Tangled Creations

Plum, Apple and Ginger jam

2011-11-04T14:25:00.001Z

Hello blogland. It has been a while, hasn't it? More on that another time, I think. As a gentle return, I thought I'd share the recipe I cobbled together for some jam earlier this week. For a recipe that was adapted from half a dozen others and largely ended up being a sort of "that looks/smells about right", this jam came out amazingly well. It's absolutely delicious.

Plum, Apple and Ginger Jam

2 punnets of plums (about 850g or so)
2 large cooking apples
6 lumps of stem ginger
About half a pint of water
1kg jam sugar

Halve the plums (no need to peel) and remove the stones. Chop the halves into four (so you have lots of plum eighths)

Peel and core the apples, and then slice them thinly.

Chop the stem ginger lumps.

Put the plum, apple, ginger and water in a pan over a low heat. Stew the fruit over a low heat until it's all gone wonderfully soft and goopy. I did it for about 30 mins, mostly with the lid on.

Stir in the sugar and keep stirring (over the low heat) until all the sugar has dissolved.

Turn the heat up and keep stirring til the jam is boiling (a hard boil that doesn't disappear when you stir it). Boil for 4 minutes and then take it off the heat.

Do a wrinkle test to check the set and, if satisfied, pour into jars!

I made that

2011-02-11T20:02:00.004Z

Just before the Christmas break, I finished the dovetailed box we were working on. It is beautiful. Of course, as it was a learning exercise, it is not perfect, but I am amazed with how professional it looks, at how well-made it is.

Also, with a shellac and beeswax finish, plus the cedar of Lebanon liners, it smells divine.

Since returning to the workshop, we have been focused on creating our workbenches: it's quite a challenge, to go from small and delicate dovetail joinery to hefting huge pieces of timber around, cutting large mortice and tenon joints and the like.

As you can see, we're getting used to it, however. Here are the two end-frames for my bench, dry-assembled to test the fit.

Quick! Quick!

2010-12-05T22:33:00.002Z

Write something before it's been a month of dead air time...

Phew.

So, where was I? Ah yes, furniture making of course. I think we are just about to enter our 14th week on the course, and it is ticking over wonderfully. We are deep in the intricacies of box-making, which is giving us a good grounding in various skills, on a very fine scale.

The box itself will be in black walnut, dovetailed together, a fielded panel lid and with cedar of Lebanon liners and base. I've been really enjoying the progress I'm making, and I think this is partly because I can feel how all this new knowledge and these new skills are embedding into my brain. I've improved in huge leaps over the past few weeks.

This project has been our first foray into "proper" joint cutting, with fine furniture's favourite joint, the hand-cut dovetail. As these are decorative, they're through-dovetails, so both sides of the corner joint will show. We marked and cut and pared and marked and cut and pared again... painstakingly trying not to cut over our lines, back-breaking days spent hunched over the bench chiselling away tiny amounts of waste. And then fitting the joints together, adjusting, fitting again...

Now that I know the sides go together, I can work on the bottom and lid. There's a false sense of nearing the end having seen the sides assembled, but actually there are quite a few steps before I actually get to start final assembly. I started preparing the bottom and liners from a beautiful piece of cedar of Lebanon... and at the end (just before cutting the rebate so it'll fit into the grooves in the box) discovered a split in the timber! So, I found another piece to make the bottom from... only, it was of a very different colour to the original liner pieces I had prepared. So, I also prepared some new liners as well...

It's a good job that planing cedar (especially with a freshly honed plane iron) is about as good as hand-planing can get - the smell is lovely, and it cuts very nicely.

Now, I've cut the rebate and the rough steps for the fielded panel of the lid... Then comes the finishing off of the lid sides (to fit into the grooves). And then we work on pre-finishing some of the box surfaces. And then, finally, we get to glue some of these pieces together. More on that next weekend, I expect!

Something That Isn't Wood-Related

2010-11-12T23:00:00.002Z

I've been pushing myself a little to do creative things outside of my course. This is harder than I expected: when I get home from the workshop, I am somewhat spent. But I miss my fibre-based crafts, and so when I saw this very cute hat kit on the Colinette stand at the Knitting and Stitching Show this year, I couldn't help myself. Something interesting, something small, something quick, something luxurious, something quirky... it just about ticked all requirements for a return-to-knitting project.

Here is the finished article, unfortunately with an iPhone camera so the colours aren't quite as warm and vibrant as they are in reality.

Useful Information

2010-11-11T13:03:00.002Z

Ever wondered what £1200 might look like?

When that wood is olive ash and American maple, it looks like this:

Miss a Few... Nine!

2010-11-07T22:28:00.002Z

It's been pointed out to me more than once that I haven't updated in a few weeks. I meant to, honest I did... time keeps getting away from me. We've now finished week number 9 of the furniture making course!

Weeks six and seven were spent making the trestles. The first, as I probably explained before, was to be made entirely by hand. The second, to involve machines where appropriate. Tellingly, the first trestle was finally finished on the Monday of week seven, having started during week five. The second trestle was finished by the Friday of the same week. The real time savings were in the planing/thicknessing of the components, routing the notches for the bird mouth joints (instead of sawing then chiselling the waste away), and using the drill press.

Here they are, the finished articles:

They are already proving useful in the workshop, and I will hopefully get around to giving them a coat or three of danish oil to attempt to offer them a bit of protection. Jane's (Jane is one of my fellow students) trestles are currently supporting the black walnut wood for our next project, which will be a decorative box. We've been doing some milling of the pieces on that:

This amused me: having been using machines on pine and then black walnut, the colour contrast in the bag from the shavings/dust extractor is striking.

The walnut, by the by, is looking glorious. I hope that I can do it justice.

We've also been doing some technical drawing for the next project, which is the first Big Deal: our workbenches. Based upon Jonathan's bench, with some modifications, we've learned the basics of technical drawing (without fretting about ISO standards etc.). I particularly enjoyed this exercise: something in the construction of such a drawing is deeply satisfying. Here is an orthographic projection, my first technical drawing since first year of university:

And here's an isometric exploded diagram of the tail vice we'll be building. I am extremely proud of this: exploded diagrams ain't easy, but I still did it!

Week Five, Still Alive

2010-10-14T21:30:00.002+01:00

Have you noticed how this blog is entirely about my furniture making course? Currently, I'm doing pretty much nothing else remotely crafty: all my creative energy (and most of any other sort of energy I have) is being poured into it. I haven't picked up a pair of knitting needles in weeks.

Week five involved a lot of planing, trying and trying and trying to get the pieces of softwood into shape for my trestle. A laborious and somewhat frustrating process. This is a picture of the trestle-top (from last week), once I'd finished making it true, and a piece of approximately its original dimensions...

One of these boards is not like the other. Thankfully, applying the same process to the leg components was much more straightforward: they were less warped overall, and with smaller surfaces. The next job was marking and cutting compound angles at the legs' ends: this is so that the legs of the trestle will be neatly splayed in two dimensions.

After my previous efforts with the saw, I was a little nervous, but with a bit of extra coaching I found the knack and was somewhat more reliable in cutting a straight line. Once cut, I finally had the opnportunity to use two other planes (the #4 and the block plane) to smooth down the ends. Aren't they beautiful?

European Woodworking Show

2010-10-14T21:20:00.003+01:00

So, the Sunday before week five truly began, my co-student Jane and I went to visit the European Woodworking Show in Essex. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but it was, not surprisingly, largely devoted to various companies selling tools, people touting courses of one kind or another, demonstrations and selling of items made from wood. From the "European" moniker I thought it would be bigger, but in the end I was quite glad it wasn't, as we spent a fair amount of time going from room to room (actually, barn to barn) and it was pouring with rain.

I did remember to take my camera, but I did not remember to take spare batteries. So, unfortunately, all I have are two iPhone photographs:

This is Sadatsugu Watanabe, hard at work demonstrating the use of Japanese hand tools. One of the primary differences, as I understand it so far, between European style hand tools and Japanese style hand tools, is that European tools cut on the push stroke (ie when you are pushing the saw/plane/whatever forwards) and Japanese tools cut on the pull (ie when you are pulling it back).

This was a stall selling a lot of wood of various kinds, in the form of blanks for woodturners/carvers. Pretty! It was great to see such a variety in a manageable format.

And then to week five...

Week Three, Week Four, FEWTEL futile

2010-10-02T16:43:00.004+01:00

In general, I prefer blog posts which involve photographs of some sort. So, when a week mostly involves doing the same thing I was doing before, I tend not to take new photographs, and then tend not to post.

Week Three of the furniture making course was such a week. From the long distance of a week's time having passed, as I recall it mostly involved more tuning: chisels, a cabinet scraper, and my No. 7 plane which finally arrived after some gently persuasive phonecalls to Axminster. I'll take a photograph of my two bench planes next to each other so you can admire the difference in size: the No. 7 is huge, longer than my forearm and hand, and very weighty. It's mostly used for true-ing (truing? trueing?) up boards of timber...

And true-ing up is what I've been doing this week. In week three, we took a trip to BuildBase in Wantage, and bought some softwood. This will be for making our first real project items from: trestles! We are making a pair each, one entirely by hand, and one with machines to start with and then finishing off by hand. In theory, they should ultimately be all but identical... we shall see.

Once the timber had settled a bit, our first job was to roughly cut the pieces we needed. Here are my fellow students, Ian and Jane, and Jonathan (our teacher)'s head as they marked out the boards into sections. We then set about them with saws.

Lesson from this activity: I can't saw straight... yet. I am sure I will be able to, but right now, not so much.

Then it was a case of putting our pieces "in stick" to settle a bit more before we started doing anything to them.

And then... the work started! The first step is to "true up" one of the larger sides, which becomes the "face". True-ing up means, essentially, making something flat (in this case) and square (in the sense of sides being exactly square to each other). At this stage in my woodworking skills, it is far from an easy process.

Once flat, the next step is to true up the edge, to ensure that it is square to the face. Once these two sides are done, you have created two reference surfaces: everything is measured and marked from these two sides. They're also indicated with a mark like this:

Next come the width, thickness, end and length. FEWTEL. Not necessarily a straightforward acronym until, if you're me, you come back to the piece the next day and find that the previously true face and edge are no longer true. And that your cutting gauge (used to mark out the width, thickness etc.) won't hold to one measurement. FUTILE. Harrumph.

I am sure this process will get easier with practice. After all, at this stage I have pretty much no experience, I'm a complete beginner. But that didn't stop me dribbling a few tears of frustration on a Friday afternoon. I finished the week with a true face and edge on this piece of softwood, and a width of 80mm marked out... hopefully next week I will be able to finish that and true up some of the leg components!

Tomorrow I'm off to the European Woodworking Show with my co-student Jane. I will try to remember my camera, there may be interesting things to see!

Week 2, Boogaloo

2010-09-21T08:11:00.002+01:00

This is my no. 4 smoothing plane, tuned up and sharpened, and proving that it works! Lovely shavings, less than 0.1mm thick. I also started tuning my beautiful chisels, and two other planes of different types. More on them next week.

The tuning and sharpening process is hard work, but becomes somewhat meditative. There is a lot of figure-of-eight grinding, first on a lapping plate (essentially a hard steel block) with oil and decreasing coarseness of grit, and then on waterstones. The aim is to make everything flat and true (i.e. square), and finally to adjust things like the front of the plane iron (the blade) to be a slight curve (this stops the corners from digging in when you are planing).

I've also had some time for aesthetic tuning!

These are my flat head screwdrivers. When they arrived, all the handles looked like the middle one pictured here: covered in a thick almost-orange lacquer. Not very attractive, and not all that pleasant a feel in the hand. So, I attacked them with a scraper and then some abrasive paper to strip them back to the bare wood, as you can see. I've since been oiling them with danish oil, after which they'll be waxed.

The process of stripping off the handles is a little addictive: I've taken the lacquer off my pin hammer handle, and I've got my eyes on several other tools...

While I'm here and remembering, let me finish off with another couple of photographs, per The Knit Nurse's request. In reference to this post, here is a picture of my reddened hair and my new tattoo:

First Week

2010-09-12T22:00:00.002+01:00

So, my first week on the furniture making course. One down, 44 or thereabouts to go.

It's been a whirlwind of information overload, getting to know my co-students (and teacher!), settling in. This is the view from my workbench.

Also, I've been spending money, lots of money. Tools: many of them. Here is the first batch:

Since then, several more parcels have been delivered! And I've started the process of tuning my first ever plane, a Clifton No. 4 Smoothing Plane. Initially, it's all about dismantling, adjusting... there's something unnerving about the idea of taking something shiny and brand new (and expensive) and stating "This is good, but it isn't good enough," and then taking a set of files to it.

I also got my first cut! Scraping the varnish off one of my screwdriver handles, my hand slipped and lo and behold a small cut across the first crease of my right middle finger. Alas. But... it could have been worse.

Adult Response

2010-09-05T23:09:00.001+01:00

I start my training tomorrow. So, for the past couple of weeks I've been enjoying unemployment, and revelling in the fact I no longer work in an office.

In a very mature way, of course. Like any down-to-earth 31 year old, I dyed my hair bright red and got a new tattoo.

A New Kind of Life

2010-08-07T23:12:00.004+01:00

Let me tell you what I'm in the process of doing with my life. For the past 8.5 years, I've been a computer programmer by trade. Initially, I worked in the computer games industry. After a few years, I moved to an investment bank. The work had similarities in both, although the environments and culture of the industries was completely different. My most recent workplace was extremely intense: a high pressure environment, with expectations of excellence. I am the kind of person that initially responds well to such an atmosphere: I push myself to be as excellent as required, and beyond. I hold myself to impossibly high standards. And a workplace culture like this feeds off this perfectionist, driven attitude (which means it's prevalent among the workforce): everyone goes further, gives more, until there is no more to give.

Over the past two and a half years, I've had two episodes of serious depression. This is an illness that I've struggled with before, but never to the extent that I had these times. And although many of the underlying issues were personal, and nothing to do with my choice of work, both times it has been clear that my job has contributed in a significant way.

Thanks to work-provided health insurance, I was also able to get a level of treatment that I've never had before: with two extended periods of leave from work, two hospital stays, and a lot of talking, I realised that I needed to leave. I no longer felt any level of fulfillment in my job, working long and intense hours to attempt to make lots of money for people who already had too much money. The technical challenges were still there, but I was losing interest: as my career was progressing, I had less time for programming (the aspect of the work I enjoyed). I longed to do something creative, and practical.

So, searching for options, I found out about various creative industries and endeavours I might pursue. Ceramics, stained glass, textiles, stonemasonry, boat building... and furniture making. As I looked into courses and training options, I kept coming back to the wood-based crafts, and particularly furniture and cabinet making...

