Pondering

I think if I made these mitts again I'd move the cable/lace panel over a bit, or perhaps move the thumb further round - they have to be adjusted into the right place rather than sitting there naturally. Perhaps I just have oddly shaped hands.  The interesting thing about the wool is that it looks quite different colours in different light. In daylight it looks red - not scarlet, but more to the orange side of the range (tomato red perhaps). By the light of my bedside lamp it looks rusty which is why I didn't like knitting them in bed.  When I was out for a walk today they looked quite autumnal, as if they could almost, almost, have done for the orange project too.

I don't knit with a lot of red or orange, or warm colours much at all come to think of it - until I started Project Rainbow this year had been all about the blues and before that there were more greens (and I'm just remembering a Far Side cartoon of a frog in sunglasses singing 'I got the Greeeeeens, I got the Greens real bad..'). I'm not sure warm colours suit my peely-wally colouring - would my fingers look less blue with blue mitts?

Comfort

Today has been a very stressful one but at the end of it My Beloved made his truly delicious oaty rolls - comfort food at its best.

Aching Monday

I did a Metafit class this morning. 'Nuff said.  It was a lovely frosty morning though. And now it's a lovely frosty evening. The Boy and I went out for a walk to see if we could see any fireworks - I tried to photograph them and got such gems as this:

Still he seemed to enjoy himself and it really is a lovely, if chilly night.  We'd thought of taking the kids to a firework display but they're on so late. Why? It's dark before six o'clock, they don't exactly need to wait until 8 o'clock.

So I'm doing a bit of knitting rather than trying to escape a crowded post-firework-display car-park. Hmm, I'm not too disappointed! Note the cat-hair in that picture - there is always a stray cat-hair in my knitting photos and I never notice until I get the pictures on my 'puter.

I'm so sleepy though, might not get much done *yawn*.

Autumn colour

 We had a lazy day today. We watched The Muppets on DVD (complete with microwave popcorn - bleurgh), then we watched the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix (and I held my breath for whole chunks of it - blimey what a race), and then the Boy and I went for a walk.  Most of the leaves are down now..

 .. and the colours are in the copper-to-brown range, more muted than it was.

Back at home the less muted Circle Socks (what I eventually decided to do for my Project Rainbow 'Orange' item - not toe-up; top-down but with this fun slip-stitch pattern)  are proceeding. I've never knitted a slipped-stitch pattern before and it's a lot of fun - much quicker than I thought for a start. Actually the purl rows are much slower than the slip-stitch rows. I did have a slight issue of a dropped slip-stitch meaning I had to go back three rows. And then do the same thing again when I realised I'd dropped the flamin' thing again, but it's all sorted now!  It's looking lovely but I'm not sure it's going to fit over my foot - I have quite big feet and although I'm sure the ankle will fit my ankle, if you see what I mean, I'm not sure I'll get it to my ankle. Feet are so inconveniently shaped! So I may have to start again with a few more stitches - I'll do a few more rounds and see how it's doing. The thought did cross my mind that the slipped-stitch circles would make a lovely cuff for a pair of gloves/mitts but I really don't need any more.

Greenest

 Wool dyed with dyers chamomile (anthemis tinctoria), soaking in water.

 The same wool added to the slightly pongy black bean dye bath (black turtle beans soaked in cold water out in the garage for several days),

 The same wool after soaking for another couple of days out in the garage.

The same wool after washing and drying. It's green! Really green!

 The same wool shown with my previous Best Green, the drab one - photo taken with a flash.

For days after this I was waving the wool under the noses of my family saying 'Look at that! It's green!' That's how pleased I am!

Dough

Friday night is Pizza Night in our house. It started when we got the breadmaker - initially we made bread, then we discovered the pizza dough recipe, then we realised that while we were using the breadmaker regularly, we were only using it for making pizza dough.  And then the breadmaker blew up ceased to function and we've discovered that actually pizza dough is incredibly easy to make without it, so we've kept going minus the breadmaker.  The kids love it - they sometimes help with the dough (that's Miss M doing her best Paul Hollywood impression there) and they like to add their own toppings. The only downside is that it's rather spoiled them and they're inclined to turn their noses up at non-homemade pizza. Ah well, there's worse ways to be spoiled.

I don't really do anything doughy apart from the pizza dough. My Beloved makes incredibly wonderful oaty rolls occasionally, and sometimes bread. And I've been known to make soda bread in the past. But having watched the Great British Bake Off now I'm tempted to try a plaited loaf - I've done all sorts of braiding, how hard can it be...?

The Great British Bake Off was a surprise hit in our house - I hadn't seen the previous two series, and only started watching this year's about halfway through because people kept telling me about it and Funky Knitwear James is from the part of Shetland where I grew up so I felt obliged to watch. No, I don't know him - I'd headed off to university before he was even born (How To Feel Very Very Old) and we'd moved out of that area by then though I still had relatives there, but in the way of people originally from small places I can 'place' him in the community. Do you get that in other small places? In Shetland people like to know who they're talking about and if you don't you can place them by who they're related to or who they were at school with. I was just 'Peter's daughter' for years, probably still am to some.

