Ginger Lucy

Mass-ochism

2010-05-13T22:44:00.003+01:00

Hello, and Christ on a bike, it’s been well over a year since I last blogged. What happened? I changed jobs at the very end of March 2009 to one that takes up far more of my time than I want it to – I can’t say it was wholly a mistake as the pay is good, but sadly I find there to be few other redeeming features. That extra pay did help with the other major event: my wedding in September 2009. It involved an incredible amount of preparation (I didn’t quite believe people when they warned me) but was, in all seriousness, the best day of my life, so most certainly worth it. And as well as the new job and new surname, I’ve been getting a lot more serious on the knitting and wildlife fronts. I’m sure if I can get back into blogging I’ll cover all of those, barring work, in a few detailed catch-up posts.

For now, I should explain why, suddenly, on Thursday 13 May 2010, I am back.

As I’m sure most readers will know, we’ve just had a general election in the UK, with a shiny new Prime Minister. I was following some political discussions on the British Knitters group on Ravelry, when someone mentioned the Mass Observation social research project. Started in 1937, this seeks to create an archive of the experiences of the average British citizen, as a historical record of the populace. The sort of thing that we had to analyse in GCSE History, by the time I took it (at the time with much eye-rolling, but of great interest to me now). The original project ran until the 1950s, and was resurrected in 1981, the year of my birth. These days, participants are asked to write three pieces a year for the archive on their thoughts on specific issues, plus any other pieces they’d like to contribute. These are archived anonymously, catalogued by date and by topic, and available to researchers upon application to the University of Sussex. I am sure I could spend hours reading through the minutiae of people’s lives. I have, in fact, just ordered the first book of records by the prolific Nella Last, a housewife who kept very detailed records for Mass Observation through World War II and into peacetime, and I can’t wait for it to arrive.

I would absolutely love to write for Mass Observation, but unfortunately they are currently only recruiting males aged 16-44 who live in the north of England. They might consider those who meet two out of three criteria, but since I only meet the age requirement, I’m not going to get in. Given my blogging performance, that might be a good thing… Happily, and also by the power of Ravelry, I was alerted to a one-off project for anyone to submit a 750-word diary entry for 12 May 2010. I believe the date was chosen to be an ordinary day, because that same date had been used for the same project in 1937 (the date of the coronation of George VI); I am probably going to order that book too. As it happened, given the rather drawn-out process of forming a coalition government over the last week, the entries might be a bit more political than the Mass Observation people had anticipated.

Last night, after knitting, I sat down to write my diary, and, having done so, I realised that I had a ready-made blog entry – or at least half of one seeing as I suspect the above introduction might easily be as long. Longer, in fact, since I have a tendency to be verbose (perhaps that’s why I don’t keep up the blog – it takes too long to write all I want to say). My first draft of the diary entry came in at just under 1,000 words and still, in my mind, contained hardly anything. No details, no feelings. Cutting it down even further to meet the word limit pained me greatly. But having survived doing so, I might as well offer it up to any dear readers who might still be around.

The style is, therefore, sparser than usual, and contains the required background information. We were asked to describe our day, including whether it was typical, and to include such details as who we met, what we ate, and the like.

On that note, I will leave you with the entry itself below, and go and do some long-needed comment moderation since the spammers found this blog. I promise to be back soon!

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I am a 29-year-old female living in north London with my husband. I am an accountant specialising in corporate tax.

Today was a typical Wednesday: work followed by my knitting group’s regular weekly meet-up.

I first woke up at 7am, when the alarm went off for my husband to get up – he is due in his office earlier than I am due in mine, and he has usually left the house before I get out of bed at 8.15am. I value sleep more than a leisurely time getting ready, so I rush to shower, dress and do basic make-up – I don’t make much of an effort with that for the office. I never eat breakfast at home – I might buy something on my way into work but often, including today, I skip it entirely. This morning getting up was harder than normal because I’ve been suffering with a cold for the last few days, and kept myself awake coughing during the night. I’d had the last two days off work sick, since I’d completely lost my voice, so today was my first day back.

My usual route into work is to take the bus down to the tube station. It is within walking distance but I am shamefully lazy. On arrival at the tube station I found the gates closed as one of the two lines it serves was disrupted and so the station was overcrowded. However we were let in reasonably soon, so that didn’t make me late for work. I have to change once on the tube, then there’s about a ten-minute walk to my office in the City.

My work involves the preparation of tax returns for our UK companies, plus dealing with correspondence with the Revenue, sorting out tax payments, and fielding queries from the accounting teams in our business units. Nothing out of the ordinary happened today work-wise.

I work in a team of five people, plus our boss who sits in her own office. We are quite sociable and chat whilst we work. Today’s main topic of conversation was of course the new coalition government, and in particular their tax plans. We will need to report to our board on the outcome of the replacement Budget that we have been told will be given soon, so that gave us an excuse to spend a lot of time surfing various news websites in search of any rumours. Plenty of tea was made, as always.

For lunch I bought a freshly-prepared salad from a take-away place by our office, plus a soft drink and a chocolate-chip cookie for later, but sadly the cookie turned out to be not very nice so I didn’t finish it.

At 5.45pm I left the office – this is unusually early for me, as I tend to stay until at least 6.30pm, often later. I am not paid overtime, but my contract says that I am required to work any additional hours needed to do my job. This is quite standard in financial services, but I do at least get a bonus (never enough!) once a year.

Having exchanged e-mails during the day to arrange a venue, I headed across to west London to a crêperie to meet my knitting group. This was to be a new venue for us, and did not work out very well. We do not generally all turn up at the same time, so need a place where we are able to take over a table big enough for all of us for the whole evening. The crêperie was extremely busy and the waitresses could not let us do that, but luckily fewer people than normal came along. We admired each other’s knitting, ate crêpes and chatted about the election, books, films etc. I was knitting a plain triangular shawl, since this is easy to do whilst talking!

We left the restaurant at 9pm. The tube disruption from earlier was still going on, so it took me longer than usual to get home. Coincidentally I arrived at my home station at the same time as my husband, who had been rock climbing with his friends, so we took the bus home together, arriving back at 10pm. We don’t have a television, so both spent some time reading and surfing the internet on our laptops, with the heating on as it is unusually cold for May. I wrote this diary entry at just past midnight, and will go to bed as soon as it is sent.

Belt up

2009-03-11T23:43:00.002Z

Last week I finally made it to a class at The Make Lounge, after basically everybody I know has been there multiple times without me. Can't think why I haven't before. It's even really close to where I live, and opposite the road where my most-local yarn shop Loop is.

The Make Lounge is a tiny little studio devoted to interesting crafty classes, owned by the very friendly Jennifer, and has been open for nearly a year now. It's really bright and still cosy, and you get free wine, tea and biscuits with your class.

The one I went to was on leather belt-making, so something I figured I could not do at home. The class was run by the very lovely Merle and there were about eight of us doing it. We were given a basic design to work with and allowed to choose dark or light brown leather (or a combo), plus metal hardware in the form of buckles or studs, in gold or silver, then away we went with all the fun stuff. It was quite hard work: cutting the leather (it was very thick), polishing down the edges, conditioning and buffing the surface to a shine, painting the edges with dye, deciding to bevel everything so more polishing, buffing and dyeing... Better than a gym workout for the upper arms. That was even before we moved onto the hole punching and riveting, with rubber mallets, tiny little anvils, and strange punching machinery.

After all that, here's my attempt, modelled by me the next morning in the garden before work:

I also tried to get some shots of round the back to show off the fact that the holes go all the way round for decorative purposes, but it's really hard to twist and take a photo without displaying hideous rolls of fat, so I gave up. This was the best I could do.

Towards the end of the class I decided to use my offcuts to make a matching wrist cuff. It worked perfectly but I probably annoyed the hell out of Jennifer by still being at it well after the supposed end time of the class when she wanted to close up and go home. If you're reading this, my apologies, and thank you for your forbearance.

Jennifer took some photos of the class in progress, and I particularly like this one for the colours of my turquoise nails and mustard dress against the leather.

Gail has done this class before and her belt, different to mine, is here.

All in all not something I'll try at home, what with all the equipment needed, but a brilliant class and good value considering I got the belt and the cuff (and wine, had I wanted any). I'll definitely be going back!

Proud to be...

2009-03-10T23:42:00.005Z

At the very end of February I had a great weekend "representing", one way or the other.

On the Saturday I met with a group of UK-based members of the Lazy, Stupid & Godless (LSG or lsg if you want to live up to the lazy bit) group on Ravelry. The group was founded on 1 February 2008 - I am pleased to say I was there on day 1 - and so first birthday celebrations took place worldwide during February (taking the whole month Jack Daniels style). We lazily managed it on the last possible day.

For those not members, the group was founded after an argument on the main boards of Ravelry about swearing. Two camps quickly became apparent - those who think that four-letter words show the user to be a stupid moron sitting around scratching their pubes and drooling (but funny how using asterisks makes it all OK, isn't it, hmm?), versus those who consider the judicious use of solid and venerable Anglo-Saxon words to be an augmentation of the vocabulary. And why the fuck not? You know which side I was on, of course. We agreed to pander to the delicate sensibilities of the objectors, refrain from swearing on the "Big 6", and decamped to our own group to be as filthy as we liked. It remains one of the most fun, supportive and kind groups on the whole internet, let alone Ravelry. These really are my kind of people.

We decided to meet up at Prick Your Finger, a yarn shop in Bethnal Green, east London, which is sufficiently quirky for such purposes. Additionally, LSG-member Kirsty was performing an art installation there anyway, so it worked out very well. We arrived in dribs and drabs over the course of a couple of hours, and took over the whole floor for a knit-in, whilst owner Rachael Matthews made us many cups of tea.

We watched Kirsty's Pin Ritual. Her pin-based art is amazing - here's a close-up of one of her hanging pieces:

And the trail of pins she leaves wherever she goes (wear shoes):

Some fab stuff from around the shop:

We then decamped to the nearby pub for pies, alcohol, ice-cream, knitting and good conversation - it is called The Camel but was re-christened The Camel-Toe:

You're all awesome, twatweasels!

The next day I celebrated not my sweariness but my gingerness, at a photographic exhibition called Root Ginger, devoted to redheads. I'd seen something about this before but it was somewhere up north, Wolverhampton I think (yes, as far as I'm concerned that's north, way north), so I was thrilled to see it come to London.

It was fairly small, and consisted of large close-up portraits of redheads, all taken against a white background as if a scientific study. I think they're beautiful, but then I would!

There was also some video and printed interviews about the experiences of the participants with respect to having red hair - inevitably the bullying and teasing, the unthinking slights in folklore (the warning about tea-pouring and the threat of bearing ginger twins, the proverbially unwelcome "redheaded step-child", to name but two), but also the admiring comments from old ladies about children - that used to happen a lot to me too. What was particularly interesting was the number of gingers there. If I'd been manning the front desk, I'd have kept a tally of the redheaded visitors as a proportion of all visitors, and I bet it would have been far higher than the general population. Certainly there were plenty of us on the streets of Shoreditch, headed towards or away from the exhibition. I was able to direct a few people who looked lost, because their hair told me exactly what they were looking for.

Particularly nice to see were the number of ginger children there, and I say that as someone who would normally rather be anywhere but in a gallery full of kids. It is rather isolating - especially if you're the only one in the family like I was - and I thought it was great that they could see other people, celebrating their hair colour, particularly for the little boys who have a hard time of it. I like redheaded men but I know I'm in the minority there. I feel they're often forced to become extroverted to survive school, and to an extent that applies to us girls to in having to live up to our "fiesty" reputation. I'm not complaining, I love my hair as my screen-name suggests, and I wouldn't change it for the world. But it does get a little tiring when people casually say they'd hate to have a ginger child, or when my brother says on his Myspace page he'd do any member of Girls Aloud except for the ginger one because gingers are minging, or even family holidays spent hiding miserably under an umbrella wearing SPF 50 total sun block whilst my quick-tanning family basked on the sand. So of course I loved the exhibition.

Lots of people were having their photo taken with the big sign, so I got the boyfriend to do it for me. It's not a great photo as I have my eyes shut, but it turns out I'm inadvertently mimicing the pose of the child on the programme.

Gingers rule!

Baba Marta

2009-03-02T23:13:00.006Z

Last week a colleague asked me, out of the blue, "How long does it take for your wool to arrive?" I blinked in slight confusion. To which particular wool of the many stash enhancement packages that arrive at my desk, er, several times a week, could she be referring? Then I realised that to "normal" people, there could quite conceivably only be one type of wool and only one supplier. I'm sure I'd be equally surprised by the variety of things available for any one of a million different past-times.

Anyway, some questioning revealed the rationale behind the question. This particular colleague is from Bulgaria, where there is a tradition of exchanging little red and white woolly things, called Martenitsa, on 1 March, which is a national holiday for the first day of spring. The ornaments placate Baba Marta, who is a crotchety old grandmother/witch - the archetypal crone. They are hung up or worn from 1 March until the owner first sees either a stork, a swallow, or a tree in bloom - if the latter, the ornaments should be tied to the tree (presumably this is not feasible with the stork or the swallow and therefore not required by tradition).

It is acceptable and common to purchase Martenitsa (although not for yourself, you have to exchange), but handmade is best. We therefore headed to John Lewis for wool, beads and other supplies, then spent an enjoyable lunch hour creating the ornaments.

Most of the Martenitsa are based on tassles, and the most traditional are little people, a man and a woman. For these, step 1 involves making a tassle:

And then binding it at various points to make a neck, waist and arms:

After some trimming, and the same process again in reverse colours, you have the couple:

Other kinds of tassles and pom-poms are also fine. I made these in the rest of our session:

Here are some examples of purchased ones, including friendship bracelets which are also popular:

Mine are now hung up on my desk, awaiting the sighting of a tree (storks and swallows not being common in central London):

My colleague also sent me a link to this news story from a Bulgarian website, which shows the street markets in Sofia at which these things are sold. They are all rather more complex than my attempts - I did find the knitter in the one I've linked to most amusing (the others are worth a look too for novel things to do with wool). I admit I tried to steal the photo but the site wouldn't let me, boo.

Happy March, and let's hope it is nearly spring!

Shriven

2009-02-24T21:17:00.002Z

I hope you are all enjoying your pancakes today.

I always use Delia's recipe, with very hot butter and a non-stick pan, and I'm pretty good at tossing them accurately (and more importantly, catching them).

Different fillings are nice, from time to time, but for me it really has to be the traditional lemon and sugar on Shrove Tuesday, even though the citrophobic boyfriend treats them like tangy yellow grenades.

Mmm...

Finito

2009-02-23T21:08:00.006Z

Leyburn Socks

My Socks That Rock Leyburn socks for the KAL are finished! Done, done, done. And on time, even ahead of time, no less, seeing as the KAL runs until 31 March. That alone is an extraordinary achievement for me.

You might remember from before that the socks had spontaneously generated a grey quilted lattice effect over a coloured background, on the foot. That didn't last on the legs, of course, due to the different stitch count and floats all the way round. It's still cool though. Looking at the socks (and other ones in this colourway on Ravelry) I think I would have disliked the pooling of these colours in a plain sock, but the Leyburn pattern breaks it up just enough. I think I need to be more careful in buying sock yarn as I have a few which are just too contrasty for me. At some point I'm going to convert some of my skein photos to greyscale to see if there's any way of telling by hue what I will and won't like. I have the KAL rules, in that we all had to pick a different colour of STR and this was the only one I had that hadn't been taken, for getting me to knit with it, otherwise it might have languished in my stash forever. Check out the KAL projects in all those STR colours, so much fun!

Details: BMFA STR mediumweight in "Tide Pool" on 2.75mm needles for a very tight fabric indeed. Pattern as written with short row toes and heels (and not many gaps actually) until the leg, where I only increased to 60 stitches not 72. They are a little hard to get on and off, but fit perfectly once on. I finished these off with a picot cuff as I just didn't fancy doing ribbing and wasn't sure it would work all that well with the busy pattern and pooling. I hadn't done a picot edge before but enjoyed the process, even though stitching down all the live stitches at the end was more time consuming than a regular cast off. I think here it gives a crown-like effect which goes with the regal quilting.

There is one slightly amusing mistake in these, though not easy to spot. They were almost entirely knitted whilst watching the Joss Whedon sci-fi series Firefly, and then the follow-on film, Serenity, all on DVD. Not wishing to give the plot away, there is a particularly tragic moment towards the end of the film, and on reflection that has to correspond to the plain row I missed out of one pattern repeat near the top of the second sock, leading to one slightly shallower V. Proves I enjoyed the film, right?

I will definitely make this pattern again and am pondering whether or not it would be possible to do the socks in black and the floats in another colour, but will have to figure out what I'd do across the soles to get the yarns back into the right places. Not a task for just now though. I have promised the boyfriend a pair of socks and so will be working with STR mediumweight again straight away, doing plain stocking stitch songs in man-size. Possibly dull, but I am going to challenge myself by learning to use two circulars instead of DPNs, just to see if I can. Vaguely considered trying magic loop but will have that as next on the list.

I also have some other FOs but these are old, I just failed to do the finishing on them for ages, then failed to blog them.

Oil Slick Triangular Shawl

From back in July, oh, the shame. Worse still, I finished it back at the very start of November and then didn't do all the ends until some time in January. Never mind, I wear it around the house with pleasure now, although it's a bit rustic and bulky to wear out on the streets of London where I have to preserve my gritty urban cool.

It is huge. I can't measure it because my tape measure is AWOL, but it's wider than my armspan and that's meant to correspond to my height of 5'8". So about six feet. It's six balls of Noro Iro which were in the John Lewis sale in the summer. As far as I'm concerned, Noro = KNoto which is why there were so many bloody ends to avoid dealing with. The result is very snuggly though, and I love the striping.

The pattern is my own, just garter stitch starting at the nape of the neck, then increasing in the middle and at the edges until I ran out of yarn and/or would have given my soul to be finished, on 7mm bamboo circular needles borrowed from Ting.

Feather & Fan Silk Scarf

Worse still, I started this back in June, finished it not that much later, and again it sat waiting for weaving in until after Christmas. Sheesh.

There are lots of photos of this one because I adore the combination of the ripples of the pattern stitch and the glowing orange and pink yarn. It's Skein Queen Kimono, a pure silk aran weight, in "Phoenix". I have subsequently bought the same stuff in another two colours for more of these, but nowhere near as vibrant.

Again the pattern, such as it is, is my own. It's just feather and fan over 36 stitches, plus two stitches either side for a garter border. I got to use my favourite vintage 4.5mm Inox metal needles, which always make me happy in my knitting.

The yarn was wonderful to knit with although did shed pink, slightly fluffy silk strands all over me during the process, and it continues to do so now over my black coat. Must get the lint roller out.

But I can forgive the prettiness anything.

Battleship Potemkin

2009-02-17T20:14:00.006Z

I don't like giving bad reviews. I feel horrible about it. Most of the time, I enjoy gigs, plays and restaurants, because I'm pretty easily pleased. The rest of the time, I just don't talk about them. However, this week I actually managed to have a restaurant experience so bad that I feel the need to write about it as a warning - as well as the mutiny we did, for my first time ever, stage at the restaurant. I doubt the Soviets would have approved of this as much as of the actual uprising.

It all started so well, at Potemkin, a Russian restaurant in Clerkenwell, to celebrate a friend's birthday. The promise of 108 different types of vodka was alluring, and indeed proved to be true:

Does that vodka menu look a bit odd to you? We were told that all their prices had gone up (in a recession? with a VAT cut?) and that a couple of the menus had been marked up with the new prices, but not all. Those of us without writing all over the menus would have to consult with others, or, er, guess what price we'd be charged. I'm not sure that's legal under Trading Standards. Possibly a sign of things to come.

In essence, to make your party of a dozen celebrants happy enough to spend lots of money in your establishment, I would recommend that you, dear restaurant owner, do not:

Agree a set menu over the phone when making the reservation then decide that only "a few" of us could actually have it;
Take half an hour to come and take our order;
Take another forty five minutes on top of that to bring our first drinks (if we hadn't seen the menu we would have lost faith in there being any vodka at all by this point, let alone 140 kinds);
Take even longer than that to bring our starters, whilst other tables around us arrived, ordered and pretty much got through three courses;
Ignore our repeated reminders that we had a set time to leave (which we delayed once for your convenience when it became clear even the starters weren't going to make it by then);
Despite our order being made first, sell out a main course dish to all the other tables so suddenly there was none left for us, especially if you only bother to mention this and ask for alternative choices about ten minutes before we really, really had to leave, thus demonstrating that the mains weren't even in the oven yet; and/or (but definitely not and)
Be extremely surly all the way through.

We left. It was just too frustrating for words. Many jokes were made by us about queuing and the stereotypical food shortages... Anyway, we walked out, which I've never done before. It was a shame, because the starters were actually very good, but we had no hope whatsoever of getting the rest of our meal in time to do anything else that night, and we weren't even getting drunk in the process.

We ended up in, horrors, Kentucky Fried Chicken. I don't think I'd been in one before. Actually, it wasn't too bad because the thing I ate bore some resemblance to an actual piece of chicken (although most certainly not free range) and certainly more edible than my place mat and cutlery at Potemkin. Best of all, it was in my hands about thirty seconds after I'd ordered. Magic! Demons!

Thus actually fed, where was this place we were in such a hurry to get to? Karaoke! More particularly, Karaoke Box by Smithfield Market. This was awesome fun. I'm a terrible singer but I do know the words to an awful lot of songs, and I'm a complete exhibitionist who always wanted to be a rock star. Even stone-cold sober, it's difficult to get me to give up the microphone to save the eardrums of everybody else. Luckily Karaoke Box rent you your own private room to do this in so as not to inflict the likes of me on the rest of the punters (and additional benefits of your own computer with 8,000 and waitress service). Here's our gang giving it large to Dancing Queen in our little room:

I had the dignity to sit that one out because I absolutely hate bloody Abba. What did I sing? Well, I rocked Depeche Mode's awesome Personal Jesus. That's a good one to chant along to, if you know the song well enough to avoid coming in at the wrong place.

We had a group mosh to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, just like in my teenage clubbing days. At least I was wearing flat boots for all that hardcore bouncing.

But the highlight of the night? The cod-Welsh singalong to Goldie Lookin' Chain's Your Mother's Got A Penis, which almost caused me to wet myself with laughter.

"Don't come back in huur!" As the owners of Potemkin might say, and we won't.

I'm not a pheasant plucker...

2009-02-16T23:34:00.013Z

...I'm the pheasant plucker's son. I'm only plucking pheasants 'til the pheasant plucker comes.

For the rest of the tongue-twisting song, go here. I can't even think it without stumbling. Nor can I get it out of my head whenever I'm dealing with said birds. Or as Neil Young might say, "Why do I keep plucking up?"

I am not the hunting, shooting and fishing type. I, personally, don't see the attraction in spending a day out to kill an animal for "pleasure". However, many of my family and the boyfriend's family do enjoy that sort of thing. It is mildly hypocritical, because I am very much a carnivore, and feel that as such I should be willing to kill my own meat - and I am prepared to do that, if the situation demanded it, but I wouldn't do it for fun. That and the fact that I'm such a crap shot, I doubt I'd hit anything, or if I did, it wouldn't be clean and I would hate to cause suffering.

On the other hand, I very much approve of pheasant shooting as a means to an end. Given I am going to eat meat (and I am, many people have tried and failed to convince me otherwise) I want the animal in question to have had a happy life and a swift and painless death. To me, a pheasant, bred and cosseted to a certain age by the likes of my great-uncle, then released into the guardianship and feeding of a gamekeeper for an untroubled, free-range life of pottering about in the English undergrowth, until a brief moment of being startled by a person with a stick crashing around the woods (and that's me doing the beating, on occasion), flying up and getting shot by any of the marksmen in-laws and dying instantly - well, that's a million times better than being a battery hen, surely? It has also been hypothesised that the only reason that so many tracts of deciduous woodland still exist here is that they are managed as pheasant territory and therefore worth more intact than razed for farmland or buildings. That provides valuable habitat for native bird species.

