Of pumpkins and turnips

Hallowe'en has been and gone, and this year I carved two neepie lanterns, although I don't seem to have a photo of them together, and knitted a pumpkin. The pumpkin pattern was one I saw in a magazine, just when I fancied a quick, easy knit. The wool is Wendy Ramsdale, which I'd never used before, and is absolutely gorgeous.

Neepie lantern dribbling wax

I hung one lantern up outside the house and the kids took the other with them when they went guising:

Neepie lantern in action

When I took the lantern down from outside the house I managed to spill candle wax all over my hoodie so I've learned how to remove candle wax from clothes now! Actually I knew in theory how to do it but had never had cause to try, and now I know that ironing the item between layers of brown paper does actually work! Well, up to a point anyway - it got most of it out and I've just put the hoodie through a wash to see if the rest comes out.  See, you're never too old to learn something! Talking of which...

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

I graduated on Saturday! BA(Hons) in Humanities with Literature, and a very lovely graduation ceremony it was too.

Open University graduates are of all ages and, as was pointed out in one of the speeches, have almost all been studying under awkward circumstances - while working, while bringing up children, while caring for someone - so there was a real sense of achievement. I graduated from a traditional university 22 years ago having had a traditional student experience  - study, party, study, kid myself that sitting on the beach with my notes meant I was studying, beach party, study, repeat... As a young student I had a great time, learned a lot (not all from the studying part of it), and wouldn't have missed it for the world, and I did have a sense of achievement then. But really my only responsibility then was to remember to feed myself - and I wasn't even very good at that! Studying when you have actual responsibilities is a different kettle of fish entirely and I was taken by surprise at how amazing it felt to graduate with all these other people who had squeezed studying in here and there, fitting it in around families and commitments and responsibilities. So, it was a really nice, happy day!

creeping back in

St. Andrews  - East Sands, pier and cathedral

That's been a long break - almost five months..

Things have been hectic and there have been family (and cat) illnesses, and blogging just fell by the wayside. Luckily things are calming down now, so here's the update!

I've finished my Open University degree and will be graduating at the end of October. I got a 2.1 (Upper Second). Again. I already have a 2.1 in Social Anthropology from the Olden Days of my youth. I was very close to getting a First with the OU degree but not quite. And if I hadn't taken that pesky Literature in the Modern World course partway through, maybe I'd have got it, but it turns out I hate 20th century literature. I blame Mrs Dalloway. I'm sure I'm not the first to say that. I am, of course, very happy with a 2.1, but I admit to being just slightly wistful about not getting that First.

The kids are back at school now but we had a pleasant summer - a week in St. Andrews again, a few days in the Highlands visiting Mum and Dad, a lot of lazing around reading.

St.Andrews - North Street at sunset

Falls of Pattack, near Loch Laggan

I started knitting again! I did hardly any knitting over the winter, probably because I was studying a lot, but as soon as I submitted my last assignment at the end of May I picked up the needles again to knit a present for a teacher at Miss M's school who was retiring after 40 years at that school. She's a lovely person who's done so much for the school and the kids, and taught both my children, so I wanted to make her something special. But as she announced her retirement quite suddenly we were all a bit taken by surprise and there wasn't much time! Luckily I'd come across the pattern for this shawlette (Sunburnt by Nidhi Kansal) which is quite quick and straightforward to knit up, even for me. I think I only messed up the lace section once, which is pretty good going for me!

Cat assistance

Modelled by Miss M

I was really pleased with how it turned out, so the next time I'm at the Yarn Cake I'll get some more of the yarn (DROPS Alpaca) in another colour and start one for myself. I also knitted another Boneyard shawl over the summer but I've totally failed to get a photograph of that. Actually it's more Boneyard-esque - I used yarn-overs instead of the left- and right-leaning increases and I completely forgot about the garter ridges.

Okay, none of that sounds very exciting! But the main thing is that everybody is healthy again. 

lurching into winter

It snowed on Friday night. The snow didn't last beyond Saturday evening but it proved that autumn has definitely gone. It had lingered longer than usual really, being quite a dry and mild autumn, but we had gales last week and suddenly the trees are bare. So these pictures are my final fling of autumn, all taken in mid-October when we were visiting my parents.

 Looking at them now I'm realising how much warmth is in them!

