On the Kitchen Mantelpiece

My house is an old, three storey Victorian terrace and it has fireplaces in seven of the rooms (that's actually most of them, it's not a mansion). I only light fires in one of them but the others look nice and, of course, they all have mantelpieces - ideal for displaying favourite things.

The kitchen mantlepiece is higher than a small child which is handy as it means I don't notice the dust. It gets dusted only very occasionally.

In the middle is an old clock which gains time steadily through the week, one of my many tea related cards and a small, china sheep (obviously).

The rest of the mantelpiece is taken up with two of my favourite collections. First, there's my commemorative china.

Most of these mugs were made to celebrate various royal occasions and a few are old family ones. I particularly like the mugs for the coronation that never was. These two were made for the coronation of Edward VIII in May 1937 ... who abdicated in 1936, less than a year after coming to the throne. Monarchs become King or Queen on the death of the previous monarch but are crowned later; let's face it, organising a coronation probably takes a while.

The arrangements for Edward's coronation were kept in place for his brother Bertie who was crowned in May 1937, becoming George VI. 

Coronation Mugs for George VI and his Queen, Elizabeth

Our present queen, Elizabeth II was crowned in 1952; many children were given mugs like these to mark the occasion.

More mugs were issued to mark various royal jubilees, such as the Silver Jubilee of George V and Queen Mary in 1935. She always looks rather cross in her pictures, I think.

The next mug is the only black and white one I have and was given to me at school to mark the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977.

In 2012 the Queen celebrated her Golden Jubilee so I had to buy new mugs to add to my collection.

These both came from Whittards; the one on the left is a traditional mug but the other one is a bit more quirky. It shows the Queen drinking a nice cup of tea, flanked by her iconic corgi dogs.

I also have one commemorative mug that doesn't mark a royal landmark but a national one - the First World War.

And the commemorative china doesn't have to be mugs - or in fact china at all. I have an Edward VIII plate ...

... and an Elizabeth II child's teapot ...

One day I hope to find more pieces from this lovely little tea set. This little tin beaker is from George V's Silver Jubilee in 1935 ...

... and here is my Granny's coronation pyrex dish (she did like her pyrex).

I even have a coronation spoon in my tea caddy which you may or may not be able to see in this photo.

So, back to my kitchen mantelpiece. At the other end from the china is my collection of tin money boxes in the shape of post boxes.

Did anyone else have one of these? These two belonged to my brother and I; I think mine is the smaller one.

For those of you outside the UK, the 'ER' stands for Elizabeth Regina with the 'II' showing that she is the second Queen Elizabeth. On the backs of the tins are these two jolly figures.

Most of the rest of my collection are older than these (which date from the 1960s).  These are small, basic ones; the one on the left is the oldest.

These two look like the big, double post boxes you get on city streets.

The older one looks like it would originally have had a key to lock it and the 'GR' (George Rex) shows that it dates from earlier than 1952. Both of these have interesting backs too.

They both have the letters of the alphabet on them, while the older one has a picture of Dick Whittington and his cat. I particularly like the list of coins on the newer one; who remembers those? There were threepenny bits too and half crowns. When I was at primary school, we had lists like this on the back covers of our exercise books so that we learned essential facts such as how many chains there were in a furlong. England's currency went decimal in 1971 and metric measurements followed, although many people still refer to 'real' measurements (especially when asking how much a new baby weighs).  I still use Imperial measurements for most things, except for yarn which I've got used to in grams.

The last three money boxes are smaller versions of these oval ones.

The one in the middle even has a picture of the King (George VI) on the back.

There are just two more things on my kitchen mantelpiece, the biscuit barrel given to my Grandparents when they married in 1935 and a small model of a yellow 2CV car.

More than thirty years ago, we had a car just like that. It was great. You could take out the back seats and take the roof off to fit more in (we once carried a fireplace home from the Old Kent Road like that) and the window folded up to open. You couldn't listen to the radio if you were doing more than thirty miles an hour as it was so noisy but, when you met other 2CVs, you would wave to each other. We sold the car when we decided we couldn't afford a baby and a car but I've kept the little model ever since.

Winter Sampler

Do you remember the Autumn Samplers my daughter and I stitched a few months ago? Here's my finished one.

It's part of a four part series of seasonal samplers from Little Dove Designs and we plan to stitch them all. The idea is that we work on each one during the appropriate season so that we're ready to frame and hang them all by next autumn.

The first one went well but then circumstances conspired against us with the Winter one. For a start, Christmas was looming and we both had lots of other crafting that needed to be done first. I had a Christmas box to stitch for Rose's stocking ...

... and she had Kipper felt ornaments to make for me and her brother ...

This is a new Christmas tradition. Each year Rose designs and makes us a felt ornament of a character from Children's Literature. Last year we got two - well, you can't really separate Oliver and Amanda Pig, can you?

Anyway, back to the cross stitch. There was also the problem of choosing the fabric for our Winter Samplers. There's quite a lot of white on them and this wouldn't show up on lots of colours. After an encounter with some unpleasant Spearmint Aida, I settled on a pale grey but Rose tried all sorts before finally deciding to use the same colour she used for her Autumn Sampler.

