In Search of Badby Wood

On Tuesday I packed a picnic and set off to explore some local woods that I've never actually been to before. Badby Wood is near Daventry in Northamptonshire and is best known for its displays of bluebells in the Spring. There are also badgers to be seen if you go late in the day and are prepared to wait patiently.

I decided to park outside the village and walk across the fields to the woods from a handy lay-by on the main road. There was a gentle breeze as I set off across this barley field so the walking was quite comfortable.

Is that the wood I see ahead?

It was but there were a few obstacles to deal with first. Like this overgrown stile ...

should have taken my secateurs with me

... and more than one section of path swamped with ferns as tall as me ...

It was a case of arms above your head (in case of nettles) and feel the way with your feet. Every stream I saw was dried up like this one ...

But finally I reached the trees.

I'd like to say that it was cool and shady in the wood. Shady, yes but it was also really close and the air was full of thunder flies. I was quite pleased with myself though as I managed to find my way through the wood to the high point in the centre which is called Hazeley Knob.

Oak Tree

It is a beautiful wood though and I shall come back when the weather isn't quite so challenging. There were lots of trees down which gave me some extra exercise climbing over them but they're also handy when you want to sit down for a rest.

I walked back to the car along a slightly different path so that I could see this ...

This is a small earthworks known as Badby Grange which dates back to the 13th century. As you can see, it's completely overgrown now but, if you venture inside, you can still see its shape.

After walking in the heat I was glad to get back to my air-conditioned car. I called in at Banbury Antiques on the way home for a pot of tea and came away with this lovely little collection of old buttons ...

I'll add these to my rainbow button jars.

Half a Blankie

We're now halfway through knitting Frankie's Blankie on my Frankie's Knitted Stuff ravelry group and the blankets are getting quite big now. Well, those that are sewn together are anyway. The sewing up fairy still seems to be a bit slow at getting round to everyone so there are quite a few piles of knitted blocks awaiting her attention.

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to share some of the different blankets that people are knitting from the same pattern. Let's start with one using the same yarns that I chose.

Pat, from the United States

Doesn't that look good? And there are as many blocks again to be added yet, each one with a different stitch pattern. By the end of this year the blanketeers will all be expert knitters.

Of course, lots of people are using different yarns for their blankets and it's lovely seeing how they all turn out. This one is knitted with yarns from Bendigo Woollen Mills and, as you can see, Dora has chosen a range of colours inspired by water.

Dora, from Australia

I think this is going to be a very sophisticated looking blanket once it's finished.

Something as simple as just changing the main colour can make a huge difference. Erika has chosen a dark grey to set off the colours in her blocks and don't they look great?

Erika, from England

Erika only started knitting her blanket recently and she's already caught up. I like the effect she's got by crocheting her blocks together too.

This next one uses Patons Merino DK with a dark brown as the main colour.

Jill, from England

Again, this looks to me like it's going to be a very grown-up blanket. Why do darker colours seem more sophisticated to me I wonder? This picture makes me want to knit something with brown, pink and green ...

Instead of using one set of colours for the whole blanket, Lida is choosing a colour theme for each month which I think is a brilliant idea. Here are her squares for April ...

Lida, from the Netherlands

... and May ...

I don't know much about this next blanket (other than it looks great) as the picture was sent to me by Marianne who translates my patterns into Danish.

Bente, from Denmark

The slip stitch patterns stand out really well when only one contrast colour is used, don't they?

Last, but definitely not least, is Jackie's blanket. She's using up stash yarn, some of which has come from her 91 year old mother who no longer knits.

Jackie, from the United States

I think the nicest thing about this blanket is that Jackie's mother is enjoying seeing its progress and talking about the different stitch patterns with her. Knitting at its best.

The last of the 50 block patterns will be published just before Christmas but, just in case everyone thinks they'll be finished by then, I'd like to remind you that there will be two more patterns in January 2019, for a plain knitted border and then a colourful edging. And be warned - that edging takes forever to knit!

More Pretty Books

Oh yes, I've been buying secondhand books again. This time from The Shakespeare Hospice Charity Bookshop. My son and I were in Stratford on Saturday for one of our regular theatre visits - Miss Littlewood since you ask and yes, it was very good thank-you. Anyway, we varied our normal bookshop trawl to include this shop  where I found this lovely book.

