Still Moving House.

This somewhat unpreposessing photo, taken sometime last winter, in the rain, is two-thirds of the back garden of the house that STILL ISN’T OURS. We first went to visit it at the beginning of June. Tomorrow is the beginning of October. And we still don’t live there.

I realise that four months, just heading into the fifth, is a very short period of time when it comes to selling houses. I know a lot of people whose moves have taken a lot longer, for a lot of complicated reasons.

But we’ve been living amongst boxes since the beginning (we had to put a lot of things into storage before our house was pretty enough to be sold), and I’m sitting on the sofa looking at two empty bookshelves and nine enormous cardboard boxes where the books now live. I haven’t been able to look anything up for months! All of our artwork has been taken down, the rabbit’s still living with a friend, and right now the weather’s turned so cold that I’m rather wishing I hadn’t packed the quilt that usually lives on the back of the sofa!

I think the worst thing is that it’s completely out of our hands. We’ve handed over and searched out and signed every piece of paperwork we’ve been asked for, and a few more besides. The estate agent, contrary to popular opinion, has actually been fantastic, facilitating communication between the three of us in the chain, and keeping us all as well-informed as he possibly can. It’s all with the solicitors, there’s nothing more we can do to move things along.

So all we can do now is wait. And wait. And wait.

(The difficulty being that I am really not a patient person.)

Experimental Hat’s first outing

Felted hat

Turns out it’s quite difficult to take a photo of yourself in a hat – my arms aren’t long enough!

I took the hat for a test-drive this morning, after I’d spent a while blasting the brim with a hairdryer to make sure it was properly dry. It took ages to get all the pins out, and it was half way through the day, when I was showing the hat to a friend, that I inevitably found the one that I’d left in. Thankfully I discovered it before I stabbed myself in the head!

Felted hat

I do need to stab the hat slightly though. Now that I’ve worn it a bit, the brim has succumbed to gravity and the corners have started to stick out in a way that reminds me of the leaves of a cabbage! It’s also got a slightly thin patch on the top, which is covered by one of the long parts of the brim, so I think a bit of needle felting will help to overcome both of those issues.

So far I have been described as looking like a flower fairy and a “woodland creature” in the hat, so as far as I’m concerned, that makes it a complete success!

Experimental hat

Felted Hat

I’ve spent all week thinking “I must get around to doing a bit of felting”, so today I got out some fluff and some soap, and got on with it. This is three layers of merino tops – dark brown on the bottom, a light tan in the middle, and a sort of a foxy-coloured orangey layer on the top.

Felted Hat

I’m always surprised by how quickly the felt actually comes together when you make the layers nice and thin. Perhaps because my initial experience with felt was making it with kids, who tend to whack a ton of fluff down any old way, no matter how carefully you explain “thin layers” to them! There again, I’m always surprised at how long the fulling part takes. As soon as my felt’s holding together I want to call it finished, and I’m always a bit disgruntled when it isn’t.

Felted Hat

Once the felt was made, and fulled a bit, I decided to get out my hat block from Wingham Wool Work, and try to make a hat. If I’d known at the beginning that I was going to make a hat, I’d have made the piece of felt round instead of square! I did a lot of the stretching and shrinking by hand and with my trusty wooden soap dish, all the while thinking “I wish I had a palm washboard” alternated with “I wish I’d just bought a felt hood“. Eventually I resorted to the ironing board, and discovered that steaming the living daylights out of the felt with the iron worked really well!

(Although I also discovered that I hadn’t actually washed all the soap out of the felt, so my Shed now smells of hot, soapy sheep. Could be worse, I suppose.)

Felted Hat

And here’s what I’ve got to show for an afternoon’s work – a funny, felty, foxy sort of a hat.

I thought about cutting away the excess, or trying to neaten it up into some kind of tidy brim, but I really like the raw “unfinished” edges of the felt, and the way you can see all three layers of colour this way. I’m hoping that once the hat is dry, the pleats and folds will stay in place, but I suspect that I’ll actually have to stitch them. Which is fine, because I can take the opportunity to embellish the hat a little bit more as I’m working on it.

