Sticking to the Shallows

Burning yer boats

2012-02-01T12:13:00.007Z

Hurray, January's finished! And it finished on a Tuesday meaning that last night was Up Helly Aa, always the last Tuesday in January, so I was over at my brother's house watching the webcast of the procession. There were technical issues (possibly at our end, or possibly due to the volume of viewers) so it was a bit laggy and the broadcast failed just as the torches were about to go into the galley, but despite that it was the next best thing to Being There. I took some more pictures of the tv screen (that one above is about the best) but they didn't come out well so I'll give you a link to some pictures on the BBC news website, and the Shetland News article on the event (if you scroll down to the bottom there's a link to Billy Fox's pictures of the day too). Considering that the procession and galley-burning is just the start of a very long night of celebration (one of my friends updated Facebook to say she was just off to bed at 6 o' clock this morning) it's very impressive that there are pictures online already.

So, that's January gone. Thank goodness. I lost my camera on Sunday. I think it fell out of my bag on the train into Glasgow. Nobody has handed it in to Lost Property at the station. I would if I found a camera, but perhaps I'm in the minority. I hope the git that's acquired it enjoys my pictures - my daughter posing proudly with her dance exam certificates, for example. I hope they're bored to tears by my photographs of apple crumble and of streetlight reflections on icy puddles. I'm a bit peeved. I'm using My Beloved's camera now and it's just not as good. *sigh*

February has started with my daughter's class assembly - their topic was Chinese New Year and they did an excellent presentation. It was lovely. They all looked so tiny, but there they were reciting quite complicated lines, and they all spoke so clearly and looked as if they were having fun. It cheered me up no end. Also it's a cold, clear sunny day, and that helps no end!

Reasons To Be Cheerful

2012-01-27T13:37:00.011Z

I've got to say, I'm struggling with Reasons To Be Cheerful this week. There are Reasons To Feel A Bit Swamped, Reasons To Be Mildly Anxious, Reasons To Need More Sleep, but.. Reasons To Be Cheerful? Well, it's not coming naturally. That's not to say I'm feeling depressed or anything, there's nothing wrong, I'm just Not Cheerful as such. I've even been Too Tired To Knit.

However, there are Reasons To Smile.

1) Watching Warehouse 13 - our new addiction. We'd seen the Eureka/Warehouse 13 crossover ('Crossing Over') so thought we'd try Warehouse 13 itself, and very enjoyable it is too. Fun programme with plenty of geekiness. Yes, just right. We've watched Seasons 1 and 2 in about a week and a half.

2) Daffodils. I have a pot of Tête-à-Tête daffs that I bought in a supermarket last year, and after they'd finished flowering the pot just sat in a corner outside the back door. I'd intended to re-plant the bulbs in the garden but the pot got shoved behind something else and forgotten about. Until a few days ago when I noticed green shoots coming up from that little pot. I brought it inside on Wednesday and on Thursday the first flower appeared! Yay!

3) Apple crumble. Mmmmmmmm.

4) Just thought of a fourth Reason. It was beautifully clear last night so the kids and I went out (well wrapped up, it was baltic out there) in the back garden to look at the stars just before bedtime. I've finally got round to buying a planisphere so we have more idea where to look and what we're looking at. The Orion nebula (fuzzy blob in Orion's sword) was more obvious last night - usually the light pollution here makes it hard to see - and the Boy was really pleased about that. Miss Mouse just likes looking for patterns and making up constellations! I also found our binoculars which was helpful - I can't see a thing through a telescope but if I shut one eye, binoculars work quite well for me.

The sky

2012-01-26T14:30:00.004Z

I finished my brother's fingerless mitts last night - these were the ones that were supposed to be his Christmas present but I was still bogged down in the cable bit come Christmas Day. Once past the cable bit they fairly flew off the needles and last night I finally settled down to tackle the thumb which is my least favourite bit of mitten/glove-knitting because I'm quite nit-picky about the neatness of it and hate an untidy thumb! But being a bit of a fiddly thing to knit in the round getting them neat takes a bit of effort.

I'm pleased with the result though - the wool (a discontinued Rowan one I think) was an ideal choice for the pattern (Stephen West's Coler from Westknits 2) and I love that blue. I wish the sky was that blue - it just makes me think of skies and sea whenever I look at it. Gorgeous... Unfortunately the actual sky is a flat heavy grey with snow coming out of it just now, wet snow that's only just beginning to lie. Ooops, made myself shiver there!

No time for Reasons To Be Cheerful today so I'll do that tomorrow (loving the thought of pencilling 'Cheerful' into my diary for tomorrow!).

hearts and stars

2012-01-24T13:48:00.005Z

I made a heart yesterday. I'm not sure if it's a very small pin-cushion or if I'll attach a ribbon and hang it up somewhere (Miss Mouse has her eye on it - she wants it to be a pillow for her teddy, but it's really too small for that). The idea was to brighten up miserable January with a bit of colour, and I thought a few hearts in cheery colours might do the trick!

It was cold and clear on Sunday night so the Boy and I went out into the garden to look at the stars. We didn't have a hope of seeing the aurora as the glow of Glasgow is to the north of us, but we did get a good view of Orion and I was pretty pleased with myself for finding Cassiopeia. And as he was interested, yesterday I showed the Boy various aurora pictures online - some cracking ones on the Shetland News report and Paula Moss Photography. When I was a kid I used to find the northern lights a bit creepy - I remember standing at our door once watching it then having the urge to run back inside. It does look a bit like a dodgy special effect in a film I suppose! I do kick myself a bit now, that I lived in a place with reasonably dark skies (though the flare-stack at the oil terminal did affect that) and more opportunity for aurora-watching than most places in Britain, yet I didn't stand still, watch and make a point of remembering these moments. Especially when so many of my friends now I'm on the mainland say that they'd love to see an aurora. There's nothing like being irrationally irritated with your former self!

More reasons to be cheerful!

2012-01-19T14:16:00.008Z

I'm always slow with my Reasons To Be Cheerful (Planet Penny usually starts the cheerfulness ball rolling on a Wednesday or a Thursday) so today I'm going to cram in three super-quick reasons while having my coffee, before going to get the kids from school.

*deep breath*

1) Stargazing Live - granted I didn't get to watch it actually live ('Kids! Go. To. Bed!') but either on delay or on iplayer, but ah, how I enjoyed it! Thought-provoking, funny, fascinating, intriguing. Shame it's so often cloudy here, particularly in January.
Oh, I took this picture last week on a clear evening (well, afternoon really).

I watched the 2nd programme on iplayer with the Boy yesterday and he was mostly fascinated and is quite keen that we take his telescope up to Granny and Grandpa's next time we go as we'll get more of a dark sky there.

2) Flowers! Yes, more :-D. My tulips are past their best now but I've hung onto them for their weird sculptural shapes and rich colours:

but I've also got some daffs! Excuse my excessive enthusiasm for a moment but I love daffodils - the colour, the shape, the smell:
.. the shadows they cast on themselves..

Buying flowers is a bit of an indulgence but so worth it when the sun comes out briefly and the windowsill just lights up with colour.

3) Shade cards:

That's the Jamieson's one

All those colours, all those possibilities! I've been playing about with knitters' graph paper this week, doing some Fair Isle/colourwork designs. It's not something I've really done before (the designing that is) but is very absorbing. I've got a few ideas in my head at the moment so the shade card, aside from being a thing of beauty in its own right, is a way of focussing the ideas a bit in terms of colours and how they work together. And seeing the colours is quite inspirational too. Sorry, went off in a daydream there..

Right, gotta go!

Reasons To Be Cheerful

2012-01-15T20:49:00.011Z

1) Locorten-Vioform. Ear-drops that is. Wonderful stuff for those of us with recurrently scabby ears!

2) Science. Or Potions, depending on your point of view. A bit of silly science with the kids! In a vase, white vinegar, food colouring, glitter and washing-up liquid:

..and a spoonful of bicarbonate of soda:

Add a sinister cackle:

Mwahahahaha!

Actually the one we did with yellow food-colouring looked the most sinister (quite sulphurous) but I didn't take pictures of that one.

3) Sunsets. I went for a walk with the Boy this afternoon and we took pictures of the sunset. It was cold out, still frosty in places, but very calm and beautiful.

I like that picture, it looks surprisingly rural (it's not).

This week went so quickly. The kids went back to school on Monday and have settled back into the routine. I've had a sore throat and sore ears all week so have been doing a fair bit of knitting and crochet. The razor-shell scarf is growing slowly but I've memorised the lace row now which speeds things up a bit. The crochet is beginning to click - it still looks wonky but is more crochet-like at least! The only hook I could find was really the wrong size for the wool I'm practising with, so I bought a set of gorgeously coloured metal crochet hooks off ebay and now I can crochet with anything (probably even cobwebs with the teeny-tiny one):

Shiny!

Those hooks are pretty much a Reason To Be Cheerful in their own right! I'm so shallow :-D.

Anthropomorphising flowers

2012-01-09T20:45:00.007Z

Well that one's just a tulip. Pretty, mind.

But this, this one, is applauding. Or swooning? Or maybe facepalm!

I lead a dull life don't I?

So, today. Making Monday. I got the shopping, housework, lunch and stuff out of the way, and prepared to knit. Like Natalie of the Yarn Yard I've never really got to grips with lace knitting so I'm trying to encourage myself to get out of my knitting comfort zone with it a bit. At the moment I'm doing the razor-shell lace scarf, as mentioned before - only one line of lace, repeated over and over so easing me gently out towards the rough currents and shoals of lace knitting where there be charts, yarr, and x almost certainly does not mark the spot but more likely some tricky sl1-kfb-while-standing-on-your-head-psso operation. But I made the mistake of switching the television on, having a look at what's on catch-up and saying to myself 'Ooh, I'll just have quick look at that Borgen thing, people have been talking about that on Ravelry/Twitter - subtitles though so I'll only watch a couple of minutes..' Yeah. Some time later with the remote still in my hand I realised that it was finished and it was almost school pick-up time so no time for knitting. I'm so glad I did though.

Some thoughts on this:
1) Media bint character really does look like Rose Tyler's Danish cousin as somebody on Ravelry pointed out. Uncannily. Which reminds me, does anybody remember The Tenth Kingdom? My Beloved dubbed the character of Sally Peep 'Alice Tinker's slutty cousin' and everytime we've seen Lucy Punch in something since that's all we can say. Mind you in Hot Fuzz it was pretty accurate.

2) Subtitled Danish or Swedish drama is weird because it sounds familiar enough for me to forget that I don't actually speak the language and do need to read the subtitles. So no lace knitting while it's on.

As well as the lace knitting thing I also have a tentative not-quite-resolution thing to get to grips with crochet a bit more as well. I sort of managed granny squares last year, but I want to make a granny stripe blanket eventually (even if it's only a little one for the cats' basket) so last night was spent doing wonky treble clusters while watching Pride and Prejudice on DVD.

This was another Reason To Be Cheerful - I am fortunate enough to have secured a gentleman who will willingly and happily watch the whole of Pride and Prej over two consecutive evenings. Not so surprising really as he's addicted to Patrick O'Brian novels which are the nearest male equivelant I've encountered. I won't show you a picture of my wonky crochet, but honestly, it is improving. So, woohoo!

Since the ginger-wine/keyboard interface incident I'm still using my Beloved's noisy keyboard so I shall stop typing there before I drive him to distraction.

Reasons To Be Cheerful

2012-01-05T12:35:00.007Z

1. Knitting. I've started a razor-shell lace scarf with wool my brother bought me for my birthday. I've now learned not to try the lace rows when I'm watching television. Last night I managed to get one stitch short on one lace row, sorted that, then got four too many on the next. No idea how.. So I took it to soft-play with me today (Miss M was at a birthday party there), ripped it back four or five rows to tackle what was possibly a hole or possibly just a very loose stitch but was bugging me slightly either way, and got it all sorted. So satisfying. See, if I never messed up my knitting I'd never have the satisfaction of being able to fix it! (Pollyanna moment no.1).

The thumb bandage is because I cut the tip of my thumb chopping something and the wool keeps catching on the sticking plaster. This is the unattractive best option when knitting.

2. Opening a new bottle of brown sauce. My Beloved made the dinner, fish and oven chips (we were feeling tired and lazy), to which of course the only sensible accompaniment besides vinegar is brown sauce. I'm so mundane aren't I?

3. Flowers. I bought some tulips the other day (this picture is from Thursday I think - note the rare blue sky!) and even though they're doing that alarming tulip sag they do quickly they're so cheerful and happy looking. I've had a sore throat for several days and haven't really been out so a bit of colour indoors has been Just What The Doctor Probably Would Have Ordered. (Pollyanna moment number two)

Despite the sore throat I'm actually spoiled for Reasons To Be Cheerful choice at the moment (Pollyanna flounces off in a huff at being outclassed), even if the brown sauce one makes you suspect otherwise, so I may even do another post tomorrow, once the kids are safely back at school. I've loved the school holidays but a return to routine is something to look forward to in its own way.

Two days

2012-01-03T21:28:00.017Z

Our little trip up north was a last-minute sort of thing and very short but so lovely!

On Hogmanay the snow was thawing - we had a beautiful walk down to the golf course, then back around the loch. And then Miss Mouse and her Granny and I had a game of golf in the garden - according to the rules of Miss Mouse! We just tried to keep up with what she was doing!

Then that night there was a torchlit procession, followed by fireworks at 'the bells'. I don't really like crowds and enforced jollity, and Mum said she didn't see anybody she knew (so probably a lot of visitors and holiday-home people) so we headed back to the house before midnight and watched the fireworks from the upstairs landing window. I'm astonished the kids didn't wake actually because it was a tremendous display!

On New Year's Day my Beloved and I left the kids with their grandparents and did the Wildcat Trail - a walk/hike/ramble around the village. It's a bit of a tradition that people walk it on New Year's Day and the Wildcat Centre provide mulled wine, shortbread and a certificate for those who complete it. Due to the melting snow there was a lot of floodwater on the lower half of the trail running below the village down by the river, so people were only doing the upper portion. Which was quite wet enough itself!

That watery bit there was the path. It got muddier and wetter further on too (especially the bit where we took a wrong turn in the wood and ended up in a boggy field). But it was tremendous fun!

The rain was intermittent hence the odd raindrops on some of the pictures but we were lucky that it was mostly dry when we were up on the moor.

Scampering around in the muck makes me feel like a kid again! And look at those beautiful colours..

My cheap snow boots from Lidl stood up to the walk very well - actually the worst bit was walking along the pavement back through the village. The boots are definitely at their best on a surface with a bit of give to it!

Apart from all the fresh air stuff I also got some peaceful knitting time and have nearly finished my brother's other fingerless mitt. I knew it'd be quick once I got some peace and with three other adults on hand to distract the kids it was a doddle! We had a farcical moment when I forgot whether it was the left or right mitt I'd already done so went out to the golf course (for mobile reception) to text my brother. He replied he couldn't remember and was on a train to Edinburgh so couldn't check. You'd think one of us would remember which one it was! Eventually, looking back through the pattern, I decided it was the left mitt I'd done as there were some faint pencil marks on the 'left' section. And thinking about it I'm pretty sure I usually do knit left mitts and left socks (not that there's a difference but I try them on as I go along and the first sock is 'left') before right. Odd.

So now it's January - my least favourite month. I don't hate winter at all, I just hate January. So I'm going to make a concerted effort to keep myself cheerful this January. I have some more felt so I might make something colourful with that, and once my brother's mitt is done I'll knit something Just For Me. Actually I did a bit on my Peerie Flooers hat while I was away so I'll probably finish that in the next week or two - yay!

Back from the Frozen North

2012-01-02T22:58:00.005Z

We managed to pick the two worst days to be travelling through the Drumochter Pass - snowy parentheses to our little trip to Badenoch.

On the way.

On the way back. Not very much snow really but very dodgy visibility.

It turns out I'm really too tired to blog tonight - I blame the sleeping cat on my lap making me sleepy by suggestion. Good night!

Lucky me!

2011-12-29T11:27:00.007Z

My own Secret Santa is a star! Look at that bookmark! The whole present was lovely - the little tins, chocolate, the little silver shell, but the bookmark made specifically for me was just perfect! (Click on the pic to enlarge and you'll see what I mean)

It's been a lovely Christmas - lazy and easy-going. Presents were wonderful - knitting books, yarn, Kindle cover, Moomin postcard, chocolate liqueurs, Lush bath stuff, sword.. sword? Yes, my Beloved has been suggesting 'sword' as a present for everybody we know for the last umpteen years (he's not much help when it comes to suggesting things) and at last he's put his money where his mouth is:

Letter-opener!

I actually lol'd when I opened it. Isn't it cool? My Beloved (who knows about such things) reckons it's pretty good. Very swordy. I've been reading quite a bit of Terry Pratchett recently and reckon this is pretty much Feegle-sized. Nifty! The kids love it - every time something needs opened Miss Mouse yells 'Mama! We need your sword!'

Over the last few days I've been wondering how much sellotape can be safely consumed while tearing it off with one's teeth when wrapping presents. Just an idle thought, you understand. *cough* 'scuse me, furball..

A new culinary experience for me this Christmas were Cadbury Magical Elves, from Miss Mouse's selection box. Chocolate with popping candy (i.e. Spacedust for those who remember such things) in it! Weird, very weird. Too weird for Miss Mouse which is why I was trying it.

Aside from sellotape and Magical Elves, we've only been moderately indulgent on the culinary front - we never go over the top really. We had roast chicken on Christmas Day with things we like but not going overboard with 'all the trimmings'. Thanks to my Beloved shopping at Lidl we had Wildpreiselbeeren (lingonberry sauce) for the first time and we love it! A jar of cranberry sauce was on the table too but was largely ignored. The kids had homemade pizza, because they're not that bothered about roasts.