And so I decided to try and make my way out of my current job, into a whole new industry, a whole new life. I took a short course, to check that I would actually enjoy the activity as much as I'd hoped. I made this:

A double sided game board: chess on one side, backgammon on the other. Hand-cut veneers of zebrano, wenge, dark walnut, rippled sycamore, with a dark walnut edge.

And I loved every second of it. Even small exercises like learning the basics of a dovetail joint:

Just wonderful. I had a sense of satisfaction that I'd never thought could be part of my life outside of creative hobbies. And a sense of comfort in the materials, the atmosphere of the workshop... I felt deeply happy.

And so, nine months later, I have left my job in The City, and I'm waiting to start a year-long course in furniture and cabinet making: just one more month until I start. It's a scary step, of course: I've left behind a regular good wage, the familiarity of an office environment, my established career and skills... for a dream. But at every step of this change I've felt, deep in my belly, that this is the right thing to do.

I hope that as I progress through the course, I'll write some of my progress here, alongside my other, more regular, creative pursuits. Socks one day, occasional tables the next, perhaps.

Potholders 2010

2010-04-26T11:40:00.002+01:00

It's been a long time since I took part in a swap. The last was a Secret Pal exchange, but I don't even remember what number it was. Occasionally I've been tempted to sign up again, but nothing ever quite grabs me enough... until I read about the Potholder 2010 swap. The rules were simple: crochet five potholders (in the same pattern), send them in and get a selection of five back.

I picked up some Rowan handknit cotton yarn in a small selection of colours, and got stuck into reading many many different potholder patterns. Eventually I settled on this one: Tried to Look Pretty Potholder. I'm far from being a crochet genius, but the pattern is wonderfully clear and easy to follow, and the results are lovely.

I packed up my five, and sent them off looking like this:

And last week I received a package of new potholders all for me, looking like this:

Clockwise from top, made by Knithound Brooklyn, Purl Diva, zKnitter, Lucia, SusieKrochets.

Aren't they lovely? I almost don't want to use them, they're so nice. Almost. These are going to be well-loved in this house. Thank you so much to my five crochet angels, and to the organisers of the swap!

Jam

2010-04-01T21:21:00.005+01:00

I have, in the past, made marmalade. As a household, we're not quick to consume it but homemade is always more fun to eat when we do. My last effort was two years ago, when, having had so much fun making it the previous year, I decided to make a double quantity. Having given away plenty, I haven't made any more during the past two seasons because we are still working our way through the final jar.

That didn't stop me becoming obsessed with the desire to make jam, however. Specifically, rhubarb jam. I am a huge fan of rhubarb. And when I found this recipe, I was smitten. So last week I set to in the kitchen, and found that the rhubarb was so beautiful, I had to take a selection of photographs, just to show it off.

The final verdict: for me, this jam is a little too sweet, but still blissfully rhubarb and ginger-y. It is absolutely divine on toast... and we are halfway through the jar already.

A Model in the Making

2010-04-01T21:17:00.001+01:00

As promised, a photograph of the Anouk dress in action:

Photograph and baby by Helen and her husband, and physical baby support also provided by the latter...

Anouk

2010-03-22T11:02:00.002Z

Sometimes you see a pattern and you just know. Practicalities might stop you casting on Right Now, but it sits in the back of your mind (or the bottom of your Ravelry queue), waiting for you. You find the right time, and it's almost with slight trepidation that you re-open the pattern, sit back and cast on.

Anouk is one of those patterns, for me. When I first came across it, I was in love. Of course, it helps that the baby in the photograph is adorable, but the dress itself just... spoke to me. I loved the stylized design, the colours, the practicality of something that could have a longer useful life.

But, in 2004, I didn't know anybody who had a baby. And, although I do sometimes make things just for the process, part of the appeal of this would be seeing it on a baby. Lastly, I didn't have the "right" yarn, nor the money to go out and buy it.

But now, in 2010, I have a friend with a baby. A baby girl, no less. Ever since Helen announced her pregnancy, I've been planning to make this dress. And now I have.

-- full dress

I bought the yarn (Rowan All-Seasons cotton) from the closing-down sale at the yarn shop in St Albans. Even without it being a closing down sale, the selection of colours was smaller so my palette was more limited than the original. But a nice selection of cream and two blues seemed just right. The colours, of course, don't quite work with the original poppy motif, and so I designed a new one.

This was my first "proper" piece of intarsia colour knitting (I had previously knit a small swatch, several years ago, to attempt to understand the technique). It's not perfect (note the uneven tension and pulled stitches), but I am very happy with it nonetheless. Particularly as it's my own design.

Evenstar continues

2010-03-11T19:20:00.004Z

Evenstar (the Mystery Shawl) is progressing slowly. I tried to take a picture this evening, but the light is too poor and my camera options too limited. Never mind.

Clue #3 is due to be released tomorrow night. When Clue #2 was released, I was hugely ahead, having knit through #1 at haste. Unfortunately, as a result, I put other projects into the foreground and so #2 languished. And then when I did start it, with an increase round and three plain-ish rounds, I found that I was short by several stitches! So, that was an evening of unknitting those rounds, then reknitting them. Thankfully all is as it should be now. There are... 30 rounds still to do, and I'd love to be caught up by Saturday morning (when I'll pick up the new clue), but I feel this is unlikely.

That's okay, though. It's just my neuroses that are bugging me about it.

Sprang Spring Sprung

2010-03-08T14:47:00.001Z

This winter has felt interminable. But finally, a little colour...

Treasure Tuesday

2010-03-03T19:25:00.003Z

One day, I’ll post a Treasure Tuesday on an actual Tuesday. Probably.

Here is my treasure for this week:

This is a piece of embroidery that my Granny (my maternal grandmother was always called Granny) did. I don’t remember ever not having it, so I imagine that it was done when I was very young indeed. Over the years, it’s been proudly displayed, or safely stashed, remembered and forgotten in different measures. It used to have a proper frame: I don’t know what happened to that. Currently it’s in a cheap Ikea frame just so I can actually display it. It hangs in the improbably long hallway of my flat.

One of my brothers had the corresponding “What are little boys made of…” embroidery when we were little. I’d love to find that, so I could hang them both next to each other. Although the rhyme for boys is less pleasant (“Slugs and snails and puppy dog tails,” anyone?), I remember the embroidery piece being very similar, and just as attractive.

My granny is one of the real reasons that I have always been craft-focused. She taught me to knit, when I was very young, with a little kit to knit a blanket for a teddy. As I recall, I made a few misshapen squares and lost interest… but I’ve never had to re-learn. When I was a little older, she taught me how to embroider (particularly cross-stich, some printed and some counted), and that has stayed with me as well. I look at the work she put into this now, and I’m moved: I wish she could see that I took up knitting again, that I still embroider. That said, I do feel a connection to her through these things. When I made the embroidery piece for Helen, I knew that Granny would have loved to have seen it, but also that she would have loved to see me work on it. And she’d probably have nagged about my sometimes haphazard approach to managing my loose threads (and, indeed, the stash of embroidery floss, which I never wound onto small reels as she would), and she probably would have driven me slighty nuts, but… it would have been good.

So, a treasure. Thank you, Granny. I think of you every time I see it.

Progress

2010-03-01T11:08:00.000Z

The ragdoll I started last week is progressing! She has a face and some crazy crazy hair:

The hair is some peaches & creme cotton that I was given at a St Albans stitch and bitch session a few months ago. I think it suits her! Unfortunately, I didn't have enough so currently it runs down her centre parting and along her forehead. Later, I'll be doing some judicious tacking down to cover her bald spots!

Storing my Buttons

2010-02-27T16:04:00.002Z

Up until recently, I've kept my ever-increasing collection of buttons in a small, but attractive, tin. The buttons came from charity shops, end-of-range sales and eBay, the Fortnum & Mason tin from another charity shop. This is a similar method that my mother used (up until she gave me her button collection), and I thought it was fine.

Until I started making jewellery out of buttons. Then I realised that I had a big tin of mixed buttons, and finding colours to go with each other was increasingly a time-consuming and frustrating task. So, one snowy day in December, I sorted my buttons into a series of mugs, and separated them entirely by colour. I hadn't anticipated quite how pleasing the overall effect would be. By chance, my mum had a series of colourful boxes from Ikea that she had been waiting to use for nearly a decade... and so my new button storage method was born.

A quick glance into any of these pots makes me happy:

But it is these pots that give me particular joy at the moment:

Pictures taken by Helen, who has already blogged the buttons. Button sorting by me.

An Afternoon

2010-02-25T23:00:00.004Z

I hauled out my sewing machine (now that I have a new foodpedal and power cable) and did a little sewing. Here is the result, very much a work in progress and currently at the "deeply creepy" stage.

More details when she has a little more going on!

Treasure Tuesday... on a Wednesday

2010-02-24T22:29:00.005Z

Sunday… Wednesday… close enough.

So, I am kicking off my “Treasure Tuesday” series of posts. Introducing my first treasure: an origami rose.

This is a Kawasaki Rose, folded by my husband, using green paper for the stem and leaf and several layers of red tissue paper for the flower. It was a present for my 30th birthday, beautifully presented and carefully protected in a lovely box.

It is one of the most beautiful and thoughtful presents I have ever received. This is somehow compounded by the fact that, although my husband is very good at origami and suchlike, he is not one for giving handmade gifts.

I adore it. At the moment, it is on a bookcase in our living room, and every time I see it I get a little stabbing feeling of joy so intense it almost brings tears to my eyes.

Treasure Tuesday is, for me, a time to consider one thing that I hold dear to my heart, for whatever reason. I want to give these things in my life a little more thought and a little more space, to take some moments to consider what they really mean to me.

By nature, I am an unwilling pack rat: I accumulate things even though I absolutely adore having clear-outs. I harbour deep-seated envy of people whose houses are entirely unlike my own: those houses which are neat, where everything appears to have a place. My flat is cluttered at best, usually messy, and everything always feels like a chaos of projects and hobbies where Greg's and my interests collide and explode. So clearing things out is always imbued with a hope that this time, we’ll be organised and stay that way, and of course it has yet to quite work out like that.

Perhaps, if I spend a little time thinking about the things I love, I’ll accumulate fewer things that I don’t love. I want to live more by the William Morris quote, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

So, there is treasure the first. Tell me about something you treasure!

Thursday

2010-02-18T22:11:00.001Z

I am going away for the weekend, so a slight hiatus in my attempts at daily posting. I should be back on Sunday night!

Oh Baby Baby

2010-02-17T18:47:00.002Z

As I mentioned in a previous post, my friend Helen recently had a baby. As the due date approached, I was seized with the urge to knit beautiful baby clothes, and this was one of the first things I picked:

Knit in Sirdar's Baby Bamboo, which gives it a lovely cool and silky feeling. I just adore the buttons and the slightly unusual shape. It was based on a pattern in "One Skein Wonders", a book that I've had for a while. Unfortunately, the pattern is so riddled with errors as to be almost unfollowable, so I ended up largely making things up as I went along. Once I'd pieced it together, I felt there was something missing, so I crocheted the little border around it as well (this also did a top job of hiding the slightly messy ends).

The bad news is, it doesn't fit. The body is too large, so Baby Tilly can grow into that, but the arms are just about the right diameter right now. So, essentially, the proportions are out of whack. As a result, I've taken it back to do some remedial work, widening the sleeves. So far, I've unpicked the seams and picked up some stitches along the base of one sleeve. It shouldn't take long...

2010-02-16T22:20:00.000Z

On a roll for a while, but today I find I have nothing to say. I plan on using Tuesdays to post a little bit about an item that I treasure. But that involves photographs, and if there is anything I'm particularly bad at organising, it's photographs for here.

So, instead, another finished item. This was a Christmas present for my little brother, Fred. He is at medical school at the moment, and is going to spend a few months in Canada in the summer doing an internship (or whatever the real term is) with a cousin of mine (who is a Doctor).

Knit in Rowan Big Wool and Sirdar Big Softie, I initially tried to use intarsia to make the maple leaf, but the pixellation at that size rendered it almost unrecognisable. After hunting on the internet to attempt to find a pattern I could use to create a convincing leaf, I made up my own! I hope you agree that it's pretty convincing. I plan to post my notes at some stage, share the love etc., but not right now.

Incidentally, my brother is 6' 8" tall, so the scarf had to be extra long. I've never been so glad for the speed of knitting up a decent chunky yarn. And he loved it.

M for Monday, M for M-broidery

2010-02-15T21:23:00.003Z

Sometimes I stumble into a project almost unintentionally. My friend Helen had a birthday in September. Not just any birthday, but her last birthday before having a baby. As she is as craft-oriented as I am, I knew I wanted to make her gift, and I knew she wanted me to knit her a jumper or cardigan or similar. On the downside, at 6 months pregnant I was either going to end up making something to fit now and never again, or to fit post-baby (hopefully fit post-baby) which she couldn't enjoy now.

I dithered and asked my husband, her husband, friends, gathering opinions far and wide. And in the end, I decided to do neither and make this instead:

This is something that she had pointed out to me: a poster for sale here, Helen wanted to know if it could be embroidered, and how? We discussed transfer papers, and I put it to the back of my mind. Until I needed inspiration for a beautiful present. So, I grabbed the picture and spent a lot of time with The GIMP reducing it to a sensible number of pixels, flattening the colours and so on. Then, saving it into an .XSF file and opening that in a text editor, and then that into a spreadsheet... with some effort, it becamse my very own cross-stitch chart. I've never made a chart before, but "how hard can it be?" was my cry as-per-usual. The answer: more fiddly than difficult.

I bought some embroidery floss and some aida, and started stitching. I'll let the rest of the photos speak for themselves, save to note that the result is now beautifully framed and hanging in the nursery of Helen's house. I couldn't be more pleased.

(All photos in ths post taken by Helen's husband.)

2010-02-14T22:07:00.001Z

One of the things that cheers me most about Valentine’s Day is that I don’t care about it. One of the things that cheers me most about my relationship is that neither does my husband.

For my part, whilst I usually adore presents (both giving and receiving), I really hate trying to shop for a present around this time. Shops are crammed with pink things, heartshaped things, things covered in drippy sentiments. I don’t like pink things, I have a limited tolerance for heart-shaped things (I like some, but they’re usually verging more on the unusual side than the Valentine side). And drippy sentiments? Well, I prefer them home-grown.

Furthermore, it is precisely two weeks after my birthday. My birthday cards are still around the room. I don’t want to displace them with a couple of last-minute shop-bought cards that neither of us really wanted to spend money on.

But, that said, I like the opportunity to sit down with some nice wine and some nice food, watch a good film perhaps, and enjoy life. Sure, this shouldn't (and isn't) limited to one day a year... but if I'm treating this like any other day of the year, I'd like it to be a *nice* any other day of the year.