Finally, there's the whole ethos of being closer to one's food. I like to know where things have come from, and how they've been reared. I like to be told exactly when my food has been killed, and who by. When we visit the families, it's therefore not uncommon for me to be presented with a brace of pheasants for my own plucking enjoyment.

Oh, and my great-grandmother would turn in her grave if she thought I couldn't do this, so I have to keep my hand in.

I was going to fully document the plucking activities undertaken last weekend in my garden, and photographed it all as a kind of tutorial, but then when I sat down to edit them I realised that perhaps they were a bit too gory and I might run the risk of upsetting people, so I have only posted my close-ups of the stunning feathers of Mr Pheasant. Mrs Pheasant was lovely too, though not so striking in patterning, and this shot shows her soft grey-brown plumage next to his iridescence.

Instead, I'll tell you about an entirely un-natural food experience during the week. This follows on quite nicely from our Vanilla trip. On Wednesday night, Anna of the cakes took me and the boyfriend to the Dana Centre, an offshoot of the Science Museum in South Kensington, which hosts various interactive/popular science events for adults in the evenings. This one was on taste, and in particular how other senses can manipulate what we think we are tasting. There were some fascinating experiments. The first was to find out whether or not one is a "supertaster", someone with an intense perception of bitterness. This was done by each of us placing a small piece of filter paper impregnated with a chemical, PROP, on our tongues. Anna reacted with violent disgust, indicating that she is a supertaster. Me? I'm a "non-taster" - I could barely detect the mere hint of bitterness. Maybe this is why I like bitter drinks like campari - I simply don't taste the full hit. On the other hand, I don't like things like chili, coffee and grapefruit juice, which supertasters are supposed to dislike. Go figure.

We then dyed our tongues blue with food dye and counted the papillae to be found within the area of a ring reinforcer. Witness possibly the most unflattering picture I will ever post on here:

Then there were a set of vials of coloured, scented liquid - will the perceived aroma be altered by the visual cues? Yes - it was hard to recognise the green one as orange-scented or the red one as lemon.

Water scented with banana odour, or not, and/or with added sugar. Sugar + banana scent = intense banana flavour because we are trained to think of banana as sweet. Just banana scent doesn't taste like banana, but sugar-water alone does if you've had the banana-sugar first.

Blue, ground up mush, very difficult to recognise as rice if you also wear a nose clip to remove taste, texture and colour cues.

The inevitable molecular gastronomy table: textural experiments of Thai chicken soup and a coffee/chili/orange combo mixed with agar and extruded into spaghetti. Ick.

White wine dyed red, and sniffers initially identify "berry" and "chocolate" scents usually associated with red, which magically disappear when you tell them it's really white. Actually, I got that it was white straight away, hooray for my supersmell if not supertaste.

We did get some normal food too whilst we were listening to the talks (I just liked the primary colours here).

On the way out, we passed the beautiful, gothic Natural History Museum in the dark. One day I'll go back and photograph it properly, like this man was doing in the arched doorway.

Back to the bog standard food for a bit now, I think.

Oh, and whilst we were off playing with taste, Gail and Lotta were off playing with crafts at the Make Lounge's pre-Valentine's craft evening. I then had this sweet little Valentine's present in the post from Miss L. Thank you lovely!

Vanilla Ice

2009-02-05T23:32:00.005Z

The snow is clearing now, at least in London, so everything is drippy. Sleet is expected tonight which isn't half as much fun. There are a few more pictures from the last few days that I want to post while I'm still excited, mainly from a lunchtime hike that my colleagues and I decided to undertake around Hyde Park on Wednesday lunchtime.

You wouldn't think that this was in the middle of a capital city, would you?

Hyde Park is full of web-footed residents who also leave tracks:

I'm not sure if the "Danger Thin Ice" signs are new:

I'd seen so many snowmen over the last few days that I thought I should build my own. However my impatient colleagues wouldn't wait so I had to be quick, and make a mini one. He's about six inches high, with twig arms and bark eyes and buttons:

And to show the scale, here he is in situ on top of a big rock:

I bet he'll be gone faster than this, rather larger specimen (not of my creation):

Less fun were the streets of Mayfair, especially those around us where the footfall isn't high enough to force the melting. We had plenty of ice-rink-alikes around our way. Some had started to shatter into crunchy diamonds:

I believe in America (maybe certain states?) residents are required to shovel their own sidewalks outside of their homes and shops to keep them clear of ice. Not here. We merely complain that the government isn't doing enough about it. Even I, as a responsible citizen, wouldn't even think to go out and deal with the pavement outside my flat. I suppose if we all did... But no, we just all skid along and whinge some more.

During all this, the boyfriend and I did brave the slippery streets to go out for dinner for our anniversary. We chose Vanilla, on Great Titchfield Street (the northern end), because it was one of the most highly user-rated restaurants on toptable. This seemed to be flatly contradictory to a rather amusing but very bad review by Giles Coren. However, it turns out that the chef has changed, and with it the ethos, since Mr Coren's visit, so they are trying madly to shake off the bad reputation from their older reviews. Personally, with a change of chef and cooking style I'd have renamed the restaurant too to sever ties with the bad stuff, but perhaps I'm being too sensible here.

So the "new" Vanilla is a tasting menu-only restaurant along the "molecular gastronomy" lines of The Fat Duck and El Bulli. I've never dared to go to the former, and doubt I could get into the latter, because whilst I'm impressed by the concept, I'm not partial to snail porridge or cock's comb. Thankfully Vanilla do the strange textures and combinations but with relatively normal foodstuffs, and they have a vegetarian version, which is a requirement for the boyfriend. You can choose a four-, six- or ten-course menu - we went for six, but really it's more with the various canapes, amuse-bouches and the additional cheese course we tacked on and failed to finish, so replete were we.

I took a couple of pictures, firstly of the entirely white bar (with pink and blue lighting) - note smooth floor as mentioned by Giles Coren:

And the almost entirely black restaurant, which was very small indeed, maybe ten tables:

I then stopped taking photos, because although the food certainly deserved photography, I did think it was a bit rude. Added to which, one of the few other diners in the tiny restaurant (most of the other tables, we were told, had cancelled due to the weather) was an incredibly loud Californian who regaled us all with tales of her various properties here and there, her separation from her husband who just can't "reach out" sufficiently, and her blog. Oh god, did we hear about her blog. Almost every sentence. She'd been to the restaurant before and has, apparently, blogged it in detail. I rapidly became embarrassed that I'd even considered writing anything about Vanilla, even having a blog at all, if it put me in the same category as her. Actually, it went through irritating and out the other side into hilarity - after all, we couldn't actually hold a conversation of our own above her discourse (neither could her companions) so we mainly listened and fell about with silent laughter.

However the food was too interesting not to talk about it, at least a little bit. As I said, this was all about textures. The meal kicks off with the presentation of a slate rectangle on which appear to be three stones, one shiny black and two matt grey pebbles. The black one is a real stone, very hot so that essential oils can be dripped on it at table to set the mood. The grey pebbles are actually new potatoes coated in an edible clay, to be picked up, dipped in aioli and seeds, then eaten clay and all. The shell is a bit like eating a potato-filled Smartie or M&M. Apparently the clay aids digestion, like the parrots at the clay lick we saw in Ecuador. Other weirdnesses followed, including: a mozzarella injected with cauliflower puree and then inflated to a huge, translucent, puffball-mushroom-like balloon; an egg poached at 64C for 45 minutes, at which temperature the white sets to a fine wibbliness but the yolk (with a higher setting temperature) does not, giving the perfect consistency; cod skin fried so delicately that it was like a faintly fishy poppadom; grapes soaked in soda water to explode with bubbles on the tongue between cheeses; and sauce poured into a vial of dry ice to bubble out and spill over the rest of the dessert, chilled right down. Everything tasted wonderful but the main focus was food as entertainment, and it genuinely was incredibly engaging and fun. Kudos too to the waiter who could answer all of our questions on exactly what everything was, and how, and why.

The most interesting bit? A very small flower bud presented between the fish and meat courses with the instructions to chew it as a palette cleanser. We were told to expect an unusual effect, and to be sure to chew on both sides of the mouth to make it even. Hmm. We dubiously tried it and, wow. The initial taste is astringently lemony, very strong. Your mouth first goes numb, then starts tingling - like a strong, rapid, cold fizziness, not hot like chili or mustard. Vast quantities of saliva are produced - I had to keep swallowing, much like (for me) when I'm about to vomit and have to swallow repeatedly, but without the nausea. The tingling takes about five minutes to wear off, after which your mouth really is completely clear, with no "recollection" of the previous course. It's bizarre. Clearly this flower bud contains some neurotoxic alkaloid as a defence mechanism. If I were a grazing animal, I wouldn't eat it again (I'm glad I did try it but not sure I'd want to repeat it). I'm sure the waiter said it was called a "Szechuan Berry" but I've searched for that and that seems to be a kind of peppercorn-like thing which isn't right at all. Very, very strange, whatever it was called.

After all that, we probably could have slid home on our distended bellies like penguins on the icy roads, but isn't it great that we have cabs for that kind of thing instead?

Couldn't Resist

2009-02-02T18:04:00.002Z

It's still snowing. At about 5.30pm I broke and just had to go and stick my face into that perfect round snowcake on the table outside, once I'd got the door open that is. Refreshing!

The round circles at the bottom? My boobs. No, I wasn't naked. They really are that big.

Then I decided to take a flash photograph and freakiness occurred:

My face in relief! It's like the Turin Shroud! Scary!

Snow Day!

2009-02-02T10:31:00.007Z

Overnight, London has had its heaviest snow fall in 18 years. Witness the scene outside my house this morning:

Therefore, everything has shut down. All buses have been suspended. Heathrow airport is shut. The status of the Tube is not great, as this screenshot shows (coloured lines on the map indicate the problems listed down the side):

And actually that makes it seem better than it is because the Waterloo & City line is suspended too but for about five minutes stopped showing as such on the web.

I'm therefore working from home - not necessarily just because I can't get in, as the one line that is still running is the Victoria line which would get me there, but also because our dilapiadated office has no working heating system and it was bad enough there at the start of January let alone today (no, this is not legal). Luckily I can log in from home, so I'm on the sofa with the spare duvet, a cup of tea and the heating on full.

How much snow have we had?

It looks like a Christmas cake! That's about six inches I guess, maybe slightly more (the doors to the garden open outwards so I can't go out and measure). That is all it takes to bring London to a standstill - the intrepid boyfriend who loves his snowsports is walking in and he says there's hardly anyone getting in to work and he's already seen a couple of crashes amongst the cars actually on the roads. Overseas readers may find this amusing, but this is extreme weather for our little island, or at least the south of it. Whenever I hear about blizzards, heatwaves and hurricanes in other parts of the world, I am eternally grateful that being in a temperate climate really does mean that here. When I was living in New York in 2006 there was a record-breaking snow fall overnight on a Saturday of over two feet. Sunday's travel was a bit disrupted but volunteers were out shovelling and the city had big snowblowers to melt it (we'll ignore the environmental impact of that for now). By Monday morning they were reporting a five minute delay on the trains as news. Here that's a normal day's delay - we have no trains today. We're just not set up for this kind of thing, but then most of the time we don't have to be.

It's pretty, anyway. This is the tree behind our garden that's had a blue plastic bag stuck in the branches for months:

And the keyhole on our front door, with its own little dusting of flakes:

Hooray for snow!

A very good week

2009-01-25T23:34:00.003Z

I have been the recipient of an embarrassment of riches this week, both big and small. I can, finally, tell you about them here. Seeing as it's late on a Sunday night, I might split this up into the ones without pictures, and the ones with, for processing and posting tomorrow.

On that basis, luckily the biggest news and the thing for which I was anxiously waiting in my last post has no photos. I have been offered a new job, which I am of a mind to accept. I enjoy my current job, but for the usual minor irritations and slight lack of challenge, but I've been told that they would promote me (overdue already) and give me a pay rise (so far below market rate it's not even funny) but they have no budget to do so. Therefore I have found myself a job which is a promotion and pays the market rate. Simple as that. Without meaning to be vulgar, it's a big enough pay differential that it will make a huge difference to the wedding and, basically, not starting out our married lives in debt. I can't say no to that, nor, actually, do I want to, because the job description and extra responsibilities appeal to me greatly. So, fingers crossed for an actual paper contract early this week, then a rather awkward conversation with my current boss towards the end.

I am taking the risk here that my current employers do not know of and read this blog. I don't think they do. I'm extremely careful. Still, it's not as if the new job is going to be a secret for very much longer, which is great as I loathe the cloak-and-dagger nature of seeking alternative employment.

I also admit to being slightly worried about changing jobs at all in this economy, giving up a pretty secure position for somewhere else where "last-in-first-out" may well be the formula in the even of redundancies, and every other company going into administration at the moment it seems. But hell, I was last into my current place, so that wouldn't be any better there. Also, with the job I do (and even more so with the specific new role) there's a need for me no matter how badly the company itself does... I'm therefore choosing to be brave and make the change, rather than putting up with things for a sense of security which is most likely false anyway.

What else?

Well, with the January detox regime my weight has finally dipped below a number which had seemingly been a bit of a barrier for a while. There's no real significance to it other than that it makes me feel like progress is being made. I haven't even been exercising that much, what with prepping for interviews, going to interviews, and endless calls with my recruitment consultant, so this has been from quasi-religious devotion to the diet alone. This makes me think it will be even better now I can get back down to the gym this week.

The only breach of the diet so far, by the way, has been accepting cups of tea in various interviews, and then a sandwich when offered at the final one. I felt that the social conventions were pressing enough to abandon my dietary fads. After all, I'm not stupid enough to risk my career on wanting to refuse wheat and dairy products for a month. Otherwise, my sushi consumption has been through the roof which makes me a very happy bunny indeed.

What else, what else...

Finally the building work that our landlord has put off for months is being done. The flat is currently in disarray but at least they have found and fixed the root cause of the horrible fluffy mould that was eating our spare room so that's all to the good. My laptop is now all fixed up with a new, reliable hard drive and an extra gigabyte of memory whilst we were mucking around with its innards, so I am typing this on my new, whizzy set-up - this means for the first time I don't have to disable all of Vista's fancy graphical bells and whistles. I scored some Wollmeise (that's yarn for the uninitiated, very covetable yarn) in this Friday's update, and plans are now afoot to head over to Germany in the spring to visit one of her market stalls for in-person shopping. I spent some quality time in person and on the phone with various lovely friends, some of whom I see all the time and some of whom I see all too rarely, though most of that stuff will go in the picture-driven post. And I have finally managed to secure a bouncy castle booking for the wedding, with the 2009 rates actually being lower than the 2008 ones for some strange reason.

I hope that you are all having an equally fortuitous time of it, and if not, well, things can and will change, take it from me.

Dulli's-ville

2009-01-20T22:01:00.006Z

That title is a bit of a misnomer. Last night we went to see Greg Dulli, ex-lead singer of the Afghan Whigs and currently of the Twilight Singers, in a collaboration he's doing at the moment with Mark Lanegan, ex-lead singer of Screaming Trees and occasionally of Queens of the Stone Age. These two are now writing together as The Gutter Twins. I've been a fan of Greg Dulli's work for years, since buying "1965" by the Afghan Whigs back in 1998 on the strength of a review in Q magazine extolling its darky, gothy, highly sexual, New Orleans-inspired feel (I can't find the Q review online so here's the one from Rolling Stone). I introduced it to the boyfriend as soon as we got together and he bought me one of their other albums for Valentine's Day a couple of weeks later. Aaah. Mark Lanegan, however, was a bit of an unknown to me - for some reason I've never really listened to Screaming Trees - which is why I said we went to see Greg Dulli.

It certainly wasn't dull. The two of them have very different voices: Mark Lanegan's is very deep, absolutely controlled, and with huge range; Greg Dulli's is more of a charged yelp across the high notes. Together, they work really well. It was a great concert, and I am now going to have to find a copy of their album together, and some of Mark's stuff.

That photo isn't very good as they were strictly enforcing no flash photography. I'd never use flash in that situation anyway (in fact, hardly ever in any circumstances) as all you do is illuminate the head of the person in front of you and irritate everybody around, but the stewards were generally unhappy about anyone whipping out a camera. After what happened to Eddie Vedder last year (even the first few seconds should give you the idea), I'm not surprised bands are cracking down on this. But during the interval I got a slightly better photo of the venue, the stupendous Union Chapel in Islington:

It's even more stunning in person, when your eyes can pick out the octagonal chamber and old wooden pews by candlelight. This is what churches should be for.

Other than that, life is in a state of flux... I won't say any more but I am waiting for news, something good, but it's boring to wait. I've been distracting myself with the Leyburn socks KAL. Here they are:

The other foot is coming along too.

I've also been amusing myself by spotting these signs around London which I'm sure the lsg crew on Ravelry will enjoy. Yes, yes, the company's actually called ISG, not LSG, but it looks that way with the oh-so-trendy mixed upper- and lower-case.

Back to the pretty socks and a pile of DVDs...

Swap Joy, even for Bees

2009-01-17T15:00:00.007Z

My Rubberswap Redux swap package arrived today, hooray! It is from the fabulous Lisa B of Lisabeedesigns. It actually arrived yesterday but the postie had to leave a card through the door. I wasn't sure if it would be ready for collection at the sorting office yet, but I couldn't wait, and it was a lovely, sunny morning (for a change) for the walk so I chanced it, and the knitting gods smiled upon me.

Because it was sunny, with decent light for photography, I decided to open it in the garden with my camera. This was a mistake, as will become clear.

First layer unwrapped - I thoroughly approve of recycling boxes, for both economical and environmental reasons, so you are a girl after my own heart, Lisa. I send most of my packages out in boxes from something else. Hotel Chocolat are, incidentally, an excellent source of useful, small boxes for this type of thing.

Opening the box, I found a lovely note which I read with great excitement.

Unfortunately, as I was doing so, a visitor arrived. A honeybee. Actually, I'm assuming it arrived, rather than being in the box already. This is Lisabeedesigns, after all. I did even joke on the thread in RR that my partner shouldn't send me a boxful of live bees because they are an illegal import at UK Customs because of nasty bee diseases... Surely not? No, I'm pretty sure I saw it land. It wandered over the tissue paper for a bit:

Then disappeared into the depths of the box. Oh dear.

I can't remember if I've mentioned it before, but I have a horrible phobia of wasps. I'm slightly more comfortable around honeybees, but I would hardly say I was keen on them. Worse still, by this point a furious buzzing was emanating from the box. I wasn't entirely happy about putting my hand in there. I whacked the box a couple of times with a stick, to try to frighten it out, but no bee emerged. Shit.

Dilemma: leave the box until later, or proceed with opening? I didn't really want to leave it as I wouldn't have known whether or not the bee was still in there. The boyfriend, who used to work with honeybees and therefore has little fear of them, was off climbing so not around to save me, and anyway, how pathetic and girly would that be? Besides, all he would do to remove the bee would be to upend the box and steal my joy of unpacking it. I decided to be brave. I extracted the contents gingerly (ha) using the big scissors I'd had on hand for unwrapping to pick things up.

On the top, a "Ravel Mix" CD burned by Lisa of music she thought I'd like, based on my Amazon wishlist. This is so cool, and shows such thoughtfulness that I really am humbled.

Pretty yarns! There's some yummy Andean Treasure baby alpaca from Knitpicks, always great to receive here in the UK. Then there are some truly gorgeous yarns from Lisa's local Dancing Leaf Farm in Maryland, beautiful! I am guessing from the website that the bigger one is Rhumba organic worsted-weight merino in the Briar Patch colourway, and the smaller one is Salsa DK-weight mohair/wool in Purple Passion. They are really, really nice.

On the food front, Hard Times Chili spice mix (mmm!) from Texas and Lake Champlain Hazelnut Praline dark chocolate (double mmm!) from Vermont. These will go down very well indeed.

Cute little fingerpuppets of a girl and a chicken, lovely bamboo needles with pink balls on the end, and a beautiful notebook with birds on the front. You all know how much I like things with birds on the front.

Having removed most of the stuff, I discovered what the bee was after (crap photo as I was too scared to check the focus):

Gorgeous soap samples from Alchemic Muse, as I'd mentioned on my questionnaire that I'd like inspiration for my own soap-making. The bee had made, er, a bee-line for the Brier Rose-scented one. I think this is very telling on how proper essential oils (like Alchemic Muse use, and so do I) absolutely kick the arses of synthetic fragrance oils. The bee must have thought that summer was here, and it wanted it. Really wanted it. I did feel a bit sorry for the bee - it was quite groggy with the cold and lacking energy from no food all winter, and it must have thought that the wonderful rose scent meant nectar. And it's not as if honeybees are doing very well at the moment. However, this one wasn't going to survive long by waking up in January anyway. I eventually managed to shake it off onto the lawn so that I could get at my soap:

Thank you so much Lisa, it's all bee-rilliant!

Crash!

2009-01-14T22:26:00.009Z

That most nightmare of technological scenarios befell me on Wednesday night: the hard drive error. I got home from WNK, hit the return key to wake my laptop from its slumbers, and... nothing. In fact, it switched itself off. Strange. Then it repeatedly tried to start up, never quite making it. I knew exactly what had happened, because the drive had thrown up error after error since I bought the thing, but I carried on regardless, and did I back up? Well, sort of, just not as regularly as I should have. So it was soon ascertained that I was the owner of a useless lump of plastic, metal and silicon, and potentially no longer the owner of quite a few photos and knitting patterns. Thankfully my dear knight in shining armour was stubborn enough to spend the next four days fiddling with components from Maplin and software from off the internet, and eventually managed to read off the data, so nothing lost and not too much money spent in saving it. He's a genius. I now have to order a new hard drive to get my laptop up and running again, but at least my stuff is safe.

So two New Year's Resolutions to add to the list:

Back up, back up, back up, not less than every two weeks.
Get blogging on the stuff I thought I might have lost, and generally blog faster, so everything I want to keep is uploaded.

The benefit of all of this was that I got some knitting done whilst I was bereft of the distractions of the internet.

Firstly, the stripy "Blood & Bone" socks from my own hand-dyed yarn are finished! I am so pleased with them.

As detailed here, the yarn is Knitpicks Bare for the striping sections, and The Yarn Yard Bonny for the contrast heel/toe/cuff, all dyed with Kool Aid. It's a toe-up stocking stitch sock, 64 stitches on 2.5mm needles for a UK size 6, with my usual toe, Sherman heel and 2x2 twisted rib cuff. I had loads of yarn left over, as they only used 51g (ie half) of the Knitpicks and 19g (less than half) of the Bonny. I could, and probably should, have made long boot socks, but I don't have the patience for the relentless knitting involved or the subtleties of calf shaping. The extra has therefore found a good home to be made into more socks.

I asked the boyfriend to take the photos for me, on a break from IT repairs, as I was fed up with trying to take good photos of my own feet. Once we'd done the above "technical" photos, showing the contrast bits and construction, I thought we should dress them up a bit with my current favourite shiny black shoes, so it was into the garden to take advantage of the weak winter sun.

Thankfully none of our neighbours were around to see this silliness.

Having finished those, I moved onto a deadline job. Tomorrow is my father's 60th birthday and I thought he deserved a luxurious, warm hat for out on the golf course or when he's working on his motorbike. In my stash I had two skeins of bulky cashmere from School Products in New York (the trip on which this was acquired is one of the things I nearly lost the photos of, and must blog soon) and that seemed perfect. It's black, but a fairly washed-out, flecky black. It is very soft and lovely. The hat itself is just a 4x2 rib, 72 stitches on 6mm needles, decreasing for the last few rounds. It took me two evenings, and was finished just in time to make the post down to Bournemouth. Seeing as the finish and immediate wrapping was late at night, I had no photographic help and had to do the traditional Myspace dirty mirror photos.

I sustained a small knitting injury from this as it seems, at that particular gauge, my left index fingernail hits my right first knuckle at every stitch. By two-thirds of the way through the hat, I was bleeding, and had to wear a plaster for the rest. I'm sure I've never had that before but will have to alter my technique if it starts to be a problem.

That done, I can now start the Leyburn socks for the KAL from my last post, so will, in fact, go and do so now.

Remember, back up, people, back up!

In with the New

2009-01-06T23:38:00.002Z

So it's only taken me until the 6th to do the New Year's Resolutions...

