Reading list

I often end up 'theming' the books I read somehow. It's not really intentional, just a habit I learned from my dad. Whenever we went on holiday, he'd take books about or written by authors from the place we were going. Last summer I read a lot of French books (in translation of course; I did try reading L'Assomoir with a French dictionary and a pencil a few years ago, and it was fun, and satisfying, but not quite the blissful escapism I usually want from a holiday read!), and I loved building up the layers of French adventures, both literary and actual, comparing buildings we passed to those planned by Aristide Saccard, thinking of Emma Bovary as I watched people clothes-shopping in Arles.

We're not going to Japan this summer, but I've recently found myself more and more drawn to Japanese recipes and sewing patterns (still only at the reading and dreaming stage), so when I got my first paycheque from my summer job I treated myself to an hour browsing around Amazon's marketplace, looking for novels about or related to Japan. Books have been popping onto my doormat all week and I picked up the last two from the parcel office this morning, just in time to pack to go away.


We have lilies on the kitchen table because we're moving soon, and Zoë bought them to brighten up the flat a bit for when we show people round. I thought the books looked so pretty stacked next to the flowers I tried to include them in the photo, but it means you can't see the titles very well. Top to bottom they are:
Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata
The Silent Cry - Kenzaburo Ōe
Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima
Shōgun - James Clavell
When the Emperor was Divine - Julie Otsuka (actually about a Japanese-American experience of the WWII, which I chose because of a new friend)
The Makioka Sisters - Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

The book at the bottom was a gift from a friend of Deri's. They graduated on Wednesday, and Mike really kindly gave me his old copy of Harrison's as now he's a doctor (!) he wants the latest edition. They're about eighty quid new, so I'm trying to think of a suitable, possibly knitted, thank you. Any ideas?

I'm also taking this, this, these and yarn and needles to start this, which should be enough to last me a lifetime of holidays. It's a good thing we're driving! See you when I get back.

Grey cables

The library cardigan is watching from the sidelines for a little while; I'd always intended to add sleeves and they didn't go quite as planned, and I haven't yet faced up to ripping back all the raglan decreases and recalculating them with different sleeve numbers.

Meantime, I'm seeking my cabling pleasure in this:


A few rounds of stripes in the round, a few rows of Silk Wool cables. Happy.

Red, white and brown

.... and another colour I thought in the skein was grey, looks navy flecked with yellow wound up, and appears black under the strip-lights of a temporary hospital canteen.


This is my dad's birthday scarf, knit in the round to make it light but warm, using TECHknitter's (stationary) jogless stripes, with varying degrees of success.


Gentle stripes for knitting in the park or while talking on the 'phone.

All about me

I've been tagged ! I never have been tagged before and I thought I'd hate it but actually I'm just touched. Thanks Kristen.

1) What was I doing 10 years ago?
Ten years ago I was fifteen, not very happy at school, and looking forward to the end of term. This was (almost) the last summer between then and now that didn't begin with exams (I took a year out between school and my first degree, which was blissfully exam-free apart from the odd typing test, and I was part of the last year to do the old-style A levels so my summer exams two years later didn't really count for anything). I would have spent some of my summer temping as the secretary/receptionist in my dad's office while the real one went on holiday, and some more of it filing stuff in their library. Architects' libraries are funny. Apart from leaflets and catalogues, they also have bricks, blocks of flooring material, books of carpet samples, and occasionally the odd lamp or chair. Finding places to put these in a standard library set-up is more annoying than anything, so I used to spend a small portion of each day choosing exactly which type of flooring, paint and so on I would have in my dream house, to make up for it. I went on holiday to France with my parents that summer, beginning a love affair between my family and a particular town called Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie, which has involved my parents going to work there for six months when I was in my second year at university, and eventually buying a house in a village nearby. At the time it had no electricity or running water, and my dad is slowing turning it into his own slap-dash Versailles. It is currently rented out, but D and I went to stay there for two wonderful weeks last summer, and thinking about it now I really miss it! Hopefully one of these days I will actually stick to my plan of not buying any more yarn until I've knit through a bit of the stash, and will be able to afford to go for a weekend. (You can get there by train, which is very lovely, but not cheap).

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today?
Today is a very exciting day, I'm going to meet Jelly Bean, now named Nina, for the first time! Anna and H had planned a home birth, but ended up in hospital and Anna and Nina will be there for a few days yet. I also have to iron some shirts as I'm starting a new job tomorrow, tidy my desk (which I have been putting off since getting home after my last exam), start a scarf for my dad's birthday (which is on Friday. It doesn't look good, does it?) and finish making and freeze the lasagne I started to take round to Anna's for when she gets home. I might also make a cake with the bananas which are rotting in the fridge, but then again, I may not. Oh, and I owe some brownies to the man downstairs because he let me use his internet connection when ours broke in the middle of exam season. OK that's seven, but the last three are cooking-related.

