Two Georges

My seventh birthday, over fifty years ago, is one that I remember particularly clearly. Partly because it was the first one I'd had to go to school on. My birthday is at the end of October which means that it often falls at half term. I don't think I normally had a party for my birthday but, that year, I had two. 

There was one at the weekend for my friends ...

That's me at the back in the blue dress and alice band, next to my best friend Heather (also wearing an alice band, that's how you know we were best friends). Heather emigrated to Australia about five years later and I haven't seen her since. If you look closely you can see the yellow Harlequin plates that were part of my Mum and Dad's wedding china. I still have some of that left and use it regularly.

Anyway, I also had a very special party on my actual birthday although, sadly, there are no photographs. I got off the school bus to find all my favourite dolls (including Hoppity the Space Hopper) grouped round a table full of miniature party food for me to share with them - tiny sandwiches, baby cakes ... I can still picture it and remember how excited I was when I saw it. My Mum was good at that sort of thing; I can also see her on another day, holding up my Tiny Tears doll to show me that she'd made her a new dress during the day.

I still treasure my Tiny Tears who now has to rely on me for new dresses.

You may be wondering where the Georges come in to this story. Well, the first was actually Georgie and he's a nightdress case. He was my seventh birthday present from Mum and Dad so he was an honoured guest at my dolls' birthday party. Here I am with him ...

You can just about see my 'I am 7' badge.

And the second George? He arrived in the post last weekend as a Mother's Day present from my daughter. I didn't know that Merrythought made other hedgehogs in the same family but meet small George ...

Isn't he lovely? He seems to have made friends with my original Georgie and he makes me smile every time I see him.

As you can tell, I was one of those children who really love their dolls - they were (and possibly still are) real to me. I might show you some of the others that I've kept one day.

Juggling

No, not that sort of juggling. My son taught himself to juggle years ago (a very useful skill now he's a primary school teacher I always think) but I've never mastered it.

The juggling I'm talking about will be familiar to you all - the sort that involves juggling work, family and all sorts of other commitments. In my case, I'm trying to combine looking after my stepfather (who is getting much stronger now) with designing, housework and music. Oh, and the cats would like me to tell you that I've been neglecting them for months too.

Over the last couple of months, I've had precisely one day off from caring. My daughter had planned to come up and take over for a couple of days recently but then she came down with That Virus so, obviously, couldn't go anywhere. She's better now and my son and I are managing, together with the support of some wonderful professional carers. That would be some of the carers who the government classes as unskilled workers and who are now working as normal to help the most vulnerable people during this crisis. Enough said.

Anyway, the house is a mess and I still haven't had time to pick up my violin but I am managing to get some work done on several designs, swapping them round as the occasion demands. Want to see what I'm doing?

Do you remember me telling you last year about my search for the right colour scheme for a crochet blanket? You can read about it here. Well, I ended up settling for shades of yellow and green, reminiscent of Spring primroses.

I've been making quite a lot of progress with this one lately. I've decided that it needs to be biggish to show off the 3D effect so I'm making 25 of the squares and filling in with lots and lots of long hexagons. So far I've done three out of the five 'rows' and I even know how I'm going to finish off the edge.

Those squares are flush with the rest of the blanket, not laid on top.

I've got another textured crochet design on the go too. This one is, at the  moment, called 'Blooming Flowers'.

Again, I experimented with lots of really quite ugly colour combinations before settling on shades of pink. Not to mention making a lot of lumpy squares; that green border was harder to work out than you might think. Then, when I put the squares together, all that texture was just a bit too much. The yellow sashing is crocheted on to avoid lots of sewing and (hopefully) tones the whole thing down a bit.

I bought some old wooden workbag handles in a charity shop a few years ago - you can read about that particular treasure hunt here - so I'm going to turn my flower squares into a pretty workbag. That panel of twelve squares will be one side of the bag, the other side will be the same and then I'll probably make up the rest with simple stripes.