This is one of a series of nostalgic Scrapbooks compiled by Robert Opie; I've already got a couple of the others. They're huge books and each page is packed with things from his vast collection of consumer memorabilia. Here's the page on Women's magazines of the 1920s ...

Look at those lovely copies of Weldon's.

Or how about this page of toys ...

Those rather sinister looking toys in the middle are characters
from the Winnie-The-Pooh books.

There's something to appeal to everyone in these books, whether it be trains (yes Stephen, this picture's for you) ...

... or just lots of lovely old adverts ...

There are ten of these giant scrapbooks all together, covering much of the twentieth century and they're all beautiful. You can buy them new from Robert Opie's Museum of Brands which, by the way, is a great little museum. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting it a few years ago; it's absoulutely crammed full of memories.

The other book I bought at this shop isn't quite so pretty but it'll be very useful.

I bought The Quilter's Bible by Linda Clements for my daughter a few years ago and thought at the time what a comprehensive book it was for a new quilter. Now I've been quilting for a while but I mostly learned from my Mum so I was pleased to find a copy of this book for myself.

It's full of detailed information on just about every technique you could think of and has lots of inspiring pictures too. I love the section on creating the illusion of curves with straight lines.

I've made a Storm At Sea quilt (the purple design at the bottom) but my Snail Trail quilt  - that's the main picture - is languishing in a bag half-finished. 

I love pages like this one that show lots of designs from just a few simple shapes ...

You could turn any one of these into a knitted or crocheted blanket.

After the charity bookshop, we still had time to pop into the Chaucer Head Bookshop, where I found this treasure ...

This may well have been the prettiest book in the shop ... well I thought so anyway. It's 'A Medieval Miscellany' by Judith Herrin and is a collection of medieval texts and images, translated into modern English.

'A Shepherd's Duty' and 'Magic'

'Pilgrimage' and 'Travel'

As well as being beautiful, the book is a wonderful history of daily life many hundreds of years ago. I love this sort of book - history and art combined. What more could you want?

It's all about the colours

Sometimes I feel the need to start another project just because nothing on my needles is colourful enough. This happened to me a couple of days ago so I went in search of a big, dramatic crochet stitch that I could work in bold stripes of colour. This is what I came up with ...

How about that for some serious texture? This is my version of the marshmallow stitch and I'm using a rainbow of Patons Diploma Gold DK for it. Of course this sort of stitch just eats yarn so I shall have to order some more soon. I'm hoping that three balls of each colour plus some sort of edging will make a small blanket.

I've also started using this Catona Colour Pack that I showed you the other week. 

You get one little 10g ball of each of the 109 shades of Catona in the pack and, after playing with them for a while, I decided it was time to actually start using them.

I'm going to knit straightforward squares and then sew them together to make a blanket. Deciding on how to arrange them is going to be exciting. I'll probably only do 100 squares so that I can make a 10 x 10 blanket but just think of all the possible ways of arranging 100 colours. I'm seriously considering taking a photograph of each square so that I can create pictures of different ways of putting them together ...

... but I'm getting ahead of myself here. So far I've knitted one green square. It's a very pretty square though.

As you can see, I've also crocheted a tiny square and made a yarn peg to use in planning designs. Just another 99 to go then.

Handicraft Medal

I'm wondering if anyone can tell me something about this ...

I bought it a few years ago from an antique stall in Burford. The person I bought it from had got it from a dealer who found it in a collection of military medals. It had been kept with the husband's medals but the dealer didn't want it. I thought that was rather sad.

Anyway, as you can see, it's a medal for Handicrafts awarded by Woman's Own magazine. The front shows a scantily dressed woman proudly displaying what looks like fabric, made up of strips of different designs. Personally, I think she'd be better off making it into something warm to wear but there you go. The back has a garland border with space to have a name engraved.

There's no name on this medal but luckily it came in its original box which has a name pencilled on the back.

Without any more information I've been unable to find anything out about Mrs F M Webb or indeed  about these medals and when they were awarded. I wonder what she did to win hers.

