The Little Things

Hello everyone. I thought I would squeeze in one last blog post before Christmas. I find the extra work and change of routine involved with the festive season puts extra pressure on my already fragile health which, for someone who has always loved Christmas, is rather sad. The greatest pleasure I get at this time of year is from the quiet times when I don't have to deal with people or, in fact, do anything much so I thought I'd share some of the little things that are helping me at the moment.

I love all the decorations that I've collected over the years, many of them made by my children or myself. My daughter spent a day the other week putting them all up for me and I'm really enjoying them. The tree in the picture above is my 'special' tree which is in the latest room to be decorated. When I say the latest, the rugs arrived a day before the tree went up. It's basically a spare bedroom but, as you can see, I've saved a cosy reading corner complete with my Mum's rocking chair.

One of the most exciting things about finishing this room is that we've finally been able to get all my Mum's quilts out of the bin bags they were languishing in and on to the big set of shelves we bought to house them. I'll start showing them to you in the new year but, in the meantime, I've been able to put some of the Christmas ones up on the wall at last. This one, behind the rocking chair, is my favourite.

Opposite the reading corner, in the alcove by the fireplace, is the little stained glass robin quilt Mum made us years ago which I love.

The dolls house on the table below it is one I've had for many years but have never had time to decorate and furnish. I'm hoping to make a start on it next year now that I've got a space to work on it. For now, Father Christmas is trying to work out how to get down the chimney.

We have always had baskets of Christmas picture books out at Christmas. There are two more baskets of them under the piano downstairs but I have got one basket up in this room.

After a bit of a struggle, we managed to hang my Christmas Bunting above the fireplace and then Rose decorated the mantelpiece with pretty things and gingerbread men lights. I'm not sure what the lace knitted fairy thinks she's up to.

Tolly cat isn't a little thing and he's definitely not just for Christmas but he does make me smile. He loves the patchwork coverlet I've put over the bed (to keep cat hairs off the clean bedding underneath). Here he is in a quiet moment in between hunting all those little hexagons. And yes, he really does do that.

As well as the quilts, I have a lovely collection of Christmas stockings that my Mum made me - a new one every year. We hang these on doors around the house. This one is on the front room door this year.

It was one of the first ones Mum made and, as you can see, it's a collage of photos of the children at Christmas when they were small. I also have this beautiful cross stitch stocking which Rose gave me a while ago - this one's on the airing cupboard door.

There's another tree in the front room and more decorations. It was a bit dark to take good photos this morning (it's gloomy most of the day at this time of year) but here are an assortment of knitted things on the piano.

You might recognise some of them as old patterns of mine. The round candle quilt above the piano is another one of Mum's and the little knitted cone snowman was a present from my friend Pat a few years ago.

The front room mantelpiece is pretty too. It's a mixture of old, treasured things, some new and a bit of knitting.

That's my Christmas Wreath hanging between photos of my much-missed Granny as a toddler and on her wedding day.

I've been enjoying my cross stitch this year and there are two new ornaments on this mantelpiece. Here you can see my pyramid shaped Christmas tree; the tree is different on each of the four sides.

I also cross stitched what was called a Christmas pincushion but decided to use it as an ornament stand instead ...

The village scene continues round all four sides and then there's a big snowflake on the top. Again, my apologies for the bad light in these pictures. You get the general idea though. At the other end of the mantelpiece are my cherished tiny crib, a cross stitch gingerbread house and a very pretty old tin. The tiny quilt propped up by the radio is another one of Mum's. She made them into fabric postcards, complete with a terrible poem on the back.

Something else I'm really enjoying this year (as I do every year) is getting out my Christmas china to use. I've collected so many pretty festive mugs that they don't all fit on the shelves. You can see a few of them in this picture.

Choosing which one to use each time I put the kettle on makes a cup of tea a bit special. The teapots on the dresser have their Christmas cosies on too ...

... and I've knitted new ones for the smallest ones this year. Here they are on the tray I use every day which I've lined with one of Mum's Christmas placemats so it's ready for Christmas too.

As a family we really enjoy our advent calendars and, this year, we've each had three different ones. We share pictures of them every day which is nice as we are all in different places. Firstly, we have paper advent calendars. Mine this year was a Brambly Hedge one. Here it is on my bedroom fireplace.

There's a bit of a competition each day as to which of the three of us has the prettiest picture but with festive mice I think I'm winning this year. While we're in this room my little criss-cross shelves are Christmassy too.