3) Snacks I enjoy:
Pickles! I can eat a whole jar in one sitting. I also like hummus with celery, carrots and pitta bread, or pitta bread with peanut butter. I eat cherry tomatoes like sweets, and I love clementines in the winter, and cherries and raspberries in the summer, oh, and peaches and nectarines. I haven't had a peach this year! Must go and find one. And apricots and plums, and strawberries, although raspberries win. I don't very much like bananas, which is why I often make banana bread. I also like cheese and crackers, but I tend not to buy cheese other than for cooking with, because if I do, I often get home hungry and eat the whole lot straight out of its paper. Which is delicious, but not ideal for my pocket or my arteries. I don't have a particularly sweet tooth but I do like cake, a lot, so if there's any around, I'll eat it. Sometimes for breakfast. More than anything, though, I drink tea. Normal, dong ding oolong, assam, white dragon jasmine, darjeeling, ceylon, gunpowder green... I am usually to be found clutching a mug, and leave a little trail of nearly-finished teacups around the house.

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
Pay off my student debt, pay my parents back for my education, and put enough aside to pay for the rest of it. Set up a charitable trust so that I could give money to various charities without them having to pay tax on it (currently, any donation I give to charity doesn't qualify for gift aid because as a student I don't pay tax. Although I suppose if I were a billionaire I probably would...). From it I'd give money to ChildLine, the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, Unicef, MSF, Sense, Shelter, The Samaritans and The Woodland Trust, among others. Get my sofa re-upholstered (the people up the road were throwing it away and I rescued it. It has a hardwood frame and feather-filled cushions and I love it, but it is covered in hideous fabric, fraying at the edges, and needs its springs replaced). Buy a flat over two floors (or maybe even a house!) so that I could have a garden but not sleep on the ground floor. I lived in a ground-floor flat next to a schizophrenic who stopped taking his medication in my second year at uni, and since then I've always wanted to sleep up a flight of stairs. The flat would have a little room I could use as a study, so that I didn't go to sleep looking at all the work I had to do the next day. And obviously space for a yarn and craft cupboard. Send Deri's parents on holiday. And pay someone to redo their kitchen, which they have been intending to do themselves for the last five years, but are working too hard to get round to. Buy a food processor so that I could make latkes without having to grate onions by hand, and a dishwasher. Oh and since I'd be a billionaire, maybe I'd get an ice creamer maker, too! That would be cool. And I'd pay for my mum to have anything cast that she wanted to. I would undoubtedly buy quite a lot of clothes (I love clothes) but I hope I'd do so responsibly. I'd buy Deri a new car, although he would choose it, and could spend all the time planning, and plotting, taking test drives and reading reviews, which he loves. And after that, if I had any left over, I'd put it in a savings' account, for a rainy day.

5) Places I have lived:
Tuffnell Park, north London
East Oxford
Guadalajara, Mexico
King's Cross, central London
Haggerston, east London
Oval, south London

6) Jobs I have had:
Waitress, secretary/receptionist/PA in various architects' offices and two charities, medical secretary, in many departments of many different hospitals. It was working as a secretary in the colorectal department of a north London hospital, the summer before I started my English degree, that made me start thinking about studying medicine. Funny how life turns out, isn't it?

7) Bloggers I am tagging who I will enjoy getting to know better:
Anna
Daphne
Dawn
I would tag Emms but she's already written one
Jane

Free yarn

I went home to stay with my parents this weekend, and on Saturday drove off with Mum to see some of her sculptures in an exhibition near Tewkesbury. We avoided the motorway, wending our way through the gently beautiful Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire countryside, and were thinking aloud that it was about time we stopped for some tea when we saw signs to coffee at Filkins.

I was quite excited as we pulled into the car-park to see bales of cloth piled up along the side of the windows, and more so when we found that the route to the café took us through the tithe barn, filled with furniture covered in their own tweed, blankets woven in the Cotswolds, and two of their looms. I was looking at a display of old Welsh blankets when a large hamper caught my eye.


I had to do a double take when I saw the sign above it:


I went off to check in the shop that it they really did mean 'free yarn', and then came back to start rummaging through the basket to find quite a lot of it was sodden and some of it seemed to be growing mould! The lady kindly came after me with some plastic bags to pack it into, and explained that it was soaking wet because they'd left the basket outside in the rain for a while until someone suggested they bring it inside in case someone wanted any of it.

