interknitter

Gone bloggin'

2009-11-16T16:47:00.005Z

The winds of change have been sweeping through the knitting blogverse recently, rattling windows, flapping washing on the line, blowing dust from corners and sweeping the debris from nooks and crannies long untouched and uncared for.

Writers of blogs I’ve loved have either shut up shop entirely, or stopped posting very often. As for me, I’ve barely knit a stitch for the past year, let alone written about it.

I’m not quite ready to hang up my hat, pack up my yarn, and say goodbye to the corner of the blogverse that I've built for myself, but this little bloglet has run its course. I don’t knit enough any more to sustain just a knitblog, lots of things have changed both for me and the world since I started writing here, and I find myself wanting to post about other things – things like this recent entry that somehow didn’t sit quite right with this softly worn old blog.

So, in the spirit of this spring-into-autumn clean, I’ve moved to a new address, and am slowly furnishing it with new posts and the odd knick-knack. There will be knitting, but also cooking, random thoughts and medical conundrums, poems and adventures and all the things I get up to. So if you feel like it any time, stop by!

Garter stitch

2009-05-25T12:54:00.003Z

... on big fat needles with thick squishy yarn.

Just the thing for restoring flagging spirits and an errant knitting mojo.

It is a bank holiday and boilingly hot here, and I'm indoors revising (and photographing last night's knitting). My boyfriend has gone to the Cheese Rolling.

I hope you are enjoying today, whatever you're up to.

Patience

2009-05-24T13:22:00.002Z

An important part of our medical education is patients. We are often told that the best way to learn medicine is to talk to patients, examine them to find any physical clues to broaden or narrow the picture we have built up from talking to them, and then go away to read up on everything we have learnt from that encounter. As medical students, we are expected to ‘clerk’ patients on a daily basis, to spend our days in between timetabled teaching sessions talking to patients, looking at their hands and inside their mouths, tapping their tummies and listening to their chests and generally trying to build up our knowledge of patients and diseases from the foundations of the individuals who happen to end up on the wards in our teaching hospitals.

‘Clerking’ a patient involves taking a full ‘history’ and examining them. Taking a history means asking questions about how and why they came into hospital, what led up to that, any other medical issues they might have, medicines they take and any allergies they have, their social and family background, and also doing a ‘systems review’, running through a checklist of questions to pick up any other symptoms or past events that might have been missed in the rest of the history. Examining a patient means looking at, feeling and listening to various parts of the body to pick up any diagnostic clues and to build up a better picture of their overall health. For students in my year, this means making a general assessment of the patient’s appearance, and examining the cardiovascular and respiratory systems (heart, major blood vessels, lungs, signs of oxygenation or carbon dioxide retention), the abdomen (including the digestive system, liver, spleen, kidneys, and bladder), and central nervous system, which involves asking the patient to perform lots of odd tasks like baring their teeth and tightening the neck muscles like a scary monster.

Clerking patients is an extraordinary privilege. You can ask patients about anything from headaches to their bowel habits, and most of the time they will tell you happily. Because you’re wearing an ID and a stethoscope (not a white coat; they’re considered infection vectors in this country!) people will tell you things they wouldn’t tell close friends. You might talk about what happened when they were giving birth, or learn that their daughter’s husband hits her and they’re not allowed to see the grandchildren, or that their brother was killed by a landmine.

I went into medicine because I am interested in people above anything. People are often surprised that my first degree was in Eng. Lit., but to me, they’re just different approaches to the same questions: about who people are, and how they got to be like that. Clerking a patient can be fascinating, gratifying, and inspiring. To begin taking histories from the most boring-looking patients can be to embark on stories that are complicated and challenging, uplifting and often humbling, and the relationships you can build from spending that time with a patient, and keeping an eye on them for the rest of their hospital stay, are rewarding beyond words.

There are times when it doesn’t go so well, of course. The patients with cancer who feel accused when you ask how much they smoke or drink alcohol, no matter how hard you assure them (truthfully) that these are routine questions you ask absolutely everyone. The patients from the local prison who will happily tell you about their past drug use, but absolutely clam up and become verbally abusive when you try to establish their social background or any illnesses that might run in the family. The professional patients who’ve been in and out of hospital so many times they know the format off by heart, and tell you you’re useless when you start asking questions they think aren’t relevant. All this before you’ve even got to the examination and started poking and prodding while asking them to take big breaths in out through their mouth.

A few days ago I went with a friend to clerk an elderly man who’d been in hospital for a few days. He was fairly happy to talk to us, although he became annoyed a couple of times during the history when we tried to clarify things, or he felt he’d already answered our questions. When we’d examined his chest and abdomen and were about to begin our neurological exam he seemed to be getting annoyed and M suggested we could stop if he was tired. His response was, ‘Look, I’m half naked, lying here being touched by two beautiful young girls. What more could I want?’. Neither of us said anything. M carried on with examining the cranial nerves, and I watched her doing it, looking at her red pen and waving finger instead of his cheerful face. When we finished, we thanked him, and as we were gathering up our notepads and stacking the plastic chairs he cackled and asked ‘When’s my turn?’.

I don’t really know what I should have done in that situation. I wanted to tell him he was behaving inappropriately. I wanted his cancer to disappear immediately so that somebody would realise it was a mistake his being in hospital and throw him out so I’d never have to see him again. I wanted not to be a student, to have some kind of role in his care so that I’d have at least some authority to tell him that his behaviour was not acceptable.

As medical students, we rely on the generosity of patients to give us their time and let us into their secrets. We are not allowed to give patients information, to tell them anything about their condition, advise them in things as basic as how to seek support for stopping smoking, or talk to them about the operation they about to have in any kind of informative way, although we are taught all of these. This is a recurring theme in my medical student support group. We find ourselves in a strange position as medical students: one with authority but no power, with responsibilities but few rights. We walk and talk like doctors, but if you try and catch us, you’ll find we are just shadows, flitting onward after the qualified doctor who actually can give you reassurance or answer your questions.

So instead, I am angry. I am pissed off with the patient for overstepping the mark. I am furious with myself for not saying anything, for not being sure what I should or could say. I’m annoyed with M for not thinking that this was beyond the pale. Above all, I am outraged with a society which allows a man in hospital for treatment and care to think that it’s acceptable to sexualise an encounter with two young women trying to improve their clinical knowledge and further their education.

GMC guidelines for students state that they ‘are expected to maintain a professional boundary between themselves and their patients … They must not use their professional position to cause distress or to exploit patients’ but there are no guidelines for when the situation is reversed. Guidelines don’t necessarily help anything, but I wonder if it’s time there were.

In the meantime, I am trying to get on with my day, and, in the spaces in between, to think of what I could do next time I'm in a similar situation, and how I could be better.

Incidentally, my mother thinks I am overreacting, and that this was 'harmless joking' from a man 'trying to regain some manliness' in a difficult situation in hospital. If you do too, let me know.

Yves Klein Blue scarf

2009-02-17T20:48:00.003Z

I finally persuaded my sister to take photos of her scarf. She's been wearing it ever since I unpinned it from the row of towels on my bedroom floor, adding it to her work clothes, weekend outfits, and even her pyjamas first thing in the morning - which is obviously pleasing, but this bloglet is already too sparse to do without photos even of a plain vanilla scarf. And of course being my sister she stuffs it into the bottom of her handbag and leaves it lying on the floor, so it’s already looking a bit worse-for-wear. Also, my camera is broken, again, so I've had to ask her to persuade other people (thanks Ma!) to get involved in these antics, which complicates matters.

We're just about to finish our surgical rotation, and, as with many so things, I've only started to realise what I'm going to miss, and what I ought to have been doing with the last ten weeks of my time, as the ground slips away beneath my feet.

I haven't loved surgery; my feelings towards it are a strange mix of awe and horror, utmost respect and revulsion - not the actual operations themselves, which I find fascinating and beautiful, but everything else surrounding them, from the way surgeons behave toward each other to the post-operative complications.

In addition, we're moving hospitals, which is a bit like starting term in the middle of the school year. Half of my firm are coming with me, and the other half going to the third of our 'home' teaching hospitals, which means half of my next firm will be made up of new faces. It's exciting, but daunting, and I have really loved my time at this hospital, getting to know the regular patients and befriending people from the porters to the Professor of Cardiology who always stops to chat in the corridors and the SHO in A & E who goes out of her way to tell you when something interesting is happening so that you can go and see and learn. I feel quite sad to think that all these relationships, short-cuts through the hospital learned and bleep numbers memorised just disappear in a puff of smoke when I hand back my security pass on Friday.

Anyway, cheer up, P. Let's talk about some knitting.

Yarn: Malabrigo Merino Worsted, colour Azul Bolita, 2 skeins exactly. One skein from somewhere I don't remember, the other from Wool and Company, one of only two shops I could find on the internet selling this colour.
Needles: 5.5 mm Addi bamboo
Via the stash?: Kind of. I bought one skein years ago, intending to make a One Skein Wonder and try out some Malabrigo, and then the colour was too bright so it slumbered in my stash. A few months ago, Z mentioned that she'd love an Yves Klein blue scarf, and I realised that this yarn would pretty much fit the bill, gleefully thinking that I could make a tiny dent in the stash - and then I ran out of yarn, ordered some more (and of course ordered two more skeins, so that I wouldn't run out again, and now have one more skein of exactly the same yarn sitting in my stash, and am back to square one). For some reason this yarn doesn't photograph well, but it is a deep royal-blue-purple-ultramarine, similar enough to International Klein Blue.
Cast on: 22 November 08
Cast off: 24 January 09
Details: Cast on 25 sts using Estonian cast-on (instructions here). Knit in Brioche stitch: Plain Brioche Stitch Knit version - uneven number sts (good instructions here), with Annie Modesitt's Slip Stitch Double Knit Edge (Right Side: K1, sl1wyif, K1; Wrong Side: sl1wyif, K1, sl1wyif) until it seemed a good length. Cast off using EZ's sewn cast-off.

This would have been a very quick knit if I hadn't had to order more yarn in the middle, and one I'd happily knit again, if my To Knit queue weren't so intimidatingly long.

Hope you have good things lined up for the weekend! I'm off to Whitstable.

Snowfall

2009-02-02T13:38:00.000Z

London's heaviest snowfall for eighteen years. (View from my bedroom window this morning).

It may not look like lots, but predictably, the city ground to a halt, with no buses running, trains and tubes delayed, airports closed, and not even any parking wardens around! (There is a car that has been parked in the bus stop outside my house all day, and no-one has even noticed. It is hidden beneath a blanket of snow, but I can see its little wing mirrors sticking out). I made it into hospital this morning, and was sent home. The people who would have been teaching us critical care, have more critical caring to do when people fall over and slide cars into each other. A bittersweet holiday. I have a heap of notes to write up, so I'm not going to spend this unexpected day at home reading Snowfall, but I wish I could.

An unexpected afternoon

2009-01-31T15:16:00.006Z

... with my sewing machine

... and these...

... led to a pair of hemmed jeans!

Imperfect stitches. Tiny little steps, but ones I've been putting off since before the new year. And a new pair of jeans to wear to have six inches cut off my hair!

Something old and something new, both made by me, and both of them blue

2009-01-24T09:17:00.005Z

Well, it's nearly February and I haven't even wished you a happy new year! - or Christmas, for that matter. Let's make up for that, shall we?

I wound down / ground to a halt towards the end of last term, and the closest I came to knitting was practising sutures on a little sponge! (We started surgery three weeks before the end of term, and I hated it. It's growing on me though, as I guess anything does when you settle in and start to make something your own - and of course the more I learn, the more I want to know, and it gets better). The day after term finished, Deri and I took the 7:20 a.m. Eurostar to Paris! Exciting, non? It was my parents' Christmas present to us (thanks padres!) and we ate lots, drank more, walked miles, went to the Musée d'Orsay, to the Mystery and Glitter exhibition (I loved Jozsef Rippl-Ronai's Un parc dans la nuit and William Degouve de Nuncques' Night in the Royal Park of Brussels), to the Pompidou, to night-time concerts in churches and to see the Sonia Rykiel retrospective at the Musée des Arts décoratifs, but not to the Picasso because we couldn't get tickets. We stayed here, which I would highly recommend (and go back to in the blink of an eye!).

I didn't take any pictures, I think I was too exhausted. In fact the only photographic evidence I have is...

I know, poor socks. One day of tramping around and suddenly, I fear they may be beyond mending. What do you think? I did say I was going to wear them until I wore them out, but I didn't think it would happen so quickly! I've probably only worn them about five times.

Christmas at home with my family was full of most of the things I love about Christmas (the only things missing were not having gone home in time to make the Christmas pudding, or made any pomanders): listening to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on the radio while making bread- and apple sauce and red cabbage on Christmas eve, visiting my granny, ransacking my parents' stack of newspapers on the way to the recycling and spreading them all over the dining room floor to read in as higgledy-piggledy fashion as I'd like, going to Christ Church for Sung Matins (yes, I am a godless heathen, but Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without, well Christmas), seeing old and much-missed friends on boxing day and going for frosty walks.

The much-bigger-than-intended-tree-bought-from-the-Sea Scouts, when I went downstairs on Christmas morning. Those lumpen stripy sausage things are our stockings. My mum used to wear them!

After Christmas I went to the Lake District with my parents for a few days, then caught a train back to London to spend New Year's eve cooking, drinking champagne, gossiping, and tucked up on the sofa watching Rome on DVD with one of my oldest friends, who was just a few days from the start of her first job as a Classics teacher. All in all, a very good holiday indeed.

Then back to university, and looming exams - and suddenly they are over, and I did OK, and am looking forward to the weekend, which should include darning in the ends of this scarf, going to watch some rowing, and making this soup.

Hope your weekend has some good things in store, too.

Lead and Roses scarf

2008-11-21T19:14:00.006Z

Pattern: Lace Ribbon scarf, by Veronik Avery
Yarn: Sundara sock yarn (100% superwash merino wool, 350 yards, 100 grams) colour Lenten Rose. One skein.
Needles: Webs' Valley Yarns bamboo US No. 4 (3.5 mm)
Cast on: 8 November 2008
Cast off: 18 November 2008
Via the stash? Sure is. I'm ashamed to say this is the first project I've actually knit with any of my Petals Collection yarn, but it was definitely worth the wait!
Dimensions: unwashed 17 x 111 cm, 25 x 138 cm blocked

Notes: cast-on with waste yarn which was then unpicked and both ends bound off with Stem Stitch Cast-Off (Montse Stanley's Knitter's Handbook, p. 90).

This scarf has single-handedly (stitchedly?) restored my knitting mojo. I loved knitting it, I love wearing it - I just plain love it. If I could knit this one all over again, I would make it one repeat narrower in order to make a longer scarf (I should have listened to all those Ravellers !) but I actually really like it this width. I imagine it will stretch lengthwise in the wearing, too; most of my scarves do. If I were to buy yarn specially for this pattern, I'd buy two skeins, or one with a bit more length per skein.

Happy, happy, happy. In spite of a leaden sky.

The colour of lead

2008-11-13T08:16:00.001Z

When this yarn arrived, an installment of the Petals Collection sock club, I read the colour written on the label as ‘Leaden Rose.’

The lenten roses I know are eerie shades of pale green and puce, and for some reason, although I know that lead is in fact grey-white, darkening to a deep grey-brown if anything, I’ve always thought of it as purple-grey. I think it’s because when I was quite little and living in London, my dad told me about the Victorian lead water-pipes running beneath the city, and explained that the word 'plumber' derived from the Latin for lead, ‘plumbum’. I couldn’t read ’til I was seven, or spell until long after that, so in my imagination lead was a deep dark purple, and you could search the depths of something with a little plum tied to a string.

I’ve been planning this scarf for a while. As soon as I saw the Lace Ribbon Scarf on Knitty I knew it was the pattern for this yarn, and slowly in my mind, between beginning it early in the summer, pushing it unravelled back into the workbasket, and taking it up again on Saturday night, the ‘Leaden Roses scarf’ has become the ‘Lead and Roses scarf’.

There's something about the juxtaposition I find inexplicably pleasing - maybe because it reminds me of ‘Bread and Roses’.

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses."

As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men --
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes --
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew --
Yes, it is bread we fight for -- but we fight for Roses, too.

As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days --
The rising of the women means the rising of the race --
No more the drudge and idler -- ten that toil where one reposes --
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

James Oppenheim, Bread and Roses

At the going down of the sun

2008-11-11T09:20:00.003Z

... and in the morning
We will remember them.

A soldier of the Great War
Known unto God

Today is a good day

2008-11-05T09:41:00.009Z

I had no idea this would make me so happy.

I may have been taken in by campaign rhetoric, been swept up in mass transatlantic hysteria and thrown reason to the winds of emotion and idealism - but somehow, fundamentally, it does.

Today, the sky is a brighter grey. People seem kinder, braver, stronger. I feel as if I woke into a world in which possibility can become reality, hope can turn to belief, and something wonderful, perhaps even magical, is brewing.

