On My Table

For someone who normally works at home, being out all day, every day for months is proving very challenging. During the few hours I have in the house I have a constant 'to do' list running in my head but it never seems to get any shorter. Being me, there's a creative list as well as the washing, cooking and cleaning one - well, more of a creative pile really ...

This is the coffee table in the front room. The coloured bricks and crochet mandalas are normally there but the rest is stuff I'm working on. Apart from the lamb obviously. She was balanced on a table by the window to entertain passing children but the cats had other ideas. Apparently, any table in the window is solely for the use of Linnet and Tolly so I kept coming home to find them sunning themselves there and the lamb on the floor.

What shall we start with? My comfort knitting I think.

I'm knitting several of these squares a day. They're not a new design (the stitch pattern is one of those I used in Frankie's Blankie) but they are very soothing to work on and the yarn is beautiful. I'm using the Scheepjes Stone and River Washed Colour Pack of 58 little 10g balls of yarn.

Each of my squares uses the best part of one ball of yarn, leaving just enough to make a colour peg for future reference. When they're all finished, I'm going to photograph each square so that I can use them as a digital colour tool for planning blankets. Then I'll probably sew them together into two separate blankets, or a blanket and a scarf. There are 58 colours all together which is an awkward number so I'll probably divide them up into the 36 stone and 22 river shades.

This particular colour pack is good value I think. It costs about £36 but you could use it to make two yarn advent calendars, something I may well do.

There's nearly always a little collection of my Stylecraft Special colour pegs on the table as I play around with ideas.

I'd like to do something with really bright colours contrasted with either black or white but, as you can see, I haven't got much further than that thought yet. It would be nice to use some of those neon shades that I normally reject as too bright even for my taste. 

On the other end of the table is a pile of fabrics waiting to be a quilt.

It took me over a week just to get these washed and ironed and then a late night to get the first pieces cut out. I'm going to be hand piecing this one as that means I can get some done up at my stepfather's house during the day.

I have another little hand sewing patchwork project on the go (this one's on a tray on top of the piano) but it's a different sort of piecing.

I'm using traditional English paper piecing to make these tiny hexagons - the finished sides are only 2 cm long. I cut the paper shapes and the fabric with my trusty Sizzix cutting machine which makes the whole process so much easier. The card shape underneath the patchwork is the pattern for what I'm making, a bigger version of this ...

Here's one I made earlier, as they used to say on Blue Peter. This little wallet is just the right size for a mini cross stitch kit like the Mouseloft Stitchlets, making it easy to take some sewing out with me. Lately though, I've felt the need for a bigger version, especially for some of the cover kits from Cross Stitch Crazy magazine so this new one should fit the bill.

Too big to fit on the table is my Primrose Garden blanket which is nearly finished now. I'm working on the border; once that's done, I can block it and it'll be ready for a photo shoot. 

It's too big to take out with me now so I can only work on it at home. During the day I need things to work on that are quite mindless and take up very little room in my bag. This is the little bag for the Scheepjes squares ...

I came across this bag in one of my big boxes of old designs and decided it was just the right size for a couple of pairs of needles and some tiny balls of yarn. It's one of a set of little baskets I crocheted about four years ago. There are three different sizes in the pattern; this one is the middle one.

Flower Baskets

I've also got this drawstring bag with the doings for the mini stockings I knit to go on my Christmas presents each year. So far, four people will be getting stockings on their presents in 2020.

I decided I really ought to turn out the folded flower squares that I started knitting with yarn from an advent calendar in (I think) 2017 ... only to find evidence of the dreaded moth. So, they spent a night in the freezer and then had a good wash and are presently drying on top of the fruit cupboard. So called because the fruit bowls go on top of it, not because I have a cupboard full of fruit you understand.

Why do I start so many projects involving lots of little pieces in thin yarn? Who knows?

So, that's some of the things I'm trying to work on at the moment. How about you?