I'm enjoying working on both of these projects but the thing that's really grabbed me lately is my Climate Change scarf. My son was telling me about Ed Hawkins' Warming Stripes which represent the earth's rising temperature in coloured stripes and I immediately wanted to turn the data into a scarf.

This is my 'first draft' - a long, garter stitch scarf, representing global warming from 1880 to 2019. The data I used takes the global average temperature for the period 1901 - 2000 and then sees how each year's average temperature deviates from this base temperature. There are fifteen colour bands, each one representing  0.1º Celsius; those bands below 0º are shades of blue and those above are pinks and reds. 

As you can see, the scarf illustrates the way our world's temperature has risen over the past 140 years but this has turned out to be a much more exciting project than just that. As I knitted, I found myself thinking about each year as I got to it, remembering global events and also family birthdays. It turned out to be very calming and therapeutic. There were also some interesting surprises along the way. 

There are only five shades of blue and ten of pink / red but for nearly sixty years the scarf is completely blue. Warmer colours start to appear by the 1940s but it's only from the late 1970s onwards that the blues disappear and the rest of the scarf becomes a race through all the pinks and reds.

The first block of pinks in the scarf represents the years 1939 - 1945, the Second World War. This shook me. You can also spot particularly hard winters, like that of 1963-4, when a long patch of pink is followed by a bright blue stripe. I've promised this scarf to my son but he can''t have it until I've taken all the photos I might want for the pattern.

I've now started a shorter version of the scarf, using a slightly different stitch pattern so that you can count the years more easily to read the information in it. I may or may not add ruler-like lines to one edge to mark the years too. Once I've knitted this one, I think I'll work out a pattern for a crochet version too. At the moment I'm calling them 'Warmer World' scarves. What do you think?

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 ...

Starting and Finishing

Hello everybody and I hope that the new year is treating you well. I thought I'd start my first blog post of 2020 by showing you one of my favourite Christmas presents.

My daughter made me these felt ornaments of Oliver and Amanda Pig from the much loved children's books. Written by Jean Van Leeuwen and illustrated by Ann Schweninger, you can read about the origins of the stories here. I hadn't realised that Oliver and Amanda were inspired by the author's children, David and Elizabeth.

We have two big baskets of treasured Christmas picture books that we bring out every year and 'Oliver and Amanda's Christmas' is one of our favourites.

In the five stories in this book, Oliver and Amanda make presents, help choose a Christmas tree and bake some fat biscuits. Oliver gets carried away with how many presents he thinks he needs, at one point deciding he'll need to hang up a big tablecloth rather than a stocking, but the arrival of Grandma with new hand knitted stockings calms him down. In the last story they celebrate Christmas and the little pigs play with their new toys, including a doll and a fire truck. 'Amanda rocked Patsy Ann in her arms. Oliver put out a fire under the piano.' As you do.

Here's the illustration of Amanda Pig carrying home the little nest that they find in their Christmas tree.

You can see how well my felt decoration matches the original. My daughter tells me that there will be more felt ornaments of children's book characters to come in future years so I'm going to get a mini tree to put them all on. Apparently, I'm not allowed to make requests but, if you're reading this Rose, Alpaca!

Anyway, this lovely present reminded me of my plan, many years ago when the children were small, to embroider pictures of characters from children's books. I started off bravely with this patchwork Elmer. I drew the elephant and then worked each square in different needlepoint stitches. The whole thing is quite small - my eyesight was a lot better then.

I then rashly decided to fill in the background with tiny green stitches ... which is why it never got finished. It took me quite a while to find it in the bottom of a basket of half-finished projects and I'm pleased to see that there's not actually that much more to do. Now that I've got my wonderful magnifying craft light, I should be able to finish the background and then outline Elmer with a bit of backstitch.

Maybe I'll start on another one once Elmer's finished. I though a blackwork picture of Rosie from Rosie's Walk would be good (although using the colours of the illustrations) so that's next on my list.

