of scale...


And what happens when you bring in 10 large boxes containing exhibition pieces, and take your eye off them for a minute or two. Instant cat furniture. And the house pecking-order is maintained with Tilda getting the taller position as usual...

I have two nearly-finished things - will take pics when they're done.

The damage...

Pretty things from the NEC - in the red corner, two balls of Socka Limbo in rainbow colours; on the left three balls of Twilleys freedom Spirit in colour Fire

And in the blue corner, on the left two balls of Adriafil Quarzo in blue/green/golden brown, and on the right a ball of Fortissima Colori... No idea why everything was pinky/red or turquoise this time, but hey.

And some buttons in a pack - I think all of these may be used on one item, just haven't decided what yet...

I also picked up less photogenic items - four 1 lb cones of dishcloth cotton and one of blue flecked lambswool DK at Uppingham Yarns

And here's a better colour impression of the Handmaiden with the Icarus pattern - it looked a little bright in the photo the other night...

The phoenix at the NEC

Some photos from the NEC, then... We were in stand F24, which was just about central in the hall. Here's a view looking from the entrance


and one from the back of the hall.

I haven't asked for permission to blog other people's pieces yet, so I'll just show some pics of mine. The group challenge was to make something to a particular size (and we commissioned steel shelves to that size) which was based on an idea of recycling, and used mainly recycled materials. It had to be accompanied by a sketchbook (the shelves on the left in the second picture).

Mine was based on the Phoenix myth, and the general cultural consensus that a Phoenix lives 500 years; which is the lifespan of a plastic carrier bag in a landfill site.

I used knitted plastic for the 'nest', a Fanta bottle neck as a stand for the 'egg' (velvet from an old skirt), and turned sweet wrappers from a colleague's leaving do and some shiny purple tissue from last Christmas into feathers when combined with food wrap. There's some reclaimed electrical wire in there too.

The photo above shows the colours more accurately, but the distance shot using flash didn't work with the toplighting and spotlights in the building...

Another detail of the 'egg'...

I ws going to blog the stash acquisitions tonight, but the photo upload problem has struck again; maybe tomorrow...

Back from the NEC

Got back from the NEC an hour or so ago and am currently waiting for the oven to heat enough to throw in a pizza - haute cuisine this evening chez stroppy-cats. Amelia is, however, obligingly eating any daddy-long-legs within range... Quick pic of my show knitting; the view from the stand, and a Gryffindor scarf (PoA/GoF version) for a small friend's 8th birthday... she's got heavily into all things Harry Potter this summer and has a birthday in late November...

The show was very good fun if relatively quiet compared to Ally Pally and Harrogate. We chatted to a lot of people who hadn't been to that sort of thing before; and that was great. I got a natter with Gill on Saturday, and caught up with Fred on Sunday; he brought Noonie along later and I met her (but had completely failed to realise this was the weekend she was doing a skydive; well, evidently she survived!) ... The knitting content was wonderful; there were a couple of notable omissions because they were off elsewhere but I came, I saw and I spent (within budget). Then we broke down the exhibition like insane, driven women, packed it all into Sue's car and came home...

Haven't sorted out the 73 photos I took over the weekend yet, most of which need rotating and otherwise mucking around with, but will blog some tomorrow - I wisely took the day off to recover. However, one rather blurry pic.

Spot the difference puzzle for objects lounging around: one blob of Hand Maiden Angel Hair mohair (colour Vintage); one blob of cat.

Hint; although essentially the same shape as the cat, the mohair doesn't look pissed off...

Meme break

Again off topic, but so many friends have had this on their blogs recently and they've invariably been interesting, so snagging this one for myself and apologies if it doesn't measure up... I'm off to the NEC (Knitting and Stitching show) this weekend, anyway...

One book that changed your life Le ventre de Paris by Emile Zola. Worth it for the stunning descriptions of Paris, and food; changed my point of view on both. There's a plot there too if you're reading the whole Rougon-Macquart series. Read during a truly miserable year abroad in Paris in 1988/89, it restored my faith in many, many things.

One book you've read more than once: The one which springs to mind is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I re-read this every couple of years; the combination of Southern heat and righteous anger always keeps me hooked. I also have this as a DVD and my mam and I share an admiration of Gregory Peck.

One book you'd want on a desert island I'm assuming the Bible and Shakespeare are included. If they are, I'll take one of Barbara Walker's Treasuries of knitting stitches. I'm sure I'll be able to find some form of sticks and fibre somewhere, even if I have to derive fibre from seaweed... Otherwise, I'll choose the Bible, preferably in the first Jerusalem translation as that's the one I'm used to - complete guide to humanity at its best and worst.