Discipline

2010-02-13T16:16:00.002Z

It had reached a critical point. Skeins of yarn would attack Greg (my husband) if he opened the wrong cupboard. Sitting on a chair involved a good deal of precautionary checking, lest he be assaulted by needles hiding inside a work in progress (WIP). My yarn containment plans had mostly fallen apart: yarn was containing them.

And so began a great sorting and cataloguing, with the help of some vacuum storage bags from Argos, and some small freezer bags from Ikea. I carried out some heavy-duty filtering and managed to slim the stash and mountain of WIPs a little. I sorted yarn into the freezer bags and put those in the vacuum bags. I sorted hibernating WIPs into plastic bags and stuffed them into a wicker basket. And everything that was being actively worked on was removed to a box to sit beside the sofa. I promised myself that I wouldn't cast anything else on until I had finished at least one of the existing projects.

And all was well with that for a month or so, until I stumbled across the Evenstar Mystery Shawl knitalong. I have the yarn for this, which has been waiting to be used for five years or so:

I've wanted to do a mystery knitalong for a long while, having been transfixed by the creations (and drama) that floated out of the Swan Lake knitalong. How could I resist? It has lace, it's using stash yarn that has been begging for a decent project, it has geek credit.

After wrestling with my conscience, I spent some time yesterday knitting the swatch:

I'm happy with the swatch size (after washing, 6" by 3.5" - and I think the height could be more with a little more aggressive blocking). The feel of the swatch is nice, and I think it's going to make for a beautiful airy drapey shawl.

The first clue came out last night, and I'm about halfway through it. But this is the last time I cast something on until I've finished something. Honestly.

Resuscitation

2010-02-12T19:58:00.002Z

It's a whole new month and a half into a whole new decade already. And I kept having plans about reviving this blog at the beginning of the new year, or the new month. But I think the 12th February 2010 will do. It's not a special date to me, as far as I can remember, so perhaps it is perfect for a quiet reawakening.

I just noticed that I made a grand total of four posts in 2009. That's not great. What is even less great is that I haven't posted a picture of anything finished since October 2008. And that was a tiny piece of blackwork embroidery. And, honestly, I have been far from inactive, creations-wise. A friend suggested that perhaps it was just because Ravelry is so easy to use... but I only updated a host of projects on their recently.

As a result, I have a slew of posts almost begging to be written, detailing Things That I Made.

For Christmas 2009, I embraced the wonder of home-made decorations, for the first time since I brought home pre-school crackers made from toilet rolls and crepe paper. As a result, our tree had a more home-y, traditional look than it's ever had, and it was lovely. Having previously bought a cheap box of colour-coordinated decorations from Argos or similar, it was a great feeling to replace many of the glitter-encrusted fancies (I am not a fan of glitter, especially when it hasn't been glued down properly) with things that I made myself.

Among the decorations in question were these:

These are polystyrene balls (which I picked up at Hobbycraft). I wrapped them entirely in layers of yarn, initially just wrapping and then "sewing" the yarn across itself to secure it (stitches haphazardly across the bauble). And then I decorated them with embroidery floss and buttons, whatever popped into my head really, created a loop and hung them from the tree. I intend to make more of these next year: very simple, very satisfying, very effective.

To Infinite Jest and Beyond

2009-09-25T07:51:00.001+01:00

Over the past three months, I have read "Infinite Jest", by David Foster Wallace. I had never heard of the book, or indeed the author, before this drive, and I was inspired to take part by the Infinite Summer project: bibliophile? Count me in!

First understatement: it's a very big book. More than 1000 pages. "But," I thought, knowing nothing about it, "I read voraciously, it won't take me long, I am wonderful and all of these people talking about how they tried to read it once or twice and failed, they just don't measure up." Yes, I have been known to be arrogant around my consumption of fiction. How could a book possibly defeat me? There are very few books I haven't finished, even if I disliked them. I get... sort of funny about unfinished books.

Second understatement: I had no idea. Absolutely no idea. It has never taken me so long to wade through 200 pages as it took me to get through the first 200 pages of Infinite Jest. It's by far the most wilfully impenetrable book I have ever read. But, I took heart from the various sources promising that "once you get through the first few hundred pages, you won't want to put it down", and so I battled on. I don't think I ever considered stopping (like I say, I'm funny about books), but I did get increasingly irritated with the ever-growing stack of other books I could have been reading.

Third understatement: This is a difficult read. Acronyms (not all of which are explained) abound. Footnotes (all at the end of the book) mean you constantly shift between the narrative and whatever extra information, dry medical detail, excruciating fictional filmography, backstory or whole other branch of fun DFW had decided to insert at that point. But at some stage, which may have been after the first couple of hundred pages, I stopped fighting. I think this might be the key: stop fighting, let it wash over you, don't worry about the bits you can't quite follow or understand right now.

I wonder if that's a theme of the book as well. It certainly mirrors some of the themes of addiction, control, entertainment, happiness.

Fourth understatement: It's funny. Really, very very funny. Not always, but enough that I have read bits to Greg (my husband), mailed quotes to friends, recall snippets and smiled.

Fifth understatement: Even when you expect the ending to not be an ending, it's still like a punch in the ribs. There was no neat conclusion. I can see why people re-read the book immediately: I want to re-read to desperately find closure on areas where there is no closure to be had. Surely in the first 200 pages (which I'm sure I don't remember) there are clues to fill in the gaps. And there, of course, is the obvious parallel between the book itself and the Entertainment it describes. Trapped forever in a constant re-reading of the same book, to the exclusion of all else in life.

Except, obviously, not: I am saved by the large pile of other books. Infinite Jest can go back on the shelf for now, at least. And, if nothing else, my shoulder bags can return to their former shapes, my scraps of paper (bookmarks) can dissipate, and I can finally enjoy the process of reading 100 pages in one sitting without knowing that I'll have to flick forward by 800 pages multiple times to find pharmacological names for hard drugs.

Focus is Everything

2009-07-19T20:17:00.001+01:00

At St Albans knit night last week, I was struggling through a complicated lace chart, a large glass of red wine and at least two conversations. This combination resulted in more than a few ubpicked stitches... Until I stole the two "reserved" post it notes to allow me to focus on the row in question. Now I only lose my place within the row, which is a huge and welcome step forward.

Technology Advances

2009-06-18T11:09:00.001+01:00

I have an application on my iPhone that should allow me to post. This is my first test... I hope you are not disappointed by the promise of content which this singularly fails to deliver.

All Quiet on the Tangled Front

2009-02-09T22:52:00.002Z

Wow, that last post has been up for a while, huh? Over two months? That's pretty terrible, even by my standards. But... I've been busy! There was that whole Christmas thing going on, and I moved teams at work, and then I had to turn 30... it's been all go!

I'm afraid that the crafty side of my life has suffered a little in recent weeks. No progress on sewing projects, and no photographs of knitting progress at all. It is very sad. I'm not even keeping my Ravelry list of projects up to date.

Suffice it to say that I got sucked into the internet trend of knitting a Noro striped scarf (like this one, but selvedge-ing differently), and then decided I had to knit another one: it's very good mindless train knitting. And I made a total of one Christmas present, which was quite a relief in the middle of all the other madness. And there have been odd bits here and there that I've paid attention to intermittently.

So, maybe I will be able to post photographs soon (including my first major foray into crochet, oh yes), if I find the cable, the camera and some knitting all in the same time/space bubble in my life.

Coat

2008-12-05T00:07:00.003Z

So, let's have a quick update on the Over Ambitious Sew a Coat Project, shall we? Given that I've actually done something, an' all.

Avid readers (I'm sure you're out there) may remember that I'd cut out all the pieces of the main coat, and exhausted myself so thoroughly that the idea of cutting out all the lining pieces wasn't top of my priority list. So, I let it stew for a while. In the meantime, I sewed Yet Another wrap dress. Unfortunately, I don't have a good photo of it yet (you can blame Greg, my husband, for that. I try not to be vain, but it just feels wrong to post deeply unflattering photographs of me on my own blog). Fabric from the market once again, and this time I worked out the cuff pieces properly. I'm really pleased with this one: maybe it's practice but it seems to fit really nicely.

Anyway, the coat. I laid out and cut out all the lining pieces, and it was less traumatic than I'd feared: much less of the crazy rearranging of material and wishing I lived in a manor house.

Then, I had to put the tailor tacks in. For the uninitiated (I'm pretending not to be uninitiated, but really, it's just an act), this is basically transferring marks on the pattern pieces onto the fabric so that when it says "line up the circles" you have an idea of where they actually mean. Helen showed me this method, which I will share with you! It is, I know, deeply thrilling.

1. See a mark!

2. Needle threaded with a double strand of contrasting thread. In my case, bright red.

3. Needle in one side of the mark and out the other. Leave a long tail. Needle in another side of the mark and out the opposite to that... making a sort of cross. Leave big loops on the near side. Cut the thread, leaving a long tail.

4. Don't ask me how many times I stuck needles in my fingers doing these photos.

5. Then, you can gently pull the pattern away from the mark, holding the threads firmly together between the paper piece and the fabric. You should be able to pull the threads through the paper with just a small tear.

6. If you're doing this on a double layer of fabric, you can then gently tease the layers apart, so you have reasonably long threads between them but not so much that you pull the threads out entirely. Cut.

7. And voila, some threads marking the spot! This is the other side (i.e. the back layer of fabric, which gets a very nice neat + mark. The near side is a bit more... uh... open to interpretation.

Anyway, that was fun. And took a long time.

And then, dear reader, I STARTED TO SEW.

Oh dear

2008-11-18T23:02:00.002Z

After that beautiful rush of activity, I've become a sporadic poster again.

Well, what I was going to write about was my lovely break in New York. But it seems silly to write about that when I don't have the photographs online to illustrate it: it was such a lovely break, I'd really like to show as well as tell. And creations-wise, it's... not so much patchy, as... well, OK, it's a bit patchy. What have I been doing?

Well, I finished the next wrap-dress which I was hoping to make for my Belfast break (but didn't), and am absolutely delighted with it (possibly the best one yet). I'm crocheting a shawl/wrap thing from some yarn I bought in New York: a mini-project that took about a week to get off the ground as I struggled to find a good pattern that I could actually crochet (not a shining skill of mine, I must admit). There's a pair of socks on the go which are making for good commuter-train knitting. I finally crocheted a border onto the clamshell wrap that has sat unfinished for longer than I would care to imagine: that just had a hundred thousand ends to sew in and then some serious blocking.

The coat project is in exactly the same state as when I last posted about it. Something about the dark evenings and working days (it's not a great time to be working in The City, I must admit) has contributed to a short hiatus, really rooted in just being too damn tired to crawl around on the floor pinning out lining pieces.

Diversion

2008-11-11T23:06:00.003Z

It's been brought to my attention that I left on a bit of a cliffhanger there. Sort of. Thankfully, the St. Albans knitters neither killed nor ate me, I survived the night, and had a whole bagful of fun. There were roughly, I don't know, six or seven of us, sitting at a big wooden table in the lovely little pub. Unfortunately, the football meant that we couldn't have the sofas, but we've apparently been promised them for next time. Next time? Oh yes, it was quite successful enough to be a more regular occurrence. In the end, I took along some squares and some lace, which mixed nicely with a couple of glasses of wine and lots of chat.

I don't know, it's quite strange to have this hobby where you can meet complete strangers and have full conversations that are all but impenetrable to the outside world. Instant bonding. It's like being in a secret society or something. We exclaimed over someone knitting the optical illusion blanket from Knitty, now up to four or five circular needles in circumference. And someone else had the Mason Dixon book. There was one non-knitter, who wasn't quite persuaded to try it out, but by the end was certainly far more interested than she had been.

Stitching the Hare and Hounds

2008-10-22T18:46:00.003+01:00

Tonight, I am going to a Stitch'n'Bitch in St Albans, the town where I live. This is exciting, and somewhat nervewracking. I was hoping the ever-fragrant Helen would be able to make it, but she has plans, so I am off to meet strange knitters in a familiar town.

I'm sure it'll be absolutely fine! I just have to decide what project-type thing to take with me, which is thus far proving to be problematic. Having missed the Endless Squares deadline, that has slipped, so I could go back to my pretty lace, or pick that up again, or unravel my mum's jacket, or pick up a pair of socks which could really do with finishing or... or... Choices choices!

Did you notice?

2008-10-16T23:02:00.002+01:00

Did you notice that I've been attempting to post once a day so far this month? It's been going pretty well, but this is the point at which I must stop: I'm going away for the weekend, and rather than write lovely in-advance posts to keep anyone and everyone entertained, I've been trying to make another wrap dress at high speed (current project: not going to make it but never mind). So, there will be radio silence from me until Monday morning.

I'm sure you'll be able to cope in my absence. I will certainly be able to cope! I am going to see a friend, and we are planning to be Ladies Of Culture, Ladies Who Lunch and all that sort of jazz. There will be cocktails. And, quite probably, beautification.

See y'all next week.

Purchasing Power

2008-10-15T18:50:00.003+01:00

Tonight, I am destroyed. An unlucky combination of appointment time and work meant a very early start for me this morning, and not an early finish to go with it.

So rather than try and give some interesting thoughts or musings on anything (well, to be honest, how often do I provide that anyway?) this will be picture-heavy text-light blogging of The Stuff I Bought At The Show. Something about this feels terribly consumerist and, I don't know, wrong. But I'm too tired to think it through at the moment.

First up, these marvellously weird kitschy circular bag handles. I'm not sure I have any yarn that would do these justice in any shape or form: I may have to dye some, or make a very plain fabric bag with just a hint of accent.

Buttons buttons, many buttons. First a pick'n'mix selection of buttons in some bright colours that attracted me as surely as a stranger with a bag of sweets. And secondly, some gorgeous understated buttons to go on my Over Ambitious Sew a Coat Project.

Yarns that I fell for, for entirely different reasons. First, I think it's called Organza, by Sirdar, a fairly unexciting ribbon yarn, but I like the colour combinations. Then, Debbie Bliss SoHo. Predictably, the photo doesn't do justice to the colours in this yarn: it was half price, so I bought a lot of this: it's going to be some sort of delicious jumper. And, finally, a single skein of Knitwitches cashmere/silk "Seriously Gorgeous" seriously gorgeous yarn. This is the kind of yarn that, when you touch it, you can't quite tell where it begins. The Knitwitches stand had a scarf knit from this and it was all I could do not to bury my face in it. I dithered at the stand for ages, and got the latest on some woman who had buried her hands in the display of this yarn and made slightly disturbing "When Hally Met Sarry" noises. I can kind of see where she may have been coming from (ho ho).

Finally, some very cute jersey fabrics to make more wrap dresses with. The orange nature-y print is very me, a standard viscose jersey, light and soft. The blue car print is too cute to be ignored: apparently a Liberty print, which I didn't realise, I have a feeling that if there are any scraps of that they may go to little soft things for my numerous baby relatives...