A good day for planting little acorns.

Autumn into winter

2008-10-28T21:29:00.003Z

This is what I saw when I woke up this morning:

Flame-bright leaves and thick frost on the funny flat roof of the house behind our flat, and on the street below, a tree already losing its autumn leaves.

Over the weekend the weather turned from cool to cold. Snow is forecast for the week ahead, and this evening on the way home from my new favourite grocery shop I was caught suddenly in a hail-storm.

Time to put away jackets, pumps and canvas handbags, and reach for mittens, scarves, long coats and woollen socks to pull on beneath winter boots.

And definitely time to curl up with some knitting and a pot of comforting tea.

(Thanks, dear).

(ETA, as I go to bed: It's snowing! Brrr).

Leafy

2008-10-22T10:55:00.004Z

Well, it's been over a month since I last posted, and what do I have to show for it?

The same socks!

Actually they're not the same the socks, they are the same yarn knitted to the same pattern, again, at the right tension this time, only because they were knit with an added measure of tiredness and lack of concentration, they are too long. For the past few weeks I've been unable to do much more at the end of a day than cook myself some rice and vegetables, stare blindly at the TV for an hour or so and then tumble into bed, but this morning I actually got round to measuring some swatches! We finally have internet at home (after five visits from different BT engineers), and I'm getting more used to the wonderful and exhausting life of a clinical medical student, so hopefully knitting and blogging will pick up soon.

In the meantime, for MG: Baz Luhrmann II, thriving on the windowsill of my new flat

(complete with rotting window-frame, but that's another story).

Sockery

2008-09-15T09:43:00.003Z

The little sockette at the bottom is the beginnings of an Embossed Leaf on 2.5 mm needles, begun in December. Too small, the stitches too tight.

Above it, a second attempt on 2.75 mm needles, cast on waiting for Jane, outside the MI6 building last Saturday morning, knit while listening to her Harlotiness and on buses and in between lectures since. Too big, the stitches too loose.

Jane suggested I try knitting on with the 2.5 mm needles, and suddenly, it is the right size. I’ve been trying to knit more loosely with DPNs recently, and it seems to have worked. Oh, and I’ve also learned to make my YOs bigger, bringing the yarn forward as if to purl and then back over the needle instead of just up and over, as instructed in Heirloom Knitting, which was my bedtime reading a few months ago.

I’m off to knit a hat.

I Knit with the Yarn Harlot*

2008-09-07T19:07:00.003Z

This week has been humbling, exciting, exhausting, challenging, uplifting, surprising, disappointing, inspiring, frustrating, saddening – and one of the best of my life.

What better way to round off such a week than to go and see the Yarn Harlot?

I had determined not to buy anything at all (I’ve just moved house, and shocked even myself with how many books and how much yarn I’d squirreled away since learning to knit), but, well. The best-laid plans and all that...

Undyed Bluefaced sock yarn, to experiment dyeing with; enough to knit into a Yarnissima pattern which she'd understandably sold out of by the time we managed to fight our way to the front of the huddle in front of her little stall, but I’ve since purchased from Ravelry.

A cookery book full of all things gingery, from the people behind the gingerbread house knit in support of GOSH.

A lovely, robust and woolly hat kit from Heathland Hebridean. I tried the sample on at the stall and it’s the first hat I’ve worn since learning to look in the mirror that didn’t make me feel like a boiled egg in its little woolly cosy.

Some Lionel Nichols buttons for a cardigan, one of these days.

Laceweight cashmere from Knitwitches. I’ve only ever knit a Branching Out, and that in worsted weight, and yet I keep squirreling away skeins of laceweight. Maybe I should actually try knitting with it….

All in all, it was a wonderful day. Stephanie’s talk was inspirational and restorative, as well as being very very funny. I was delighted to meet Lara and the many stall-holders who were so generous with their time and advice, as well as in bringing such wonderful yarns and patterns! and more than anything, thanks to Jane, for her bolstering and soothing words over large mugs of tea and breakfast beforehand, and being an excellent partner in knitterly crime.

*I forgot my camera and any of her books to sign, but you can just see me in this post on the Yarn Harlot's blog. See the third picture down? Look just behind the raised elbow of the lady in the front row wearing apple green, and you can see my fuzzy little head wearing glasses and looking insanely happy, next to Jane weilding her camera.

I hope Steph comes back next year.

Kitchen sink Kitchener

2008-08-23T14:56:00.001Z

I've been wanting to knit this jumper ever since my friend Anna showed it to me the summer before last. I bought the yarn on sale along with that for Elli's HWBC, and have been dreaming of it since. I put it off and put it off because I thought I wasn't good enough to knit it yet, then bought the yarn and pattern for a more ambitious cabley project, and finally settled down to knit Catriona a few months ago.

I've really enjoyed the cable pattern, I love this yarn, I still can't wait to wear it - and yet. There's something prosaic about this jumper, far from the magic of which I'd dreamt. I knit some here, knit a bit there, didn't read the pattern properly and had to rip back quite a bit (measuring 55 cm from end of ribbing, instead of from cast-on edge), put off grafting the shoulders for a month, changed my mind about the length and frogged some more, and finally, amidst half-packed boxes and with half an eye on the Olympics, stitched the shoulder seams together.

I couldn't work out how to Kitchener in pattern (any suggestions?) and since the pattern didn't match up properly anyway, I knit two rows in stocking stitch before grafting front and back. I think it looks okay. Not perfect; the transition between reverse and right side stocking stitch is a bit abrupt, and the cables lump up a bit, but okay.

And now, as they say, I'm on the home strait. I wonder if my knitting mojo is lurking somewhere under the heaps of things I have yet to pack?

How to mend a Primark shirt

2008-08-15T11:08:00.004Z

Well, what a busy few weeks. I can barely believe it’s August, and suddenly we’re halfway through. D started as an F1 at the end of July, so we took things to be dry-cleaned, bought new shoes, packed and repacked, made lists, mended, shopped, washed and ironed, and generally did some of the things you do to prepare for moving house and starting a new job all in the space of two days. The last week of my summer job coincided with the week before an inspection, so I started early and finished late, working as designated proof-reader, photocopier, printer and general minion. I did fit in a tiny bit of knitting, by the photocopier! - but it was only more rounds on the stripy scarf which is eating yarn at a rate far beyond my wildest calculations. A skinny little scarf for cycling to work may end up being the most expensive project ever.

I came home to stay with my parents last weekend and have been visiting family, running errands, and helping my mum with filing, collecting materials and taking tools to the menders for her work. Today is the first day I’ve spent at home and I’ve been watching the Olympics (who knew track cycling could be so exciting?!) and mending. Mending new clothes!

I start clinics in three – no two! – weeks, so in between fretting about what I don’t know and trying to read Cheese and Onion, I’ve been worrying about what to wear. I found a sweet little shirt in Primark, and as they were £3 each I bought two. They needed a bit of work of course, snipping off loose threads, darning in ends, sewing up little gaps here and there where a seam hadn’t quite caught. The two little piles of ends are from a blouse each, the first rolled up into a ball.

Looking for new trousers and shirts in the sales, as summer draws to a close and it's time to start gathering books, feels disconcertingly like buying school uniform. I almost feel I should start sewing in name-tapes...

The loveliest yarn shop in the world?

2008-07-15T18:43:00.015Z

Just south of Ullswater, or at the bottom of the Kirkstone Pass if you're coming from the south Lakes, sits Crookabeck Farm. Hidden off the A592, across a little stone-and-metal bridge over a stream and down a bumpy track, Crookabeck Farm is home to the redoubtable Mary and her family, flocks of Angora goats and Herdwick sheep, and studio and shop (and, I've discovered, a holiday cottage!).

And what a shop. Not everything Mary sells is from her own animals, but all of it is British, mostly yarn spun in Wales from the fleece of sheep grazed in Cumbria, and without exception everything in the shop is awe-inspiring. It took me about fifteen minutes just to decide what I wanted to look at again. From wiry, robust Herdwick and Swaledale aran-weight to lofty, downy, Bluefaced Leicester spun from Hogg fleece and silky, fluffy Finn kid mohair, the selection is incredible. Most of it is undyed, but Mary dyes some of it into vibrant skeins, often sold with a co-ordinating boucle, as well as shawl- and hat- kits, and mohair socks. Crookabeck also sells Herdwick rugs and blankets, cashmere lace shawls and mounds of tops which made me long to spin. Mary wasn't very well when we went to visit so I didn't ask to see the goats. Hopefully we'll be back soon, though!

Crookabeck Herdwicks grazing in front of the shop

I found it by accident, almost. Knitmap. Have you seen it? I just googled 'yarn shop Cumbria' the night before we set off, and lots of the links were to entries on Knitmap. A word of warning. I'm not sure why, but the phone numbers for both Crookabeck and Woolclip were missing the final digit, so if you're going to use a Knitmap entry, it's worth checking the details before you save the page on your laptop and merrily go away to somewhere you won't have internet access. Luckily my dear ma looked them up for me so I was able to call and ask them when they were open. Woolclip, for example, says it closes at 4 pm but is in fact open 'til 5 pm in the summer, and since Crookabeck is Mary's home it's a good idea to ring before you go.

View back to Ullswater from the bumpy track

The other contender for the title is Woolclip, the other stop on our day 'woolling', as Deri put it. Set up in 2001 by a group including the late Carolyn Rawlinson whose idea Woolfest was, in reaction to the low price being offered for wool, notably 2p per kg of Herdwick fleece, in the middle of the foot-and-mouth crisis, the Woolclip is a co-operative of fifteen women involved in the fibre arts. Members of Woolclip organise Woolfest, and their collective shop is set in Caldbeck, a charming fell village just north of the Lake District national park (and when I say 'charming', we were charmed. D noticed a GP practice there, and has been audibly thinking that it might be very nice to live and work there ever since).

Visiting Woolclip wasn't just fun because they have lots of nice yarn (and rugs. In my flat-in-the-sky, I've a rug by Chris Crofts on each side of the bed, and another huge one in front of the sofa). It was heartwarming, uplifiting and inspiring. I have since (cough cough) rung to order some more yarn by post, and to ask questions, and without exception everyone I've spoken to has been warm and exremely helpful, but I feel particularly privileged to have met Cecilia. She answered questions I never knew I had, taught me more about yarn in a few short hours than I learned in a year of knitting, and introduced me to a panoply of ideas, books and blogs and other yarn shops, and people. We stayed chatting 'til way past closing (and feeding-time for her poor goats! Sorry goats), sitting on a pile of Chris's rugs.

I would have been happy to come away with any or all of the yarn from either shop, and have since been ringing to find out what this particular yarn was or that so that I can jot them down for future projects, because of course I forgot to take anything useful like a notebook. This is eventually what I bought after much dithering.

From Crookabeck:

... DK Jacob Wool

... 4 ply worsted-spun kid mohair

and from Woolclip:

... Herdwick rug wool dyed by Chris Crofts

... and Cecilia's handpun, Gotland and Bluefaced leicester.

The rest of the holiday was good, too. It rained quite a lot so we didn’t walk as much as we’d hoped (city slickers that we are, we didn’t feel quite brave enough to strike out in threatening storms), but I read a bit, knitted some, cooked lots of recipes I’d been wanting to try for ages, met up with old friends and spent time with the boy.

Ullswater with sheep and feeding lamb, from atop Arnside Crag

Sweet and too short.

Reading list

2008-06-28T10:37:00.009Z

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

2008-06-21T11:44:00.003Z

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

2008-06-15T10:29:00.004Z

.... 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

2008-06-08T08:07:00.010Z

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

2008-06-04T10:34:00.008Z

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

2008-05-30T09:41:00.004Z

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...

2008-05-27T08:23:00.000Z

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...

Catching up

2008-05-24T09:35:00.006Z

Exams finished on Thursday. They were truly awful, so I will be back in the library as of Tuesday. It was going to be Monday but Monday is a bank holiday and I love bank holidays, so Tuesday it is. I spent yesterday pottering around Brixton market with Anna, looking at fabric, and then sitting on her sofa with tea and biscuits, knitting, and talking about everything and nothing into the small hours, vaguely waiting for something more than a Braxton Hicks.

Want to see what I was knitting?

It's Yahaira's Asymmetrical Cabled Cardi, knit in some very un-soft Debbie Bliss Maya from the stash. More of that anon. I'm off to buy a ribbon for JB's jumper and dust off my sewing machine.

Nearly

2008-05-15T09:40:00.005Z

The garter stitch bands on Jelly Bean's jumper blocked differently, so I'm reknitting them, this time on smaller needles.

JB is 39 weeks ...

Elli's Hot Water Bottle Cover

2008-05-12T13:48:00.006Z

Aeons ago, I posted something about a hot water bottle, Elli asked what a HWB actually was, I offered to send her one, and a swap was born. I was quite busy at the time, so I sent it off with promises of a cover to follow, wrote it at the top of my To Knit list, went off to medical school and ignored it successsfully for a year.

Pattern: Hot-water Bottle Cover from Sarah Dallas Knitting
Yarn: RYC Silk Wool; colours 307 'Velvet' 3 balls, and 302 'Porcelain', a smidgen. You could easily knit this from three balls of Silk Wool
Yarn source: Angel Yarns
Needles: 4.5 mm Addi turbo
Gauge: 20.5 st x 29 r = 10 cm in st st unblocked, 20 st x 28 r gently blocked
Via the Workbasket? Unquestionably

Notes: I found the instructions at the beginning of this pattern quite confusing. After trying to get the right number of stitches in the fifth row approximately seventeen million times I ended up knitting P2, *P3, kfb, k1, kfb, k1, rep from * to last 5 sts, P5. I couldn't find any published errata, and after reading this post on Knitter's Review I can see that the directions do kind of make sense if you think that way. The increases are on the wrong side, so if you want to use M1 increases, M1R will leave a humongous bar along the bottom of your next row.

I don't have a crochet hook, and I wasn't sure about a picot bind-off since I'd chosen to leave out the eyelets and plaited drawstring, so I knit the final row in the contrast colour and did the Decrease Bind-Off from Vogue Knitting. I do like the way this looks, but having finished the cover, I think it looks a bit bare without the neck tie. Next time I knit this, I'll probably change the proportions of the two halves so that the opening, and therefore the decorative contrast edging, are further up.

While I'm doling out my seed pearls of wisdom, I tried to start the cover last summer, and found that the yarn I'd chosen was mis-spun. The shop I bought it from online didn't respond to any of my queries, and neither did Rowan after a preliminary email asking me to send it to their product design department (which I promptly did), despite much chasing. After stuffing it into my Workbasket and vowing never to buy Rowan yarn again, I ventured into Liberty looking for yarn for Jelly Bean's jumper, and told my tail of woe to the redoubtable Jules. She told me to call Rowan, and the next day they sent a replacement ball of yarn and a copy of Rowan 43 by way of an apology, explaining that the person dealing with complaints had been on maternity leave when I'd been contacting them. Make of that what you will, but the moral of this paragraph is that if you've a problem with Rowan yarn, ring them. (The number is on the back of any of their magazines).

I finished this ages ago - before I started JB's jumper - and put off sewing it up until last week. When I did I was struck anew by how soft the fabric is. I'd forgotten, while it was languishing mournfully in the Basket, quite how lovely the Silk Wool is. It's a tiny bit splitty, but simultaneously bouncy and crunchy, shiny enough to gleam through any bloom, and the softest yarn I have knit with, ever.

I finally gave this to Elli when we met up on Friday (I know!!). Hopefully she'll have some use for it when winter comes around again. My camera is broken, and D misunderstood me when I asked him to bring his, so no posts for the moment, but hanging out with Elli and Thunk was some of the most fun I have had in ages. They are lovely, warm, inspiring people and it was a pleasure to spend an afternoon of their brief trip to London together.

Sewn up

2008-05-05T10:42:00.003Z

I've been putting off sewing up the knitting in my Basket partly because I am the queen bee of procrastination, and partly because I was scared of sewing knitting. I've read that it's difficult, and trying. I'd heard that sewing up reverse stocking stitch is hard, and joining stitches to stitches fiddlier still. I read in the first Stitch'n'Bitch, which Anna lent me when I was learning to knit, that some people dislike it so much they take it to knitting shops to pay other people to do it for them. The only thing I've ever sewn up - my third, disastrous, finished knit - was lumpy and loose and lopsided.

Oddly, I often don't feel like knitting much when I've exams looming. Stranger still, this year they seem to make me want to sew. So I finished all my mending (some of it having been in the basket - a different basket - for nigh on two years), organised the old jam jars and cottage cheese pots kept as storage containers which are usually in a muddlesome heap on top of one of the kitchen cupboards, and polished all my shoes. I painted my toenails when they needed it rather than when I could be bothered, stuck recipes in my scrap book, and ironed everything I could possibly justify pressing (and I loathe and detest ironing). And when there was nothing else I could possibly do between blocks of revision, I sewed up.