A book that made you laugh Most which fall into that category these days are political and therefore cynical. But the Christianna Brand Nurse Matilda books, every time; I can laugh just thinking about them. Molesworth has the same effect.

A book that made you cry For some reason, biographies do this more than novels these days. The first couple of pages of Bill Clinton's My Life are shockingly sad. And there are chapters in Julian Clary's otherwise-hilarious A Young Man's Passage which make me teary thinking of them...

A book I wish I'd written Apart from the Harry Potter books, which would keep me in yarn for life, I'd love to have written the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide; such a brilliant idea.

A book I wish had never been written I'd probably prefer that Mein Kampf had never seen the light of day, but obviously as a liberal I can't oppose it. However, I do nominate Proust's A la récherche du temps perdu. I hated it; it sucked out my soul for the time I was reading it and for a long time thereafter...

A book I am currently reading Anthony Bourdain's The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Useable Trim, Scraps and Bones. He's probably the only chef who can genuinely get away with dedicating a book to the dead Ramones. God, he's good: the combination of the high-octane, mucho-macho, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas stuff and the incredibly delicate, almost ethereal, descriptions of the food. I was reading this book on the train earlier, after writing the first half of this several days ago, and Bourdain cites Le ventre de Paris as a must-read, too; and I'm really not surprised; it's the same combination of breakneck speed and delicacy, total sensory overload and incredible precision...

A book I've been meaning to read Bryan Garman's A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen. Got it for Christmas and it's working its way to the top of the pile.

A book I wish had been written Not so much a book, a section of a book; there's a 7 year gap in Margrave of the Marshes, John Peel's autobiography, between the point he left off and the point he met Sheila and she was able to carry on with the story...

Bridge art and the phoenix

There's not been that much knitting going on here, and this post is a bit random. First, photos of Mill Road Bridge in Cambridge, which has been repainted thanks to the Castle Project (which helps vulnerable 16-25 year olds with housing and work) and the Cambridge Youth Forum. I cycle over this twice a day and until now it's rained every single time since they repainted. Today it didn't, so this is the north side

and this the south side looking towards the station.

It's just tremendously cheering. So far it's stayed untouched by the attention of vandals or anti-war protestors, unlike most public spaces that size along the road.

The main reason I'm distracted and seriously sleep-deprived (and not knitting) is due entirely to my own almost zen mastery of the art of procrastination. Until Sunday night, this was what I had for exhibition at the Knitting and Stitching Shows (Birmingham and Harrogate iterations)

which would be fine if it didn't have to be a piece 9" by 12" by 18" consisting mainly of stitching by hand or machine using one of those needles with a hole in one end. However. This is the nest for my Phoenix piece, knitted out of fine strips of carrier bags and parcel ribbon and melted round a Pyrex bowl using a heat-gun. I spent 20 hours on Monday working on the rest of the piece (culminating in a particularly poignant moment at 3:15 on Tuesday morning when my machining on water-soluble fabric did the inevitable and completely dissolved on contact with water.... I went to bed; I got up 2 hours and 45 minutes later and embarked on a replacement) and eventually, 6 minutes before my lift to the selection meeting arrived, it was finished. So, it is done, and I did it. Still have the sketchbook to finish and post to the group leader...

I can't show you the finished piece. I'd like to say this is because it's confidential until the shows, but that would imply that anyone who cares was reading this, or because I'd rather leave it until it's sitting on its rather beautiful display thingy; and there are good reasons why both of those are true; but actually, I didn't remember to take a picture before it was transported off to be seen again at the NEC in a week or so's time.

And one final random thing. I distinctly heard Jennifer say "Mrs DeSouza came out one day and found a Gloucester Old Spot nibbling on her sarong" in The Archers this evening; am hoping this was some form of exhaustion-induced auditory hallucination...

Nature notes

It seems to have been a stunningly long week, although I only did 3 days at work. I'm learning small amounts of new things but mostly feeling foolish...

When I got back this evening though, I met this lovely thing attempting to scale the side of the house... Aren't those colours amazing?

It's a Privet Hawk-Moth (Sphinx ligustri) caterpillar. This one was about 12cm (5") long so presumably somewhere near fully grown. I went in to find trapping materials and the neighbour-with-connecting-garden wasn't at home (and has a lilac tree which is one of the main foodplants), so I rehomed the caterpillar there...