We haven't had any mince pies because I didn't buy any and couldn't be bothered to make any. We still have last year's Morrison's Christmas Pudding in the cupboard (use by April 2012 - maybe the whim'll take us by then). I quite like Christmas pudding but only in such minute quantities that it's not really worth bothering. It's so flamin' dense!

I started writing this post this morning but constant interruptions have derailed my train of thought. I think perhaps it's time I went to bed!

In which there is peace and quiet

2011-12-28T12:27:00.007Z

The kids are out at soft-play with their grandma, my Beloved has a bit of a cold and has gone back to bed, one cat is asleep (looking like a tortoiseshell-and-white cushion), the other is gazing out of the window at the horizontal rain, and I'm peaceably blogging. The weather has been wet and windy and for the last few days we've been more or less stuck inside so it's nice to effectively have the house to myself for a little while. Lovely and cosy though it's been, peace and quiet has been in shortish supply, although thankfully there were no Annoying Toys That Make Noises this year - we seem to be past that stage!

So here's what I've been up to!

My elderberry/onion-skin dye from just before Christmas turned out like this:

Photo taken on Christmas Day - there's dedication to natural dyeing for you!

I'm very pleased with the colour, a very subtle reddish-brown. I don't know if the elderberry (if that's what it was - may have been blackberry come to think of it) made much difference but it was certainly worth chucking it in, rather than out if you see what I mean!

The run-up to the festive season was all about secretive knitting - first a forum Secret Santa present for my friend CJ:

They're based on the Susie's Reading Mitts pattern that I like so much, with a few tweaks. The wool is St. Magnus DK by Orkney Angora, which is like cuddling a kitten! I made the cuff with a split in it and added a wrap around tab in a contrast colour (done on smaller needles for finer stitches) with a button - non-functional, it's just sewn on because I thought a button on a cuff would never stay done up! The buttons are by Susan Sharpe of Susan Sharpe Ceramics and just couldn't be more right for this project! Aren't they gorgeous? I bought a set of three and kept the third for myself - I have a plan for another hat-with-a-button. We had a sort of unofficial aiming-for-handmade theme to our Secret Santa swap this year, so, quite apart from the fact that they're just lovely buttons, it was nice to get them from a small-scale seller rather than an anonymous haberdashery department.

CJ is very creative and artistic so it was fun trying to create something special for her - she seems to like it anyway!

And there's the traditional Ooops-didn't-quite-finish-in-time-for-Christmas project - this year it was fingerless mitts for my brother:

The pattern is Coler by Stephen West and the first one knitted up so quickly that I was sure I'd get them finished way before Christmas. But I didn't count on December! It's not a difficult pattern by any means but the cable section does require a degree of concentration and decent light that I just didn't get enough of in December. So I wrapped up the finished one along with that picture of the second one and I'll finish them off this week - at least with gloves/mitts/socks there is the option of at least giving the completed one!

All wrapped up

2011-12-24T20:58:00.005Z

And time to relax..

Though I doubt there's human anywhere who can relax quite as thoroughly as a cat!

Enjoy the festivities everyone!

Baa and Moo

2011-12-23T22:39:00.005Z

Happiness is the smell of wet sheep.

Today was more restful - all the important stuff is done so the kids and I went to the museum and said hello to the young bull:

I've forgotten his name but he was very friendly.

And this afternoon I did a bit of dyeing with some leftover dye liquor (possibly elderberry?) I had in the freezer and a mixture of onion skins, mostly red. It's the first time I've done any dyeing in ages and the smell of wet wool was pleasantly familiar. A comforting smell, I always think. I'm leaving it to soak overnight this time - no idea what colour it'll turn out though it's a rich reddish-brown at the moment.

This evening I have been wrapping presents - imagine my eyes crossing with tiredness. I'm not done with the wrapping yet but at least I've broken the back of it and tomorrow night shouldn't be quite so chaotic. Yeah.

Reasons To Be Cheerful

2011-12-22T22:45:00.004Z

1. I like making pomanders. Okay, I get masses of indentations on my fingers, but it's worth it for the smell. Mmmmmm.. I also like my new table-cloth!

2. I was in Argos at quarter to ten this evening and Sainsbury just after that, but I'm done now! Apart from things like veg which My Beloved will get tomorrow. Bliss bliss bliss.

3. There's nothing quite like the smug glow you get from going to a Zumba class on the 22nd of December!

Too busy to be cheerful

2011-12-21T20:54:00.005Z

That's a glum title isn't it? It's not meant to be - it's just that I've only just realised that I missed Reasons To Be Cheerful last week - not that I wasn't necessarily cheerful, just that I was too busy to notice. It's all been a bit of a frenzy..

But.. school finished today, we're mostly organised for the festivities and my cat looks like Yoda:

It was the school nativity play this morning but, frustratingly, I did not get a single decent picture of Miss Mouse being an angel. She made a very cute angel though!

In the spirit of last-minute panic I finished the final owl-for-the-teacher last night:

Some new squares of felt arrived in the post this morning so I'll make a couple more owls I think, but without deadlines and just for the fun of it. In the meantime I'm off to watch a Next Gen episode - make it so!

Deep and crisp and even

2011-12-20T23:59:00.000Z

It's the annual tradition of digging out all the cookery books and trying to remember how to do royal icing - my books vary hugely in the quantities they think are required. I think I've got it right this year - enough coverage but not too deep (getting crisp but not quite even). I've discovered that the new 'natural' food colourings are not nearly as strong as the old-style best-not-ask food colourings. I usually add a drop or two of blue colouring to the icing to stop it looking yellow. Once I accidentally added a little too much and had a turquoise cake. This year I kept having to add more and more. I'm pleased with the result though.

It looks almost identical to last year's of course as I only have the two retro style cake decorations!

Maybe I'll tie a ribbon round it too.

Further to yesterday's marzipan musings, on checking the top shelf of the cupboard today I found a spare packet of marzipan from last year - clearly this has happened before.

Tinselly

2011-12-19T11:01:00.001Z

I'm cheating - it's Tuesday morning. I was too dozy to blog last night. I switched off the 'puter, then I remembered I hadn't actually written this - which had been the point of switching it on in the first place! Easily distracted, see..

It was that kind of day. At twenty to five I'd suddenly remembered that Miss Mouse was supposed to be at her dance class Christmas party at five. Cue mad panic! We made it on time though and she enjoyed herself - in the picture above are the decorations at the venue, a masonic hall of all places!

Despite the inherent chaos of the week, things are reasonably well under control (or so I keep telling myself while madly writing Christmas cards and to-do lists) and starting to feel a bit sparkly. I put the marzipan on the Christmas cake last night, which is always fun! Like playing with play-dough only the smell is better. I'd bought two packets of marzipan but actually as I prefer a fairly thin layer of marzipan on my cake I only used one, so I'm wondering what I can do with the other packet. I don't think a last minute stollen is feasible!

Potential disaster

2011-12-18T22:57:00.003Z

On the left, vegetable oil; on the right, lime juice cordial. I like a glass of soda-water and lime now and then. I can see that at some point something is going to go wrong. Emulsively wrong.

A Christmas Carol

2011-12-17T22:39:00.006Z

I'm reading A Christmas Carol at the moment - I've never actually read it before, though obviously was fairly familiar with the gist of the story, and I'm encountering a problem. Quite a nice problem actually - I'm not complaining!

From the very first line I've got the Muppets elbowing in. I love The Muppet Christmas Carol. It's one of the great Muppet films (second only to the sublime Muppet Treasure Island - sorry Mr Depp but this is the definitive pirate film) and I love it to bits, so I can't read 'Marley was dead to begin with' without thinking 'the Marleys were dead to begin with'.

I'm tickled to see that the rather po-faced Wikipedia page for The Muppet Christmas Carol has this to say about the Marleys - 'One notable difference from the original story is the addition of Jacob Marley's brother, Robert, who was not present in Dickens' story, to allow the use of both Statler and Wardorf. It is suggested this name was chosen as an oblique reference to musician Bob Marley'. Just let me roll my eyes there - it's not an oblique reference, it's a joke! Muppet films are littered with jokes! It's what makes them funny!

Anyway, I'm enjoying the original. It's funnier than I expected, the only Dickens I'd read before being Great Expectations (which was okay but not really my cup of tea). I like it! Though the Muppet film follows it quite closely so I'm not really getting the feeling of reading anything new!

Enough of that - we finally got our Christmas tree up today! It was weird opening the box containing our artificial tree - I vividly remember packing it away last year.

Fortunately I'd had the foresight to re-label the colour-coded branches (different sizes for different layers) and change the 'apple-green' which was barely distinguishable from the 'yellow' branches and caused a lot of confusion last year. Boring, but I'm glad I did it - it saved a lot of time this year. And made me feel like an organised person! The boy-cat managed to knock the tree over before we even got the decorations on it but hasn't actually climbed it yet. Yet. It'll happen - he doesn't know that he's too big to climb Christmas trees.

Anyway here it is, in its fuzzy glory:

The stripey tail at the top left is the giant toy tiger that lives on top of our bookcase. It's adds a Calvin-and-Hobbesian element to our lives.

Fa-la-la-la

2011-12-16T21:07:00.009Z

You'll have gathered, I suppose, from the brevity of my last post that Thursday is a busy day for me. Yesterday was even more hectic than usual because there was a school disco in the evening. The school carpark was pretty icy when we left (before the end - Miss Mouse was up past her bedtime and had hit the Wall, metaphorically speaking) but it had started raining so I thought it was getting warmer. So I was bit surprised when I opened the curtains this morning to see the White Stuff again!

That would be my Optimistic Hollyhock

As the rest of the family appear to be asleep I shall enjoy this moment of solitude and witter on for a bit. The other day I was singing while driving (my best time to sing) and found that I was singing 'O Come All Ye Faithful' and I still knew a whole chunk of it despite not having been to a carol service since leaving school. I was three verses in before I had a blank - amazing the stuff that sticks. And I got to thinking about Christmas carols - I do like a good carol. They don't mean anything to me in a religious sense, I'm an atheist, but I do like to sing and they're crackin' tunes (well, some of them are). And then there's the emotional connotations of memories of childhood, singing carols at school, the build-up to the Christmas holidays, the barely suppressed excitement and so on. They're all mixed in with that.

I'd never have said as a child that 'O Come All Ye Faithful' was a cheery song, but now it's one of my favourites, perhaps because it's combined in my mind with really glorious Renaissance art - 'sing choirs of angels, sing in exultation' and in my head it's the inside of the dome of Florence Cathedral, mixed up with the puffy-eyed, sturdy angels of the northern Renaissance and their brightly-coloured wings, with a heft dose of Giotto thrown in for good measure.

A very weird Christmas carol is We Three Kings - it seems to start out quite jaunty (perhaps with the alternative childish lyrics running through my head - '..one in a taxi, one in a car/One on a scooter pipping his hooter..'), but as it goes on it just gets more and more plodding and grim and depressing until you get to 'Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying', you can't help but feel that perhaps the myrrh wasn't the best idea, and even 'Star of wonder, star of night' can't get it going again. It's plodding out there with the Little Donkey for company, on the dusty road...

The Holly and the Ivy is a great one - bucketloads of pagan symbolism, lots of colour, mad rhymes, cheery tune. Can't go wrong with that!

The First Nowell's another good one. I've never really understood 'on a cold winter's night that was so deep' though - deep? It does hint at primary school poetry - 'Quick! We need something that rhymes with sheep! Deep! That'll do!' And that for me is part of its charm.

And of course While Shepherds Washed Their Socks.. we sang that so often at school that I struggle to remember the real words - it's such a vivid image! It's another one I imagine in a Renaissance style - shepherds on the hillside; a wooden tub, half-barrel most likely; blazing stars in the sky; couple of rainbow-winged angels hovering with a washboard between them; and some rather elegant hand-knitted socks. And the sheep have wandered off. Sheep do that.

One we sang at school a few times was called something like 'Now Light One Thousand Christmas Lights' which as far as I can work out from five minutes googling is originally a Swedish song (the title seems to vary according to the translation). It was quite a nice tune and made a change from the very familar 'Away in a Manger' and the like, which is why it stuck in my head I suppose.

Enough wittering - wanna see a flock of owls? Well, three, in a tree:

This was taken yesterday. Today the tree is all frosty. The red and burgundy one is for one of Miss Mouse's teachers (she has two), the red and yellow one is for the Boy's teacher and the blue and brown one is for us. I'm halfway through the one for Miss Mouse's other teacher. It's all very soothing. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy handsewing, especially with felt as there's no hemming or Fear of Fraying.

Oh dear, I just yawned, hit a key at random and thought I'd lost this post. And the cat has reached his chewing the cables time of evening (it's a hint to feed him) so I'd better stop there!

Ta-daa!

2011-12-15T22:13:00.001Z

Sickeningly proud of this!

Zesty

2011-12-14T21:13:00.005Z

Mmmmmmmmmmm, nice citrussy smells. I've been drying orange, lemon and lime slices today. Among other things.

I've also done a lot of washing-up, finished another owl and made a hot-water bottle cover for the Boy out of his old fleece dressing-gown. The photographs I took of the hot-water bottle cover came out a bit rubbish so I'll take few more tomorrow and show them off in tomorrow's post because I am inordinately proud of how well it turned out! The Boy likes it and Miss Mouse has already complained that I didn't do one for her too, but the Boy was making do with a pillowcase for a hot-water bottle cover while Miss Mouse has a perfectly good knitted cover made by my mum years ago - probably when I was a student actually.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the dried citrus slices - I saw a picture somewhere of a kind of wreath made out of dried orange slices but I don't think I have enough. Perhaps with large beads for spacers. I have some from my old beaded car-seat cover, though I'd need to paint them. Hmm. Or maybe I could make paper beads..

Return of the garter-stitch square

2011-12-13T21:57:00.005Z

Back to the 'comfort knitting'..

Today was vile weatherwise - peaking in horribleness just at school picking-up time of course! I've probably got red marks all over my face from the hail pinging off it at warp speed (it's quite breezy again) . The children were not vastly enthusiastic about being out in it either. The curious thing is that from the house the weather seems worse than last Thursday when it was a red weather warning. Today was yellow upgrading to amber - such lovely warm sunny colours they use! How much more depressing would it be if they chose 'mottled mauve' like the colour of my hands in this weather? So yeah, it sounds a whole lot worse from the house - probably the wind is coming from a different direction, more to the south perhaps. I wonder how many roof tiles we'll have to replace - they appear to be stuck on with blutak or something similarly not-all-that-sticky.

Tonight was knitting coven night and although I fully intended to go my train was cancelled due to a train fault (whatever that is - not weather-related presumably) and the alternative was driving which I didn't fancy in this weather. So I stayed at home and went on with the project I'd intended to work on if I'd been out - nice easy garter stitch squares, perfect for when I'm tired and really need to clean my contact lenses! I really should see how many squares I've made so far but they're kinda scattered around the house.

I did a whole lot of Christmas shopping this morning so tomorrow I'm intending to be doing stuff in the house, maybe I'll even wrap some presents and write some cards. That would be very organised of me!

Ooops, just edited out a typo in my title - 'grater-stitch' indeed :-D.

Braiding from the past

2011-12-12T22:21:00.005Z

Once upon a time, a long time ago, when we did Viking and Mediaeval period historical re-enactment, I learned how to do various types of braiding, mostly from a really helpful website. Time passed, I had babies and gave up re-enactment, and forgot about the useful website.

Then one day recently I needed a bit of braid for an owl hanging-loop and couldn't remember how to do the one I wanted. So I went looking and found a more modern incarnation of Phiala's String Page, and the bit I remembered best, the braiding instructions!

The braid I wanted was finger-loop braiding which I got quite quick at back then. Not quite the case now. It took a while to get back into shuffling the loops down my fingers and I felt as if I had about 20 fingers, but it's amazing how things do come back to you. Muscle memory I suppose. The one in the picture is a bit uneven but that comes with practice as I recall. Actually it should have been done with five loops but I measured the wool wrongly so I just did four loops. You can do more loops though - quite a few more with additional hands!

a mixture

2011-12-11T22:30:00.006Z

I spent the morning at the Museum of Rural Life's Christmas event with the kids and my mother-in-law. The Christmas event is always one of my favourites but unfortunately as the kids had swimming classes to get to after lunch we didn't have as much time as usual so didn't get up to the farm. They usually have pomander-making going on in the farmhouse and the fire lit - it's the only time of the year that it's lit and that makes it all the more special! Must make time next year.

We did get to the craft fair, which was varied as usual. My mother-in-law bought me some more of the pear and ginger jam I like so much and we got some bags of tablet. I've been meaning to try making tablet myself, never having done it before, but just haven't got round to it. I don't like sweeties, but I do like tablet, even though it's really really really sweet. You just can't have very much of it at once!

I also got a snowball candle for my friend, the kids made Christmas cards in the craft room, and Miss Mouse and I made made 'mulled wine teabags' at one of the museum's craft-demonstration-type stalls. I don't really like mulled wine (or actually wine at all), but having chosen the proprtions of the spices myself and limited the cinnamon, I'll have to give it another go.

Tired now - hot water bottle, book (currently The Graveyard Book) and bed beckon.

lighting up

2011-12-10T21:59:00.004Z

Thaw again, but the outside Christmas lights go up so we're getting more festive. Our lights are only boring white and are a bit restrained compared with some in our street - the kids would love it if they were a bit more colourful. But they're quite pretty.

This morning I went into Glasgow to get a couple of things and while I was on the train I thought about things I was going to blog about. And now I can't remember what they were. I should write these things down. There was definitely something about wool...

Reasons To Be Cheerful

2011-12-09T13:57:00.008Z

What I was going to say for my first Reason was that, looking on the bright side, at least Hurricane Bawbag got rid of the last of the snow. And then this happened:

This week has been All About The Weather. But it is December after all.

So reasons reasons reasons..