After all that, I quite enjoyed it. Let's hope this lasts past exam season.

Pictures when they've reached their recipients.

The best boyfriend in the world.

2008-04-19T09:26:00.003Z

A few days ago D and I were setting off on a long trip and I wanted something to knit in the car. I really really wanted to start a sock with my new yarn, but I'd forgotten to print out the pattern at uni the day before, and as neither of us has a printer, I was fretting.

So he drew it out for me.

Thanks, Del.

Pop! goes the weasel

2008-04-07T11:52:00.003Z

I finished knitting Jelly Bean's jumper a few weeks ago, and it is now waiting for me to sew it up. I have exams brewing (real, summative, end-of-year, everything-you-should-have-learned-since-the-first-day-ever exams), and sewing bits of knitting together doesn't seem like the welcome break from revision that a few rounds of sock provides.

Undaunted by the growing sewing pile, as soon as I'd finished knitting the baby jumper I started plotting what I might knit next for JB, and thinking about the Chunky Knit Cardigan from Erika Knight's Simple Knits for Cherished Babies, and how to fit yarn for all the projects I want to knit into my monthly budget, I remembered Ashley's thoughts on Valley Yarns Longmeadow. I immediately hopped over to Webs, chose the colour of yarn and was about to click 'buy', when I remembered this. 'Hum,' I thought. 'Four balls of cotton-blend, in a colour I don't really want; what on earth would I do with that?' and was about to give up on the quest when I noticed they had a colour card! Problem solved.

Only, of course, since I was trying to save myself money, it didn't quite make sense to pay transatlantic postage just for a piece of flimsy card with some threads tied on, did it? Obviously, it would be sensible to buy some more of the yarn I have plans for from Webs at the same time, so I went looking for them. Lamb's Pride Worsted, Cascade 220, no colour cards. Silk Garden, Bamboo Soft, not in the colours I was hoping for, Rowan Denim, sold out of the colour I wanted - and after that, I was plunging into the realms of the unknown, or unneeded.

And then I remembered that I'd always wanted to try Louet Gems, and then I found that their super fine yarn was recommended for socks, and then I thought of a pattern, and then - Well, buying sock yarn has always been a good way of saving money, hasn't it?

Half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle...

Louet Gems fingering weight in Eggplant and Grape. Yum.

Garden string

2008-03-31T23:28:00.001Z

This ratty-looking thing is another self-striping Noro scarf. When Mum came to visit a few weeks ago she admired my Bournemouth Pier Scarf, and since it is a rarity for her to express anything more than abstract approval of a knitted item, I thought I could make her one for her birthday. (My mum is one of those people who, when pressed on what she'd like for her birthday, will say something like 'New kitchen scissors. Tulips. A cup of tea and some time to read my book').

I'm knitting it from the two balls of Silk Garden I have left over from her Lady Eleanor. Since the BPS took up three balls, I am knitting this on larger needles and in stocking stitch instead of ribbing to make the yarn go further. The plan is to back the scarf with fabric, which will mean dusting off my sewing machine. Poor thing, he has been sitting meekly in the corner since last I bought a pair of jeans (which, necessarily, needed shortening) over a year ago, waiting for me to love him. And yet I am irrationally scared of him - or, more accurately, of myself, when faced with a threaded needle.

There is more knitting waiting in the Workbasket to be machine-sewn (which has been waiting for nearly two years, tsk tsk) and I've been meaning to make myself a new school bag for almost as long, so it's about time I made my peace with Señor Coser (hm, maybe anthropomorphising the machine will help), and the most of my fantastically thoughtful and generous 21st birthday present from the best uncle uncle in the world. To whom I owe a neckwarmer, still. Oh dear.

Watch this space.

February socks

2008-03-27T20:49:00.002Z

Because February is all about perseverance.

Pattern: Conwy socks, from Knitting on the Road
Heel: Round heel, slip-stitch heel flap
Toe: Star
Yarn: Knitpicks Gloss in Dusk, a present from Laura. 1 1/3 skeins
Needles: Brittany birch 2.75 mm dpns, from I Knit London
Gauge: 16 st x 24 r = 5 cm in stocking stitch
Via the Workbasket? Oh yes

I really enjoyed knitting with this yarn, and it is a pleasure to wear. It is strong and soft and shiny and fluffy all at once, and socks knit from it are both snuggly and firm. Just right. They were already fuzzing a bit by around the cuff by the time I'd knit to the toe, but I am going to wear them and wear them until I wear them out, because they feel lovely. I didn't enjoy knitting the pattern as much as I'd hoped, but the final socks fit me perfectly, and I'm still really looking forward to going to Conwy itself one day, and knitting another pair!

The chart for the calf shaping kind of abandons you for the last two decrease rows. I stuck as closely to the chart as I could, just changing the last two k2togs to p2tog and the ssk to ssp to keep the ribbing intact - leaving a V-shape of disintegrating ribs down the back, which isn't very handsome. For alternative, prettier versions, see Ashley's and Amy's.

I am pleased to have these out of the Basket and on my feet. Thank you, Laura, for the wherewithal to make a pair of cosseting socks. It is much appreciated, and this week, needed indeed.

White Easter

2008-03-25T22:57:00.002Z

My term finished with a bang (read: exam) last Wednesday, and on Thursday D and I set off to the Lake District for the Easter weekend. I was looking forward to reading, cooking, eating, sleeping, walking, talking, and taking pictures of my knitting basking in the sunshine atop daffodil-fringed stone walls.

On Sunday morning I was woken early by the glowing white light and hushed stillness of a world that's been cloaked in snow overnight. I leapt out of bed with the joy of someone who only sees a real snowfall once every few years, and took these pictures from the bedroom window:

I wanted to post them immediately and wish you a happy Easter, but we didn't have internet access where we were staying - or mobile reception, or a phone line at all after heavier weather elsewhere in Cumbria brought down the phone wires. Or central heating, for that matter. But we split enough logs to keep a fire roaring in both rooms downstairs, the storage heaters took over as we went to bed and continued to give off heat 'til mid-afternoon, and we had hats and scarves and gloves galore. I found these tucked into the back of a drawer:

They are acrylic and not very pretty, but they fit nicely and I love the long cuffs that tuck into sleeves to keep the wind out. The cuffs have patterns on the insides, too, which I forgot to take a picture of. I've been wanting to make some mittens for ages, and now they are careering to the top of my To Knit list. (If you've Ravelry access, how beautiful are Gully's mittens?!).

I didn't knit these little Easter chicks; Mum sent them away with us to unwrap on Sunday morning. They had Creme Eggs in the bottom, and their heads are stuffed with cotton wool. I'd like to find or work out a pattern for these; they'd be great for using up little scraps of yarn, and they made us so happy it would be nice to do the same for my friends next year.

Hope you had a good Easter, and managed to keep warm!

Trunks and branches

2008-03-16T10:47:00.004Z

Britttany birch DPNs: 8 mm and 2.75 mm.

Banana loaf

2008-03-10T18:03:00.003Z

This is a perfect recipe for people like me, who buy a million bananas optimistically, eat two and then leave the rest slowly going black in the fruit bowl. I used seven small bananas for this cake; it makes quite a dense loaf that doesn't rise very much but doesn't feel heavy to eat, either. Use as many or as few bananas as you have; if you have less banana, use another egg.

4 large or 7 small overripe bananas
8 oz (225 g) self-raising, wholemeal flour
6 oz (175 g) caster sugar
4 oz (100 g) butter, melted
1 egg, beaten
2 tbs golden syrup
Pinch of salt
I don't really like nuts in banana bread, but if you do, add a handful of chopped brazil nuts, walnuts or pecans, or a mixture.

Preheat oven to 150 C/300 F/gas 2. Grease a 2 lb (900 g) loaf tin.
Mash bananas with a fork, add golden syrup and beaten egg.
Sift flour and sugar together and add a pinch of salt. Beat in banana mixture, spoon into tin and bake for 1 hr or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean.
Leave to cool in tin for fifteen minutes before turning out.

I've never iced this before but Deri decided to and it does make it even nicer! This icing is only brown because I saw unrefined icing sugar in the shop a few weeks ago and was curious to try it. It does actually taste slightly more caramelly or golden-syrupy, and I think the brown icing with the brown cake looks quite pretty, but normal icing sugar would do just as well.

To ice:
Mix icing sugar and a few drops of water in a bowl to desired consistency. Spread onto cake with the back of a teaspoon or a knife, leave to set.

This cake will keep well in a tin for over a week, if you let it. It travels well, too, so is good for taking in slices in your lunch box.

A Jumper for Jelly Bean

2008-03-07T14:26:00.006Z

In September, one of my best friends found out she was expecting. I was (and am) over the moon, and wanted to start knitting at once, but she sweetly asked me not to until they'd had their three-month scan, and after that Christmas and exams and things presented themselves with greater urgency - so now she's due in eleven weeks, and Jelly Bean is quite a bit more than a Jelly Baby, it's time I got clicking.

By 'jumper' I mean a sweater, but I suspect if you're American the word probably means something else entirely to you - a garment I've never quite understood. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found out that it can mean a jumper dress (which apparently I would call a pinafore, although I have never seen such a thing as the garments in the picture in real life, and I thought a pinafore was more like an apron and went over your clothes) or 'a unisex US Navy uniform garment'. Is that a jumpsuit?

And what about 'pullover', or 'jersey'? Does anyone use those words any more apart from my dad?

What do you call a knitted garment designed to cover the upper part of the torso and some of the arms, without buttons down the front? And what does a jumper mean to you?

Using what you have

2008-02-29T15:26:00.001Z

(And copying Amy).

Last weekend, reading some of the archives of blogs I've recently discovered, I read Amy's post about making challah every Friday with Jacob, and, suddenly, wanted to eat challah more than anything in the world. My dad's family are Jewish, and while my granny didn't make us challah every week in the way she did chicken soup and kneidlach, it still reminds me of her kitchen, her stories, and her love. So when I spied some challah while buying sandwich ingredients the next day, I carried it lovingly home and ate half of it all by myself, drinking a cup of tea, writing knitting lists and making plans.

And then, I noticed the little plastic tag that held the bread bag closed, and I remembered reading this post, and wishing that I had a little bobbin like that, and inspiration struck!

From knot...

... to neat.

Thank you, Amy! - for your advice on the Conwy socks, and the inspiration.

PS Happy Birthday to any leaplings!

Timely

2008-02-20T10:59:00.002Z

I've written before about reusing swatches; ripping them out, rewashing the yarn and winding it up to use again. It stems partly from growing up with a mother born during the rationing of post-war England, and partly my own squirrelly instinct. It's also a matter of making this sybaritic hobby of mine go a little further, feeling that I can just about justify buying luxurious yarn if I spin it out to the very last inch. And, of course, it's due to my timorous insistence on swatching for absolutely everything.

When I was knitting D's Welsh Hiking Scarf last summer I thought about how much time I spent swatching, unravelling, reskeining, washing and finally winding the yarn again, and took photos as I went along, thinking about writing it up at some point. I worked out that the whole process - from first stitch to rewound ball of yarn - took me about two hours.

Now, thanks to these...

... turning these

... into these

took me less than ten minutes.

For Christmas, one of my best friends gave me a ball-winder. It is a funny, ugly little thing that looks like so much plastic - and yet.

It means that the half hour I wanted to spend curled up on the sofa knitting, I can actually spend knitting, instead of coiling part of a skein around a tubular object. It means that instead of planning projects around when I can be in with time to wind up yarn, I can choose something at a moment's notice and be out of the house with the right needles and a brand new ball of yarn in twenty minutes. It means rather than winding yarn being a task to fit in somewhere, sometime, it becomes the start of an exciting new project.

Thank you, Anna, for that inexpressibly precious and seemingly ungiveable of gifts: time.

Perseverance

2008-02-17T12:27:00.009Z

Something else I hoped to find in the Workbasket.

This yarn, a present from Laura over a year ago, had been sitting in the basket as a bundle of swatches since I started medical school, mostly because I found reading the Conwy pattern quite confusing. But, New Year's resolutions aboard, I reread the pattern and sternly reminded my imperious inner perfectionist that making mistakes and starting again is better than knitting nothing at all.

I wound up the other skein last Thursday night and began the sock on the train on the way to Bournemouth, picking it up again on the way back on Sunday, very sleepy and thinking that I really ought to be reading some neuroscience. On the bus on Monday I realised I'd made a mistake, so back into the basket it went.

Last night I ripped back to the mis-twined cable and worked on it for a bit after supper before going back to my revision... only to find on putting it down again that I'd sailed merrily on way past the first decrease rows.

Post-it note, strategically-placed safety pin, Kipling in mind, tea. Let's hope this works.

Bournemouth Pier Scarf

2008-02-11T22:11:00.003Z

D is studying in Bournemouth this month, so we spent some of the weekend on the beach!

Pattern: based on Saartje's striped Noro Kureyon scarf. I rewound the yarn from the So Called Scarf complete with my imperfect splicings into two roughly equal-sized balls, cast on 42 sts and knit in 1 x 1 rib, alternating two rows from each ball, until I ran out of yarn. I used the round cast-on and cast-off explained in the Henry pattern because I didn't want too firm an edge, but they splayed out too much so I used the ends to draw them in a bit as I wove them in.
Yarn: Noro Silk Garden colour 8, 3 balls I think. At least I know I bought three balls and I couldn't find a third one, so I am assuming I spliced it into the Rightly Called Mess scarf. I could use my kitchen scales to weigh it to double check, but they are about as precise as I am.
Needles: 4 mm Susanne's rosewood circ from Scottish Fibres
Dimensions: 138 cm x 13 cm
Via the Workbasket? Unquestionably

This scarf is quite a lot shorter than I would normally wear (or knit!) but to my surprise, I like it. I didn't block this, just gave it a good soak, a normal spin rather than the gentle one I usually use for woollen things, and draped it along the top of the radiator overnight so I could wear it the next day. It's good to have a WIP out of the Basket, and a new scarf is a treat.

Project Workbasket's first foray

2008-02-07T19:37:00.000Z

Right, first up in our catalogue of ripping yarns is the Self-Striping So-Called Scarf, in Noro Silk Garden. I bought three balls of this colourway along with the yarn for Mum's Lady Eleanor because I loved the mini swatch I saw on the internet, and then cast around looking for a pattern. A little while later I was reading through the archives of a wonderful blog I'd recently discovered (do you do that too?) and found this. Hurrah! Same yarn, a pattern I'd wanted to knit for ages, and all the worrying about whether it would work or not done for me. In theory.

I'm still sometimes surprised to see how colour can change - everything. I'm learning that this one of the loveliest things about knitting: discovering how a chosen pattern can be transformed not only by a different yarn, but also in another colour. I loved Ashley's scarf, and I'd happily be wearing it today, but this one isn't working out, is it?

It's a great pattern, I still like the yarn, but they're wasted on each other, as I realised about five minutes after posting about it.

Better, I think. Not perfect, but good enough. And at the moment, good enough is plenty good enough for me.

(Sorry about the light. It is dark before I get home, and will be for weeks).

Severn Socks

2008-02-05T23:50:00.001Z

I have been taking off my boots all day because I can't stop showing off my new socks!

Pattern: Charade, by Sandra Park
Heel: Slip-stitch heel flap
Toe: Wide
Yarn: Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock, 045 'Cranberry', from Get Knitted. 2 skeins with lots left over
Via the stash? Definitely. I bought this last Christmas to knit some socks for my uncle, changed my mind and bought some yarn I thought was grey but turned out to be brown, and then didn't knit him any socks at all
Needles: 2.75 mm Brittany birch DPNs, from I Knit London
Gauge: 16 st x 23 rnds = 5cm

There are a few mistakes in these, which I'm quite proud of. Proud that I managed to let them go, and keep knitting. Proud that I didn't abandon the socks to the same forlorn fate as the other imperfect projects in the Workbasket just because of the odd misplaced stitch. Proud that I love them nonetheless, and perhaps because of their little idiosyncracies. Once or twice I didn't pick up stitches perfectly in pattern, and as you can see on the right foot in the picture above, one of the toe decreases is in the wrong place. The stitch markers popped off at various points and I thought I could sail through by counting. I couldn't.

I finished these in November - after struggling a bit with the grafting and giving the socks little ears a few times! - but didn't want to wear them until I'd taken some pictures. (Already, after a day of admittedly a fair amount of walking, they are pilling a bit around the heel; is this normal for Shepherd Sock or did I knit them too loosely?). Finally this weekend I managed to collect Deri, the socks and his camera all in the same place and take a few pictures (my poor little camera is going the way of all electronic goods). I am so proud of my first socks, they are so comfy and keep my feet so warm! I want to cast all my other projects aside and knit socks, socks, nothing but socks - all for meeeeeeeeeeee!

Ahem. Luckily there are a few socks in the Work Basket.

I love this pattern. Love it. I loved knitting it, I love the finished socks. Thank you, Sandra!