Workshopping at Ally Pally

2008-10-14T20:43:00.003+01:00

This year, I decided that going to a workshop/class at the Knitting and Stitching Show would be fun: something to break up the retail yarn & fabric gorging and admiring of spectacular works of textile art.

So, my friends and I attended the Blackwork workshop. I wasn't sure what to expect: I've done some embroidery in my time, but primarily restricted to cross stitch and tapestry kits. But we sat down, each with a little pack containing all we would need: fabric, thread, needles... Our instructor, who told us we'd forget her name and so I have, was wonderful: encouraging and interesting, she got us started and it turned out to be very straightforward, but wonderfully satisfying.

It was a lovely way to spend an hour of our time, gently absorbing, but with enough scope for much laughter. I enjoyed it so much that I finished off the little sampler on Saturday:

I love the way the shading is developed by using different numbers of strands of thread.

Meme Monday Again

2008-10-13T20:00:00.002+01:00

This was doing the rounds a while ago, and I liked the idea of it.

The idea is that you take a picture of yourself, right now, without fixing anything about your appearance. Then, post it, without editing the photo in any way. If I could remember the precise wording, I'm sure I'd post some approximation of it.

Anyway, this is me, about five minutes ago, after a fairly standard Monday at work.

Snip Snip Snip

2008-10-12T22:23:00.002+01:00

There's something wonderful about having crafty hobbies, don't you think? Today I was faced with a rare occurrence in my calendar: the best part of a Sunday with nothing in particular to do. The only item on my mental "Must Do" list was tidy the bedroom, it was 1.30pm and I had several hours of beautiful free time.

I decided to take some time to do the next step of the Over Ambitious Sew a Coat Project: pinning and cutting out pieces. The necessary tools: fabric, a decent pair of scissors, unsullied by non-fabric cuttings, and some pins. Far more pins required than are pictured here.

Thankfully, the cutting layout was simpler than I had feared for the main coat fabric: everything just on the standard folded fabric, so no messing around with having to unfold half of it. Sadly, I don't live in a house that has a room long enough to lay out more than 4m of pattern pieces at once, so I had to do it section by section. Here are the middle pieces:

The thing that I always forget about cutting is that it is quite physically exhausting. Clambering around on the floor, trying to keep the fabric smooth, adjusting the pieces to match the grain properly, endless inserting of pins (and, in my case, scrabbling around to find more pins from my selection of impromptu pin cushions e.g. balls of yarn). By the time I'd got to the end, I was absolutely exhausted, sweaty and somewhat out of breath! So, no to the lining and interfacing pieces just today, I was glad to take a break and do something more genteel and relaxing, but I was really chuffed to end up with a nice pile of soon-to-be-coat pieces. This is a small selection:

Missing the Deadline

2008-10-11T10:30:00.003+01:00

Well, there are still 12 squares to attach to the blanket, and there are many ends to sew in, and we are leaving for the service in about two hours... and I took a proper look at the area that is sewn together: it is too small to be a baby blanket, really.

I need more squares. Damn.

Oh well, belated blanket it is.

In the meantime, enjoy this photograph! This is me, knitting. But not just knitting anywhere, knitting on the Great Wall of China:

Exhausted and happy

2008-10-10T23:15:00.003+01:00

Knitting and Stitching Show: it is good again. I did some lovely shopping, and some lovely workshopping, and rounded it off with a lovely glass of champagne. I will share some photographs tomorrow or Sunday, I hope, but right now I am going to bed: 12 squares left to join to the blanket, many ends to sew in, I hope that I'll have time tomorrow to finish it off.

It's that time of year again

2008-10-09T23:35:00.003+01:00

Tomorrow, I go to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace! Rar!

This year, for a change, I am going to be going to a couple of the workshops, which should be fun. I'm hoping that I'll remember the camera this year.

American Football

2008-10-08T20:30:00.004+01:00

Greg, my husband, loves American Football. Or, I guess, just "football" to Americans. He used to play it when he was younger (which is pretty rare here in the UK, I think) and consequently he understands it and actively enjoys watching it.

I really don't. On both counts. The rules of the game seem increasingly ridiculous, and the commentary is entirely moronic. The last match we watched, they talked about some guy's knee injury, and knee injuries they had known, for 20 minutes straight.

However, tonight I am tolerating watching some recorded game, apparently between TB (Tampa Bay?) and DEN (Denver?). The only reason I'm sitting through it and not doing something more constructive, say pinning out pattern pieces or poking pins into my eyeballs is because of the endless baby squares. Currently I have 40 of them. If I arrange into 8 by 5, it's still a pretty small blanket. So, more squares are required. And so, I tolerate the American Football.

Cop Out Photo

2008-10-07T21:35:00.004+01:00

Bit of a fog of "Meh" this evening, I am feeling uninspired. Instead, let me show you a picture from my summer holiday this year:

Lake Baikal, Siberia, Russia. Stunningly beautiful.

Meme Monday

2008-10-06T22:53:00.003+01:00

1. What was I doing 10 years ago?

10 years ago, October 1998. I was just going into my second year of university, which means I was just moving into an interesting flatshare in north Oxford. I was, overall, quite unhappy and struggling with the impending death of my grandad. I'd done well enough in my first year exams, but from the outset I didn't gel so well with the 2nd year work. I was in a fairly serious relationship at the time (well, possibly my most serious ever at the time), but I was quite restless in it as well. Bit of a downer to start with, isn't it?

2. What are 5 things on my to-do list today?

Write in the morning when I wake up - done.
Post to this blog - doing that now.
Cut out the rest of the OASCP pattern pieces - done.
Knit four squares - I've knit two. Damn.
Finish writing the GUI part of my current task at work - Done.

That's quite encouraging: I should monitor my mental "todo" list more carefully to get this same sense of achievement.

3. What snacks do I enjoy?

Oh, let me think. All sorts of nibbly things. I am trying to keep sugar out of my diet, which is both limiting snack availability (especially at work), and limiting my desire to snack. I do get through a lot of sugarfree chewing gum. I know, it's rotting my bones, but at least my breath is minty fresh.

4. Where are some places I've lived?

Canterbury, Kent, where I was born. Maidstone, Kent, where I did most of my growing up. Oxford, where I studied. Mill Hill, NW London, and Barnet, N London, when I was working in London and Cambridge. Arlesey, Bedfordshire, when I was working in Cambridge. Biggleswade, in a hotel, when the house in Arlesey was broken. Maidenhead, Berkshire, and now St Albans, Hertfordshire. Part of me thinks that we might settle here, but part of me thinks that we are chaos-addicts.

5. What things would I do if I were a billionaire?

Give up work. Do some studying for fun and interest. Set up some charity things. Give some to charity. Give some to my friends and family. Buy a nice house. Travel and see some amazing parts of the world. Big things and small. There are too many possibilities to come up with a proper list. How much money do you need to fix things, *really* fix things?

I tag YOU if you read this post. Yes YOU. And let me know if you fill it in, in case I miss your post.

Tissue Paper

2008-10-05T21:45:00.003+01:00

The only thing I have done creatively today is cut out nearly all the pattern pieces for a coat that I want to make. I think I will refer to this as the Over-Ambitious Sewing a Coat Project (OASCP) from now on. Yes, I may be insane to be even contemplating this at this stage of my sewing abilities, but I have always been the sort of person to say "Eh, how hard can it be?" and try it anyway. This does not always work out to my advantage. My therapist would probably argue that it often turns out to my detriment, one way or another.

But, eh, how hard can it be?

I am going to be attempting this pattern, in view "D", the single-breasted side-pocketed one with no extra fluff (shown in the illustration in a wildly patterned fabric. It's going to be great. No, really, I have some wool tweedy fabric, some lining fabric, and a lot of self-belief. What could possibly go wrong?

Don't answer that question. There are 8 or so (out of 29) tissue paper pattern pieces that are laughing at me as I finally gave up cutting things out for the evening. I'm only at the paper cutting stage and I'm exhausted! Ha. It won't beat me at this stage.

Greg's Socks

2008-10-04T11:15:00.003+01:00

I finished these last week, finally:

Pattern: Wendy's generic toe-up socks. I think. By the time I was doing the second one, I was really just making it up as I went along. I had to put a lot of increases in before the heel.

Needles: I don't even know, how terrible! Probably in the 2.5-3mm range, birch needles, possibly from my trip to Get Knitted last year.

Yarn: BFL DK, home-dyed.

The Good: I love how my yarn dying came out, I really like the offsetting stripes. Pretty happy with the final fit around the foot: It's snug, but not too tight, or so I am told.

The Bad: Wish I'd had more yarn to make them longer, but never mind. The first one needed repeating re-knitting because every time Greg tried it on, his foot seemed to have grown an extra inch. I'd rip it back a bit, knit it to be longer, and then he'd try it on again, and it would still be an inch short. MAGIC.

Hip to be square

2008-10-03T23:18:00.002+01:00

Squares, squares, all is squares.

It's not even the endless knitting of these squares that I mind, it's knowing that each square involves two little ends to sew in, and all of these are going to have to be sewn together. I am not looking forward to that bit, and it's going to be sooner than I would like, given that I now have a week until the christening.

So, while I'm on a bit of a whinge, let's take a look at this:

Beautiful, isn't it? Obviously, in need of a little blocking and all that, but a triumph! Except... no. This is the Radiance Jacket (pattern at Webs) that I am knitting for my mum. It was all going so well til I got her to try it on. It doesn't really fit. Well, not quite true: it fits absolutely beautifully at the back, drop dead gorgeous, the waist shaping I added works wonderfully... But at the front, it's rather a different issue. I know that the thing will be improved with blocking, but I don't think it'll be improved to the tune of really needing an extra six inches at the front in order to be able to close without ugly distortion.

Unfortunately, the body is all knit in one piece. I've been coming up with alternatives, adding extra wide button bands, all that sort of thing, but when it comes down to it, I know that it needs to be entirely frogged and redone. My only consolation is that at least the sleeves are done. I hate knitting sleeves.

Tonight's work is all about the construction of squares, the taking of extensive notes on where I've made alterations to this pattern, and finally the ripping out of some really lovely knitting.

Baby Blanketing

2008-10-02T22:08:00.002+01:00

My cousin had a baby a few months ago, and he is being christened in a week and a bit. In a fit of insanity, I decided that knitting a baby blanket would be a lovely idea. Currently, I have 24 or so 3-inch squares in fetching shades of cream and green. And that's all well and good, except I don't think that something which is 12" by 18" is really blanket size.

Does anyone know what size a baby blanket is supposed to be?

Please Excuse the Terrible Photo Quality

2008-10-01T18:48:00.002+01:00

Over the past six months or so, I have made friends with Helen, who is (a) my neighbour, she lives nine doors up from me, (b) crazily crafty in all sorts of similar ways to me, (c) crazily crazy in all sorts of similar ways to me and (d) engaged to an old friend of mine. Among her many creative talents (and believe me there are many), she can sew. And I mean, she can *really* sew. Not like I can sew an A Line skirt sew, but more like a "I am making my bridesmaids' dresses" sew.

What are friends for if not for leeching skills from? In a fit of inspiration, I bought a pattern and some jersey fabric from John Lewis. It's a Vogue "Very Easy" pattern, so "How hard can it be?", said my inner voice. I even realised I needed to buy special sewing machine needles, and interfacing, and all sorts of jazz. And then I got home and realised that I had no idea what to do next. Do you cut out the pattern pieces? Do you trace them onto old paper? I had vague memories of my mother tracing out pattern shapes to make a skirt: did I have to do that? What if I cut them out and then it turned out you weren't supposed to? And what are all these cross symbols and notches and things?

Helen to the rescue! She came by and gave me "Sewing 101: So You've Got A Pattern, What Now?". Hello, grain! Tailor tacks! Notches! And, by the power of Grayskull (and a few evenings, several terribly pin-pricked fingers and some persistence), I ended up with this beauty:

Not bad, huh? And I loved the pattern so much, I went to the town market and bought some more fabric, and now I have another one:

which I managed to get in spite of being about 0.5m short in the fabric department. Contrasting ties!

I have definitely caught the bug: I have some more fabric from the market, just waiting to be made into the next one. I am going to replace my entire wardrobe with dresses!

Ginger and White Chocolate Chip Cookies

2008-03-21T20:06:00.005Z

It's been too long: between working on a Secret Project and working on my Real Life Work, I've let the blog slide somewhat. And there hasn't been a great deal of knitting, sewing or other creating in the meantime.

But! I am back! At least for now. And I have content.

I made these cookies today. I was planning on making white chocolate and cranberry cookies, but had no cranberries. I did, however, have a big jar of stem ginger in syrup.

Note the big bite taken out of it... I confess, that was me.

Ginger and White Chocolate Chip Cookies

Recipe adapted from this one, at A Spoonful of Sugar, which itself was taken from eGullet. Basically, I replaced some of the chocolate chips with stem ginger and added some dried ginger too:

Yields approx 17.

300g plain (all-purpose) flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
1 teaspoon fine salt
3 teaspoon ground ginger
170g unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
215g brown sugar
120g granulated white sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 large egg
1 large egg yolk
200g white chocolate chips
100g stem ginger (approximately 5 lumps), finely chopped.

Sift together flour, bicaronate of soda, salt and ground ginger. Set aside.

Stir together melted butter, brown sugar, granulated sugar and vanilla. Add egg, then the yolk. Beat well to ensure that egg is evenly distributed. Stir in dry ingredients, then fold in chocolate chips and ginger until incorporated. It will look as if there are too many chocolate chips but the dough will be able to hold them all. Cover with clingfilm and chill dough until firm. At least 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 190C/Gas Mark 5.

Place ~50ml sized mounds of dough onto a greased baking sheet (50ml makes sizeable cookies, and they do spread - some of my later ones were smaller and so need less baking time).

Bake in preheated oven for approximately 10-12 minutes or only until the edges begin to turn golden: they will look and feel underdone! Remove with a wide spatula to a cooling rack: at this stage they'll probably behave as if they're underdone as well. Cool thoroughly.

The Year That Was

2007-12-31T16:19:00.001Z

It is the last day of the year. Tomorrow, it will be 2008. This seems hard to believe.

This year has been an interesting rollercoaster. We moved house. My husband changed his job. My job became extremely busy. I completed another year of my OU degree. Our house nearly flooded. I attended two music festivals, three weddings and an 80th birthday party. We had our first car accident. We moved house again.

I started this blog in 2007, of course, and I've enjoyed keeping it. An average of 3.67 posts a month (and a median of 3), it's not far off what I had intended. There have been the tangled creations I had hoped for: sewing, knitting, baking. I don't have any idea what 2008 will hold, but I predict more of the same.

After all, next month is marmalade month.