Also went off and entered things for the Village Show this evening (because you do; well, because Sandra threatened and begged, and she's show secretary this year, and it was her Civil Partnership day when she did the begging/threatening, so how could I refuse...) so I now have to round up some knitting/crochet (!I have a curly wurly)/needlework/jelly/savoury flan on Sunday morning... Coming back from that, I spied Amelia being Mistress of All She Surveys. Centre of photo (that black-and-white smudge on the ground), average-to-large cat. Rest of photo, territory she strenuously defends. She looks so cute trying.

And also, while gratuitous cat-shots are going - double-decker cats. Tilda (aka Pig) above; Amelia (aka Bug) below. Sofa 0-cats 1, I think.

Ordre et beauté

Absolutely not a description of my life today; which went something like

• wake up looking like something from Shrek due to ludicrously swollen eyelid - remnant of something-or-other incurred during the folk festival which has decided to make its presence felt again; listen to splashing rain, decide to get bus rather than cycle-train-cycle; miss bus, which arrives early; go home and potter about for hour and a quarter until the bike ban no longer applies; cycle-train-cycle; arrive wet at work and discover first meeting started 35 minutes earlier; a new low for professionalism there, then...
• at lunchtime, go into town on employer-provided bus (no complaints there, certainly), pay in cheque, buy Optrex, attempt to get new watch strap in market (nope; watch/phone vendor replaced by T-shirt stall), attempt to find out why mobile no longer working (nope; Vodafone shop currently inhabited by workmen having lunch), buy copy of Knit Today (first issue*), go to usual uninspiring-but-quick pub for lunch, wait half an hour while reading Knit Today*, get refund for forgotten order, buy sandwich, go back to work
• go home via station, which has two broken-down trains clogging platforms, a fatality and broken points down the track, every train on the board cancelled at one stage and an "emergency service" for local stations provided, onto which the damp and huddled masses stream; but then the inevitable tacit commuter-leperdom-for-cyclists treatment prevails while I attempt to extricate my bicycle up the line... the scene at the home station, when the two people guarding the doors stand with their backs pressed against the 'open door' buttons staring into the middle distance, is particularly fine... you'd think they've been rehearsing... Tom Stoppard would have been proud.

*am not going to comment on Knit Today in the light of the rest of this; maybe I was just in a bad mood and it wasn't that bad. I'll have another look at it tomorrow.

So. Something much nicer. Last Saturday.

Jan and I set off, fired with Cultural Zeal, to go to the Tiffany at Somerset House. We started off at the British Library. The café at the BL has a lot to recommend it, if you're stuck in the Kings Cross/St Pancras area for any length of time. You don't need a BL card to get into it (or the bookshop), the sandwiches are good, it's quiet and civilised, and you get to stare at books from the Kings Library while you're at it. You can give, and open, presents in relative privacy and coo over them for a reasonable amount of time. And you can knit (Jan demonstrates)

and finish and blog socks.

Those are books from the Kings Library in the background, but Jan's photo is much better.

Anyway, les Baudelaire - basta! - they're finished, they're really lovely, I'd do them again no problem, they're easier than they look, and I wore them for the rest of the day (it was, frankly, not very warm on Saturday, and they sort of went with the rest of what I'd hesitate to classify as an ensemble)...

Obviously all that kulcheral proximity had worn us down; a simultaneous decision was made to ditch the plan and go to Loop because we'd not been there for a bit... I picked up the latest IK, a pair of purple 3.25mm Swallows to replace the one I snapped last year, an Addi for St Brigid and a skein of undyed Opal sock yarn because I belately realised I'd dyed up the one I offered as a prize in the Hanging Garden KAL. Phew. But got out of there without further temptation.

So that's the beauté part of this post; apart from this last one: EJ has already blogged the mouse; but here he is in his new habitat, surprisingly unfazed by surrounding cats... Bless. And as ever when I get something handmade, I end up picking him up and and just looking at him every so often... The urge to say 'Look, my friend made this for me!!!' on the bus on the way home from Ely was very strong, but I quelled it on the grounds that People Just Don't Understand.

Now. Ordre.

I'm trying. Here's The Stash. It fits into 12 large storage boxes (at the moment; I've rounded most of it up from around the house) and I'm now trying to bung it onto a spreadsheet... Most of it is odds and ends; I need to learn to crochet ripple stitches...

Mon semblable - mon frère!

The first Baudelaire is finished, and its brother is well on the way - I have four or five repeats of the pattern to go. The leg looks small in this photo, but it's pretty stretchy... the sewn cast off recommended works extremely well for this pattern, although Elizabeth Zimmerman, who probably invented it, doesn't originally recommend it for ribbing... I like this toe-up sock business; somehow it seems to go faster!

