Time-travel

Oooh, is it the Future yet?

Coasting

My first attempt at mitred squares. These will possibly be coasters or I might join them up into.. something.

Mitred squares appeal to me in the same way that the log-cabin knitting did - clever but easy! Actually it's more than that, they're just very satisfying somehow. They feel more like my natural medium than, say, lace. Lace is untidy to me in so many ways - not just how it looks until it's blocked (and sometimes even afterwards) but in its creation. All those rows with different numbers of stitches, the distortion inherent in the process. Granted there's distortion in mitred squares, but ahhh, there's symmetry too! Mitred squares are like simultaneous equations (which were my favourite thing in maths), they prove themselves and have balance.

All hail the mitred square!

A multicultural cure for what ails you

Chicken soup is supposedly the Jewish penicillin - tattie soup is the Shetland equivalent. Traditionally tattie soup is made using reestit mutton, but as a student I had no access to such a delicacy* so started substituting with chicken, mixing the best of both worlds. Far from traditional it may be, but in my opinion it works very well. Generally speaking I hate soup. But I love proper tattie soup, and now I love my own chicken tattie soup.

So..

1. Chop up an onion and gently soften in oil over a low heat. Meanwhile cut two or three largeish potatoes into cubes, and chop a carrot and maybe some neep (Swede) if you have any. You could add more of the other veg if you prefer, it's personal taste - I tend to limit the carrot as it can make the soup very sweet. Which some people love.

2. When the onion is soft add stock (I use chicken stock made from stock powder because it's easy) and bring to a boil. Then add the tatties, carrot and neep if using.

3. Chuck in some chicken. I either use leftovers from a roast chicken or if I've not done a roast recently I boil a chicken portion (leg, wing, whatever) in. If it's on the bone obviously you'll have to fish it out once it's cooked to remove the meat from the bone. But that's kinda fun.

4. Add half a teaspoon (or more) of mild curry powder. This just gives it a bit of oomph.

5. Simmer for ages. Then simmer some more. I like it to reduce down a bit so it's almost verging on being a stew.

6. Serve, preferably with crusty bread and a squeeze of lemon juice or lime juice. The idea of adding citrus juice (the multicultural bit) came from a Bulgarian friend of my parents who served lemon juice with fish soup. I've no idea if Bulgarians do this with any soups other than fish, but it goes really well with chicken tattie soup as it cuts through the comforting richness of the soup and gives it a bit of zing.

It need hardly be said that it tastes even better reheated the next day, as today's lunch was.


* Halls of residence would probably frown on heavily salted lumps of mutton hanging around the place.

Loot!

Apparently I was on the 'nice' list! Lucky me!

The Holly and the Ivy

And the various other bits of greenery I found in the garden. So that's my very first wreath, and I'm pleased with it. I'm not into flower-arranging perfection - and a good thing too!

It's a B&Q silver willowish basic wreath to which I attached, with garden wire and knitting yarn and optimism, the afore-mentioned various bits of greenery, some silver pine cones and some mad glittery red twig things. And I didn't swear once.

Comfort and Joy

I was slightly organised today and hung various scarves up in the porch to keep them from falling off hooks onto the soggy doormat. I had a moment of knitty joy admiring my work (excluding the gorgeous red pashmina - my brother brought that back from India). I love scarves!

Further to my last post on this blog all those months ago, I've been watching Kirstie's Homemade Christmas - aah, comfort telly! Inspired by that I'm having a go at a wreath tomorrow. Should be interesting. That's after icing the cake - I love doing that! I can't wait to see how it's turned out this year. It's based on a Sue Lawrence Christmas cake recipe but with a few tweaks - the omission of cinnamon, cloves and mixed peel because I loathe them (I replace the spices with extra ginger and the mixed peel with extra dried fruit), and swapping the brandy for whisky. I marzipanned it last night and the whisky fumes were delicious. *drool*

And later the boy and I will be baking 'cookies' of some description - the usual recipe we use is really more like a shortbread recipe rather than a chewy, gooey cookie but the book calls it a cookie so a cookie it is to him.

And, and, and... No, in fact most stuff that needs to be wrapped has been, the food shopping is done (we're low-key with the Christmas food) and all the cards that can be delivered have been delivered. Could it be that we're done? The frenzy is over?