A Girl With No Net

2007-11-25T15:15:00.000Z

Having just moved house (second time in 12 months, for those of you counting along), we currently have no internet. This state of affairs is likely to continue for another couple of weeks, thanks to a cock-up by Sky, our proposed new ISP. Doubly a shame, as I was hoping to take part in this year's NaBloPoMo. Maybe I'll do my own in January...

Moving house has a tendency to take over: everything is in boxes, nothing is packed with the things it should be packed with. If I can find something I want to knit, I can't find the right yarn. If I have the yarn, I can't find the needles. I've lost my sewing machine bobbins. I didn't have particularly big plans for Gift Knitting etc., and that's probably a good thing.

In the meantime, I am continuing to work knitting magic on a cabled jacket for my mother and a sock for Greg (which I have had to rip back twice so far, as his feet seem to have grown another inch every time I get him to try it on). I have promised my brother some fingerless gloves, which may materialise if I can just find the box with that part of my stash in it. Recent creations include costumes for a Halloween/Birthday party, which were great fun: I will post pictures when we are connected, because I am disproportionately proud of them.

Also, I am dying to make these socks.

Hooray for the Knitting and Stitching Show

2007-10-14T23:06:00.000+01:00

I went, I shopped, I sipped champagne, and much fun was had. At least, by me until my boots started to rub too much and my feet became sore. This was my third Knitting and Stitching Show: you would think that I'd remember to wear Very Comfortable Shoes.

First, the shopping... I was fairly restrained, I think. My biggest purchase was something that I've been planning on getting for a while:

A swift, finally, from the Get Knitted stand. It is beautiful, very pleasing to just look at, and it works like a dream.

I wound this skein into a ball earlier this evening, and it took me a fraction of the time that I normally spend when I wind from a skein balanced on my knees or, worse, slung around the back of the chair.

The yarn being wound is another K&SS purchase, "Quito", a very loosely spun Alpaca yarn from KnitShop.co.uk. It is unspeakably soft: it will have to be a scarf or something I can wear very close to my skin. I spent a large amount of time just stroking the skein (and I'm really not one for yarn petting on a regular basis): part of the reason I wound it into a ball is so that I can be trusted to actually make something with it, rather than just fondling it.

The other yarn I bought was this:

I am a sucker for these art yarns, even though I am still not sure how best to show them off. This is Lanartus "Artist", a glorious array of vibrant oranges.

I also picked up a copy of Yarn Forward magazine at the HipKnits stand (although I was too shy to introduce myself to Kerrie). So far, it seems to be great, but I will report back with more detail when I've actually had a chance to do more than just flick through it.

Other than the shopping, my friend and I took the opportunity to walk around some of the textile art exhibits, ooh-ing and aah-ing over some of the incredible things that people can create. One of the things that sticks in memory was a kinetic knitting sculpture: the artist had knitted transparent tubes together, just simple stocking stitch. Bubbles of air and coloured liquid was travelling through the tubes in a big loop... it was hypnotic at the very least, fascinating to have the knitting defined in terms of the journey of one bubble through the fabric's tube, and slightly creepy: there was something insectoid and swarming about the overall effect, like nature documentaries showing swarms of shiny beetles.

We rounded off the day with a glass of champagne at the Champagne Bar, "Knitting at the Movies". We laughed and groaned at the knitting/film puns ("Raging Wool" was particularly good), and it was the perfect end to a predictably exhausting day.

Next time on Tangled Creations: So Many Works In Progress

Alexandra the Great

2007-10-12T21:25:00.000+01:00

EeeEee, tomorrow is the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace, and I can't wait! I am going to attempt some restraint and budget-consciousness, because my stash doesn't need much in the way of expansion and I have plenty of projects the go and planned.

Yeah, that's really not going to work.

Sew What?

2007-09-17T22:38:00.000+01:00

I made a skirt! By the power of Sew What! Skirts, I brought together a couple of metres of green slightly patterned cotton and some scraps of material and created the simple A-line skirt I've had in my head for months.

The cream petals are cut-away applique, the patterned are straightforward applique. I wanted a sort of fraying around the petals, so the edges aren't finished and now that it's been through the wash I'm starting to get the effect that I wanted.

The book is a dream to follow: I'd never put a zip in before, always faintly terrified by memories of my mother faffing around changing the foot on her aged Singer machine. Who knew that it could be so straightforward? Well, possibly lots of people, but not me.

Everything is laid out in a very easy to follow way, clear step-by-step instructions etc. Most of all, however, the book is oozing with the confidence that you too can make these fantastically creative skirts, creating the wild and wonderful. I've so often been too scared in case I buy the wrong material, or sew it in the wrong way or, worst of all, buy some fabulous material but ruin it, but this book has chased that out of me, and now I have a great skirt!

On The Go

2007-08-30T22:53:00.000+01:00

I am slow to update at the moment, I know: work has been completely insane for the past couple of months. I am clinging on by the skin of my teeth (and other assorted mixed metaphors), but I am exhausted.

Knitting is helping with some calming time on the train to and from London. We live far enough away that there are nearly always seats available, so that's a good hour a day to zone out with the needles. When I get in of an evening, well, there may be another half hour in front of the TV that I can spend growing my projects.

I promised some photographs of the finished Hidcote. Here it is, in all its glory:

With that done and dusted, I have got most of the lace bug (which was one of the reasons that led to me putting those Jaywalkers on hold) out of my system. Hence the HipKnits Project Club first project, Della, is slow-going. I haven't really been able to cement the pattern in my head, so I'm constantly faffing around looking for the chart.

Initially I wasn't sure about the needle size with this weight of yarn - it's practically cobweb, and I'm using 3.5mm needles. However, now that it's beginning to look more like a lace pattern and less like a tangle of yarn, I'm quite liking it. In this colour, in particular, I think it looks like smoke.

At the opposite end of the gauge, I'm working with double-stranded Cascade 220 to knit up a Noni Lattice Bag. It's all very soft and bouncy right now: I am looking forward to felting and lining it!

I am planning to go back to some of my older works-in-progress when these are done... I know, I know: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But I really think that Ravelry is good for making you aware of what you've got on the go/in the stash/planned for the future.

Hidcote Garden Shawl

2007-08-09T22:56:00.000+01:00

Hooray!

I wanted to put off posting again until I finally finished Hidcote. It's somewhat taken over my free time recently, and with upwards of 600 stitches per row, progress became unbelievably slow. Yesterday, I had four rows and the cast off to do, and I think it took me about 6 hours...

But it's finished! And blocking on the spare bed.

Pattern: Hidcote Garden Shawl, by Miriam L. Felton.

Needles: 2mm circular needle. Initially one from Pony, until the poor join between needle and cable became too much for me to bear. I switched to (my first ever) Addi Turbos, which weren't pointy enough (they don't go down to 2mm in the lace needles (yet)) but were at least smooth.

Yarn: Arabella, cobweb weight 30% cashmere 70% merino, from Posh Yarn, in "Scarlett".

Modifications: I added an extra 44 rows in the final pattern section, because otherwise it would have come up rather small I think.

You really can't tell which extra bit is my modification. I love maths. And spreadsheets.

The Good: The final result. I can't wait to unpin this and take some photos wearing it... it's so light and delicate (I can't quite pull it through my wedding ring, but it's a close run thing!). The pattern is great, very easy to follow, and I didn't ever need to use stitch markers (or even lifelines) because it makes so much sense as it flows. The yarn is beautifully soft. The dye ran onto my hands a little, but not noticeably thanks to the colour. As before, a couple of good rinses washed off any excess dye in the yarn and all is well now.

The Bad: I will never wind so much yarn that is so fine into a centre pull ball ever again. I was gently tugging great tangles out of the middle and eventually (predictably) it snapped with no sign of the end to be found. That's when I started winding from the outside and my sanity was restored. I should've put more repeats in other sections as well, I still have quite a lot of yarn left over!

I'll be taking more photographs at the weekend, I think. I am extremely proud of myself!

Tired and I Want To Go To Bed

2007-07-27T22:28:00.000+01:00

It has been an incredibly long week, with limited time for knitting or, indeed, other creative endeavours. I am absolutely exhausted.

This was our front door, a week ago:

Exciting, no? Thankfully, the water didn't rise much higher, and so the house was spared.

Hidcote continues to grow, crawling along now. I decided to put some extra repeats in after chart 9 (of 10), crow-barring an extra 40 rows or so in in order to get it to line up nicely. I have four rows of that left to do, and then chart 10, which isn't many rows but has many many stitches. I think I'm up to approximately 550 stitches per row right now...

I bought Sew What Skirts this week: looking forward to getting stuck into that: big plans and clever tricks!

Secret Pal 10

2007-07-18T13:34:00.000+01:00

I am returned from my holiday! In fact, I've been back for a week, but life immediately got back to operating at breakneck pace (as per usual) so I haven't had time to think.

First things first: Secret Pal 10! I received a parcel at the weekend:

and my Secret Pal revealed herself to be Beth, from Good-Natured Ribbing, who has been a wonderful Secret Pal, thank you so much! In this was a skein of Colinette Jitterbug in really warm orangey tones, some bamboo dpns (I hope I don't break them), a lovely project bag which she made herself (which is proving extremely useful protecting my Hidcote from the handbag-bound attentions of my hairbrush) and a copy (my first ever copy!) of Interweave Knits.... and a super-secret present which just blew me away, but which I can't mention yet!

I do love a secret. But instead, why not look at the yarn more closely:

Beautiful, isn't it? I can't wait to sock it... Thoughtfully, Beth sent the IK which has a pattern for Jitterbug in it, which is probably what I'll use. Thanks again, Beth: I'm looking forward to reading your blog properly!

On the flipside of SP10, I can now officially reveal that I was spoiling Carla at My Little Tribe with all manner of goodies. Carla, you were great to shop for, and it was fun to really go to town on the whole orange/green thing.

Finally, because if I can't have soppiness on my own blog, where can I have it?

Two years ago on the Monday just passed:

The sound of impending holiday

2007-07-03T18:22:00.000+01:00

Genevieve came to visit at the weekend, as she is trapped in Europe for the forseeable future. I took advantage of having more knitters than non-knitters in the house to orchestrate a trip to the Get Knitted shop.

If you get a chance, go. It's fantastic! Huge (by my standards at least) and so much variety. Greg had a nice comfy sofa to sit on whilst we ignored him and walked round and round in circles oo-ing and aa-ing over the mind-boggling variety of yarn from all corners of the globe.

I was fairly restrained, buying a Noni bag pattern, handles and the yarn to make it. I've been daydreaming over these bags for ages, and settled on the Lattice bag as a good one to start with. I may well move onto others yet... such fantastic patterns!

I also took the opportunity to finally pick up some Addi Turbo needles, because the Pony circular I was using for Hidcote was starting to drive me insane (the stitches were forever catching on the joins). Well, the Addi circular has revolutionised that, it's so smooth! My only gripe is that they don't make the Addi lace needles in a 2mm (why not?), so the ones I am using are a little blunt. I'm changing my k3togs into "slip two stitches separately knitwise, knit one, pass the two slipped stitches over", which seems to be doing the trick.

And tomorrow I am going on holiday! This time tomorrow I will be by a swimming pool in the south of France, feet up, glass of wine. Bliss.

The Muddy Version

2007-06-27T18:11:00.000+01:00

Hidcote is still progressing, slower and slower. Part of me was hoping to finish it before my summer holiday, in a week's time, but I don't think that's going to happen now, with or without the extra repeat (the jury's still out on that). I'm nearly finished with chart 8 now, but I dread to think how many stitches there are in a row. Plenty, I'm sure. I reckon it's about 21 inches from edge to point (vertically) at the moment, but I've no idea if that's a decent length or not (and it may stretch somewhat more or less than that when being blocked properly).

I did get a few rows done at the weekend, as we went to the Glastonbury festival. I wouldn't have thought that a festival, especially one under so much mud and rain, would be the ideal place to do some delicate lace knitting in cashmere/lambswool, but we were doing it ~~all wrong~~ in style, by the power of caravan.

A good job, too, because it rained and it was cold and muddy: the caravan was blessed relief from the elements and, indeed, from the much-discussed toilets.

We saw: Modest Mouse, Amy Winehouse, The New Pornographers, The Coral, Arcade Fire, Dirty Pretty Things, Jeremy Hardy, Bat For Lashes, Editors, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Mark Thomas, Young Knives, Scott Matthews, Manic Street Preachers and the Kaiser Chiefs. And we heard (from varying distances) a bit of The Who, Rufus Wainwright and KT Tunstall.

Of those, I think I probably enjoyed Modest Mouse, the New Pornographers, Arcade Fire, the Kaiser Chiefs and Jeremy Hardy the most.

(I think I probably enjoyed the 14 hour gruelling marathon of an attempt to get out of the site and home the least).

Let Them Eat Cake

2007-06-19T15:30:00.000+01:00

Hidcote continues to grow, I have just finished chart 6 and now I am caught on the horns of a dilemma. I have used about 22g (out of 100g) of this cobweb weight yarn to get this far. My calculations indicate that I am 45% through it. I could put in an extra row of these squares, which would mean that I am currently more like 35% complete (I'm working out these figures based on number of stitches).

So either I knit it as is, and end up with a smaller shawl and more leftover, but sooner and with guaranteed finishing on the horizon... or I insert an extra repeat of the squares and end up with a larger shawl and fewer leftovers, but with the potential to be wrong about the yarn calculations and there being an awful lot more left to do.

Added into the mix is the fact that the squares pattern isn't half as interesting as the other sections and I think I've decided on option (c): I finish the squares pattern and keep going and decide in the next pattern segment whether I want to put in more or not. By then I'll have a better idea of how big it's going to be too.

My brother in law and his fiancee were down at the weekend, as a belated birthday celebration, so I baked this cake:

It is from Nigella Lawson's "Feast", and I'm reasonably happy with it. The sponge is wonderful, mostly thanks to the custard powder in the mix (or rather, the cornflour in the custard powder in the mix) which leaves it very springy and tasty. The filling (buttercream with custard powder) is a bit too sweet for my tastes. The chocolate icing is lovely, but I'd rather it was thicker so it didn't pool around the bottom so much. It is supposed to, according to the book, but it seems like a waste to have a puddle of chocolate icing/sauce when you could have thicker icing on the actual cake.

See How The Garden Grows

2007-06-12T11:05:00.000+01:00

This is my Hidcote Garden Shawl, growing more slowly now as the number of stitches per row grows and grows. I took this photo on Saturday morning: not bad for a week's work. The pattern is great so far: it is keeping my interest and is showy enough to give me a little kick when I look at what I've done so far.

The pattern consists of 10 charts, split into three different pattern sections. I am getting to the end of chart 5 now (the photo was taken at the end of chart 4, I think), which is the end of this pattern section and I can't pretend I'm not looking forward to the change. The little flower motif is adorable and I love the way that they all line up and flow, but I'm itching to do something new.

The yarn is working well, and the end result feels deliciously light and soft.