I also started Ragna from Elsebeth Lavold's Viking Knits - I'm adapting the original sweater to be a zipped jacket and this is one front. It's a 16-row pattern so should be easy to memorise. The colour is just about there, but taking this picture using flash washed all the texture out... it's a Wendy mostly-acrylic-with-wool Aran in a grey/green/purple mix, and is destined to be The Thing I Leave at Work for Days When the Air-Conditioning Is Fierce...

This is a skein of Opal previously-undyed sock yarn, dyed with the leftovers of another experiment at the weekend

and here are two balls of Velvet Touch from the bargain bin at the LYS (and Amelia, who wouldn't get off the table); this stuff acid-dyes beautifully (100% nylon) so the somewhat icky colours don't bother me. It's soaking in vinegary water at the moment waiting for me to go and colour it...

More Baudelairing and some Tapestry

Got to the heel part of Baudelaire on Tuesday/Wednesday - this pattern is more-than-slightly addictive and I really like the heel construction - and then came a total cropper when I went for the 'leg with larger instep' option. The pattern says to knit into the back/front loops of the stitches without dropping them, and then into the front/back loops of the stitches, and create a cable. I just couldn't manage it. I don't know whether this is the relative strengths of bamboo and metal needles (I nipped the tips off a new bamboo needle trying) or my own ineptitude, or what. So I did something different...

I did a standard increase (k1 into the front, then 1 into the back) of the 4 stitches ...

... then I separated the fronts from the backs on 2 needles ...


... and then I twisted them and put them onto one needle again for the cable...


and reversed the order of the knitting into the front and back for the cable at the other side, so the front part of the twist has the knit-into-the-front, and the knit-into-the-back horizontal bars are hidden in the twist each time

It's not as much of a twist as I got on the one attempt on one side which did succeed according to the pattern, but better than, say, flinging the whole thing across the office/train, as on all other attempts... So I'm plugging on...

Also went into Robert Sayle/John Lewis today to see the new Rowan yarns. Tapestry is gorgeous - and feels like something a lot more expensive - I fell, and picked up the last three balls in the Pot Pourri colourway, which I'm hoping will make into a small felted satchel-type bag with this button as a clasp (while I seem to be on this pink-and-brown kick...).

The button comes from a felted embroidery workshop several years ago by Teresa Searle... it's about 4 cm long and is some sort of bone...

I also loved Country in the purple-and-red colourway but the yardage put me off... looked as if I'd need at least half a dozen to make anything at all... There was also a really nice new Wendy novelty yarn called Moiselle which was unpriced there - if they'd had a price on it - and I gather it's less than £3 a ball from anywhere on the Internet - I'd definitely have had a couple of oddments for mad scarves, because the colours are excellent (shinier and more vibrant than on the shade card I linked to)...

Concert in the Park

This was my Mystery Project of a couple of months ago - I handed it over to EJ last night at knitting because her baby is now imminent... the Concert in the Park shawl worked in Blackberry Ridge wool/silk "laceweight" (more like a 4-ply)...

Knitted some more on Baudelaire (halfway up the foot gusset) and started another project yesterday...

Bohémiens en voyage

Gill and I started our mini-Baudelairealong today - and so far I'm loving this sock. It's by the designer who also gave the world Pomatomus...

Gill has great photos of the figure-8 cast-on, which was less complicated than I thought although a bit fiddly first time...

Once I'd done the toe and a pattern repeat over lunchtime at work, I realised it was going to be too big (great advantage of the toe-up thing!)... so instead of doing the middle size on 2.5mm needles, I'm now doing the smallest size on 2.25mm needles. The second cast-on attempt was easier and neater than the first one...




I'm using Fleece Artist merino in Burgundy, bought at Stash. The wine in the pic has sirop de violette in it for full Baudelairian decadence... It's an 8-row pattern repeat which is going to be really easy to remember...

Dances with Wasps

I've always had a bit of a problem working out what wasps are actually for. This afternoon, particularly. I had a phone call yesterday from Kate, who lives in Waterbeach Hall, which comes with a wonderful old garden which includes a mulberry tree. The mulberries are now ripe and it was an invite to come and pick some.... Being a bad blogger, I didn't take my camera to take pics of the house, the garden, the tree or the stroppy black-and-white cat which sat and commented on my efforts throughout... So, it was me, the tree, the cat, many thousands of lacewings, very many moths; and several hundred wasps. The wasps and I decided to bide by some sort of uneasy truce. I didn't nick the fruit they were actually sitting on, and they didn't sting me...