Well, not resolutions exactly, but I do have some plans for the year to come. Shall I split into crafty and non-crafty?

Crafty

Firstly, I have to get my knitting productivity up. I have a stupid amount of yarn. I love it all, and don't intend to destash (or kid myself that I'm not buying any more), but I do need to get on with knitting it. For me, that means making sure I have a mindless project on the needles at all times, such as stocking stitch socks, so that I can knit whilst commuting or in the canteen at work, and if I get to a heel or some other bit that requires concentration, I have to make sure I do it that evening so I can continue. I think I should spend less time on Ravelry to achieve this. I'm just addicted to reading other people's knitting questions and/or drama.

I have to finish a garment that is not socks or another kind of accessory. That KSH jumper would be a good start. I do also have the materials for a couple of other jumpers and it would be nice to do them - although this may be better achieved after the body shape changes that are mentioned below.

I have to knit myself a wedding shawl. I have a pattern, Icarus. I have yarn, undyed alpaca/silk/cashmere from Bluefaced. However, I've just realised that it's cobweb weight so that might be a mistake if I want to finish by September. I'm going to double strand it. To add to the confusion, I also have this gorgeous rust-coloured silk laceweight from Yarn Chef, which would match the wedding colours perfectly. So perhaps I should do the shawl in that instead? I've pretty much decided to go ahead with the white one first, and if the pattern proves as easy and pleasurable as I'm hoping, I'm thinking about making the orange one too and deciding then.

I've also joined an online KAL, on the Ravelry Socks That Rawk group, after having had my attention drawn to it on Turtlegirl's blog. We, over 100 of us, are each taking a different colour of STR for one pattern, Leyburn, and it will be interesting to see how it looks in all the different colours. Mine is Tide Pool in mediumweight and here it is, wound up:

Even the boyfriend remarked that this was "pretty" when he saw me winding it, and he never notices yarn (except in terms of the volume of it entering the house, and he's pretty good-natured about that). I have only about an hour's more work to finish the stripy socks then I'll be casting on for the Leyburns.

But... drumroll please... I have a new toy which could very easily derail all of the above, if I'm not careful. Ladies and gentlemen, please meet my Kromski Sonata:

Isn't it pretty? My dear parents bought it for me for Christmas (at my request, they're lovely but not psychic) and it is going to be a huge time suck. Should I name it, to give Ting's Ewan a sibling? If so, I think it's a girl wheel, and I shall name her Magda because that's the Polish name with which I'm most familiar. Say hello to Magda, everybody. Let's hope she needs less of my time this year than a real baby.

That's not even including any bead bouquet-making, baking, soap or needlefelting. Yikes!

Non-Crafty

Now I know this is an entirely stereotypical response to getting married, but I do really need to lose some weight this year. Not that I think I'm fat, exactly, but I am three stone heavier than when we met (nearly seven years ago) and I'd rather be back to that for the Day of a Thousand Photographs, and ongoing, of course. In the autumn of last year I lost a stone by diligent attendance at the gym coupled with a food diary to make myself more aware of what I was eating - not denying myself anything at all, even chocolate, but pausing to think about whether I really wanted whatever I was about to eat, and if I didn't really want it, I didn't have it, or had less. It worked incredibly well, in a way that nothing really has before because I've never truly tried. Then I hurt my ankle and that was followed by a series of colds, so I was out of action during November and December. I haven't put much back on during the festive season though, and I've been down the gym at least every other day since just after Christmas. Go me!

To kick-start things, during January I am doing the very restrictive detox diet I've done many times before, based on this book. I'm not a huge believer in the "detox" concept actually, but the principles cross over well to having a very healthy and calorie-restricted diet. So until a planned night out on 31 January, I am off alcohol, meat, dairy, wheat, sugar, caffeine... pretty much everything, leaving me to eat fish, rice, potatoes, soy, and all the fruit and vegetables I can stand. As I said, I've done it before and always had great results, just never coupled with an exercise regime to make it stick. I'm remarkably good at hyper-restrictive diets, with rules and a defined end date - I am not so good at trying to follow vague concepts such as "eat fewer Mars Bars". Also, this one still allows me to have my favourite food, sushi, so I cannot be unhappy. Five days in (started on 2 January so the hangover on New Year's Day could be dealt with appropriately with a fry-up) and I am not feeling the pinch yet.

I find it critical to have the correct food available at all times, to avoid unwanted lapses, so we took a bracing walk over the cold hills of north London at the weekend to the farmers' market, and bought fruit with leaves and wormholes, like fruit from the tree should have, and beautiful, sleek, fresh fish from the Dorset coast.

Now doesn't that look better than refined sugar?

Tying in with that, and mainly prompted by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's philosophies in this book, and my desire to make my own yummy chutneys from this book (both from my grandma for Christmas), I am seriously considering trying to grow some vegetables in my garden this year. I have no idea if it'll work. There are some borders I can dig out and plant, and I'm just going to try with some courgettes and carrots to start with, but it would make me very pleased indeed. It's too cold to get started yet though.

Oh, that's far too much bucolic idyll, isn't it? Back to gritty urban life. I leave you with a symbol of London, a graffiti'd Tube train as seen on the way to the New Year's Eve party we attended:

May all your 2009 endeavours be fruitful.

Christmas Crafting

2009-01-04T18:28:00.001Z

Happy New Year! Christmas seems to be well and truly over; our tree is down and it's back to work tomorrow after a blissful two weeks off. Now everybody has received their gifts, I can give a run-down of the things I made, as there were a few of these.

Knitting

Since last year's holiday knitting didn't go all that well (with a distinct lack of thanks from the recipients), I'd decided not to bother any more. After all, isn't it better to knit with no stress, no deadlines, for someone who'll appreciate the work that went into it, ie me? But then my aunt came to stay for the night some time in November and gushed so appreciatively over my various WIPs that I deemed her to be knit-worthy and decided to make her some socks. That and the fact that she has really small feet (UK size 2.5) so I was fairly confident of being able to finish socks in the time allowed. Ting is the same size so graciously supplied measurements and acted as in-progress tester.

I chose the Floral Lace Anklet pattern from the Interweave Lace Style book, which is full of pretty patterns. I figured it would be nice to make her something really luxurious, and found some semi-solid pink cashmere/silk Posh Yarn in my stash (Eva 6-ply in Blithe). This is billed as a DK-weight yarn but I'm sure it's far heavier than that - on the 3mm needles I used it made an exceptionally thick and tight fabric. To compensate for the gauge and her little feet, I cut out two of the pattern repeats around, and more than that in terms of length - for example, the leg was meant to be six repeats for an ankle sock versus the five I did for a full-length sock for her, and the foot was meant to be about ten repeats to the toe, versus the five I did here again. This meant that despite these being my first lace socks, and my first top-down socks, they went really quickly. If I hadn't had to take a break for several days because my wrists hurt from wrestling the super-tight lace decreases in the gauge I was at, I'd have had them done in a week I'm sure.

Here are the finished socks:

I actually quite enjoyed the various elements of top-down construction, including the dreaded Kitchener stitch (which went very easily with this video tutorial) but I still think it's all a bit of a faff compared to toe-up. Why do a three-step process of heel flap, turn and gusset, if you can just do a short row or Sherman heel?

I also immensely enjoyed the lace. I haven't done much of it, but every time I learn more about how to read my knitting, and how to fix without frogging. During the course of these, I had to drop down stitches on occasions to add missed increases and decreases, so I feel far more confident about doing bigger shawls now.

Anyway, they were very well-received, and I had the chance to use the "Selfish" gift tags I have from Knit, which make the point by reading "This project took hours of my precious time to make. You may now ooh and ahh and wear it every single day for the rest of your life."

I did also finish off (as in, sewing in the ends) on two WIPs which were otherwise finished a while ago. I managed to get these done on the morning when I was due to head down to Bournemouth for the holidays. May I present garter rib socks for me made from Cherry Tree Hill Supersock DK in the Cherry Blossom colourway:

(Talking of DK weights, the CTH was about half the weight of the PY!)

And the Lucious Llama Lace scarf in Mirasol Miski, which has been very snuggly indeed over the last week or so:

I also used the time off to get on with my stripy socks:

And my Kidsilk Haze jumper:

Just one other knitting-related photo from the holidays:

Sadly, I think they mean fibre optics.

Needle Felting

A new craft for me, this. I'd picked up some felting needles and merino tops from The Handweaver's Studio early last year, and a copy of Fleece Dog some time before that. Then very recently one of my colleagues brought me back another very cute book of needle felted animals from her native Japan. It was time to give it a go, so I decided to see if I could make the lovely Gail small effigies of her own two kitties.

I didn't take any photos during the process, and I was subjected to plenty of "that'll never work" heckling from the boyfriend, but it did work! Here are the girls:

They are based on pipe cleaner skeletons (big green fluffy novelty ones were all I could find locally so they had to do), covered with merino tops. The eyes are small green beads poked into the heads on U-shaped lengths of craft wire, and the whiskers are the more slippery beading wire pushed through the heads and clipped to the right length.

These were great fun to make and I will be doing various other little animals for myself at some point. I think certain members of the mustelid family might be pretty adorable (red panda, sea otter and zorilla in particular).

Beading

It had been ages since I'd picked up a bead in earnest, certainly not since starting this blog, but I used to make quite a bit of jewellery and do have a bead stash. I needed to get back into it as I intend to create my bouquet out of Swarovski crystals. I ended up making this keyring out of green and clear crystals, silver beads and white pearls, for Lotta:

Probably not the most practical keyring, but never mind!

I also made some stuff for myself that evening, including this ring out of blue-green (technically "Indicolite") crystals, large dark grey-burgundy pearls, small white pearls and small silver beads, on one of the ring bases with a loop to attach things, as sold at the Swarovski shop on Great Marlborough Street:

I did really want to have the bunch more solid and able to stand up, but it seemed to be impossible to pack it that tightly whilst still being able to access the loop to attach things, so the stalks flop around and jangle as I move my hand. It's quite fun although distracting to wear whilst typing.

That's it for the presents. My craft (and other) activities for 2009 will be in the next post.

Post-Christmas Greetings

2008-12-26T20:09:00.003Z

On Boxing Day evening, I hope this finds all of you slowly emerging from your gluttonous turkey-induced slumbers, dragging your way out of piles of wrapping paper, and wondering what the hell to do in this slightly boring bit of the year between Christmas and New Year. It's not quite time to be doing anything useful or indeed anything that would require resolutions, like tidying the house or hitting the gym; those are what January is for. No, what this period seems to be for is watching the telly.

As I don't do the evil television, instead I will make you a present of some knitting-related videos. Can you tell I just worked out how to embed YouTube videos in my post the other day?

Firstly, and this is the one I would really recommend watching, a knitted music video by French-Canadian pop duo Tricot Machine. Yes, the name of their band is "knitting machine" in French. Apart from that, the song, "Les Peaux de Lièvres" is ethereal and lovely. I am a complete sucker for French pop, and piano-driven songs, and this is both, and gorgeous.

Isn't that wonderful? Effectively a knitted flick book. You can see as the camera is zoomed out at the start and end there are numbers on the knitted sheets which are presumably frames, just over 700 of them. Amazing. Their other songs are pretty good and I may be using my Christmas Amazon voucher from the future in-laws for their album.

Much less pretty, but fun nevertheless, another music video made of knitting. "Walkie Talkie Man" by Steriogram. It's probably a good thing that sound recording doesn't really involve that much yarn - the music would be all muffled.

Not music, this one's an art installation. Forget holding yarn double, here Extreme Knitter Rachel John knits a mattress using 1,000 strands held together. The only points to this, presumably, being the ones at the ends of her needles.

More of a point here - hideously annoying background music, but this does use knitting (or rather unknitting) to make illustrate the potential effects of climate change rather well.

You've probably already seen this a million times, but here are the Mason-Dixon Knitters with "Pardon Me (I Didn't Knit That For You)", which is pretty funny though I wouldn't expect a non-knitter to find that much amusement in it, or at least, not more than once.

To wrap up, news of something I'm very excited about: there's a film coming out in February of Neil Gaiman's "Coraline"! That in itself would be great (but scary), but even better, it's a 3D stop-motion animation (inherently cool) and has plenty of craft content. I mean, buttons for eyes and all... The trailer is here on the film's website and certainly worth a look, but I shall embed here for you a short film about the person who made the incredible minature knitwear for the puppets.

Enjoy!

The Economics of Chutney

2008-12-23T23:24:00.007Z

Greetings from down south, where I am already whiling away the holidays by spending too much time on the internet and eating too many mince pies.

Whilst at the hairdresser's this afternoon, I happened upon this piece in the Telegraph: apparently our illustrious Mayor of London Boris is giving home-made gifts of chutney this year.

I would very much like to try Mr Johnson's chutney - I expect it is made to very high standards with quality ingredients, him being that sort of chap. It's also, in a small way, nice to know that my elected representative can turn his hand to such things. Perhaps by next year he'll have learned to knit?

Interesting economic analysis and I did love the photo tag-line: "Home-made chutney is not the answer." What was the question?

Hark! The Herald An... Oh, Wait...

2008-12-22T12:22:00.003Z

I don't believe in them, do I?

For the last few days I have been suffering with yet another cold, like most of London. I have been puffy of eye, impacted of sinus and snotty of nose. My fellow commuters have been staring at me with horror lest I cough over them, almost as bad as if I'd been bleeding from my eyes with the Ebola virus. I am, thankfully, better today, in time for the holidays.

Unlike my nasal congestion, I have been trying not to be too snotty about religion at this most godly (well, for the majority religion of this country) time of year. My own opinions are very strongly atheist, but I do make an effort most of the time not to foist them on people. I honestly don't care what anyone else believes, as long as they don't try to convert me or give me no option but to do things religiously. As an aside, I randomly found out this weekend that it is former Conservative MP and generally orange person Gyles Brandreth I have to thank for pushing forward the law to allow non-religious weddings in this country, during his time in office back in the '90s. Who'd have thought?

I do reserve the right to be highly critical of religion in my own home, and on this blog, which I really see as an extension of my lounge. But I won't enter into a conversation with anyone about it in public, unless they start it. But then, who does, in England? We're all far too polite. I rarely assume anyone has any firm religious feelings anyway, unless they bring it up, and it certainly doesn't affect my opinion of them otherwise.

However from time to time I will indulge myself by hanging out with the militant atheist crowd, which is how I found myself, armed with plenty of tissues, at Eight Lessons and Carols for Godless People on Thursday night at the Bloomsbury Theatre. This was billed as an alternative evening of celebration at this time of year where traditionally one would find oneself in church. Various comedians were billed, alongside the man who would be god if we had one, Professor Richard Dawkins. Aside from that, I had no idea what to expect.

The problem was, I don't think the organisers really knew either. What we ended up with was a three-hour-long variety show. Many, many comedians came on. All except the very famous ones got about a minute on stage. There were a couple of musical numbers, none of which were very good - one problem being that it's hard to sustain a musical comedic number for very long. The unfunny answer is to veer off into a whole other song ("Centerfold" by The J. Geils Band in one notable case) or keep trying to come up with more verses. This is why Mitch Benn does it so well, he keeps them short and knows when to stop.

Of the comedians, Richard Herring, Stewart Lee and Natalie Haynes were all very funny. Tim Minchin was awesome, as he always is. But I must register my strongest possible objection to Ricky Gervais. The Office was great, and I've heard Extras was pretty good, but as a stand-up? Appalling. Seriously offensive. Jokes about raping an old woman with Alzheimer's on the basis that no-one will believe her, and about a father wanking over his young daughter's report of being molested in a park, are unjustifiable and (better or worse depending on your viewpoint) not even funny. Seriously, the man is supposed to be a national treasure, taking British comedy to the world? If so, I hope they don't let him get up on stage, or our international reputation is ruined.

Simon Singh and Richard Dawkins, of course, spoke brilliantly, but then they always do which is why we go to see them speak elsewhere for more than five minutes. The compere, Robin Ince, was very funny, full of the kind of scientific jokes about Richard Feynman that I love, and attacks on evil bitch Ann Coulter (yes, that's Dickipedia, the encyclopaedia of dicks) but it was a bit ruined by hearing him on the radio yesterday using all the same jokes. It always disappoints me when I realise that comedians aren't making it all up on the spur of the moment just for me. I never buy comedy DVDs for that reason. Some of the other acts were OK, others were pretty terrible.

The weird thing was, only a few of them were about Christmas/celebration/religion. Some were just nothing to do with it. There was even a fair bit of shoe-horning in of other "issues" - see the very funny rant on breeders with a sense of entitlement just for having babies, and a wholly unfunny (on purpose) discussion of access to AIDS medication in South Africa. Now, I agree fully with the points made in both of those, but not really what I was expecting.

And there were no songs! It's not a carol service without a bit of a singalong. Looks like I'm going to have to hypocritically go along to midnight mass again this year.

We were all issued with a free copy of New Humanist magazine, which I hadn't heard of before and probably won't be buying again on the basis that it's too dull and worthy for words. On my way home, I happened to sit down on the bus next to an older lady also clutching a copy so we got to talking about the event (her opinion matched mine: too long, too hot in the theatre, about half of it good and half not). She then produced a card and strongly encouraged me to join the National Secular Society. Uh, how is this different from a Jehovah's Witness trying to recruit me? Luckily conversation moved on to the air-time given to religion on Radio 4 (Thought for the Day, I'm talking about you, because I don't want god with my cornflakes and news broadcasting) and then I escaped the bus.

So for all of you celebrating one thing or another over the next few weeks, even if that's only getting some time off work and the opportunity to stuff yourself with Terry's Chocolate Orange, I leave you with my little light-up USB Christmas tree from my cubicle at work:

MERRY WINTERVAL!

(Off to my parents' place now for the festive season, so blogging will be limited.)

Saponify!

2008-12-20T23:10:00.004Z

That sounds like it should be a spell in Harry Potter, doesn't it? Wouldn't that be a good threat, to turn someone into a giant bar of soap with a wave of your wand? Technically, humans can be turned to soap, but only once dead - it's what happens if you undertake (ha ha) your decomposition in cold, wet ground out of the reach of oxygen. Your fat bits will turn into adipocere aka "grave wax".

That's probably not the best way to start out a post about something that's meant to be nice, pretty, and hygienic, is it? But I couldn't resist, especially since having researched the above I have a new goal in life: to visit the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia to see not only The Soap Lady (a saponified corpse) but such other amazing attractions as The Big Colon! The Secret Tumor of Grover Cleveland! And a Freeze-Dried Cat!

Sounds on a par with the fascinating but sadly private Gordon Museum, which I was lucky enough to blag my way into whilst a student at King's College London. All the deformed foetuses in jars you could ever hope to see in one place, plus a great collection of stomachs as damaged by various poisons. I don't recall whether our soap-making friend sodium hydroxide was amongst them but I suspect it would have been.

This is not how I envisaged this blog post going. I should really plan them out in advance. So without further ado, on to the soap...

As you can see from the trays above, I made a whole lot of soap at the end of November, after the initial post. I wanted to have enough for general distribution to the knitting group (because fellow crafters know how to express appreciation for this sort of thing), to give to most of my friends and family in addition to regular Christmas presents (and therefore hopefully reduce actual expenditure on real presents), for swap packages, and, of course, to have enough for myself so that our household doesn't have to buy surfactants for personal use for most of 2009. I wanted to have plenty of variety to match scents to recipients, and, given the initial outlay on new pans, silicone bakeware, blenders and fats, I thought I may as well amortise the cost over as many bars as possible. It's all about the marginal cost, people. You can tell I'm an accountant, can't you?

I therefore made six different kinds in the end, ranging from two loaf tins and then some of the first lavender batch, to only five little round ones of the orange batch at the end. I have a much better idea now of how ingredient volume translates to bars of soap, but I don't have that to an exact science yet. Here are the six:

I shall introduce you to each in turn, in the order in which I made them.

Lavender Soap

You've seen this one, back in November. I used the basic soap recipe from The Soapmaker's Companion, to the letter, being coconut, palm and olive oils, plus lavender essential oil, lavender flowers and alkanet root to colour it. The grooves you can see are from cutting it and sort of forcing some of the flowers down through the soft bar on the edge of the knife. Since doing all these six, I've been advised that I'd get better results by cutting with a fine wire like a guitar string. Wish I'd known that before! There's a soapmaking group on Ravelry which has been brilliant for this sort of thing.

Anyway, the lavender soap lathers beautifully and looks very pretty. Lavender seems to be a very popular scent amongst my friends so it's good that I ended up with so much of it.

Floral Luxe Soap

This was the second batch I made. Exactly the same recipe as above, but with sweet almond oil added to the initial oil blend, and grated shea butter added at trace. Essential oils used were rose geranium, ylang ylang and bergamot - real rose being way too expensive. I added three whole rose buds to the bottom of each cupcake mold before pouring in the soap, and I'd hoped that they'd stay sunk so show on the top once turned out. Unfortunately they floated so they are on the bottom instead, and the above bar doesn't look all that special. They've also turned from pink to a more dried brown during the curing period, but still look OK.

This stuff should be incredibly moisturising, but I haven't tried it myself yet.

Marine Biology Soap

My darling's request - he is a biologist, aquatic in PhD subject, although freshwater rather than marine. This came about when he spotted the jar of chopped up bladderwrack whilst we were shopping for essential oils in Neal's Yard, and he asked if I could incorporate them into a soap. Why not? We then went to Holland & Barrett and bought spirulina, which not only provides more microbial content but is the natural green colourant recommended in the books. He saw bags of sea salt and asked if we could throw them in. Sure. I then thought it smelled just a bit too oceanic to be a totally pleasant washing experience, so I added peppermint essential oil for the refreshing (rather than slightly damp) aspect of the sea. I also added avocado oil to the initial mix, because he loves avocados, and it's very moisturising.

It is a bit of a rough diamond, this one. It looks exactly like he wanted - like something dried up and horrible on a rock on the beach. It drops lumps of salt everywhere because the crust is so thick it isn't all properly sealed by soap. It has weird black lumps of bladderwrack sticking out, and the green colouring is patchy, obviously due to some weird reaction of kelp, spirulina and lye. I can understand not wanting to use this. But having done so, it's brilliant! The lather is white, not green, the salt provides a nice exfoliating element if you use that side of it, and oh wow, it is just amazing on the skin. I was starting to get dry patches from the recent cold weather, and this has cleared them up wonderfully. Clean and soft, totally unlike a dead fish. So far, this is my favourite one to use in the shower. If no-one else wants it, then all the more for me.

By the way, some books extol the virtues of seaweed and spirulina as providing lots of vitamins in the soap. Other books say all that's tosh as any there would be denatured by the lye. I don't care, I just like the thought of having a shower with thousands of little creatures (each cell of the bladderwrack and each cell of the spirulina being a separate organism). There's no privacy with this soap!

Lemon & Ginger Scrub Soap

Two new things tried with this: animal fat and layering. Traditionally soap has been made with mutton or beef tallow (look for "sodium tallowate" in your soap ingredients) or other animal fats, so I thought I should give it a go even if I never did it again. Besides, lard is really cheap compared to all the rest of the stuff I've been using, and is actually in the supermarket rather than having to mail order. So this became the regular coconut, palm and olive oils, with added slightly bacon-smelling lardy goodness (seriously, it no longer smells of bacon, but there was a hint during the initial melting of the fat). I did half the quantity on a Saturday night and added only ginger essential oil to it before pouring into loaf tins. The next morning, I did the rest, adding lemon essential oil, benzoin (a natural resin which helps to "fix" lemon scent into soap, as otherwise it's a bit ephemeral), poppy seeds and yellow iron oxide for colour. This is therefore the only batch I've made which is non-vegetarian and with "artificial" additives in the form of the colour.

The problem with this is that I had enormous trouble cutting it on the Monday. It kept sticking and dragging on the knife, which would have been helped by the guitar wire trick above if I'd known. Unfortunately, the drag meant that for a lot of the bars the layers were pretty much pulled apart. I sort of squished them back together and most are fine although I suspect some will fall apart when used. There'll be two perfectly good bars, one lemon scrub and one ginger, but not quite the layering I had intended. I've been trying to only give out the ones that were best stuck together. Apparently (thanks Rav!) next time I could try only leaving an hour or so between layers (so the bottom one is only just solid enough), raking up the surface of the bottom one with a fork, or spritzing the surface of the bottom one with alcohol. All these should apparently improve adhesion.

