Deja vu

Sickness Bug round 2 - Miss M this time. And fortunately (depending on how you look at it) I've got this week off work so I didn't have to figure out what to do when a puking child coincides with a work day. Actually it was yesterday that she was puking - today she was recovering, i.e. tired and hungry but otherwise pretty much okay. So we spent the day pottering around and it was all very pleasant.

What I'm supposed to be talking about of course is crochet. Now crochet and I have never really clicked. I can do the basic stitches, manage a wonky granny square and so on. I'm okay in the round as it were (spiraling), but not so good at going back and fore. But recently (well, a couple of months ago probably), I saw something lovely on Instagram. I follow Jane Lithgow (probablyjane) on there, and she shared a picture of some Tunisian crochet she was doing and I really liked the texture. After watching a couple of 'how to' Youtube videos I got an ordinary crochet hook and some scrap yarn, had a go, and promptly ordered a set of Tunisian crochet hooks (needles/?) for a proper go. I loved it - it's the ideal blending of knitting and crochet as far I'm concerned and I don't make it go wonky! Well, not very. I started making a cowl with some gorgeous sock yarn I'd had lying around for a while (that's it above) - and promptly broke the bamboo hook. So I started another cowl with some chunky yarn (Wendy Fusion - a discontinued one that I had three balls left of) and a thicker hook.

And it was so easy. I was only using the simple stitch as I wanted to get the hang of it properly before leaping on any further, but it's such a lovely texture it didn't need anything else. I didn't have enough of the Wendy Fusion to make a scarf so I made it just long enough to graft the end for a cowl. Well, I say graft, I just crocheted the ends together. I don't even know the proper crochet term for that. But it worked, so that's fine.  Item in picture modelled by cat, naturally.

 

I did have enough left to knit an alternating stripes hat. So this winter I will match.

a better picture

1. a better picture of the wool, in daylight and all fluffed back up.

2. a picture of the moon, possibly the least fuzzy I've ever taken.

The anti-sickness tablets also turn out to be anti-sleep tablets* so after four days of insomnia** I've decided to stop them and just hope I don't throw up too much.  I've only three more days of the antibiotics left. I'm sure it'll be fine. FINE. When making 'January bearable' amounts to not being sick there's not really much you can illustrate it with...

*surprisingly - the first dose knocked me out.

** actually on adding it up it's been three nights of insomnia. Addled.

flat

 I got a package in the post today - it was flattish with odd lumps. When I opened it I realised it was some wool I'd ordered which had been packed in the most awesome and cool way - it had been vacuum-packed.  Yes, it looks like plasticene.

The best fun I had today was cutting a tiny hole in the packaging and watching it inflate (reflate? reinflate..?). Call me easily amused but it made me laugh. It also made Miss M laugh so it's not just me. That said, we've both been giggling at really bad cracker jokes this evening..

The pictures are dark and gloomy once again because once again I pretty much missed daylight. I had to go back to the doctor because the current antibiotics were making me very queasy. But as they do seem to be working on the chest infection, rather than stop them she's given me anti-nausea tablets to go with them. These are a kind of antihistamine, most of which make me sleepy, so I spent most of this afternoon sleeping or dozing. On the upside, no nausea, and it's only until I finish the antibiotics so just a few days. A few days of sleeping? Why thank you!

Wool and books

We wound another ball of wool today - this is one of my home-dyed efforts (anthemis tinctoria).

And I'm reading The Tempest, which I haven't read for years.

Also I've pulled muscle and it hurts too much to type, so a short post it is!

The ceiling saga

 Last month we had a leak in the teeniest little pipe under the floor in the bathroom, right over the kitchen inconveniently enough. It turns out it was the most awkward pesky place to get to and half the kitchen ceiling had to come down to get at it. The actual leak was quickly fixed but the kitchen did not look good. Also we found out that it used to be a not particularly nice shade of green - and I love green, so that's saying something.

But a month later and the ceiling is back where it should be, the cabinets that had to be taken down are back up, I've repainted the kitchen, got a new clock as the old one was a bit rubbish and running slow, and the small cat has found a new place to perch.

