New Things

Amongst all the monotony there have been a few new things here lately which I thought I'd show you. The first one isn't very exciting but extremely necessary.

My laptop Mabel (all my laptops are called Mabel) suddenly stopped working last month and, after  over a week at the repair shop, they came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth mending. Getting a new one was easy enough but it was hard work putting all my software and stuff back on it. It's all done now though so I'm able to get back to work. One good thing is that the new Mabel has a dark keyboard. I made the mistake of getting a silver one last time which meant I couldn't read the letters at all. My touch typing isn't bad but it is nice to be able to actually see what's written on the keys. Does anybody else have this problem?

Much more interesting was the arrival in January of my new recorder.

It's a Yamaha Bass and I bought it from Just Flutes, a woodwind specialist shop who for some reason sell it for a chunk less money than everywhere else. I first realised there were different sized recorders when a group visited my primary school with what were then called Descant, Treble, Tenor and Bass recorders. Now the two smaller sizes are generally called Soprano and Alto. I remember telling my Mum all about them when I got home and thinking maybe one day when my hands were bigger ...

My hands still aren't very big but I've had the first three of these sizes for some years now although I struggle with the reach on the tenor. I've been following Sarah Jeffery's Team Recorder for years (which I thoroughly recommend by the way) and she says that the reach on the bass is actually less than the tenor because it has keys for some of the holes. And she's right! Despite it being so big, I can reach all the notes much more easily on my new recorder and the sound is beautiful.

Mind you, working out how to play it without hurting my back took quite a bit of trial and error. I've ended up wearing the sling across my body rather than just round my neck and that, as well as constantly checking that I'm sitting up straight, seems to have done the trick.

The bass recorder, like the alto, is in F so you can play music written for the alto on it but I thought I'd challenge myself to use music written in the bass clef which is what is used in orchestras. It's harder to find but I ordered several books from Recorder Music Mail who have a very comprehensive catalogue.

As I've played the piano for over fifty years I thought reading bass music wouldn't be too much of a problem. Turns out I was wrong. I'm getting there though. At the moment I'm alternating between the bass and the alto every day so I do sometimes find myself playing the notes for the wrong recorder but it'll settle down eventually.

There's exciting news on the tenor recorder front too. Kunath have just brought out an amazing new recorder called the Sigo which is about the size of an alto recorder but sounds like a tenor. Isn't that exciting?. I am resisting the temptation but one day ... It's also very reasonably priced. If you'd like to know more, Sarah Jeffery did a great review of it on her channel - Sigo Recorder - and here's a little sample of what it can do.

Right. More new things. Isn't this the prettiest notebook ever? 

This notebook is the control centre for my 'make all the birthday cards I send in 2025' project (I know, catchy title) I had a lovely time going through all my saved patterns and kits, working out what to stitch for everyone on my list. I've ordered lots more threads which is always fun and I use my Sizzix machine to cut aperture cards as well as bobbins for all those new threads. 

I stitch most evenings and am really enjoying it. I've only got about three cards to go now and that's despite having well over twenty on my list - not to mention the two people who were inconsiderate enough to move house this year. I can't show you most of them as they haven't been given yet but here's my daughter's birthday card from February ...

... and those two new home cards ...

I did sneak in a bit of my normal cross stitch while waiting for a thread order so my Hogsmeade picture now has another building and a lamp post ready for Hedwig to sit on.

As well as cross stitch, I've used blackwork, ribbon embroidery and counted canvaswork for some of the cards which I've really enjoyed. The source for these patterns is often my collection of old 'New Stitches' magazines. This was unusual among stitching magazines in that it included lots of different techniques rather than just cross stitch. I'm gradually collecting old issues when I can find them and, just before Christmas, I bought a big pile from ebay.

One type of embroidery that I discovered through these magazines is Lagartera which is a lovely counted thread technique from Spain which can be used to make very nice geometric designs. And no, I can't show you the lagartera card I made yet. However, Mary Hickmott, the editor of 'New Stitches' published several booklets on different embroidery techniques (I have the hardanger ones which are very good) so I've been keeping an eye out for the one she wrote about lagartera. Then, a few weeks ago, I found not only the booklet but also a materials pack to go with it.

It includes all the fabric, threads and finishing bits and pieces to make everything in the book. I can't wait to make that bell pull later in the  year.