1) Pottering around and crafting - sewing owls, doing a bit of knitting and making stuff with paper. This has been taking my mind off the stress of shopping centres in December. There's nothing quite like a panic attack in Primark is there?

2) The positive side of shopping centres in December is meeting up with my friend L for coffee and chocolate and orange tart (*drool*) and a mooch around the shops.

3) Sleep. I love sleep. I don't get nearly enough of it. I love my bed. I love cold nights with snow falling outside, a book and a hot-water-bottle. I love falling asleep with a cat curled up next to my feet. The cats used to be barred from our room - we even put a lock on the door because they could shove it open, but now that they've stopped pouncing on feet at random times in the night and just curl up purring we've decided to let them in if they want. They seem happier.
I came home from the dreaded shopping centre today with much-needed new pyjamas and some brushed cotton trousers which are described as 'loungewear'. So pyjama bottoms for people who don't usually wear pjs. They're a sort of pastel tartan and not deeply flattering for those of us blessed with curves, but so warm and comfortable. Yay for winter!

owl

2011-12-08T22:50:00.004Z

It was an unexpected day with the kids as the schools were all closed due to high winds/scarey weather forecasts. So, going a bit stir crazy again....

On the other hand, I finally had the chance to finish the owl, make a Bambi casserole and start another owl (very nearly finished it too - much quicker this time round).

Folowing on, from a conversation with my brother yesterday - how do you spell the thing owls are supposed to say but actually don't? Tu-whit tu-whoo? The more you think about the more your mind goes blank (cue spooky music). Or perhaps that's just me and my brother.

shiver

2011-12-07T23:03:00.004Z

Ever notice how much colder it can feel once a thaw starts? Wind-chill I suppose.

I'm beginning to struggle with this Advent Blogging lark - too tired tonight I suppose. I helped the kids write their Christmas cards for school tonight - 49 cards between the two of them and Miss Mouse insisted on writing all of hers herself. I would have at least done the envelopes for her if she'd wanted. But she didn't. At the beginning of it she didn't know how to write 'from' - she's fairly confident about it now!

A Christmas musing

2011-12-06T21:51:00.004Z

I've been thinking today (inspired partly by Mooncalf Makes' blog post on a similar topic) about the pressure we put ourselves under in the run-up to Christmas. It does seem a bit bizarre. A few years ago I bought a magazine with the usual 'how to survive christmas - eight million simple tips for your best Christmas ever!!!!' article. It included instructions on how to decorate the back of your dining-chairs with a 'simple but chic' (no doubt) arrangement of something like white ribbons and mistletoe. I was impressed that in half a page they'd managed to create a wholly new way to make people feel inadequate at Christmas.

I don't do chic at Christmas - or at any other time really. Christmas is chaotic and colourful and I do not decorate my chairs, at Christmas or ever. I can just imagine the reactions of the kids and the cats! There are times when I would love simple classy white lights and decorations of course - serene and tranquil. But even pre-kids that never happened...

somebody designs boot tread patterns

2011-12-05T21:15:00.010Z

That was today's odd thought. Somebody has to sit down and design the tread of boots and shoes. And tyres I suppose, though I imagine that has slightly less to do with interesting patterns and bit more to do with function.

Imagine them meeting the Queen - 'And what do you do?' 'I design boot tread patterns Ma'am' 'That must be very interesting' (actually this may be King Thistle).

Someone designs the patterns on upholstery for trains and buses (coaches) too. And curtains-round-beds in hospitals (this was a thing that struck me when I was drugged up to the eyeballs* and floating round the ceiling after giving birth to Miss Mouse). Well, whoever they are, I praise them, bringing abstract patterns and odd colour combinations to the world.

Right, so, today. Yeah, more of the white stuff.

the 'school run'

The cats didn't know whether to go in or out, so settled for both, at frequent intervals of course. I did this and that (mostly opening and shutting doors for the cats, come to think of it), and had a go at sewing. Just hand-sewing - I still haven't figured out the ~~accursed~~ sewing machine yet. Wanna see? I had a ridiculous amount of fun playing with the the possibilities for the eyes:

'paranoid'

'exasperated'

But I'll just do eyes-forward for this one I think. I'm looking forward to the embroidery bit. I don't think it'll turn out as good as the ones in the book or the ones Andamento made but so far it's easier than I expected. Quite absorbing. I do need good light though. Ooh, just realised it's Monday (d'oh, need more sleep) so this is a Making Monday post!

* only co-codamol actually but it made me reeeeally spaaaced ooout.

the white stuff

2011-12-04T21:52:00.004Z

Dyer's chamomile in the snow

If there's something I really like, it's watching snow fall. It's fascinating - the layers of depth you see, some falling faster than others, some at different angles, odd little flurries swirling up and down again. Today we had snow showers, enough for a scattering of white, just a thin layer, but enough to change the quality of the light. And then there was the weird flat sky you get just before a snow shower - not obvious cloud, just grey blankness. It intrigues me. It's woolly hat and scarf weather! Hurray! (A Pollyanna moment :-D)

There has been much secret knitting today - the kids have their swimming classes on a Sunday afternoon so I usually take some knitting to be getting on with while they're splashing around. The cafe by the pool has good lighting so today I was taking advantage of that to do some fiddly sewing-up.

Therapeutic

2011-12-03T20:51:00.007Z

Now I'm not a papercrafts person really, but I do enjoy a bit of cutting-out and the like at Christmas. The kids and I had a whale of a time making paper chains last year, and they've already started looking through our various kids-art-and-craft books for ideas for this year. But for me it's all about little birdies this year! The original design (from Christmas Crafting in No Time by Claire Youngs - a grown-up art-and-craft book) has quilled wings but one of the lovely things about that book is that it prompts so many ideas. Andamento has already adapted the quilled-wing birdies design to give them concertina-folded wings. I'm going to try that and the original quilled wings too, but for the moment painting patterns on with white paint has been my little pleasure. A lot of the ideas for the patterns came from other projects in the book actually. Happiness is a fine paintbrush and some white paint!

I'm not sure what I'll do with the birds - maybe string them on a ribbon so they can be strung up like the paper chains. Or I could just dot them round the place, perching on picture frames and so on. I'd love to hang them on the Christmas tree but they'd get chewed to bits by our Christmas-tree-climbing cat. He's really far too big to climb Christmas trees but he had a good go at it last year and I don't expect him to have outgrown the notion this year.

It seems weird not talking about knitting more, but it's still all secret stuff! Do any other Ravelers mentally sing 'Ravelreeee, Ravelry' like 'Valerie (the Steve Winwood song from the early Iron Age, i.e. when I were lass)? Just me? Ah well..

Jinxed

2011-12-02T12:48:00.005Z

Noooo, I shouldn't have mentioned the cavity-wall insulation! Bad idea! Things did not work out. That, coupled with my Beloved falling off his motorbike (due to invisible ice) and me falling on my backside trying to see if he was okay (also invisible ice, and he was fine), meant that it wasn't a great morning. So I cut out lots of little red birds to calm myself down. Cutting-out's very soothing.

I'm trying Advent Blogging - a post a day 'til Christmas. Some of them will no doubt be very short, some of them might only be a picture, but ah, it'll be a bit of a laugh. After all, there are such gems as the school nativity coming up...

Reasons To Be Cheerful-ish

2011-12-01T11:22:00.011Z

Yay! It's the 1st of December! (Yes, you knew that).

And it's week 7 of Planet Penny's Reasons To Be Cheerful! I don't think I've done seven weeks of it yet though - have I? I think I missed the first week.

The wind has dropped a bit and it's not actually raining - at the moment anyway. It was sleeting as I dropped the kids off at school (bitterly regretted forgetting my woolly hat). And I've just gone round the house and changed my many calenders over to their new pictures! I love turning to a new calendar page. So that's my first reason to be cheerful. Do you like our Santa Claus in that picture? Miss Mouse made it yesterday - the schools were closed due to the strike, and we were stuck inside due to colds and grim weather, so apart from bickering, telly and the Wii there was a little making going on. I like his curly beard!

Reason number two is a much delayed ta-daa! Finally, finally, the item fondly known as Bogroll Barbie (though she's not a Barbie, she's a cheap pound-shop 'fashion doll' equivalent) is FINISHED! Hurrah, huzzah, rejoicing in the streets!

I painted the base yesterday, and there she is in all her glory, on her little pedestal! Loo-roll dolls are just the most bonkers creation aren't they? I sometimes wonder who first thought 'You know, that toilet roll really needs a crinoline!'

I like this picture a lot - it's pleasingly strange..

Reason three - well, I don't want to jinx it, but we should, fingers crossed, touch wood, being cautiously optimistic here, be getting our cavity wall insulation done tomorrow. I'm being very cautious about this because we've had people out three times to do this, but this time.. well, let's hope. In any case, we're reasonably well-prepared for winter:

This time last year we were up to our oxters in snow - well, slight exaggeration but looking back at my 365 blog, this is how things were on the 1st of December 2010. Chilly. I'm working on my mum's premise which is that if we're well-prepared for winter it won't be such a bad one!

You know what? We forgot the advent calenders this morning! Something to look forward to once the kids are home from school :-D.

a little Making Monday

2011-11-28T20:47:00.007Z

Can you tell what is yet?

This is something I've been meaning to get back to for a while. Can you guess? Well, actually it's a base/stand for a loo-roll doll:

As you can see from this In Progress picture her legs are too long, so I've made the base with a hole in it to sort out the disparity in height. So far so good, but I started this project two years ago for my friend's daughter! The dress itself was a doddle (and really really good fun!) to make but the base has been a bit of a nightmare. I tried various things but ended up using layers of cardboard stuck together, which was okay, but putting papier-mâché on it to smoothe out the surface has not come naturally!

So anyway, today I finally went into a paper-and-glue frenzy and got it done. It's still drying but with any luck I'll be able to paint it tomorrow (pink naturally) and be finally done! Yay! Fortunately my friend's daughter still thinks such things are cool...

It's so great to able to write about something I'm making, however pathetic it is!

More Reasons To Be Cheerful

2011-11-27T10:18:00.007Z

Reasons To Be Cheerful are all I ever post at the moment - though that's not a bad thing of course!

I'm doing a lot of bloggy catching-up this morning, which is lovely. I seem to have missed a lot though! It's been a hectic week - my Beloved had a stinking cold and was off work for a couple of days, then he passed it on to me (so generous!) and the kids have had a busy week. But despite the snifflings and snufflings, I have Reasons!

Reason 1 - Miss Mouse had her very first dance exams this week. Due to a mix-up in the paperwork she actually did four when she was supposed to do three - she ended up doing Disco as well as Tap, Majorettes and Cheerleading - but did very well! Shh, I'm not telling her yet, so it's a surprise when she goes to her class this week, but she's passed them all. Actually I get the impression that with the little ones you'd probably have to have two left feet and hit the examiner over the head with a baton to fail, but nevertheless I'm very proud of her. Not least because it's so very far outwith my experience! Anyway, here she is as she was about to go in to the cheerleading exam:

A blur of pompoms

2) The Boy's tooth fell out! It hung in there until Tuesday lunchtime though, persistent thing that it was. It got to the rather gross state of being able to spin back to front and he was getting thoroughly fed-up with it but persistence on his part paid off. And very fortunately their school photos weren't taken until Wednesday morning. No picture of the momentous dental occasion as at the moment I only have one very blurry gap-toothed picture taken under electric light - it's so murky when they head off to school and much the same when they come home that photography in decent light is impossible during the week. And they're off at their Grandma's so I can't take one now - shame as it's a bright morning. We've had a wet week and three days of strong winds so the sunshine today is wonderful. The cats are outside making up for lost time! They were most offended by the weather and there was a bit of regression to climbing the curtains.

3) Tomato - there is an actual tomato on the Boy's tomato plant:

I think I may have mentioned it a few weeks ago, when it was still green, but look at it now! I never did get round to repotting the plant, but it doesn't seem to mind too much.

Secret knitting is progressing nicely, Christmas shopping is progressing (but I wouldn't say nicely), and I'm going to 'feed' the Christmas cake. I might even do some mordanting this morning..

Reasons To Be Cheerful

2011-11-19T20:27:00.005Z

Reason 1. Wheeeeeeee - it's my trashy-telly-time-of-the-year! It's I'm A Celebrity..Get Me Out Of Here time! There's no defending it - I just love it. I love the the way Dec says 'may cost considerably more', I love z-list celebs I haven't heard of eating bugs, I love the inventive ridiculousness of the trials and celebrity chests. Add Stuart Hall wetting himself laughing and it'd be It's A Knockout all over again. I love to wonder whether I could do better than the celebs at the trials - in the case of Sinitta's one yesterday, almost certainly!

Reason 2. That incredible feeling of freedom you get when you get called for jury service but they don't need you after all! I thought I'd be spending much of this week at the High Court in Glasgow, but instead I've been doing things like Christmas shopping and going out for lunch with a friend.

Reason 3. The Boy has the wibbliest wobbliest wobbly front tooth ever. It should fall out tonight or tomorrow. The school photos are being done at the start of the week - will my boy have the most engaging gappy-toothed smile for his school photo? Will he? Will he?

Has anybody else got the same problem as me with blogging in November and December? Which is that I'm making things which I desperately want to witter on about, but they're Christmas presents so I can't blog about them in case the recipients reads my blog. Oh the frustration! I'll have to have a ta-daa binge on Boxing Day!

And just to finish, a picture which makes me smile and which I should have had for my last Reasons To Be Cheerful post:

Tap-shoes and scabby knee!

Reasons To Be Cheerful

2011-11-11T20:47:00.007Z

They're very small and domestic reasons to be cheerful this week!

1. My Peerie Flooers hat is progressing nicely. I've done virtually no knitting for the last week or so for one reason or another, so it's nice to get back to it.

2. Miss Mouse is enjoying her dance classes and it makes both laugh and smile to see her practising in the middle of the living-room. I never thought I'd have a child who does tap, majorettes and cheerleading! I was going to take a picture of her brand-new tap shoes to illustrate my point (she's so excited about them, she took them to school to show her teacher!) but it's too dark now.

3. Weird low winter light makes me smile. I took this picture yesterday when there was no direct sunlight in the garden but indirect sunlight (bouncing off the house) was lighting up what's left of the nasturtiums.

Looking at other blogs today and seeing various beautiful poppy pictures for Armistice Day, it occurred to me that I was sure I'd planted poppy seeds this year, but none came up. Odd. I'd thought they were supposed to be fairly straight-forward to grow. Maybe next year!

Poppies at Kittochside, June 2011.

Christmas Cake

2011-11-09T11:21:00.006Z

So this is how I spent my morning. A bit of frenzied weighing, chopping and mixing, then several hours of inhaling delicious cake-baking smells. Mmmmm..

Anyway, here's what I did!

This is not my own recipe, it's a Sue Lawrence Christmas cake recipe with a few tweaks for personal taste.

The tweaks being that I don't like cinnamon, ground cloves, mixed peel or brandy so I've made some substitutions - ground ginger instead of the cinnamon and ground cloves, chopped dried figs (and actually a few chopped dates this year as well) instead of the mixed peel, and whisky instead of brandy. I always use whisky instead of brandy in Christmas cakes and it always works well! And this is what I like so much about Christmas cakes, they with stand quite a bit of tweaking - I've tried quite a few recipes over the years, substituting when they call for such horrors as mixed peel, glace cherries, cinnamon and nutmeg. They've all been fine, but I like the Sue Lawrence recipe as a base the best so it's the one I've stuck with for the last few years.

I tried one recipe one year which called for a couple of tablespoons of treacle which was a bit of a 'mare because a) treacle is such a pain to work with and got everywhere and b) I don't use treacle for anything else so I had the tin sitting oozing in the cupboard until the end of time (or until I got fed up with it).

Ingredients:
250g self-raising flour
1 ½ tsp mixed spice
three-quarters of a teaspoon of ground ginger
50g ground almonds
400g currants
250g sultanas
400g raisins
50g dried figs, chopped
50g dried apricots, chopped
50g walnuts, roughly chopped
50g whole (unblanched) almonds, roughly chopped
250g unsalted butter, softened
200g dark muscovado sugar
grated zest and juice of 1 unwaxed lemon
5 large free-range eggs
100ml whisky (any cheap stuff). Plus will need some for 'feeding'.

Method
1. Preheat the oven to 150°C/330F/Gas 2, and prepare tin (grease and line with baking parchment).
[Actually I don't preheat the oven until just before stage 3 because it takes me forever to do all the weighing out and chopping]

2. Sift the flour spices and ground almonds into a bowl. Then add the currants, sultanas, raisins, figs, dried apricots and nuts. Stir thoroughly.

3. In a separate bowl cream the butter, sugar and lemon zest until fluffy, then beat in the eggs one by one, adding a teaspoon of the flour mixture with each egg.

4. Stir the egg mixture into the flour mixture with the lemon juice and whisky.

5. Spoon into the prepared tin. Level the top and bake for two hours. Very loosely cover with a sheet of greaseproof paper and continue to bake for another hour, making three hours in total - but test for readiness after two and three quarter hours' cooking. The cake is cooked when a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean and the sides have started to shrink from the edges of the tin.

6. Remove to a wire rack to cool. Once completely cold, wrap in foil and store in an airtight container 'til Christmas. removing every two weeks to 'feed': unwrap, prick the top with a long skewer and spoon over 1-2 tbsp of whisky. Reseal as before.

Notes
The original recipe calls for 350g each of raisins, currants and sultanas but I vary the amounts of each from year to year (providing it adds up to 1050g) - I prefer a dark cake so tend to use fewer sultanas and make up the weights with raisins and currants. Last year the proportions were 450g raisins, 350g currants, 250g sultanas, but this year I fancied a higher proportion of currants.

--------

I have some dried fruit left so I'm considering making mincemeat next. I've never made it before - I usually buy a jar of mincemeat with good intentions, then not get round to making mince pies. Maybe I will this time!