I have an awful lot of things that I started and never got round to finishing so, this year, I'm going to try to get some of them done. I have quite a few cross stitch pictures ready to frame, for example. I've even bought some of the frames so there's no excuse for not doing them.

This little 3D gingerbread house was a project in an issue of 'World of Cross Stitching' from 2016.

I finished the stitching that year but, two Christmases later, I still hadn't put the house together. So, earlier this month, I spent an evening doing that and, apart from attaching the roof which was tricky, it went together quite easily. Doesn't it look nice?

I finished it just in time to put it away with the rest of the Christmas decorations but I shall enjoy getting it out next year.

Here's another project that's been waiting to be finished for a while, this time a needlepoint decoration.

This is one of a series of six decorations that I bought together as a kit.

I'd only managed to actually finish one, the Christmas tree, but now I have two to hang on my tree.

I also managed to finish my weaving advent calendar that I showed you last month. I wove 24 squares and sewed them together to make a small blanket. Determined to use up all the odd lengths of yarn, I crocheted a random border all round it (Oh, all those ends to sew in) and then gave it a good blocking. This transformed it from an uneven hotchpotch into something quite respectable.

Its the right size to go on my coffee table but, at the moment, its draped over the back of one of my chairs like a modern day antimacasser.

I still have some more squares to weave for the border of my temperature blanket from last year too. They're not very exciting so I keep putting them off but it will be nice to finish it. Im looking forward to showing it to you all once it's done.

I've started a UFO (unfinished objects) group on ravelry for mutual support and encouragement. It turns out that I'm not the only one who doesn't finish stuff. If you'd like to deal with some of your lurking UFOs this year - any craft welcome - then do come and join us. Unfinished Objects 2020

Merry Christmas

Hello everyone and a very Merry Christmas to you all.

I'm just popping in to introduce my new pattern, published today as an extra gift to all the knitters who like my weird ideas.

Tetrahedrons is one of my oddities - patterns that are difficult to classify. Basically, these are tiny knitted shapes which can be sewn together to make decorations or anything else you can think of.

Personally, I started off by putting them in a bowl and playing with them from time to time. Then I took six and sewed them together to make a flexagon. You can fiddle with this endlessly, making it into different shapes.

And then I discovered - oh, joy of joys - that it fitted on my wrist too. 

I had a lot of trouble taking this photo. Trying to position one arm so that the knitting shows up properly while holding the camera steady with the other hand ...

The clever part about this pattern is that the shapes are knitted as double layers so they don't turn into shapeless lumps when they're stuffed. I was rather pleased with that idea. If you've never tried the double knitting technique - slip stitches, two separate layers knitted at once - then this pattern would be a good place to start.

Anyway, have fun with it and enjoy your Christmas.

Advent Calendars

Throughout what has been a very busy December (a General Election in December  - whose bright idea was that?), my rare moments of calm have involved these lovely things.

I absolutely love advent calendars and this year's have been particularly good. As a child I remember the excitement of taking turns with my brother to open a door each day and see the picture inside. Did everyone share an advent calendar with their siblings in the 1960s or was it just us? Anyway, I still enjoy a traditional picture calendar each year, even if I find it increasingly difficult to read the numbers on the doors. 

Last year's was particularly entertaining as Waitrose had commissioned one which had, as well as the numbers on the door, the number of days until Christmas printed at the top of each picture. Unfortunately, the numbers inside didn't match those on the doors so, for example, on the 2nd December, it was apparently only 16 days until Christmas. This made me laugh every day as we jumped back and forth through the month, although it must have been confusing for children. 

Anyway, this year my picture calendar is a very small one that I bought at the RSC two years ago and then promptly forgot all about.

As you can see, it's a traditional street scene spread over four sides. The numbers are actually dark enough for me to be able to read and there's space inside the walls for a battery operated tea light. The one I got actually flickers (how do they do that?) so it looks very realistic. When lit, the light shows through the open windows. It's hard to catch this in a photo but I had a go.