February 2: A Bloggers' (Silent) Poetry Reading

2008-02-02T18:50:00.000Z

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky

-sunlight and singing welcome your coming

although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess

(except my life)the true time of year-

and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each

nearness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love

e.e. cummings

Dredging the frog pond

2008-01-30T09:35:00.000Z

Starting to write again; trying to follow through on things and finish those I begin knitting; finally getting round to projects that have been on my To Knit list for as long as I've been knitting... What better place to start than my work basket?

I have essays to write and exams looming and when I haven't done enough work in a day I feel as if I'm walking around with a cloud on a string, like a small child with a helium balloon tied to its wrist, only a fair bit less exuberant. My knitting has been a little like that too, for longer than I care to think about. Whenever I get excited about a new project, I stumble across my basket full of unfinished and determinedly unmentioned projects, sternly tell myself that I can't knit anything else until I've dealt with the unfinished muddle, and assuredly sooner or later the shiny new knit joins its sad cousins in the basket.

It's a new year full of plans, I turned 25 a few weeks ago, things are changing rapidly all around me and I think it's about time I faced up to a few things around here.

I really don't want to lose hold of this little space and all the joy it has given me (however sporadic a blog poster and lax a blog friend I may be) so I'm going to document this spring clean here.

Please excuse me while I rip, wash and sort out my crumpled knitting in public. I'm hoping much good will come of it, and I'd love to have you there to talk to along the way.

Brown on brown

2008-01-22T09:55:00.000Z

Rowan Polar in Dark Truffle; Lantern Moon circular. Lovely.

Labour of love

2007-11-13T15:05:00.000Z

A few weeks ago, Deri left for the other side of the world. I wanted to make something while he was gone, to knit him a little closer and to wrap him warm in when he gets back. He took his last scarf to New Zealand with him; I wanted a comfort blanket on the needles, and to knit him something he could wear to work next year.

I loved Henry as soon as I saw it. In a different life I'd have a loom as well as a basket of knitting needles, so the idea of knitting to look like weaving really appeals to me. I also thought a pattern written for 'those who may not necessarily choose to sport a hand knitted item' might be smart enough for a junior doctor to wear to his first job.

The colour and tweediness of this Inca Cloud are just what I wanted, and with the silky squashiness make the yarn a dream to knit with. They make counting the stitches in the swatches a little more earthbound...

... and that's before I've even begun. Typically, I only read the pattern after I'd bought the yarn and started swatching. Turns out that to make the scarf the desired length (2.2. m), I am going to be knitting 652 stitches in each row.

Good thing I didn't plan on making this for anyone else.

Socks that Block

2007-10-13T15:02:00.000Z

But how?

I was up at 5.20 to go rowing this morning, and finished the toe decreases on the train, which made the fact that it was still dark somewhat bearable, and prompted conversations with random strangers (a very grumpy man on his way to a stag weekend, a sweet lady who took one look at me knitting and whipped out the blanket she was crocheting for her bed). I'm now going to have something to eat and go back to bed, and graft my first toes when I get up.

I'm a bit confused as to how to block these, though. I've seen these and even a tutorial on how to make your own, and remember reading in a Knitting Daily newsletter that Ann Budd pins her socks to blocking boards hanging on her office wall (how cool is that?). Can I just pin mine to a towel laid flat in the same way I block everything else?

Hope you get to spend a little time near some water this weekend.

Severn Sock III

2007-09-23T13:30:00.000Z

I know what you're thinking. There she goes again, starting all over again, again. After all our careful advice and encouragement. Will this girl never finish anything?

But look!

Prophylaxis against SSS.

I'm calling these the Severn Socks because I took the second one (before the heel débâcle) to Bristol and Bath last weekend when D and I went to look at hospitals there. He has to apply for jobs soon and is hoping to work at the Severn Foundation School.

The sock at Bath Abbey.

My term starts tomorrow. I'm really nervous and excited. Wish me luck!

The heavy bag that goes with me*

2007-09-21T08:35:00.000Z

How much do you need to take when going to stay at your boyfriend's parents' for two nights?

Why, this much, of course!

(Clockwise, L-R): swatching for sister's Treeless Apocalypse Hoodie; blocked but unmeasured swatches for Phildar cardie (I forgot to take the print-out of French knitting terms on holiday with me so that didn't get very far) plus more yarn and needles for further swatching/beginning the cardigan; kitchen foil inner-tube for winding green Koigu onto; plastic drinking straw for cutting into stitch markers; green Koigu for Embossed Leaves socks; swatches of variegated Koigu, only some of which have been measured; IK and Tendances with patterns for Embossed Leaves and Phildar cardie; Rang, Dale and Ritter; knitting notebook for writing gauge notes into when they're eventually taken.
(Not included: clothes, toiletries, novel, camera)

After your advice and encouragement (thank you!) I'm not going to start the leafy socks just yet, but when I get home will face my little red sock with renewed hope and enthusiasm and a smaller needle. This may also be the last gasp for the Phildar cardigan. I've been trying to knit this since buying the yarn over a year ago, and something never seems quite right. Maybe it's the gauge (although I hope not, because there are a million things with yarn knit at a looser gauge than that specified on the ball band which I want to knit), or maybe just the yarn and the pattern together that I don't like. We'll see.

This is only the upper layer of WISs in my work basket. That's works in stasis, if you're wondering.

*With apologies to Delmore Schwartz

On why trying to correct your mistakes can be a mistake

2007-09-20T08:27:00.000Z

Towards the end of a day to end all days, I wondered whether the two SSK I had knit instead of the k2tog along one side of the gusset of my charade sock bothered me that much. I decided that since I really really love this sock, and since this was going to be The Sock That I Finished, my First Pair of socks, and all those other noble ambitions with which I had imbued each stitch, that they did. I wanted this sock to be perfect, so I'd just tink back four rows, reknit them, and sail merrily into the foot with an awesomely neat little line of decreases to frame my first* short row heel.

The problem was, due to a full-on no-good bad day, I attempted this in the pub with a comforting pint of Doom Bar on hand. The pub was quite dark. The Doom Bar was very good. The knots that hold my skeleton in place relaxed sufficiently for me to lift my head and unclench my jaw a bit. I began to concentrate more on my companion than on the sock. I then realised that I had dropped one of those YOs, and that fixing them last time had elicited the suggestion that knitting might be a bit antisocial. Since I had only just begun uttering complete sentences rather than monosyllabic snarls, I decided instead to unknit a few rows, since in theory I can do this and talk at the same time. I noticed that the unknitting had created two more dropped YOs.

I came home, I unknit a few more rows, I cried (this was at the end of One of Those Days, remember). I ripped back to before the heel flap, realised that I would never ever be able to pick up those pesky dropped YOs in a remotely sensible way, cried some more and left the sock sitting on the floor.

Help.

The irony of the fact that one of those noble sentiments was to worry less and knit more, accept my mistakes and stop letting my inner perfectionist rampage over everything else, is not lost on me.

*Sock Incomplete I at this point still being known by its childhood name, Prototype.

A sock in France

2007-09-13T10:23:00.000Z

The last post was a collection of images that caught my eye, things that seemed quintessentially French to me, that reminded me somehow of my holiday reading (the rest of The Kill, Madame Bovary and Suite française) and just made me happy to be in France. Pictures that I wouldn't share with anyone else; the kind that made passers-by wonder what on earth this latest tourist was snapping at now.

Strangely, this meant that I left out the more conventional and probably better pictures from my holiday. Troyes is in fact a fairytale town clad largely in fifteenth-century timber and dominated by three cathedrals; Flemish-influenced Arras has the only colonnade of its kind in France and a magnificent town hall that was entirely rebuilt after the Second World War (actually the intricately carved stone corner in the last post is part of the back of the mairie); Avignon is famous for its university, the Palais des Papes and of course the bridge; Arles for its Roman amphitheatres and international film festival as well as Van Gogh.

Maybe another day.

The sock mark II continues apace. Before I unravel its predecessor, the little sock that accompanied me all the way home, I thought I'd show you a few more pictures I left out the other day.

A more organised person would have done this before we left.

Don't worry, I only left it like that when we stopped!

Oh, and you do get to see the Arras town hall after all.

Quatre couleurs françaises

2007-09-10T19:05:00.000Z

Arras:

Avignon (the église des Carmes):

Arles:

Troyes:

In which I learn about sock knitting from my dear internet friends

2007-09-08T13:30:00.000Z

Thank you so much for your comments on my last post. I was overjoyed to read them not only because of what you said, although of course that too, but because you said it. I have no idea how anyone manages, or bothers, to read this blog when I post so infrequently and even more rarely about knitting, but thank you, thank you for doing so. On the subject of comments, I'd really like to be able to reply to all of them. I have made such good friends through conversations begun with the response to a comment, and, as you know, Blogger doesn't make this so easy. Hannah, if you'd send me an email (address in the sidebar) I'd love to be able to get to know you a little. I can't say I'm much better at emailing than posting, but it would be nice to think it wasn't all one way. Only if you want to, of course.

Right, on with the story of the sock. I took some more photos because I found the memory stick and then left it in London again when I returned to Casa Mum'n'Dad. French photos tomorrow, because Deri is coming to visit later! (And bringing his computer, and my camera, which I left in the glove compartment of his car).

The pattern is Charade, and I should begin by saying that I love it. The herringbone rib is truthfully addictive, and it's simple enough to knit whilst map-reading but sufficiently interesting to make even waiting for a ferry a pleasure. It did take me a while to work out how to pick up a dropped stitch (I kept dropping the last YO off the end of the needle, and then could not for a while work out how to pick it up in pattern) which tempted D to venture, after I told him that he should go to the loo since we would be landing soon and he pointed out that he had just been and I hadn't even noticed, that knitting is 'a bit antisocial'. 'Nonsense!' I cried. 'It stopped me from getting bored in the car, and I navigated the way here successfully, and you didn't want to hit me over the head with the map because I was whining like a five-year-old, and it produced you a lovely scarf which you brought all the way to France even though it was sometimes too hot for your little Celtic self to step outside!' to which he meekly replied that he would never have wanted to hit me over the head anyway and left it at that. Antisocial, huh.

So, the sock. I begin as any knitter should, and dutifully swatch. Since I can't decide which one looks like the best tension for a hand-knit sock, never having seen one before (in the thread, as it were), I consult the oracle by way of the gauge specified for Roza's Socks, which are knitted in Lorna's Laces, the yarn I'm using for Charade. So far, so good enough for Grumpy.

I read the pattern and decide to decrease the number of stitches since this is written for a 'medium' woman's foot and mine are usually considered small. Measure my foot to check, and find that mine measures 8" around the ball of the foot, while the pattern says 6.5". This cannot be! Measure D's foot to check. His is 9" around the ball of the foot, even though he takes shoes eight sizes bigger than mine. Measure again. Spend a while wondering whether I have troll feet.

Decide to consult another oracle. She says 'Multiply the inch measurement you have taken for the widest part of your leg by your gauge and then deduct twenty-five to thirty percent of that number ... This percentage reduction is necessary to make the stocking tighter than your actual leg measurement at the top ... You don't want your socks to fall down!'. To decrease by 30% would leave me with 56 sts, by 25 % with 60 (the pattern is written for 64 sts). Feel vindicated in my assumption. CO 60 sts and knit merrily on two car journeys and the ferry home. Try on sock. Notice with horror that there is skin showing through the holes in the pattern, which is not the case with the other Charades I have admired on the internet.

Knit on past the heel knowing that at some point I am going to rip this, pretending all the while to myself that I have faced my demons and am going to finish this sock if it kills the perfectionist in me.

Try on sock again. Note hole at heel flap join. Tear needles from sock in pique and chagrin. Leave sock mouldering in London while I jaunt off to my parents's house.

Return to London for the first meeting of my book club*. Write this post. Feel reconciled to sock, and determined to finish it. Start casting on with correct number of stitches, wonder if I should decrease a needle size to remove gaps in pattern, start swatching for something else (of course) and finally turn to you lot for help.

So, once again, I am seeking your good advice. First, please note the hole. It is only on one side, that of the second side of the heel flap from which I picked up the stitches (does that make sense?) which for some reason I found harder. The holey side:

The not so holey side:

Should I just rip back to here, correct it, and carry on? Or should I start again, equipped with the knowledge on how to pick dropped YOs successfully? (I pretended to myself that those times where I hadn't maintained the pattern were Persian flaws. Secretly, I believe that my knitting is uneven enough to constitute a flaw in its own right and I should try to make everything else as good as can be). You know which way I'm leaning, right? And if so, should I cast on for 64 sts with this needle size, or with the smaller needle size, which gives me an extra half a stitch per inch (an extra two in 4")? Or is that too small a difference to eliminate the little holes in the pattern, in which case should I go down another needle size? And in that case, should I in fact increase the stitch count? I do not, after all, want my sock to fall down. Or cut off my circulation.

In anticipation of your help, thank you. And in the meantime, have a great weekend!

*Yes, I am a granny in all but biological fact. I put my hair in a bun for work. I knit. I'm working on the rocking chair.

Lost: one willy

2007-09-05T18:04:00.000Z

By which I mean, of course, a memory stick. It has all my photos from France on it, plus an old version of a certainty-based marking question programme I much prefer to the new one and was certainly instrumental in me passing my exams, as well as some very funny photos that don't belong to me. Also, it was the first thing Deri gave me and in theory still belongs to him, in addition to its sentimental value for said reason. (Had he not offered to give me the old version of LAPT, I would never have gone to sports night to collect it and our budding romance might never have blossomed. But I digress).

Two of my most treasured knitbloggers are trying to post more often, and in theory so am I. These two posts meant a great deal to me, chiming both with my own ever-present intentions to post more frequently, and more deeply with some of the reasons that I don't. When I've found the willy (or been reunited with D's computer. Sadly it, and he, are in the wilds of Essex on a GP placement) I'll be able to show you some photos of a sad little sock, ripped from the needles by its cruel knitter due to its deceptively lovely appearance on said needles and holey hag-like treachery on the foot. While you're here, could anyone guide me in the direction of learning how to pick up stitches along the edge of a heel flap so as not to leave a gaping hole when resuming knitting in the round?

So that this isn't an entirely picture-less post, I'll leave you with the photo that would be the background to my title bar if only I could work out how to put it there, taken during a biology field trip last May.

The white flower is a Stellaria holostea, I think. It's more commonly known as stitchwort.

Lost in a book

2007-08-11T08:57:00.000Z

I'm still here, I just haven't been knitting much.

I passed my exams, had some hospitally stuff, D had exams (and did very well), and now we're zipping around seeing friends aplenty and packing to go away. In between, I've been reading - these last week

and this week this and now this and this. I suddenly seem to have rediscovered the ability to lose myself in a book, mislaid somewhere along an English literature degree, and while I can read and knit, I'm relishing the ability to curl up in a chair by an open window and surface only for something absolutely necessary like lunch.

I am taking some knitting to France with me and should be able to fit some in on the car journeys, if not between all the sleeping, reading and cooking. See you when I get back!

Whatever shall I do?

2007-07-13T12:09:00.000Z

So I was merrily knitting away on my second swatch when D asked to borrow my computer to look up cor pulmonale and pulmonary atresia. Which normally would have been fine, except that this time it meant that I stopped reading your lovely blogs and started looking at my knitting. And noticed this:

I'd thought the yarn became a bit thin earlier in the swatch, but as I was busy reading I didn't pay it much attention and carried on. This time, it commanded my full attention. Want a closer look?

Daphne noted that Rowan seem to have problems with the great yardage. Which is slightly annoying, but since you'd usually expect to have to join ends in a piece of knitting, a few extra knots in a ball of yarn is not the end of the world. Obviously finding that the dk yarn you'd bought is in fact thick and thin is also not the end of the world, but is a bit more annoying.

Hum. Adulterated pleasure after all.

Pure unadulterated pleasure

2007-07-12T11:24:00.000Z

Swatching with Rowan Silk Wool on a new Addi lace needle, because my other 4 mm needles are all in other swatches. Surprisingly, this one is already off the needles and they, um, are not.