All the fun and games coincided with the last few weeks of term and we had workmen in plastering and putting the ceiling back up on the first Friday and Monday of the summer holidays. It's all been just a little stressful. So I treated myself to some colourful sock wool that I have been pining over for a while. It's Trailing Clouds' Primary/Secondary (as in primary and secondary colours) and it is self-striping loveliness in a skein. 

I have other things to finish before I cast on but I'm so looking forward to having bright stripey feet in the winter!

But enough of the w-word, it has been warm and sunny here and I've been chasing bees around the garden, trying to get a photo.

Here's one headbutting a lupin. Whee! *thump*

I think this is a carder bumblebee, very ginger thorax. They move surprisingly quickly, I always think, and I have umpteen fuzzy pictures of a ginger blur and as many closeups of a bit of flower that the bee has just left. Exit bee, stage right.

The dyer's chamomile is just starting to flower now and the garden looks very happy in the sunshine.

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!

Happy times

Cake:

more cake:

 a trip to the frozen north:

 loot from the 'Glasgow School of Yarn' event:

 and finally, a picture and story by Miss Mouse:

'I wish I had a coin ov choclit.'

 I like the snails she's done at the bottom of the trees - click to embiggen, they're a cheery bunch and worth a look.

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

It's been the October break here - the kids went back to school yesterday. The holiday started with Miss Mouse's birthday party, then the next day on her actual birthday we headed up north to see my parents for a few days (hence cake picture no.1). It was cold but glorious there, and it was snowing lightly just as we left. The last chilly picture was taken mid-morning the day we left.

When we got home we had a couple of days lazing around and I made Miss M a birthday cake, cake pic. no.2. I always make the kids a chocolate sandwich cake with chocolate buttons on top on their birthdays - it's not an intentional tradition, it just evolved really. Of course we were travelling on her birthday, but although she had cake at my parents' she couldn't miss out on her own special cake could she? I think the chance to blow out candles may have something to do with it of course!

Then on Saturday I had some glorious time to myself and went into Glasgow for day two of the Yarn Cake's second birthday bash, the 'Glasgow School of Yarn'. I caught up with old friends, met some Ravelers (Ravellers?) in real life for the first time, bought some very nice yarn and generally had a brilliant time.  I'd been saving since last year's GSoY but actually I was fairly restrained. Possibly if I'd been there on Day One I'd have spent more as I imagine quite a lot had already sold by the time I arrived on Saturday lunchtime!

I've just realised there was something stuck to my monitor that kept making me imagine rogue commas - very distracting, I kept trying to delete it!

doppelganger

I found the previous black-bean-dyed wool. That's it on the left. So despite the things I did differently, there's not a lot of difference - oh well! What to make with it though, that's the question..

I'll just include a gratuitous string shot, just for the sake of it:

Wound Up

That's 4-ply wool on a cone. I love the way it looks when it's neatly wound like that. Also string:

A new ball of string is a thing of beauty.

The 4-ply wool on the cone was about to be un-wound into a skein, with help from a small cat of course.

I do the skeins on the legs of an upturned chair and the small cat frequently finds this too hard to resist. She's sitting on the underside of the seat there if you can't figure out what you're looking at.  But eventually, with the cat untangled,..

a 54g skein of 4ply waiting to be mordanted (alum/cream of tartar) ,

 .. and finally immersed in a cold black bean dye.  This time I added a bit of bicarb to the soaking beans because that's what somebody on Ravelry had done, and I wanted to see if it made any difference to the colour - it didn't I don't think. I've put the last bean-dyed wool somewhere safe  - by which I mean I have no idea where it is. 

What is different this time is that the bean solution did smell (it didn't last time), not terrible but pungent and distinct, and also you can see in the picture that the dye bath was a bit frothy too.

 And the end result - another nice blue. I dipped one end into a soda crystal solution to see if that affected the colour and it did. Slightly. It's a little greener and a little paler, but not enough to show up in the photos, which is slightly frustrating.

 And now it's in the process of getting would up into a ball. Got a bit tangled there. As usual! 

Warning, may contain traces of beans

Beans?

Dyeing with beans, black beans. There has been a long thread on a dyeing group on Ravelry about dyeing with black beans so I thought I'd have a go.

Sooooo.. here's what I did. I had about 50g of aran-weight wool, mordanted with alum and cream of tartar. So far, so normal.