Now that I have a working laptop again I'm also trying to write up new patterns as there are a lot of finished things waiting to be published, not to mention an awful lot of half finished designs. Anyway, the next one will be this yellow garter stitch lace scarf, the first of far too many scarf patterns either in progress or waiting to be written up.

I'm also trying to tidy up my craft room after the avalanche of new Stylecraft Special colours which swamped my yarn storage system. I'm slowly getting it back under control. Theoretically, I know where all my craft things are now and this normally proves to be the case apart from ... when it doesn't.

For years I've been looking for a doll from the 1960s who reminds me of one my brother gave me one Christmas. Her name is Kelly and she came as an offer with Kelloggs cereal. One of the reasons I wanted her was that I have a booklet of knitting patterns for her clothes that Patons published specially for her and I though it would be nice to knit some of them. Anyway, I finally got lucky (ebay again) and, after re-stringing her arms and a bit of a tidy up, here she is.

She was only ever a cheaply made doll but I think she's rather nice and she came with her original clothes too which was a bonus. I bet you can guess what's coming next. I went to get the knitting booklet out and it wasn't there! Where have I put it? Who knows? So Kelly will have to wait a bit for her new clothes.

One more new thing which is not at all nice is that I've made a start on the next room in the house to be re-decorated and sorted out. This time I'm having to do it in two halves so, this morning, I made a start.

All I can say is that it looks worse in real life than in the picture. This was the damp corner and those dark patches are where the plaster crumbled as I took off the lining paper. So tomorrow I shall be up the ladder filling them all. That's if I can track the filler down. It will be better when I get on to the painting. At least you feel you're making progress then rather than going backwards.

Linnet

I'm starting off the new year with some sad news. My lovely black and white cat Linnet died at the start of this month. I had her for nine years after she was rescued from terrible conditions and I thought I'd share her story here.

Here she is when I first met her at the cat shelter back in 2016. She was very frightened of people and would 'freeze' if you came within touching distance of her. She was found in a house with 16 cats, all of them related to each other. She had only ever been carried by the scruff of her neck and, having had a litter of kittens, the owner kept her in a rabbit hutch to stop her having more. When rescued, both her nose and paws were torn where she had tried to dig herself out.

It seemed unlikely that anyone would choose to give such a traumatised cat a home but I thought maybe I could help her. Years ago I took in a feral cat who had been hit by a car and had a broken leg and she turned into a very loving pet so that gave me confidence.

Needless to say, Linnet wasn't impressed by coming to live in my house. Here she is on the first day, trying to squeeze herself into a small space to hide from me ...

Once I'd gone to bed though she found a much better hiding place. I have an old fashioned bath on legs and she took up residence under there, only coming out when I was asleep or out of the house. For about three weeks I had to lie on the bathroom floor if I wanted to see her (which was very difficult if she looked the other way so that her white parts were hidden). I took to sitting on the floor up there regularly and talking to her and, one evening, she ventured out for a stroke. That was very exciting but she still wouldn't come with me into the rest of the house.

Then this happened ...

Before meeting Linnet I'd gone to the shelter determined to choose a kitten and, having discussed it with the staff there, decided to also adopt a kitten in the hope that it would help to socialise Linnet. I collected  Tolly when Linnet had already been with me about a month; the delay was partly because he was too young to leave his mother but also to make sure that Linnet would be the top cat in the cat hierarchy here.

Anyway, as soon as she realised another cat had moved in, Linnet decided it was time to come downstairs and see what was going on and, from then on, she moved around the house freely. She was still very wary of me; I was sometimes allowed to stroke her but only if I kept at arms length. The kitten was obviously more of a known quantity to her and they were soon playing together (after a fashion).

It wasn't long before they were sleeping together on the settee, although Tolly has never really mastered the whole 'curling up tidily like a proper car' thing.

He wasn't very good at washing his face either but, luckily, Linnet was on hand to help ...

This is a much  more recent photo and is typical of how Linnet would be sleeping nicely somewhere, only to be joined by Tolly who was twice her size once fully grown, sprawling alongside and sometimes on top of her.

It took Linnet years to learn to sit on peoples' laps. I think Tolly helped here because she could see him doing it. For quite a while though she would only stand on my lap, purring away but not quite being brave enough to sit down. Instead, she would curl up next to me like this ...