Bring it on

2011-11-08T13:09:00.007Z

I have a snow shovel and weather-proof boots. I am ready*!

I carry a spade in the boot of the car in the winter but really a snow shovel is much better. My search for unwaxed lemons took me to the supermarket today and they were selling snow-shovels, so there I was at the checkout with a snow-shovel, a bag of unwaxed lemons, some onions and a jar of coffee. Somehow it would have felt less silly if I'd had a huge trolley of shopping with the shovel perched on top.

I found myself humming the Harry Potter film music as I shopped - eventually it occurred to me that it was because I felt like I was lugging a broom around!

I had plans to make my Christmas cake today but by the time I got back from the shop it was really too late to start - it takes hours to cook and I'm not the kind of person who can leave the oven on while going to get the kids from school. I'd worry the house was burning down the whole time. Ridiculous really - I mean nothing ever goes wrong with the oven when I'm in the house, why would it in the 15 minutes I'm out? But there you go - it's my superpower, excessive worrying. Hard to save the world with it, admittedly, but then superpowers aren't always practical are they?

I might go and cut a few of what's left of the flowers in the garden - the kitchen window-sill is looking a bit drab today:
We had a few days of cold bright weather and I cleaned the kitchen window on Sunday because the low sunlight was really highlighting how spattered it was with, I dunno, washing up liquid maybe? Now normal service has been resumed and we're back to dreich, I feel I needn't have bothered! But a few of the last sweetpeas might perk the window-sill up a bit. Look at the Boy's tomato plant though! It was grown from seed at school then brought home and left to me to deal with (ha ha..). I was just wondering if he'd notice if I chucked it out, though I always feel tremendously guilty throwing plants out, when a little tomato appeared on it!

Later:

What d'you reckon? Better?

*Actually I am not quite ready 'til I've got the kids new boots. Then I am ready.

The demon drink

2011-11-07T21:16:00.004Z

Or to be more accurate, our first attempt at home-brewing. I love that picture above, it looks so peculiar. But it's just the bottles sitting inside the brewing tub.

So there we are. Doesn't look much but tastes quite nice! We used a home-brewing kit and had fun doing it.

A Walk in the Park

2011-11-05T21:19:00.008Z

After two days stuck inside with the unwell child, today the sun came out and Miss M had perked up enough for a trip to the country park.

I am actually Too Tired To Blog - good night!

Reasons To Be Cheerful: the search for optimism

2011-11-04T12:57:00.006Z

It's Reasons To Be Cheerful time again and I'm discovering that for me the end of the week is not the optimum time for optimism! I've had a peely-wally Miss Mouse off school yesterday and today so a lot of my time and energy has been taken with that. But there are always reasons, so here we go:

1) Things we'd forgotten. My brother recently got a slide scanner and has been working through a box of colour slides (remember them?) that our parents re-found among their stuff. They'd thought the slides were long lost so were delighted, but as their slide projector was long lost they'd no way of seeing what there was. So most evenings my brother scans a few slides and bungs them in Dropbox for us to look at. Here's a classic:

These are old pictures that haven't seen the light of day for decades (that's me in that picture). Some of the slides have quite a bit of damage to them - see the purple spots on that one? But just to see them at all is fantastic!

2) A bit of silly telly. New season of The Big Bang Theory - yay!

3) A smidge of sunshine and a coffee outside is better than nothing. I like being outside but sometimes there's not much opportunity. I've borrowed this idea this from The Philosophy of Lists, another Making Winterer, who has decided to try to have a cuppa outside every day. I know I won't manage it every day - the climate and my garden are against me - but every half-decent day I'll make the effort. Today I sneaked out into the garden while Miss M was watching Numberjacks and bloody blissful it was too (stir crazy? me?). I did the same thing yesterday and it was somewhat less blissful. Cat2 discovered she could climb up the old bit of trellis (remnant of a piece of fence) in the corner and get up onto the garage roof.

Getting down of course was less easy. It all got a bit farcical - Miss Mouse was feverish and asleep so I was tiptoeing around trying to extend a ladder quietly* while hissing at the cat. I got a ladder up but she was having much too much fun scampering about the roof to come anywhere near me. Eventually she made her own way down but I don't know how. Teleportation most likely. This cat has ladder phobia - the noise of ladders that is. Every time there are window-cleaners are in the street she runs round the house growling out of all the windows. Maybe this has cured her! What's funny about the growling is that our other cat, her brother, has picked up the habit from her and now thinks that ladders are a legitimate threat!

So, yeah, peaceful cup of coffee in the fresh air!

*Not possible.

Making Winter : toast

2011-11-03T09:22:00.009Z

The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

It would have to be the twitter of Twitter for me, and I don't have a fender or a fireside unfortunately, but I do like a bit of toast.

This post is mostly because I was reading The Wind in the Willows to my son last night and got to the bit above in the chapter about the annoying Mr Toad's escape from prison. I can't stand Toad, the book would be so much better without him. Ratty and Mole pottering about in boats and bumping into demigods - what could be nicer? I do like that description of toast though, and it occurred to me as I read it how appropriate it is for Making Winter, finding pleasure in the small things in winter. Toast is all very well in summer but in winter it's an indulgence. All the better if it's made with nice bread, rather than the cheap brown bread I got in a hurry yesterday, but even cheap-bread-toast is nice on a cold day. My Beloved occasionally makes bread with our breadmaker (mostly used for pizza dough) and has recently branched out into making the most delicious oat-rich rolls. Honestly they'd make you drool...

Making Winter : baking

2011-11-02T15:52:00.005Z

Aaah, it's all so idyllic - pottering round with the ingredients, happily sifting flour*, enjoying the warm smell of baking drifting through the house. So cosy, so familiar..

.. so disastrous.

I do like baking but sometimes it Just Goes Wrong, and that's what happened today. The recipe was for banana bread, which I'm not that keen on really, but I had some bananas going mushy and I thought the kids might like it. I'm not sure what happened - it was looking fine on the top, and the skewer came out clean but when I took it out of the tin the middle was mushy and the bottom third was glued to the tin. I bunged it back in the oven for a bit longer on the off-chance, but it didn't really work out. I'm not too worried - at least it wasn't my Christmas cake! I'm planning on doing that next week and I would cry if that went wrong! I'm not sure I can be bothered trying the banana bread again, though I think that was what my brother baked a lot of last year and his was fine. Maybe I should get his recipe.

Still, the house is full of baking smells, could be worse!

* Apparently some people hate sifting flour and icing sugar and begrudge the time it takes - it's my favourite bit of the whole process! I sift even when I don't have to just because I like it!

Making Monday and Making Winter - neeps and knives

2011-11-01T10:33:00.013Z

This is a combined Making Monday and Making Winter post. Making Monday is, I suppose, slightly on hiatus because our glorious leader, Natalie of the Yarn Yard who started it, is away on holiday, snowed-in in Boston last I heard, but it's a good blogging habit now. Making Winter is silverpebble's and thriftyhousehold's idea for this winter, in an attempt to embrace the winter. I don't really have a problem with the winter, which is probably just as well, and Hallowe'en is the first episode of winter fun for me. Anything involving fire is pretty much a good thing in the winter - neepie lanterns at Hallowe'en, bonfires and fireworks on Guy Fawkes night, candles at Christmas, and then the most incandescent of the lot, Up Helly Aa, enjoyed vicariously by webcam!

Yesterday afternoon was spent doing one of my favourite things - making neepie lanterns. I pushed the boat out that this year (at 50p a neep I think I can manage it just this once) and made two. One was for putting in the living-room window and one to take out with us when we went out guising.

A neep is much harder work than a pumpkin and I always have skinned knuckles or blisters or both to show for it, but it's really worth the effort. Hallowe'en isn't Hallowe'en without the smell of singed neep!

This is my preferred method - slice the top off and cross-hatch the flesh with a sharp knife. This makes it easier to start gouging it out.

After that it's a bit of a free-for-all - knife, spoon, swear-words, all have their place. These two didn't actually take all that long to do.

This year I managed to convince the Boy to come out guising with us - it's not usually his cup of tea but I pointed out that he only gets few years to do this as a kid so he should enjoy it while he can. And actually he got quite into the spirit of it once we'd cobbled together a hobbit costume for him (brown Jedi robe that My Beloved had made for him from a bit of scrap brown material ages ago, One Ring on a bit of leather, wooden sword). We were going out with my friend and her kids and we all dressed up. I was a pirate, nicking the waistcoat and velvet jacket my husband wore at our wedding and the Jacobite shirt he wears with his kilt. Miss Mouse was a fairy, my friend was a rather slinky red devil and my husband dug out his re-enactment kit and was a mediaeval knight. Last year it was a beautiful night - clear, not too cold, dry and not windy but this year unfortunately it was bucketing down, so Frodo and the fairy had to wear raincoats on top of their costumes. We had a great time though! Much silliness..

The one on the left, with the handle, is the one that came out with us, though unfortunately it was so rainy I couldn't keep the candle alight, even with the neep's 'lid' on. I like his cheery expression - I don't like to make them too scarey!

Reasons To Be Cheerful

2011-10-27T12:45:00.012+01:00

Thanks to Planet Penny I'm looking for Reasons To Be Cheerful, but as yesterday was just one of those days, it's been harder than usual to think of any.

However I'm a relatively glass-half-full person so here we go :-).

1) There is still some colour in the garden! There was some sunshine and blue sky yesterday morning so I grabbed the opportunity to take a few pictures:

2) The other day I hauled out all wool I'd dyed myself to have a look - actually I was looking for the blackberry-dyed stuff to compare it to the elderberry-dyed but once I got everything out I just had to take a few photographs!

And it really gives me a boost to see how much I've done with so many different bits of vegetation, and how much I've learned in the process. When the kids came home from school we spent some happy (non-bickering!) time looking through and they decided which were their favourites. Miss Mouse, predictably went for the pinks:

(balls at top - blackberry; middle skein - red cabbage, I think; bottom skein: elderberry)

..while the Boy decided his favourite is the soft orange at the bottom of this picture:

I like the brown in the middle best I think.

So, a bag full of naturally-dyed happiness. I'm easily pleased :-D.

3) Looking at something I'd cast on the other day I decided that the cast-on wasn't really stretchy enough so this morning I had a look at YouTube for stretchier cast-ons (my usual cast-on is the long-tail thumb cast-on). And I found one excellent one involving a crochet hook (which I notice a nippy purist has cast aspersions on in the comments - come on, most knitters have a crochet hook lying around for picking up dropped stitches, and can learn how to do one chain in two minutes with YouTube, it's hardly taking you over to the Dark Side) and another one which took me a minute or two to get my head round but could be useful. So my third Reason To Be Cheerful is for the learning of new skills, however small!

You know if type 'cast-on' often enough it looks really weird. Also, do any other Scots habitually think of 'YouTube as 'ya choob'?

Pink

2011-10-25T12:52:00.006+01:00

Just before we went up north I did another quick elderberry dye, and this time let it stay pink. Pretty, isn't it? It's a bit paler in real life but nice nevertheless. I tried an acid (vinegar) modifier but to be honest I don't think it made much difference to the colour. It was still damp and smelling faintly of vinegar when we set off up the A9 so I took it with me and dried it at my parents' house. I just had a sniff to see if it still smells vinegary but it just smells of their house! Isn't it odd how houses have a distinct smell? I dread to think knows what ours smells of...

Here's the elderberry pink with the elderberry green from a few weeks ago:

Ah serene!

I was out for a walk yesterday, getting more blackberries for the crumble, and saw lots of serene muted shades, like this:

and this:

and then:

Woah! Colour!

Making Monday and GSoY loot

2011-10-24T18:46:00.008+01:00

On Saturday I went to the Glasgow School of Yarn, an event organised by the Yarn Cake to celebrate their first birthday. There were classes and a marketplace, coffee and cakes. And lots of lovely knitters - many of whom seemed to have been there for both days (it started on the Friday). I had been looking forward to it for ages and even ensured that we'd be back from our little jaunt up north in time for it. Unfortunately by the time I got there I felt lousy - really drained and dizzy and just not right. It's probably as well that I'd been too disorganised to sign up for any classes. I kept having to sit down, and couldn't focus (mentally) which possibly was a good thing in a way as the Marketplace was very tempting and had I been well I'd probably have spent far too much. As it is I came away with two (signed!) books and a skein of Colorimetry yarn.

It was lovely to sit and chat. Knitters are such nice people aren't they? Angela had been to a steeking class and was full of enthusiasm for getting the scissors out. And she mothered me most excellently when I was being peely-wally! And despite the wooziness I did have a great time. I caught up with Purplejen of Colorimetry who I've not seen for Far Far Too Long, and Added Sparkle who works with my Beloved and has been turned to the Motorbike Side..

The venue, the Mackintosh church, was interesting. It amost feels like heresy to say it, living so close to Glasgow, but I *whispers* don't like the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh that much. As Angela pointed out there was a period when you couldn't move for Mackintosh-inspired stuff in Glasgow and I suspect that may coincide with when we moved down here - it was ubiquitous to the point of silliness and I think it put me off.

It's a nice building though.

It wasn't until today that I noticed the colours in the Colorimetry I bought were very like those in the Peerie Flooers I'm knitting at the moment - that's probably what drew me to that particular skein when usually I'm drawn to greens!

Which brings me to today's Making which has been limited due to dishwashing, cat-litter-changing, hoovering, post-school-obnoxious-child-wrangling and similar exciting projects. Today I have been mostly knitting Peerie Flooers and making another apple and blackberry crumble. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

A little break

2011-10-23T10:07:00.008+01:00

Hello! We've been away for a little break - it was the schools' October break so we headed up north to see my mum and dad. Last time we were there it was July and blazing sunshine (or as blazing as it gets in the Highlands) so poor Miss Mouse, with her as yet limited sense of the passage of time, was hoping for paddling-pool weather. Alas no..

We did get out a bit - that picture was taken at the Highland Folk Museum, one of our favourite places, looking back along Newtonmore to Creag Dhubh.

It was a cold blowy day but the nice thing about the museum is that although it's an outdoor kind of place you can go in the buildings and warm up. Like the hens did:

You can even sit round the fire in some of the houses. I like the teasels on the windowsill - I must grow teasels again.

Down at the croft we looked at the butter-making stuff..

I love the way that pictures I take at the museum always turn out nicer than I expect. I think it's something to do with the muted colours and natural light.

The next day we went to the Highland Wildlife Park - it was even colder and was snowing lightly once or twice, but we all had a good time. I think it was the first time we'd been there that it hasn't been cut short due to excessive whinging. The trick is to keep the little horrors apart - at one point the Boy, my mum and I went off to see what Walker the polar bear was up to and to have a look at the new wolf enclosure (fairly new anyway, we hadn't been to the Wildlife Park for over a year). Walker has a thing about hard hats but wasn't playing with one when we saw him.

We all went to see the camels at feeding time.

They don't really get fed much at that time of day - just a few green things. I think it's more of a chance for the keepers to check on the animals and talk to visitors about them. The staff are really enthusiastic which is lovely to see. Having worked in a visitor attraction myself I know the enthusiasm can wane sometimes so I'm always very aware of staff when I visit places.

I wasn't well for most of our trip - I thought I had an allergic reaction to something but it may actually have been a cold. It can be hard to tell sometimes. So I'm glad to look back at my pictures and see that we did do stuff, and that it wasn't just me sneezing or sleeping.

I love this last picture - it sums up our trip, a combination of wintery cold and autumn colour.

scarf of many colours

2011-10-15T16:55:00.003+01:00

Zingy, innit? Like so many others, I used the Brooklyn Tweed 'Noro' striped scarf instructions (as opposed to pattern), and although I hate doing 1x1 rib it knitted up fairly quickly and easily while I watched telly.

No time to blog more, I'm going out tonight - woohoo!

PS Cake turned out nice. And I tasted the chocolate raspberry brownies (quality control, naturally), mmm - they will be consumed at my brother's party tonight.

I type this while wearing a pinnie.

2011-10-14T14:18:00.014+01:00

In fact an apron with an annoying label that keeps sticking up. Just at the front. Very distracting when I'm Baking A Birthday Cake! Sneak preview:

I think she'll like the sprinkles!

The recipient is at school so she hasn't seen it yet. It's also the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings you know - or at least the Battle of Hastings was fought on the 14th of October, I think there have been calendar changes in the meantime so I'm not sure it's an actual anniversary.

I finished her scarf, just. With a few rows to go I managed to drop a stitch ( I do this all the time when I'm tired - hopeless) and not notice until it had run down several rows, so last night was late-night salvaging, casting-off and wrapping. Phew! But she likes it and was off to school proudly wearing her new coat (present from her step-granny for want of a better description) and new scarf. I took a couple of pictures this morning but they're a bit blurry and the colours are awful being under electric light, it being a pretty murky morning here. So I shall Ta-da tomorrow!

The topic of knitting gadgets has been on my mind (see the giveaway on the a ¼ to blog) and I've come to the conclusion that my most used knitting gadget is this:

It's called a Knit Kit I think - something like that. My knitting buddy Cristina brought it back from America for me last year and it's perfect for a person like me who can never keep everything in one place. My most used bits of it are the little crochet hook which attaches to the side for picking up dropped stitches, bane of my life, and the teeny tiny fold out scissors. Who can resist the cuteness of teeny-tiny folding scissors? Well, not me anyway.

Also on the subject of a ¼ to - she opened an etsy shop very recently with some beautiful bags in it and the other day I ordered one of the really pretty little bags, meant to be a project bag really but actually also ideal for a Small Person's nightdress case:

Big thumbs up from me! It arrived very quickly, in time for Miss M's birthday - I really didn't expect that! Gorgeous isn't it?