In other news, I got an invite to Ravelry, which is fun.

A sucker for a good deal and a challenge

2007-06-07T14:43:00.000+01:00

Kerrie from HipKnits has come up with a fantastic new club idea, and I couldn't help but sign up.

The details are here, but essentially, every three months, the yarn and pattern for some sort of challenge: lace, cabled socks, fairisle etc. etc.

Count me in!

Hooray Secret Pal

2007-06-04T21:05:00.000+01:00

I had a rubbish day at work today, and I stamped my way home in a total huff. The tube I caught changed which line it was running on halfway round, the train I wanted was cancelled, grump grump grump grump grump.

And I got home, and found a parcel waiting for me! Hooray for my Secret Pal!

A cute little jumper keyring, a little pot of solid perfume which smells beautiful, a bar of "chocolate mousse soap that floats"(*), a card with a nice message plus artwork from my pal's 3-year-old, a skein of Manos del Uruguay in gorgeous rich autumn colours and "One Skein Wonders". The book is particularly great, I've been trying to find it for ages: Secret Pal, I think you must be psychic.

I took another photo of the yarn here, to try and get a better shot of the colours. They are truly glorious:

(*) Greg made predictable jokes...

Thank you so much!

Printing the Wave Redux

2007-06-02T17:40:00.000+01:00

I sewed in the ends this morning and took advantage of the beautiful weather to get some photos of the Print o' the Wave stole. Details can be found in this post and, much like in that post, the colours in these photos just aren't right. I have yet to master colour adjustment tools: maybe another time.

The final result is lovely: there's a nice weight to the yarn that gives the stole a nice level of warmth, and the lace pattern is wonderfully clear.

MeMe Friday

2007-06-01T18:25:00.000+01:00

My creative urge has been somewhat knocked out of me recently: the unravelling of that sock made me much less inclined to do anything constructive to it (beyond deciding to just keep some of the leg - it'll still be a Jaywalker, just shorter). Life got a little bit odd, and then commitments like my friend's hen weekend and an OU assignment got the better of me.

Last night I unravelled the red lace shawl I started earlier this year: it had taken to sitting on the side, glaring at me reproachfully as the Print O' The Wave stole took a higher priority. In truth, I'd gone off the idea of the pattern, so deciding to rip it out was almost a relief. Instead, I've cast on for the Hidcote Garden shawl, and have just finished the first chart: I'm really pleased with it so far. The charts are clear, and the kinks in the unravelled yarn aren't too troublesome (I really couldn't be bothered to wash and hang it).

I was tagged for the "7 Random Facts" meme by Genevieve, so I will use it as a replacement for content. Here are seven facts about me:

1. I was in a play at infant school, based on the Pied Piper of Hamlin. Initially, I was picked to be a rat, but I was so scared of being eaten that I had to be swapped into being a cat instead. I didn't get to eat any rats.

2. One of my day-to-day fears is that there are telepathic people, who will hear all the awful things I am thinking about random people on my daily commute. Some of my commuter-rage thoughts are shocking.

3. I love to read, and always have. When I was in my teens, I used to take out the maximum 12 books from the library every week and devour them. At one stage, I started selecting books by size: this is how I discovered John Irving.

4. I have two-and-a-half kidneys. I have a duplex kidney on one side of my body, which essentially means that I have a normal kidney on that side and then a tiny kidney next to it. I found this out when I had a kidney infection in my early teens: they injected dye into the back of my hand and then took some x-rays.

5. I went through a phase in my very late teens/early twenties of avoiding bringing boyfriends home to meet my parents because I noticed that whenever I did, I would start to see all their glaring flaws and the relationship would be doomed. Of course, what I should have realised is that this was my boyfriends' faults, not my parents'.

6. About a week after I started dating Greg, who went on to become my husband, I told a friend of mine that if he asked me to marry him right then I would have said "Yes".

7. I adore musicals. The camper the better! Every year, my family and I go to see a show in London's west end: it is one of my favourite suddenly-sprang-from-nowhere traditions. Most recently, we saw "Guys and Dolls". Other highlights have been "Anything Goes", "Kiss Me Kate" and "Oklahoma".

Well, that was harder than I thought it would be. I think I'm pretty much the last person in the entire of the internet to fill this out, so I won't tag anyone. If you happen across this and you feel like doing it too, consider yourself tagged...

A Million Ancient Bees

2007-05-23T11:09:00.000+01:00

Last week I bought a small set of digital scales. Nothing flashy, they cost less than £10 from Robert Dyas, and they measure to the nearest gram. At the time I was worried that I might run out of yarn before finishing Print o' the Wave so I applied some simple maths:

*) Count number of repeats remaining = 8
*) Weigh yarn = 14g
*) Knit one repeat
*) Weigh yarn = 14g

One repeat uses less than a gram of yarn. Therefore I need less than 8g, and so I have enough.

Today, I picked up the Jaywalker sock (I have just started to decrease for the toe) and thought "Er... there doesn't seem to be as much yarn left as I thought...". Time for more simple maths:

*) Weigh the nearly-complete sock (which has three needles in its top) = 69g
*) Weigh one needle = 3g
*) Weigh remaining yarn = 36g

So the sock has used 60g yarn... and it's not finished... and I only have 36g yarn left.

Result: swearing, unravelling, wondering what to do instead, but secretly, relief that I didn't find out halfway through the next sock.

Printing the Wave

2007-05-21T14:13:00.000+01:00

It is finished! Sadly, Posh Yarn weren't able to go to the show that they needed the sample for in the end, which let me off the hook with half the edging still to knit. I took it easy for the rest of the week and finished at a leisurely pace on Saturday. The stole is now blocking on the spare bed, and I am delighted with it: I will definitely be taking another, modelled, photograph when it's dried.

Yarn: Two skeins of Eva 2-ply (cashmere/silk blend) in "Emerald Isle", from Posh Yarn
Needles: 2mm metal straight needles, substituted for a 2mm metal circular when it got to the edging
Pattern: Print o' the Wave Stole, from Eunny Jang

The Good: Lovely feel to the yarn, which didn't tangle or split at all. There's a nice subtle sheen to the finished stole, thanks to the silk content, and it has a nice weight to it, which should translate to a nice drape once it's finished blocking. The colour is lovely, with very subtle variegation in the green. Great pattern, easy to follow and make sense of although it took me a while to find the corrections to chart B for the edging online. I am delighted with how the pattern has opened up in blocking.
The Bad: If I were knitting this again, I would probably use slightly larger needles: the finished stole is a little smaller than I had hoped for, even after some fairly aggressive blocking. My grafting across the centre was a little off by the end (more haste less speed), I could probably improve that (or just knit the centre all in one). My blocking is a little wonky (I should really get some wires or something) as indicated in this photograph, but I'm not all that fussed here. It's much better than I was expecting it to be, and I managed to really stretch it out, with the help of lots and lots of pins. Finally, the yarn stained patches of my hands bright green:

That was annoying, although once I washed the stole and rinsed it, it didn't seem to be bleeding any more. Oh, and the plaster on my left hand index finger is thanks to a tiny tiny imperfection in the tip of one end of the circular needle: by the end, I had an actual hole in my index finger. Very sore!

Panic Stations

2007-05-08T18:08:00.000+01:00

I didn't do all that much knitting over the weekend: we drove up to Leicester to visit my little brother and fix his PC. The PSU had exploded in a shower of sparks, and the combination of "swanky" case with dubious design plus the Biggest Processor Fan Known To Man meant that there was no way to take it out without also taking out the fan (not ideal). Thankfully, powered by purest glee at a chance to finally use his new toy, Greg cut away part of a metal lip inside the case using a Dremel, and lo the PSU could be removed.

On Sunday, we went to Hobbycraft, which was good: every time I visit one of their stores the knitting section has expanded. You'd almost think it was catching on in the UK. I traipsed around in a craft-induced daze for ages, and eventually bought some things for my Secret Pal, and some cheap fabric I want to use to try and make a summer dress for me. I've never really sewed anything more complicated than a skirt (and the occasional fancy dress bits and bobs), but I have an idea of how to progress with this (and it's only intended for lazing around in the sunshine in, so there's no need for it to be a work of art).

Monday, I decided to be proactive and return the erroneous wardrobe door to Ikea (and replace it with the correct one). If I ever, ever plan to go to Ikea on a bank holiday Monday ever again, for any reason, please kill me. It was not fun.

Anyway, this is the long way of saying: not a great deal of knitting time. Which didn't worry me until I sat down to calculate exactly how I'm doing with the Print o' the Wave stole, which needs to be in deepest darkest Wales by next Wednesday. I've got six repeats of the main body pattern left to do, so I thought I was doing fine. Until I calculated the amount of edging on the horizon.

In terms of sheer number of stitches (fairly rough calculations):

Centre Panel: 32800 stitches

Inner Border: 3856 stitches

Edging: 51072 stitches.

So I'm... about a third of the way through. And I have a week left. And Genevieve is coming to visit at the weekend.

I'm so not going to sleep this week. I think that I'm doing about 1300 stitches in an hour in this main section: I hope (but I'm not confident) that my speed will be a little better on the smaller-number-of-stitches edging.

The best way to get over a bad day

2007-05-02T22:35:00.001+01:00

I had an abysmal day at work yesterday. The week after business month end is always fairly stressful, but yesterday was particularly poor.

But all was alleviated when I stomped home and found a parcel by the door! Hooray, Secret Pal!

I opened up the box with some difficulty: my Secret Pal used some NASA-strength sellotape.

Everything was so beautifully packaged!

These are the contents, all piled up.

Inside the two sausage shaped parcels were yarn and dyes! First, KnitPicks yarn and KoolAid, and then some Australian merino and acid dyes in fabulous sounding colours like "mahogany". I can't wait to get stuck in and play with these.

And in the rest of the parcel: a funky notecard, some wool-wash, chocolate (now mysteriously vanished), a huge amount of koolaid for drinking, and a bodycare kit from Burt's Bees!

Thank you so much, Secret Pal: this is a wonderful package!

The Travesty of La Traviata

2007-04-30T15:26:00.000+01:00

My hands are stained bright green in the telltale patches that indicate that I didn't do very much this weekend except knit. This is primarily because Dee of Posh Yarn asked for some speedy sample knitters last week and I volunteered to take two skeins (800 yards) of beautiful Eva 2-ply (laceweight cashmere/silk) in semi-solid emerald green and create a shawl. The yarn arrived on Wednesday, so that evening I plotted and planned, and decided that it would be simply divine to create the "La Traviata" stole from the second "Modern Lace Knitting" book. It has a falling leaves motif going on, and the yarn is bright green! Do you see?

Without a handle on how far the 800 yards of laceweight yarn would carry me, I decided to cut down the pattern repeats from five to three. Everything was set, I cast on 146 stitches or so, and dove in on Thursday morning.

By Friday evening I was bitter with frustration. The pattern should be easy. It should. But I'd barely got two rows into the "interesting" part (where the leaf actually is) and I was bored of the mesh and completely incapable of keeping a cap on the right number of stitches in the right place. Furthermore, the wrong-side rows required concentration as well, dealing with the double yarn-overs with a purl and then knit meant I couldn't tune out and just purl back across.

By Saturday morning I'd had enough. I couldn't work out where I'd gone wrong in the pattern, and all I could see in its future was frustration. So I ripped it all out and hunted on the internet for alternatives and, frankly, thank God for .Eunny Jang. I narrowed my choices down from a whole host of sources, and the Print o' the Wave Stole (NB: link is PDF) came out a clear winner, mostly thanks to the beautiful edging. Almost as soon as I'd cast on I felt happier. At this stage, I'm thirteen repeats into the first half and going strong.

If only the dye wasn't staining my hands quite so decisively. It's not the best look for the office. If anyone has any tips for removing dye from skin (preferably without removing too much of the skin in question), do let me know.

Thou shalt not deny Stephen Fry

2007-04-23T13:16:00.000+01:00

The finished yarn!

I'm not only delighted with the yarn, I'm delighted with that picture as well. The flash on my camera sometimes seems to be a little over-powerful, but in this case it's done a good job at bringing out the colours of the yarn.

I am absolutely exhausted today, having spent the weekend in Flat Pack Nirvana, also known as Ikea. We hired an enormous van (which was great fun to drive, but not so much to park), and bought the last (I hope) pieces of furniture we need for the house, with an additional trip to my parent's house to pick up the last boxes of books and junk that they were storing for us. We built most of the new furniture yesterday, including the new bed for us. I can't work out whether the new bed's wonderful comfiness is the reason I had the best night's sleep I've had for ages, or if it was just the sheer exhaustion from so much construction. Or perhaps I'm allergic to chip-board dust.

A couple of weekends ago I made these:

Inspired entirely by a post I read on someone's blog somewhere (I'm really sorry if it was yours, I can't remember) extolling the virtues of chocolate chip muffins made with Mars Bars instead of chocolate chips.

Mars Bar Muffins:

Recipe makes 6-8.

Ingredients:

150g self-raising flour

150g margarine

150g caster sugar

2 eggs

4 Mars Bars

Method:

Chill the Mars Bars for several hours, then chop them up. The best way to achieve this is to carve off slices and then halve the slices vertically down the middle.

Sieve the flour into a large mixing bowl, then add the margarine, sugar and eggs. Mix well with an electric whisk until creamy and smooth.

Fold in the chopped Mars Bars until the chunks are evenly distributed.

Spoon the mixture into large paper muffin cases.

Bake in the oven at 190C for approximately 25 minutes until they're risen and springy.

Cool on a wire rack.

NB: the Mars Bars caramelise hugely, which is fine unless they drip onto your oven innards: be careful and put a large foil-covered baking tray on a lower shelf to catch the drips if it looks like you might have a disaster!

With a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"

2007-04-20T18:26:00.000+01:00

I am in a low-level sulk about the cashmerino jumper: I'm very unhappy with my decreases! In my plans they are beautifully executed, but the reality is much uglier. Part of me was determined to carry on regardless ("You'll get used to it, it's not that bad! You don't even know how to fix it anyway..."), but the rest of me intervened ("If you're spending so much time on something, you don't want to get to the end and know that you're unhappy with a feature of the first eight inches!"). Earlier today, I worked out how I would fix it, and so when I get home tonight I have a plan to drop back the decrease stitches and redo them in this new way to see if it will indeed work.

If it doesn't then I'll just have to unravel the whole thing and think again!

This is some of the yarn I dyed recently. In an attempt to create a helpful resource (and a reminder to myself), I made a "how to dye yarn with food colouring" tutorial following the process behind the blue/turquoise skein. That is going to be socks for my husband Greg: I asked him "What colour socks do you want me to knit you?" and his immediate answer was "Blue!". I think he might have had a more manly plain navy blue in mind, but that's just tough. The other skein was originally a sort of lime-green with a big blood-bruise coloured splodge on it, the result of an unsuccessful experiment. I'm very glad that red food colouring is so vivid: it dispensed with the green, no problem, and it wasn't much of a hardship to deepen the bruise to a more satisfying purple.