Manly Wood Soap

This was the boyfriend's initial request before he went off on the marine tangent, because he liked cedarwood when I was asking him to sniff essential oils. I decided to add sandalwood as well and fought the desire to call it the more smutty "Morning Wood".

New thing: an attempt to make Castile soap, which, like Marseille soap, has a base of pure olive oil. Actually, some sources I've seen has it as just requiring a base of pure vegetable oils, in which case everything made already but the lemon and ginger qualifies, but regardless, I wanted a go at pure olive oil. This requires the addition of melted beeswax into the oil, as otherwise it won't generate a hard bar. Otherwise, nothing else added. It is creamy-coloured, pure and lovely.

Orange Happiness Soap

In fact, stolen from the Manly Wood batch above, to indulge myself. During all the various sessions of essential oil choosing above, I realised what the true scent of happiness is: sweet orange. It just makes me feel better. I had to make a soap out of it, just for me.

Seeing as I had some to hand, I grated in the zest of a couple of oranges, before adding the sweet orange essential oil. It is lovely and will cheer me up when I need it. There's not much of it so I'm afraid I'm guarding this jealously, though I may make more in future.

So having done all of the above, let it cure for the requisite four weeks, and tested it to make sure my skin wouldn't fall off and turn me into an exhibit at the Mütter or Gordon Museums, I needed to distrubute it. That would require wrapping in something at the very least, probably some labelling too. And we all know packaging is important, don't we?

I may have taken this a bit too seriously. I went and bought some little brown luggage tabs and a rubber stamp kit. Observe my soap labels:

Aren't they cool? I did do a batch of just "Lucy's" instead of "Ginger Lucy's" for use with those who don't know about the blog (eg colleagues, parents), but if you're reading this, you'll be seeing the labels above.

I then spent whole nights of my life wrapping each bar in colour-coded handmade paper (no, not by me, from Paperchase), writing the ingredients on the labels, and adding ribbons. One day I'm going to learn not to be such a bloody perfectionist.

Here they are:

So the knitters have them already, and I have a couple of overseas packages to go out although they won't arrive by Christmas. If anyone reading this wants one and isn't already aware they're getting one, do let me know and I'll happily send you a bar.

My house smells like Lush, my friends are dead impressed, and my skin is clean and lovely - win!

A Little Birdie Told Me...

2008-12-19T21:34:00.007Z

More birdies! These from the lovely knitters at the Wednesday Night Knitting (or WNK, snigger) Christmas Partay on, predictably, Wednesday Night at Pham Sushi (mmm, crunchy tuna rolls are now in my favourite sushi list, along with these from ThinkGeek).

Lotta made us all pairs of über-cute little birds from fabric scraps and buttons, stuffed with lentils and lavender. So clever! Can't decide whether they should go into the underwear drawer for scent, or stay out on show. Here they are with some yummy-sounding ginger cordial from her too:

Generous sweetheart that she is, she also bought me this gorgeous necklace in the shape of a peacock feather. Not sure of the maker but they are at Spitalfields apparently. Love love love it.

She also made this card out of lilac and silver leather scraps:

My WNK Secret Santa turned out to be Gail, and this is what she got me:

A lovely diary with fab, almost Art Deco birds (see, I am crazy bird girl already), and posh chocolate. I especially like the shiny blue bull on this. I don't believe in astrology at all, but if I had to pick one of the signs to be, I'm quite glad I'm a Taurus because I really like cows. If I could choose to have one physical feature from an animal as some sort of weird hybrid or Egyptian god effect, I'd want to have big spreading horns like a Highland cow, which I could brandish for effect. When people annoyed me, I'd toss my head and snort. If I had them, I'd probably get a nose ring too to complete the look, as I've always thought that would be a cool piercing. My darling would prefer me to have a fluffy squirrel tail or twitchy llama ears, but perhaps that's TMI...

Talking of which, my no-longer-Secret Santa gift to Ting was, in part, sheep stitchmarkers from Yarnimals, and at the same time I had to get myself a pair of squirrels. Here's an action shot of the "skwerls", as I like to call them, assisting with my nearly-finished Christmas knitting.

Yes, that's a top-down sock, but the skwerls are making even gusset decreases bearable. Look at the cute white tummy! Love them!

And finally, not animal-related but softer than a squirrel's belly fuzz, lovely wristwarmers from Jade Sapphire Cashmere 8-Ply in Berries & Cream. Mmmmm... Pauline and Lotta enabled me on this in Loop about a week ago, not that I needed a great deal of persuasion - they didn't actively dissuade me is all.

They also suggested and helped pick the buttons. Took me much frogging to decide on what stitch pattern would best show off the yarn without eating too much yardage, and after all sorts of slip- and herringbone-stitch swatchs, it ended up being the seed-stitch that won out. Just like the sample in the shop. How boring of me.

They are soft and lovely although I think they will pill like a bastard as soon as I dare to hold anything. I will love them regardless.

Finally, anyone for tea?

Book Club

2008-12-14T22:14:00.008Z

I saw this meme on Stash Haus' blog earlier in the week and coincidentally on a couple of others on the same day, so I thought I should give it a go. I was a bookish child and so got a lot of reading of the classics done then; now it's limited to commuting but that does allow me to motor through at least one novel a week and so I have done rather better than the "average" six (I know!). The below is actually quite useful in identifying what I should be reading in 2009.

Convention:

1. Look at the list and highlight in bold those you have read.
2. Italicise those you intend to read.
3. Place * after the books you love - I did try to keep this to top five, but I think I've ended up with ten.
4. Post your list so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read six and force books upon them.

The list:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen * (A girly choice of favourite, but I was an impressionable 14-year-old when Colin Firth was getting his britches all wet and it has stuck with me.)

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (On an ill-fated holiday in France which we decided to share with another family, with whom we had nothing in common whatsoever. Thank god for Tolkein in that situation.)

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (I remember failing to read this at school and still managing to make up the right answers for a test on it. But I've read it properly since.)

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (From cover to cover, even. I just thought I should. I feel this means I can make an informed decision that it's utter bullshit.)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell *
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy * (I adore how nasty Hardy is to his characters. Also, they're all set around where I'm from, in Wessex.)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (I've started this a couple of times. No idea why I haven't managed to finish it.)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (What, all of it? Seriously? Even the poetry? I've had a good stab but can't claim to have read the whole lot yet.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (Made me cry on a long flight to Bangkok, but then that may have been a side effect of being squished into a middle seat with no seat-back entertainment.)
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (One day...)
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams * (My absolute favourite book(s) of all time.)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Why is this duplicating #33?)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (Hated it, as it happens.)
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (And others by Mr Brown, I'm ashamed to admit.)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood * (So good I had to re-read it last week. I love dystopias.)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (This is a book? I have been forced by my darling to watch the film a couple of times.)
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (Ooh, shocker, what with all the knitting. Must correct over the hols I think.)
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley *
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov *
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy * (Even more harrowing than Tess above. Great.)
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks *
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams * (Just wonderful.)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (So is this in addition to having read The Complete Works? Do you have to read it twice?)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I think that makes a round 60 I've read, so I am ten times better read than the general population. That makes me feel very smug indeed.

Oh FFS

2008-12-10T23:35:00.005Z

Even the news services are in on it now...

Firstly, the least annoying of the two and the most recent: this article on the BBC News website yesterday. Apparently we must crochet or knit presents for everybody because homemade presents are the way to survive the financial downturn.

Er, no. I mean, OK, the person who is advocating the cashmere wristwarmers is knitting from stash, so that's cost effective at least, but if you're the kind of person who already has a stash of cashmere yarn, you probably already know that making wristwarmers is an option and are either well on the way to finishing them or have rejected the idea. Anyone else? They're going to have a heart attack if they bound out to any of the London yarn shops in search of the required materials - if the price of the cashmere doesn't do them in, learning to knit on the recommended 2.5mm circs certainly will.

And ha ha, yeah, crochet makes nice, practical gifts. Not sexy or wanted, practical. Oh dear.

That reminded me about the second item, something I meant to blog about last month but forgot: an article in thelondonpaper (non-Londoners: this is one of the free ones and you only get spaces in your titles if you're paying for them) which I saw on my way home and had saved to scan and post as a picture, but it seems you can cleverly read it online, and zoom in and everything. All together now, ooooohhh, get you!

Go here and have a read, then come back to me, if your head hasn't exploded. If the reader doesn't show the right page, you're looking for the 17 November 2008 issue, page 13.

OK, deep breath.

I shall ignore the fact that this is written by the faintly annoying DJ Johnny Vaughan.

Let's take the opening section by dear Johnny. Where do I start? So we're "Yappies" now: "young aged pensioners" because we like crafts. How patronising is that, both to those of us who are in their 20-30 year old category, and to actual pensioners, who, it seems, are the only people who are supposed to like crafts but for this recent turning of society on its head. We don't go out much, clearly. I should probably be watching TV right now, but, oh dear, I don't have one. If I'm feeling really really brave, I guess I could leave the safety of home (because crafts = agoraphobia?) and "venture out" to a "so called 'stitch and bitch'". It'd have to be at a "knitting nightspot [insert shriek of incredulity here]" and apparently there are loads of these! Funny, I've never seen one. We just go to bars and cafes like normal people but I guess we are just even weirder than the Yappies in the article and should be shunned and driven back to our acceptable special knitting venues, or preferably home, where it's nice and warm and safe, after all.

Then there's a whole heap of shit about cardigans and Pyrex. Oh please. When have people ever not worn cardigans? And Pyrex is fairly useful but I'm not excited about it as such. Silicone bakeware, maybe, but that would imply that I'm actually fairly cutting edge, and that wouldn't fit with the jam making, would it? (No, I haven't made jam, yet, but I've asked my grandma for a book on it for Christmas.)

It's OK, though. Johnny says "there's no shame in it", so I won't kill myself over being outed.

Then! Then there's the actual box about knitting itself. If anybody ever said to me anything about being "26 not 86", they'd feel the sharp end of my needle, I can tell you. And "the money I save" - ha! At least this person bucks the normal trend of knitting = cheap by admitting that this might not actually be true. "Yarns of wool"? Who says that?

I could live with all of that, you know, were it not for the last sentence here. She wants to convince her friends that her FOs are from a "pricey boutique". For the love of god, why? What's wrong with being proud that they're not from a fancy, expensive shop, being proud that you've made them yourself, showing off your unique and beautiful crafts? Wazz writes about this kind of thing far more eloquently over here (in the context of the execrable Janet Street-Porter), whereas I can scarcely type for fury.

I'd better go and have a fish finger sandwich for dinner, or else the modern world might frighten me so much that I can't sleep tonight.

Happy Yapping.

Wool in the Wild

2008-12-09T22:36:00.003Z

Just a couple of random photos to pass the time:

Another shop window with a knitting theme - here we have cones of yarn at Benetton, I think, on the corner of Oxford Street and Regent Street. No apparent reason other than that it's cold and people might be encouraged to buy woolly things, I guess.

Startling knitwear seen in Ping Pong on Great Marlborough Street, whilst unsuccessfully waiting for a table after the Liberty cardholder night. Thanks Mel for posing so that I could surreptitiously "take a photo of your hand".

From your roving (ha ha) reporter.

It's that time of year again...

2008-12-06T20:56:00.003Z

Yes, it's Shoppingmastime again. This year is even worse as the increasingly desperate retailers practically fall to their knees in front of us and offer us sexual favours if we'll only buy some stuff! Please!!! Our Darling Chancellor thinks that knocking two and a bit percent off everything by cutting VAT will help. I doubt it. The massive discounts at the shops will though, and you'd be a fool to buy anything at full price at the moment - there's bound to be a sale on somewhere of pretty much everything. What the hell are the January sales going to be like - free?

So, I got most of mine done with the magical power of the internet but did briefly venture to the high street for a couple of the big discount days at the department stores. Selfridges, for once, was very disappointing, with their 20% off promotion really not applying to very much at all once actually in store - not food, not drink, and only 10% off in beauty - and that was all the bits we wanted to buy. Oh well. Liberty was much more satisfying with one of their regular cardholder evenings with free drinks and 20% off, including in yarn, including stuff ordered on the night (I wouldn't know of course, ahem). There was 50% off in the more fashionable departments, not that I ventured in. This was the scene in handbags:

Pauline, you in there?

The nice ladies in the knitting department really do need to be allowed to check the rest of the shop though. I found this knitted cardigan mislabelled as crochet in the Gaultier section:

And vintage DPNs being sold in sets of two, because, yeah, that's useful:

Outside, giant snowmen were bouncing down Carnaby Street:

And there were some fantastic metal sculptures of animals in the windows of an office on Great Marlborough Street:

More esoteric shopping was to be had at two, yes two, craft fairs at the same time on Saturday. No idea why the organisers held them in competition - some of the stallholders expressed displeasure with this scheduling clash as well. Luckily (sort of) they were both very small, though good, so could both be done in one session, but one bigger one would have been far better.

Because it opened earlier, I went to the We Make Christmas (by We Make London) fair first. There was a nice professional, colourful sign:

But this one was more suited to a craft fair in a church hall, really:

Here's the scale of the fair:

I'll go through what I bought at both in a moment, but this one was mainly good for cool greetings cards, and at the back on the stage was an awesome cake stall from Simply sCRUMBlicious. I need to work out the recipe for the banana and chocolate marbled cupcake I had, perfectly moist with milk chocolate chunks, buttercream icing, a dried banana slice and drizzled chocolate on top. Marvellous, especially as I'd had no breakfast. There were a few stalls selling knitted goods, but I didn't partake as I can do my own.

Then it was on to probably the bigger of the two, the Bust Christmas Craftacular. I arrived just before the official start time of midday, to find posters:

And a queue! To get into a craft fair!

Most likely because the first hundred people got goody bags. I was one of them but wasn't all that impressed - really the only things in there were a free copy of each of the sister publications Yarn Forward and Sew Hip, neither of which I would buy. The We Make Christmas goody bag was actually much, much better, with badges, sweeties, postcards, and even earrings (I don't have pierced ears but they'll be good for a present at some point) and a knitted flower brooch. Learn, Bust, learn.

Inside, this one was also tiny, but much more packed and very hot:

Whereas outside, it was so chilly that someone had decided the lampposts needed crocheted cosies:

So what did I buy? Well, it was mainly (a) necklaces and (b) things with birds on, including one necklace by Jess Turnbull that was both, like a Venn diagram but with plastic swallows:

Incidentally, I should take this opportunity to show off the silver, rosewood and mother of pearl necklace I got from Amy Bengtson recently, not at Bust:

I then picked up this necklace from Eclectic Eccentricity. I am kind of tempted to take the rose off, but not yet sure:

And then I saw this one by Me Me Me at Hannah Zakari, and knew I must have it:

It is insanely smooth and tactile and makes me think of the Black Rabbit of Inlé from the animated film of Watership Down. I can't wear it, it looks ridiculous, but I own it as some kind of talisman. I can't explain it. After the show I had to go to her website and buy the other, cuter and more wearable, ceramic sitting bunny, which is on its way to me now.

Bunnies are great, they so are, but a bird will win my heart every time, and, unfortunately for my wallet, they were everywhere. On tote bags:

(Goody bag at WMC decorated with a felt and button birdie from My Aphrodite, pictured with a very cute diary from Fur Will Fly.)

(Printed tote from Mr Wingate and purse from notes.)

And on paper goods:

(Notebook actually from Liberty on the cardholder night, and inspired gift tags with international bird stamps by someone whose name I failed to get at Bust but I think it was one of the cake sellers.)

I am going to get a reputation as the crazy bird girl soon.

And a rather cool thing left until last. I was buying these gorgeous padded leather brooches from a stall called Love from Hetty & Dave:

I was paying by cheque as at most of these things, they don't take cards and I never have quite enough cash. Asking the name to make it payable to, I realised that the owner "Zo Zo" was in my year at school back in Bournemouth! And now she's all famous as Amy Winehouse wears her tattoo-like brooches, and she has given up the rat race to craft full-time. Great to see a local girl made good, and best of luck, but I am soooo jealous. Sigh, but I suppose the rate race lets me buy this stuff. Must keep buying those lottery tickets...

Rubbernecker Redux Swap

2008-12-03T22:54:00.002Z

Another swap questionnaire answer post which will be totally boring to all of you except my swap partner.

What form of fiber manipulation do you prefer? (Particularly, do you spin / would you welcome roving in your swappypack?)

Knitting and spinning. I'd like to crochet but I'm veeery slow at it so can't be bothered to get faster. My spinning is also slow but I'm getting a wheel for Christmas so that should improve.

What fibers do you prefer?

All of them. I'd rather not be using 100% acrylic but a bit of man-made stuff in a blend is fine.

What yarn weights do you prefer?

I do have a weakness for lace and sock yarns, but then when it comes to projects the ones I actually get around to knitting are the bulky instant gratification ones. So all of them really.

What colours do you prefer?

Most strong colours throughout the spectrum, and blacks, whites and greys. I'm not a fan of pastels, partly because they're just not forthright enough and partly because they make me look washed out. I don't like muddy greens/browns/yellows although the clear/bright versions of those colours are fine. Oh, and having collected a vast amount of variegated sock yarn, I'm more inclined towards shaded solids now for a bit of subtlety.

Would you be amenable to noms in your swappypack? Any allergies your buddy should know about?

Absolutely. No allergies, but a strong dislike of coconut.

Do you have a wishlist? If yes, where can it be found?

I do have one here at The Loopy Ewe for yarn, and also here at Amazon for books.

Do you have a blog? Where?

You're here!

Is there anything else you collect?

Other crafty stuff eg beads, ribbons and buttons. I've just started making soap but I guess I'm more collecting inspiration than physical items for that. Recently I'm having trouble resisting notebooks and letterpressed stationery, and anything with birds on or anything scientific.

Any books, yarn, patterns, or needles that are out there that you are dying to get your hands on?

Apart from the stuff on the wishlists above? Well I was fortunate enough to get some Knitpicks Bare for dyeing in my last swap but I'm still curious about the rest of the range from the-company-which-will-not-send-here. I'm also curious about those needles with a square cross section.

Thank you!

Look what I've got

2008-12-01T22:59:00.004Z

I collected this today:

No, don't worry, we haven't eloped, that's a certificate "for" not "of". Effectively a marriage licence. That means we've given notice, and nobody objected in the period allowed, so we are good to go.

It is valid for a year, but actually you can only use it on the specified date at the specified venue (with the specified people, obviously). I think we are allowed to shift the time without getting a new one, but that's about it.

If that seems inflexible, try getting the thing - the registrar's office is only open for truncated office hours, closing at 4pm, on weekdays, at the town hall. And no, they won't post it, and no, of course they won't take the next step of actually sending it to the place where we're getting married - that's our job. I feel a rant growing with phrases such as "despite all the council tax we pay" and "how much did we pay for this certificate". At least I'm the sort of person who likes admin, and, well, seeing it and sending it off myself appeals to my control freakishness in that at least I'll know it's done.

However it does seem rather unfair that, to get married in this country, the absolute minimum seems to be the ability to take at least two afternoons off work to do the admin (once to apply for the certificate and once to collect it) and at least £400 of fees for the legal niceties in our home and wedding districts. Surely if "they" wanted to promote marriage, and generally when people say that they mean to people on lower incomes (and that probably goes hand in hand with less flexible jobs than mine), they should make it a damn sight cheaper and possibly ask registrars to keep more sensible hours - even one person there to hand out certificates that are ready until, ooh, 5.30pm? Bloody local government, defining bureaucracy since the Domesday Book...

A Dyeing Art

2008-11-30T21:23:00.005Z

I've been quiet (again!) on here these last few weeks, because November is my busiest time at work, with most things I do having a deadline of the end of the month, so that other people can then work on the data generated for year-end close. This means lots of late nights, but I don't mind that for a couple of weeks a year - my last job involved that every bloody day so this is a great improvement. It doesn't stop me actually going out and doing stuff in the evenings, but that leaves no time for blogging. It's all finished now, so I can catch up on some of the things I've done in that time. First up, dyeing!

I mentioned back in October that I'd received some undyed yarn and Kool Aid in a swap, so I was eager to give this a go. Being a hopeless overachiever, I was not content with my first go being plain or even random splodges that would knit up with no purpose. Oh no, I wanted self-striping sock yarn, with contrast heels and toes, and god damn it, that's what I was going to do.

I armed myself with this article from Knitty, on how to dye with Kool Aid. I decided to go for a colourway in the red part of the spectrum, using the three flavours of cherry I'd been sent and the colour chart in the article. I planned on using Cherry as a bright red for the contrast yarn, then stripes of Blastin' Berry Cherry (pink) and Black Cherry (purple) with white stripes in a pink-white-purple-white sequence, with four rows per colour, ie a sixteen row repeat.

I must pause here to share my horror at Kool Aid. This is food? For children? Even before opening the packets I was struck by the strong, sweet, violently chemical smell. Opening the packets nearly made me gag. This was not something I'd be prepared to put anywhere near my internal organs. It just can't be good for you. That's not even counting the Jonestown connotations of drinking it.

OK, so I'm not entirely stupid, I did start with the easy bit. In my stash was a 50g skein of undyed Bonny (75% wool, 25% nylon, fairly rough, hardwearing, unknown washability) from The Yarn Yard, which was included as a freebie with an order I made ages ago. I figured that in dyeing that solid red for the contrast yarn, I'd work out anything else I needed to know. I dissolved two packets of Kool Aid in a large glass of water (water quantity doesn't matter by the way, just enough to cover the yarn) and put it into a bowl. Merrily, I started off by completely ignoring the first step of the Knitty article, which was to wash the yarn. Why on earth would I need to do that? It was clean yarn and was going to get wet anyway. Here's why:

Dry yarn doesn't soak in the dye solution properly. Damn. I poked it with a spoon, a lot. It got pretty wet but not entirely. There were loads of dry, white sections which just kept repelling the liquid. Bugger. I put a lid on it anyway and put it into the microwave for a few minutes minutes, as directed. On having a look, it was better-soaked, but there were still white patches, so I added a third packet of Kool Aid, aiming at the paler parts. Another two minutes in the microwave and I had this:

Pretty even-looking, I thought, and I was impressed by how clear the water had gone, as if by magic! All the dye had been taken up, hoorah! So I rinsed it and hung it up to dry, like so:

However, here was the dry yarn the following day:

Far too patchy. I therefore washed it with actual detergent this time, to use those surfactants to get it properly wet. I then repeated the dye job with my fourth and last packet of Cherry. The result was much, much better:

Buoyed by my success, and determined to include the washing step this time, I started on the main event, the Knitpicks Bare (75% merino, 25% nylon, very soft, superwash) from the swap package. So how do you get self-striping yarn? By dyeing a sequence long enough to give a set number of rows per colour. I wanted a sixteen row repeat, so I had to make a skein that was 16 rows' worth round, and then dye the first quarter pink and the third quarter purple, leaving the second and fourth quarters undyed. First of all, I had to work out how much yarn one row of sock would take. Unusually for me, I swatched:

As you can just about see above, I marked with a red pen where my sock row ended. I then frogged back to the start of that row. I measured how much yarn that was between the DPNs and the mark:

It was roughly 30 inches, which meant my big skein would need to be 480 inches or 40 feet around! Luckily my main living area is an open plan lounge/kitchen/dining room. I placed two dining chairs the right distance apart and started the rather boring task of walking round and round the room, stringing out the yarn into a giant loop, like so:

You can see from the picture the usual general disarray in my flat - I am not a tidy person. I tied off the skein and also added further ties at each quarter point so I'd know where I was. This skein was not going to be able to go into the microwave so it was time for some hob-top dyeing:

Above you can see quarter one in a pan containing the pinky-red Blastin' Berry Cherry, and quarter three in with the purplish Black Cherry - needless to say this was after I'd washed them. The linking sections, ie quarters two and four, are just in another pan (with no water) to keep them out of harm's way. As directed, I brought the two dye pans up to nearly boiling, then covered them, turned off the heat and let them sit for about an hour. Again the water was nicely colour-free as can be seen better with the pink than the purple:

Except, well, they aren't really pink and purple, are they? More like red and brown. I don't know why, maybe because the yarn was superwash? For whatever reason, the Bonny took the dye true to the Knitty colour chart, but the Bare had a much more yellow-toned cast to it. Oh well.