If anyone knows anything about the Woman's Own Handicraft medals (or indeed Mrs Webb who may or may not have lived in the Cotswolds) then do let me know by leaving a comment below.

Starts and Finishes

I love starting work on new designs and, after my recent trip to Wool Warehouse, I've got the yarn I need to get on with a couple of ideas that I thought of a while ago. First of all, can you guess what this is going to be?

Obviously, this is a pencil case in progress - how could you not guess that at once? I knew the colours I wanted to use but spent hours trying out different stitch patterns to get one I liked. And what did I end up with? Garter stitch. Not that I don't love garter stitch but you'd think I would have thought of that first. The coloured stripes are the clever part (well I think they are anyway); I wanted a blended look but without having too many ends to darn in and I eventually worked out a way to combine four colours that fitted the bill.

My other new project is probably going to be a bag, made up of blocks like this one ...

This is a Log Cabin block, a traditional patchwork design where the central red square represents the hearth and the strips around it the log walls. It's a block that always makes me think of that part in Little House on the Prairie where Laura describes how Pa builds their house. 

In my knitted version the two strips in each colour are knitted without cutting the yarn and there is no sewing up to do. Do you like the colours I've chosen? I'm rather pleased with them, although I wasn't too sure about that lightest pink when I bought it. It's a bit garish on its own but I think it looks fine in with the other colours. All the colours for this (and the pencil case) are Stylecraft Special DK - such a useful yarn.

So that's the new starts. Now for the finishes. I've recently published two patterns, one of which I've been working on for the best part of a year, on and off.

This one is called Helicopters and it's another design inspired by Patchwork, this time by the Inner City block. There's a lot less sewing than you'd think in my pattern as I've picked up stitches to knit shapes wherever possible. 

I really like the  yarn I've used here. It's Rico Creative Melange DK which comes in a nice range of shades which have enough variegation to be interesting without being overpowering. I've just bought some more in these two lovely shades which I'm hoping to turn into a double sided Tunisian Crochet pattern.

The other finish was a much quicker pattern. I started knitting it last week and published it today. 

The Perfect Cowl is a very easy knit - just panels of reverse stocking stitch. I've used an odd ball of Noro Silk Garden for a colourful cowl but you could use any similar weight yarn. 

The name comes from the perfect number that the pattern was designed around. A perfect number is one where all the numbers that divide into it can be added together to make the number. So, in the case of 28 (which I used for this pattern), 1+2+4+7+14 = 28. All those numbers play an important part in the design and no, I don't think that's a strange way to design a knitting pattern.

I'll leave you with a photo of one of my quality control team testing out the work in progress earlier today. He's lying on a partially knitted blanket with his head on the new cowl and yes, that is a knitting needle under his paw.

Tolly Cat

Can't resist a book bag

Sam at my  local bookshop Books & Ink knows how to get me through the door. Every so often she'll offer free book bags with any purchase over £10 and, every time, I obediently trot down there to buy a book or two. This is what I got today ...

First of all, that all-important book bag. It's decorated with an illustration from Judith Kerr's classic picture book 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea' which was published 50 years ago. Many will know Judith Kerr from her wonderful Mog books (my favourite is 'Mog and Bunny') but she also wrote a series of books based on her wartime experiences as a refugee from Nazi Germany. The first of these is called 'When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit' ... and it's just struck me that maybe the pink bunny in the Mog book was inspired by her lost toy. 

Anyway, the book I bought today is one I saw earlier in the week when I was buying presents and resisted the temptation to add to my pile. So, my resistance crumbled today and I bought it.

Frances Mountford is an artist who has written several beautifully illustrated books about the countryside; this is her first book. The whole thing is a work of art - text and pictures. Here's the title page ...

She takes the modest farm in Surrey where she lives and traces its history over four hundred years and the dozen or so families who have lived in it from the 16th Century to the present day. Here are just a couple of pages; the whole book is like this ...

A Quaker Wedding, 1719

World War One

I love this sort of book that combines art with social history. I bought her second book 'Heartbreak Farm' a few days ago for my Dad and now I want that one too. It's not illustrated throughout but is still lovely. It tells the story of her family farming in the twentieth century. I believe she's written other books, if anyone knows of any please let me know.