I made off with quite a lot of yarn, more than I would have been able to justify if it hadn't been waiting to rot! The yarn is spun for weaving, so it might not knit up brilliantly, but I'm going to do some little swatches and if it twists too much take the cones to Oxfam. Like most weaving yarn, it's spun in the grease, and what with being damp too it smelled pretty awful.

I left it in my parents' kitchen, the warmest room in the house (I even put the largest cones in the oven to dry as it cooled after baking some mushrooms), and I've just remembered I left it there when I raced off to get my bus on Monday morning. Sorry Mum! Hope it's not too smelly.


Something even better to come out of the day (apart from seeing the beautiful garden at Showborough House, meeting its warm and generous owners and feeling thoroughly proud of my mum) was that Mum was so taken with some of the yarn on little bobbins (labelled 'thrums', although I thought thrums were these?) that she asked me to teach her to knit.

I started her on some 5 mm bamboo needles which I'd bought as part of a needle roll from ebay when I was learning to knit. They're quite long, and when I looked up she'd tucked one of them under her arm! I was so impressed I let out a hoot of glee at which she quickly removed it and said, 'Oh I'm probably doing it all wrong', but I explained that I'd always wanted to knit like that but could never get the hang of it. I spoke to her on the phone today and she proudly told me that she'd been knitting away in front of the Ten O'Clock News last night with one needle tucked under the arm and 'the other one waving all over the place'. When she started she asserted that she only wanted to knit little squares 'to hang things from' (I assume like a fabric noticeboard that she'd pin to the wall), but this morning she told me that her technique was so much better she thought she ought to actually knit 'something' to try it out on.

Well I never.

Jelly Bean's Little Jumper

Jelly Bean must be one of the only babies about to born in this country whose mother, both grandmothers and two great-grandmothers all knit. They got clicking as soon as they heard about the new arrival, so JB will be one of the best knitted-for little people on this island, when he or she finally gets here. Having heard about all the anxious phone-calls from grandmothers ('I'm just checking, do you handwash things?') I was irrationally pleased, when I dropped this round yesterday, to learn that it was the first knitted item they'd received!



Pattern: Classic Cashmere Sweater from Erika Knight's Simple Knits for Cherished Babies
Yarn: Rowan 4 ply Soft, colour 39d 'Dove', 1 1/3 balls
Ribbon: cotton tape from V V Rouleaux
Needles: Webs' Valley Yarns circular bamboo, US 5, US 4 for garter stitch bands
Gauge: Unblocked 26 st x 32 r, blocked 21.5 st x 29 r = 10 cm in st st
Via the Workbasket? Jelly Bean is a lot younger than most things in the Basket

This little jumper was great to knit. It was fun to see it take shape, an exemplar of minimalist elegance and a funny little thing at the same time. I did a slip-stitch selvedge to make seaming easier, but because it's knit so loosely this made the column of stitches on either side of the seam a bit sloppy, so I won't do that again next time I knit this. I didn't do a slip-stitch edging for the sleeves for the same reason, which I'm pleased about, and I might pick up and knit a tiny garter stitch band around the ends of the sleeves like this one, next time, if I can be bothered. I really like the way the sleeves look turned back, and the flexibility that gives you once it's on the baby to change the sleeve length. The 4 ply Soft was nice, and I love this colour, but I'll try Baby Cashmerino next time, which I've heard highly recommended for baby knits.

Little Jelly Bean, I wish you well to wear this, and please hurry up because I want to meet you!

It's raining, it's pouring...

After the wettest bank holiday ever, I have succumbed to the lurgy Deri threatened to give me last week, and will not be going to the library today but sitting in bed employing the whole tissue population of south London. Snuffle snuffle.

Luckily, Elli thoroughly cheered me up this morning by posting about her trip to Britain, which made me inordinately happy, and reminded me that once upon a time the sun did shine on this damp corner of the globe.

Two happy knitbloggers atop Primrose Hill:


We took Elli and Thunk for a picnic in Regent's Park, where it was so hot we had to sit under a tree and lazily watch others play football in the blazing sun, then up to Primrose Hill to see the view and sit and knit awhile and then on to one of our favourite pubs.

D and I had such a good time we quite missed them the next day, which is good going for an afternoon's acquaintance! Luckily for us, Thunk is still here for a while doing some research, so after I have shaken off this pestilent cold I will go and route him out for some more merriment. Meanwhile, I may also have purchased some yarn for the Aran Crossover Top, so if I can't hang out with Elli in actuality at least I knit just like her...