Anyway, the big skein was rinsed (a fair bit of excess dye came out but the colour didn't fade) and hung up to try all around my kitchen:

I then had to put it back into a workable format, which was tricky as my swift obviously can't handle a 40 foot skein. I had to drape it over the sofas and walk around it again, very slowly and carefully winding onto a wooden spoon. It was intensely frustrating, even more so when I had to then wind a proper ball from the spoon. I've since invested in a niddy-noddy from here to save my sanity next time. But here it is, ball-wound:

And here are the two together:

Not bad going, apart from the colour-tone issue. What I didn't want was for the red of the contrast yarn to just look like an odd dye lot to the stripes, I wanted it to be distinctly different. Just slightly different would have been bad. As luck would have it, the contrast red is exactly the same colour as the stripe red, even though they are different flavours of Kool Aid - you really can't tell. It must be the yarn bases. I do quite like it, and it is very arterial and venous blood against bone. The balls smelled faintly sweet for quite a long time afterwards.

Just to prove that my sums worked, here's how the socks are knitting up:

More than that's been done now, although I've stalled because I've reneged on my commitment to do no Christmas knitting, so I'm working on that at the moment.

Finally, look what it did to my hands!

This was with me being very, very careful not to get it on anything, but I still ended up stained for several days afterwards. Even more grossly, breathing in the airborne powder stained my snot reddy-pink - yuck! And surely if it dyes yarn so well, what is it doing to your digestive tract? Again, people drink this stuff? Disturbing.

Being a good girl, for once

2008-11-13T22:30:00.009Z

I spent today at the O2 Arena in Greenwich, formerly known as the Millennium Dome, at a professional conference - the same one I went to at Lord's last year. Actually, this one was in the excruciatingly-named IndigO2, a mini-venue inside the massive tent. The size of the damn thing never fails to amaze me.

As it happened, who should be playing there tonight?

This meant we had to endure an extremely lame crack by one of the speakers about the economy being "even more depressing than Leonard Cohen". Weak.

Furthermore, one of my fellow delegates had a spare ticket going. And was willing to sell it for less than the £75 (ouch!) face value. And I already at the venue so wouldn't have had to trek across London to get there...

But I took a deep breath, put my sensible hat on, and declined, for a number of very good reasons:

Tonight was a gym night not a going out night. I've lost a stone so far in the attempt to look better in the wedding photos, and those calories won't burn themselves.
Given our over-exuberance with booking entertainment for said wedding, I really shouldn't spend the money, even at less than face value. Hell, what with the depressing economy and the sinking of the pound to only $1.50 for the first time in years, I've just decided I mustn't buy any more yarn from the States (or anything else in dollars) for the foreseeable future. I shouldn't buy concert tickets either, even in sterling.
I actually saw Mr Cohen on Tuesday night this week, in Bournemouth, my home town. He was brilliant, of course. He is a god. This wouldn't have been half as good, being in the cavernous O2, and on my own as it was only a single seat on offer (I don't mind going to concerts alone as such, but wasn't up for doing so tonight). The show in Bournemouth was amazing, he did "The Partisan" this time so there was even singing in French, and our seats in the BIC were even closer than at Manchester. I didn't take my camera though.
Oh yes, and because I vowed earlier in the year that I would never set foot in the O2 again for a concert, because it is so horrible. Back on that blog entry, I even said that I would not go back there, even for Leonard Cohen. Mind you, that was before he was touring, when I thought he never would again. Still, I do keep my word.

As an aside, the person offering the ticket has seen Mr Cohen twenty times this year, so far. And you think I'm obsessed?! Even though I've seen R.E.M. another three times since I last blogged about them (Southampton, Twickenham and Copenhagen over the summer), that only makes 18 in my whole life. I'm jealous, of course.

So I headed off home to the delights of sitting on the exercise bike watching MTV. However I did stop to purposefully walk back and forth across the Prime Meridian a few times:

I have photos, not yet blogged, of me doing much the same on the Equator in Quito, back in May, and I have a small sense of satisfaction at having been to both zeros in one year. I would like to go to 0,0, just to say I've been, but that seems to be somewhere off the coast of Nigeria so I think it's unlikely any time soon. Instead I am now sat at home listening to a bootleg of the Manchester concert and only just regretting not taking that ticket...

Putting that education to use

2008-11-09T23:40:00.005Z

So what crafty hobby should someone with a Masters degree in chemistry have? I mean, knitting's all well and good, but doesn't really cut it on the science front (although Cassie has written recently about knitting scientists and other mathematical types - also, please go and do her questionnaire on knitblogging) and I felt I needed something with the ability to write an equation and a bit more potential for dangerous chemical burns. Cold process soap making seemed to fit the bill, so hell, why not? You all know what you're getting for Christmas now, and indeed birthdays, forever.

I armed myself with two books before I started, it always being helpful to be informed, and besides, I had no idea what ingredients to order. The one recommended by this website was The Soapmaker's Companion by Susan Miller Cavitch. This is a very comprehensive book, from first steps through to the actual science (with bonding diagrams and everything). I read it cover to cover, but don't find it terribly well laid out. I think I need to apply some judicious sticky labels down the side. The other book, The Handmade Soap Book by Melinda Coss, is far simpler, and easier to follow, but not as informative. They work very well together though. That and a spreadsheet I just had to make myself for the saponification values, being the uber-nerd that I am.

Soap making is rather dangerous, as it involves NaOH, otherwise known as sodium hydroxide, caustic soda or lye. This stuff can burn through flesh, disfigure and blind. You know, I don't recall being particularly scared of it at university, where we threw noxious stuff around the lab with impunity. Perhaps that was the general feeling of immortality that every late-teen has, or perhaps the comforting presence of the lab techs who I'm sure would have known what to do in the event of severe injury (and I only ever saw one bad chemical injury during my studies, although many more cuts on broken glassware). I used to come home with my clothes full of little holes, but miraculously not my flesh. These days, I have far more fear, and therefore approached the lye with caution. In all seriousness, this is bad shit, people.

Because of my course and habit of never throwing anything away, I was already kitted out for protection when I embarked upon the practical session this weekend! This is how you would have found me in the kitchen on Saturday afternoon:

And with a little knowledge of acids and bases, I got out my bottle of vinegar (normally used as fabric softener in this house) to splash in case of alkali burns. Mortal enemies:

The process for making soap, or "saponification", involves the sodium hydroxide turning the fatty acids found in a variety of fats and oils (and, oh, skin, hence those burns) into glycerin and a sodium salt which we normally know as "soap". If you look on your proprietary soap and see something like "sodium tallowate", "palmitate" or "stearate", that's your salt. Indulge me for a second:

C3H5(COOR)3 + 3NaOH --> C3H5(OH)3 + 3NaCOOR

OK, OK, no more of that, I promise. The actual process is relatively simple, assuming you get the amounts right. The amount of lye needed depends on the exact types of fatty acids (those COOR chains) and every kind of fat and oil out there has many different types in different proportions, leading to different lathering/cleansing/conditioning properties. So you can either follow a recipe for the amount of lye, or use some nice numerical charts from the books. I followed a recipe for batch 1 but have now made that spreadsheet I mentioned to work it out for my own proportions of oils.

The fat is by far the most innocuous step. My first batch was to be made of coconut oil, palm oil and olive oil. The first two are solid at room temperature so have to be melted. Here was my pan of fat before melting:

Heh, no I promise I didn't go all Fight Club and source bloodied human fat from the local liposuction clinic. The red colour is because I had steeped the olive oil in chopped alkanet root first. This is a natural dye, acting a bit like litmus paper. It's red in acid, but turns a pretty blue-purple in alkaline conditions such as soap. Seeing as I was scenting this first batch with lavender (being a nice cheap essential oil if this went wrong), it seemed appropriate.

Whilst the oil is cooling back down to around 40C/100F, you prepare your lye by dissolving this very innocent-looking stuff in water. Do not confuse it with sugar.

The mixing with water is highly exothermic (heat generating) so that also has to cool. Mine peaked at about 70C when first mixed, with noxious white fumes given off, and took a little while to cool. Here's where the chemistry training came in useful, with it having been drummed into us for years that you add most reactive to least reactive, never the other way, ie base to water not water to base. That's because if the first drops of water hit that base, there'd be a huge exothermic reaction which is dangerous, whereas the other way round the excess water will quench it. Similarly you add the lye to the fat, not vice versa, later. The books mentioned doing it this way round, but not why. Given I like ignoring instructions, I might have done it the other way, had I not known better.

So here were the two liquids, pre-mixing:

The rest all went pretty quickly so no photos. Lye gets added to the oils, and the mixture is then stirred vigorously. I used an electric whisk. This did cause a bit of splashback and I have some tiny red marks on my face from it, and man, they stung - I soon learned to use a pan lid as a splashguard. After 15-20 minutes, when you drip the liquid back into itself, you can see a faint mark on the liquid surface. That's called "trace" and means it's time to add other stuff, such as scent, then pour it into the molds. Note that if you rush this bit, the soap can separate back out into caustic soda and fat, leading to a rather nasty chemical peel instead of nice, fluffy bubbles. I used silicone bakeware (love this stuff) which is non-reactive (teflon or aluminium being bad choices here) and easy to unmold again. I layered dried lavender flowers into the bottom then poured in the soap. Here it is, poured into two loaf tins and some overflow yoghurt pots, as it made more than I thought it would, then wrapped in clingfilm against contamination:

Look how purple the alkanet root had gone! They are then wrapped in towels for insulation, and left for a day to happily react away, generating lots more heat as they go. I kept peeking, of course. Who wouldn't?

This evening I got to free them from their molds, which is important to do whilst the the soap is still soft enough to cut into bars. It then gets to sit and cure further for another four weeks, until it's mild enough to use. Here's the cut soap, which by this time was a pale lilac:

Pretty! So that seems to have worked. I started another two batches tonight, one floral, one rather more manly at my darling's request - he is ever so forbearing of my whims, although did suggest that I could do with a shed.

Fingers crossed it is fully cured in time for present-mas!

Enter Sandman

2008-11-04T23:34:00.007Z

Last week's photoshoot (and thank you for the lovely comments) was all about getting the camera settings ready for Halloween. We didn't go to Torture Garden like last year, but we did go somewhere that was equally fitting of serious dressing up. It was another White Mischief night, as we've been to before, but smaller than the others as it was at 33 Portland Place, a small mansion/private party venue in Bloomsbury (with a bad reputation - there was a police drugs raid when we were there!), rather than in a big club. The theme was "The House of The Sandman", but the original German version by ETA Hoffmann, which is much nastier than the sanitised version we get these days, like most of the Brothers Grimm stories. Here's the relevant quote from the story:

“He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won’t go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.”

As such, one of the suggested dressing-up themes was "eyeless bodies", and that's what I chose to go with, getting some black-out contact lenses for the occasion (not the full-sclera ones though, those are incredibly expensive), fake blood, and a new corset - any excuse, right? In the 20 minutes we had to wait for our cab, the boyfriend took rather a lot of pictures of me, and this being an entirely narcissistic post (and blog), I shall present them here:

He's a clever boy with a camera, isn't he? Everybody kept saying I looked really young wearing the lenses. I'm not sure why that would be.

I don't have any good pictures of the evening itself, as the boyfriend was shooting film (old skool!) and it's not developed yet, and I took my smaller camera on the basis that it fits in my handbag, but it truly is shit in low-light conditions, so all my photos are shaken to buggery. I'll put them up though, so you get the general idea.

Me and the boyfriend, who went as Wee Willie Winkie, "sleepwalkers" being another recommended theme:

Me and Mrs Lovett, aka Gail, complete with meat pies:

A rather sexy older man with a gravelly voice and marvellous dusty grey wings. I told him he was like Leonard Cohen will be when he dies and goes to heaven - if only I wasn't spoken for...

Smokers on the patio, photographed because I really wish this many people wore hats in everyday life:

The Sawchestra, there being rather a lot of saws being played that night:

Burlesque performers, one as the devil, one as a ballerina in a hooped skirt:

The Puppini Sisters, who are fairly famous but I thought they were rubbish, but they only did three songs anyway:

And actually even more rubbish was Death doing a pastiche of Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet":

Our hosts, the band formerly known as Kunta Kinte, now called Tough Love. They're pretty good and they did a cover of Metallica's "Enter Sandman". Rock on!

I actually didn't get a photo of by far the best band of the night, The Dead Victorians. Check out their songs on their Myspace page - genius. So much so that we're trying to book them for the wedding. This is rather indulgent because we already have the awesome Southern Tenant Folk Union booked, but hell, we may as well make this a music festival while we're at it, and some risque songs from men in top hats will go down very well indeed.

Unexpected visits by the Metropolitan Police notwithstanding, the organisation wasn't great - the hideously overpriced bar even ran out of alcohol by just after midnight, and we all called it a night just after 1am. Better to leave early when the going's still good, in my opinion. Sadly I have no scheduled dressing up occasions this side of Christmas now, but I'm sure I can find one if I look hard enough...

P.S. Here's the official photographer's shot of us, and here are the police!

Hope vs Experience

2008-11-03T22:11:00.008Z

This is not about tomorrow's US election, despite the concepts of the title being rather hijacked in recent months. I don't really want to blog about politics, particularly those of a country not my own - in many ways it's none of my damn business. Which isn't to say I don't have an opinion or indeed a strong preference; I just doubt my blog will be well served by discussing it. All I will say to any US readers is: please go out and vote. Not only did people die to give you a vote, not only is it your civic duty, not only do you have no right to complain if you don't bother, but it would just be nice this time if whoever does get in has a proper, undisputed mandate to lead. Don't worry, I'll be saying exactly the same thing whenever we get round to having an election over here. Sermon over.

What prompted the title was actually this rather touching piece of graffiti in the loos of London's Astoria II music venue:

If you can't read it, and there wasn't much I could do to make it clearer, it says "Florence *heart* LIAM 4 EVA (HOPEFULLY)". Doesn't that just speak volumes? Florence, poor girl, clearly likes Liam very much, but she's so painfully aware that these things don't always work out. Perhaps things haven't gone so well so far. I don't even want to dive into the psychological depths of why she's done her name in lowercase. Fingers crossed for you, unknown lovers.

We were at the Astoria to see a band with rather a lot of experience: Kill Hannah. They've been around since the early 90's, but really only got famous on the recent emo bandwagon. I'd never heard of them until the boyfriend got tickets, but it's always fun to go along to something completely different, if only for crowd watching. Emo kids are so funny, after all. And kids it was - they were all so young! I mean, seriously, even the lead singer referred to them needing fake IDs to get in, which makes them mid teens, it's not just me feeling my age. Given he, underneath his Robert Smith-style hair and makeup, is 34, it was rather disturbing to watch the teen girls who could easily have been his daughters scream and squeal, desperately wanting to be the "crazy angel" or the "girl with lips like morphine" of the best-received tracks. Apparently knicker-throwing is not uncommon. The tour (and the album they're plugging) is called "Hope for the Hopeless" and I really do hope that's the case with those groupies. Many of their parents were waiting patiently outside in the cold to collect them, and I doubt they'd want their daughters breaking their hearts over him.

In case you're wondering, and it seems this the most common question they get, Hannah was a girl who the singer briefly dated who then dumped him. He retaliated by naming his then-new band "Kill Hannah". Apparently she knows and doesn't mind. The boyfriend and I have several possibilities between us over the years for a popular beat combo to be named "______ _______ is a Fucking Bitch", but sadly we both lack the musical talent to make it to the big time, and it really would only be a decent riposte if we managed to get to the top of the charts. The second most frequent question for Kill Hannah is, he said, "What's your proudest moment?" He claimed it was playing the Astoria that night. We were sceptical. It was a cold Wednesday night in a tiny venue by Tottenham Court Road. But that and the other over-emotional hyperbole from the stage seemed to go down well with the kids. Shame his speaking voice is so much like Michael Jackson's...

They were very good, though. I'm not dissing their music. I had a great time!

Oh, and it seems black fingerless gloves are absolutely de rigeur for an emo. Must knit some, because whilst I'm not an emo, I do think they look wicked cool.

WTF?

2008-10-28T23:35:00.002Z

It is snowing. In central London. In October.

Huh?

Smackdown?

2008-10-26T18:25:00.006Z

So I have nearly achieved my WIP Wrestling goals, which were meant to be done by this weekend. But it is only 6pm on Sunday night, so we have time yet!

So far I have finished the big Noro shawl, and have actually also finished the garter rib socks, which I had not expected to do. I have not quite finished the llama lace scarf but I will carry on with that in a bit. I won't get the weaving in done on anything, but I think that's offset by the socks. I think that makes me at least WCW even if not quite WWF.

The boyfriend was playing with his cameras earlier and wanted a model to check the settings. Being busy with the socks, I agreed only on condition that I could stand there in front of the fridge and knit whilst he took photos. We ended up with one I really like:

Definite Facebook profile photo material there. Oh, and being wildlife nuts, you can see our fridge is covered in animal postcards!

I'd better go, I have knitting to finish...

P.S. I don't intend to make this a regular feature, despite appearances, but here's more random weirdness, this time from Camden:

I wonder if it works?

Some like it hot

2008-10-25T22:53:00.005+01:00

Today I went back to something I used to love but haven't done in ages: Bikram yoga. Also known as "hot yoga" (to prevent those sneaky trademark infringements), this yoga is performed in a studio heated to 40C (just over 100F) so that you sweat. Really sweat. You have to take a towel to use on top of your yoga mat, to drip on. It's recommended to drink at least a litre of water during class - any less and you end up with a nasty hangover-like dehydration headache later in the day. It is an awesome workout.

The principle is essentially that you can stretch more when your muscles are warm, and given yoga was invented in a hot country, this is more appropriate to the practice. There's a set series of 26 asanas, plus breathing exercises either end, and best of all none of them is flipping dog pose, which I hate. I quite like yogas with set sequences - I used to do ashtanga before the only class available to me ended up a 6am weekday one. No thanks.

I do have certain issues with Bikram yoga in terms of the above-mentioned trademark issue. Bikram Choudhury came up with the concept and continues to own it, which means that only studios affiliated to him can use the name, the sequence and the narration that goes with it (after a couple of classes you realise that the encouraging dialogue from the teachers is word for word the same every time). There has been plenty of controversy over this, in the sense that the asanas are standard yoga poses, and there is some discomfort over the idea of owning intellectual property in something that has existed for millennia. There's nothing particularly startling over the ones picked, or the sequence, and it seems odd to try to claim the sequence as one's own. Still, given I'm not about to set up a rival studio, I'll go no further with my objections.

It's weird that I enjoy this, because I have an odd relationship with heat - entirely one-sided, as heat clearly doesn't give a shit about what I think of it. I feel the cold intensely and am always the one begging for the A/C to be turned down at work as I wrap myself in knitted shawls. I can stay in a sauna for longer than most people I know. However, I detest sunshine, which makes me feel physically sick in even small doses, and a lot of the time actually hurts my skin (it only takes about 10 minutes for me to burn in the standard English summer, and I can feel the horrible prickling almost immediately). I'm generally OK outside if it's hot and overcast, hence my ability to survive holidays in tropical jungles but not beaches, and I'm static, but as soon as I start to move around, I can't seem to dump heat. Exercise makes me overheat extremely quickly and I hugely dislike the sensation of being sweaty, which to me itches terribly. This all sometimes adds up to me having to put my coat on when I'm in the office, because I get really cold when sitting down, then removing it to walk home. My hands are either extremely warm or extremely cold. Essentially my internal thermostat is whack. Oh, and my bedroom needs to be very cold for me to sleep. I'm strange.

So really I shouldn't enjoy Bikram at all, but I do. I guess once the sweat is literally pouring off, I can resign myself to it until after class. That or the yoga is so hard, I just forget in a way I can't when I'm running in hot weather.

Anyway, you do feel wonderful afterwards, so thoroughly stretched and somehow clean inside. A 90 minute intense detox, I suppose. I'm going to keep going this time, despite it costing thirteen quid a class, which is pretty much why I stopped before.

This afternoon was more of a retox as we showered Helen's forthcoming sproglet. This was beautifully organised by Pauline, down to the sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and a quiz. Unfortunately the pairing of me and Ting didn't do very well at this - round 1 was about television, and seeing as neither of us own one, we pretty much resigned ourselves to losing from the start. And we did. There was plenty of cake to cheer us up, of course. Here's the chocolate peanut butter cake I made, with Ting's yummy mango and mascarpone cake behind:

I had actually made one of these CPB cakes earlier in the week to take into work for a colleague's birthday, but wasn't fast enough to get any photos other than this:

Clearly the knitting girls are much more restrained and genteel than the office locusts.

Since the Bikram class was at 9am this morning (on a Saturday! Ugh! Thank god for the extra hour in bed tonight), when we came out it was too early for my favourite post-yoga food: Vietnamese pho bo from the nearby Kingsland Road (my favourite of the many restaurants there is Song Que). There is nothing like fiery Asian broth to rehydrate and replenish salts after profuse sweating. Presumably that's why they eat this stuff in Asia. Pho bo is almost as reviving here in chilly London after hot yoga as it was in Saigon's central market after a morning's trek in the countryside... almost. But since there's no Vietnamese restaurant round where I live, I had to settle for Thai tom kha kai for my soup fix tonight, with chicken, lemongrass, chilli and galangal instead of beef, star anise, lime and mint. All good though. I'm sat here waiting for it to soothe my aching muscles from the inside out. A most satisfactory day.

P.S. This was high up on a wall I passed on the way to the studio:

Very creepy indeed, and entirely inexplicable.

WIP Wrestling

2008-10-21T21:00:00.007+01:00

Being the Ravelympics event in which I did not participate.

Let's revisit that picture of my new stash storage solution from a few days ago, with a close up:

See all that stuff on the tops? WIPs! WIPs everywhere!

Now they are out in plain sight, it's time to tackle them. I therefore announce a concerted plan to squash them into submission, rather than squashing them under the sofa out of sight. No more casting on until a good load of them have been cleared. Let's assess the situation:

Skein Queen Silk Feather & Fan Scarf (orange thing): this one, shamefully, was finished quite some time ago, but I haven't woven in the ends. That's all it needs. Maybe a blast of steam if I can get my old and neglected iron to do such a thing, but I don't want to block it as such. I really should just do it. Probably one for the coming weekend, with some other finishing work, hopefully.

Luscious Llama Lace Scarf (dark blue in the middle): half a ball of Mirasol Miski to go. An evening's work, if that. Then gentle blocking, for which I can use the kit of blocking wires I bought at IKnit the other day. I'll aim to get the knitting finished on Thursday or Friday evening for finishing this weekend.

Oil Slick Noro Iro Shawl (John Lewis bag): I did pick this up again the other day, mainly because I know Ting wants her 7mm circular needle back (sorry hun). Just one more loooong row of garter stitch to go, then the cast off. Again, one evening should do it, and more weekend finishing.

Garter Rib Cherry Tree Hill Socks (right at the front): stalled because I've finished one and need to turn the heel on the other. The instructions for the heel are the white piece of paper you can see. I'm going to do that this evening whilst I watch a DVD, so that it can go back into circulation as my travelling project. With a few rows whenever I can in the office canteen/whilst commuting/at knitting group, it should get done reasonably soon. I can then cast on for a pretty sock.

Lost In Music Colinette Shrug (hidden from view): I started this not long ago because I thought I should make one thing out of last year's Ally Pally haul before going again this year, and figured that the Colinette Zanziba in a lacy shrug pattern would make a quick knit. This failed because I mistook which week this year's show was, and it was sooner than I thought. Clearly I didn't stop myself going, even though I broke my own condition. Never mind. The pattern's OK but not all that inspiring. I'll get it done when I'm bored enough.

