Two Georges

My seventh birthday, over fifty years ago, is one that I remember particularly clearly. Partly because it was the first one I'd had to go to school on. My birthday is at the end of October which means that it often falls at half term. I don't think I normally had a party for my birthday but, that year, I had two. 

There was one at the weekend for my friends ...

That's me at the back in the blue dress and alice band, next to my best friend Heather (also wearing an alice band, that's how you know we were best friends). Heather emigrated to Australia about five years later and I haven't seen her since. If you look closely you can see the yellow Harlequin plates that were part of my Mum and Dad's wedding china. I still have some of that left and use it regularly.

Anyway, I also had a very special party on my actual birthday although, sadly, there are no photographs. I got off the school bus to find all my favourite dolls (including Hoppity the Space Hopper) grouped round a table full of miniature party food for me to share with them - tiny sandwiches, baby cakes ... I can still picture it and remember how excited I was when I saw it. My Mum was good at that sort of thing; I can also see her on another day, holding up my Tiny Tears doll to show me that she'd made her a new dress during the day.

I still treasure my Tiny Tears who now has to rely on me for new dresses.

You may be wondering where the Georges come in to this story. Well, the first was actually Georgie and he's a nightdress case. He was my seventh birthday present from Mum and Dad so he was an honoured guest at my dolls' birthday party. Here I am with him ...

You can just about see my 'I am 7' badge.

And the second George? He arrived in the post last weekend as a Mother's Day present from my daughter. I didn't know that Merrythought made other hedgehogs in the same family but meet small George ...

Isn't he lovely? He seems to have made friends with my original Georgie and he makes me smile every time I see him.

As you can tell, I was one of those children who really love their dolls - they were (and possibly still are) real to me. I might show you some of the others that I've kept one day.

Juggling

No, not that sort of juggling. My son taught himself to juggle years ago (a very useful skill now he's a primary school teacher I always think) but I've never mastered it.

The juggling I'm talking about will be familiar to you all - the sort that involves juggling work, family and all sorts of other commitments. In my case, I'm trying to combine looking after my stepfather (who is getting much stronger now) with designing, housework and music. Oh, and the cats would like me to tell you that I've been neglecting them for months too.

Over the last couple of months, I've had precisely one day off from caring. My daughter had planned to come up and take over for a couple of days recently but then she came down with That Virus so, obviously, couldn't go anywhere. She's better now and my son and I are managing, together with the support of some wonderful professional carers. That would be some of the carers who the government classes as unskilled workers and who are now working as normal to help the most vulnerable people during this crisis. Enough said.

Anyway, the house is a mess and I still haven't had time to pick up my violin but I am managing to get some work done on several designs, swapping them round as the occasion demands. Want to see what I'm doing?

Do you remember me telling you last year about my search for the right colour scheme for a crochet blanket? You can read about it here. Well, I ended up settling for shades of yellow and green, reminiscent of Spring primroses.

I've been making quite a lot of progress with this one lately. I've decided that it needs to be biggish to show off the 3D effect so I'm making 25 of the squares and filling in with lots and lots of long hexagons. So far I've done three out of the five 'rows' and I even know how I'm going to finish off the edge.

Those squares are flush with the rest of the blanket, not laid on top.

I've got another textured crochet design on the go too. This one is, at the  moment, called 'Blooming Flowers'.

Again, I experimented with lots of really quite ugly colour combinations before settling on shades of pink. Not to mention making a lot of lumpy squares; that green border was harder to work out than you might think. Then, when I put the squares together, all that texture was just a bit too much. The yellow sashing is crocheted on to avoid lots of sewing and (hopefully) tones the whole thing down a bit.

I bought some old wooden workbag handles in a charity shop a few years ago - you can read about that particular treasure hunt here - so I'm going to turn my flower squares into a pretty workbag. That panel of twelve squares will be one side of the bag, the other side will be the same and then I'll probably make up the rest with simple stripes.

I'm enjoying working on both of these projects but the thing that's really grabbed me lately is my Climate Change scarf. My son was telling me about Ed Hawkins' Warming Stripes which represent the earth's rising temperature in coloured stripes and I immediately wanted to turn the data into a scarf.

This is my 'first draft' - a long, garter stitch scarf, representing global warming from 1880 to 2019. The data I used takes the global average temperature for the period 1901 - 2000 and then sees how each year's average temperature deviates from this base temperature. There are fifteen colour bands, each one representing  0.1º Celsius; those bands below 0º are shades of blue and those above are pinks and reds. 

As you can see, the scarf illustrates the way our world's temperature has risen over the past 140 years but this has turned out to be a much more exciting project than just that. As I knitted, I found myself thinking about each year as I got to it, remembering global events and also family birthdays. It turned out to be very calming and therapeutic. There were also some interesting surprises along the way. 

There are only five shades of blue and ten of pink / red but for nearly sixty years the scarf is completely blue. Warmer colours start to appear by the 1940s but it's only from the late 1970s onwards that the blues disappear and the rest of the scarf becomes a race through all the pinks and reds.

The first block of pinks in the scarf represents the years 1939 - 1945, the Second World War. This shook me. You can also spot particularly hard winters, like that of 1963-4, when a long patch of pink is followed by a bright blue stripe. I've promised this scarf to my son but he can''t have it until I've taken all the photos I might want for the pattern.

I've now started a shorter version of the scarf, using a slightly different stitch pattern so that you can count the years more easily to read the information in it. I may or may not add ruler-like lines to one edge to mark the years too. Once I've knitted this one, I think I'll work out a pattern for a crochet version too. At the moment I'm calling them 'Warmer World' scarves. What do you think?