Making Monday - ssh, it's a secret

2011-10-10T10:55:00.013+01:00

What I'm making on this Making Monday is a birthday present for my daughter - it's alright, she can't read yet, so I can hide it in the middle of this post and she won't spot it if this tab happens to be open (I am the tab queen - my husband laughs at how many tabs I have open at a time) .

This week I had foraging-and-dyeing success and foraging-and-baking success.

Foraging-and-dyeing was with elderberries. Now I'm ashamed to admit this but I'm rubbish at recognising trees, shrubs and wildflowers, so I take photos of plants I'm curious about, email them to my dad and get him to do the identification. It's not urban ignorance, I do have reason for this - most of those plants don't grow in Shetland or not in my bit anyway so I just didn't grow up knowing them. I did introduce my mother-in-law to the joys of popping seaweed à la bubble-wrap though so I have my own incredibly useful plant skills!

Anyway, using the 'ask Dad' methodology I've learned to identify elderberries (yay! go me!) so went and gathered a small pot of the for dyeing purposes. I squished them up a bit (with a tattie masher) before simmering for an hour, cooled a bit, strained the mush out, added the alum-mordanted wool, simmered for another hour, then left to soak overnight. And this is what I had next morning:

But I was still after green, so pretty though the pink was, it was time for an alkaline modifier. This time, this time, I would be careful.

That's it a few minutes after it went into the soda-crystal solution. Initially it was quite a nice grey, then gradually turned greener. I warmed it (not even reaching simmering point really) for a few minutes, let it cool, then rinsed in a fresh soda-crystal solution. And here's the result:

Yay! Green! It doesn't photograph all that well but it's a soft sage green and I'm very happy with it. And as the majority of elderberries I've seen round here are still at the green stage I have plenty of time to try a pink dye too.

I was flicking through a dye-book while eating my dinner last night (pitta-bread pizza, my new default quick and easy dinner) and it said that alkaline modifiers shouldn't be heated when using animal fibres so I'll have to try without heat another time, maybe when I try the red cabbage again. It would certainly take the stress out of it.

And now, I'll just sneak my daughter's birthday present in here:

Yes, a 'Noro' stripe scarf using Mochi Plus in 'bright rainbow' or some such name. I'm knitting it only when she's not around so it's a proper surprise, but I've only got a few days to get it done. Over the weekend I've obviously been knitting only in the evenings once she was in bed, so today was the first time I've seen it in daylight - very zingy!

And now after that colourful interlude, back to my foraging adventures, this time foraging-and-baking. Miss Mouse and I went out brambling yesterday and yesterday evening I made apple and blackberry crumble. Crumble is another of those things I've never made before but Mum emailed me her recipe so I had a go and oh my! - it was lovely. I mean droolingly delicious, perfect comfort food for a cold wet evening.

I think I'll be making it again.

A Tale of Woe

2011-10-05T14:15:00.007+01:00

Remember the start of my red cabbage dyeing session last week? Well, it all started promisingly. The wool got a nice pink from the cabbage, but I was after green so I did the soda crystals afterdip thing - wool to be simmered gently in a soda crystal solution for 5 minutes. This is the yarn going in and as you can see the change from pink to green is instant!

A beautiful green, but I know colour doesn't always stay that strong and sometimes a lot of the colour comes out the moment the wool comes out of the solution. Nevertheless, looking promising. But then... [dramatic pause]

I got distracted by the kids (rule no 2 - no point doing dyeing when the kids are in the house) and forgot about it so rather than a gentle-simmer-for-5-minutes it got a boil-furiously-for-10-minutes and there's the end result. Sludge. I don't know if I'd have got a greenish shade if I'd paid attention (though I did get a soft green last time) but I'm so annoyed with myself for not paying attention at the important point! *sigh*

So there it is dry - my stupidest mistake. There are hints of both pink and green in it when held up to the light, but there's no getting over it, it's beige.

I shall try again. And again, and again, and again....

But now I must find my daughter's swimming stuff, something for the Boy to read while Miss M's in her swimming lesson, and my knitting, and head out into the wind and rain to get the kids from school. It'll be invogorating, oh yes!

Making Monday - a bit of serenity

2011-10-03T12:58:00.007+01:00

Today I've spent some blissful time knitting while watching a DVD (nothing at all highbrow - it was The Bounty Hunter in fact, which was suitably silly for the kind of mood I'm in and the short attention span I have when knitting). It is a grey day and the wind is really getting up now, so some peaceful warm knitting time makes me feel cosy and wintery. As do these colours! Mostly when I knit from a pattern I choose my own colour scheme but for Peerie Flooers I'm doing just as the pattern dictates (in terms of colour at least - I've made the rib section a bit deeper than the pattern says, partly by accident) and I love the colours. They're bright but muted at the same time. I don't think I'm very good with words, especially enthusiastic ones, but the way each change of colour changes, oh I dunno, the mood of the knitting is a real pleasure. I can't wait to get on to the flower pattern. So anyway, yes, lovely wool, lovely colours. Thumbs up!

[An edit: harmony, that's the word I was looking for! The colours harmonize. Love them.]

The cats are glaring out the window at the weather, and I should really be doing some housework, not sitting knitting, but one more round can't hurt, eh?

a weekend

2011-09-27T14:17:00.009+01:00

I didn't have a Making Monday, I had a chaotic what-day-is-it-today-anyway Monday. It was a local long weekend holiday here ('the September weekend') so the schools were off on Friday and yesterday and my Beloved took those days off too. We went to the Glasgow Science Centre on Friday - worth a visit but as it was a holiday it was busy and Very Noisy.

The kids loved it - Miss M especially liked the bubble thing!

I got thoroughly bewildered over the weekend though, never sure what day it was - culminating in sending my daughter off to school today in the wrong clothes and without her PE kit because I forgot it was Tuesday. Poor kid is wearing a pinafore, blouse and tights - not the easiest to change out of. Thankfully my Beloved had left for work before she asked for her tie, and I can't tie ties so that was one problem evaded. I dropped her PE stuff off at the school office later to pass on to her, but as she struggles a bit getting out of her pinafore I'm wondering how she's got on... I am useless!

Non-achievements of 'making' Monday include :
going to Sainsburys with the intention of trying on the top I saw there last week only to discover that there were only two left (in sizes best described as Far Too Small), discovering that the new trainers I bought for Miss Mouse the day before were half a size too small, and taking Miss Mouse to the Heritage Loch (duck pond) to feed the ducks and finding the somewhat inadequate car-park was full.

On the upside we got Miss Mouse's shoes replaced with no fuss, Miss Mouse wasn't bothered about the ducks, we got a birthday present for her friend, and in Sainsbury I ran into a friend I hadn't seen for ages. Achievement of Sunday - aside from getting the wrong size shoes for Miss M - was going to Lidl and getting new kitchen scales with 1g increments, which are already making mordanting so so so much easier. Already? Yep, mordanted this morning, have simmered red cabbage (bleurgh, I mean really - have had the back door open and scented candles lit) to have another go at red cabbage dye.

Doesn't that make you want to heave?

And the yarn has just gone in! Smell aside, I'm quite excited about trying the cabbage dye again as I got interesting results last time.

After commenting on Sakthi's blog to the effect that I couldn't find my nostepinne (and yes it is a lovely word!), it turned up, so the other night I wound my calendula-dyed wool from last week into a lovely squishy cake.

Could also be a weapon. Well, you never know when it'll come in handy.

That's all folks!

Phew

2011-09-22T13:28:00.010+01:00

I did it! I grafted the two bits of my cowl - without any tears or anything! Not perfectly of course - despite the instructions I still managed to have it go crooked, but nobody will ever notice that when I'm wearing it. So I finished it on Tuesday morning, blocked it Tuesday afternoon,

(quite proud of my ingenuity there actually - I'd been wondering how I'd block it and worked out that a rolled up camping mat was perfect), and wore it to knitting night that evening. It was my 'coven' who gave me the yarn for my birthday, so they were pleased that I'd a) used it and b) broken into the scarey world of lace knitting in the process!

So that was my first time following a lace chart (turned out to be a doddle - thanks, Gudrun, for a nice clear chart) and my first time doing much fiddly grafting (had only previously done the few stitches on the toes of socks) - all in all a success. And with the very changeable weather this week, the cowl has been very useful already. Malabrigo's a reaaly warm yarn, isn't it?

I tried to photograph myself wearing it for my Projects page on Ravelry but the only picture that didn't look silly was the robbing-a-bank pose, which looks silly in a different way.

I've done a bit more dyeing too - a marigold (calendula) one this time, with just enough flowers to make a pale yellow. As ever the yellow hasn't photographed well, but trust me, it is yellow and it is pretty.

It looked absolutely nothing in the dye-pot and I had to restrain myself from chucking other things in to add some colour, but it was worth the restraint. I don't know whether I'll bother with calendula again - I love the flowers but the colour I got from them is not dissimilar to the one I got from horsetails last year, so I think on the the whole I'd rather use the weeds for dyeing purposes and grow the marigolds just for my own pleasure.

I'll end with a picture I took on the way to get the kids from school yesterday, purely because I love the colours:

I love it when nature bungs colours together that I would never have thought of putting together and it looks great. I probably looked really weird photographing the pavement but I'm trying to train myself out of embarrassment at things like that!

Making Monday 8

2011-09-19T20:49:00.007+01:00

Making Monday Eight? Already?

Well, today was the day of our tattie harvest. I had two bags with potato plants growing in them and from them we got this:

Not the most impressive harvest. Though they do taste great and we (me, Miss Mouse and her friend) had fun digging them up.

And now for the scarey bit. My Crofter's Cowl, lovely knit, very quick, but.... now I have to graft the two halves together. Scarey.

I find grafting sock toes hard enough. *gulp* Well, here goes.

Making Monday 7

2011-09-12T20:55:00.010+01:00

It was my daughter's first full day at school today (after several weeks of half-days) and I just couldn't settle to anything. I did plenty - went for a run in the wind and rain, did two loads of washing, mended rips in two pairs of trousers, persuaded the cats that no the weather hadn't improved in the ten seconds that had elapsed since I let them stick their noses out the door - but couldn't settle to anything for very long. I just kept wondering how she was getting on, if she'd cope at lunchtime, how grumpy she'd be by hometime... So I just drifted around, doing a bit of this, a bit of that, but unable to really concentrate. I even had a DVD to watch - Bright Young Things - and usually I find things like that suitably distracting because even if the story doesn't grab me I appreciate the costumes. But nope, couldn't concentrate.

And after all that, she was fine. Tired of course, but happy enough.

So, as the weather was what I'd usually describe as 'Shetland weather' I embraced the fact that I was mostly indoors today and did things such as appreciate my garter-stitch squares:

Aren't they gorgeous piled up like that? So squishy. I quite often find that I like the look of a wool when it's still a skein but it loses its allure when I knit with it. And similarly I like the look of my garter squares when they're piled up on each other but I wonder if I'll like them as much when they're sewn up into a blanket. Maybe I should just knit a huge stack of them and display the stack as a piece of art in its own right!

I also appreciated my cut-flowers:

.. cut yesterday because I knew the wind was going to bash them to bits anyway so I might as well cut them and enjoy them indoors. I followed Belinda of Wild Acre's tips in her post on harvesting flowers from your garden, so I'll see how they do. Some of them were slightly past it when I cut them of course, but, well, I felt sorry for them. I grew the calendula for dyeing purposes so if I'd been organised and had some wool wound and mordanted I could have tried another calendula dye. Oh well, never mind. And on the kitchen window-sill masking the view of the battered garden...

Can't resist the sweet-peas. Oh, and the Boy's tomato plant needs to be repotted really.

In the end, it being that kind of day, I retreated to the kitchen and mused on the importance of the onion.

Resulting in bacon/tomato sauce with pasta - comfort food for a wild day. I took pictures but they looked all yellowy, like the food pictures in takeaways. Not nice. Tasted good though.

Making Monday 6

2011-09-05T21:31:00.009+01:00

I did it! I finally got round to getting a sturdy notebook for my dyeing record - thanks to meeting up with my friend Lyndsey for a coffee and a mooch round the shops. Funny how often we end up in stationery places!

So that was my 'make' of the day, starting my dyeing notebook. It's not very exciting to anybody but me, and looking through my home-dyed stash I realise how few details I have for quite a few of them, but this should organise things better. And that's a good thing. I also bought some teeny-tiny labels on string - you know the type, like very very small luggage labels, so I shouldn't have the lost label problem any more either.

I also went on with my garter stitch squares, using the anthemis tinctoria-dyed wool this time.

I've been on a bit of a roll, creatively, over the last few days - I finished the thick gorgous Drops Nepal socks that I started at midsummer:

These have very much been a pick-up-when-I'm-in-the-mood project - they took no time all really in terms of hours spent working on them.

And I managed to make Scones That Actually Look Like Scones:

.. and taste bloody good! I think I'm a sconvert! Sorry - who knew what a wonderful world of scone-based puns was waiting out there for me! I'll get me coat..

my dyeing week

2011-08-30T17:27:00.005+01:00

I haven't managed a Making Monday this week. My husband, somewhat unexpectedly, had a day off work yesterday (he works for a Scottish company that was taken over by an American company and suddenly gets an English Bank Holiday - ssh, don't tell'em!) so we took the opportunity to dismantle/smash up our daughter's old somewhat wrecked chest of drawers and get her a new one. This was of course flat-pack but I won't inflict another flat-pack Making Monday on the intartubes.

Most of the rest of the day was spent sorting out her outgrown clothes and putting them in piles for the charity shop/textile bank and the odd few which have pretty fabric that can be re-used/upcycled/whatever.

So no making. However this past week has been good for dyeing - I mordanted several skeins last week so have been able to do a quick dye-pot whenever the mood takes me. The 'pot pourri' dye from the other day has turned out a softer, slightly muddier yellow than the anthemis tinctoria one from last Monday, and I followed that up with another onion-skin dye. I love the richness of the onion skin dyes - this was from the big brown onions I use most often - and of course the easiness of it!
It photographs relatively easily too, unlike the yellows - try as I might (and believe me I've tried), I just can't seem to take a photograph that reflects even semi-accurately the yellows I've got. Never mind, here's a picture anyway!

Top to bottom is - anthemis tinctoria, brown onion skins, mixed yellow/orange flowers from the garden. The two yellows are actually closer in colour than they appear in that photo.

For my own notes as much as anything (no, still not started the dyeing notebook yet), they're all approx. 50g hanks of aran-weight wool, mordanted with alum/cream of tartar. Talking of dyeing notebooks we were at Kittochside for the Country Fair on Sunday and the lass doing the spinning demonstration had examples of her hand-dyed wool (fleece that is, rather than yarn) and her dyeing notebook on display. I felt inspired! Though not enough to actually find a notebook... But what an excellent record of her work - I must get round to it, must. I didn't get a chance to talk to her unfortunately because she was so busy. I did get out the drop spindle when I got home and had another go with that, inspired by her (wheel) spinning.

If I get off my bum and get some more yarn mordanted I might have a go at calendula dyeing tomorrow as the marigolds are blooming more profusely this week. I do like that word 'profusely' :-). Excuse the smiley but an exclamation-mark seemed a bit po-faced, like the Rev. I.M. Jolly trying to be cheery!

And on that note, I'm off!

baroque scones

2011-08-23T21:05:00.007+01:00

Miss Mouse and I made scones this afternoon. I'm not a huge fan of them so had never made them before. There was an error in the recipe. Oh dear. It called for adding milk and then mixing to a dough. I added the amount stated and it mixed to a batter. So we added some more flour. And a bit more sugar. And some more flour and a little more sugar. And, oh sod it, the rest of the packet of flour. Eventually it was something resembling a sticky dough. I warned Miss Mouse that it had gone spectacularly wrong and possibly wouldn't be edible - she was prepared for this having made fairy-cakes-that-went-wrong at her friend's house last week.

BUT they turned out wonky and un-scone-shaped but actually quite nice. Not being a sconnoisseur (sorry) I'm not sure if they taste as scones should, but who cares? I like'em! Miss Mouse won't try them of course *mutter grumble*. The Boy pronounced them 'nice' which is high praise from him. I think they call irregularly-shaped pearls 'baroque pearls' so why not baroque scones?

In other thrilling news, I've been dyeing again, this time with a bit of this and that from the garden.

More specifically, a couple of dahlia heads, some tagetes, some calendula, a bit of yarrow, a yellow flower whose name I've forgotten (coreopsis perhaps?), another anthemis tinctoria flower. It's basically a pot pourri dye - any flower that was looking slightly past its best went in. The wool simmered in it at teatime and I'll let it steep overnight and see what happens. I'm hoping for a less wet day so it can dry on the washing-line rather than hanging from the door-handle where the cats think it's a new toy. Not looking at any cat in particular of course.

Making Monday 4

2011-08-22T20:23:00.009+01:00

Busy week- I've not had a chance to blog since last Monday.

Little Miss Mouse has started school. She's settled in well so far and seems quite happy about it! Last week she was only in for two-and-a-half hours a day but from today it's full mornings so after a very hectic child-dominated summer I suddenly had three-and-a-half hours to myself. Which feels a bit odd to say the least.

This morning I dug out some felt and fabric I had tucked away and decided to make her a little brooch. I (slightly reluctantly) went for the felt as the fabric seemed a bit too thin to hold the shape. The brooch has come out looking a little like a political rosette unfortunately - it's actually purple, dark pink and light pink rather than red, white & blue though! The purple button in the middle is one that was one an old pair of her trousers - the trousers were absolutely trashed but I salvaged the buttons at least. She likes it anyway!

This week I've been continuing with the garter squares. The soft pinky-brown there is from yarn I dyed myself though I'm not sure what I used for it. It's a fairly recent one so maybe it was my last batch of onion skin dye. I do try to label things but the labels fall off and I lose track! I keep meaning to get organised and keep a dyer's notebook with samples of the dyed yarn stuck in but haven't got around to it. It's the story of my life *grin*.