My little beaded Christmas village has grown again this year. I think I need to make some stands though so that the houses and things can stand at different heights. New to it this year are (I think) another building, some trees, a post box and a couple of street lights. Next on the list will be a church I think. I'm also very fond of this book which I read again the other day ...

We always have an advent jigsaw each year too. The pieces are divided between 24 envelopes and put together one day at a time. There was much hilarity when Jack's first day consisted almost entirely of white snow pieces! This is how my puzzle is looking after nineteen days.

The third set of advent calendars is the result of my concentration this year on improving my tatting skills. Over many months I tatted three sets of 24 snowflakes, three in each pattern. We have one set each (they're different sizes) and we add one to our snowflake trees each day. I'll write about this project properly next year but here's how my tree is looking today.

So, I may not be able to do very much or celebrate with friends and family as I would have done before the Long Covid but, when I think about it, there are lots of little things around me that make me smile and give me comfort. I hope that wherever you are and whatever your situation you all have a Happy and peaceful Christmas.

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.

Knitted Yo-Yos

After my short and simple Tropical Scarf pattern, I'm back to normal with my new pattern which is sixteen pages long. They just seem to get longer and longer. To be fair, this one explains a new technique (well, new to me anyway) and then illustrates it with several sample projects. You can't do that in a couple of pages.

Knitted Yo-Yos

Fabric yo-yos (or Suffolk Puffs as they are traditionally known here in England) are gathered circles of fabric which are simple to make and can be joined to make lovely quilts. They are easy to sew by hand but you can also buy Yo-Yo Makers if you fancy a new gadget. 

Yo-yos make lovely scrap quilts but the circles can also be arranged into planned designs or appliqued to a background fabric. I particularly like this pattern from Kim Diehl's 'Simple Graces'. 

She also uses yo-yos to make a matching door hanger. I love her designs; she has a really good eye for colour.

These little circles turn up in toy patterns too. Jean Greenhowe calls these 'Rosette Dolls' in her classic toy book 'Favourite Dolls & Toys'. 

I bought my copy of this book years ago because I wanted to make her little doormouse tree trunk house for my daughter when she was little.

I wrote about this years ago; you can see pictures of the inside in this blog post.

There are various patterns out there for crochet yo-yos too which I have tried over the years. I bought Melody Griffiths' book 'Crocheted Throws & Wraps' purely because I spotted the Puffs Baby Blanket on the cover. There are some other interesting designs in this book too.

Isn't it nice?

I couldn't find links for any of these books so they are probably out of print but second hand copies would be easy to find, I'm sure.

Anyway, back to the knitting. All you need for a knitted yo-yo is a strip of knitted fabric with drawstrings at both ends. It took me quite a bit of experimentation to come up with a drawstring cast on that matched the one at the other end of the knitting. Instructions for this cast on which may or may not be new are in the pattern. I had a lot of trouble both trying to explain how to do it and taking the photos.

Once I'd sorted out the basic pattern I knitted lots of them, using some of my little balls of leftover yarn. Each one only takes about 2g of yarn and they're quick to knit.

After I'd worked out various ways of sewing the yo-yos together I knitted some different sizes ...

... and then several sets of flowers.

Can you spot the difference between the two pictures above? It turns out that you need the right number of petals if you're going to be able to sew flower yo-yos together to make a flat shape.

I also found that you can turn a yo-yo into a heart (with a bit of tricky sewing).

Next I had a play to see what I could make with my knitted yo-yos. First, inspired by Eric Carle's book, I made a Very Hungry Caterpillar. Like the Jean Greenhowe toys, he's threaded on to elastic so that you can shape him a bit.

I thought a more traditional project was called for next so I set about knitting lots of four patch blocks of yo-yos, using two shades of one colour for each block.

These were pretty but I thought they needed something more so I knitted tiny black yo-yos and sewed them into the middle of each block which really set off the colours.

Eventually I stopped playing around with them and arranged them into four rows of three and sewed them together, adding more little black circles in the gaps between the blocks.

What I love about this layout is the way the black circles turn into on point squares once they're sewn in place. There's a hint of the hexagon about the inner coloured ones too. All this is because of how the yo-yos are sewn together; you can play with it to achieve different effects. 

I hadn't got a plan for this rectangle but it turned out to be exactly the right size to go on top of my cross stitch workbox so that was a bonus.