Brownie Jumper (Liberty bag): a new one this, because, yes, I have finally decided to knit a jumper! An actual non-sock garment! The shrug above is too pointless to count. This is in lovely teal Kidsilk Haze, and I'm doing pretty well on it. I'm into the armhole section of the back, and I only started a week and a half ago, although I did have a very dull weekend at the parents' plus two long train journeys in that time. Progress will inevitably slow now, but that's OK. Given the scope of the project, I'll be content to have this done by Christmas. The KSH is pretty enough to deserve a picture here, though I have none of the jumper so far.

By the way, I'm not doing any Christmas knitting this year. Once I've finished that little lot above, I need to start work on my wedding shawl, and I have more sock yarn than should be humanly possible so really need to make more of those. And handknit socks are too precious to give away to the non-believers.

So yeah, expect an update on Sunday with at least a couple finished, blocked projects, or you have my permission to beat me over the head with a swift and winder.

And now an update on my poor, scarred Liberty holdall: I took it to the mothership (aka the Regent Street shop) this evening, and although deeply sympathetic, there's not much they could recommend even though they got the designer on the phone to check. The problem is that the water got into the seams and into the leather from underneath, so can't be treated from the surface and it's not worth tearing the whole bag apart to fix. Also not worth claiming on the insurance as they don't make this colour any more, so I couldn't get a replacement anyway. I am so last season, it seems. However, thankfully the staining has faded considerably over the last few days (I've kept it in a warm, dry room) and really is now only visible in certain lights at certain angles as a darker green on an already pretty dark green background, not that awful black that it was when it first happened. I know it's there, but it would probably look fine to a casual glance especially as the surface is shiny. I can live with it, and hopefully it will continue to fade down anyway. Still grumpy though. P.S. Jen, don't just comment, e-mail me and tell me how you are!

Finally, atheists represent! I will be mentally honking when I see one of these drive past!

Waterworld

2008-10-19T14:38:00.004+01:00

A slightly strange noise roused me from my slumbers at 10am this morning (yes, I know, but that's what the weekend is for, right?). The sound of heavily running water, like a shower. I vaguely considered ignoring it, then had the, "No, seriously, what is that?" thought. Good job too, as I dashed into our main living area to find water pouring down from various points all over the kitchen/dining room ceiling in an impressive waterfall effect. Turns out upstairs' toilet had flooded - the cistern thankfully, not the waste pipe, so it's not skanky water, but still, aaargh!

The good news: the stash is fine, being safely in its trunks about two feet beyond the limit of the wet area. I should probably consider lining the inside of the bottom one with plastic though, in case this happens again. Everything in the top one is bagged already. Luckily we don't have carpets so no damage there other than the potential for us to break our necks skidding on the wooden floors. Because it was in that bit of the house, there's not much else damaged except that the breakfast cereal and washing powder are a bit damp. Except...

The bad news: my beloved big leather holdall from Liberty was on the floor in the dining room, in the firing line. It's the most expensive thing I have ever bought myself (well, that isn't jewellery), being worth a grand (it was in the sale though at 75% off so as Lotta and Gail pointed out at the time, impossible to resist). It is, or rather was, beautiful racing green patent leather. It now has awful black water marks all over the front. Observe the horror:

I am hoping that it will dry out a bit and look better. We're pretty sure the water had only been flowing for around ten minutes when we caught it so it could be worse. I am going to call Liberty tomorrow for advice, unless any of you guys know what to do? Otherwise I do have the receipt for an insurance claim, hence the photos, but that depends on whether they'll replace it or refund what I paid. And the premiums will go up. Buggering fuck. It's my own fault as it shouldn't even have been there; I had lazily failed to unpack it from our trip down to my parents' place last weekend (good thing this didn't happen then whilst we were away, right?), and it should have been safely away in its dust bag in the cupboard. Damn and blast.

Oh, and because the water was pouring down through the light fittings, and behind and over the electric hob and oven, we can't have the lights on or cook until the electrician has been tomorrow. We had to hit the greasy spoon for breakfast. Mind you, upstairs had it worse as their toilet was out of action all morning until the plumber came after lunch.

Yet again I am terribly pleased that we rent rather than own this place, as it is marvellous to be able to ring somebody and make it their problem to get it fixed now, without having to pay for it. I really do love renting. OK, we can't have pets, but that's a small price to pay (and we are thinking of getting an illegitimate hamster anyway) for easy household repairs and frankly, the ability to move if the neighbours are antisocial. We even got a new washing machine earlier this week. Property ladder be damned, I would say, if I weren't so busy with the mop and bucket...

Cross stitch and bitch

2008-10-18T16:20:00.006+01:00

The weekend before last, the girls (being Gail and Lotta) and I happened upon a whole new craft: cross stitch! But not any boring samplers, oh no. This was subversive cross stitch, by the Interior Anarchists. Those lovely people had organised an afternoon of free cupcakes and cross stitching at 93 Feet East, on Brick Lane. Free cakes? We were so there. They handed out hoops, needles, thread and squares of aida (something for which I had no a-idea there was a proper name), and off we went. Surrounded by their rather fun Banksy kits as inspiration, we decided to stitch various swear words, because really we all have a mental age of about ten. I went for "bitch" in a snazzy pink and orange combination. Here's the work in progress (note cakes on groovy cake stands made of vinyl records):

And finished, at home:

Given my decor doesn't really suit little framed bits of embroidery, I am considering making this into a bag, as I have a black jumper of the boyfriend's which accidentally got shrunk and felted in the wash (no, don't panic, it wasn't a handknit) that I could slice up. Not that I'm a great one for sewing, but I might be able to manage what I have in mind.

Clearly this is not a unique idea; these guys even have a book!

So that was all fun of itself, but it gets better! Gail and I went to Ally Pally last weekend, and the Interior Anarchists had a stall. We stopped by, and guess what? There was a photo of me doing my sweary stitch! I'm famous! There's a picture over at Gail's blog of me looking most pleased with this.

Ah yes, Ally Pally, that time of year again. Last year was the first time I went and it was enormous fun. This year? Less so I'm afraid. Didn't help that I'd sprained my ankle the evening before so I was limping around, but even so, the calibre of stalls seems to have decreased. Of course, the yarn stalls were great, and I bought a fair bit (Knitwitches in particular is a weakness of mine at knit-fests, and because they don't show many colourways on their website), but they seemed outnumbered by stalls of dubious relevant to "Knitting & Stitching", the title of the show. There were ready-made clothes, for a start. Jewellery. Hair pins. Loads of glitter and card making. OK, if it's a general craft fair, say so... I'm not sure about next year, I mean, it's fun, and I love participating in something so big in the UK knitting scene, but I could spend the £12 entry on another skein of sock yarn. We'll see.

I didn't take many pictures there, but this sign did amuse me as the inevitable bandwagon-hopping:

So where does all this stash go in the Ginger household? Well, up until yesterday, into a rather uninviting pile of disarray:

That's three plastic tubs and a whole lot of overspill into bags. Not great, although at least it was all sealed in ziplocs against moths. But now, now we have a storage solution. May I present, the trunks:

Don't they look great? I rang and ordered them from here on Thursday morning, and had them delivered in the very early hours of Friday (5am!) by the ever-so-genial Steve, in his special service for London residents who don't want to take the day off work to wait for the courier. I did actually order three, but the biggest one is so unbelievably big in the flesh that it has to go back. We had measured for it, but even so, it dominates the room. I could get in there with my stash, and sleep all cosy and warm, but hardly practical otherwise. I'll trade it in for some smaller flight cases for my fibre stash. By the way, the WIPs are the bags on top, the top trunk of those two is nearly full of sock yarn, and the bottom one is everything else, again almost full. Oh dear. Must stop buying yarn (except for the Wollmeise I scored in yesterday's update, hoorah). Another reason not to attend next year's Ally Pally, perhaps?

Blogiversary presents

2008-10-08T23:14:00.004+01:00

I am a bad blogger. I do not deserve presents for yesterday's blogiversary (yeah, a whole year since I mashed that "create blog" button). But because there is clearly no natural justice in the world, I got presents anyway, ha! Up yours, karma!

You see, my Ravelry Rubbernecker Swap package arrived from the wonderful Melyssa aka Gwlana! Actually, it arrived at the end of last week, but I've had my mother staying with me so I had no chance at all to do more than have a quick look, squeal with delight, then put it away until my daughterly duties were done. Tonight I finally got to spread it all out and play. Here it all is:

The yarn is something I'm terribly excited about: Knitpicks Bare, which is sock yarn for dyeing, and loads of Kool Aid to dye it with! I have been dying (groan) to try this for years but was scuppered by the lack of both readily available undyed yarn and the Kool Aid itself - neither one impossible, but not easy, to come by. I am going to have a lot of fun with this. I have a few colourway ideas in mind already... Just one thing, being hit by the incredibly sweet smell from these little packets even unopened, do people really drink this stuff?

There was other cool stuff too! A little hand-carded batt of royal blue wool with sari silk and angelina, which doesn't show up as prettily in this photo as it really looks (glitz never does) but should be lovely to spin. There are also some gorgeous sparkly stitchmarkers, again not photographing that well, but they are lovely. I am dead impressed.

Also included were two issues of a magazine from the 1950's called "The Workbasket", one from 1951 and the other from 1958. Utterly fascinating. I am even more touched that Melyssa sent these from the collections of her mother and grandmother - that's so sweet.

Last but not least, the edibles! Yummy chocolate, dried cranberries (which I think will become muffins, if I can find a good recipe) and some very interesting green tea mints. Since I love green tea, I can't wait to break into these!

Thank you so much Melyssa, it's all fantastic!

In other news, the wedding planning is starting to move faster, now we are past the year-to-go date. We now have a photographer, and we have contacted these people, these people and these people for silly things to do at the reception... Our guests don't get to sit down!

Shank's Pony

2008-09-15T21:47:00.008+01:00

This evening I decided to walk home from work. No real reason, other than that it was a nice evening - not raining, not too cold, and not too hot either as I had a jacket and wouldn't have wanted to carry it. I used to do it occasionally, but as it happens not since the day of the Tube bombs, when I had to.

According to the AA's route planner, it's 6.6 miles (10.6km) door to door, by approximately the route I ended up using. It took me exactly an hour and three quarters, which means I walk at 3.77mph. According to Wikipedia, the average human walking speed is 2 to 3mph, so I'm rather faster. That seems about right, as even my father says he virtually has to run to keep up with me. I think this is because I wore high heels so much when I was a teenager, learned how to stride out, then kept that speed even though once I moved to London I defaulted to trainers (currently very bouncy sparkly Skechers) to get anywhere.

It's a fairly nice walk although some areas are not altogether salubrious, but all well-lit and populous. I am now tired in a pleasant way, and rewarding myself with a bowl of lemon chicken and egg fried rice from the Chinese takeaway. I should do this more often.

Bandwagon

2008-09-14T20:01:00.005+01:00

Even more knitting spilling over into mainstream culture this week. On Friday morning, the illustrious Today Programme on Radio 4 deigned to notice that it is becoming quite popular again "recently". They aren't half slow! Interviewees were knitwear designer Lise-Lotte Lystrup and the guy whose company runs the Knitting & Stitching Shows (including Ally Pally, which isn't far off). There's an article about it here, and the interview itself can be played about halfway down the page.

However, whilst I was pleased to hear my dear hobby on that bastion of radio programming as I was ironing my office clothes, and in fact was very late to work because of it, I did get annoyed enough with Evan Davies to start shouting at the radio. No, this is not because of the credit crunch, not everything is, even though as ex-economics correspondent you probably think it should be. I'm afraid, Evan, that this resurgence does slightly predate the recent market troubles. And as you hopefully now know, it's not exactly money-saving.

Annoyance on Friday turned to horror on Saturday as I saw this travesty of a shop window in Covent Garden:

That's Diesel, who have clearly employed a marketing department who have heard one phrase only about knitting, and don't feel the need to look it up to see how it's spelled. Actually, I've just Google searched "knit and pearl" and there are 2.36m hits, which is worrying, compared to less than 1m for "knit and purl". Or am I the one who's getting it wrong, along with all of Ravelry and the blogosphere?

Anyway, they've even got their own branded wool for the window. I'd be impressed, if I hadn't been so irritated in the first place.

Not that my tolerance was up to much yesterday, seeing as we'd been to Shunt the night before and I was suffering badly with the after-effects of too much cheap red wine, only mitigated by enough paracetamol to run the risk of even more liver damage.

Bad Lucy. Shunt was as amusing as ever. What did we have there this week?

An enchanted forest at the entrance:

Followed by an astonishingly photo-real and erotic series of portraits of a woman undressing herself, through her hoop skirts and corset (in fact called "The Fear of Falling" by Sophie Lewis and Emma Critchley):

Crazy Japanese kids Yes-Yes-5638 programming noise-art, and no PCs allowed evidently:

The KissBox - put your blindfolded heads in here...

...and start snogging for the whole bar to watch on live feed:

(And no, I didn't, though we did have some amusing discussions on how popular and ergonomically feasible BlowJobBox and DVDABox would be.)

Pinball Geoff was back:

Including table football in the dark:

Water pistol-wielding ninjas policing hygiene in the loo - they even gave me a mint imperial:

I may have been drunk whilst trying to take this self-portrait:

Best of all, awesome Mongolians! Playing fantastic music!

They are called Hanggai and are over here for the Thames Festival this weekend (to which I utterly failed to go, even to Johnny Woo's cabaret). They were utterly rocking and the crowd loved them. I mean, seriously, holy crap they were good. If only we could book them for the wedding...

Look at his shoes! And go listen to their stuff on Myspace!

And finally, a complete WTF moment walking around Soho:

The website is even more baffling.

Oh, and we're not dead yet! Hooray for CERN!

Ravelry Rubberneckers Swap Questionnaire

2008-09-08T21:00:00.008+01:00

*Waves to Melissa from the Rubberneckers*

What form of fibre manipulation do you prefer? Knitting. Me and the crochet are passing acquaintances but I don't have time to get good at it. Oh, and I spin, because I can't resist the fluffiness, and wow, I can MAKE YARN, which gives me the warm fuzzies.

What fibres do you prefer? All of them. I guess I probably am a fibre snob in that I don't own any pure acrylic these days, but I have nothing against it and consider man-made fibres to be helpful in certain blends. Otherwise there's pretty much no fibre I wouldn't be overjoyed to receive, although I have a crush on camelids (llamas, alpacas etc) and angora bunnies.

What colours do you prefer? All of them, although my liking for yellow can be variable so I always cite that as one to avoid. I'm not all that keen on muddy green/brown/orange colours either (olive, mustard, khaki etc) though warm browns are fine.

Are you allergic to any fibers, perfumes, drugs, or food? Not really, unless you come round and actually rub a cat in my face (so the cat having hugged the yarn is fine). I find scratchy wools, mohair and angora mildly uncomfortable to wear immediately next to my skin, but I wouldn't call it an allergy, and would happily knit/spin/wear those fibres as accessories or as garments with a layer underneath.

Do you have a wishlist? If yes, where can it be found? No. It's a shame you can't see my shopping cart full of Socks That Rock at Blue Moon Fiber Arts though!

Do you have a blog? Where? Yep. You're reading it.

Is there anything else you collect (other than yarn)? This is going to sound weird, but field guides (birds, wildlife, plants, rocks etc) - these are my favourite things to bring back from holidays, but I also love ones for places I've never been. I also love guide books and find it fascinating to read really old or foreign guides to my own city, London, and see how similar/different a tourist's view is to my own life here. I also find vintage knitting patterns/magazines highly entertaining in terms of photography/fashion/wording, although I haven't knit from one. Non-books: I immensely enjoy adding to my stash of beads, ribbons, card stock, stickers and other craft supplies - not that I get round to doing much jewellery or card making, but when I do get the urge, I like to be ready! Also sparkly stitch markers, cool postcards or badges, geeky science toys... all these things make me happy.

Any books, yarn, patterns, or needles that are out there that you are dying to get your hands on? Call me a cheap date, but I'd love to try some KnitPicks yarn, because I hear good things but they don't ship internationally. I'd also love to give dyeing a go, so undyed yarn and dye would be fab, especially Kool Aid because you can get the expensive dyes here, but not that, and I'd rather start off cheap and non-toxic! Sock yarn is probably the most likely to get used - I like other weights too and am a sucker for laceweight, but have never actually made anything from my laceweight stash yet as I'm too scared.

Edibles? Yes please! Although (takes deep breath and finds somewhere to hide) I don't like Hershey's chocolate. I've tried to like it, honestly I have, but to me, that's not what chocolate tastes like and it's icky. Naturally I defend anybody else's right to eat it, as long as I don't have to. Oh, and assuming, dear swap partner, you're not in the UK, there are some Customs rules to be borne in mind although they generally don't cause a problem. You can see what's restricted by country of origin here.

Food Interlude

2008-09-02T00:39:00.011+01:00

You may, if you wish, now accuse me of trying desperately to bump up my post count with memes. You'd be right.

I saw this on a couple of blogs (Stash Haus and somewhere else before that but can't remember) and thought I'd give it a whirl. The list shows things I have eaten (bold), haven't yet eaten (normal) and would not eat (italic - bold if eaten once and never again, normal if no intention to ever eat this).

I consider myself fairly well travelled food-wise, as it were, and fairly adventurous, but we shall see...

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros (the chili would ruin it for me)
4. Steak tartare (yum!)

5. Crocodile (not yet, although even my vegetarian boyfriend has, in New Orleans)

6. Black pudding (took a while to pluck up the courage, but it's pretty good)
7. Cheese fondue (I dislike melted cheese in anything; solid cheese I adore)
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush

11. Calamari (this is almost in italics - I'm not a fan of eating molluscs generally, but will tolerate when there's nothing else)

12. Pho (oh, to die for in the heat of a Saigon market or even on the Kingsland Road)

13. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich (sorry Americans, I can't even begin to imagine how disgusting that would be)

14. Aloo gobi (but I prefer aloo saag)
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (of course)
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras (ethical considerations make me hesitate to order it these days)
24. Rice and beans (presumably this is AKA "rice and peas")

25. Brawn or head cheese (heh, more than once - the boyfriend won't kiss me after I've eaten this)

26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (I don't do spicy)
27. Dulce de leche in ice cream

28. Oysters (had to be tried, but they taste of something best saved for the bedroom, and cold and slimy at that)

29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda

31. Wasabi peas (yeah baby! Spicy hot = no, horseradish hot = big yes)

32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl (those pesky molluscs again)
33. Salted lassi or sweet lassi (mango lassi please)

34. Sauerkraut (antipathy more to do with unfortunate intense hangover + liver dumplings + sauerkraut as provided by a loving Austrian mother, not mine)

35. Root beer float (but coke floats yes)
36. Cognac with a fat cigar (oh yes... not that I condone smoking)
37. Clotted cream tea (I am from Dorset, and see this post)
38. Vodka jelly (plenty, but I don't see them featuring heavily in my life these days)
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (no different to prawns in my opinion, but the opportunity has never arisen)
43. Phaal (just no)
44. Goat's milk (often - it does taste of goats though, doesn't it?)
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth $120 or more (I am decadent)
46. Fugu (would love to!)
47. Chicken tikka masala (oh come on, this is Britain's national dish)
48. Eel

49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut (I refer you to Anna's poem)

50. Sea urchin (mollusc!)
51. Prickly pear wine
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone (mollusc!)
54. Paneer
55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal (seriously, never, although I have eaten their hamburgers)
56. Spaetzle

57. Dirty gin martini (but I prefer it non-dirty, and essentially just gin)

58. Beer above 8% ABV

59. Poutine (sadly no, not even in Montreal, can't think why we missed that one)

60. Carob chips (why?)
61. S'mores (what on earth are they?)
62. Sweetbreads (not yet, but no objection to offal at all - see head cheese)
63. Kaolin (presumably for indigestion?)
64. Currywurst (but I prefer brat- or bockwurst, ohne currysauce)

65. Durian (I am weird, I like durian and I even like the smell, which led to amusing behaviour in Bangkok)

66. Frog's legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears, or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain (but no to pressed plantain again, it's very dry)
70. Chitterlings or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini

73. Louche absinthe (I really like absinthe - at uni I used to drink it with cola as well as in the traditional method - I even tried to brew my own once from wormwood and what a mistake that was)

74. Gjetost or brunost (sounds good!)

75. Roadkill (but only pheasants so far - no objection to expanding my experiences here)

76. Baijiu (sounds wicked)
77. Hostess fruit pie (never heard of them, but they look synthetic)

78. Snail (they just don't taste of much, so what's the point, oh and mollusc!)

79. Lapsang souchong (tea of choice!)
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant (hell, yes!)

85. Kobe beef (first time as a uni post-final exam celebration, yum)

86. Hare (no, but rabbit is yummy)
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse (I adore horse meat)
90. Criollo chocolate

91. Spam (spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam... has never passed my lips)

92. Soft shell crab (I don't like the shell - yes to dressed crab)
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano (sounds lovely!)
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee (no, but civet coffee yes)
100. Snake (it's on my list to try, seriously)

So what else have I eaten of note that's not on the list? Bone marrow. Jellyfish. Shark. I'd like to try dog some day - we missed out in Vietnam, and I also missed cuy in Ecuador; we visited the wrong regions for both. Frankly I'll eat anything that's not endangered (or a mollusc), and I love exotic street food.

How about you?

Knit-Lit-Crit

2008-09-01T23:47:00.008+01:00

Knitting, as we know, has become "cooler" over the last few years (five maybe? more?) and inevitably popular culture has caught on, to a degree. I thought it was about time I commented on a couple of manifestations of this and how I feel they represent my chosen hobby/lifestyle, and, of course, just plain whether or not I enjoyed them. This will be long, I'm afraid, with no pretty sock pictures.

Books first. There are, as far as I'm aware, two fairly well-known novels with knitting as a central theme: The Friday Night Knitting Club and Divas Don't Knit. I must admit upfront that I am prejudiced against chick-lit, and I perceive both of those as being firmly within that genre. Aside from preferring a fairly serious read to fluff, I find the whole concept of gender-specific literature just unbelievably patronising. A good book should not need to pander to trite assumptions of what a "chick", presumably short for a "young, strong-minded female" should read - and god forbid she should be strong-minded enough not to obsess about shoes and men... But that's a whole post full of rant for another day. I really did try to set that aside and take the novels for what they were, so let's get down to business.

The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs

Shall I be frank from the start? I hated this book. There, I said it. Hated it. This did actually make for quite a compulsive read, in a "how bad can this get" way, and yes, every time, it managed to get worse, culminating in one of the most dreadful "plot" twists in modern writing. But, oh, it's faults are not limited to that. For a full run-down, I turn to a rather vitriolic e-mail I send to Gail and Ting at the time, with a blow-by-blow account of exactly why I hated this book. Those of sensitive dispositions, or anyone who enjoyed the damn thing, may wish to look away now.

My first objection: has the author ever picked up a pair of knitting needles? Perhaps, and perhaps I do her a great disservice, but I really don't think she has. To me it comes across as that she may have once set foot in a yarn store for research purposes, she may even have interviewed a knitter, she's probably nicked some vaguely philosophical concepts about it from somewhere, but no more than that. I get no particular sense of reality from the knitting. All that has essentially been established about knitting, per her universe, is:

Knitters occasionally knit together, but mainly want to eat cake instead. Whilst this may in fact be true, for me, there is some desire to actually do some knitting too.
All knitters, without exception, loathe purling with a passion normally reserved only for the Nazis, and would do anything to avoid it.
Cashmere is somewhat desirable in an undefined way.
Knitting needles come in several materials, namely bamboo or rosewood (this is why I think she might have spoken to a knitter once) but also in types known as "round" or "bendy", by which I can only assume she means circs rather than the ones I've heard of made of a slightly flexible plastic compound, to be easier on the hands if you have arthritis or RSI.
A knitter who is capable of making a jumper would choose to jack all that in and only ever do garter stitch squares, and that knitter would then jack the whole lot in to study for law school.
Knitters knit jumpers, cardigans and scarves, with no desire to knit or mention socks or lace. Whereas these things seem to be the twin obsessions of the real on-line knitting community.
A jumper is a suitable KAL project for beginners and experts alike, and no-one complains or has trouble at all, they just get on with it industriously, because knitting makes you calm and serene.
None of them use the internet because knitting absolutely is the only thing they do.
All knitters are taught by their grandmas at a formative age and never stop in between.
We would never buy more yarn than we needed for that specific project. Ha!