Welsh Hiking Scarf

2007-07-08T15:06:00.000Z

Pattern: Hello Yarn Irish Hiking Scarf
Yarn: RYC Cashsoft DK, colourway 521 'Opulence', 8 balls knit double, from Liberty
Needles: 4mm, 60 cm Addi circ
Dimensions: 216 cm x 11.5 cm washed (I didn't block it as such, and forgot to measure it before washing, but from the swatch and memory I don't think it grew much). I could probably have got at least another 10 cm from the last two balls, but was modelling it on a favourite scarf and I'm happy with it this length.
Modifications: I cast on 36 stitches and replaced all the k2 except the first and last with kfb; for the last row I knit the kfb stitches together. I take no credit for these mods whatsoever. I emailed Adrian to ask which cast-off she had used as I wasn't very happy with the way the top and bottom of my swatches had splayed out, and she suggested these increase and decrease rows. I also cast off in pattern after the sixth row of the repeat to make the ends of the scarf symmetrical.
Thoughts: this is a great pattern. It's really simple but effective, and as you all probably already know, cables rule. Plus, I really like the two stich garter stich edging, which frames the cables hansomely and gives a nice flat edge without being too obtrusive. The yarn is beatifully, beautifully soft and was a real treat to knit with, although I'm a bit worried about how it will hold up. It was already starting to pill after only a few days accompanying me on public transport, and I had to stop D from patting it in order to avoid having a felted scarf before it was even off the needles! Apparently it's machine washable but I'm not sure I'd take the risk. It's a bit too splitty to be perfect cabling material, particularly knitting with two strands held double, but I like the stitch definition so I'd happily do it again! I also found three knots in the eight balls I used, which isn't the end of the world - and at least both sides of the knot were from the same dyelot! - but for something that expensive it seems a bit cheeky. Knitting a scarf from eight balls of the stuff was truly extravagant (opulent, in fact!), but D and I spent ages searching for the right colour and as it was the first thing I've knit him I wanted it to be perfect. And I can't think of any other way I'd rather spend my money.

So far the scarf has spent most of its existence in a drawer waiting for winter, but luckily I thought of taking it to the seaside and it turned out to be the perfect addition to a (Cardiff Blues) rugby shirt at the end of a brisk, breezy, beautiful day at Aldeburgh. A cherished scarf for a very happy day.

Unexpected consequences...

2007-06-10T12:45:00.000Z

... of a first evening spent in front of the TV since I was at home over Christmas: wound yarn.

Hydrangea and Bird of Paradise, from Sundara's Petals Collection. I joined the Petals Collection at the very beginning, when I was revising for my exams last year. I'd never really thought of joining any kind of yarn or pattern club before, but I liked the idea of spending the money I had saved unexpectedly by staying in revising on some kind of reward for said hard work, and the idea that I'd keep receiving little presents all year seemed too good to miss - from me trying to get into medical school, to me at medical school. Or something like that. So far I have swatched the first installment. Uselessly, as it turns out.

Luckily a medical education is studded with exams. Maybe by the time I'm a registrar I will have a whole Petals sock.

Comforting cables

2007-06-08T20:46:00.000Z

In her introduction to Scarf Style, Pam Allen calls scarves 'the comfort food of knitting': soothing to knit, comforting to wear, and 'a virtual hug to the recipient.' I have often heard of the magical power of the cable, adding excitement and adventure to otherwise backwards-and-forwards knitting.

This scarf, then, is the perfect comfort blanket and travelling companion for someone with a few scattered worries (exams looming - again - and with them my less pleasant self, D's uncle is sick, the overflow from the toilet is leaking (clean) water into the flat below and the neighbours are neither patient nor polite, D is away and I miss him, the doctors still don't know what's wrong with me but I have some slightly grim investigations to look forward to as soon as my exams are out of the way), repepetitive and monotonous enough to let me think my own thoughts, quietly, clearly, with the hustle of London flowing around me, without being so mindless as to let my thoughts fly off into the anxious rafters.

It's the Irish Hiking Scarf, which I am calling the Welsh Hiking Scarf because it's for D who is a bit Welsh (Deri, which rhymes with 'berry' by the way, means 'oak tree' in Welsh) and likes hiking.

Although next time he climbs Snowdon, something made of polar fleece might be more in order.

(Gratuitous boyfriend blog shot. Like I said, I miss him. Also I have no idea why the camera put that date on, twenty years before Kodak released the first professional digital camera system. It amuses the luddite in me).

Not with the band

2007-05-31T10:02:00.000Z

Last week I saw Mohair at the Camden Barfly. I was really looking forward to posting about it because - well, they're called 'mohair', and as it turned out they had their name lit up in dressing-table-style lights. I had a great photo planned with the sock (the Schaeffer Anne has a bit of mohair in it) in the foreground in true Harlot style - only I forgot my camera*. (Possibly a good thing. It was almost too hot to sweat, let alone wave around a bit of hairy knitting).

Yesterday I went to see some of Hot Chip DJing at Fopp on Tottenham Court Road to promote their album for the DJ-Kicks series (and then, because I was one of the first twenty-five to turn up, on to the invitation-only party at Plastic People no less!). It was brilliant - a bit like being at a really great houseparty, with someone with impeccable taste and lots of humour on the decks, and at Fopp there were little candles on the tables, beer to drink out of handsome glasses, and much knitting. I even spoke to one of the Chips afterwards and he was really friendly and would I'm sure have been happy to pose with the knitting... only my camera ran out of batteries while I was checking the light levels.

Clearly, to be anything like Her Harlottiness I am going to have to try harder in more ways than just the knitting.

*So that this isn't a completely picture-less post I stole this picture from this nice man. Thank you Canolais!

In the absence of a niddy noddy

2007-05-26T07:36:00.000Z

... you can always use a cereal box. (Two because the swatch I am unravelling is knit from two balls of yarn).

See, they even have a neat little yarn anchor! (Not the one on the right because my flatmate opened it upside down. You can still hook the yarn over the edge).

It's better if they have some cereal in to stop them tipping over. (Better still if there's more than a tiny bit in an open bag so you don't end up spilling your flatmate's favourite cereal all over the floor).

I wish I had a niddy noddy.

An almost perfect weekend

2007-05-21T07:39:00.000Z

A friend's birthday party*;

a trip to Brixton market; a smidgeon of work;

melanzane al funghetto from here (the tomatoes and basil are in fact not in this recipe at all but the one on the opposite page; I managed to read and pull out the ingredients for both and didn't realise until halfway through, so there is now garlicky tomato sauce in the freezer)

with tiny baked potatoes and salad,

rhubarb crumble;

lots of sleep; goslings,

watching cricket,

and a band (from our vantage point overlooking the pedaloes, drinking tea, halfway round the lake), in Battersea park;

warm feta and lentil salad (recipe cut out of a newspaper some years ago),

with green salad and naan bread.

The Persian flaw in a blissful weekend: still getting 21.5 st to 2" on 2.25mm needles.

More swatching.

*I put this picture up because I was so touched when Jane and Ashley allowed us a tiny glimpse more of the face behind the camera. Please note that for some reason this was the hottest party I've ever been to. Much fun nonetheless.

Gauging the situation

2007-05-16T20:30:00.000Z

We are often given problem-solving exercises like the following:

At which I always think 'Duh, what kind of idiot wrote these problems? As if the labs are filled with people playing pin-the-tail on the test tube! What kind of idiot would forget things like that!'.

What kind of idiot indeed?

On the left you see all the swatches I've knit in the past few months when knitting round and round was just about my intellectual limit; on the right are the labels I was supposed to attach to said swatches with needle size, gauge, method and so on (I even knit two of those swatches on the same size needle, one with two circs and the other magic loop to see if my guage varied with technique. I'd like to say it didn't, but who knows?).

To make matters even more befuddling, the one swatch that still has the needle attched comes up at a gauge of 22 st x 27 rows over 2" in Schaeffer Anne. Now I find that the Sock Queen, in the Gentleman's Fancy Sock, knits the same yarn on the same needle at 18 sts and 24 rows to 2". And I always thought I was such a loose woman.

Sigh. One of these days I am going to have to change my byline to 'swatching, and reading about other people's interesting knitting on the internet'.

Flowers never bend with the rainfall

2007-05-10T17:27:00.000Z

These are the flowers my classmates brought me in hospital last week (surrounded by work). I'm actually fine - they thought I had appendicitis and I didn't, although I did get as far as the anaesthetic induction room! It was interesting to experience a hospital from the other side of the curtain, and the head of Phase One medicine pointed out to me she had yet to meet a medical student whose education hadn't benefited greatly from time spent in hospital. On Thursday morning I was reading about the patient experience of hospital care in my medical sociology text book on the tube, and that evening I was lying awake trying not to roll onto my IV line, watching the shadows of the night nurses on the ceiling, thinking about my own experience of anxiety and lack of information.

I still have some tests coming up and in the light of all this happening the week before my end-of-year exams, the dean recommended that I withdraw from the May session and take them instead with the resits in July. This is both a blessing (I have more time to revise, and have put off the inevitable for a little while!) and a perfect reminder to be careful what you wish for. I've lost count of the number of times I've wished, in the weeks coming up to an exam, that someone would suddenly turn around and say, 'Actually, you've got an extra two weeks!' - and unexpectedly I've been given a six-week reprieve and it feels decidedly odd. Not only do I feel strangely like I've cheated somehow, it's also turned my summer on its head. I was really looking forward to doing a 9-5 again for a little while, earning a bit of money, and having evenings and weekends with nothing to do but go to the park, read novels and knit!

To keep things on the straight and narrow I've promised myself to treat the library like an office (or keep office hours there at least - I don't mean eating cake at my desk and eavesdropping on the most interesting conversation in the room!) and hopefully that will mean I still get to knit in the park and go to Sunday Jazz at the Princess of Wales. I realised when I was in hospital how much I've missed knitting (there's nothing like being stuck in bed with a canula sticking out of your arm to make you want to use your hands!), and how much I've missed not blogging this year. I miss being part of the wonderful warm community of knitblggers that I valued so much last year, I miss my friends, and I feel like I've forgotten how to write in full sentences.

So, bear with me please! I'm really hoping that the underside of these new leaves means more knitting and blogging time, as well as more time to revise. I'm visiting Deri's parents this weekend and will be taking my needles along with an embryology text book. By the time I come back I should have... ooh, a swatch! In the meantime, be well.

Conversation with a muggle: II

2007-02-22T23:06:00.000Z

D: (Asking about Jasmine's guage swatch) But why was she knitting it round?
Me: She wasn't. It was a flat piece of knitting, but stocking stitch does just curl round. See, if you look at this side it's rows of tiny little half-moon bumps, and on this side it's rows of little 'v's. If you just knit backwards and forwards you get garter stitch, which has equal numbers of 'v's and bumps on both sides so it lies flat. It looks a bit like this, which is actually reverse stocking stitch, but with more space between each row of bumps. If you're knitting stocking stitch, instead of knitting backwards and forwards you knit one row and purl the next, so you get all the 'v's on one side and all the bumps on the other. That means that one side of the fabric is a bit bigger than the other side and that causes it to curl round.
D: But that's a good thing, right?
Me: Why?
D: If you're knitting a stocking.

Waving

2007-02-16T19:52:00.000Z

In a few days exams for this module will be over and I will have three days to count some gauge swatches, take D on a mission to answer the question 'How much is a piece of yarn?' and apply sticks to thread. Then by the time my next round of sociology lectures kicks in I'll have something to keep me occupied through all the jargon - and maybe if I'm feeling really energetic I might even knit on the bus! Oh, and there's all that belated Christmas and birthday knitting...

This is just to let you know that I'm rowing, not drowning.

Feb 2: A (Silent) Poetry Reading

2007-02-02T18:40:00.000Z

Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are —
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of gray waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
the shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.

— Ezra Pound, Doria

Conversation with a muggle

2007-01-15T12:39:00.001Z

D: OK, but if I did earn enough I'd definitely buy a yacht.
Me: But there are so many better things you could spend that amount of money on.
D: Like what?
Me: Well, like yarn...
D: You could buy a lot of yarn for that money.
Me: Exactly.
D: Alright, when I buy a yacht I'll buy you a piece of yarn.
Me: What, one piece?
D: A really nice piece. How much is a piece of yarn?

I got a salad spinner for Christmas

2006-12-27T10:53:00.000Z

I love salad. I love it a lot more than I love fruit. I will happily eat leftover salad for breakfast, and if there are no fighting irons in the immediate vicinity I will do so with my hands, with relish. Chez moi, however, I really rarely eat salad. This is because I hate wet lettuce almost as much as I love salad, and none of my efforts using colanders or whirling the washed leaves around my head in a clean tea towel achieve much more than wet kitchen cupboards. If I leave them to dry on another kitchen towel, they go crinkly and wilted, which is a little better, but requires time and planning that I don't have.

Thanks to my dear and lovely aunt and uncle (yes, he of the unfinished socks. Her Christmas present is also unfinished, but less so) I can now spin salad to my heart's content!

Still not as excited as me?

Ta da!

OK, this is a store-bought jumper and not one of my handknits*, but think of the possibilities! I resorted to this on finding that the spin cycle in my parents' washing machine includes a rinse cycle too, which is great if you haven't used Eucalan and less great if you have, but think! Not only could you use this for delicate lace in preference to wrapping it in a towel and treading on it - it may also be the answer to one of those questions I have pondered on failing to get to sleep more than once: how on earth would I dry a garment to which I had attached my Lionel Nichols buttons? (That I fear are too delicate even for the treading option).

Now I just have to think of a garment worthy of the buttons.

*Truly, if you are looking for one of those you'd best come back in a few months time. I may have completed a sock, or billions of swatches. In which case, I will be well on my way to a very lumpy patchwork blanket

'Twas the night before Christmas

2006-12-24T23:59:00.000Z

The stocking was draped over the tree with care, in an attempt to make the two circulars attached look festive.

Oh well. At least my uncle's sock is closer to being finished than some other people's Christmas presents.

Joys of the festive season to all!

Just what the doctor ordered

2006-12-15T16:09:00.000Z

After an exam, snooker on TV and a (very) small amount of Christmas knitting.

Small pleasures

2006-11-17T08:14:00.000Z

... perhaps more precious for that.

Hand-winding yarn, new needles, hand-dyed sock yarn from a new friend's work basket.

I think this sock is a little too big, don't you?

2006-11-15T21:17:00.000Z

A little while ago, I started these socks for my uncle. He deserves socks partly because he is almost impossible to think of Christmas presents for, and mostly because he loves that I knit. He likes to tell me two stories about knitting in my family. The first is that when his grandparents arrived in South Africa from Lithuania, his grandmother earned their living by making clothes. She made baby clothes and patterned sweaters, and whenever my great-grandpa saw someone wearing a Fair Isle jumper, he would follow them along the street, memorising the pattern stitch for stitch until he could go home and write it down for my great-grandma who would add it to her collection. The second is that my grandmother, who is legendary in my family as a wonderful knitter, could never work out how to fix her own mistakes. My grandpa didn't knit at all, but whenever she made a mistake she would hand him her knitting as he got home from working on musical radio or playing the trumpet in a nightclub, and he would fix it straight away and hand it back to her.

For these socks for my dear uncle I wanted a simple, straightforward pattern, one I could neither quarrel with nor change my mind about halfway through, and settled on Thuja, which has the added benefit of claiming to be quick. I chose this yarn as the manliest I could find at Stash, and the best substitute there for the Artyarns Supermerino. Then for some reason I now can't remember, I did some calculations and came up with a number of stitches which might fit Hossein Reza Zadeh, but not my slip of an uncle.

Retrieving the sock stub from the knitting basket today, it occurs to me that this isn't the right yarn for a pair of uncle socks either. I know he likes the colours because the sock fell tactlessly out of my bag when I went to visit him one day, but the yarn is too squooshy and bouncy and squeezable to be turned into a pair of socks. Especially ones that will get a lot of wear on stone floors and inside hiking boots. Plus, I don't think I like knitting socks with yarn this fat after all.

So peeps, what do you think? Do I abandon the Thuja sock altogether and find some yarn for either socks like these or an even simpler sock, a very plain one with a few strategically placed stripes like those of the Gentleman's Sock in railway stitch (minus the railway stitch. Time and skills are of the essence people), or do I turn the yarn into something else entirely for my uncle?

I have already considered and rejected wristwarmers.

11.11.11

2006-11-11T09:24:00.000Z

Halted against the shade of a last hill
They fed, and eased of pack-loads, were at ease;
And leaning on the nearest chest or knees,
Carelessly slept. But many there stood still
To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge,
Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.
Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled
By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge;
And though the summer oozed into their veins
Like an injected drug for their bodies' pains,
Sharp on their souls hung the imminent ridge of grass,
Fearfully flashed the sky's mysterious glass.

Hour after hour they ponder the warm field
And the far valley behind, where the buttercups
Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up;
When even the little brambles would not yield
But clutched and clung to them like sorrowing arms.
They breathe like trees unstirred.

Till like a cold gust thrills the little word
At which each body and its soul begird
And tighten them for battle. No alarms
Of bugles, no high flags, no clamorous haste,-
Only a lift and flare of eyes that faced
The sun, like a friend with whom their love is done.
O larger shone that smile against the sun,-
Mightier than his whose bounty these have spurned.

So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together
Over an open stretch of herb and heather
Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned
With fury against them; earth set sudden cups
In thousands for their blood; and the green slope
Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space.

Of them who running on that last high place
Breasted the surf of bullets, or went up
On the hot blast and fury of hell's upsurge,
Or plunged and fell away past this world's verge,
Some say God caught them even before they fell.

But what say such as from existence' brink
Ventured but drave too swift to sink,
The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,
And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
With superhuman inhumanities,
Long-famous glories, immemorial shames-
And crawling slowly back, have by degrees
Regained cool peaceful air in wonder-
Why speak not they of comrades that went under?