The Great British Bake Off entertained me greatly but I'm not entirely sure why, given that almost none of the baked things made me drool. Oh, I admired the skill involved in making them, but I'm not into pastries or puddings and not even particularly keen on cake. I have one friend who said the doughnuts episode made her really hungry but there was nothing I saw that I'd have wanted to eat until John's chocolate cake in the final. So it was a bit of an odd thing to watch really.  I think it's just the satisfaction of watching people who are competent, because even when they had disasters they were all much more technical in their baking than I'd ever be (or choose to be, if I'm honest).

But anyway, talking of cake and the Bake Off, may I recommend Mary Berry's Chocolate Sandwich cake? I love Nigella's Chocolate Fudge Cake but this one is almost as good, much quicker and less fiddly so it's what I use for the kids' birthday cakes. It's brilliantly easy, even with kids helping, and always gives great results.  I originally found it on the BBC website with their 'Recipe Finder' and normally I'd include a link but I can't find it there now so here it is, with the disclaimer 'This is Mary Berry's recipe, it deserves to be known and baked, often!'

Mary Berry’s Chocolate Victoria Sandwich sponge cake

Makes 20cm/8in cake

Preparation time less than 30 minutes

Cooking time 30 minutes to 1 hour

Ingredients

2 tbsp cocoa

3 tbsp boiling water

225g/8oz soft margarine

225g/8oz caster sugar

4 eggs

225g/8oz self-raising flour

2tsp baking powder

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Grease and base line 20cm/2x8in sandwich tins.

2. Blend the cocoa and water in a mixing bowl then leave to cool slightly. Measure all the remaining ingredients into the bowl and beat well until thoroughly blended. Divide the mixture evenly between the tins and level out.

3. Bake in the preheated oven for about 25 minutes or until well risen and the tops of the cakes spring back when lightly pressed with a finger. Leave to cool in the tins for a few moments then turn out, peel off the paper and finish cooling on a wire rack.

Chocolate buttons optional.  Were there any chocolate buttons on Great British Bake Off? All a signature wotsit needs is chocolate buttons and gold star sprinkles! In our house anyway.

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People often say that baking has to be really accurate and you should follow the recipe to the letter. Actually I take liberties with baking - my Christmas cake always has loads of extra fruit and I leave out things like glace cherries which I don't like. I've made mistakes with weighing ingredients and *whispers* it's not as critical as the books would have you believe (think about it, how long have really reliable and accurate scales been in existence? How long did people mostly measure 'by eye'?). And when I made Miss M's birthday cake last month I realised far too late that the margarine I had was 'light' and 'not suitable for baking', so I used mostly that with a bit of leftover butter from something else I'd been making and it was delicious.  There are occasional disasters of course, but not many.

NaBloNeeneeNoonoo

Apparently it's Blog Writing Month - NaBloNeeneeNoonoo or some such thing. I don't like Newspeak-style agglomerations, especially ones start with Na standing for National because there's never any mention of which nation exactly. So in support of the nation of Tuvalu who are fairly unlikely to be the nation in question, I'm avoiding the nasty word and I'm just saying that the plan is to blog every day this month. Last year I tried Advent Blogging in December - every day up until Christmas Day - and managed that so how hard can thirty days be? Well, the honest answer is that the some days it'll be quite difficult indeed but I'm allowing myself a few posts that are just a picture and a caption.

So we start with Last Night. That's a pile of bags of sweeties (also satsumas as a nod towards vitamins and stuff) I put together yesterday in preparation for hordes of kids at the door. In fact there weren't huge numbers of kids out and about, we always have too much (everyone does) and there are always leftovers.

And that's the Horrors dressed up for going out guising - the Boy is the classic sheeted spectre and Miss Mouse is 'Violet Vocabulary', a superhero known only to primary school-children so other kids her age thought it was cool and nobody else knew who she was.  The Boy, who is rather shy, had a completely fantastic time this year. As his face was covered he didn't feel nearly as shy as usual about telling his joke to people on their doorsteps ('How does the ghost like his eggs cooked? Terror-fried').  The rain had stopped by the time we went out and we met up with some other kids and parents to go round together - my friend's husband made a very impressive Darth Vader but nobody gave him sweeties, awwww....

And keeping up with tradition I made two small neepie lanterns. The neeps (swedes) I got this year were teeny which makes it a bit awkward but no skinned knuckles! One of my friends told me on Facebook this morning that she once ended up getting six stitches on her hand after a neep-carving accident, so I'm counting myself very lucky! We left one on our doorstep while we were out guising and I carried the other with me.

The aftermath - singed neep. Aren't tealights a brilliant invention?

My Powerhoop class has been cancelled this morning so I'm off to wind wool for my orange project - not really comparable exercise but it needs to be done!