2020 is Postponed

2020 started off so well. I made three New Year's Resolutions this year:

1. To practise my clarinet regularly. I had it repaired last year and am now re-learning how to play it after a gap of about thirty years.

2. To teach myself shorthand. No idea why, it's just something that I thought would be fun to do. Inspired by Long Live Pitman's Shorthand which is a treasure trove of information and advice, I assembled a few supplies ...

3. To fit work round the rest of my life rather than the other way round. This is something I've been working on for the last few years. I enjoy designing but that means that it's very easy to end up spending all your waking hours doing it. Especially when, if I don't publish a pattern for a few weeks, people start to ask if I'm all right. One day, I'm going to do a breakdown of the amount of hours it takes to design and publish a pattern. Just because something is quick and easy to knit doesn't mean it's quick to design. End of rant.

Anyway, for the first two weeks of January things were going quite smoothly. I was managing a short clarinet practice most days as well as keeping up with my longer violin practices. I hadn't actually started on the shorthand but, as you can see, I'd printed out the first lesson, all ready to go.

The work / life balance wasn't too bad either. I find that making time to actually leave the house and do something different occasionally makes the work go better too. I had a lovely trip to Bramble Patch, my local quilt shop. My rotary cutter has been slowly dying for ages. I replaced the blade before realising that something was out of alignment and it was high time to buy a new one. This one has a button lock which I like and it cuts through the fabric so easily.

The fabric and webbing is for a bag. I've been making my reversible tote bags for ages and thought it was about time I designed a new basic bag. The plan is to try making a roomy shoulder bag, this time lined with wadding. Not sure if it will be reversible or not as that may make it too complicated to do.

Anyway, this is all academic as that pile of fabric is still sitting on my work table, waiting to be unfolded. 

In the middle of January my eighty year old Stepfather had a fall and ended up in hospital for two weeks. He wasn't badly hurt and recovered well but was finally persuaded that he needed some help at home from regular carers. He has very bad arthritis in his knees, arms and hands so everyday tasks are difficult and take ages. While we were waiting for everything to be set up, we had a good sort out at his house, making it ready for him to come home.

Things went well for the first three weeks after hospital; I started off being there all day but, gradually, he was able to do more and we were getting into a routine which meant I could eat a hot meal at my house every day and do some work. I even got back to practising my violin and was thinking I might be nearly ready to start my lessons again.

Then he had another fall, this time putting his head through the glass back door. Carers were with him at the time so they called me and the ambulance and then we all waited an hour and a half for it to arrive. He had two deep cuts on his head which they glued back together in A & E before sending him home. 

Now you'd think that would have left him with a serious headache but no, he said it just felt a bit sore. They obviously made them tough in 1939. The fall knocked him for six in other ways though and we had a rough few weeks before he started to get better again. My son and I have been sharing the care - I do the days and he does evenings and nights. I think he's really tuned the corner now so that's a big relief.

So, if you've been wondering why I've been so quiet since January and haven't been publishing much, now you know. I have been doing bits of work as and when I can but it's very slow. I had nearly finished this reversible scarf in early January and finally managed to get it done and published.

Double Up Scarf

This is much more complicated than most of my patterns. I normally aim for simple designs that most people can have a go at but I was fascinated by Nancy Marchant's book Knitting Brioche and used one of the simpler stitch patterns to knit a double sided scarf. It took me about half the scarf before I finally got the hang of it and stopped making mistakes.

I then looked round for some portable knitting to work on in odd moments and unearthed my pile of triangles.

Looking back through my pattern notebooks (there are fifteen of them so far), I found that I'd started this project in February 2018 and had been working on it off and on ever since. Definitely time to get it done. Anyway, several weeks later I had all 150 little triangles done and was ready to assemble them. 

This would have normally taken me a day or so, taking photos as I went but, as I had to wait to be at my house in daylight (and where my big photography lights live), I could only photograph one stage per day - sometimes every few days. It was like building a kaleidoscope ...

And here is the finished thing ...

I've called it Seven Sisters after the traditional quilt pattern which was presumably named for The Pleiades. My finished hexagon is about 96 cm across at its widest, big enough to do duty as a table covering but you could easily use it as a blanket pattern. Either knit more stars or use thicker yarn to make it bigger.

The yarn I used is Schoppel-Wolle Edition 3, a DK weight yarn which comes in some beautiful, subtly shaded colourways. These are the two that I used ...

The star colour is shade 2296, English Garden and I used shade 2298 Wash Day for the background triangles. This yarn is one of my favourites ever; I shall definitely be using it again.

With such a geometric project the normal 'drape it here and there in a vaguely artistic way' approach to photography wasn't going to work. Instead, I had a lovely time folding the knitting into all sorts of shapes.

Much to my delight, I got home yesterday evening to find that this pattern had reached Number One on the ravlery 'hot right now' list. It was number seven first thing in the morning but I  don't have access to the internet at my Stepfather's house so I asked my friends on my ravelry group to keep an eye on the list for me. As normal, they rose to the challenge so a big thank-you to them all, especially Isolde. And thank-you to everyone who looked at the pattern page and thereby pushed it up the list. There was a bit of happy dancing going on here last night.

I'm now concentrating on two crochet designs - both heavily textured - and yesterday I started knitting a climate change scarf. This last one is going to be quite quick to do I think now that I've worked out all the maths behind it. Mind you, when I say I've worked it out, what I actually mean is that my son has patiently explained it to me several times and I've made notes. I've never been comfortable with negative decimal numbers so I have to keep checking them with him. So far I've knitted to the end of the nineteenth century - only 120 years to go. I'll take some photos to show you when I get time ...