Before I go, I want to thank all the people who are continuing to donate to the Children's Liver Disease Foundation, the charity that I support, during these difficult times. They have had to furlough half their staff due to a sharp drop in donations so, to those who are still able to support them, a very big thank-you.

Warmer World Scarves

What do you do when your days are already full of caring duties and it's a major achievement if you can keep on top of the washing and manage to eat each day? You knit two scarves, each using fifteen colours of course. Welcome to my Warmer World Scarves.

As I told you recently, I've become fascinated by the idea of illustrating Climate Change with coloured stripes. If you do an image search for Show your Stripes and add the word 'climate', you'll see what I mean. 

Now I struggled a bit with the maths for this one. I found the data on this page, Climate at a Glance and I understood that all right. I generated a table of the average annual global temperature for each of the 140 years, from 1880 to 2019. The numbers on my table aren't actual temperatures; what they represent is how far the temperature for each year deviated from the average annual global temperature for the whole of the twentieth century. 

So, if the average temperature for any year was the same as that for the years 1901 - 2000, it would appear as 0º Celsius. The range of numbers on my chart is from -0.46º to 0.99º so I divided them up into fifteen bands, each covering 0.1º ... she says, casually. This is where I got hopelessly confused and had to call in an expert (that would be my mathematician son). I'm fine with positive decimal numbers but when we get to negative numbers I just can't cope. I'd like to blame it on the fact that we didn't go decimal here in the UK until I was ten years old but, in reality, I think it's just me. After all, I had no problems with changing to 'new money' and I happily work with both imperial and metric weight measurements - metric for knitting, imperial for cooking and weighing babies.

Anyway, once I'd wrestled my data into fifteen numbered bands, then came the fun part of assigning them each a colour. Back into my comfort zone again. I used my trusty Stylecraft Special DK and the colour pegs I use to plan my designs. I wanted the negative numbers to be shades of blue and the positive ones to be red but there were five bands below zero and ten above and there just weren't that many reds. So I settled for pinks and reds for the warmer colours.

The original scarf was going to be for my son who started me off on this project and he wanted a really long one (think Tom Baker's Doctor Who). I decided to keep it simple and knit it in garter stitch. To avoid a regular colour blip on one side when changing colours, I worked seven rows for each year stripe so that those blips would appear on both sides. This also had the advantage of sharing the tails of yarn between both edges of the scarf. Because I like number patterns within my designs, I worked on a multiple of seven too - 49 stitches.

The disadvantage of having an odd number of rows is that it's harder to keep track of where you are, so I needed a row counter so I didn't get lost. I ticked off each year as I knitted it and made myself darn in the yarn tails after finishing each decade. 

I absolutely loved knitting this scarf. Despite it's size, I didn't get bored once. Instead, I found it quite meditative as I thought about each year as I knitted it and remembered things that happened, either personally or on a global scale. There was a sort of shiver when I got to World War Two and suddenly switched to warmer colours and as for all those family birthdays ...  Here's the finished scarf.

My son was pleased with his scarf. He wears it wrapped twice round his neck and it looks great. I wanted to include a photo of it being worn but, as I only see him occasionally at a distance of two metres when he drops off shopping ... 

Having finished the scarf, I then set about knitting another one, this time on a smaller scale. I went for multiples of four this time - so four rows per year and 40 stitches on the needle. Having an even number of rows in each stripe would make the colour blips appear all on one side so I made the first row of each stripe a K1. P1 row to hide this. I do like my scarves to look good on both sides. This resulted in a very pleasing stitch pattern with one ridge per year on one side and two on the other. Entirely unplanned but I wasn't complaining.

That band of pink is the seven years of the war, 1939-1945.

I enjoyed the knitting just as much the second time round. If you look closely, you can see that I've added a ruler to the side of the scarf to make it easier to count off the years. It might look more balanced to have this on both edges of the scarves but I couldn't be bothered.

I'm hoping that lots of people will knit their own Warmer World Scarves, using my pattern as a starting point. I'd love to see them at the next Climate Change school strike protests - once it's safe to take to the streets again, obviously. In the meantime, get knitting!