My anthemis tinctoria (dyer's camomile) has just started flowering so I also took the opportunity this morning to do another bit of dyeing. I used aran-weight undyed yarn, mordanted it with alum/cream of tartar, and the dye-bath was all the flowers that were open - not very many but after a couple of minutes it was a clear yellow, so apparently a little can go quite a long way. Though I should point out I only dye about 50g of yarn at a time due to the limited size of my dye-pot.

The end result is some nice light yellow wool, though not quite as light as it shows up in my photographs.

I'd really love to have as much of my own dyed yarn in my garter square blanket as possible. The muted colours should go together quite well I think.

And that was my Monday - one in which I finally did some making (that didn't involve swearing or splinters)!

Making Monday 3

2011-08-15T21:55:00.008+01:00

Squares. Soothing mindless blissful knitting.

It's the last week of the school holidays and my day has been dominated by shades of blue - this..

..and washing school uniform! I've just folded all the light blue stuff and realised that my daughter, who is starting school on Wednesday (*sob*), has ten hand-me-down polo-shirts! My son's (age 7) poloshirts shrank really badly and are now five-year-old size. So add that to all her age 5 poloshirts (also once my son's, and still in good condition) and I'll only have to wash her clothes once a fortnight! Bet it won't work out quite like that.

My husband is back from California (hurray!) so I have a little bit of time to myself again. Or rather I will soon - at the moment he's still looking a bit unsure as to what time-zone he's in. But we're happily watching telly and I've got my soothing garter-stitch squares. Nice :-). Must ask him about the sewing-machine though...

The Legolas Scarf

2011-08-11T21:56:00.005+01:00

I finished this a couple of weeks ago and have only just got round to updating my Ravelry projects to show it in all its greeny glory. Actually I've found it a bit of a pig to photograph - gorgeous as the yarn is, I can't take a photo that does justice to it! Oh how I love it though - such a relaxing knit, the lace was enough to make it interesting but not so much that I had to concentrate on it all the time (I've not done much lace knitting and have to concentrate and stick my tongue out). I went and bought a second skein (thank you Antje of the Yarn Cake for putting it aside for me) but actually completed it with just under one skein so I have another to make, well, something matching. Mitts maybe? Hat? Jings, crivvens and help ma boab, at this rate I'll end up co-ordinated!

As for the sewing, I'm no further forward with the sewing-machine. I'm a bit mystified. But I'll keep trying to figure it out.

I'll end with some sweet-peas in the rain just because they're pretty. It's been absolutely bucketing down for the last couple of days, which saves me watering the plants at least. And it makes everything smell great!

Making (A Mess) Monday 2

2011-08-08T22:51:00.010+01:00

Ah. Well.

I was Not Great at sewing at school. I got by, but I most certainly was not a natural and I was convinced that sewing-machines hated me. Since then I've mostly avoided them, but I'd really love to able to make things - cushion-covers, that kind of thing. So naturally I decided today, Making Monday, was the day to re-acquaint myself with the sewing-machine. Well Miss Mouse/the cats and the Boy were distracted by Scalextric and the Wii respectively so it was a good opportunity.

This is my husband's machine - he used it a lot in our re-enactment days, while I stuck to handsewing. I can't remember what he used it for last, most likely something motorbike-related, but it was fairly recently and it's been sitting underneath the dining-table for a month or two.

What surpised me as I tried to thread it was how much I remembered. I got it slightly wrong and had to Google it but mostly it was right. I don't actually remember using a sewing-machine between the day I dropped sewing at school (1984!) and today so I'm quite pleased about that! Then I realised the needle was bent and had to be replaced - managed that. Then the bit holding the bobbin in fell out and I figured out how to put that back in.. eventually. I even got as far as actually doing a bit of sewing, but all I got was tangled threads and a row of holes. It was just like being at school again!

I've been googling for answers. I think the upper thread is snapping but I can't work out why. I did noticed it had seemed to get tangled down by the bobbin at least once. Maybe that's the problem.

So I've sewn nothing, but I've enjoyed tinkering, googling, and watching Youtube idiot's guides to sewing. And as sewing isn't really possible while watching television (I'm choosing A Town Called Eureka over riot news coverage) I've been doing a bit of comfort knitting. Since I enjoyed making a couple of squares for the Ursula's Donegal Blanket (pictures of the finished objects, two blankets, here - no idea which are my squares though), I've decided that for those times that I need fairly mindless soothing knitting I'll use up my stash making blanket squares and eventually I'll have a blanket. So Square One:

While writing this post I paused to feed the cats and managed to splash cat-food all over the place (Opticat salmon & crab in gravy is very runny, just so you know..) so I smell of cat-food. How lovely. On that revolting note I'll finish for the night.

Making Monday

2011-08-06T09:35:00.007+01:00

Yes, I know it's Saturday - this is the story of the Making Monday that didn't happen. Natalie of the Yarn Yard had suggested Making Monday as a blog theme (meme?) on her blog. I thought, that sounds like fun, I'll join in.

As a bit of background, my husband is in California with his work at the moment, so it's just me and the kids. As it happened my mother-in-law was taking the kids out for a few hours on Monday so rather than just blogging about Making on a Monday (something I've obviously spectacularly failed to do) I could actually do some Making on a Monday and blog it. I was aware I'd have precious little time for making anything or indeed blogging with my Beloved away. This would be great! I just had a flat-pack thing to fling together first - this is much easier to do when the kids are out so I needed to take advantage of this opportunity - and then I'd have some time to myself.

Naturally of course it didn't work out that way. I've never had problems with flat-pack before but this time it apparently required brute strength as well as a hammer and two sizes of Phillips screwdriver.

This was the main problem:

It's blurred because I took the photo that night, shaking with exhaustion. The screws just would not screw in fully. I eventually got most of them more or less done but that last one would not budge, either in or out. I physically could not turn the damn thing. In the end I went to bed cursing my weakness and hating to be defeated by a flatpack. It was turning into a feminist issue.

The next morning I channelled my Inner Bloke (i.e. Did What My Husband Would Do) and bodged it. The cross-head screw was no longer cross, more mildly peeved, and was clearly going nowhere. I got it out with pliers, a bit of cloth (to stop it scratching the veneer of the chipboard - stable door, horse etc) and muttered swearing. I rummaged in the garage for the plastic tub of random screws, nails and other ephemera, found a screw roughly approximating, but shorter than, the offending one and used that instead. Ah, it'll do.

I do have this perfectionist streak. I want to do it right. But sometimes you just have to say 'Sod it. It'll do.'

And that's the story of Making Monday. I'm off to catch up on what all the other Making Monday people did!

Oh the fun to be had..

2011-07-28T23:26:00.006+01:00

Like my new header? I'm trying to mess around with the picture file to add text to it directly rather than using the blogger template thingy. But possibly it's too late at night for me!

We've had a few days away - lots of this:

That's Loch Morlich. The water was a bit chilly but Miss Mouse and I swam!

I had plenty of blissful lazy knitting time in the sunshine while we were away..

.. and I've nearly finished my Saroyan scarf. In my head it's my Legolas scarf. Every time I look at it it makes me think of The Very Secret Diary of Legolas* - 'Am definitely prettiest member of the Fellowship. Go me!'

Too tired for blogging now - good night!

*old meme but it's classic innit?

The Burrell Collection

2011-07-15T22:12:00.011+01:00

We were at Pollok Park again this morning - that's the second time in two days, how keen are we? The kids and I were there yesterday with my brother (pics on my other blog), up at the Pollok House end. The kids love the playpark but it's very popular and that late in the day very crowded, so I told them that we'd go first thing in the morning one day. Today was the first day of my Beloved's holidays, we were up early and it was sunny so it was the perfect opportunity.

The playpark is in the part of the park where the Burrell Collection is, so after about an hour in the playpark we headed inside for a dose of history. When my Beloved and I first moved down here (back here in his case, he's 'local') we used to go the Burrell quite a lot, especially in our historical re-enactment days, but since the kids came along it's been a lot less frequent. They're getting to an age now where they can take a bit of an interest (especially the Boy) so we were in there for longer than I expected but it was nothing like as leisurely as it used to be! My favourite objects, the tapestries, have been moved around a bit since I was last there and there was an interesting leaflet about the Burrell Tapestries Research Project explaining what's going on with them.

Well, it would have been more interesting if Miss Mouse hadn't been running riot while I was trying to read it! I've linked to the Project's blog before but it's worth doing again!

I bought a few postcards - top right, Hercules Initiating the Olympic Games, c. 1465-70 (bit of a foppish 15th century Hercules!), at the bottom The Bible Tapestry, 1505 or 1550. And top left?

A closer look! This is one of the paintings from the 'upstairs' (mezzanine I supose) gallery. It's called La Raie (the Skate) and is by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) and it amused us because this is exactly what our own little tortoiseshell-and-white cat does. We're sitting eating (this is when we're lazy and eating dinner on the settee) and she saunters over, sits down and apparently falls asleep. At some point while we're eating she'll think 'Oh I'll just casually have a s-t-r-e-t-c-h, and, ooh fancy that, there's a bit of steak almost on my claw...' Hmm. Well-observed Monsieur Chardin.

I googled La Raie to check it is a skate as although I was pretty sure it said that on the label by the painting it doesn't say on the postcard. And through Google I found another painting entitled La Raie, also by Chardin. If you have a look you'll see it's another cat (I think), another skate and some more oysters. Further googling of 'Chardin cat' finds The Silver Tureen and Still Life with Cat and Fish and a bit of a theme developing. Poor Monsieur Chardin!

Anyway, why are the postcards on the grass? Well, after we went back outside the kids had a bit of a run around and an ice-cream each, while I sat on the grass, had a coffee (also from the ice-cream van, how sensible of them!) and looked at the postcards and the tapestry leaflet. What could be nicer?

Brownies

2011-07-05T19:38:00.001+01:00

I can't believe I forgot to mention the brownies!

After our fruit-picking expedition the other day I'm left with more raspberries than even I can eat, and I adore raspberries. So I googled chocolate and raspberry recipes, convinced I'd seen a recipe somewhere that combined chocolate goodness with raspberry goodness. ('Scuse me, drooling on the keyboard). And I found a Sue Lawrence recipe on the BBC Food website for Chocolate and Raspberry Brownies. Mmmmm. I've tried quite a few Sue Lawrence recipes now, by chance really - quite often her recipes are the ones that I find when I do a search for a particular thing, so she must have similar tastes to me! - and they're always spot on.

It didn't go entirely to plan because I used a silicone baking 'tin' as it was the right size, but really I think a proper tin is called for in this recipe as the middle was more of a chocolate and raspberry crumble than brownies. It was still very edible but had to be eaten with a spoon! But the pieces round the edges are more cohesive and, chilled especially, taste truly heavenly. I may have to make another batch. Now I've just got to work out what to do with all the strawberries..

In other Thrilling News, ooooh - I googled 'dyeing nepeta' after an idle thought, and a couple of sites suggest you can get a yellow dye from nepeta leaves. Hurray! I've got masses of it!

a stripey ambition

2011-07-04T16:51:00.010+01:00

For some time it has been my ambition to get a deckchair. 'Ambition' - that's a lofty word isn't it? That's the secret of achieving ambitions, don't aim too high :-D. This one was a particularly achievable ambition as the deckchair I bought was half-price at the supermarket. And I love it! It's so comfortable, I can put my head back and shut my eyes, and there's plenty of elbow room for alfresco knitting. And it's stripy. Miss Mouse loves it too, as you can see - there may be squabbles over who gets to sit in it.

My cheap-as-chips folding picnic chairs are fine, but this is just designed for leisurely loafing around. And as my mother-in-law took the kids out today I had the chance to do a little bit of loafing, in between doing a tonne of laundry. Actually the pictures are from yesterday, but it was much the same kind of day - warmth, sunshine (intermittently clouding over but remaining warm), cats prowling around looking for patches of shade,

green things growing (that's the nepeta),

until it became too much for Cat2 who retreated inside to fall asleep on a bag-nest. She does love bags.
I spent some time yesterday afternoon winding a skein of yarn into a ball - this is one I'd been meaning to do for a while. It's a Colorimetry yarn by my friend Purplejen (she also sells her yarn at The Life Craft in Glasgow) - doesn't it look as if it's hovering there? I think it's because I used the flash! I've been hanging on to this one trying to decide what to do with it. I love the colours, they're so rich and happy. I just can't decide what to knit. It's a laceweight yarn I think (lost the label of course), finer than I usually knit with, but then I'm making efforts to break out of my knitting comfort zone. It'll be character-building!

Mr Borg's comment when he saw it was 'You didn't dye that.' No dear. Purplejen uses acid dyes which I'd love to try some day. I don't know how she keeps the cats out of it all - her cat Cocoa is my cats' mother. I'm sure my cats would be leaning over my shoulder, supervising. As would the kids. Maybe when they've all grown up..

the little dye mystery

2011-07-02T21:12:00.011+01:00

As I've mentioned before, the unpredictability of natural dyeing is not a problem for me - I enjoy the air of anticipation. Sometimes the results are disappointing, sometimes they exceed anything I'd hoped for. Sometimes they're a bit bewildering - Thursday's red onion dyeing being an example. I'd left the skeins to soak overnight and when I drained them yesterday morning the 4-ply was a distinctly different colour from the aran. Sometimes the colour you get once the yarn is dry is different from when it's wet, so as the yarn was dripping wet I put it on the washing-line and.. pretty much forgot about it.

The kids and I were heading out for the day with my mother-in-law so the yarn went on the line in the middle of a a picnic-making, coaxing-son-into-wearing-clothing-suitable-for-the-weather, rounding-up-cats frenzy. We had a glorious day out - the weather was warm and sunny and we went fruit-picking at a pick-your-own farm right next to the runways of Glasgow airport so we got to watch 'planes take off and land as we had our picnic.

Then we went to Pollok Park and had a wander around.

I love the gardens at Pollok House - there are parts where you feel obliged to stroll in a stately Jane Austenish manner (I'm thinking Miss Elizabeth Bennet and Colonel Fitzwilliam at Rosings Park). Well I feel obliged to stroll, the kids feel obliged to belt around like very small commandos on a secret but surprisingly noisy mission.

As it happened Georgian strolling was actually the order of the day as some location filming for Garrow's Law was going on (I hadn't actually heard of this programme before, I just found out from Googling 'pollok house filming') so there were weird lighting set-ups in odd places..

.. and men in breeches hanging about:

Apparently the programme is set in London but filmed mostly in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Bit like Cardiff really.

I've only been in Pollok House once, when I attended a day-long NTS conservation course held there (that's historic object conservation, i.e. 'kill the clothes moth', not save-the-whale!) and I keep meaning to go again. It's a lovely and fascinating house, but I suspect if I went with the kids I'd see nothing of it!

After all our adventures we headed home and I remembered the yarn. And if anything the colour difference between the two skeins was even more marked once they were dry:
Intriguing isn't it? Well, it is to me.. They were dyed in the same pot for the same length of time yet have turned out really different colours. Possibly wool from different breeds of sheep? I'm very happy with both colours, but I particularly like the uneven uptake of dye in the aran skein. I just need to mordant another skein to see what I get from the exhaust of this dye as there's still a lot of colour in the water...

let's have a bit of colour

2011-06-30T22:52:00.010+01:00

The weather here is not as it has been Daan Saaf in the Tropics of England (yeah, my English Facebook friends taunting me with their heatwave..) - it's been intermittently sunny but breezy and Not That Warm, pleasant enough in direct sunlight and out of the wind, but a bit cool otherwise. And pretty showery. But when the sun comes out the colours are so intense, and at least I'm not having to water many of the plants. Anyway, look at that amazing leaf! I can't remember what the shrub is called - it's got purple leaves that can look red (sounds very Roald Dahl) - but it's given me so much visual pleasure this year.

I can almost see the garden growing - or rather I turn away for a second and when I look back Things Have Changed, a bit like the scarey angels ('Don't Blink!') in Dr Who but with more chlorophyll and less of the aura of menace. I'd swear the anthemis tinctoria have doubled in size in the last two days!

And a good thing too - these are my dye garden and I'm impatient!

Meanwhile at the front of the house..

.. a mystery solved! If you look over on my other blog you'll see this mystery plant which had been, well, mystifying me. After discussion with my Dad (my plant-guru) we've decided it's an orchid, which was what I'd thought it looked like but seemed just too big as the only wild orchids I've ever seen are pretty short. However Dad assures me that there are loads on the boggier bits of the golf-course in his neck of the woods that grow that big, and after googling 'dactylorhiza' (Dad's good on botanical names) and finding loads of images that match the Mystery Plant I'm convinced!

I'm just blown away by the fact that a sad little windswept shady patch of earth in between paving slabs and monobloc driveway, previously inhabited only by an annoying spiky shrub should have managed to produce first the big soft-leaved plant (that is also a mystery) and now a big purple orchid. And I'm even more blown away that I didn't notice it 'til the other day when I was pulling up some weeds in the paving cracks. It was well tucked away in the other plants. I've been reading Weeds by Richard Mabey, borrowed of course from Dad, which talks a lot about the extraordinary persistance of wild plants so I shouldn't be surprised!

This afternoon I decided to do another bit of dyeing and use up the last of my mordanted yarn - a tiny skein of what was left of the 4-ply and a squidgy skein of Aran-weight. I'd been tidying up a kitchen cupboard and found I'd accumulated enough red onion skins to play with. So here's the yarn simmering gently.

I've let it cool now and will just leave it to soak overnight. I've dyed with red onion skins before and got a really rich brown but I'm really interested to see how it'll turn out because you can see the little 4-ply skein on the left looking a slightly different colour from the Aran.

