My First Coat

 I've never had a grown up coat, one of those smart long ones. And now I have!

It's a nice relaxed fit so that I can wear big jumpers underneath it and, having taken my daughter's advice and gone for a 'petite' size - by which they mean 'short', the sleeves are the right length without having to roll them up.

I'd never have managed to buy it without Rose's help. I'd seen it in my newspaper and it was surprisingly cheap for Marks and Spencer but, as we no longer have a branch here, I couldn't check the colour or fit. Rose went into her Marks in Oxford, tried one on and took photos to send me. She then ordered it for me in the size we decided would fit. Ordering clothes (and especially returning them if they don't fit) is too complicated for my Covid brain so I don't often do it.

I'm really pleased with my new coat and, having worn charity shop jackets for decades, it feels very smart. However, it turns out that it's not actually my first proper coat.

Here I am in 1967 at the age of six with my brother Stephen. Note my alice band - remember those? - and Stephen's traditional plaster on his knee. Those were the days when boys wore shorts up until they were about ten or eleven. The photo was taken in Hamble-Le-Rice (isn't that a great name?) on one of our days out. Here I am wearing my coat again, this time somewhere you probably recognise. I'm glad to see that Stephen's knee is better.

Stonehenge

I seem to have had a bit of a run of buying things for around £70 lately. First there was the coat and then I invested in this wonderful Piano Lamp.

I haven't been able to play the piano for several years because of not being able to read the music. Then it dawned on me that I could ask the optician to prescribe me a pair of fixed vision glasses just for the piano. It took a couple of tries to get the distance right, what with not having a piano to hand in the consulting room, but we got there in the end. The frames are the same as my normal glasses so the piano ones live on the piano (and have an elastic band round one arm too) so that they don't get muddled.

The glasses have meant that I can read the music but I realised that I also needed stronger light, hence the new lamp. It's very bright and also adjustable with a dimmer switch. The picture above was taken in the evening when it was the only light on in the room. The black lamps are intended for modern black pianos but I think it goes well with my old 1920s upright.

Of course, my playing is very rusty so I'm starting with some simple studies by Burgmuller. I never had these as a child learning to play; my violin teacher told me about them. My only experience of studies were the Demnitz ones for Clarinet which weren't exactly exciting. The Burgmuller ones are proper tunes and lovely to play.

My other £70 purchase was this big pile of magazines.

I've been filling in the gaps in my collection of 'New Stitches' magazines for a long time, mostly buying individual copies as and when they come up. I was enquiring from a seller on ebay about combining a couple of small lots when she said that she had lots more to sell. She kindly sorted out all these magazines, 58 in all, to fill in quite a few of my gaps. They arrived in two heavy boxes and will keep me busy for quite a while. Doesn't that cat on the cover in the middle look like Tolly cat?

I particularly like these magazines because they have a range of projects and masterclasses covering lots of different needlecrafts rather than just cross stitch. I think I now have about 80 issues left to find (out of 261). I don't have any of the latest ones though, Issues 213 - 261 and I've never seen them for sale. I expect they'll turn up one day, all together.

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 ...

Picking up the Clarinet

What was your 'thing' when you were a child? Did you play sport, dance, act ...? My thing was music. I began learning the recorder at primary school and then moved on to the piano. When I was about ten or eleven I started going to a weekend music school where everyone played in the orchestra as well as their normal lessons. Funnily enough, the orchestra didn't need lots of pianists but there was only one clarinet player. So, I started learning the clarinet too.

During the years since then I've always played the piano and have developed my recorder playing to include alto and tenor recorders as well as my original soprano. But ... the clarinet has been neglected. I'm enjoying learning the violin and I started wondering if I should get my clarinet out again ... which is when I discovered that clarinets don't like being left in their cases for decades. The foam lining of the case had disintegrated all over the place and lots of the pads were dry and cracked. I have to say it reduced me to tears.

Then I pulled myself together and emailed my local music shop Presto Music who suggested I take it in for them to have a look at. Fast forward some months and look what I've just collected ...

One working clarinet, complete with a brand new case (no nasty foam this time), reeds. grease and cleaning thingy. That last was a revelation to me; when I last played, we still used those brushes on a stick to clean our instruments. Now there are things called 'pull throughs' which are basically cloths with a weighted cord on the end. You feed the weight down through the clarinet and then pull the cloth through after it - very clever.

So far, so good. Now was the time to wonder whether I'd be able to play it after all this time (40 years). Having decided I needed to start from the beginning again, I got some soft reeds and fished out my original books.

My very first book was this one, A Tune a Day for Clarinet Book One which is still in print (although they've updated the cover just a bit). My copy cost 40p too, rather than the £6.99 it would set you back now.

Anyway, this book takes you through the notes, one by one and also has detailed instructions on putting the instrument together and the embouchure - that's how you position your mouth to make a sound.

I was relieved to find that I remembered how to assemble the clarinet and how to put the reed on. The embouchure was fine too but ... it took me ten minutes to be able to play a single note. I'm not sure if it was me or the reed that needed warming up but, eventually, it all started to work. 

I can now play about a dozen notes and it's starting to come back to me slowly. Each new note is vaguely familiar and my breathing is getting better too. I'm hoping that, at some point, it'll all suddenly 'click' into place. I think I'm probably progressing more quickly than I would if  I'd never played and I'm enjoying the challenge. 

The clarinet is a beautiful instrument; I'd forgotten how much I loved its sound. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, here's Dimitri Schenker playing Norbert Burgmuuler's Duo for Clarinet and Piano, written in 1834, just two years before the composer's death at the age of 26.