Houses

For many months now I've been doggedly working on a little knitted house that doubles up as a box. I made the original cardboard model last year (or possibly the year before) but got no further than that for a long time.  Then, earlier this year I made myself start work on it, calling it 'Spring Cottage' in my pattern notebook. It took longer than I'd expected to finish so it's now called Summer Cottage.

I must admit that I made things hard for myself by including two little dormer windows - just as hard to design as you might imagine - and two chimneys.

The finishing touch is the abundance of flowers that decorate all the walls. I worried that I was getting a bit carried away as I added these but I'm pleased with the finished result. You can never have too many flowers can you?

This was the first wall I decorated; lots and lots of french knots in four different shades to make a rose bush. There are several more roses on the cottage; they're my favourite flower. I was pleased with the hollyhocks on the other side wall too. These are made with crochet rings and a few straight stitches.

And of course there had to be a cat sitting by the back door; you can just spot him in this picture.

I had always intended this cottage to be based on the stone Cotswold cottages in my part of the world but, while I was working on it, my son bought his first house and parts of that sneaked into the design.

Far from being a stone cottage, his house is one of many Victorian railway terraces built about 150 years ago to house the workers when the railway came to our town.

This link with the railways is rather fitting as we have a long history of working on the railway in our family, starting with my Great-Grandfather and ending with my brother. Here is George (my Great-Grandfather) on the Winchester to Alton line around the start of the twentieth century.

Jack's house has small rooms but they are very tall which is handy as it means he can fit in lots of tall bookcases. It also has some nice original features like the tiles in the hall and the stained glass over the front door.

That front door was my inspiration for the knitted door on my little cottage; I basically copied the colour and all the fittings as well as I could.

Downstairs he has a small front room with a kitchen at the back. This has a huge, original built in cupboard, very like the one in my house which is also a Victorian terrace. You can fit an awful lot of stores in this sort of cupboard.

 

The stairs are boxed in, going up from the kitchen, right next to the back door. These sorts of stairs always remind me of those in my Granny's house and make me feel nostalgic.

On the next floor is a bedroom and bathroom and then there are more steep, enclosed stairs leading up to the attic room.

This is one of those wonderful little rooms with sloping ceilings, a huge, wide chimney breast and a little dormer window to the front. And yes, that's where the dormer windows on my knitted cottage came from.

That's the chimney breast in the photo above and the little door in the wall below leads to the storage space under the eaves.

This attic room has now become the games room and is lined with shelves of board games, with a table and chairs in the middle to play them on.

As for the rest of house ... it's filled with books. There was already an alcove of fitted shelves in the front room that were just the right size for Jack's collection of Puffin First editions ...

... and he's added shelves to the other alcove for more childrens' books, including his collection of picture books and then every other bit of spare wall space is lined with more bookcases.

He's started putting up some of his pictures too. There's his Puffin Club poster in the front room which you probably can't see for the glare in the photo. By the way, see that coffee table? That's the one I'm making the quilt for. You'll be pleased to know that I'm on to quilting the borders now so the end is in sight.

And here's another painting you can't see properly, a painted map of one of his Woodcraft camps.

Above his mantelpiece we have hung the dragon quilt that his Grandmother made him. Mum was a very creative quilter; there is a beautiful castle quilted in the background of this quilt.

Here's a close up of the quilt so you can see it a bit better ...

And here is the label from the back of the quilt. Mum didn't often bother to sign her quilts but she did with this one.

I've just realised that the backing fabric for this quilt is a partner to the one I've used for Jack's coffee table quilt. Mine is the same colours but with blue stripes rather than squares. Mum had long lengths of both fabrics and they turn up on several of her quilts. Here's the backing on my quilt ...

... and here is the same backing fabric as on the dragon quilt on Mum's last, unfinished quilt.

My daughter is having this one but first I have to pluck up the courage to finish quilting it. My quilting is nowhere near as good as Mum's.

There's one more thing to show you from Jack's new house and it's either the worst or the best thing, depending on how you look at it.

At the back of his tiny garden he has another house! Yes, really. This outbuilding is as old as the main house and, in its time, has been used as a workshop so it has electricity (not that you'd risk using it now), a big sash window and the original old stove.

It also has a hole in the roof, a back wall that needs to be rebuilt, and lots of damp. But ... it's big and has lots and lots of potential. When he can afford it, Jack has plans to have it turned into a proper building which will give him at least one extra room. You'd never get planning permission for such a big building in a small space now but, as it's an original structure, it can be repaired. We think this is very exciting.

Going back to knitted houses, I had originally planned to design a series of four cottages using the same basic shape, one for each season. Now, though, I'm tempted to make each one a different style of house. I'm thinking of a white thatched cottage for one and possibly a terraced house for another. I may use other family houses as my models too. I lived in two brick and flint houses as child and am particularly fond of them. Here's the one I remember ...

This was a tied cottage in the village of Longstock where my Dad worked on a farm. The other house that I have especially fond memories of is my Granny's house which my Great Grandfather (he of the railway photo) had built for her when she married in the 1930s.

It was a sort of half house; the downstairs was bigger than the upstairs. There were two living rooms, a kitchen and a tiny bathroom downstairs and two small bedrooms upstairs. Here my grandparents brought up four children. I've recently discovered that steep roofs like that are called 'cat slide' roofs for obvious reasons. That little window at the front is in the storage space in the eaves and could only be reached through half size doors from the bedrooms, accessible only to a child.

One day I'll show you more photos from the gardens of this house; they had a big garden at the back where they grew roses and lots of vegetables and kept chickens, racing pigeons and, during the war, a goat. That's enough about houses for now though.