Musings on learning new stuff

My latest joy is watching Kirstie's Homemade Home on 4oD (I missed it when it was on actual telly) with a cup of coffee and my knitting. I can't watch an episode tonight because my husband is watching a big pile of shit (points for recognizing the quote) and as my 'puter is in the living-room..

Anyway, last night I watched The One Where Among Other Things Kirstie Learned To Knit and it got me thinking about learning new things, how our preconceptions can make it difficult, how I like to learn things and how mystifying knitting must be to my husband.

Learning New Things

Watching Kirstie learn new things makes me want to learn new things. Maybe not blacksmithing - I've seen too many farriers at work not to be impressed by their work, but likewise too many not to have noticed how fiery and hot and frankly dangerous their work is. Maybe not so much for people who are less clumsy and short-sighted than me but those are not characteristics that go with hot metal and fire. Soldering silver is as scarey as I've ever tried or wanted to try. Stained glass looks fun though, patchwork I've been meaning to play around with, screen-printing looks good...

Preconceptions and Learning

One of Kirstie's comments was that a relative tried to teach her to knit when she was wee but gave up because Kirsty was left-handed. From this Kirsty was left with the impression that left-handers can't knit and so never had a go until making that programme. I'm right-handed but both my aunt and my granny tried to teach me to knit when I was little. They were both lefties, it didn't work! But I learned at primary school so that was okay.

However the downside of learning at school was that I'm not very confident of my knitting abilities, possibly because I hated it at school (the class was weekly torture as far as I was concerned) and possibly because I associate it with there being a right and a wrong way to do things. Therefore I'm unadventurous with knitting, reluctant to experiment. Oddly though with every other textiley thing I've tried - naalbinding, braiding of various types, crochet, weaving, sprang - I've worked from diagrams or written instructions (mainly things I've found online) and just had a go, not worrying about what was 'right' or 'wrong', just seeing what seems to work. Or not in the case of tablet weaving. I keep meaning to go back to that! But the point is I had a go.

It wasn't the teaching of knitting that was in any way at fault - looking back it's pretty impressive that Mrs Manson could take a bunch of largely disinterested eight-year-olds and teach us enough of the basics that we'd be tackling Fair Isle projects within two years. I think it's more to do with the way we learned anything at school at that point (and this may have changed with new teaching methods or it may be just the way primary-age children think) - it was all quite black and white, and experimentation although not actually discouraged was not really encouraged either. So it's only since I've taken up knitting more enthusiastically in recent years that I've learned new things. Things as mundane as other methods of casting on. I learned the long-tail cast-on so always used that, but it's so handy to know other ways. I'd never tried lace-knitting until last year, a full 30 years since I started knitting! It's partly having more interest now, but it's also down to consciously reminding myself to have a go.

Liking to learn new things

This is the positive side of what my mother has always referred to as my 'butterfly mind'. There's always something new to learn or try. The negative side of course is the number of unfinished objects in my various knitting bags!

The Mystifying Knitting

My Beloved is occasionally disparaging of my knitting, but more often when he comments it's with an air of being faintly impressed with it - it's something technical that he can't do or understand. Bear in mind that he's a Software Engineer, a programmer, a proper geek. He installs Linux on things for fun, then slags it off, all the while referring to it as Lunix. He reads xkcd and understands all the jokes. But he's impressed by two sticks (or one or four or five) and some yarn. He was even more impressed when I gave him a list, as requested, of Things I Might Like For My Birthday and he became aware of the technicalities of needle choice. This was prompted by KnitPro interchangeable circs - he asked about them and I started telling him about the various types of needle there are, the properties of different types of material in needles (metal vs. bamboo vs. plastic) and so forth. He looked both put out and impressed that I was a tech geek too, just in my own field. He is equally mystified by the fact that I can read music, and pick out the Iggle-Piggle song on the piano by ear. Funny old world innit?

To get back to Kirsty, seeing her struggle with the basics of knitting when she's so clearly competent and knowledgable in other fields was oddly reassuring to me. Compared with a complete novice I must seem fairly competent and confident - to non-knitters it must seem we have weird arcane (and pointless?) knowledge, possibly the reason my husband refers to my knitting group as the Coven.

So what shall I learn next?