While I was messing around with the dye-pot this afternoon my son was running in and out giving me breathless updates on how he's getting on with riding his bike. He's only recently got the hang of the balance thing, but his new bike is slightly too large for him so getting started each time had been tricky. But for the last couple of days he's been going out voluntarily on his own to practise in the cul de sac (this is an excellent street for it) and is cracking it, hence the updates. I couldn't be more proud of him :-).

a little more dyeing

2011-06-26T00:00:00.004+01:00

Probably shouldn't blog late at night- I just forgot what I was about to say! But isn't that pretty?

I tried marigolds (tagetes) again. I'd had a go with them last summer but didn't have many flower heads to work with (still got good results though) so as I've loads in the garden this year I thought I'd have another go with a plentiful supply. The left-hand skein is the first go, the right-hand one is what was left over. I wasn't sure there was enough colour left actually but it's come out a pretty lemon yellow. As usual photographing it is tricky - in reality the darker skein is quite a strong colour, a bit harsh really.

Brain not co-operating now - good night!

end of term

2011-06-24T21:20:00.024+01:00

To start, a ta-da! A present for the Boy's teacher - a large plain mug, and a mug cosy knitted in New Lanark yarn. The pattern is this one, Owl Coffee Cup Cozie, but I knitted it flat so I could make ties as it was for a mug rather than a takeaway coffee cup. It was fun to knit and turned out pretty well I think - hope she liked it. I put a little bag of chocolates in too, just in case! And the Boy drew her a picture of the school as she was only at his school as a sort of long-term supply teacher after his original teacher retired, and is going to a different school next year.

This was the scene walking up to school - it was a non-uniform day (we used to call them mufti days when I lived in NZ but I've never heard them called that here - shame, it's much easier to type!) hence the Boy's jeans.

School finished at lunchtime so we headed off to Kittochside for a picnic, taking my brother with us as he had some leave due and fancied the afternoon off. Aaaah, coffee in the sunshine - the cups were hot, could have done with a coffee-cup cozy actually!

Lunch took some time as much running and jumping and other expenditure of energy had to be fitted in between morsels. Parkour? Pah! An alternative name could be just 'being eight'! After lunch we had tickets for the three o'clock tractor but...

... disaster! Epic flat tyre! Pretty impressive isn't it?

So we walked up to the farm in the sunshine.

The farm is full of babies - an incredibly noisy lamb, calves, piglets...

Awww!

Miss Mouse tried out 'new Clover', the wooden cow. New Clover's udder arrangement seems to work better than that of old Clover who had her udder at an angle and kept leaking, poor old thing.

Aaaah. Bliss. A perfect start to the summer holidays!

cosiness

2011-06-22T11:45:00.004+01:00

Oddly enough I haven't done much knitting with the results of my dyeing efforts. I do plan to do some Fair Isle mitts with them, so really the more shades I have to work with the more fun it'll be - I tell myself I'm building up a decent palette! But actually it's mostly that I have various other things to finish first - 'I've started so I'll finish' is not a phrase associated with me, more like 'I've started so, oooh, look, something shiny..'! I did break into my own colours though to do a couple of squares for the Ursula's Donegal blanket project organised by Antje (of the Yarn Cake) - she wanted colours associated with the countryside of Donegal and though the nearest I've been to Donegal is Connemara (i.e. not particularly near at all) Antje had done a mood-board to give people an idea of colours. I thought the onion dye and the blackberry one might suit so knitted up a couple of squares, and very enjoyable they were too. I hope the colours fit in with all the others she received - apparently she got enough squares for two blankets so that's brilliant!

On the subject of dyeing I'm really excited that the anthemis tinctoria I've been growing from seed have survived been chucked around in a gale and now they've been planted out in various places they're thriving - the ones in the pot are doing particularly well:

Yesterday was the longest day in the northern hemisphere - it also had a bloody good try at being the wettest day in my neck of the woods.

I went out to my knitting group and get Quite Wet on the way and Thoroughly Drenched on the way back.

I know it doesn't look much, but believe me it was bucketing down. But, hey! Still light!
My shoes and bag are still drying out, and my jeans are in the wash. So I didn't feel too silly working on the thick cosy sock after all!

Oooh, I've just noticed the 'labels' thing on blogger. I'll give it a try - bet I get bored with it quickly though!

Midsummer

2011-06-21T11:42:00.012+01:00

And my favourite knitting project at the moment is a woolly sock:

- in fact my wool/alpaca bedsock knitted in squishy Drops Nepal. I'm using Lunamoth's Comfy Old Favourites pattern - love the eye of partridge heel-flap. Can you see it? I gather from a few people's notes on Ravelry and from on my own first two attempts that there's a typo in the turning-the-heel bit of the pattern, so I sent Lunamoth a message and she's checking it out. Nobody had told her! But then I had another go myself at figuring out where the typo is and I think, being very cautious here, I may have turned the heel! I may have been knitting for donkey's years but I'm fairly new to sock-knitting and am not good at seeing what's going on when turning the heel if you see what I mean - it's still like magic to me! So it's great for my self-confidence to figure something out for myself. It's a lovely pattern though - I do like thick cosy socks so I can see myself making quite a few of these.

On Sunday I took a trip to the Yarn Cake again with my brother and he bought me the rest of my birthday present:

Oh, and we ate more cake. Mmmm, I do like their apple crumble cake!

Anyway, apart from some more Drops Nepal (mitts to match the socks maybe?) and some bamboo needles, the contents were:

Aaah...The blue is Shilasdair 4-ply which actually I may struggle with knitting as it contains angora and my nose has problems with that sometimes, but I couldn't resist it and I'm sure the end result will be worth it. Shilasdair yarns are naturally-dyed so I got the blue as it's indigo-dyed and I doubt I'll ever try that! The green is some more Malabrigo worsted. I really shouldn't have photographed them in bright sunshine as it doesn't do the colours any justice but it was so unexpectedly sunny yesterday (forecast was for rain for a fortnight) that I just had to take the photos outside. And I'm glad I did too because it's bucketing it down again today!

Miss Mouse and I had some time to kill before getting the Boy from school yesterday so we took some photographs of wildflowers in the sunshine. Looks idyllic doesn't it? Quite meadow-like. In fact it's just a bit of waste ground between the back of the local Lidl and a business park, but it's quite a haven for bees. Gorgeous!

colours

2011-06-14T20:58:00.013+01:00

Woohoo! Colour in the garden!

And on my feet - these are my cheapy mock crocs, paint-splattered and really too pink for me - I'm not a pink person - but very comfortable.

And my 99p bunch of flowers from the reduced stand at the supermarket!

And back into the garden for rosa glauca..

.. and dianthus.

It's been a wonderful, colourful, busy week, in which my daughter had her nursery 'graduation' - sounds so twee but actually a lovely little ceremony with the kids doing incredibly cute dance routines as well as getting their certificates.

Little Miss Mouse enjoyed the dancing so much I've had to find the tunes on Youtube for her to groove on down to in the living-room.

My parents were down for a short visit to see us and go to the graduation and they brought me this:

Can you guess what it is? I couldn't! It's bactrian camel hair (fur?) - the lighter brown is the softer undercoat. Isn't it brilliant? They have a friend who works at the Highland Wildlife Park and asked if they'd like some - they knew of course that I'd love some! I've had to put it out of reach of the cats just in case they think it's rabbit or something.

Bactrian camels are the ones with two humps - which always makes me think of Alastair Campbell. Pourquoi? Well when the Boy was Miss Mouse's age he was always singing 'Alice the Camel' only it always came out as 'Alice da Camel', so naturally I'd find myself singing 'Alastair Campbell has two humps, Alastair Campbell has two humps..' You'll see why I have a hard time taking politics seriously.

Racing for Life and a Woolly Week

2011-06-05T21:19:00.012+01:00

Oh my - what a morning. I'd signed up to do the Race for Life in Glasgow with a friend but unfortunately she'd misread her rota (looked at July instead of June) and it turned out she had to work. There are two things about that forced me to be brave - 1) driving into Glasgow on my own and 2) I don't much like crowds and the Glasgow Race for Life is BIG.

But it all went well! I did get lost briefly on the way - I'd checked the route using Google maps/streetview but there were roadworks and the road I was following just ended so I had to take a detour into uncharted territory. Fortunately I have a fairly good sense of direction and in fact I had no problem getting to the place I intended to park, and even better there was plenty of space.

And although there were squillions of people there (fifteen or sixteen thousand participants I think they said) Glasgow Green is big enough that it didn't feel overwhelming. The weather was overcast and coolish with a nice breeze so it was pleasant running - well as pleasant as running gets anyway!

It was either the end of a busy week or the start of an even busier one, not sure which. Last Sunday was great - I went on a trip off to the wilds of the West End of Glasgow. It's kind of 'student-land' but not having been to university in Glasgow I don't know the area very well. I took my brother with me and we went to the Yarn Cake - a lovely wool-shop/cafe - to indulge in German home-bakes and lovely squishy yarn (the latter much more my thing than his but he'd said he'd buy me yarn for my birthday if I liked so he was The Money!). So I had two slices of apple crumble cake (heavenly) and left with some very nice Drops Nepal that I intended to make into a scarf but after knitting a bit I decided what I really needed was some lovely thick cosy socks:

Stripey ones. Naturally the sun came out at the end of the week and made me feel like an idiot for knitting thick woolly bedsocks but equally naturally that didn't last!

When I got back from that day out I took the notion to do another onion dye but with far fewer onion skins to get a lighter colour. Here's the quite pleasing result being modelled by the boy-cat..

He was sleeping on the chair that I usually photograph yarn and knitting on so rather than move him I just put it on him. He's so sensible with wool now - when he was a kitten this would have been a Bad Idea but he just glanced around in mild bemusement. I think his markings (think Rorschach test) make quite an effective backdrop actually!

I had more Woolly Wonderment on Tuesday night at the knitting coven* when my lovely friends gave me some Yarn Yard Moondance and Malabrigo worsted for my birthday. How nice is that? It was totally unexpected and I nearly cried! Wonderful friends... I've spent my few free moments this week trying to decided what to knit with the yarn. I often think that's one of the best things about knitting - the potential state when all the possible gorgeous patterns are weighed up mentally!

I'm pretty sure I'll use the Malabrigo to make Gudrun's Crofter's Cowl and the temptation is to cast on right away but I've got too many works in progress at the moment and should really finish something now and then!

*my Beloved's name for the knitting group - it's a small group and quite often there'll only be three of us so the temptation to cackle 'when shall we three meet again' is great. However I'm the most hag-like by far so it's not a great analogy!

2011-06-03T21:48:00.006+01:00

Aaaaaaah - bliss! Warmth, sunshine, contented cats, flowers - all manner of nice things.

Sufficiently advanced

2011-05-28T16:38:00.005+01:00

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke

Wednesday was Towel Day. Coincidentally it was also my birthday and that of the Boy. I love that my Beloved's birthday is Star Wars Day and ours is Towel Day! While the Boy was delighted with a mountain of Lego, my Beloved indulged me with a Kindle. Wednesday and Thursday were so busy one way or another that I hardly got a chance to play with it, but yesterday and today have been Kindle days. And it is completely indistinguishable from magic. I've become quite blasé about technology - well, the rate of technological advance within my lifetime has been so quick that you do take new things for granted after a while. But the Kindle has had me saying 'this rocks!' so often that I sound like a second-rate character in an American sit-com. It's just so cool! And for the following reasons..

Cool Thing no.1. I can read on the Kindle while knitting (it has to be propped up slightly, but that's okay). This is fundamentally exciting for me! I'm like Nanny Plum but the other way round:

Cool Thing no.2 . Now I can buy and read books instantly on a whim - ah, this may not be so good. Fortunately several other presents from family were Amazon vouchers and money!

Cool Thing no.3. I will never be on holiday in the rain without anything to read again! As long as I'm organised - I have the wi-fi version, not the 3G.

Cool Thing no.4. I can look up interesting/unfamiliar words in a dictionary as I'm reading. Granted I occasionally did this before, either with Chambers perched next to me or looking up dictionary.com on the 'puter. But this brings up definitions on the page I'm reading.

Cool Thing no.5. Changing font-size!

So, a good birthday for me, despite the fact that it was one of Those Birthdays that get you depressed! And bear in mind that I got engaged on one birthday and had a baby on another so I've had some pretty euphoric birthdays to compare it with! These more than make up for the I spent doing one of my Finals..

I'll leave you with a picture of the Boy blowing his candles out while preventing his sister from 'helping':

the wind blows

2011-05-24T11:47:00.014+01:00

It was a bit blowy yesterday - and obviously anything strong enough to blow chunks off trees is strong enough to wreck my mini-greenhouse. In fact it was in quite a sheltered spot, wedged in next to the playhouse, so it fell over scattering all my seedlings rather than shredding completely. I'm trying to be 'glass half-full' here - I had to dismantle it and fling it in the garage but at least I should be able to put it back together again. However the seedlings took a battering. I just salvaged as much as possible, and put as many as would fit in the playhouse, crossing my fingers that it'd remain standing - it was here when we moved in five years ago and has been rotting gently ever since. It's on its last legs really, and while I was trying to jam the door shut to protect the poor seedlings the door-handle came off, leaving me standing staring at it like a cartoon character!

I couldn't get them all in the playhouse so the rest got put in the garage with the wheely-bin.

Poor plants. The rest of the garden was mostly okay though. I'd put most of the pots jammed together by the windward fence so the only place they could blow was against each other and the fence.

Today the weather is very mixed - I just saw the poor postie being blasted by a heavy shower - but when the sun comes out the garden looks surprisingly cheerful.

My honeysuckle is really taking off now and the nepeta at its base is getting very bushy:

I've been watching some of the coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show and wondering how on earth they make such temporary gardens look so permanent!

This is a phenomenally dull post isn't it? I've just been reading the news - the soft fruit growers were hit really badly by the strong winds. I think I've got off lightly with battered seedlings.

unseasonal

2011-05-22T22:18:00.013+01:00

Oh my, a week without blogging - it was just such a quick week. From the Eurovision Song Contest last Saturday (ah, how I love the Eurovision..) until now has seemed like no time - time flies when you're running round like the proverbial fly, though I can't really recollect what I've been doing, mostly stuff with the kids I suppose, plus the car's MOT and so on. I did a bit of mordanting the other day though before rounding off the week with some dyeing - unseasonal this time, being supermarket blackberries. Mad whim when I was shopping - I'd meant to try wild blackberry dyeing last autumn but didn't get round to it. So that's my blackberry 'soup' above, pretty isn't it? And below is the yarn freshly rinsed and hanging on the kithen tap while I figured out where to hang it to dry, given that it was bucketing down outside again (yes, it's been that kind of week).

I'm completely delighted with the result, it's the most gorgeous pinky lilac, much more intense than I expected. Quite often the colour looks quite strong when wet but as it dries it looks a lot weaker, but this looks hardly any different wet to dry. Water's a funny thing.

I'm so enamoured of this I couldn't stop taking photos of it!

Oh - 'science bit' (to resurrect a prehistoric meme) - as usual I mordanted with alum and cream of tartar. I crushed the blackberries (ha! so satisfying!) , simmered them for about an hour then sieved out the mush and added wet yarn when the dye liquor was cool. Then I brought it back to the boil, before simmering for just over an hour. Then I left it to soak overnight.

It's occurred to me that messing around with natural dyes reminds me a lot of when I was about eight or nine, and my friend Yvonne and I loved the Worst Witch books and used to spend hours down by the burn below her house making 'potions' - pondweed, mud and goodness knows what else mixed up in old bottles.

I'll end with a picture of a few of my results - left to right: horsetails and marigold heads; blackberries; brown onion skins; not sure about the far right one as the label has come off but I think it may have been onion skins too (my first dye attempt).

I'm surprised by the range of colours I've achieved actually. I'm not sure I'm still sticking to the shallows with this now, I may be in up to my knees!

There I was a-digging this hole

2011-05-13T21:17:00.007+01:00

Hole in the ground, it was big and sort of... rectangular*.

So yes, I was digging a hole today. The rain stopped so I seized the opportunity, and only moderately reluctantly. It turned out to be quite a lot of work and partway through I had to stop for a coffee and a biscuit in the sunshine.

After something like two hours effort I had managed to remove a layer of turf from a corner of what we generously call a lawn (it's really so small and scruffy) to create a new flower bed. I didn't have anything sensible to edge it with, hence the strange fencing offcuts around the edge. The netting is to keep birds from eating the seed and even more importantly to keep cats from digging it all up. I'm quite proud of how thorough I was in removing as many traces of grass and dandelions from it as possible, but oh boy my legs are aching now. I should really stretch befiore gardening!
To my delight we've got honeysuckle creeping through from next door - I love honeysuckle, I even have honeysuckle perfume. I have a honeysuckle growing on the other side of the garden but this section of fence was rebuilt last summer (hence the fencing offcuts lying around) so it's quite bare so far, but next-door's honeysuckle and, towards the other end, clematis are spreading happily.

* With apologies to Bernard Cribbins, national treasure. One of the things I like to watch on Youtube when I'm feeling low is the Dr Who episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks featuring, among others, Bernard Cribbins being brilliant.

Mixed bag

2011-05-11T12:10:00.007+01:00

I'm starting with that just because it's pretty!

I got a postcard this morning:

It's from my parents who are back up in Shetland for a family wedding (congratulations Steven and Emma!) - they know what I like! It's from the Shetland Museum and is titled 'Rowers, ready to spin into yarn c. 1920' A brief explanation found on the RLS website- 'Rowers are what you end up with when you are carding wool for spinning. The wool fibres are carded so as they are all parallel, then by reversing the direction of the cards, these fluffy rolls of wool are made. ' These look to me to be the natural sheep colours - gorgeous aren't they? I love the abstractness of the postcard - I might frame it actually.