So, better late than never, we have started our new samplers. Rose is winning so far. I know, it's not a competition ...

I may not have done as much but I've put my pretty thread tin in the picture to make up for it.

As before, Rose is using Anchor threads and 32 count linen while I'm stitching with DMC threads and 16 count Aida. I really enjoyed working on this yesterday afternoon, even if I did have to lie down afterwards to recover from all that concentration. I am a feeble creature.

You can see the current sampler at Little Dove Designs. Winter is my favourite season so this one is going to be lovely to stitch.

Taking It Slowly

Taking it slowly pretty much sums up my life for the past eight months. Living with Long Covid means that every single task has to be broken down into small stages which can be tackled one at a time with rests in between. I'm trying to incorporate this approach into my designing too in the hope that I'll be able to still publish new patterns albeit less frequently than before. 

Here's an example of this ...

... one not very exciting mitten.

While knitting a pair of my walking socks as a Christmas present, I thought that the padded heel stitch would make a nice warm mitten. Now normally, I could design this sort of thing in a couple of days of solid work. This single mitten has taken me a week; I did the cuff one day, the thumb gusset the next, then the thumb ... Now all I have to do is knit the left hand mitten. I want to use two other thicknesses of yarn to see if the same pattern can be used for different sized mittens too (that chunky yarn is a possible for the bigger size).

As you can see, starting from scratch with a new pattern takes quite a while. The actual designing process is much harder than it used to be too. The ideas are still there but working out the maths is much slower now. So, I'm doing a mixture of new, very simple patterns and reviving some unfinished projects where I've already done the bulk of designing.

I do like those workbags in the picture. The red one came from a charity shop for a few pounds and the pastel one I made with some fabric my daughter gave me. Before getting ill last year, I was working on a crochet workbag in this style - that's another project I could revive.

Anyway, let's look inside those bags first. The red one holds a pile of simple knitted squares for a  blanket.

I'm using two shades of King Cole Riot DK and cream Sirdar Snuggly, both of which are very soft yarns which catch on winter hands. Luckily, I got some satsuma hand cream in my Christmas stocking which I can even smell sometimes (my sense of smell and taste is coming back, albeit in rather erratic patches). This is lovely, simple knitting as it's only garter stitch so I can work on this even when I'm feeling bad.

The other workbag holds a new lace knitting project which is the opposite of simple. First of all, I had to wind the yarn into a ball ...

It was a 100g skein of thin wool so just winding it was enough for one day. Then it took me days and days to work out the stitch pattern. I kept making mistakes with calculating how many stitches I needed to make the pattern fit and then I decided to re-arrange the stitches ... Eventually, it was done and safely written down in my notebook.

It's an eight row pattern repeat and not actually that difficult to knit but it does require counting up to five so I only manage one set of eight rows at a time. This could take a while to finish. I really like the look of this stitch pattern though; here are the two sides, both of which I think look nice.

Going back to the collection of projects - I'll give you the photo again to save you scrolling back - the pastel squares underneath are going to be another blanket.

These are knitted in the round using a rib pattern in fifteen different shades of Stylecraft Special DK. I tend to favour bright colours so it's been a nice change using the paler shades that I normally ignore. I'm halfway through this project so it's not going too badly.

Those tiny crochet squares are but a small part of what will be a mammoth project, inspired by the yarn advent calendar given to me by a friend.

It will be called 'The Power of Two' and involves more than a thousand two inch squares, half of which will be plain cream. As it's much more fun to work with variegated yarn than plain - tell me that's not just me - I'm going to make myself alternate between the two. Unfortunately, that means some catching up; I have to crochet 125 cream squares now. This is another one of my patterns influenced by maths, thanks to my mathematician son who explains it all to me.

As if one project involving lots of tiny pieces wasn't enough, I've also been working on my never-ending Folded Flowers project.

This started with another yarn advent calendar several years ago and I've been working on it more off than on ever since. The actual knitting is very simple and, over Christmas, I finally finished all the dark grey squares which were boring to knit. Now I just have to knit the rest of the coloured ones, only 39 to go.

These make lovely patterns when folded into flowers.

When they're all done, the plan is to turn them into a padded blanket for the top of the blanket box at the foot of my bed which will fold into its own cushion. Not quite sure how I'm going to make that happen but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

So ... this is how I manage to keep working, one stitch at a time and lots of rests in between. It's nice to see something completed every day, even if it is only a small knitted or crocheted square. For the same reason, I'm very much enjoying doing jigsaw puzzles too. My son and I did a 1,000 piece one over Christmas; he's much quicker than me so he was rationed as to how much he could do at one time. I'm now doing a 500 piece one on my own and the time I spend working on it each day is one of the best bits of my day.

Luckily, I have a puzzle board so it can be put away under the settee after every session. Jigsaws and cats are not a good combination. Apart from Tollys tendency to take a flying leap on to the coffee table, there's that similarity between a box full of little pieces and a litter tray ... doesn't bear thinkinbg about, does it?