Spring Offensive, Wilfred Owen

(See also this and this).

Too tired to think of an original word to say

2006-11-10T21:25:00.002Z

You read it here last.

48 things you could care less about, plus a few

1. FIRST NAME? Philippa

2. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE? My dad's uncle Phil. My middle name Maya (the middle a rhymes with 'eye', by the way) is after my dad's grandmother Manya. My mum stood up to my granny when my sister came along

3. WHEN DID YOU LAST CRY? August

4. DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING? Most of the time

5. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE LUNCHMEAT? Can you only eat lunchmeat for lunch? I like most not-processed-much meat, but I don't eat it very often

6. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU? I've wondered this often. I'd like to think so, but I might think I was a pretentious idiot

7. DO YOU HAVE A JOURNAL? Just the blog

8. DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR TONSILS? Yes

9. WOULD YOU BUNGEE JUMP? No. I think I'd love it but I value my retinae too highly

10. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE CEREAL? Porrridge made with water, eaten with honey and sunflower and pumpkin seeds or peanut butter

11. DO YOU UNTIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF? Depends how late it is

12. DO YOU THINK YOU ARE STRONG? 'She takes just like a woman, yes, she does / She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does / And she aches just like a woman / But she breaks just like a little girl'

13. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ICE CREAM FLAVOR? Pistachio. Or mango. But I don't eat ice cream very often; it's too cold

14. SHOE SIZE? 38

15. RED OR PINK? For what? I often like them together

16. WHAT IS THE LEAST FAVORITE THING ABOUT YOURSELF? Procrastination and fear of failure. They're linked

17. WHO DO YOU MISS THE MOST? My almost-godmother Frances and my grandparents

18. WHAT FOOD WILL GET YOU OUT OF BED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT? Leftovers, or whatever I've cooked for tomorrow's lunch

19. WHAT COLOUR TROUSERS, SHIRT AND SHOES ARE YOU WEARING? Indigo jeans, grey sweater, black cardigan, cream and pink scarf woven by Jessica Knott, Silver Streaks. I have plans for these shoes. They are going to look excellent with these socks, when I have copied them shamelessly

20. LAST THING YOU ATE? Rice and courgettes, borlotti bean salad

21. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW? Hot Chip

22. IF YOU WERE A CRAYON, WHAT COLOR WOULD YOU BE? What?

23. FAVORITE SMELL? Pomanders, quinces, gardens and hot summer pavements after the rain, clean laundry

24. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO ON THE PHONE? Olly, checking whether the text books he'd lent me were of any help, and inviting himself round for tea

25. THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE? Their posture, and how they look at people

26. DO YOU LIKE THE PERSON YOU STOLE THIS FROM? Very much

27. FAVOURITE DRINK? Water. Tea: green, black and white

28. FAVOURITE SPORT? Rowing

29. EYE COLOUR? Brown

30. HAT SIZE? No idea

31. DO YOU WEAR CONTACTS? I love my glasses, but I am going to have to get some contacts soon; see (28) above

32. FAVORITE FOOD? Anything that comes with rice, especially fish. I will happily eat anything that's made for me, except raisins in savoury food, which are clearly wrong and should be stopped

33. SCARY MOVIES OR HAPPY ENDINGS? Are these antonyms?

35. SUMMER OR WINTER? Winter, the first half at least. I love autumn too

36. HUGS OR KISSES? Both please

37. FAVOURITE DESSERT? Rhubarb crumble with crème fraîche

38. WHAT SIDE OF THE BED DO YOU SLEEP ON AND WHY? The left, because I prefer facing into the middle of the bed than out of it and I most often sleep on my right side

39. IF YOU DIDN'T MAKE THE DECISION TO GET MARRIED AND HAVE A FAMILY, WHAT WOULD YOU BE DOING TODAY? I didn't. I wouldn't rule anything out in the future but right now those are fairly far down my list! (Although, embryology? Terrifying)

40. WHAT BOOKS ARE YOU READING? A Brief Stay with the Living by Marie Darrieussecq, Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi

41. WHAT'S ON YOUR MOUSE PAD? I don't have one, or a mouse

42. WHAT DID YOU WATCH LAST NIGHT ON TV? I watched the Ten O'clock News last week

43. FAVORITE SOUNDS? Laughter. Birds waking up and chirruping before the sun has risen. The sound of the oven door of the Aga at my parents' house

44. ROLLING STONE OR BEATLES? Both, rarely. Never at the same time

45. THE FURTHEST YOU'VE BEEN FROM HOME? Guadalajara, Mexico

46. WHAT'S YOUR SPECIAL TALENT? Good at everything and nothing

47. WHERE WERE YOU BORN? University College Hospital, London

48. WHO SENT THIS TO YOU? Having nearly copied Mary, Laura and Kris, Anna's was the final straw, partly because some of her answers were so close to those I'd half-written. I stole it complete with extra questions, for your viewing pleasure:

1. FLIP TO PAGE 18, PARAGRAPH 4 IN THE BOOK CLOSEST TO YOU RIGHT NOW, WHAT DOES IT SAY? 'Ideas about disease emerging during the nineteenth century were influenced by two developments which provided a philosophical and empirical basis for the biomechanical approach characteristic of modern medical practice. These developments were the "Cartesian revolution", which gave rise to the idea that the mind and body were independent, and the doctrine of specific aetiology, which flowed from the discovery of the microbiological origins of infectious disease. These effectively denied the influence of the social and psychological factors in disease onset. Rather, the body was viewed as a machine to be corrected when things go wrong by procedures designed to neutralize specific agents or modify the physical processes causing disease. These ideas have been progressively challenged as the monocausal view of disease has been modified by multicausal models of disease.'
('Social Causes of Disease', David Locker, Sociology as applied to Medicine ed. Graham Scambler)

2. IF YOU STRETCH OUT YOUR LEFT ARM - AS FAR AS POSSIBLE, WHAT ARE YOU TOUCHING? Nothing. I have a huge desk which touches the wall along its right edge. Plus, I'm fairly short

3. WHAT’S THE LAST PROGRAM YOU WATCHED ON TV? See (42) above

4. WITHOUT LOOKING, GUESS WHAT TIME IT IS Time I was in bed

5. EXCEPT THE COMPUTER, WHAT CAN YOU HEAR RIGHT NOW? Rain outside and, now, Paganini's 24 Caprices, Op. 1 for solo violin, played by Itzhak Perlman. This is not, after all, instant blog content

6. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU WERE OUTSIDE AND WHAT DID YOU DO? I walked home from the tube station

7. WHAT ARE YOU WEARING? Exactly what I was wearing in (19) above

8. DID YOU DREAM LAST NIGHT? IF YOU DID, WHAT ABOUT? I dreamt I'd been asked to teach a class of primary school children who were visiting London for the day, in Spanish. We did lots of painting and then went to the swimming pool at which point I discovered I couldn't swim

9. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU LAUGHED? Yesterday, listening to these

10. WHAT’S ON THE WALLS, IN THE ROOM YOU’RE IN RIGHT NOW? Postcards, scraps of paper with the library opening hours, the syllabus of my French course and lots of people's phone numbers, an Afshar rug that was my 21st birthday present from my parents, a huge mirror which was another birthday present, two etchings, one by my mum and one by a friend of hers, a present for getting into medical school. These last four make me very happy

11. HAVE YOU SEEN ANYTHING STRANGE LATELY? Kids throwing fireworks at each other as I walked home. It's not that usual to see flashes of green light exploding in front of cars on Clapham Road of an evening, or people being that stupid in public. Although this poor man made it into the Metro

13. WHAT’S THE LAST FILM YOU SAW? Volver

14. IF YOU BECAME A MULTIMILLIONAIRE, WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH THE MONEY?
Spend a bit, save a bit, give lots to Médecins Sans Frontières and The Woodland Trust, stop worrying about my student debt and the amount I cost my parents

15. TELL US SOMETHING ABOUT YOURSELF THAT MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW Isn't that what this whole exercise is for?

16. IF YOU COULD CHANGE ONE THING IN THIS WORLD, WITHOUT REGARDING POLITICS OR BAD GUILT - WHAT WOULD IT BE? More parks

17. DO YOU LIKE DANCING? Yes. I used to be very good at it, and once upon a time I tried to go to ballet school but my parents put their feet down. For this I am grateful but I wish I hadn't given it up. I miss it lots. I dance around my bedroom nearly every day but dancing in public is a whole other matter. Partly because I'm self-conscious, and partly because the music is usually so rubbish

18. GEORGE BUSH?! Indeed (my exclamation mark added)

19. WHAT DO YOU WANT YOUR CHILDREN’S NAMES TO BE, GIRL/BOY? See (39) above

20. WOULD YOU EVER CONSIDER LIVING ABROAD? I consider it often, but I couldn't expatriate for good. When I lived in Mexico I realised how very very English I am

21. WHAT DO YOU WANT GOD TO TELL YOU, WHEN YOU COME TO HEAVEN? Everything!

22. WHO SHOULD DO THIS MEME? Anyone who'd like to join me next to the 'I'll never have a mememe on my blog' horse I have just fallen off. It's not that high after all

I measured the swatch

2006-11-07T20:32:00.000Z

Only now do I realise it was knit on needles a whole mm too small.

This

2006-11-06T07:07:00.000Z

is what my desk looked like at dawn this morning.

Not because I'd been up all night, but because I am apparently rare in preferring to go to bed before midnight and getting up early to work the next morning. This is going to get harder when the sun only gets up after I have left for uni, which is going to happen soon.

Petalling along

2006-10-30T22:39:00.000Z

Although I've now got round to measuring the swatch and washing and blocking it, for some reason I haven't taken the final step of measuring the finished swatch. I have no explanation for my knitting apathy at all. Tiredness and lots of work really can't be an excuse, since I will happily watch the Ten O'clock news of an evening, which used to be my prime knitting time. Oh, and I spend a lot of time on the tube, which, arguably, is a window designated for nothing but knitting. (I have no love for the London Lite).

So, I will distract you with pictures of some pretty yarn. Sundara cannily timed the launch of her Petals Collection to coincide with my revision. As I put in all the hours to get myself to medical school, it occurred to me that I could also put in place measures to ensure I wouldn't run out of yarn* while studying even harder at said school. Prudent,† I think you'll agree.

This sock, too, is millimetring along, because I may be, um, whisper it... throwing. I found 'knit into second st on left needle, knit first st, slip both sts off needle, k1' like knitting with yarn dipped in treacle, continental-style. Needless to say, the Conwy sock is now languishing needle-less, and I have turned to pastures green-and-pinker.

Also, it appears I may be going to the light side. Any tips to keep me on the path dark and windy are, as usual, gratefully received.

*There is no spur to irrationality like spending hours stuck between pages of biochemistry. Oh dear.

†Prudent adj. 1382, wise, discerning, in the Wycliffe Bible; borrowed from Old French prudent, learned borrowing from Latin prūdentem, contraction of prōvidentem having foresight. I am ignoring any pecuniary connotations this word may have, because as Laura so rightly observed: 'I suppose some people might find yarn to make 30 pairs of socks a little excessive, but I am not one of those people. If you are reading this, I would hazard a guess that neither are you.'

Far from the blogging tree

2006-10-06T20:27:00.000Z

You might think that after such a hiatus I'd be back with at least a pair of socks, if not some sleeves and perhaps a few begun and un-begun-again projects (that is, if you are not a regular reader of these pages). However, I'm here just to stop off quickly, wave, and turn around again. In the past two weeks I've met more new people than I ever have before in my life and tried to remember most of their names, started medical school and with it a week's-worth of lectures which are already over my head and demand extra reading, begun coxing and learning not only the commands and how to steer but also the extremely convoluted route from the tube station to the boat house, and - and - a million other things, but not amongst them a stitch.

Which is slightly alarming, considering October marches ever onward and I haven't even washed the swatch to see if I need new needles for a sweater for someone's birthday at the end of November.... Hmm. Come to think of it, I'd better get a move on if I want it finished by Christmas.

I'll keep you posted, but don't hold your breath - unless I've just crashed our boat into a bridge and you're having to swim to safety. Terrifying thought. Keep your needles crossed for me!

I ♥ magic loop

2006-09-10T19:27:00.000Z

I've discovered that not only is magic loop perfect bus and tube knitting, as promised, it also enables knitting at bus stops, knitting and walking when two buses fight for the same stop and your bus loses, and knitting whilst looking backwards over your shoulder, peering for your stop in the darkness after a few glasses of wine. I'm fairly sure that no amount of practice with dpns would allow me to do this.

I also really like noticing that my knitting has ears.

This was meant to be a gauge swatch, but I became somewhat addicted. And it was the perfect knitting to take to the park with five cousins under the age of four, beset on chasing small dogs and smearing their family with hummus and ice-cream. Thanks to the genius knitting technique, I managed to stay clean, mop up spills and chase toddlers without dropping a stitch (or, more pertinently, a needle).

You may notice that this yarn is blue. The day after my parcel from Ashley had arrived, with the colours I had carefully chosen (I wanted them all except for the Serengeti), I stopped by her blog to see that she'd chosen the blue, and appeared* to be knitting the sock I have been wanting to knit for most of my knitting life. Suddenly I found myself wishing really pathetically hard that I'd chosen Dusk after all.

And then, in one of those brilliant moments that confirms my love of all things knitblog-related, a little red ticket hopped onto my doormat, leading me to the sorting office and a parcel from Laura, containing none other than the blue yarn I'd been dreaming of for twenty-four hours. Heee! I was capable of doing nothing else for a little while than skipping around holding my yarn, and then dropping it straight onto the swift.

Thank you so much Laura. I love this yarn, not only for the lovely fabric it's knitting up into and the luscious softness of knitting with it, and not even for the fact that you sent it apropos of almost nothing, when your own life hasn't been easy recently (although I appreciate this too). I almost love it most because of the order of events that preceded its arrival, and particularly because the blue yarn came from you! If I had been asked to guess what colour plain yarn you would've picked, I'd have guessed blue (I can't think why), so it all seems to fit perfectly.

*I first read the post quickly, and assumed that Ashley was knitting the Danish socks from Knitting on the Road, which are actually the socks I've been wanting to knit for ages. Leafing through the book I found that the Conwy socks looked more likely in terms of gauge, and the novel idea of choosing my pattern to fit my gauge rather than the other way round and then trying to cook the pattern occurred to me. Lo and behold, it turns out that Ashley is many steps ahead of me as per, and is knitting the Conwy socks anyway.

Direct copying is flattering, honestly.

Love story

2006-09-08T18:27:00.000Z

I'd been wondering how to tell you this for a while, not because I want this space to be an emotional dumping ground, just - because. I don't really know. I felt like I wasn't being entirely truthful.

Then I saw that Esereth had asked about love stories - good, bad and downright ugly, so here goes. Rich and I broke up a month or so ago. It's OK, it was the right thing and necessary, but it has made my life somewhat topsy-turvy in the last few months, which goes a little way to explain the extreme lack of knitting around here.

Le fabuleux destin de Parsley l'Hamster

2006-09-06T11:05:00.000Z

Parsley is a little creature who came to me courtesy of Marie. He's a hamster, and in case you're wondering, that's a flowerpot on his head. You can find out the whole story behind him here.

Parsley arrived in my life in the middle of my exams, and so never had a real outing on this blog.

I think he's a bit happier now.

Observations on a swap

2006-09-05T21:46:00.000Z

People spend ages talking about why they love knitblogging, and if I could come up with something evenly vaguely thoughtful I would wax lyrical often. Luckily for the coherently challenged like me, there are swaps.

Swaps are useful for two reasons. Firstly, they fulfil the obvious function of providing you with presents, and, when all's said and done, there's very little to compare with receiving a gift for no reason. (In fact, I can't think of anything to compare it to. Although a stranger carrying your suitcase to the tube station in the pouring rain when 'all' it contains are Virginia Woolf's complete diaries and letters and it's pouring with rain and the wheel has now fallen off three times, comes pretty close). Much more importantly, I think, they provide an opportunity to put a real human hand just a little way into the vast and tangled virtual web, to bring an element of 'real life' friendship to those that are otherwise based solely on typed words and uploaded pictures, and for a physical manifestation of the kindness and generosity of the knitblogger.

Luckily for me, and just in case you weren't entirely convinced by Elli's parcel (although, why not?), I have another example of knitswap kindness for you today.

This parcel merits two responses. The first, obviously, is 'squee!'. The second is the observation that if Ashley ever offers to swap with you, say yes immediately, and then do a little hop of glee. Because there is a chance that the following may happen to you.

She will send you sock yarn. Plain sock yarn. In fact, just the sock yarn you had been imagining for weeks and months, particularly at moments when struggling with the pooling and self-striping of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport. Before doing this, she will email you to check your colour preferences. The situation will therefore be win, win, and win.