I hope knitters will find this a useful pattern. You can download it here and I look forward to seeing some exciting knitted yo-yo projects. I might make a yo-yo bag next ...

Sam's Blackbird

As a change from all the yarn based craft, I thought you might like to see a little quilt that I made recently as a birthday present for my daughter's partner.

It measures about ten inches square, the same size as the robin quilt I made for my daughter Rose earlier this year.

The robin was paper pieced but I couldn't find a paper piecing pattern for a blackbird that I liked. It didn't help that I wanted it to look something like this ...

Rose took this photo of a blackbird helping himself to some of their wild strawberries this summer so I wanted the blackbird on the quilt to be a strawberry thief too. I decided that I had to applique the blackbird but first came a lot of very bad sketches. Should he have one wing or two? One foot or two? Visible feet obviously, we're not talking disabled blackbirds here. Decisions, decisions.

Having decided on one wing and two feet, I set about sewing the black pieces to a square of hand dyed green fabric. I inherited my Mum's quilting fabric and I can nearly always find just I want amongst it.

Then I had to embroider the legs, beak and eye which took a lot of experimenting. I can't get at my stock of black seed beads at the moment (they're in one of the piles in the room I'm currently decorating) so his eye is actually a glass toy eye, threaded through a tiny piece of felt and mangled on the back of the fabric so it lies flat. The beak is layers upon layers of orange stitches; I kept adding more until it looked about right.

If you look closely you can see that the blackbird is holding a tiny strawberry in his mouth which I cut out of printed fabric. I added a few stitched leaves and then had to embroider a few more straight stitches in black to fill in the shadows in is mouth. 

That was the trickiest part of the project finished. Naturally, Mum had several pieces of strawberry patterned fabric so it was easy to find something for the borders. The quilting thread I chose was hers too; one of the range of variegated threads from YLI. It's sold as machine quilting thread but it works beautifully for hand quilting too which is what I do.

I drew rough leaf shapes meandering around the blackbird for my quilting design. I just use an ordinary pencil for this and make it up as I go along. I also quilted round the blackbird and gave that wing a bit of texture too.

Then I quilted the borders with straight lines and added a binding to finish the quilt.

As you can see, the quilt hangs from a wire hanger. In order to be able to take the hanger off if wanted, I only attached the fabric sleeve at the top of the quilt and then used snap fasteners to close it below the bar of the hanger. This was something I worked out when I made Rose's quilt. You can't really see the bottom of the sleeve in this photo but it's about where the little strawberry button is. The button serves no purpose but I thought it was nice.

I even managed to find a piece of fabric with little blackbirds on for the quilt label and then, as a finishing touch, I printed out Rose's photo on fabric and sewed that to the back too.

Sam was very pleased with his blackbird quilt so that was good. Now I need to turn my mind to the next mini quilt ...

Tropical Scarf

The weather is definitely on the turn here and autumn is on its way. I know this because a) Tolly cat sprawls across my lap purring every time I sit down and b) the cricket keeps being abandoned because of rain.

With this in mind, the name of my new scarf seems particularly inappropriate.

Tropical Scarf wasn't named for the weather though but for the brightly coloured yarn I knitted it with. It's a DK weight and comes in 200g balls. The range is called Tropical Beaches and I chose the shade Olympus Beach

I used yet another slip stitch pattern for this; regular readers will know how much I love slip stitch. For this pattern you need a variegated yarn and a plain one, switching between them every two rows. The fun thing is that the plain colour dominates on one side of the finished scarf and the variegated on the other. To see this you need a strong contrast between your two yarns so I used a bright white for my plain colour.

I hope you can see what I mean in the picture above. I enjoyed knitting this one but then I enjoy knitting anything with bright colours. It ended up being a bit longer than I'd planned. Once I realised that the colour run was mirroring itself, I decided to carry on until the two ends matched.

As normal, the pattern for this scarf is available to download free from my ravelry store where it joins the 36 other knitted scarf and cowl patterns I've published (there are a couple of crochet ones too. For once, this is a short pattern - only three pages long; most of my patterns tend to be much longer than that.

Speaking of which ... I'm currently trying to finish the projects to go with my Knitted Yo-Yo pattern that I showed you a while back and this one is definitely not going to be a short pattern. I keep thinking of other ways of using them.

At the moment I'm turning a pile of them into what might be a seat pad for a hard chair (the chair in question is an odd shape). Then I'm going to make a few hearts into hanging ornaments. My favourite is whichever one I've just worked on so currently that would be this little chap who I'm sure you will recognise.