I'm having a bit of trouble blogging because my knitting mojo is AWOL and I'm feeling essentially boring - how sad is that? I want to knit but I want it to be something soothing and easy. I have wool, I have needles, but can't make up my mind about a pattern!  As for being boring, well, I've been studying. Bit behind at the moment but life happens sometimes! I did my first assignment for this course a couple of weeks ago and got 84% for it which was a relief as this course is quite a step up from the one I did last year and it was all feeling a bit alarming. The first assignment is always an emotional hurdle I think.

I'd better stop now - Cat 1 is knocking things over, a sure sign that it's time the cats were fed and that I go to bed! I'll try to be (even) more fascinating in the next post.

a non-post

I'm so sick of that Safeway carrier big picture! But I don't really have the time for a proper post so here's a picture from our visit to Greenbank Garden in the rain a couple of weeks ago. Although it was really chucking it down the garden was lovely (if a bit squelchy underfoot).

The jigsaw got finished eventually, slightly hindered by the larger cat who scampered over it one day and tore a whole chunk up again.  I really enjoyed doing it but it's not that convenient having a board with a half-completed jigsaw lying on the floor for days so I'll investigate alternatives.

I'm in the home stretch with my OU course this year - just doing my EMA. I forget what it stands for, but it's a final assignment that counts for half the course, done instead of an exam. Obviously I want it to be good, and at the moment I just can't see beyond it. Another day or two and it'll be done - I have a good essay plan, half a draft and copious notes - but like an exam you can't really imagine it being of the past. See you on the other side!

knit on

I am knitting again! Woohoo!

My replacement needles arrived (curiously this didn't make the missing needle turn up again, which is what usually happens in such situations) and I've been cracking on with this cabled headband thing.  It's a plaited cable ear warmer* and I found the pattern in a book from the library.  Er,  just checking, the book is Simple Knitting by Ros Badger. Mostly I knit with 4-ply and tiny needles so to knit with aran and 4.5mm feels really decadent. It's such an easy pattern, so the whole thing is knitting up at warp-speed. Except when I spot a stupid mistake a few rows back and then spend some time un-knitting and re-knitting the same three rows over and over because the beautiful luscious purple is so dark that, except in daylight (of which we are in short supply at the moment), I can't really see what I'm doing. It's more purple than it is in my picture actually.

I could have ripped back to the last turquoise lifeline, but I was feeling stubborn and I wanted to know what I'd done. Still, it's sorted now! The lifelines are mostly there to make it easier to count the pattern repeats, and actually, because I just really like the way that turquoise looks with the purple.  The luscious purple is a Noro yarn I got at a P/hop yarn-swap event raising money for MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières). It's wonderfully soft and squishy, so it's a pleasure to work with even if it's tricky to see in low light. I'll forgive it!

Médecins Sans Frontières

Médecins Sans Frontières)

The reason I was able to throw myself back into knitting is that I finished my OU assignment with plenty of time to spare - submitted electronically on Thursday, a day early in fact. In all my academic adventures I don't believe I've ever submitted an assignment early before!  So I spent all of yesterday bouncing around with that kind of enthusiastic well-being you only get after handing in an assignment, the kind that makes it almost worth the shuffling of multiple pages of notes, the muttered swearing and eventually the sense of resignation ('it's probably rubbish but it'll have to do') that characterised the preceding few days. Of course on Thursday night I had a dream that it had been marked and I'd only got 48% - let's hope not!


UPDATE:  aargh, no, I've just clicked on that picture and spotted another mistake - some of my cables are not plaiting. I'd jotted the pattern down in a small notebook rather than carrying the library book around, but I've written it down wrong and I've had the cable needle in front instead of behind for row 7 in the last three pattern repeats. D'oh.. such a numpty.. Three-fifths wrong, that's fairly impressive even for me! I'm pleased now that I left all those lifelines in.



*for plaited cable ears?

frosty

We had the first frost of the winter last night, and a clear night was followed by a beautifully clear day. I don't know what temperature it got to in the day but it felt chilly all day - the sun was warm, but the moment you went into the shade you felt it.  It was great to see some blue sky again though! Up near the library you could see for miles and miles. I should have taken more pictures really but I was just too cold at that point. It was my first gloves day of the winter too, reminding me that I really should knit that second mitten, y'know, sometime before spring.

Tonight being Bonfire Night, the kids and I ventured out for a walk to see if we could spot fireworks. I took loads of photos but obviously they're mostly useles - that one above is of the moon with fireworks and the tops of some trees. Or alternatively it could be a colony of glow-in-the-dark bats. The cats have been more twitchy at the sound of explosions this year (perhaps there were more fireworks this year because it was a dry night?) but not excessively so. While we were out firework-watching we saw a fox slinking around completely unconcerned about the whole thing. Animals must think humans are very peculiar sometimes.