Secondly, it seems to be possible to design and knit a full length dress in tiny gauge from scratch in about a week, then redo it because your client wants a different colour, all whilst running the LYS and being a single parent. Oh yeah, and whilst she also does her own accounts. Every night. I can comprehend, given my own background, that a knitter can also do accounts, but if I were running a business even I wouldn't bloody well do my double entry bookkeeping, in pencil, in a ledger for god's sake, nightly, it would seem not even with the benefit of a calculator. I was dying for the scene where she does her own state and federal, personal and corporate tax returns, in her own blood, on time, without having to queue at the IRS at midnight to hand them in before the deadline, and without crying or eating her own head. Sadly that scene was missing from my copy.

Thirdly, the Julia Roberts thing. For those who haven't read the book (and I'm probably not selling it to you), Ms Roberts is mentioned several times - once when a superfan/stalker randomly turns up at the shop shrieking incoherently, and I think (my memory is fading) again when the starlet herself comes in. But would a cameo by her Julia-ness be enough for the inevitable movie tie-in? Of course not! So our heroine is described in a manner which seems eerily reminiscent of... guess who? So of course JR is playing her in the forthcoming film. I know JR is a "famous knitter", but really, couldn't they have been a bit more subtle? Clearly not. Given the presence of Julia Roberts in a film usually guarantees that I'll hate it, I won't be going along to the premiere or anything.

Fourthly, I hated all the characters, even more than I hated the plot, such as it or they were. Everyone's breeding, or hopelessly romantic (ie empty without a man), or slightly kooky, and all ever so slightly religious - they all go off to consult god at one point. Ick. And it's just one "issue" after another, ending with the big one, although I wasn't exactly sad when our heroine (spoiler!) carked it. Good bloody riddance although it did give the child even more of an opportunity to be precocious and nauseating. The dialogue was bad beyond description, so I won't even try.

And who has knit night on a Friday? Don't you have anything better to do for the weekend?

I know it's a piece of popular fiction and not specifically a book for knitters, and probably if any of us were to write this book, it would be incomprehensible to one not "of the fold", but still... It is entirely the view of a non-knitter of what they presume us to be doing. And that's fine, but I am disturbed that the author of a novel about knitting would not have gone beyond that viewpoint. If you are going to make a certain topic the centre of your book, do some proper research. You don't have to be an expert, but bear in mind people who are will be reading, and criticising. Heavily.

Divas Don't Knit by Gil McNeil

Given my, ahem, strong feelings on the above, I embarked upon this read with some trepidation. Was I going to raise my blood pressure again?

Actually, no. It wasn't that bad. Not great literature, but not execrable. Fairly dull, but tolerable. So what's the difference?

Well, I get the impression that Gil McNeil can actually knit. There are even some (very basic) patterns on-line to go with the book, although not very exciting and not credited to McNeil. The reason why I think she actually knows what she's talking about? Because when the film star character in this one (they seem to be mandatory) is discussing colourways of a particular mohair yarn, she mentions particular colour names including Jelly, Marmalade, Candy Girl and some others; real colours of Rowan Kidsilk Haze, as we know (and no, I don't blame her for not naming KSH per se - even I don't require that all details be there to the detriment of non-knitterly readers). I'm pretty sure there is less actual discussion of knitting in this one compared to TFKKC, but it's a damn sight more realistic. Therefore I found it easier to accept the knit shop premise, and actually read the story without being continually pulled up, spluttering with indignation.

It also has a sense of humour, sadly lacking in TFKKC. Moreover it actually deals with a fairly interesting central issue (and only one or two others, mundane ones at that, rather than an endless litany of life-stopping woes) in that the heroine's cheating bastard of a husband is killed in an accident before they can divorce, so she is forced to maintain a saint-like image of him to their two children.

Ah, the children. Admittedly I only have a sample size of two, which is far from statistically significant, but why are both heroines single mothers? I shall hazard a guess. A chick-lit novel must have a single female lead, allowing for romantic happenings (amazingly, blessedly infrequent in DDK). However, knitting is inherently mumsy, so children must be present. The result: a single mother. Perhaps I'm reading too much into these, but if I find another example, I shall feel vindicated. I'm child-free, I can't relate.

I can't say I actually enjoyed DDK - I'm just not in the market for this kind of book - but I didn't hate it. If you had to read one of these, read this one.

The Diary by Matthew Pollard

Enough of the books. In early August Purl Pirate and I went to something rather more radical - a knitting opera. Well, sort of. We went to see The Diary, a short performance as part of the Tête à Tête independent opera festival at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. Here's the synopsis:

"Set in the 1960s, our anti-heroine, Vanessa, sits alone in her bedsit, knitting and thinking. Her diary tells us the story of her isolation from the changing West End around her. Drug-fuelled orgies to which she isn’t invited, music that she can’t groove to, fashions that she can’t afford; all conspire to cross her stitches. Knit one... Purl one… With a needle in one hand, yarn in the other, there is only one way to cast off this confusing world."

Intrigued by the mention of fibre arts, we thought we'd give it a go. You should, by the way, try out the phrase, "I'm going to a knitting opera tonight," on your colleagues - it results in much hilarity.

So, unintendedly, did the opera.

Picture a tiny dark stage with a sofa and a telly. A frumpy girl sits knitting garter stitch out of some hideous acrylic on big needles. There is a piano and a glockenspiel and a male and female singer (I thought the point of opera was for the actors to sing, but whatever). Scene/song 1 revolves around work a watercooler conversation whereby our heroine reveals that she only sits at home and knits all weekend, every weekend, morosely. Her male colleague thinks that this is a sad, boring way to spend your time, which seems to be true in this character's case. Clearly she is unpopular at work and friendless. She needs to change her life but cannot see a way to do so. Scene 2 has her commuting on the tube. Some bloke pinches her arse and she is not sure whether or not she likes it or should be offended, or should ask him out (she doesn't and he gets off) and whether or not her even considering this makes her a slag. She goes home and sinks into a deep depression. She considers trying to kill herself by (and this is where disbelief took over) somehow managing to slit her wrists with her knitting needle. Right... Scene 3 has her suddenly deciding to make an effort. She dolls herself up and heads out to the "disco". She enjoys flirting with men. She invites one back to hers, ties him up with her yarn, then stabs him through the heart with her needle. Fin.

At least it was extremely short - probably less than 15 minutes. Apparently this was a cut down version of a longer piece, hence the references to the 60's, drugs etc in the synopsis, none of which were included here. I can't imagine the longer version has any more coherence though.

Just how sharp do they think knitting needles are? I suppose with some effort (and possibly a run-up) one could stab somebody through the heart with one (bear in mind these were big plastic ones, not thin metal) but you'd have to have them pretty well immobilised, I would imagine, not just tied up. I won't experiment though, or even speculate about how a metal DPN through the ear might be more effective...

Anyway, we were speechless. Flabbergasted. Laughing our arses off. Seriously, Mr Pollard, what the fuck?

I think I will have to stop there to give my overused spleen a rest for the night. Suffice to say I am still waiting for that insightful look into knitting in the mainstream media - I'll stick to reading people's blogs instead.

Later: I've had a chance overnight to think about what's missing here, for me. What I would like to see, and what I haven't seen yet, is a strong female (or male for that matter) character who just happens to knit, just because she enjoys it. Not because life has thrown her into running a yarn shop. Not because she has to be supermum. Not because she wants to hang out with film stars as an occupational hazard. Not because she's sad and lonely. Not because she's quirkily creative (although that would be an improvement on the other things). Just because it's what she happens to do in her spare time, like another character would enjoy cycling, or playing squash, or reading. Is that too much to ask?

Miss me?

2008-08-31T23:06:00.009+01:00

Dear god, I'm a sorry excuse for a blogger, aren't I? Somehow the summer hasn't been conducive to blogging Chez Ginger - a combination of weddings (planning for my own and going to others), parties (again, both at home and elsewhere), a funeral (of which more later), serious amounts of exercise (well, serious for me, but it is working!) and being terribly busy at work. However I feel it is time to get back on track. I thought I'd better get a post in whilst it's still August - just. I'll try to play catch-up this week as much as I can, both in terms of blank posts below, and things never posted at all.

For tonight, I shall concentrate on much sockage. The knitting has, strangely, benefited from my hectic schedule. Socks have gone especially well, probably due to time spent on various forms of transportation. I therefore have two finished pairs to show off!

Preppy Socks

The first pair to be finished were some that were on the needles for so long that they were in danger of being treated as hibernating. I just didn't have time to sit down and do a toe or heel to progress them. Once I did, I churned through them very quickly. Here's a picture on my new sheepy sock blockers from The Loopy Ewe:

The yarn, as mentioned in my previous post featuring them, is from Snarky Design, in a sport weight, colourway "Prep School Dropout". These are therefore big, thick, chunky socks. Too big, in fact. Don't know how that happened, since I was trying them on the whole time. Never mind, I'm sure they'll get worn, just not as often as they should. 52 stitches for the foot then 56 for the leg on 3mm needles, by the way.

I'm also not overly keen on the combination of yarn and pattern, as I think the strong horizontal stripes of the yarn fight with the strong vertical lines of the 2x2 ribbing. Some mysterious change in tension also made the second sock ever so slightly larger than the first one (you can see the leg striping is different too). I'm trying to rationalise that - the first one was mainly knit on holiday in Ecuador when surely I should have been more relaxed?

All in all, a very pleasant knitting experience, as the yarn handled beautifully, but a less successful end product. Oh well.

Pink Lemonade Socks

Thankfully these little beauties are pretty damned good, if I do say so myself.

The yarn is Cafe au Lait in the colourway "Pink Lemonade", by Yarn Chef. This is a DK weight yarn but I went down to 2.75mm needles to prevent the bagginess of the Preppy Socks, and it gave a nice, solid fabric. It's divine, with strong colours which are taken up by the yarn in an interesting way - the core of the yarn seems to take it up less than the halo of fuzz, leading to a pretty, shaded effect. It behaved itself and formed itself into neat four-row stripes with no prompting from me.

I made sure to start one sock with pink and the other with yellow to ensure that they are mirror images of each other, as this amuses me, like so:

For the heels, I initially did my customary Sherman heel, but hated the way that it interrupted the stripe pattern as when the foot stitches were rejoined, I had a pink stripe only one row wide. Not acceptable. I frogged (very rare for me!) and instead did afterthought heels by knitting in a half-row of waste yarn then pulling that out later, and decreasing down. This meant I had to - gasp - learn to do the Kitchener Stitch! I'd never dared before, as books on it seemed baffling. Thankfully I found a clear tutorial on YouTube and was fairly satisfied with the result, although next time I might try Vogue Knitting's tip of decreasing by one at the end of each needle to prevent the "corners" I ended up with. For some unknown reason the last pink stripe ran slightly short on one sock, and changed to yellow just before I Kitchenered.

Still, we can't be perfect, can we? Although the toes pretty much are, in my humble opinion:

That's a toe-up provisional cast on with kfb increases instead of m1 like the previous pairs. I think this is much easier.

Best of all, they were done in only three weeks. I'm getting faster on the needles as well as on the treadmill.

Cherry Blossom Socks

Being what I've cast on tonight. No pictures yet. They will be garter stitch socks in the limited edition "Cherry Blossom" colourway by Cherry Tree Hill, in Supersock DK.

Frogged, with sadness

I mentioned a funeral in my intro. My beloved grandfather died in August, just before his 82nd birthday. I really have no desire to go into that on a blog, so I mention it only in respect of the socks I had been knitting for him, on and off, for over a year. They will be frogged. They were never, in all honesty, going to be finished - they were my first attempt at socks, I'd lost a stitch somewhere, the cast on (they were top down) was far too tight, and I hadn't heard of negative ease. Still, I can't bear to continue them for anyone else. The yarn may become socks for either my father or the boyfriend, but not for a while.

Monster sockage

Finally, a lighter note, related to one of the weddings I also mentioned. We attended K's wedding in Berlin in August, and of course I had to take presents for the happy couple and their two children. For her daughter, I braved the horror of Hamleys, but found something quite delightful: Little Miss Matched. Apart from ultra-cute non-matching socks, which are right up my street (and yes, they do adult ones), I found some non-scary monsters made of real socks:

And best of all, little purses made out of little socks:

Far too cute to resist.

So there you are, socks: all human life is here. Tomorrow and onwards, the rest of my non-sock related human life.

Swan-upmanship

2008-07-20T22:20:00.001+01:00

Play Miski for me

2008-07-07T22:30:00.006+01:00

I promised last week I'd be more regular with my knitting updates - just think of it as the knitblogging equivalent of eating lots of prunes. I've been motoring along and making sure I knit every day, although I've also been working on a big non-fibre crafty project, which will be unveiled to you at the end of the week.

The feather and fan scarf is finished and very beautiful it is too. I don't have a photo of the final version yet as I'm in two minds about blocking it. I don't want to lose the gorgeous shine on the silk and I've heard that water can kill it. However some Ravellers have assured me that it should be OK. Oh, indecision! I think the pattern could benefit from a tiny bit of opening up, but I'm just not brave enough! Maybe steam rather than soaking?

Whilst I agonise, I've started another scarf. Yes, it's July, and I don't exactly need a fluffy scarf at the moment. Having said that, it's chilly and raining today and we even had thunder and lightning, so maybe scarves aren't so absurd. Besides, they free up more stash space volume-wise than socks or lace.

The scarf I'm doing is Luscious Lace, a pattern discovered by Knitterrooney, who I'm unashamedly copying. It's a pleasing, simple pattern - the repeat is 24 rows but there are really only two variations of the lace row, so armed with my clicky row counter I can even do this whilst watching films. The lace meanders backwards and forwards very prettily, making zigzags along the sides.

I quite like the scrunchy 3D texture that it's forming at the moment, but I think it will be even prettier blocked, so I won't fret too much over it. Here's a close-up of the lace pattern with the light behind so you can see the yarn overs:

The yarn I'm using is Miski by Mirasol (shade 105 Bluebell), a 100% baby llama which is soft like clouds. Clouds, I tell you! It's divine. If I didn't like llamas, this would convert me. Seeing as I already do like llamas quite a lot, this is making me want to steal one from London Zoo and keep it in the cupboard under the stairs, buying my head in its fleecy sides daily. If you hear of any such abductions on the news, it's probably me. Even the boyfriend is sitting holding the ball as I knit. I haven't knitted with llama before, and other than the overwhelming softness, I've been very surprised at the utter lack of elasticity compared to wool. It has really brought home the difference in the fibres - fascinating! There's no give or recoil at all. It almost reminds me of finding a dead bird, all soft and feathery, but hard and cold just underneath. Yes, I am weird.

Oh, the colours too! I'm not sure if I can do this justice, but this yarn is not just plain blue. It's actually a fairly bright blue, almost turquoise, spun with burgundy. The result is the lovely deep blue colour from afar, and from close up it's unbelievably pretty. You can just about see it in this picture:

I love the Miski so much that I fell down rather badly in the John Lewis sale, which included several colours which are evidently being discontinued. I picked up enough of a rich copper orange to make a shrug (11 skeins - they're only 50g each and the yardage is minimal), some burgundy and some lavender. They all have the amazing depth of colour. I therefore bought most of what they had on sale. I don't feel bad at all that I've denied other knitters access to this stuff. Not. At. All.

Also in the sale was a load of Noro Iro, a bulky wool-silk blend, scratchy, think and thin, over- and underspun and full of bits of twig in the greatest Noro tradition. It's not something I'd have considered normally, as it's pretty expensive, but at half price it became so much more attractive. Given the intense colours and textures of this yarn, I needed something absolutely simple for it, and so I've started a triangular garter stitch shawl, working from the nape of the neck outwards. I'm quite pleased that I've worked out how to do this from scratch, and it's turning out triangular as intended. Hooray for geometry! As you can see from this picture, the colour blends are as wild as any Noro:

The base colour seems to be charcoal, and with the green, pink, navy and russet stripes I think it looks a bit like the iridescence of an oil slick. Here's that striping in close up:

It's making my cuticles bleed as I knit because it's so rough, but I anticipate it softening up into something huge, woolly and warm enough to protect me from the office air conditioning all summer. I bought six skeins so have plenty to make it really big.

I don't even want to talk about all the Rowan Kidsilk Haze/Spray I bought in the Liberty sale. I will make something out of it this time. Definitely. I think I might have to go back on the yarn diet for a little while now though!

Knitting Update

2008-06-27T21:40:00.007+01:00

It's been absolutely ages since I mentioned any knitting on here, which is shameful given "knitting" is in big orange letters at the top of the page. But never fear, I have actually been knitting, just, er, not telling you about it. Sorry.

Let's have a round-up of my recent projects then!

Giant Green Clapotis - FO

Before I went to Ecuador I announced that the Giant Green Clapotis was finished - in fact this was done mere hours before we were due to get on the plane, and I was desperate to have it done so I could take it with me. I must say it was one of the most useful things I've ever benefited from on a flight, apart from, possibly, Bernoulli's principle. Warm, soft and cuddly (thanks to the thick, snuggly Noro Cash Iroha), huge enough to swathe myself in, and with convenient breathing holes so I could wrap it around my whole head to block out the light and sleep. Wonderful! It's now getting a lot of use at work as I like to be warm whereas my colleagues prefer the air conditioning.

I didn't block it, and I'm glad I didn't as I like its organic qualities. However its first destination was the rainforest, which is hot and humid, ie optimum blocking conditions. I'm pretty sure it relaxed just enough in these conditions to even out the stitches perfectly without going all flat.

The photo session happened in Mindo, where the light was better than in the rainforest. I'm not usually a fan of knitted items randomly and unnaturally abandoned in trees, as I've ranted about before, but I did take a few in desperation before I found the chair above, and I quite like how it looks like a big hanging sheet of moss in this photo.

I want to do another Clap, or two even, since this one makes me so happy and since there are so many yarns out there which would suit it so well. I am trying to stop myself since this one took me nearly a year, FFS, and I would quite like to do something else for a while.

Yaaaaaarrrn! Socks - FO

So called because they are made from BFL sock yarn by Yarn Pirate. The colourway is "Calamity" and is in fact a Yarn Pirate Booty Club exclusive. I'm not in said Club (or any others actually) but I fell in love with the colourway when I saw some on Ravelry, and tracked down someone willing to sell me their skein on there. Hooray for Ravelry enabling!

I loved the colour because it's a bright clear purple and green on white. The green is two distinct tones, leaf and emerald, and the purple fades in and out of lilac through to amethyst. Stunning. I was thrilled with the colour but less so with the yarn base, as it's very loosely spun and plied, and hence very splitty, with the occasional slub. I would certainly buy Yarn Pirate again but I have heard that the merino base is much better, although the sheen on the BFL is very pretty.

Technical details: exactly the same as my second socks. Exactly. I like this method. Again 60 stitches on 2.75mm needles but this time on Brittany Birches, which do not cope well at my fiendishly tight tension. I snapped two during these so it's lucky that they (via those lovely men at IKnit) replace them. Back to bamboo next time, as at least that flexes rather than cracking.

The socks, by the way, are pictured hanging out on the equator line in Quito. A sock in each hemisphere! They were almost finished bar one cuff when we set out on our way to Ecuador, and I dealt with that on the flight there. I then didn't cast off until the very end of the holiday as I couldn't take my 4mm metal needle for the loose cast off on the plane. Given I actually started them on my flight to New York in March, they are not only very well travelled but two months from start to finish, although two weeks of that was in limbo. Must knit faster.

Preppy Socks - WIP

On that same flight to Quito I moved straight on to another pair of socks, this time in a heavier DK weight yarn from Snarky Design, in a pink-grey-black colourway called "Prep School Dropout". This is amazingly springy, tightly plied stuff, which is just so much fun to work with.

Because these are on thicker yarn I decided to go for a chunkier feel, probably to wear under my regular winter wardrobe of knee-high boots (no, I'm not doing knee-high socks, it would kill me). I am using 3mm needles and a 2x2 rib for the top of the foot, carrying that on up the leg all the way round. I started off on 52 stitches but have increased to 56 at the heel so that it is over 30 rather than 26, as I think the fit will be better with a roomier heel. I didn't reduce back down again for the leg. I probably shouldn't have chosen a rib for this yarn though, as it's making the striping look a bit messy. I much prefer the plain sole, where the colours can show themselves off prettily without clashing with the rib. I'm not one for frogging so ribbed they will stay.

I've finished one sock but haven't managed to make myself do the toe to start off its pair, as that's the one part I need quiet and attention for. I should just do it as the rest of the sock can then motor along whilst I'm on the tube. Will try to knuckle down to it this weekend, although the recent hot weather has made thick socks less of a priority.

"Preppy" is not a word I would ever use, but does remind me of my brother's obsession with Saved By The Bell when he was young. I think it was meant to be some kind of insult, given the sporty one kept sneering it at one of the non-sporty ones?

Feather & Fan Silk Scarf - WIP

I don't know why but I've really been hankering after lace projects over the last few weeks. Before starting a shawl I thought I'd better do something fairly easy, so I decided to give feather and fan a go. Simple enough, you would think, but it took me many, many goes to get it right at the start, punctuated by much swearing. However once I nailed the first repeat it was plain sailing from thereon. I've nearly finished, and might even get the last of it done tonight.

I'd lusted after Skein Queen's "Kimono" aran silk for ages and this seemed like a good excuse, so I snapped up two skeins in a glowing, almost semi-solid orange-pink (I'm on such an orange trip as well as the lace thing) called "Phoenix", which I wound and cast on as soon as it arrived. I adore knitting this, and am dying to use some in another colour for a Clap (see?) when I can afford a custom order that big. It is ultimately luxurious, though I get covered in pink fluff as I knit. Nothing wrong with pink fluff as a look, though.

That's it! I am aiming to be more real-time going forwards, I promise.

The Man with the Golden Voice

2008-06-23T22:52:00.008+01:00

I've been fortunate enough over the last couple of months to see or do a few of the things that I thought I never would. Most of them were wildlife-based, and fulfilled in Ecuador: the parrot lick, the hoatzin, albatrosses dancing (and I will post photos soon now the business of the last few months seems to be over). Seeing those wildlife highlights does only, however, require being in the right place at the right time, ie ultimately easy enough with time and money. Other things are rather harder, depending on chance or the whims of others. One thing I honestly never thought I'd see was the incomparable Leonard Cohen live. On Friday night, I did. On Saturday morning, I shook hands with the man himself and told him that I never thought I'd see the day...

Mr Cohen (somehow "Leonard" seems disrespectful) hadn't toured before 2008 for 15 years. Given the man is 73 years old, I and many others assumed he never would again. Then, unfortunately for him and horribly fortunately for us, whilst he was on a five-year Zen Buddhist retreat, his ex-manager and ex-lover, Kelley Lynch, stole almost his entire pension fund and the future rights to and royalties from his back catalogue, apparently leaving him with only about $150,000 to his name and no chance of getting the money back. After admitting this had "put a dent in his mood", he's on tour again, essentially to raise some money. Whilst I suppose we'd all rather our favourite artists were doing it for the love, I'm happy enough with this, although of course I feel terribly sorry for him. But as the man himself said, on stage this time, "The cheerfulness kept breaking through."

A word on how I feel about Leonard Cohen: he is god to me. There are many bands I like an awful lot, some to a quite absurd degree (R.E.M., for instance, as you may have noticed). There are musicians who I admire and respect greatly (Neil Young, Patti Smith and a few more), and loads of others I enjoy hugely. There is only one who I utterly idolise. I'm not sure what it is - certainly the solemnity (I won't say depression, because I don't find them so) of his lyrics helps, but I think it's the poetry, the execution of his lyrics and novels, the sheer romance of the bleak, bohemian lifestyle in Montreal or New York, struggling with poverty, religion and beautiful women. I find his work desperately sexy. That's without even going into the wonder of that voice... Oh, and when I first met the boyfriend, one of the first albums I introduced him to was Cohen Live. We spent many of our first nights together listening to that. So a combination of adoration and memories serves to elevate him above all others for me.