A Very Hungry Caterpillar

I must stop playing with these or I shall never get the pattern written up.

Theme Tunes

I've had the notes for this post ready for about a fortnight but keep being too tired to write it. Let's see if I can manage it today ...

This is a trip down memory lane for me, specifically to television series shown in England in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of them may be familiar to you, depending on your age and where you grew up. The links I've included occasionally show clips or stills from the programmes and some of these are in colour. We didn't have a colour television until after I'd grown up so my memories are all in black and white.

It occurred to me a while ago that what I remember mostly about watching TV in my childhood is not particularly the content of the programmes but their theme tunes. So, that's what I'm going to talk about today.

One of the first tunes I remember (and can still sing today) is the song that introduced 'The Adventures of Robin Hood'. This was an ITV series shown here between 1955 and 1960. I was born in 1960 so the programmes that my brother and I watched in the mid 1960s must have been repeats. I have vague memories of swashbuckling forest based adventure but mostly what I liked was the theme tune.

Written by Carl Sigman and sung by Dick James, this jaunty song still makes me smile.

At around the same time we were also watching 'Robinson Crusoe'. This was originally a French series, later dubbed into other languages. The English version was shown on and off from the mid 1960s for many years. The theme tune I knew was written specially for the English version by the Franco London orchestra. 

I can't say that I noticed that this was dubbed, or in fact anything much about it but I did like the music.

The next one was also dubbed and, this time, I did notice. Perhaps it was because I was a few years older or maybe the dubbing wasn't done well. 'White Horses' was produced jointly by TV companies in Yugoslavia and Germany and was set on a stud farm for Lipizzaner horses. I wasn't remotely interested in horses and had no idea what was going on most of the time but oh, that song ...

'White Horses' was written by Michael Carr and Ben Nisbet for the English version of the programme in 1968 and was sung by the Irish singer Jackie Lee. It was released as a single and reached the top ten of the UK singles chart so it wasn't just me that liked this one.

These three programmes were all aimed at children but the ones with the themes I remember from the 1970s were for general audiences. 'Z Cars' was a police series set in a fictional northern town near Liverpool. It was shown here between 1962 and 1978 but I remember watching it with my family in the early 1970s.

The theme tune was very modern for its time and this was the first one I remember picking up by ear and playing on my recorder (I bet the rest of the family loved that). It was written by Fritz Spiegel and Bridget Fry and was inspired by the Liverpool folk song 'Johnny Todd'.

This was another one that got into the top ten of the charts. The theme has had an interesting after life as it has long been associated with Everton Football Club who are based in Liverpool. One of the actors from the programme, Leonard Williams, died in 1962. He was an Everton fan and had watched them play a few days before his death. The theme tune was played before their next match in tribute to him and it sort of stuck. This next video is from the first game played in the team's new stadium a few weeks ago. Wait for the siren which always heralds the start of the music,

I may not remember much of what happened in all these programmes but I can honestly say that I never even watched the next one. I find the opening credits and the music very nostalgic but when I watched a few episodes recently, they were completely new to me.

'A Family at War' was an ITV series that initially ran between 1970 and 1972. It tells the story of the fictional Ashton family in Liverpoool (again) during the Second World War, starting in 1938 and going right through to the end of the war.

The theme was played to a picture of a child’s sandcastle on a beach, topped with the Union Jack as the sea came in. This obviously symbolised Britain’s position, especially in the early years of the war when invasion was an ever present threat and the Battle of Britain raged. The music this time is classical, from the end of the first movement of Vaughan William's Sixth Symphony. 

The last theme I want to share with you today is from 'Crown Court' which was a courtroom drama series that was shown right through the 1970s and into the '80s. It was on in the early afternoon and I remember watching it when I came home for dinner from Grammar school. Each episode was only 25 minutes long and three episodes made up a 'case'.

It was like a play as all the action took place inside the court room. Interestingly, the jury was made up of members of the public within the Granada TV area whose names were taken from the Electoral roll (which is how jurors are chosen in the UK). This meant that the writers had to write two endings each week to allow for either verdict.

Unusually, this programme had two themes, one for the start of the programme and another for the end. The opening credits were accompanied by part of the fourth movement of Janacek's Sinfonietta and conjured up the majesty of the court.

The closing theme 'Distant Hills' was composed by Peter Reno and has a more wistful feel to it I think.

Does anybody else remember these themes or do you have your own favourites?