She will also read your mind in a spooky transatlantic manner, see into its dark and muddled depths and find out firstly that you've been wanting for ages to try one of those (in)famous Knitpicks needles and wishing that they'd ship to England, and secondly that somewhere under a little pile of laziness and fear of failure is hidden the intention to try magic loop at some vague future point. She will therefore send the needle with express instructions that it has arrived in your little mitts for the sole purpose of magic loop, thereby vaulting over all the excuses you had carefully mounted against this scary foray into the weirdest-looking knitting method ever.

Finally, she will wrap the whole thing up in a bag hand-made from a fabric that will remind you daily of one of the best analyses of a fabric print you have ever encountered, that is exactly the size and shape of the knitting bag you had been meaning to make for your travelling projects, thereby bringing One Day that little bit closer and removing yet more of your procrastinatory apparatus.

However, Ashley being her brilliant self, I rather suspect that none of the above will happen to you, but instead that your swap package will be perfectly tailored to you, and more than you would even have hoped for.

Ashley, I really need to thank you twice. First of all for your wonderful gifts, generosity, consideration and insight, and secondly for being a motivational coach and excuse-remover. So, here goes:

Thank you! Thank you!

And now I am going to stop speaking in binaries all the time. And also apologise for the fact that the last few posts haven't been appearing in real time. I don't imagine I'm alone in having problems with Blogger at the moment, but there is only so much hard pedalling and coaxing I can do every day. Tomorrow (which is actually today): more Parisian adventures, and someone else small.

Tales of the Left Bank

2006-09-04T00:18:00.000Z

I didn’t have much time to take knit in Paris. Or to take photos. Or do anything, for that matter, except study. I would really love every summer holiday I have for the next little while to involve going to Paris for a few weeks and studying at the Alliance Française, but next time I wouldn’t sign up to the Super Intensive course. And I would try not to stay in a youth hostel for two weeks. One of my favourite holiday moments comprised doing homework until eleven at night, lying awake listening to insane Dutch teenagers simulate sex across our shared courtyard until 3 a.m., getting up at six to write an essay thinking I’d have some peace and quiet and half an hour later being treated to hard trance and periodic cries of ‘Good morning Vietnam!’ courtesy of the same party of thirty-nine fourteen-year-olds. (At least I hope they were fourteen. Otherwise, if I were them I’d be very embarrassed).

Anyway, here is my random collection of photos. I thought they were mostly things that I noticed on my way to or from school, but it turns out I have more photos that I feel compelled to share with you than I'd thought, so these are the ones that could vaguely count towards something like scenery.

My walk to school every day either took me past the front of the Sorbonne,

or if I turned up the street that ran along its side I could read the names of all the sciences I could study there. My favourite, of course:

Not sure you can read it, but it says Anatomie. (I also found the medical school, the medical school street, the medical school bookshop, the museum of ancient medicine, the shop selling white coats, green hats and clogs... I managed to include them in lots of my journeys, but saved going in for when I've actually started studying. Obviously, I'll have to go back soon).

Walking back from school I'd often go through the Luxembourg Gardens, particularly if it was sunny.

I loved seeing people of all ages and walks of life sitting on chairs around the patches of lawn or by the lake, and children sailing their little wooden boats:

The small patch of sky and neighbourhood visible from my bedroom window:

Note the walls perfectly positioned for maximum echo reflection.

Views from my classroom windows:

These seemed so typically Parisian to me, and seeing them nearly every day made them feel like my little corner of the city.

What's that you say? You're not really here to look at my holiday snaps? You thought I'd said something about knitting? Er, well, I might have done, once. I had these great intentions you see...

Oh, right, it's in the banner. Right. Well um, yeah. Knitting it is then.

Er, yes. I guess my knitting news could kindly be called pathetic. I spent my first evening arranging my collection of inherited dpns.

Having turned to them in desperation when I still couldn't find those needles I bought the week my memory was on holiday, they suddenly seemed much less steely and intimidating when I had a wonderful way to arrange them.

I achieved exactly this much progress on a sock:

I spent ages practising with some other yarn, swatching, and doing calculations, and then managed to start knitting the thing inside out. I do this quite often when starting socks, and every time I cast on I think really hard about it, but I still manage to make the mistake over and over again. I also always cast on over two needles, but with this fine yarn it looks so silly that when this is ripped and rebegun I'll cast onto a slightly bigger needle and hope that that's stretchy enough.

I did find time to buy some yarn, however. You'll be amused and somewhat alarmed to learn that the reason I didn't buy more had scant relation to the small incovenience of having less than no money, and only came about because I couldn't have fitted another skein into my suitcase. This is it before I'd put in half of my clothes:

Right, now it really is about time I did some knitting in order to stop myself from being buried underneath my stash.

Ellithankyou

2006-09-03T19:52:00.000Z

A little while ago Elli asked me about our British obsession with hot water bottles, I offered to send her one, and a swap was born. I duly collected a few things to go with said bottle, wrapped them up and then put off going to the post office in my inimitable style.

The day before I went to Paris I finally took myself off to queue and queue and queue, read bizarre greetings cards, entertain myself by thinking of all the languages I could learn if I only I'd buy those shiny shiny tapes, and fill in a customs declaration. I got home to find the postie had visited while I was out, and left behind a miraculous parcel.

I didn't post about it then because I was packing, trying to get my head around going to university again, buried deep in L'Assomoir* and generally being disorganised, and as a result my photos aren't that great. (There is no need to point out that my photos are never that great. My camera is still broken, sadly; I took it back to the shop and they vaguely fixed it but now it only takes good photos on Tuesdays, bleached photos on Thursdays and Fridays and none the rest of the week. I have therefore acquired my mum's camera for the indefinite future, which I can't work out at all). I'm going to use them here, however, because the items in the package have already been put to very good use and spread to the four corners of my house.

The first thing I found on opening the package was one of Elli's brilliant needle rolls. I've always admired these on her blog, but somehow she managed to pick out the most perfect fabric for me - well, ever. (I'm not very surprised by this. My respect for Elli's gifts of taste and perspicacity knows no bounds. Still, when someone you've never met makes a better decision for you than you would have made for yourself, it calls for a few moments of awed reflection).

I can't really explain why I like mushrooms so much, or find them so endearingly funny. It could have something to do with the fact that, years ago, two entirely seperate groups of my friends discovered this website and went around singing about badgers and mushrooms for a while. Or it could just be their astounding and endlessly varied shapes, or the joy of finding them unexpectedly in woodlands and fields, or the way they spring up in fairy rings. (I know, they're mycelia. I still love them). As for gnomes, well - garden gnomes. 'Nuff said. (If you're not convinced, go here).

I have no idea why this picture is so blue. The colour is almost accurate in the photo above, but this one shows you the detail of the fabric which - have I already told you? - I love.

The other great thing about the needle roll was the layers of surprise it contained. I'd open one end and find one little present, take an excited photo, prepare to put it away and then feel something solid in the middle, unwrap another little package, take another photo, find another present.... It was like pass the parcel, only passing it continuously to myself, with the best surprises ever. It happened so many times I'm not going to show you the whole series of photos, just the first one when I thought I'd found all (and because I love the card),

and the last one, when I actually had:

In the picture, clockwise from top left: Ski Sweaters and others in his & her sizes, published by American Thread Co. I don't know when because ski-inspired clothing is so timeless, but it originally cost twenty-nine cents; Burt's Bees Lemon Butter Cuticle Creme, to which I am now officially addicted; Kiss my Face lip balm, in a perfect stick for keeping in my raincoat pocket (for some reason, when I leave the tin of Burt's Bees lip balm which I carry with me at all other times in my raincoat pocket, something always goes wrong, and only a stick will do. Never have I owned such a fine one before: it looks great, tastes delish and smells even better); lengths of vintage ribbon that I had previously gushed over on Elli's blog, and now have to come up with a project worthy of; lovely old bakelite buttons; and hand-made stitch markers in the luminous colour combinations only Elli can come up with.

Thank you so much for my wonderful parcel, Elli! I love each and every item and treasure them every time I see or use them.

(In the case of the cuticle cream, this may not continue for very long).

*In English, sadly. Although as soon as I finished it I hopped off to buy a copy from a bouquiniste, which I am reading very very slowly with a huge dictionary and the English translation to hand.

Baguettes to Paris

2006-08-20T06:34:00.000Z

Hello dears, I'm off to Paris for two weeks. Oh, it's a tough life being a perpetual student. To explain, I assumed that I would have failed my exams, so booked myself into a language course starting immediately after my results, thinking that I would be in need of a sound and improving treat before before setting off in search of A Real Job. Suddenly, it feels ridiculously extravagant, but I'm not complaining too much.

Coming with me:

For my next attempt at variegated socks. Note my aptitude for demonstrating the desirability of a ball-winder for winding laceweight. Also at mislaying needles. Remember the time I spent money I didn't have on yarn from Get Knitted because it was on sale, and the birch dpns I bought at the same time because I was already paying the postage, and the safe and sensible place I put them for future use? No? Well apparently I don't recall the second part of that escapade either. I may have to go in search of les aiguilles double-aiguë as well as some Anny Blatt yarns. Oh dear it will be tough.

Coals to Newcastle? Why yes. But what better place to buy French yarn than France? And getting myself to a photocopier before going on holiday would be just too much like organisation.

Also these wonderful, wonderful gifts from two dear blog friends that I have yet to tell you about.

Enjoy yourselves while I'm away. I look forward to many and brilliant blog posts when I get back!

Toodle pip.

Breaking news, dropping shoes

2006-08-17T14:47:00.000Z

Those of you who have been anxiously waiting for my exam results (er, right - just me then) will be pleased to know that they were better than expected, and good enough to confirm that I'll be starting medical school in September. I'm so excited about this, and so shocked, amazed, overwhelmed and generally taken aback that I can't do very much more at the moment than laugh, dance around the kitchen or stare out of the window.

Since I know you're really here to read about knitting and other things yarn-related, meet the project in the wings. (Lady Eleanor is bigger, and she looks exactly the same).

This is Rowan Polar, which I was lucky enough to buy from Liberty for £2 a ball. Yes, 'Liberty' 'Rowan' and '£2' can meet in one sentence, if you are ignorant enough to go in search of a discontinued yarn. This had been ordered by someone who hadn't picked it up, so it languished in their basement, until I rescued it in my innocence and was offered it at a marked down price. It's going to be knitted into a one-colour treeless Apocalypse Tree Hoodie for my sister. And on the way home from picking up my results I bought this from a second-hand book shop that opened today just around the corner from the college.

Am I insane?

Let's just call it euphoria.

Where no swift dares to follow

2006-08-15T20:00:00.000Z

Lady Eleanor is still fun to knit, but not as interesting as she was for the first half hour of our reacquaintance. For days now I've been itching to start some socks, a hoodie for my sister, a felted hot water bottle cover - anything, in fact, that's on my list of Things to Knit and doesn't involve buying yarn.

There are two reasons I haven't begun a new project. One is the spectre coughing softly at the edge of my guilty procrastinating conscience, and the other is the same spectre, sitting obstinately on my swift, eliminating any possibility of winding yarn. (I could of course have used the back of a chair, but I wasn't running the risk of exacerbating the spectre's cough, and thereby ruining my current listening pleasure).

I seem to remember blithely saying something like 'I think I will regret this' when I was spreading the yarn out to dry. Ha! I hadn't imagined the half of it.

If I had to choose my lowest point, it would've been this:

and while it wouldn't be strictly accurate to say that by this stage I had reached a state of Zen-like calm, I did find it helpful to repeat a little mantra as I worked: 'Thank God it's superwash, remember the Kidsilk Haze'.

Finally, at 4 pm today, I slid the ball of yarn off the baking parchment inner-tube (known affectionately as my 'bommyknocker' for obvious yarn-winding reasons), and sent it off to the yarn drawer. Not for punitive reasons, you understand, but just so it can hang out with the other yarn for a bit, and think about whether it's ready to behave yet.

Right, I'm off to wind some sock yarn. Yes, it is variegated. It's also already in my yarn drawer. I've done my time, and I'm ready to take whatever it chooses to throw at me.

Unless, of course, it chooses a ball of green yarn.

Needs must

2006-08-06T19:53:00.000Z

When you have dug yourself so deep into a knitting rut that you find you have spent hours and hours and hours knitting your way through cyberspace and the only thing your fingers have done is surf the mousepad and type the occasional comment, when you have tried buying yarn and buying patterns and nothing, nothing is going right, when you have knit this and knit that and none of it even vaguely resembles the idea in your head, there is only one thing for it.

Attack the UFOs.

I've unpicked the cast-off and last row of triangles and started knitting onwards on Mum's Lady Eleanor. I'd forgotten how much I liked knitting this. It is simple enough to knit while reading, watching TV or talking on the phone, but interesting enough not to make your teeth hurt, and there is a small sense of achievement with each and every little rectangle (not the triangles. Although I like the way they look, they are a bit fiddly, especially the first one, where you have to turn the work after one stitch, and then two stitches, and so on. I know I should be knitting backwards. If anyone can tell me how to knit backward continentally, I would be very grateful. I've worked out how to do it by throwing, but that means I have to swap to holding the yarn in the other hand, and that is even slower than all the fiddly turning).

I have finally got round to frogging the Snooker Sweater. It is taking an age to dry because having spliced all ends as I met them I didn't want to cut them again, and anyway I couldn't find some of the joins, so that is about six balls worth of yarn hanging out in the sunshine.

(It is also a tangled heap. I have turned it and turned it trying to hurry along the drying process. When I come to wind it, I think I will regret this). When this miraculous event finally occurs, the resultant ball of yarn is going to be bigger than my head. I had better start looking out for a large enough bowl, and a more portable project.

Unless you are about to put some plain sock yarn in the post with my name on the package, please don't mention footwear. I mean it. Not even shoes. Or if you absolutely must, please please don't mention the layer of knitted fabric that may or may not lie between a bare foot and the shoe. One of the lucky stars I am counting today is that it's hot enough to go around barefoot, so I can avoid thinking about those pesky boomerang-shaped knitted objects that seem so perfectly suited to variegated yarn, and are so obstinately not.

Maintaining radio silence

2006-07-28T18:23:00.000Z

For various reasons I don't feel a lot like blogging at the moment, although if I do ever finish the various knitting projects that I'm daily failing to complete I'll let you know. In the meantime, please continue to be so wonderful and creative! There is much in blogland to keep me entertained at the moment and for that I am grateful, so, thank you.

In pursuit of yarn

2006-07-12T16:06:00.000Z

The number of times I’m disappointed by the colour of yarn that arrives in the post would make you wonder why I never buy my yarn from a yarn shop, and I’ve been wondering the same thing myself. In the city where my parents live, there are two yarn shops. One sells cross-stitch kits, baby clothes, mounds of neon acrylic DK and eyelash yarn, and cuts keys. The other is a gift shop, with Turkish slippers, Moroccan leather handbags, handmade soap and mosaic-framed mirrors at the front, and a corner stuffed with skeins of Colinette and shelves of Debbie Bliss yarn, never with more than five balls of any colour, at the back. In London, there are yarn concessions in three major department stores (Liberty, John Lewis and Peter Jones), and a few yarn boutiques. As far as I know, there was only Patricia Roberts until last year, when Loop opened, followed by Stash Yarns a few months ago. And it is why I’ve never made it to either of these that I’ve been asking myself recently. My excuse, of course, has been time, and while I had exams looming it was probably a good thing I didn’t spend hours traipsing across London in search of wool.

Now, of course, things are different, and this morning I realised there was nothing between me and a bus journey to Oxford than a trip to Stash Yarns. I didn’t imagine it was on my way, but I vaguely thought of it as local. After all, it is south of the river, and since it opened I’ve felt much greater loyalty to it than to Loop, all the way up in Islington. It was time I voted with my feet (and my Oyster card). So I set off on the yarn trail (carrying as always the kitchen sink, i.e. my usual handbag stuffed with knitting, book and water bottle, plus my laptop and a bag packed for a weekend away).

My journey there comprised a twenty minute walk to the Walworth Road, and then two buses, one to and one from Clapham Junction. Stash Yarns is indeed right next to the bus stop for the Number 37. It has a very crisp, clean shop front, painted white with the name in a lovely curly bright blue, so you can’t miss it – which is a good thing since I’d been slowly sautéing by the window, peering out and gradually losing all concept of time. The TfL website told me it would take twenty-seven minutes on the Number 37, ignoring the fact that Upper Richmond Road is also the South Circular, and therefore a car park divided by stretches of traffic jam.