I learned to automatically leave her a space to the side of me whenever I sat down. It probably took her more than three years to become a lap cat but she got there in the end. She was always a tiny cat but when they both decided to sit on me, it was a bit of a squash, especially as Tolly never did learn to share space nicely.

You'd think that was just one cat on my lap, wouldn't you? But if you look from the side ..

... there's Linnet, as close to me as she can get. In the last few years she became even more friendly and would come and sit with me wherever I was. She always had a fondness for cramped spaces though - echoes of that rabbit hutch perhaps?

One of the best things was seeing how much Linnet loved being in the garden in the summer. I don't think she'd ever been outside before and she was very wary when I first opened the back door for them.

It wasn't long though before she was spending hours sunning herself in the garden. Here she is in the long grass in 2020 ...

... and in one of her many 'nests' over the years.

This next one is from last summer where she's guarding the pots for me (mostly from Tolly who likes to bite leaves).

She may have been tiny but Linnet was definitely top cat in the neighbourhood and many bigger cats (and several dogs) learnt not to mess with her. Meanwhile, Tolly would copy whatever she did and go where she went (as long as it didn't involve fighting - he's a real coward). 

The downside of her love of the great outdoors was that she was also a natural hunter. She brought in countless mice and birds, the biggest was a blackbird. I don't know how she got that through the cat flap. One evening she even came in with a live bat! Needless to say, Tolly isn't a hunter. He did once catch a mouse but then dropped it and it ran away. 

It's always sad when a pet dies but I'm glad to have given Linnet a good life after such a difficult start. And I still have Tolly. He's rather confused by her absence and is definitely more clingy. He's taken to sleeping up on my bed now that she isn't there to curl up with. When she was feeling ill, Linnet would hide on the floor of the airing cupboard and, since her death, Tolly has taken to curling up there too. Being a bigger and stronger cat though, he can get up to the shelves where there are nice clean towels for him to lie on. It's probably the warmest place in the house in this cold weather.

And here's one last picture of Linnet, helping me make my patchwork curtains.

Just In Time

I seem to have been absent from my blog for rather a long time. Oh dear. It's all the fault of the Long Covid which is living up to its name, getting on for five years now.

Anyway, I am still here and still working on new patterns, albeit rather slowly. Lately I've been concentrating on this one ...

Having designed bunting for Spring and Autumn, I was tempted to do a special one for Christmas too. I haven't forgotten about Summer and Winter; I shall do those at some point. All my bunting designs have a row of letter flags spelling out the season and another row of flags decorated with appropriate knitted motifs.

Can you spot the problem here? All the other seasons have six letters (unless you're American of course) but Christmas is nine letters long. That means an awful lot more knitting and designing. I couldn't bring myself to design Xmas Bunting though; it's really not the same.

Another problem was choosing my colour palette. For the other designs I've used two shades of three different colours. This time I decided I needed three shades of three colours which, of course, all had to go together nicely and preferably look at least a little bit festive. After much worry and confusion I finally came up with three shades of red, green and gold and then this happened ...

Stylecraft only went and brought out twenty new colours of my favourite range of yarn. I use their Stylecraft Special DK a lot, especially for this sort of pattern where you need little bits of lots of good colours. I keep some of every colour in stock and buy new shades as they come out. But twenty? All at once? So I decided to order ten to start with  and then get the rest next time. I went for the brightest colours, partly because I was starting to wonder if there might be a better red and green in there for my bunting (which I was already half way through knitting but never mind).

From left to right and top to bottom, these ones are:

Poppy, Leaf, Nigella, Cinder Rose, Jade.    

Aquamarine, Milky Tea, Pink Rhubarb, Mistletoe and Periwinkle.

There are some great names in there, aren't there? I think I might have to make something with Cinder Rose or Pink Rhubarb, just for the names. 

Back to business though. The two that I had my eye on for my bunting were these two.

Leaf is a soft shade of green which fills in a gap in the range of greens in the range and as for Poppy ... I have been waiting for a paler red for years. After Lipstick, the next reds are really quite violently bright. I've tended to use Pomegranate instead which, although it's a pink, goes well with the Lipstick.

See what I mean?

These were my original colour choices for the Christmas Bunting ...