It was still cold and clear with very little breeze and the moon was particularly beautiful:

We were trying to decide whether it was full or not, but apparently it's waxing gibbous.

My brain is still addled by Cézanne - nearly finished though. I just have to add a bit to the Cleopatra answer and trim a bit more off the Cézanne one. Actually I could easily have written something twice as long for the Cézanne, which I suppose is reassuring in that I have plenty to say, but it's also quite frustrating that I'm having to prune quite so drastically. I'm only good at pruning drastically in the garden!

the little grey cells

Now that I'm doing the OU again I'm finding bits of my brain reactivating, which is really a rather fantastic feeling! It's not that I never use my brain the rest of the time, of course, but there's something about really immersing yourself in a topic that makes the ol' brain start bouncing around as if I've been on the caffeine but without the attendant jitteriness (I do not tolerate caffeine well any more).

The course I'm doing this year is a 60-point level 1 introduction to the Arts course. It will in fact be my second last course, as I have 240 points hanging around from when I studied with the OU pre-kids, but these days they insist that you have to do a level 1 course (when I started, ahem, last millennium, I skipped straight to level 2). Actually this is probably just as well because after a twelve-year break I'm no doubt fairly rusty and it'll ease me back into it. Also this one is assessed solely by assignments - there's no exam, callooh, callay, oh frabjous day etc! So far it's going fairly well. I have an assignment to do on Cézanne and Cleopatra - not together, it's an assignment with two short questions. Imagine a single question linking Cleopatra and Cézanne! The mind boggles..

I'd written notes on both sections at the end of last week and just needed to get it into some kind of coherent answer, and today I had an intensive scribbling-on-bits-of-paper session at the local library, with both marker pens and post-it notes (get me, such a student), and it seems, touch wood, reasonably okay.  It turns out I'm a note-taker not a drafter when it comes to essay-writing, which is something our area tutor mentioned at the tutorial we had in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago.  I'd never really thought about it before, but as we have to do some reflective writing as part of the course it's probably helpful to think about the way I work and think. The whole reflective writing things is new to me and to be honest scares me silly!

As an aside I must say that I'm really really lucky with the local library. It's small and to be honest doesn't actually have a huge selection of books, though they'll try to order things in for you if there's something you really want, but it is a real community place. The staff are all friendly and lovely and helpful, and there are always things going on. Rhyme time and story time for the teeny-tiny kids, a book club, Minecraft club and regular craft sessions for the older children, and things going on for adults too. It's one of my favourite places and it's lovely to see a library so appreciated by the community.

The other day we were going out with my mother-in-law for a bit so we decided to go to Pollok Park in Glasgow. Aside from some lovely walks, Pollok Park is the home of the Burrell Collection which we used to mooch around a lot pre-children but tend to hurtle around in rather a hurry these day. Among other things the Burrell Collection includes some ancient Egyptian stuff and a collection of paintings, including a Cézanne, so I thought I'd have a look while we were there to get myself in the mood for comparing and contrasting and muttering about brushwork and so forth. Alas, the Cézanne wasn't there, just an empty space on the wall with no obvious sign explaining its absence.  I'd hazard a guess that they'd have noticed if it had been nicked though. My Beloved said there was a suit of armour missing too - the swords and armour section is his favourite bit.

So I bought the postcard:

 Le chateau de Médan

My mother-in-law and her gentlemen friend took the kids off to the café after a bit so My Beloved and I had a little while to have a proper mooch around looking at things, which is something we haven't done at leisure for ages. I had a really good look at the Egyptian stuff for probably the first time ever. I'd never had any interest in Ancient Egypt, but since the Boy did a Topic* on Ancient Egypt in Primary 4 and I had to help him, I've become more interested.  Between that, and chain-reading Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody mysteries**, and having just done the chapter on Cleopatra for the OU course I found myself looking at the various Egyptian bits and pieces with a much more knowledgeable eye. For one thing I was looking at the dates of the objects and being struck by the sheer age (and age-range) of them - there were things there which were truly old, as well as some from the Ptolemaic (Hellenistic) dynasty, the dynasty that included and ended with Cleopatra VII, the Cleopatra, which are comparatively recent as the Ptolemaic dynasty ended pretty much with ol' Cleo in 30 BC.

You know what, though? Studying can be really tiring. I'd forgotten. On that note, I'll head off to bed. Good night!


* There are many more Topics in primary school than when I was that age.

** I'm addicted to mysteries especially ones that are not in the least gritty.