Dyeing with beans is quite different from what I usually do because there is no heating involved at all as apparently heat kills the colour. So instead there's a huge amount of soaking. I soaked the beans in cold water in a jar in the garage for several days, topping up the water from time to time as the beans seemed to absorb a fair bit. Then I drained the liquid into my usual dye-pan and added the wool and left it to soak in the garage again. Various people in the Ravelry thread talked about letting the beans/wool soak in the fridge but I didn't have space in the fridge so chose the garage as it's cool.  Meanwhile I put the drained beans back into the jar and added more water to see if I got any more colour out of it.

 This is what looked like shortly after I added the wool  - absolutely gorgeous!

 I can't remember exactly when I took this picture unfortunately, but it was the same day as the picture above so you see how quickly the colour was taken up.

After a couple of days I added the second lot of bean water and left for another two nights.

And here's the result:

And I am so happy with it! Mostly blue with hints of green. I really should have taken note, but this was my slowest dye ever having taken well over a week what with all the soaking, but it was very much worth the wait.

 And in a ball:

From what I gather it's not particularly light-fast so it's one to use with caution I think, but that's fine with me. It's blue! Bluuuuueeee!

Meanwhile at the other end of the spectrum here's what I'm knitting at the moment - my mitts. Although it's quite a small project it's pushing me quite a bit because it contains cables and lace, sometimes in the same row (with increases for the thumb on some rows too), both of which I've done a bit of but not at the same time, plus following a chart which isn't my forte.

There has been a lot of muttering, scribbling, stifled swearing and a bit of undoing a couple of times, but I think I've got the hang of it now. I'm moderately pleased with this!

Dyer's chamomile

Now that it's dry, this is how the wool turned out. As ever, I find it very hard to photograph yellow wool, but trust me, it's lovely!

It hardly looks yellow at all in the close-up does it?

Anyway, a big thumbs up for anthemis tinctoria!

A pot full of yellow

 Dyer's chamomile (anthemis tinctoria), mostly leaves and stems with a few flowers chucked in too.

 After simmering for a bit.

And drying on the washing-line in the sunshine - sunshine! Woohoo!

There was actual laundry drying on the line too, and it mostly dried! It was quite breezy as well as sunny, so a great drying day.  It's a bit of a sad thing to get excited about but we've had very few decent drying days this year and I love the smell of line-dried washing.

And I wasn't the only one enjoying the sunshine:

Basking bee.

(Mum, this is a picture I took while we were on the 'phone).

All this was possible because My Beloved took the kids out for a bit. I love them to bits, but oh my, peace and quiet....  Bliss.

Charity shop gold

It is a wet wet day today, but I don't mind. The kids had their optician appointments this morning but this afternoon we've had nothing in particular to do so have just been pottering around in the house. The kids are making up some incomprehensible game at the moment, and I have been doing some soothing sock-knitting upstairs while listening to the rain. I can't be the only one who likes the sound of the rain can I? It's not just because I'm safely inside either - when I worked at the museum I was up at the farm in all weathers and provided I had the right clothes for the weather I was always quite happy.  The only weather I find it really hard to be positive about is hail. Hail doesn't have many redeeming features, though I'm sure it's meteorologically interesting.

Anyway, the other day I had to go down to the town centre for a few bits and pieces and dropped into one of the charity shops for a look around. I was about to wander back out  again when I spotted some mixed bags of wool, and when I investigated them I found not the usual charity shop acrylic or (horrors!) eyelash yarn but this:

H&O Shetland Fleece by Templetons of Ayr.

And this:

'Falcon Llama 4-ply' which turns out to be neither falcon (ho ho) nor llama, but a rather nice 60% alpaca 40% wool.  It's not a brand I've heard of or remember, and from Googling I can only find references to vintage knitting patterns, so I suspect this has been languishing in somebody's stash for years, as has the Templetons of Ayr wool - from a Google search on them I discovered that their mill in Mill St in Ayr was demolished in the 1980s.

I don't know what I'll do with them yet but they're absolutely lovely - just my kind of colours. Maybe another scarf from the 'Llama' - you can never have too many scarves can you?

a weekend

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!