I also light a real candle every day in advent. I used to buy one of those advent candles with the days marked on them but it always proved rather too stressful. Either I forgot it and burnt several days by mistake or I didn't light it at all and ended up with a week to burn at the end. So now I just burn a tea light each day. The candle holder I normally use was the thing I couldn't find this year so I've been using this little angel one where the heat from the candle makes the angels spin.

You can't see them well in this photo but each angel is carrying something different: a tree, a star, a candle and a trumpet.

All very lovely but the real excitement this year has been my craft calendars - both home made. First of all, I used leftover Shetland 4  ply from 21st Century Yarns to make a weaving calendar.

Each of these little balls weighs about 5g and, if I didn't have enough of any one colour, I combined two in one ball. The yarn is doubled to give me the thickness I wanted on my chosen loom. My son then wrapped the balls in tissue paper and attached numbered tags so that I didn't know which colour I would be getting each day - the element of surprise is a big part of the joy of advent calendars, I think.

I've been weaving a four inch square each day, using my Hazel Rose multi loom and then slip stitching round the edge with a crochet hook.

After Christmas, I'll sew them all together to make a mini blanket. Want to see more of the colours?

There are tiny balls of each yarn left after the weaving so I might have enough to give my blanket a random crochet border. Hazel's looms are great fun to use and very compulsive. If you're in the UK, both Wild Fibres and Weft Blown stock them.

I've left the best of this year's advent calendars until last, even though it nearly ground to a halt in the first week of December.

My daughter put together this mystery cross stitch calndar for me as my birthday present in October and I was very excited about getting started on it. Each of the numbered envelopes had a numbered part of the chart to stick on to the big piece of card but I had no idea what the overall picture was going to be.

All went well to start with. Day one was a roof.

Over the next few days, I added the rest of the house, several hills  and a tree. And then I realised that the fabric was going to be too small to add the next part of the picture! Cue anxious texts between me and my daughter and a frantic search of the house to find another, bigger piece of linen so that I could start again. Needless to say, I didn't have any and, anyway, didn't much fancy stitching the first few days all over again. 

So, I put it away sadly, thinking I might do it next year instead. And then, on the 7th December, I got an email from my daughter with this picture attached.

She'd got a bigger piece of fabric and had spent a long evening stitching the days I'd already done on to it. She then sent it up to me with a friend who was visiting her that day so I didn't have to wait for the post. Wasn't that brilliant? Really, like a double present.

Now that I didn't have to re-do the first five days, it didn't take me long to catch up and, since then, I've been really enjoying stitching each day's chart. I treated myself to a super duper new light for cross stitching when I saw it reduced in Hobbycraft and it's made it so much easier. It's the Purelite 4 in 1 Crafters Magnifying Lamp and has really revolutionised my stitching. As well as the light and the magnification, there's a little attachment to hold your chart which is very handy. It isn't the most attractive of lights (especially in my old house) so I take the top section with the stick and lamp on off when I'm not using it. There's always the risk of the magnifier setting light to the furniture (or the cats) if the sunshine catches it too.

So, back to the actual cross stitch picture. It became apparent quite early on that it was a sampler which of course makes it much harder to guess what's coming next as things can be placed fairly randomly. After stitching this star, for example, I was convinced that the little curl next to it was the end of a sleigh runner.

It seemed obvious - a sleigh in the sky above the house, but no. This was what that part of the chart turned out to be ...

Here's what the chart looked like a couple of days ago ...

And here's the stitching to match ...

Since then I've added the word 'Christmas' (I did guess that one you'll be glad to hear) and a stocking next to it.

I'm really enjoying the combination of cross stitch and redwork; I love patterns made up of straight lines and there are lots in this picture. Just look at all the detail on the hills. It's going to be a beautiful picture once it's finished. I can't decide whether to frame it or to turn it into a quilted hanging with a fabric border. Something like this one which I made a couple of years ago.

Then there's the matter of which colour to frame it with. Red seems the obvious choice but maybe it's too obvious. Decisions, decisions.