Meanwhile in the mini-greenhouse things are growing beautifully. Time to pot on some and plant out others but I'm too busy today - Miss Mouse and I are heading up to the school this afternoon for a 'pre-school session', meeting the other kids who will be in her class when she starts school in August, seeing round the school and so on. Of course she's fairly familiar with the school anyway since she's often been with me when I've been there for the Boy's school stuff - they always do lots of things at that school that can get the parents involved if they want to be. Nevertheless, she's really excited that she's the reason we're going up to the school this time!

It's an odd hobby

2011-05-08T10:48:00.017+01:00

Those are dandelion roots. And I'm sure you know how much fun digging those up can be. It took me ages to dig up a reasonable amount but curiosity made it worthwhile.

I started with a 50g skein of undyed 4-ply wool, mordanted with alum and cream of tartar.

For my dandelion root experiment I used approximately 60g of chopped dandelion root, which I simmered in water for about an hour. Then I added the wool, dry - I should probably wet it first but I always forget. I didn't bother removing the bits of root, deciding that it'd probably be easy enough to pick the bits out of the wool.

I simmered the wool gently for an hour then had a look at the resulting beige and decided it was too boring and I ddn't want another beige. So I added fresh dandelion leaves, unweighed but a big handful which I simmered for another hour then had another look. Still beige though a little more yellowy, so I turned the heat off and let it steep overnight.

The next day I decided it was still just too boring (there's subtle and there's plain dull) so I drained the dandelion liquor and picked out the bits of root and leaf.

And it was time to bring out the big guns in the form of brown onion skins. I'd been saving these all winter and had loads so stewed up a bagful for an hour.

Instant colour! Gotta love onion skins. I simmered the wool in the onion skin juice for an hour (onion skins removed this time as slimey onion skin is a pain to pick out of the wool) then allowed it to cool and left it overnight.

And here it is, still damp, on the washing-line. Glorious rich colour..

.. and partially dry, still a rich rusty gold.

And the result! The skein is a bit untidy because partway through simmering the wool in the onion dye I snipped a length of wool for a little afterdip experiment. I cut the snipped length in half and made up two jam-jars of afterdip - one acid (white vinegar diluted with water) and one alkaline (2tsp of soda-crystals dissolved in water). In the picture below you see the strand results on the lolly-stick. The left-hand one is from the alkali afterdip and the right-hand one is the acid one, which as you can just about see is a bit yellower.

awwwww

2011-05-06T16:06:00.010+01:00

Today was meant to be a dye post. Yesterday I started dyeing with dandelion root for no other reason than curiosity as I'd never tried dyeing with roots before. But it was only looking like a boring beige so I added dandelion leaves to see what happened - and now it's another boring beige! So I'm just stewing up some onion skins (I've been saving them all winter!) to overdye the beige and see if I can perk it up a bit. But for today I have nothing to show for my efforts so I'll show you some of my favourite pictures from Tuesday when Miss Mouse and I took a quick trip to Kittochside (that is, the National Museum of Rural Life) to see how spring is doing on the farm.

All my pictures of this calf are blurred because he kept stretching towards us - the Ayrshire calves at Kittochside are so friendly. They get used to lots of visitors and love the attention.

And the Pyrenean valerian is on its way up (and up - it gets quite tall eventually). There's loads of it there. From what I've read it was a plant that was introduced, presumably for ornamental reasons, by Scottish landowners and did well, so you'll find it on estates and in the planted woodlands of southern Scotland. Kittochside wasn't farmed much after the 1950s and so never underwent the big changes of modernisation that other farms did. As a result the plant life is particularly rich and you get oddities there that perhaps would have been cleared out elsewhere.

And finally the bluebells (or harebells, if you must) are looking gorgeous. *happy sigh*

Shed Two

2011-05-05T14:44:00.003+01:00

You know what I forgot in my shed post? The best shed of all - Percy the Park-Keeper's shed! Who wouldn't want to live there? Okay, in reality it would be freezing cold due to draughts and no insulation, and there'd be no loo or sink, but other than that perfect! I notice there is a little chimney at the back there so presumably he has a wood-burning stove at least!

Miss Mouse loves the Percy the Park-keeper books - and I approve because I love the illustrations. We got this one for £2 in a charity-shop, how lucky was that?

It's birthday month in our household - my Beloved's was yesterday, Star Wars Day, appropriately enough for a geek of his standing. The kids and I made cake:

Mmm, cake. My Beloved is not actually that bothered by cake though he'll no doubt have a slice or two, but it's the principle of the thing - and the fact that I like baking and the kids love helping. The weather has turned wet and cool here after something like a fortnight with no more than a shower which is very unusual here, and the Boy's school is shut as it's a Polling Place (Scottish Parliament elections today as well as the voting reform referendum) so the kids and I are having a lazy day in the house and the garden is enjoying a drink. The cats keep going in and out the kitchen door, convinced each time that the rain they see through the window must be in some way optional, and every time I open the door I get a whiff of green and fresh garden.

The Garden

2011-05-04T10:20:00.008+01:00

As you may have guessed from the shed post, my garden's been on my mind a lot. Actually my mind (and the rest of me) have been in the garden a lot so there's been no escaping thoughts of it.

There are two reasons for this - 1) the weather has been great and 2) we've been working hard to make the garden more attractive to our cats in the hope that they'll spend more time in our garden and less time messing up our neighbours' garden.

Also it's spring and I've been planting loads and loads and loads of seeds.

Our garden is small - there's a bit of patio, a bit of grass, borders along two sides and a raised bed. Taking up more space are, in order of decreasing size, the kids' trampoline, the playhouse, the mini-greenhouse, the compost bin and the washing-line. This means that attempting to tart the garden up takes a bit of planning - we can't just shove a new plant or feature into a spare space because there just aren't any.

Our efforts to make the garden cat-friendly do seem to be working though. In fact the other morning there were five cats (including our own two) in the garden, studiously ignoring each other and apparently playing what Terry Pratchett calls cat-chess*.

The two nepeta plants we put in last year, nepeta nervosa 'Blue Moon' and nepeta 'Six Hills Giant', have proved more appealing to neighbouring cats than our own (they're just beside the white and ginger cat in that picture), but I'm growing nepeta cataria from seed this year in the hope that it'll appeal more.

Anyway, getting to the point at last, as our little tortoiseshell-and-white cat is particularly attracted to our neighbours' pond we've built a pond of our own. This was quite an epic project for us, despite being such a small pond. It's really just a plastic tub sunk in the ground, but neither of us was really sure what we were doing so our first attempt produced a very small swamp. My Beloved is of the 'ah, sod it, it'll be okay' school of gardening whereas I'm more cautious and, being more of a Hermione by nature, inclined to read up on a subject endlessly before tackling it. Together we usually balance each other out. Our first tub sprang a leak - possibly not surprising as it had previously been used for mixing cement and we'd discovered as we dug the hole for the pond that our garden is full of rubbish. I mean actual rubbish. Like many an archaeologist we discovered pottery when we started digging - only ours was 1980s kitchen tiles. The spot we'd chosen, bearing in mind the limitations of a small garden, is where the one annoyingly mismatched wrong-sized slab was in the patio. So we gain a pond and lose a minor niggle!

We went and bought a new tub, lifted the aquatic plants and so forth out of the old one and put the old tub inside the new tub - in retrospect the other way round would have been more sensible. This time we added gravel after the aquatic compost (as suggested on the compost bag that obviously we didn't read until too late last time) and avoided the 'instant peat-bog' look. Plants and pondweed were replaced and it started looking actually pondlike. A few days on and it's settled and you can actually see into the water. The cats are fascinated by it especially now that insects are being attracted by the marginal plants.

We left the handles on the tub just in case we have to lift it again but if everything looks okay we'll cut them off soon and start planting things in among the pebbles so it looks less temporary. Looking at it as others might see it now I'm feeling faintly embarrassed by how amateur it is, but hey, we can't all be Titchmarshes and from what the books say, ponds always look a bit rubbish until the plants are established!

Inspired by Simone of Linden Grove's 'sowing and growing' list and Mother of Purl's inspiring allotment posts, I think I'll list what I'm growing - it's as well to keep track of these things..

From seed - nepeta cataria, nasturtiums, sweet peas (lots and lots - our neighbour gave us a load of seeds she didn't need), sunflowers (ditto), marigolds both tagetes and calendula for dyeing purposes, anthemis tinctoria for dyeing, night-scented stock. Also strawberry plants from some seeds I found in the garage - I don't know if anything will come up but we already have strawberries in the garden, so these will just be an added bonus if they do.

Plug plants - more marigolds (tagetes I think) , pinks.

Yet to plant - carrots, potatoes, salad things. Buddleia 'Buzz' (dwarf buddleia) ordered. I've ordered some more marigold seeds (calendula 'Lemon Zest') too, because they look pretty and I think this gorgeous flower I photographed at Kittochside a couple of years ago might be Lemon Zest:

And I'm about to cut out of a section of the lawn for a new flower bed so I've got a whole lot of flower seeds to sew for that - poppies, nigella, cornflowers and whatever else I have to hand. I've got my fingers crossed that we'll have a very colourful summer this year!

---------------------------------

* See The Unadulterated Cat. Somebody lent me this book last year, I can't remember who (I thought it was my brother but he denies it), and nobody admits to it. It's all very strange, and having read the book I suspect it was a Schrodinger's cat nipping round the corner from next Tuesday to ensure that I have all the important cat behaviour books. One of this morning's cats appears twice in my photos, at both ends of the garden without apparently having moved. Just goes to show, Pratchett knows his cats.

My first mosaic

2011-05-03T21:41:00.001+01:00

It's blossom euphoria time and I've been taking loads of photos of it! So what better subject for my first mosaic? I've admired other people's mosaics but hadn't the foggiest how to do them until somebody (Silverpebble possibly, I know she did lots of gorgeous mosaics of the Splash of Colour pictures) included links and instructions on a blogpost.

Another time I'd upload the pictures in a more sensible order and get the colours more balanced but I'm quite pleased with it nevertheless. Blossom and blue sky - what could be nicer?

dandelions

2011-05-02T20:16:00.008+01:00

It's dyeing time again! As the weather has been so good the dandelions have been blooming in every sense - blooming nuisance in my garden, but I'll admit they brighten it up no end! I didn't dye with dandelions last year or not properly anyway, so this year I planned to take advantage of the proliferation of dandelions in our neck of the woods. I suspected I'd need a fair few for a decent colour and there just weren't enough in the garden so Miss Mouse and I set off on an expedition..

She looks very purposeful there, doesn't she? She was delighted at being allowed to pick flowers for once and we got loads, half a carrier-bag full. When we got home she happily helped me take the stalks off and put them into a measuring jug. When I weighed them I found that we had more than twice the weight of the yarn in dandelion heads so working on the assumption that more is more we boiled the lot up. It was a bit smelly to be honest - nothing like the boiled cabbage of last year, but a bit swampy-smelling. Thank goodness for good weather and having the kitchen door open!

So here's the ta-da!

As is often the case with natural dyeing the ta-da is a muted one - a ta-da if you like. It's a nice pale yellow, maybe slightly stronger than it shows in the photo.

You want a brighter ta-da?

I finished the Boy's socks at last! Yay!

shed

2011-04-30T11:40:00.001+01:00

There's something about sheds that really appeals to me. I think it's the huge variety you get of buildings that are essentially 'just' garden sheds, combined with the myriad of uses people find for them. Some people using them for storing gardening stuff, some as an escape from everything, some as a place to work. I gather that authors tend to be particularly fond of sheds and other outbuildings as workspaces and I can see why. My dad uses his shed for just about everything. It's a shrine to ingenuity with stuff stored in every possible space. I love it.

And it's so covered with clematis that in the summer from some angles you can barely see it. It's a Stealth Shed.

Dad is the master of ingenuity and constructs garden buildings and storage whenever they're needed, such as the lean-to to the side of the main shed, and of course the sitooterie:

..which naturally is a place where you 'sit oot' (click here for a different take on the concept!). That's not a great picture as it was taken in the spring before growth really get going - in summer it's a beautiful green place to sit in the shade or indeed if it's raining and you still want to sit oot. Mum and Dad like to have their coffee 'outside' a lot so they're often in there or in the greenhouse. They have a washing-line in the sitooterie too for airing stuff on wet days. I should do something like that. We used to have neighbours who had what was essentially a car-port minus the car with washing-lines strung up. Here in the wet west of Scotland it meant they had their washing out much more than the rest of us. I don't suppose it dried completely but even if it had to have a few minutes in the tumble drier to finish it off it'd still have that fresh smell. Mmmmmm.

My garden is too small for a shed unfortunately. We already have the kids' trampoline taking up space, along with the PVC mini-greenhouse, and the gradually rotting and disintegrating playhouse. I have a wishlist as long as my arm, both for plants and bigger stuff like shed and greenhouse, but I'd really need a Tardis garden for all the stuff I'd like to cram in. And to go off at another tangent, now I'm imagining a courtyard garden in the middle of the Tardis - how cool would that be? I'm hoping that when my Beloved's sold a motorbike there'll be more room in the garage for my gardening equipment (where do my trowels go? Do they migrate?) and dyeing stuff. Our neighbours recently got a shed and I have Shed Envy.

One of my favourite garden buildings - it's really too much of a stretch to describe it as a mere 'shed' - is Puck's Hut in the Formal Garden at Benmore Botanic Garden near Dunoon. I suppose it's more of a summer house really but it's just such a nice design and looks so right in its setting, which is interesting because that's not its original setting. It used to be in Puck's Glen but was moved down to Benmore at some point.

It's got just a hint of moominhouse about it! I like it so much I bought the postcard:

I have the postcard up on my pinboard now, along with other things that make me smile.

Woohoo!

2011-04-10T22:33:00.005+01:00

We got the warm weather, we got the sunshine!

I'm a bit weather-obsessed at the moment aren't I? How blissfully relaxing to sit in the sunshine in the garden though. Yesterday and today were beautiful - in fact I had to stop myself from doing all sorts of gardening things more suited to the end of May, because we're still likely to get a few frosts, but honestly it felt like summer. My brother came over and sat in the garden chatting for most of the afternoon; the cats stalked tiny insects; the kids bounced on the trampoline; Miss Mouse decided she wanted to eat her dinner in the garden - how could I refuse?

On that note I'll just refer you to my second post from my picture-a-day blog which includes my favourite and very appropriate poem.

On an Adventure - part three

2011-04-10T22:11:00.007+01:00

Heron! I love herons! And oyster-catchers, but I couldn't get close enough to get pics of those.

Fortunately seaweedy rocks don't move so I could get a misty loch shot. We went to Dunoon that day and it poured the whole time so no photos of that. But I went to the wool-shop I went to last time and got some more King Cole Riot for the blanket I'm knitting, so not a wash-out. And I got the kids some books in a charity-shop :-). We've done very well for kids books in charity shops recently.

And finally we headed home the following day in even more torrential rain. This was at the Rest and Be Thankful again - where the warning signs were flashing as there was a higher risk of landslides and falling rocks. Unnerving!

So.. between rain and falling into burns and splashing along the shore and what have you, our soggiest adventure yet. Come to the West of Scotland in the Spring!

On an Adventure - part two

2011-04-09T21:38:00.002+01:00

Rain rain rain rain rain rain. Rain.

We went to Inveraray Castle (which looked a bit green, most odd) in the rain. Photography isn't allowed inside so I only have a few pictures of outside, but they're good fun - love the windows!

The unfortunate thing about visiting such a place with my kids however is that I can't tell you a thing about the history of the place. No idea how old it is or anything. Fortunately it's all there on the website so I can read it leisure without an impatient four-year-old person saying 'Come on.. this way.. hurry up..'

It really did absolutely bucket down the whole time we were there. We'd had to stop in Inveraray to buy new wellies for Miss Mouse as she'd fallen in the burn the previous afternoon and her boots were sodden on the inside. Those new boots ended up being the icon of our little break yet I don't have a picture of them. I should have a close-up of them in their gorgeous pink brightness.

Anyway, just as we got back to where we were staying the sun came out, so the Boy and I went out for a wander to take some pictures and find some treasures on the beach. As I grew up close to the sea (and I'm talking metres) it was lovely to spend some time pottering around the shore with the Boy. Last time we were there we saw some huge starfish from the jetty but this time the sea was too choppy and the seaweed too thick to see as much.

Ah, a bit of gorgeous colour!

Sticking to the Shallows

Burning yer boats

Reasons To Be Cheerful

The sky

hearts and stars

More reasons to be cheerful!

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Anthropomorphising flowers

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Two days

Back from the Frozen North

Lucky me!

In which there is peace and quiet

All wrapped up

Baa and Moo

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Too busy to be cheerful

Deep and crisp and even

Tinselly

Potential disaster

A Christmas Carol

Fa-la-la-la

Ta-daa!

Zesty

Return of the garter-stitch square

Braiding from the past

a mixture

lighting up

Reasons To Be Cheerful

owl

*shiver*

A Christmas musing

somebody designs boot tread patterns

the white stuff

Therapeutic

Jinxed

Reasons To Be Cheerful-ish

a little Making Monday

More Reasons To Be Cheerful

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Christmas Cake

Bring it on

The demon drink

A Walk in the Park

Reasons To Be Cheerful: the search for optimism

Making Winter : toast

Making Winter : baking

Making Monday and Making Winter - neeps and knives

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Pink

Making Monday and GSoY loot

A little break

scarf of many colours

I type this while wearing a pinnie.

Making Monday - ssh, it's a secret

A Tale of Woe

Making Monday - a bit of serenity

a weekend

Phew

Making Monday 8

Making Monday 7

Making Monday 6

my dyeing week

baroque scones

Making Monday 4

Making Monday 3

The Legolas Scarf

Making (A Mess) Monday 2

Making Monday

Oh the fun to be had..

The Burrell Collection

Brownies

a stripey ambition

the little dye mystery

let's have a bit of colour

a little more dyeing

end of term

cosiness

Midsummer

shiver