The last thing I’ll need to do is add an elasticated band inside the hat. That way it should mould to my head nicely (the polystyrene form’s a little bit too big for me), and it should be less likely to pull out of shape as I wear it.

Now I just need to convince myself that I don’t need a lovely wooden cloche block. The polystyrene one’s fine. Really.

Progress on the pattern, and a sock cheat-sheet!

Re-writing the pattern

Well, the knitting pattern’s still in progress. I finished knitting the first test-mitten in the larger size yesterday, and when Paul came home and tried it on for me, it was revealed to be ENORMOUS. So, after consultation with regard to how exactly Paul likes his mittens (apart from Not At All, which he doesn’t really get a choice about, being married to a knitter), I have now re-written the instructions for the larger size. I could have unravelled the Very Large Mitten, but I spent ages working out how to make a cable pattern fit on the back of the hand, and it seems a shame to let all that work go to waste. So I’m knitting the matching one anyway.

I’ve now printed out several copies of the pattern, so I can keep notes about each pair of mittens and any alterations I might continue to make. I have two test-knitters ready to go, but if anyone else would like to give the pattern a try, please let me know! I can email you a pdf file of the latest draft, but you’ll need to supply your own needles and yarn.

Judy's Magic Cast On

This is a sock toe, my first knitted using Judy’s Magic Cast On. At first I couldn’t get the hang of it, but now I’ve got the crossing-over part figured out, it really is like magic! Next I need to figure out how to cast on two socks at once using this method. That would really knock Second Sock Syndrome (where you absolutely can’t face knitting the second one) on the head. And make sure they both come out the same. (Harder than you might think.)

When I first learned how to knit socks, I made myself a cheat sheet. I use the slip-stitch heel pattern from Wendy D. Johnson’s book, Socks from the Toe Up. I very heartily recommend this book – it has lots of different options for casting on, three different types of heel, and lots of patterns to plug into your socks once you’ve got the basics figured out.

But, I don’t want to carry the entire book around in my sock-knitting bag, which is where the cheat sheet comes in. I know how to knit socks now, but I need reminders of how and when to turn the heel, and how to do a stretchy cast off, and how many rows I knitted on the first sock, so I can make the second one the same. Hence the cheat sheet.

Because I find it so useful I thought it would be nice to share it, so I’ve uploaded it to a tutorial page. I should say that the original pattern obviously remains © Wendy D. Johnson, and you really do need her book for the full instructions! The sheet isn’t a full sock pattern in its own right, it’s just some helpful reminders for when you haven’t got the book in front of you.

Meanwhile, I’ll be knitting yet another test mitten, and hoping that this one turns out to be a normal human hand size!

Midnight scrapbooking

Midnight scrapbooking

At the end of last week, I ordered some photos from Photobox. They had an offer on 75 photo credits for £5 + £2.99 p&p, so I took the opportunity to upload a pile of photos from Flickr and have them printed. (That offer seems to have expired now, but they have different promotions all the time.)

I have to say that the Photobox website left me extremely frustrated. The direct upload from Flickr wasn’t working, so I had to download all the photos I wanted and then upload them to Photobox. Which. Took. AGES. I resorted to uploading them in batches of 10, and it took a good couple of hours for them all to go through. And then, because my photos are square, I had to go in and manually edit each of the 75 images to centre it on a 6×4 piece of paper, rather than having them cropped, which is the default setting. If I’d realised that ahead of time, I’d have batch processed them all to 6×4 in Photoshop, which would have been much quicker.

That said, I’m really pleased with the photos themselves, and the speed of delivery. There are a few where I’ve tweaked the colours too much and they haven’t printed well, but that’s my problem not theirs. The quality of the prints overall is really nice.

Last night, in a fun-filled bout of insomnia, I sat down and trimmed the white edges away from each print, and stuck them into a folder filled with A4 sheets of sugar paper. What I want to do is use the photos for inspiration, and fill the pages with sketches based on elements from the photos. It might be shape, colour, texture… who knows.