I had already had a Bit of a Day today, largely courtesy of Burtons Buses, who run what's laughingly called the Sunday Service. Suffice it to say that I set out for the supermarket 2 hours later than intended due to non-appearance of bus, and then ended up having to walk the 4 miles back, the return service apparently being beneath them... A Strong Letter is being composed.

However, it's amazing how quickly anger and frustration dissipates when doing something peaceful and constructive like picking fruit... And here it is, 2 kg of mulberries. [I won't show the growing bruise on my calf where I failed to drag my second leg up onto the low wall; but the colour is similar...]

Reassurance - no ladybirds were harmed in the making of this jelly - I filched this one out of the mulberries as soon as I saw it in the camera lens...

Here's the amazing colour of the juice boiling;

and here are the 8 jars of jelly...

Blocks and Hanging Garden

Two things:

Blogger vetoed me adding yet another photo to the last post; so here's Caroline sitting in front of the blocks from 200 Knitted Blocks, kindly donated by Jan, which meant we had a whole wonderful library of stitches and techniques to play with, and people could also see how different colours might mix... I was sure I had a photo of just the blocks because they looked brilliant all spread out with people poring over them; but I think I might have taken a film of the blocks by accident! But anyway; you can see them behind Caroline - the wall of cabinets was about 2.5m long, so they were still stacked pretty deep - and also one on the table in front of Addy. In fact, they were all over the place by the end of the week; several in front of each person... thanks, Jan!

Once I got home, feeling suddenly as if I'd been felled by a blunt instrument, and spent an hour in the bath reading, and bunged a supermarket curry in to heat up, I spent a couple of hours watching some episodes of Firefly and knitting on the Hanging Garden KAL from Sivia Harding.

I cast on at the Cambridge Ktog in the Blue on the 25th, but only did the cast-on and 6 rows of garter stitch at the time (it took me 6 goes to get the cast-on right; on the penultimate try, I stared blankly at a stray bead sitting on the table in front of me throughout the cast-on; and then realised I was one bead short... "One bead short of a cast-on"; it doesn't quite compete with John Irving's "One oar out of the water and one wheel in the sand"; but almost). Anyway; I was hoping this was going to be the most difficult bit, and so far, it's proved to be so; I have to look at the pattern at the beginning of each row to start, but it's easy to memorise, and I'm two-thirds of the way through the first repeat and loving it so far...

I'm using a denim-coloured "heavy laceweight" cashmere from Colourmart, bought on eBay - the yarn is oiled so knitting it is like working with sewing thread, but it ought to bloom afterwards. The beads are from Beads Direct and are called 'raku' - they have some of the blue from the yarn as well as the brown... They're not the colours I usually knit with, but I think I'll actually wear this one more often...

What I Did on My Holidays

Was teaching this week at the Cottenham Summer School. I suppose the summer school is about 300 people in all, and covers a variety of activities from bridge and bricklaying to walking and watercolours. This year, they included knitting, and a lovely group of ladies turned up on Wednesday morning... I'd anticipated 7 of them, but the class filled towards the end of registration so we were a full house with 12 students plus me... here are Judy, Tracey, Diana, Gill, Christine and Maggie:

We covered various things over the days, including I-cord, colourwork (Fair-Isle/intarsia/slip stitching; slip-stitches were a favourite...); a bit of cabling; different ways of making holes (intentionally), and some non-linear-type stuff - log-cabin, short-rowing... bit of dry felting to embellish felted knitting; also scribble lace courtesy Debbie New. Here's the sample swatch I made up combining a lot of those techniques - I did have some individual swatches as well... This ought to become a scarf, if only because I've used nearly a ball of my very beautiful and quite pricey Swirl DK from Stash in it. And actually I do quite like it although it's not at all my usual colours!

Here are some more pictures of things people made:

Scribble lace from Mary from Sheffield (L), wielding the biggest baddest circular needle I've ever seen; and from Gill (R) using smaller needles but working drop-stitch to get the loopy effect; and below, from Maggie who doubled the fine mohair...

Here are Tracey's samples: she's going to be making scarves with these for the forseeable future...

and Addy's sample, which did all sorts of things and came out gorgeous (the row which looks green here is actually metallic gold, but the tables are turquoise which threw the camera completely...); this woman has only been knitting for a few months... she also makes the most beautiful things in basketry. Was too gobsmacked when she was showing us her rainbow-coloured fishing creel to take photographs, unfortunately....

Gill did a sample with holes, using Rowan Paper Tape, which looked quite a bit like coral;

My first time teaching knitting; my first time teaching a session longer than 2 hours... and it was a bit of a deep-end thing; three whole days. Came out feeling as if I'd been through a mangle, but in a good way!