... and here they are with Poppy replacing Pomegranate and Leaf instead of the bright Grass Green ...

I thought the second one was better so, ignoring the bright green flags I'd already knitted, I knitted some more.

It was plain sailing after that for a bit as knitting the letters is quite straightforward and new ones don't take long to design. 

The decorations for the plain flags weren't quite so easy. I made myself design and make one a day and, believe it or not, every single one took three to four hours to do. Yes, even the little presents which are just folded squares of knitting!

I tried just to use my set of nine original colours for the decorations with a few exceptions, notably black for faces and an orange for the snowman's carrot nose. By the way, it turns out that a carrot nose has to be positioned just so or it doesn't look right. Guess how I know that?

I also made an effort not to use too many extra things that people might not have like beads and buttons which means that there are a lot of french knots used, mostly for the baubles on the Christmas Tree. I like french knots.

As you can see though, I did use a sequin for the star on the top of the tree - one failed attempt at embroidering a tiny star sent me straight to the sequin box.

The decoration I was dreading most was the mini stocking (or three mini stockings as it turned out). I can knit stockings in the round easily enough but making a flat one was a bit daunting. In the end it wasn't too bad. I tend to try lots of complicated methods before finally realising that something simple is what's wanted and that's what happened here. Four short rows for the heel with no wraps and turns and it was sorted.

Once all the knitting was finally done, I just had to find long thin dowels to hang the bunting from. Did I say 'just'? For the seasonal ones, you only need 90 cm lengths of dowel so that's easy enough; for this one I needed lengths of over a metre and the next length I could buy was 2.4 metres! There was no way I was going to be able to carry two 2.4 dowels home without poking someone's eye out or breaking them - not to mention the fact that I can't breathe properly if I carry anything difficult or heavy. Luckily, my brother came to the rescue and went to the shop for me (B & Q, in case you're wondering).

With the writing on the top dowel and the pictures on the bottom, the whole thing is about 140 cm wide which still fits on a chimney breast (or it would if I could be bothered to hang it up). The dowels are tied together on the back of the bunting to keep everything in place. You may or may not be able to see the ties in this picture.

I've spent the last couple of weeks writing, proofreading, proofreading again ... and I've just managed to get the pattern ready to publish before Christmas. As normal, you can download it for free from my ravelry shop. Something to put on your list for next Christmas perhaps?

Now that's done I can turn my attention to some of my long-neglected projects. I'm getting on with a garter stitch lace scarf that I started months ago and the last of my Ten Stitch Rectangle samples is on the blocking board so that pattern will be done next month I hope.

I've also been working on some other Christmas crafts but, for obvious reasons, I can't show you those yet. This year I decided it was time to make my own crackers which it took me ages to work out how to do; it'll be easier next year though. 

I'll tell you what's in them after Christmas. I also made some Christmas hats to go with them (they're too bulky to fit in the crackers). The paper ones you normally get are too small and they tear; these ones should last.

The pattern is a free one from Waves and Wild and it comes in sizes ranging from baby up to large adult. I adapted the method after the first one to make it easier to sew. The two key secrets to success are a good interfacing - I used Vilene H250 - and sewing the zigzag seam twice to strengthen those points when it comes to turning the hats right side out. This was a revelation to me and definitely a trick I shall remember for the future.

I also made my Christmas cards, this year using scraps of fabric and the Crumb quilting method. 

I shall definitely be using this technique again. Such pretty fabric made up of strips pulled out of my scrap basket (okay, baskets - who's counting?). Then there was the afternoon I made a ridiculous number of gift tags from card, felt and stickers.

In case you're wondering just how many people I give Christmas presents to, I often give several small presents, rather than one big one. Since having my craft stuff organised, it's so much easier to find things for little projects like this. 

It is starting to look festive here now, no thanks to me though. My daughter came to my rescue and put up my decorations for me (and has promised to take them down again afterwards too). I really couldn't manage it this year. 

I think I told you about our relatively recent family tradition of making advent jigsaws for each other so that you have a section of it to put together every day. Mine is such a lovely picture this year and it's also got all sorts of unusual shaped pieces which makes it fun to do. It's really coming together now.

I hope I'll be back here again before Christmas but who knows? If not, I wish you all a very happy and peaceful Christmas with lots of knitting / crochet / sewing time.

Christmas Bunting