I keep looking at online courses in “creative journalling” or “artistic sketchbooks” or “unleashing your inner artist”… that kind of thing. Trouble is, I actually know perfectly well how to do all of that stuff already. My problem isn’t so much with lack of creativity, as lack of confidence and motivation. I’m hoping that by spending time messing about in a scrapbook, making small experimental pieces that aren’t for sale – in fact aren’t “for” anything, will eventually lead me to bigger, more creative work.

Now I’m just hoping that the scrapbook itself isn’t going to turn into a lesson in not using 20 year old invisible mounts that I found in the back of a cupboard while sorting out all my old photos. I suspect they’re old enough not to be acid free, and if all the photos fall out when I pick up the folder in six months’ time, I might have to have a little cry!

Mitten pattern…

Mitten pattern

So, the weekend’s knitting was derailed a little bit, when I decided it would be a good idea to invent a pair of mittens, knit them, and write up the pattern for publication. As you do.

I’ve knitted the first pair of mittens, in the smaller size, and have written up the pattern. (Easier said than done, maths has never been my strong point!) I like tickyboxes in my knitting patterns, so I can easily scribble all over them and keep track of what I’m doing. I’m currently knitting the mittens in the larger size, so I can make sure it’s definitely possible to get two mittens out of one ball of wool.

The design is extremely simple, and the pattern’s hopefully written in such a way that a beginner can understand it. Because the mittens are so plain, I think the back of the hand would make an excellent place to practice simple lace motifs or cable patterns. If I can figure out how to write up some modifications without making the pattern a dozen pages long, I might give that a try too. Meanwhile… back to knitting these cuffs!

Weekend Knitting

Feather & Fan

This weekend so far has been mostly about the knitting. Paul and I are both in the grip of a minor lurgy, and there isn’t a great deal we can do to hurry the house move along, so it seemed like the perfect time to have a quiet day curled up on the sofa.

The picture above is a lovely laceweight cowl, which I thought I’d almost finished… but now I think I might only be halfway through. Because the silk & merino yarn is so fine, it folds down to almost nothing when you wear it. So I’m going to double the length, which will allow it to be pulled up over the head and worn as a snood as well as just a cowl.

I’m really enjoying knitting this, it’s very therapeutic. Only one row in six is patterned, so just as you start to think you might get a bit bored of nothing but plain knitting, a simple patterned row comes along to make you concentrate for a minute or two. Even though I’m quite a slow knitter, this one seems to be coming along quite quickly.Hopefully it’ll carry on that way, because I’ve got quite a lot more knitting to do between now and Christmas!

Doppelganger Day!

Today was #AskACurator day on Twitter, which has had the museum world buzzing about all sorts of interesting things.

The two lovely ladies above are from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and one of my colleagues noticed that the lady on the left bears a striking resemblance to me!

So, to my great amusement, a matching picture was taken of me, to tweet in reply:

(We flipped it round so that I’d match the Rijksmuseum photo.)

One of my friends has just suggested an exchange programme… it’s been a very long time since I last went to Amsterdam, perhaps we should try and arrange it!

Pseudo Sunday

Italian Eucalyptus Honey

Today is one of those days when I’m extremely grateful to be able to work part time. The fibromyalgia and the endometriosis have got together, and invited some germs round to play. As a result I’m sitting on the sofa wrapped in a quilt, scoffing painkillers, doing a bit of very simple knitting, and falling asleep every five minutes. Not an ideal state of being for welcoming visitors to a museum.

To make the germs a little less welcome, I’m drinking Earl Grey tea sweetened with this incredible bright green honey! A friend brought it back from a trip to Italy, and the colour is from eucalyptus. That means it soothes and eases congestion in one go, and the flavour works amazingly well with the already-fragrant Earl Grey.

During the brief moments I’m awake, I’m plotting a knitting pattern for a new pair of mittens. Tight fitting cuffs, quite long, to keep the wrists warm. A row of holes for a pretty ribbon. I need to knit a test pair, during which I can make up the rest of the details as I go along – and then try and make a second one to match. Now the weather’s decided that it’s autumn, I’m definitely going to need some new gloves for those early mornings at the bus stop.

Life begins today…

I am 40!

So, it turns out that turning forty doesn’t have to mean growing up at all. It can mean new fairy boots, a giant badge with flashing lights, and a lovely day spent with family.

So far, so good!