I've wound the blue skein into a ball now, which always makes these things look much more professional. I've not uploaded the photograph of the ball yet, but I will do over the weekend.

The rain in Spain

2007-04-15T16:58:00.000+01:00

I am back from the holiday! It was lovely to have a week off, first in the south of Ireland for my cousin's wedding, and then in the south of Spain to visit my parents-in-law. The weather was being contrary, with blistering sunshine in Cork and miserable rain in Murcia, but it did at least mean that the weather was beautiful for the wedding.

The flight home was delayed, meaning we didn't get home until gone 2:00am on Tuesday morning: this, combined with an OU assignment due last Friday, knocked me out for the rest of the week. I've been stumbling through in a daze (work in particular has been super fun) and completely unable to get up in the morning.

Enough whinging though: here is my holiday knitting! First up, a Jaywalker sock, growing steadily, from the Emily yarn in my previous post. This colourway reminds me of ice-cream: it's pretty, but really not my sort of thing. Luckily my mother-in-law loved it, so I have a willing recipient of these socks when they're done.

The yarn is lovely to knit with, it's incredibly soft and smooth and the knitted fabric feels lush. I will be buying this yarn again, I expect! The pattern is great for exhausted-on-the-train knitting, too: very easy to keep track of.

The other knitting I had with me was the first thing that sprang to mind when I picked up some Denise needles for the plane: I've had this Debbie Bliss cashmerino chunky sitting around for ages, so I cast on for a long ribbed jumper in the round.

At the moment I think I will probably run out of yarn: I've done about 8 inches (up to the waist, with some shaping you can see there) and gotten through four balls of the stuff. I don't remember how many I have left, but I think that it may only be another four...

I've also been dying yarn this week, just for fun. But I can't show my favourite skeins because they're about to wing their way across the ocean to my Secret Pal! I kept two skeins for myself though, in different colourways in an attempt to be super secret. I'll post some details tomorrow.

It was an accident...

2007-04-03T12:30:00.000+01:00

I was delighted that Posh Yarn had a Wednesday update last week. I don't tend to use the internet (or, indeed, computers) at home all that much, so when Dee switched to Sunday updates, I found I was inevitably missing out on a whole range of beautiful yarns by the time Monday morning rolled around.

I'd been planning on resisting, but I slipped and fell on the keyboard and accidentally ordered some. That's exactly how it happened, m'lud.

I'll stand by that... The first is Eva 4-ply, a silk/cashmere blend. I was thinking socks, but I'm not sure... can I really wear silk/cashmere socks? It seems wrong. The second is 100g of Emily, which is a lambswool/cashmere/angora yarn. I don't have words to describe how soft it is.

The Emily is in my bag, ready to be skeined as I jet off on holiday for a week! I will be seeing the insides of six different airports within the next week, which should be interesting...

Hedera Victory

2007-03-29T10:53:00.000+01:00

I don't know if Flickr was wildly slow last night or if it was my internet connection but I had to give up before posting these socks, I just couldn't bear to wait to find the photograph links any more.

Pattern: Hedera socks from Knitty.
Needles: 2.25mm dpns.
Yarn: Dye-your-own sock yarn from HipKnits, but dyed with food colouring not koolaid (see this post for details).

The Good: What a great sock pattern. Simple enough to do on the train without hoiking around loads of charts, interesting enough to keep my attention through to the end. I found it more straightforward than Pomotamus (perhaps unsurprisingly), and didn't have any problems with losing my focus and ending up doing the wrong thing. I'm really happy with my first foray into yarn-dying, too, and the way that the pattern works with the yarn colour. I had to adjust the pattern a little to fit my desired gauge and possibly peculiar feet, but the result is the best fitting pair of socks I've ever made.
The Bad: Handbag/yarn interactions meant that towards the end of the second sock the centre-pull ball's structure had collapsed and the yarn became impossibly tangled. I had to break it and rewind a ball, which was irritating although ultimately somewhat therapeutic (plus I got some really strange looks as I was standing on the train home with great tangles of yarn dangling from my bag).

Wow, my legs are incandescent at this flash setting.

Hairband

2007-03-28T21:54:00.000+01:00

I'm too tired to come up with interesting titles this evening. This is a hairband I made with some of the remains of the sock yarn I had. It's very simple and was very quick to knit up, although I'm not sure anyone would ever notice that I had co-ordinated my hair accessories with my socks... It didn't use up as much yarn as I thought it would - I still have a little ball leftover. I'll stick it back in the stash until I do something creatively stashbusting.

Admire the sleekness and bizarre flatness of my hair: I had it trimmed and the hairdresser used her straighteners. I'm so unused to my hair being flat, shiny and small.

Pattern: Simple hairband, by me. Details below.
Yarn: Dye-your-own Sock Yarn from HipKnits
Needles: 2.25mm dpns.

Instructions:
Cast on four stitches. Knit a 4-stitch I-cord for 65 rows.
Increase to 10 stitches over the next three rows (doesn't matter if you use stocking stitch or garter stitch over these three rows).
Row 1: Knit
Row 2: Purl
Row 3: Knit
Repeat rows 1-3 55 times.
Decrease to 4 stitches over the next three rows.
Knit a 4-stitch I-cord for 65 rows. Cast off.

The Ikea Nesting Instinct

2007-03-26T17:57:00.000+01:00

My creative endeavours this weekend were somewhat confined. I finished sewing in the ends of the socks, used the scrag end of the same yarn to make a quick hairband (pictures of both to follow this evening for we finally have internet at home) and wondered what my next project should be. I'm not usually stumped for ideas, so I decided to take the opportunity to rifle through my stash and find the Next Big Thing.

Unfortunately, my stash was... well, stashed, hidden behind a mountain of boxes, and so I was waylaid by unpacking instead. It's probably a good job, we're having a housewarming party next weekend and three rooms of the house were all but inaccessible. Now they are accessible, although until we took a quick trip to Homebase there was the small matter of negotiating passage over large piles of books.

I love flat-packed furniture. It's exhausting, it can be frustrating and irritating, especially when it takes longer than it should or bits are missing or whatever... but ultimately it's like Lego for grown-ups isn't it? I confess that I just love putting it together: I'm a complete sucker for creative "kits", you know the sort of thing, usually manufactured by Dryad, and I get the same kick out of flat-pack construction. There are actually companies that will come and build this stuff for you... sometimes I think I'm in the wrong profession.

Stitch and Which?

2007-03-20T16:52:00.000Z

I have been to a "stitch and bitch"-style meet-up twice, thanks to London Crafts, and the power of LiveJournal. The first was a fairly straightforward knitting-in-a-pub event. I was very shy and everyone else seemed to know each other rather well, and I felt wildly socially awkward. The second was knitting-in-an-upstairs-room-of-a-pub where one of the members of London Crafts and the Brit Knits community on LiveJournal talked to us all about spinning and different fibres. I was once again very socially awkward and wished fervently that I knew somoene... or that perhaps I wasn't so new.

Tomorrow, there are two different Stitch and Bitch events. One is run by Stitch and Bitch London, and one is run by I Knit London. The first is on a boat on the Thames (a static boat, converted into a bar), the second is in a bar less than a stone's throw from work.

I would like to get out and about, meet new people and all that, and particularly get to know some people who share in this knitting thing... but I am nervous! And shy! And even if I get over all that, how do I decide which one to go to?

Edit: Ha, the dilemma resolved itself thanks to train delays meaning I was very late for work, and also finished my sock on the way! No knitting and working late to make up the time = no Stitch and Bitch this week... I'll just have to revisit the dilemma next time.

Beaded Bracelet

2007-03-20T10:21:00.000Z

I received my assignee for Secret Pal 10 today, which means I'm going to have to get in gear and get to the library near work so that I can access my webmail (and consequently my anonymous email address). We have no webmail at work (security risk) and we still have no internet at home. I am looking forward to this exchange, so I hope that my technologically bereft household doesn't get in my way.

I realised that I hadn't posted this knitted bracelet before, so here's something pretty to look at:

Kit: Earth Faire Beaded Bracelet Kit from HipKnits. I can't remember which colourway it was: it's not one of the ones they have on the page at the moment.
Needles: 2mm metal needles.

The Good: It's so pretty! And it was so easy! Basically garter stitch, with beads added on one side. I'd knitted beads into fabric before, but this was the most concentrated effort I've made. An added bonus: the kit comes with vastly more beads than you would need so now I have a little box of all sorts of pretty beads as well.
The Bad: Although I tried to account for the stretchy-ness of the bracelet, I think it might still be a little big. It might look a little better knitted with smaller needles to give even more dense beading.

Shoulders Like Meon Beach

2007-03-15T09:48:00.000Z

I left it a little long before this post: we still have no internet at home, so I'd been putting off updating... but then I realised that the reason that my stomach started growling every time I perused my BlogRoll was primarily due to its proximity to that recipe for flapjacks.

I spent the past few days at Champneys Springs, a spa in the beautiful Leicestershire countryside. There I was pummelled to within an inch of my life, slathered with unguents and over-stretched in exercise classes. It was lovely, although my legs ache so much I can barely walk up stairs.

My mum and I were there on their "Mother and Daughter" package deal, which includes a massage (among other things). I was hoping for something relaxing, a nice back rub... I wasn't expecting the battering I received. In general, I am quite a stressed person (this is part of the reason I pursue these creative hobbies: they make me calmer), and I knew that my shoulders were usually quite tense. I didn't realise quite how knotted they were until the masseuse was trying desperately to work them out (occasionally using her elbows) and still discovering what felt like pebbles buried in my shoulder muscles. My hoped for relaxing massage ended up being quite a workout on its own...

Don't Know Flap

2007-03-06T10:37:00.000Z

Hoorah, we have moved house!

I could ramble on about the new house (currently largely full of boxes) and how great it is, but instead I'll summarise with a key indication: its kitchen is so wonderful that I feel more moved to cook and bake than I have for about the last two years.

Unfortunately, we have no phoneline (and consequently no internet) at home at the moment, which means no photographs from me just yet. Not that there are many things to take pictures of: my knitting is on hold, I don't know which box my sewing machine is in... but there is the cooking. Having re-discovered a large bag of porridge oats, I decided to make flapjacks, using a recipe given to me when we made them at primary school. I would've been about 7 at the time, I guess: I sadly lost my seven-year-old-self's handwritten copy, but had noted it down in my recipe notebook along the way.

I metric-ified it, replaced the golden syrup with maple syrup because we had maple syrup in the cupboard, and then made a second batch with a variation because I found raisins as well...

Sandling C.P. School Flapjacks

Ingredients:

170g butter

120g soft dark brown sugar

50g caster sugar

2 tbsp maple syrup

340g porridge oats

How To:

Preheat the oven to about 180, thoroughly grease your tin. I used an 10" cake tin with a removable base. I also lined the bottom with greaseproof paper, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend this: the paper stuck to the flapjack and I could only get most of it off (in tiny strips). That said, it doesn't seem to have affected the flavour.

Put the butter, sugars and maple syrup in a small saucepan over a low heat and melt them together gently. Stir regularly enough and don't let it boil.

While they're melting, put the oats in a mixing bowl.

When they're melted, pour into the mixing bowl with the oats and stir it until all of the oats are coated in the syrupy-butter mix.

Press the coated oats into the cake tin, and then cook in the oven for about 35 minutes (it should start to go a sort of caramel brown around the edges).

Let it cool in the tin for a little while, and then remove to a rack or plate to cool fully (it'll still be pretty pliable (and easily broken!) until it's fully cooled) - when it is lukewarm you might like to cut it into chunks: it's easier whilst it's hot but shouldn't be too bad unless you baked it extra long!

Variation:
For the second batch, I added in two handfuls of raisins and two tablespoons of cinnamon. This is a highly recommended variation!

Secret Pal 10 Questionnaire

2007-02-27T13:45:00.000Z

I signed up for Secret Pal 10! It seems a long time since the Secret Pal exchange when I first met Genevieve. I hope that this questionnaire will help my Secret Pal, whosoeverheorshemaybe, over the next couple of months.

1. What is/are your favorite yarn/s to knit with? What fibres do you absolutely *not* like? My tastes are pretty broad, I think. I don't really like ladder yarns, or very slippery ribbons, but even then there are exceptions.

2. What do you use to store your needles/hooks in?? Usually a pint glass that sits on my dressing table. Other needles find their way to being stored in random nooks and crannies across the house: bookshelves, down the side of the sofa, handbags...

3. How long have you been knitting & how did you learn? Would you consider your skill level to be beginner, intermediate or advanced? I'm part of that large crowd who were taught by their grannies at a very young age. I knitted on and off (more off than on) throughout my teens and took it up properly again three or four years ago. I tend to think of myself as somewhere in between intermediate and advanced: I would never choose not to attempt something on the grounds of it being too difficult.

4. Do you have an Amazon or other online wish list? No.

5. What's your favorite scent? I like lavender, and also fresh scents with lemony overtones. I hate cloying sweet scents like vanilla. Also, I tend not to like chocolate-scented things.

6. Do you have a sweet tooth? Favorite candy? I have a very sweet tooth, primarily for milk or dark chocolate.

7. What other crafts or Do-It-Yourself things do you like to do? Do you spin? I crochet a little, sew occasionally, fuss about with beads. I love to cook and I like domestic DIY stuff. I am a complete sucker for interesting craft kit things. I don't spin at the moment although I do have a drop spindle and a bag of roving waiting for my attention: I intend to learn!

8. What kind of music do you like? Can your computer/stereo play MP3s? (if your buddy wants to make you a CD) My favourite music tends to be British indie. I have a CD habit which is hard to break. My computer can play MP3s.

9. What's your favorite colour(s)? Any colours you just can't stand? Warm autumn colours: rich browns, greens, oranges, rusty reds... that sort of thing. I love all of that. I don't like pastels, and I tend to avoid black and white.

10. What is your family situation? Do you have any pets? I am married to Greg, and have been for just over a year and a half. We have a dark tortoiseshell cat, called Maya, who is about five: we've had her for just over two years, having adopted her from a rescue centre.

11. Do you wear scarves, hats, mittens or ponchos? I wear scarves a lot of the time. I occasionally wear hats, but it's hard to find ones that fit me: I have a large head. I don't really wear mittens (I prefer fingerless gloves that I can wear at work). Words cannot communicate my complete loathing and utter contempt for ponchos: I hate them.

12. What is/are your favorite item/s to knit? Probably socks.

13. What are you knitting right now? Socks, a lace shawl, a jumper for Greg. Probably some other things as well, but not things that I can remember!