Stash Yarns is nice. I always make the mistake of thinking that somewhere that sells yarn will be my spiritual home, that the people who work there will practically offer me a cup of tea, smile and laugh and be interested in why I’m buying their yarn. I ought to erase this dream from my mind, to stop myself from being disappointed every time. Stash Yarns is a boutique. You have to ring the bell to be buzzed in. It has two little white tables with a pair of neat little chairs apiece, but the luxurious Clapotis draped over the back of each assures you that these aren’t really for sitting. Or at least, assures me. People in boutiques usually wonder politely what on earth I’m doing there. A bell is usually a good indication of polite wonderment. At Stash, this might have been because I was wearing shocking pink plimsolls and carrying my house on my back, or maybe because I look about sixteen. (I get asked for ID almost every time I buy alcohol, which means that most people think I’m at least six years younger than I actually am). I have since remembered Kathy's preparations when going to buy yarn, which I now realise were very sensible, necessary precautions.

Stash have some lovely yarn. As well as the obligatory Debbie Bliss and Rooster they stock Lorna’s Laces and Artyarns, and they’re the only UK stockists of Koigu, Brown Sheep and Fleece Artist, I think, all in beautiful bright girly colours. I was looking for some good solid masculine shades and didn’t come up with much, but apparently they’re ordering some good ‘guy colours’ soon.

None of this deterred me from buying yarn, you’ll be pleased to know. I spent ages perched on a kick-stool prodding the Koigu and sighing at its in-the-fibre loveliness. I liberated enough for two pairs of socks:

Plus some Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted in foresty shades of slate, sandstone and moss:

My onward journey included a very long walk to the train station, because I overshot by miles in the broiling sun and my jeans and had to retrace almost all of my steps (Stash Yarns is very conveniently situated near to the overland train station), followed by two trains to Victoria, changing of course at Clapham Junction.

Loop doesn’t seem quite so far away now. Next time I go yarn shopping, I’ll take a friend with me, or failing that, wear high heels and foundation. And before I go, I'd better knit something very impressive that I can wear.

A Backyard Leaves scarf seems like a better and better idea.

The Sad Story of the Snooker Sweater

2006-07-08T09:04:00.000Z

I've been so uninspired by my knitting recently that for the past few days I've done nothing at all. Nary a stitch. Instead, I've been reading Lost Illusions, watching Hable con ella on video, My Neighbour Totoro on DVD, and the Wimbledon and World Cup finals on TV, eating a lot and hanging out with my sister.

Then this morning as I was thinking about the sorry state of my knitting, light dawned and I realised it was time to put an end to the sad existence of the Snooker Sweater. For some reason I seem to name quite a lot of my knitting after sports. My first FO was the Cricket Clapotis, knit whilst watching England win The Ashes last summer. The socks in the last post, had they been completed, would have been my Football Socks, owing to their stripiness and the fact that I turned my first heel cheering on Henry, Makélélé and Zidane as France beat Portugal in their World Cup Semi-Final. (I was very sad indeed when they lost in the Final). This one is called the Snooker Sweater because I started swatching with the yarn while watching the World Championship semi-final between Marco Fu and Peter Ebdon, and realised it was exactly the colour of the baize table.

The strangest thing about this is that I don't really think I watch much sport on TV. Odd.

Anyway, on with the tale. I have twice now attempted Jemima. I had originally wanted to knit a green version with a pink edging, but I was taken with some beautiful grey yarn at Patricia Roberts , when Rich and I were exploring London. Nearing the end of the first sleeve, the yarn announced loudly and clearly that it did not for one moment longer want to play my games, and was going to be a cardigan at some point, thank you very much. So Jemima went on the back burner. In April, I decided to try it again, and bought some green and pink yarn. Ashley had recommended Karabella for their wonderful colour palette, so I ordered some Aurora 8, struck by the dazzling vibrant beauty of the colours on my monitor. (If there are alarm bells ringing anywhere, they rang for me too; I asked if a shade card was available, found it wasn't, and carried right on). No matter that the yarn was worsted weight, and that one of the things I like most about Jemima is its drape: I'd seen Mari's version and I was determined to have a green and pink Jemima.

The yarn arrived, I opened the box with glee and - choral music, bright and ringing. The colours were so rich and vibrant they'd brought their own choir.

Awestruck, I gazed at this amazing yarn. Gazed and gazed and gazed, and then closed the box, realising that there was no way I could bend these joyous boisterous threads to the gentle and demure shape of Jemima. A week later Anna posted about Needle and Hook and there, on the Jemima page, I saw exactly the combination of green and pink I had been dreaming of. (Let's ignore the fact that my monitor may have been playing tricks on me there too). Sadly, I relegated my bright yarn to the yarn drawer.

But the song kept looping around and around in my head, and I worried and pondered on what to do with the Aurora. My stash was increasing at a rate of sweaters, and I had no exciting project to show for it. The yarn whipsered, 'V-neck, V-neck', and I realised it would have to be something simple in the extreme to take that intensity of green. A little while later Ashley started posting about Marilyn, and following her link, I stumbled across the Essential Stripe sweater pattern. Lo! A simple V-neck, written for exactly the yarn I had in my drawer!

So I've been knitting this sweater on buses and on returning from college for a while now, and got as far as the ribbed edging when something ground to a halt. A didn't like the 1x1 edging, so on Marie's good advice I tried a 2x1 and a 2x2, and still, something wasn't right. I've been dragging the sweater around the country for weeks now, off the needle because I wanted to use it for swatching something else, so uninspired that I haven't even accorded it the respect of a length of waste yarn. I've considered dyeing it, reknitting it to defy the natural lie of the yarn, trampling it underfoot whilst gnashing my teeth and setting fire to my hair... (I should point out at this point that I have nothing against the pattern, which is clearly written and beautifully simple).

Finally, realisation dawned this morning. Two of my friends have expressed admiration for the yarn. The yarn, that is, for its very colour and not for the images of the sweater that might have been had the purchaser chosen a more understated colour. I can send this pond-wards with impunity.

I hope you will join me in bidding a fond farewell to the Snooker Sweater. Its components hope to reappear here as a hat for Sam and a sweater for Josie's little cousin. I'll keep you posted.

Taking sock

2006-07-07T08:29:00.000Z

I realise I spend a lot of time poddling around the internet looking at and learning things, plotting and fretting, and actually have very little to show for things. So I thought I'd show you my latest unsatisfactory piece of knitting before sending it to the frog pond.

This is my first sock, take two. Ashley commented on the last version that it looked 'squooshy and comfy', which I interpreted as a kind way of saying 'floppy and messy' (I was already leaning towards this assessment of it anyway). So I started again with smaller needles, and in my zest for streamlining probably downsized a little too vehemently. Thinking about it, from 3.75 to 3.0mm is probably going down three sizes. So the nearly-finished sock fits OK, it's just that there are some ladders down the middle.

(Please ignore the fact that it looks like I have oedema. I am perfectly well, and seemingly unable to take a good picture of my own foot).

Although this doesn't appear at either of the other joins, I think it has something to do with the conjunction of the two needles with fewer stitches, and my own inability to knit these neatly enough. But I've also noticed that there are even worse ladders in the picture that came with the pattern. I was wondering about this, thinking that if a pattern-writing sock-knitter had the same problems, it would make more sense to have that particular needle joint on the sole of the sock. And I was pondering and poddling, and came across this diagram via this excellent tutorial, which recommends exactly that.

Now I could of course rip back to the heel, and reknit it on the other side of the sock, but then for a pair of these socks I would've had to knit almost four of these, and at the moment I don't like them enough for all that. So, back to the yarn drawer it is. Besides, there are plenty of other socks I'd rather be knitting.

Hmm, maybe I should spend less time interknitting and a bit more time actually knitting.

Festofwool!

2006-07-05T11:25:00.000Z

For a while now Rich has been joking that instead of Glastonbury this year we were going to Woolfest. We try to visit the Lake District a few times a year, and I persuaded him to come with me this weekend so we could go to the festofwool! (It also coincided nicely with the first weekend after my exams).

Woolfest takes place at the Mitchells Lakeland Livestock Centre, outside Cockermouth in Cumbria, known locally as the Sheep and Wool Centre. As you drive in off the roundabout, there is a huge white stone sculpture of a sheep looming above the entrance to the centre. I wish I'd taken a picture of it but my camera is still not fixed so I was relying on Rich the Cameraman, who was driving. Hopefully Ruth or Mary or someone else will have a picture: it was pretty impressive.

The festofwool wasn't at all what I had expected, in a really good way. Having seen people's posts of The Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace I'd imagined a glossy trade fair with mounds of Koigu and hillocks of eyelash yarn. Instead, it takes place in a huge, open-sided shed, the entrance for people and sheep alike through gates and pens:

As soon as you go into the barn, you're met by sheep, goats, alpacas and rabbits. Here are some pictures of sheep, and an alpaca. I'm afraid I didn't take any notes so I can't tell you what any of them are, except for the one at the bottom which was Rich's favourite. He's called Bruno and likes to be stroked!

The yarn stalls were further in, and even here they were very different to my imaginings! There were lots of stalls of organic wool, most were British, and many were run by the farmers themselves. There were lots of stalls selling fibre, spindles, people spinning, lots dedicated to weaving and of course lots of people selling shawls, felted bags, and handwoven rugs. Of the very few stalls selling brand name yarn, Rooster impressed me with their knitted bunting!

At the back of the barn were some information stalls, and the judging arena. I loved this bit. A real treat when I went to stay with my grandparents on their farm in Cornwall was to go to the cattle market in Liskeard with my grandpa, and although this was a lot cleaner and filled with shepherds and spectators rather than farmers, I felt right at home and could have spent hours there. These are Swaledales (I think! - the Swaledales may have been in the next round), being held by their shepherds for judging.

I'd gone with a very specific shopping list: umbrella swift, a retractable tape measure, a needle guage and a bamboo Addi needle to see what they're like. And I had a budget. Mission accomplished! I thought I had a photo of my haul, but I can't find it now, which is probably good in case anyone with dial-up tries to read this! The tape measure, needle guage and needle were from the Knitting and Crochet Guild stall. I was really pleased to meet the ladies running the stall.

I try to buy as many of my supplies from KCG Trading as proceeds go towards supporting the guild, but they can be a bit fierce on the 'phone! In person, they are lovely and very helpful. The Addi natura has already been put through its paces swatching some Malabrigo yarn from my stash, and so far I love it. I bought an umbrella swift from Don Porritt Looms/Studio Supplies, which is lovely - and a 4 litre bottle of Eucalyptus-scented Eucalan! It's huge. I once made the mistake of sending off for the free samples of Eucalan, and predictably I'm hooked. This gigantic bottle was the equivalent of eight bottles for the price of seven, plus the saving of £5 postage per bottle, so seemed a good investment. Hopefully it should last me a year or eight!

The picture above is the only yarn I bought, from Angorgeous. I hadn't gone with any yarn in mind, and thought I'd done quite well collecting leaflets and making sure I could order things by post (like this stall, Uppingham Yarns) ...

.... until I squeezed a square of this angora plied with angora that had been knitted up and left in the yarn basket. I think I probably made one of those faces you shouldn't really make in public; certainly my heart stood still for a second. This yarn is the fluffiest, squashiest thing I've ever encountered. I enquired whether I'd have to wear goggles and a facemask when knitting with it, but apparently all you have to do is put it in the fridge for a bit to calm it down periodically! I bought two balls to make a scarf, and when I got it home remembered the rabbit tracks scarf pattern, which I've wanted to knit ever since I saw it here. The idea of a rabbit pattern in rabbit yarn really tickles me! (possibly literally).

I'll leave you with a photo of the Wool Centre in its mountainous setting, complete with lowering clouds which split just as we were leaving. A very lovely, very Lakeland day.

Out of the World Cup

2006-07-03T18:52:00.000Z

Now that England are well and truly out of the World Cup (and while I don't blame Wayne Rooney for this, I do think that if we're going to behave like that we shouldn't be winning anyway), it's probably a good time to come clean and tell you that I am, too. There has been knitting in front of the football, but sadly not the lace wrap I posed proudly in my garden some weeks ago. In fact, needle tryouts haven't even taken place yet.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, I blame the World Cup. Whenever I have had time to sit down with a cup of tea and some knitting, there's been the major problem of the football: it's on, and I want to watch it - which is where the green sweater linked to the swatch in the previous post comes in: rows and rows of mindless stocking stitch, in the round, no less. Perfect for watching the ins and outs and roundabouts and stampings of the beautiful game.

The other problem is the pattern itself. I tried to chart it the night before kickoff, and got as far as this:

I know I'll have to add in some blank spaces to make it line up and look like a proper pattern, but I'm worried there's a mistake in it, or I'm making a mistake by trying to be too clever. The pattern, which can be found here, ends each 'rep from *' with a sl1k,k1,psso, except for row seven, which has a sl1,k2tog,psso. It is at the west point of the diamond shape (if you think of the diamond as having compass directions for points), so could be right, but there are no other decreases of three stitches anywhere else in the pattern. What do you think? I can't find any errata on the internet, and I'm worried it's a bit cheeky to ring Jaeger or one of their stockists since it's a free internet pattern and might be the mistake of the magazine typist, and not in the original pattern at all. Your advice is sought, please.

Edited to add: Marie, who may be my fairy craftsister, did what I ought to have done all along and actually tried knitting the thing, thus proving that there is no mistake in the pattern, and that I should stop reading things too quickly, missing the sl1,k2tog,psso in row 15, and then fretting for days. Also proving that blogging is a wonderful thing, and that knitters really are some of the kindest people I've been lucky enough to 'meet'.

Half a post

2006-06-24T12:03:00.000Z

Hello. If you came here via Laura's post , you are most welcome. Please make yourself at home, and avail yourself of my sidebar. I endeavour only to fill it with the finest blogs.

For myself, I am still buried in a pile of exams and revision, and my camera is broken (I dropped it. Sorry camera) so the only story I can tell you is half-finished.

A little while ago, Meowgirl asked me why I'd had to unravel the swatch for my Picovoli. In that instance, I would've had to anyway, since I needed the yarn, but I always rip my swatches*, for the sole reason that I have a slightly debilitating aversion to throwing anything away. I like the idea of keeping all my swatches, and sewing them up into a scrap patchwork blanket, but I like the idea of neat balls of wound yarn in my yarn drawer better, so I tend to do a provisional cast-off, wash and block the swatch with the ball still attached, and then rip it out again and rewind the yarn. Here's a short tutorial on how to put off your revision by winding yarn in the abscence of a niddy noddy, a swift or a ballwinder, or any other knitterly appliance that would make this easier - minus the parts of the narrative that would be helped by either a swift or a ballwinder.

Tie one end of the yarn around a bar of the back of a chair, then wind the rest of the yarn around the chair back.

Untie the end from the chair back, and tie both ends around the skein.

Soak yarn.

Mourn the loss of green dye to your soaking water, and realise that even if you do use this ball of yarn to continue the project you are working on, it may now be a different colour to the rest of the sweater. Remember that a friend who saw you knitting requested a beanie in the same colour, and hope that you come in under the yarn requirement for your project.

Hang yarn over bath, using a meat hook (which, I should add, has never been used for hanging meat), an old piece of wire you've bent into a half-loop, and a hot water bottle or any other weight that isn't too heavy, comes complete with hole for hanging, and is waterproof.

Tune in in a few days to dance the post-exam dance of glee with me, read about winding yarn using a bommy-knocker, and find out what happened to the mystery green yarn.

*With the exception of an altercation I have been having for nearly a year now with some Kidsilk Haze. The swatch almost reduced me to tears, and I fear removed some of the enamel from the inner surfaces of my teeth through grinding. The swatch won and lives in a little ziploc bag as a very inanimate, fluffy pet, while the rest of the yarn taunts me periodically for my inability to turn it into anything.

Wool house

2006-06-18T19:32:00.001Z

If I hadn't had other things to do this weekend, I would've gone here for some constructive knitting.

Sadly, I was glued to my desk. Well, not glued exactly. I did sneak away to Richard's granny's house for a short spell of cake-eating and seeing lots of relatives, amongst them the redoubtable great-uncle Aubrey, who celebrates his 90th birthday today surrounded by sixty or so members of his clan.

I, however, have spent the day here.

They say a tidy desk is the sign of someone with work to do. If only that were the sign. Unfortunately, in my case indications include grating my finger along with a carrot because I'm in too much of a hurry and - my most endearing foible - telling everyone I meet the latest interesting fact I have managed to cram into my head in an attempt to lodge it there.

What did you do this weekend?

(By the way, see the little green-and-white creature overseeing my revision? One of these days, I'll tell you all about him. Right after I've tidied my desk).

Distractions

2006-06-07T13:05:00.000Z

It would appear that I have entered this.

Meet the members of the team that have already been selected:

Needle try-outs will be taking place tomorrow. (Note the ziploc bag. The stash yarn is overjoyed finally to be promoted from squad to team).

I have a snowflake's chance in hell of finishing, my exams being the equivalent of Wayne Rooney's metatarsal. For those who aren't familiar with English football, here's a picture of our national treasure:

Oops, I mean here:

Ahh, bless.

(In fairness, I should point out that Rooney is also frequently compared to Pelé).

I figured if I'm going to be a World Cup widow, I'd better have a World Cup baby to look after. Let the games begin.