14. Do you like to receive handmade gifts? I should think so.

15. Do you prefer straight or circular needles? Bamboo, aluminum, plastic? Whatever comes to hand at the time and seems to fit the job, I don't really have a preference.

16. Do you own a yarn winder and/or swift? I own a winder. Swifts seem to be pretty hard to get hold of over here. After spending the best part of two days winding a skein of laceweight in early January, it's at the top of my list of things to buy.

17. How old is your oldest UFO? About two years old: a rectangular lace shawl that I thought I might do for my wedding. It was retired when I realised I had more important things to think about!

18. What is your favorite holiday? I don't know! Shrove Tuesday!

19. Is there anything that you collect? Not intentionally.

20. Any books, yarns, needles or patterns out there you are dying to get your hands on? What knitting magazine subscriptions do you have? I'm told that "Big Girl Knits" is supposed to be very good. I usually end up buying "Simply Knitting" (primarily for the free stuff) but I don't have a subscription.

21. Are there any new techniques you'd like to learn? I have yet to attempt colour knitting on anything other than a tiny swatch. I've got some yarn earmarked for stranded socks (or similar) but haven't taken the plunge. I find most patterns out there for coloured knitting things (e.g. fairisle jumpers etc.) pretty ugly, or at least unflattering, so it's not something I've ever felt pressed to investigate.

22. Are you a sock knitter? What are your foot measurements? I am. I am a UK size 7.5-8 (roughly a 41 in european sizing).

23. When is your birthday? 31st January 1979.

Five Stay In for Dinner

2007-02-26T13:03:00.000Z

No knitting at the weekend after all. Instead I invited a few friend over for dinner, initially for no particular reason but it became a sort of last-weekend-in-this-godforsaken-house celebration. I was delighted with the menu I put together, but unfortunately, I didn't take any photographs.

Starter: Baked mushrooms with stilton and parma ham.

This was pulled straight out of an ITV Drama sponsorship advert: I can't remember who was doing the sponsoring, but it suggested putting some stilton on a large flat mushroom and wrapping the whole thing in parma ham before baking it. It sounded delicious (I am a sucker for blue cheese) so I tried it out.

Ingredients: One large flat mushroom per person, approximately 75g of stilton per person, two strips of parma ham per person.
Served with: Roughly a handful of rocket per person.
How to: Preheat the oven to about 180 C. Peel the mushrooms and gently pull out the stalk (I had to do a bit of twisting in order to get most of it out, and then pick off the extra bits). Place the stilton in the hollow left by the stalk removal (I had to break the cheese up a bit so it would all fit within the spread of the mushroom cap), and then wrap the whole thing in the pieces of parma ham: I had one piece going across the top and the other across the bottom, overlapping each other at the sides. Place all the mushrooms in an ovenproof dish and bake in the oven for about 15 minutes. Serve with a little of the juice which will have escaped into the dish.

Main Course: Rosemary Chicken

My manager came up with this one when I was asking my colleagues about their favourite recipes to serve up to friends and family. Normally I'd want to do something a bit more adventurous, but having something fairly straightforward for a main course allowed me more time to spend on dessert!

Ingredients (this version served five, just): Ten chicken thighs, one bag of fresh rosemary sprigs, six cloves of garlic, one bottle of dry white wine, a little plain flour, salt and pepper, olive oil to brown chicken.
Served with: Approximately 100g of mixed wild and basmati rice each, green beans on the side.
How to: Remove the skins from the chicken thighs. Mix a few twists of salt and pepper with the plain flour and then use it to coat the chicken pieces. Heat some olive oil in a large casserole dish (preferably cast iron, although I don't have a cast iron big enough to do this) and then seal the chicken. When they're sealed, remove the pan from the heat. Squash the garlic gloves (I use the flat of a knife blade) rather than crush them, add them to the pan. Strip the rosemary leaves from the stalks, and add to the pan. Pour in the wine and return to the heat: bring it to the boil, cover and then simmer for about half an hour. I managed to burn the bottom of the pan a bit so bear in mind that even though you've covered it you may still lose some moisture: keep an eye on it and add water (or more wine...) to keep it vaguely liquid: you should aim to have a nice gravy by the time it's done.

Dessert: Honey and Ginger Biscuit Ice Cream

I wish I could claim credit for this recipe, it is so good. I first discovered it last year, when I cooked a meal for our first wedding anniversary. Having never made ice cream before, it seems like the perfect opportunity to try. I discovered that it's not all that difficult (although it's a little time consuming if you don't have an ice-cream maker, which I don't). This time, I dipped the spare biscuits in melted dark chocolate, which was delicious but ended up making the dessert a bit over-the-top rich in the end. I prefer it without.

Full recipe: by Bevis, sourced from nigella.com, here.

This brought to you by the letter "Adrenaline"

2007-02-23T13:19:00.000Z

Everything going on is very exciting at the moment because we are about to move house. The story of our time in this house is two years long and not much fun (I particularly like the bit where we spent three months living in a hotel), so I'll save it for another time when it is firmly in the past and less likely to send me into a screaming rage. The current and much shortened version is that we accepted an offer on the house in the middle of December, the conveyancing process took a lot longer thanks to the incompetence of the solicitors we used when we bought the place, but we finally exchanged contracts on Wednesday. Yesterday we went and signed the lease on the house we'll be renting in our new town, and we move next Wednesday. Things have been all but static for so long, the speed at which these final steps are progressing has taken my breath away.

As a side effect of all of this excitement, I've been fidgety beyond belief for the past week. This makes for reasonable knitting progress, and so I can show off what my dyed yarn looks like when transformed into actual fabric:

This is a Hedera sock, somewhat modified. I wasn't getting the same gauge and I think my feet may be oddly shaped, so I altered the pattern to go over my increased number of stitches, and did a lot more instep decreasing to fit my peculiar feet. This is the best-fitting sock I've ever knitted.

In other news, egads but my skin is pale. And my camera flash is too harsh.

Here is the progress of the second:

I cast on for it immediately through a combination of stubbornness, adrenaline and boredom, and progress is rattling along nicely. Hopefully I'll finish it over the weekend.

You say po-may-to, I say po-mah-to

2007-02-20T10:32:00.000Z

I spent most of last week (and the end of the week before it) lying on the couch with no energy to move. There are some really unpleasant lurgies doing the rounds at the moment: I started off with a sort of run-down-exhaustion virus, and just as I was getting over that I was knocked sideways by a stinking cold. I ended up taking a whole week off work! I haven't had that much time off in one go in my entire working life!

I wish I could say it gave me the chance to get plenty of knitting and suchlike done, but I barely had the energy for that. Knitting a sock from the yarn I dyed, I was able to do two, maybe three, rounds at a time before having to put it aside to rest. That said, seven days of the odd three rounds here and there makes for a reasonable amount of progress. Especially when there's nothing else to do but learn the FreeView channel schedules in an effort to avoid the worst of daytime television. I'll post some photographs of that progress later.

In the meantime, here are some socks I knitted a little while back. I wore them a lot last week: there's nothing quite like hand-knitted wool socks for keeping your toes warm when you're curled up on the sofa.

Yarn: Sock yarn (wool/nylon blend), from Curious Yarns, who are sadly offline at the moment. They used to do a dual skein set for socks, a main skein of yarn for the socks and a contrasting or complementary colour small skein. I can't remember the name of the colourway, unfortunately.
Needles: 2mm birch DPNs. I snapped one whilst in the middle of the sock.
Pattern: Pomatomus.

The Good: What a beautiful pattern. What beautiful yarn. I loved knitting these: I even looked forward to casting on the second sock!

The Bad: Well, I suppose I've to learn to be more careful with small birch DPNs. I also mis-judged the amount of yarn I had, as you can see: the contrasting toe on one sock is smaller than the contrasting toe on the other. If I were to do this again, I'd divide the skeins in two before starting. Oh, also the socks are a little too big for me. I'd try and shrink them in the wash but I'm afraid that the stitch definition would be lost.

When is a fingerless glove a wristwarmer?

2007-02-16T10:59:00.000Z

I finished the fingerless gloves I've been knitting. Having worn my "Hurry Up Spring" Noro Kureyon armwarmers (pattern from one of the Stitch and Bitch books, I forget which one) to death (or at least to a sort of fuzzy dishevelledness where I no longer felt happy wearing them at work), I decided I needed a new pair. The perfect yarn from Posh Yarn had arrived, I knew what I wanted and so, voila:

I know, I know, it needs blocking but my hands were cold already...

Yarn: Eva 12 Ply (cashmere/silk blend chunky weight), colour "24 Karat", 2 skeins from Posh Yarn.
Pattern: My own. I'm in the process of writing it up and attempting to make it comprehensible. They were knit from the fingers downwards.
Needles: 6mm DPNs.

The Good: Knitting with this yarn is a little like knitting with butter, it's just so soft and smooth as it slides past the needles. I am happy with the way they feel to wear, also: the section above the thumb is short enough that my fingers don't feel restricted whilst typing. I also loved the bind-off I used, which I picked up from a post by Grumperina, here.

The Bad: I'm a little unhappy with the increasing/decreasing: I like the effect, but I think my stitches could have been neater. Also, that got a bit complicated in terms of writing it up: I'm not sure how I'm going to make it make sense in words!

If I Dye Before I Wake

2007-02-08T16:25:00.000Z

At the weekend I made my first foray into dyeing yarn. O my, I am fighting the urge to buy kilos of yarn from Texere just to do more.

It all started with a trip the weekend before last to The Knitting Hut. It may seem like I bought a lot at the shop, what with the Feza Premier from previous posts and now this, and the answer is yes, yes I did. But it was a birthday treat! Anyway, I was asking about hand-painted sock yarn, and the shop owner brought out a HipKnits dye-your-own kit, complete with two packets of koolaid and a skein of 4-ply undyed wool. I couldn't resist.

Unfortunately, following the instructions didn't work out so well for me. A "few tablespoons" of water to mix with each colour is all well and good, except when you'd rather have a lot of colour in your yarn. A "few tablespoons" leads to a couple of blotches, at best. I was most disgruntled: I nearly threw the whole thing in the bin in a fit of pique.

I'm glad I didn't, though. Something in the back of my mind reminded me that people who can't get KoolAid (i.e. the whole world outside of the US, pretty much) use normal food colouring. A quick trip to the supermarket and I came back with three teeny bottles of food colouring in red, yellow and blue (to mix to the same purple and orange koolaid that I'd splotched on the yarn). 300ml of warm water, several teaspoons-ful of colouring in each, quarter cup of white vinegar, all mixed up in a jar and then poured into a "Fruit Shoot" squeezy bottle. And it all went wonderfully:

I am delighted with the results. There's a lot more red than orange, but that's okay. Next time I want to be more careful to cover all of the undyed yarn, there are some small white patches, but they look fine in context so I'm not worried about them either. Also, next time I want to make orange I will add red to yellow, not vice versa: that red colouring is pretty overpowering.

I have yet to decide which sock pattern to use... I have a couple in mind, but no decision yet.

Feza Scarf

2007-02-06T09:23:00.000Z

Here is the scarf I was raving about:

I finished it at the weekend.

Yarn: Feza Premier, one skein.
Pattern: Feza Scarf, an online free pattern from The Knitting Hut.
Needles: 7mm

The Good: I love this pattern and the way it works with this multiple-textures yarn. The chevron shape stops the edges of the scarf from being wildly uneven along the pattern. It also lets the yarn draw the eyes and catch the light in different ways, rather than a straight garter or stocking stitch.

The Bad: If I never have to work with some of the yarn types in this stuff again it will be too soon. I hate ladder yarn. And the section that was nearly a ladder, like a ladder with one of the struts missing? That was beyond infuriating. Also, because all the sections are knotted together, I need to do some stitching with a "normal" needle and thread to disguise the ends.

Consider the Lilypad...

2007-02-01T18:34:00.000Z

Or rather, consider the frog that is sitting upon it. This is a small shawl which I knitted a little over a year ago, using two or three skeins of this mad art yarn I bought at the Knitting and Stitching Show. I loved the yarn at first sight. There were all sorts of ribbon and sparkle and texture knotted together, in beautiful autumnal colours. I wanted to take the warmth I could see in it and create something warming to wrap myself up in.

I have a confession to make: I hate it. I've never worn it because I hate it. I hate its shape, its size, its drape. It just doesn't work as a shawl. Every time I looked at it I felt disappointed in myself, and (bizarrely) a little guilty, for not having created something more from such raw materials. It's basically garter stitch with some long loops at random intervals, and so ultimately it is merely a stripey shawl. Nothing takes advantage of the textures, nothing really shows off what it is. And so I folded it up and put it away, considering it a lesson in... something.

But at the weekend I went to The Knitting Hut, near Woburn Sands, and discovered a skein of similar yarn, Feza Premier. Sucked into it once more, but this time salvation was present in the form of the shop's owner, who printed out a copy of a free scarf pattern they had on their site. I decided to give it a go, and lo and behold, the scarf that I'm creating is beautiful. The shape accentuates the texture... it works beautifully and I couldn't be happier with it.

I've finally got the impetus I needed to dig out that old shawl, unravel the whole thing and finally create the beautiful thing I can see in my mind's eye.

Concentration, are you ready?

2007-01-26T22:03:00.000Z

This is my main "concentration" knitting project of the moment. I bought a skein of laceweight cashmere/merino blend from Posh Yarn, and followed it up with both books of "Modern Lace Knitting". For a while I was stumped as to which pattern to choose, but eventually the bright red colour pulled me towards a pattern involving petals. I dithered over the English Rose-esque design for a while before settling on the Azalea design, but halved so it's semi-circular instead of a tablecloth.

Unfortunately, it's something I can't carry on the train (which is my favourite down-time for getting some knitting done), this is what it looks like most of the day:

It's semi-circular, knitted from the neck down, so it's hard to get a good shot of the lace detail at the moment:

I can't wait to finish this and block it out... I've never made lace on this scale before.

Making Marmalade

2007-01-25T22:58:00.000Z

I phoned my mum last week and caught her in the middle of making marmalade, up to her elbows in oranges. It reminded me that I'd been planning on popping my marmalade cherry (or Seville orange, if you will), and so last weekend I trotted off to the supermarket to see if they still had the oranges, and to buy the rest of the ingredients.

I took photos as I made it, and I have it on good (if somewhat biased) authority that it's damn fine (if a little over soft: I should have boiled it for a little longer but I am an impatient creature). I also vouch for its flavour: I'm not generally a huge marmalade fan but for this? I could be.

You can see the rest of the photos (in a pseudo-tutorial format here).

A New Start

2007-01-24T14:25:00.000Z

"Tangled Creations" seems like an apt umbrella to store my creative endeavours under. Whilst taking my education and career down a scientific and mathematical path, I've always needed a vent for the right half of my brain. It keeps me on an even kilter. Nobody likes it when I get unbalanced, after all. Least of all me.