When the tour was announced, I was over the moon, then immediately disappointed to see that the London gig was in the O2 Arena. I've said before how much I hate it. I even said that I wouldn't even go there if Leonard Cohen toured, ha! The alternative was Manchester Opera House, with an amazingly small 1,900 capacity (rather different to the O2) but we'd never get tickets to that... but fortune smiled on us and with some fast online work by my delegate(!) we secured them for the Friday night show. So with an early departure from work and a tense train ride north, praying for no delays, we made it to the Opera House in time for the very early 7.30pm sharp start. He's an old man, he needs to get to bed on time.

It was an awesome concert, truly - three hours, mainly the classics (such as Suzanne, Sisters of Mercy, So Long Marianne), lots from The Future (Anthem, The Future, Democracy) and I'm Your Man (most of it actually, but very excitingly First We Take Manhattan, Tower of Song and Ain't No Cure For Love). His voice is getting much lower but still utterly wonderful. Spoken word renditions of some of his lyrics/poems were spine chilling. His backing band were all brilliant too - I'm sure for them it's the gig of a lifetime. Here are some photos (no bag checks!):

(No idea what was going on with the colours in that last one, something to do with me fiddling with the white balance, but it looks cool.)

Some reviews from the papers.

Whilst that was all amazing, and I'd have been absolutely content with my lot at that point, as my first paragraph suggests it just got so much better. I was with my parents for this, and they always pick swanky hotels, so we were staying in the Manchester Malmaison. I knew R.E.M. had stayed in this one previously but thought nothing more of it as a location for rock stars. We went to the hotel bar after the show and realised that a couple of the people in there were some of his backing musicians, so we were quite excited, thinking that he was probably staying there too, but we didn't see him and thought he would probably mainly stay in his suite. At breakfast on Saturday morning again there were a few of the band around but not him. Then... as we left the restaurant to go and check out, he was standing in the lobby all on his own as his entourage were checking out!

I was far too terrified to do anything, but my dad, a man of decisiveness who gets what he wants, decreed that we were going to talk to him and pretty much dragged me over. "Leonard!" he started. My mother and I both agree we'd have gone with "Mr Cohen", but he didn't seem to mind at all. We just told him how much we'd enjoyed the concert and thanked him for touring after all this time. We shook hands, and he thanked us for coming and said it really meant a lot to him. He was ever so nice, and seemed quite pleased even, or at least he's good at politely faking it. His voice really is that fabulous in person. I didn't want to ruin it by asking for a photo or an autograph, which I felt would have been intrusive. After a few more words we left him alone to carry on checking out. Then by the time we'd collected our luggage and were leaving the hotel (after I'd gone off for a little bit of screaming and jumping up and down in private of course), he was standing outside about to get into a car, and he smiled and gave us a little wave! In all seriousness, this was probably one of the defining moments of my life. I've met my idol and he was actually not a disappointment!

I tell you what though, I fluffed my chance to run off with him. You may or may not have heard of the concept of a "Celebrity Shag List", whereby you and your partner agree that in the unlikely event of meeting one of a named shortlist of famous people, and them agreeing to it, you are allowed a free pass to go off and have sex with said celebrity with no recriminations from your other half, because of course it's never going to happen. Mr Cohen, is, of course, on mine, and I didn't even proposition him! Opportunity wasted there, but I think the boyfriend is quite relieved.

So thank you, Mr Cohen, for touring at all, for a truly wonderful concert, and for being so gentlemanly to your trembling fans. You are a legend.

Wedding Belles

2008-06-16T23:04:00.009+01:00

This weekend we went to the wedding of T & A, friends of the boyfriend from university, and sometime checkers of the authenticity of the dinosaur fossil we have hanging in our lounge, what with them being paleontologists. The wedding was up in the countryside in Shropshire, with the ceremony at Ludlow Castle and the reception at the groom's parents' farm. The farm even provided free accommodation with loads of us, including the happy couple, camping out in the wildflower meadow - a gorgeous setting although murder on the hayfever front. It was an absolutely wonderful day, the couple were beautiful and overwhelmingly in love, the ceremony was touching, the party was well stocked with food and booze, and what better way to end the day than by staggering back by torchlight, over a bridge across a little brook and to your waiting tent in a field?

I have loads of photos, of course, but this is my favourite of the enchanting couple, with the bride attempting to net a small child with her veil:

She spent a remarkable amount of time larking about with us, for which we felt most honoured, given how in-demand the bride and groom are:

Here's our little group, all dolled up, though the boys have a pathological inability pose without gurning, but then we were all saying "halloumi":

Not that the boyfriend and I are really that much better...

Just call us Mr and Mrs Gormless.

I do love my hat. I shall say it again, I do wish there were more opportunities to wear hats.

Just as well I love it as we took the smaller of our tents with us, and I had to sleep with it perched on top of my feet all night to stop it getting squished.

Of course once we got back home, much discussion ensued regarding the things we liked (most of it), the things we were less keen on (not much), what we want to steal (ha ha) and what we'll do differently. Diagrams were drawn. New spreadsheets were created of timings (there are already a few spreadsheets knocking about already). Our main area of discussion on Sunday evening revolved around the music for the ceremony. The boyfriend had an inspired idea for the walk in, which I'm sure we'll stick with (it's a surprise so don't ask), but the walk out is proving more difficult. We have essentially discovered that we only like music that has some combination of the following, non-wedding-y attributes: minor key, depressing lyrics, frankly abusive lyrics, general mournfulness, startling intros that will cause our guests to have heart attacks, unsuitable tempos, loud guitars, overdone electronica, pseudo-orgasmic yelping, suicidal lyrics, and lyrics about relationship breakups and/or paranoia. Oh, and that doesn't mention any concept of religion at all, not even as a passing reference, for example the use of the word "heaven", even once. This is a requirement of the UK civil marriage ceremony, that no religious connotations be included at all. Fair enough I suppose, and it has saved millions of wedding guests in this country from the horror of Angels by Robbie Williams, which doubtless would have been the mainstream choice without that rule (it is for funerals, I've read). We couldn't find a single suitable song by any of our absolute favourite artists, not R.E.M., Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Patti Smith, Pink Floyd or Fleetwood Mac, though I begged for a few of them either for comedy value or in the way of hope over experience. We now think we have a good contender: something happy by a band we both really like and have even seen together on that album's tour, although we have plenty of time to come to hate it. Now have to wait for the venue open day in October when we can see if the distances to walk match the timings of the songs. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, huge congratulations to T & A, and enjoy your monsoon honeymoon in India!

Scanning Tunneling Telectroscopy

2008-06-10T22:06:00.006+01:00

My "scene" (that is, you lot and half a dozen other people) has been buzzing recently about a new installation down at London Bridge. I therefore made a special trip this evening to view the wonder of the modern age that is... the Telectroscope!

If one were to believe the backstory, the Telectroscope is a vast tunnel running under the Atlantic Ocean, housing an optical viewing device by which residents of London and New York can commune with each other. The project was commenced around the 1890's, but was abandoned, forgotten, and only recently resurrected and completed. The full, tragic story is here. To add weight to the veracity of their claims, a couple of weeks ago a large piece of tunnel-boring equipment was found breaching the ground near City Hall. Finally, the Telectroscope itself was installed and finished.

Really it's all done by a broadband internet connection (hence its sponsorship by Tiscali, about whom I shall say nothing but that I'll never ever use them for telephonic services again, regardless of any goodwill generated by this), but stylistically it's very cool. Check out the details of the brasswork:

And even the ticket is in keeping:

What's not to like about steampunk? I'm sure it's already apparent that I love Victoriana in clothing - as I've said before I adore corsets, crinolines and hats, although sadly I don't get to wear them half as much as I'd like. I also passionately love science. The combination of Victorian dress-up, engineering and outrageous inventors and inventions... well, it could have been made for me, couldn't it?

That and the fact that you do genuinely get to wave and gurn like a loony at similarly over-excited participants over by the Brooklyn Bridge. This is what you look into at the business end:

My fellow Londoners and I were bouncing up and down, pointing and exclaiming, "Oh my god!" Our American co-Telectroscopers were evidently doing exactly the same (there's no sound but I could lipread and only the accents differed). Here are some of the people way down the other end of the tube. I'm in their photos so I'm sure they don't mind being in mine!

Time for some physics geekery: the meaning of the title! Scanning tunneling microscopy, whilst not something I've actually ever done, although I did get examined on it during my Masters year, is a fiendishly clever technique, for which the Nobel Prize was won in 1986. It allows viewing of surfaces at the atomic level. It's amazing. Tunneling itself, by which the microscope works, is one of my favourite concepts in science (do you want a list?) and one of the coolest things in quantum physics. Think of it as the ability to walk through walls, or for water to flow uphill. Electrons are marvellous little beasties and can do these things by means of their wave-like nature. Why does this matter to us? Well, it's the reason why food in a freezer still has a shelf-life, for a start. Those electrons will keep on moving, albeit very slowly, no matter how cold you get them, even down to absolute zero (where by definition there's no vibration). So very slowly, chemical bonds shift and reactions happen, and very very slowly, food still spoils. The concept is also part of the basis of such things as flash memory, which makes our little hard drives, iPods and digital cameras possible. Words cannot express how much I love quantum mechanics.

In other news, and sort of tying in with me hardly ever getting the chance to dress up, today I have been mostly bemoaning the fact that I do not have enough hours in the day to do all the cool stuff that there is to do in this wonderful life. More specifically, these are the things that I do not have time to do over the next couple of weeks, in no particular order:

Woolfest in Cumbria at the end of June, even though I had planned to go. Next year for sure.
IKnit's knit-themed treasure hunt around London, for Worldwide Knit in Public Day on Saturday (and indeed IKnit Day itself in September, featuring the Yarn Harlot).
The Swarovski Runway Rocks show tomorrow night, or indeed any of the exhibition in the Crystallized Lounge that's on all this week. Or any of their courses. Sparkly!
Tony Conrad: Unprojectable: Projection and Perspective, a music/art performance in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall this Saturday evening.
In the Loop: Knitting Past, Present & Future, a three-day knitting conference in July in Winchester. Can't get the time off work.
Any of the upcoming baking, cake decorating or sugarcraft courses at Squires Kitchen School. They're all fully booked anyway.
Pretty much anything at the Islington Make Lounge.
The next Last Tuesday Society Ball, which is the only one of these where corsets would actually have been appropriate, nay, de riguer.

So hopefully that will give some inspiration to anyone looking for something to do, although I will be practically chartreuse with envy.

If only I could say I was cash-rich, time-poor, but sadly the first part of that isn't actually true... I shall console myself with the fact that it's all because I'm doing other stuff instead. Unless, electron-like, I can walk through the walls of bank vaults, and then be in two places at once?

Oop North

2008-06-09T23:42:00.003+01:00

As they say in Yorkshire, lass. Pass me a flat cap and look after me whippet for a moment, because this weekend Lotta and I visited La Señorita Gloria in Harrogate. Neither of us are what you'd call experts in the north of England, being poncy southerners, but we braved it on the basis that Harrogate is terribly posh and much like an enclave of the south up in the scariness. This attitude of mine generally provokes hilarity from northerners, to whom I point out that, for me growing up, London was a two hour drive north, and anything beyond the Watford Gap was unimaginable. They still laugh.

Of course our main aim was to see Gloria, but then what to three lovely ladies do to pleasantly pass the time in each other's company? We headed into the centre of Harrogate, ostensibly to shop, but mainly to visit the famous "Bettys Café Tea Rooms", or Bettys for short, which does not seem to have an apostrophe. Bettys is quite the destination for an afternoon cream tea - in fact during the one and only time I've been to Harrogate before, the queue was so long we gave up. This time we were not to be deterred. Even queueing was easy enough on the eye, with the windows replete with breads and cakes:

And the inside crammed with jars of tea and coffee:

What could we do but indulge ourselves, once we were seated? It was all terribly genteel. Even the pots of tea and water, when they arrived, were perfectly aligned by the waitress as she placed them on our table.

We were indeed very satisfied ladies as we sipped our tea, and then demolished our scones with very unladylike gusto and discussions over whether jam or cream goes on first (I say cream). I must say though, as a true southerner, the clotted cream wasn't as good as the stuff we have, because we invented it down in the West Country, but bless them for trying. I'll grant that they have considerable heritage on the tea itself.

What else about Harrogate, apart from the tea and cakes? (You mean, there's more to life than tea and cakes?) I liked the statues of people atop the Victoria shopping centre, although a couple looked rather suicidal. Do you think anybody would notice if a real person got up there to jump?

I also liked how all the benches had snakes for legs. I'm sure there's a good historical reason for this, but I don't know it, so I'd be grateful for enlightenment.

For a touch of modernity, we also found a great little Japanese shop, selling the kind of brightly-coloured, eccentric foodstuffs that we all love. I bought the chocolate-strawberry apollos (little moon landers), and the chocolate-filled koalas (kyuuto!).

Gloria also treated me to a belated Christmas present of a Good Fortune lucky owl, a fukurou. He's very cute and will bring me lots of luck. He was also beautifully gift wrapped in orange paper with a dragonfly attached.

Full, shopped out and hoarse from late-night sessions on Rock Band and SingStar, we sadly left Gloria to head back to London. Come and visit us soon sweetie, we love you!

Da Bomb

2008-06-08T22:14:00.004+01:00

I found this most amusing on my commute to work on Friday:

I love the fact that in London, history occasionally rears its head and reminds us that, no matter how shiny and modern we might think we are, this is a city with two millennia of heritage (one day soon I'll visit here). I love knowing that we walk the same streets as the Romans, and mediaeval peasants, and cheeky chappie Cockney sparrows who survived the Blitz. I also love the deadpan way in which London Underground manages to respond to such situations. On the other hand, they might just be pleased to have an excuse that's not actually their fault, for once...

Bookish

2008-06-05T22:45:00.004+01:00

It was my irregular book club night tonight, celebrated with much wine and a remarkably unified set of opinions over our latest book (Death At Intervals by José Saramago). The consensus seemed to be that the idea was great, but that we weren't keen on the execution - we prefer some punctuation, and possibly some actual characters. But the man has a Nobel Prize for Literature so who are we to judge?

Still feeling literary afterwards, I spent a pleasant, slightly tipsy hour wandering around Borders on Oxford Street, refreshing my list of books to read in the near future, and enjoying the fact that they were playing Leonard Cohen (two weeks to the concert!). Books are such things of joy to me. I'm sure I'd go without food sooner than give up buying books (but please don't test me on that). My family are the same - growing up, even if pocket money was being withheld for whatever reason, I could always persuade my parents to buy me a book, because every parent wants their child to enjoy reading. Their problem was more how to punish me, as being sent to my room, my place of books, was no hardship to me - I was there anyway most of the time. Forcing me to go outside and climb a tree would have been far worse...

I was somewhat sad to visit the craft section and see the following:

Books everywhere, piled haphazardly on shelves, and all over the floor in such disarray. Why? I can't believe that the shop assistants have particular disregard for this section. I can only imagine that overenthusiastic crafters get so book-happy that they spend hours poring over them and don't put them back properly. So my dears, if you're reading this, please put them back nicely, OK?

Incidentally, not that this happened tonight, and not that I need it these days, but Borders on Oxford Street is one of the prime pulling locations in central London in my opinion. The number of times I've been approached by nice young men in there whilst I've been browsing... Far more often than in any other location. This seems to be particularly prevalent if I'm sat reading in the science section - clearly geeky men (I love geeks, I am one) need to establish that their quarry can actually read long words before they move in. Oh, and Borders have fairly alright, free loos, which is always a plus. If only I could live in a bookshop... I'd probably be even more happy imprisoned in one than in a yarn shop, which is saying something.

Last night our Wednesday night knitting group had an outing to the Etcetera Theatre in Camden, to where Tingles has "run away to join the theatre", as I keep putting it. You go, girl! The play was The Pilgrimage of the Heart, featuring a somewhat startling incest-based storyline. Ting, aka Tina, was fantastic - sweetie you absolutely made me forget that we normally see you grinning at us over a set of DPNs! I'll say again for future nights: break a leg!

Tube booze chaos!

2008-06-02T23:47:00.003+01:00

The new Mayor of London, our Boris, has just banned drinking alcohol on the Underground. Quite right too, I say. It might help with all the scary, lager-swilling football fans getting drunk and lairy on the Tube every time there's a match or concert on round my way (every day at the moment it seems), although I'm not sure the tramps with their cans of cider will be unduly worried by the "softly softly" approach that TfL are planning on taking. I was astonished to discover that boozing on the Tube wasn't actually illegal already - I always thought it was, and in my clubbing days back at uni we always used to top up little bottles of Diet Coke with vodka to get lashed for cheap on the way out, thinking we'd get arrested if seen drinking the hard stuff openly. It turns out we could have been as blatant as we liked! Oh well, it all added to the frisson of being a teenager, I suppose.

So, alcohol on the Tube became illegal at as of 1 June 2008. How did Londoners react? By organising an almighty booze-up on the Circle Line on the evening of 31 May, starting at 9pm, going westbound from Liverpool Street. This was never going to end well.

We were on our way to a proper party in a proper bar at about 9.10pm on Saturday night, with plans to change at King's Cross. It didn't occur to us that we'd collide with the Tube party; I even vaguely wondered where all those people were going with wine bottles. Then we got to the Circle Line platform:

Most of those people there had alcohol - you can see the standard off-licence blue carrier bags, and the ever-so-classy Bacardi Breezer (yuk). A whole load of people in fright wigs arrived just after that, as the party train was pulling in. We weren't participating, but we had to get where we were going, and it all seemed pretty good humoured. Not much going on in our carriage but we could hear the noises from further down the train where the party was really getting started, with cheering every time we arrived at a station, and a "time" bell being rung in harmony with the door opening and closing beeps. At Great Portland Street, we saw these girls realising with horror that they were on the wrong platform, and trying to leg it over to the train:

When we disembarked at Baker Street, we could see for ourselves what was happening in the party carriages:

Standing room only for the partygoers, girls all dressed up, men in fancy dress, and plenty of alcohol. What I didn't manage to get photos of were the balloons, disco balls, the sound system in one carriage, the full TV camera and boom microphone in another... It all looked like quite a laugh.

Unfortunately these things never seem to stay pleasant, and apparently it all got rather rowdy not much later on, with fights, vomiting and ripping up of train upholstery. Stations were closed, except Liverpool Street where the best they could do was to corral the party on the main concourse all night. Glad we didn't stick around. We had to walk for ages on our way back home because, surprise surprise, the station we needed was shut because of the trouble. I still have the blisters. Bloody high heels.

What else have I been up to? Well, most excitingly, I popped down south to check out a wedding venue, and it was gorgeous, and it's now booked for next September! As a consequence of which, I've been hitting the gym in the evenings, as I only have 14 months to look good enough for all the photos. At least that's fairly likely to be enough to augment my paltry willpower when it comes to such things. Must not eat chocolate... except when bought for me as a celebratory pressie by the lovely Lotta and Anna, with whom I spent a lovely Tuesday evening sipping champagne cocktails in the Moët Bar in Selfridges. They also bought me a stunning orchid from Paula Pryke at Liberty, and I'm working really hard to ensure that this is the one plant that I manage to keep alive. Thank you again my dears! But no more chocolate, please, I beg you...

Enough, already

2008-05-25T22:42:00.005+01:00

Just got back this evening from a weekend up in the Midlands, near the Welsh border, studying bats. Whilst it was very interesting, particularly in terms of all the technical stuff I got to discuss about the physics of bat calls for echolocation (harmonics, frequency modulation, heterodyne, FFT... check out the pipistrelle call sample on that Wikipedia page for what we were hearing on our surveys), we really should not have gone to this straight after getting back from South America. Not that we knew when the holiday would be back when we booked the course, but still.

Anyway, I am dog tired and slightly disturbed that I am also away for, er, every weekend until the end of June. Next weekend I need to go down to the south coast to view a potential wedding venue, then I'm off up north to visit my dear friend Gloria, then attending a wedding in Shropshire, then Manchester to see Leonard Cohen in concert (yay!), then hopefully Woolfest in Cumbria... Sigh. I would quite like to spend a weekend in my own little flat at some point, but that doesn't look terribly likely, does it?

Oh well, I suspect I'm just particularly grumpy tonight because I can detect the lingering smell of dead bat specimens about my person, and cannot get rid of it.

Incidentally, it amused us this week to see signs on the way into Shrewsbury, where we were staying, proclaiming it to be the birthplace of Charles Darwin. Can't get away from the bugger at the moment, can we?

We also saw a lorry emblazoned with the intriguing crest of "The Sheep Show". Having just looked it up online, I am bemused: "A humorous educational live stage show about sheep and wool. Edu-tainment at it's best. 9 breeds introduced onto their own stage. Don’t miss the Dancing Sheep." Huh? And can I get them for the wedding?

Finally thank you all for your lovely comments/e-mails/texts/calls/cards about the engagement. If anybody's around tomorrow and fancies a celebratory drink on a bank holiday Monday, we'll be at The Old Dairy in Finsbury Park (it's raining). Cheers!

An announcement, or two

2008-05-22T22:19:00.006+01:00

Announcement #1

I'm back! And in one piece no less, having braved rope bridges, sheer drops, sharks and scary carpenter ants over the last few weeks. I'll be writing it all up as soon as I can, promise! Thank deity-of-choice that it's a bank holiday here in the UK on Monday, so I might just be able to process some of the literally hundreds and hundreds of photos I have.

Announcement #2, even more exciting

On my travels, I managed to pick up this little sparkler:

Courtesy of my darling boyfriend, or, as he is now, my fiancé! Yes, the Galapagos Islands were that inspiring to his biologist-ness, that he was moved to propose in the cathedral of evolution. Awww. And of course I said yes.

The ring is a beauty, a big mandarin garnet (aka spessartite), because I'd said before that I didn't fancy a diamond like everyone else, and to go with my hair. Isn't he a sweetheart? Big hugs to Lotta and Anna for helping him with the ring creation, you are stars (but as I said, secretive little minxes). Oh, the stone, if anyone's interested, is from AJS Gems in Thailand, who I've used before and who are really, really good. The ring itself was set by Van Den Berg in Soho.

Am now in a whirl of planning - we will hopefully be getting hitched in September 2009. My dear mother is already in overdrive, suggesting venues, putting notices in The Times and the like. I will try my best not to turn into either a raving lunatic or a bore.

Finally, congratulations to Hels, who is expecting! Baby knitting time!

Knit in peace

2008-05-10T02:41:00.001+01:00

I shouldn't be blogging at all from on holiday, but I found out today (Friday here) that our dear friend and fellow knitter Tash died on Sunday. I am terribly sad not to have been around at the end, for her and for all you lovely Wednesday night girls and her husband Mark, and especially to have missed today's memorial service. I am thinking of you all.

This afternoon, just after I heard the news, we went out hummingbird spotting here in the cloud forests. They are such beautiful creatures, so quick, bright, remarkably feisty (we even saw one chase off a hawk), in love with colour (the flowers they feed on, the gorgeous metallic greens, purples, blues and golds of their own feathers) and gone far, far too soon, just like Tash. We'll miss you, sweetie.

Clap your hands say yeah!

2008-05-01T23:10:00.002+01:00

It's finished! The giant green clapotis is finished!

According to the boyfriend, I should drop dead now, this being my "death shroud" as he puts it. Or perhaps he suspects that I have been ripping it out, like Penelope, every night. Not true, I was just bored with all the straight repeats.

It is large, being about six feet by two feet of cuddly emerald Noro Cash Iroha, nearly seven balls. I think it's rather lovely. I'd almost like to launch straight into another one, as mine is solid - a gorgeous glowing solid green of course - and I've seen some inspiring ones in variegated yarns, silks especially. On the other hand I think I really need to not be doing all those bloody repeats for a little while, and I probably only need one clap.

What else can I write about it? Nothing that's not said far more eloquently here.

I have no photo yet (I finished sewing the ends in only five minutes ago) but I promise to take some pictures in the sunshine when I get to Ecuador... tomorrow! Yes, our big South American adventure is finally here after three years of waiting. We will be at altitude in Quito this time tomorrow, deep in the Amazon rainforest the day after that, and afterwards we're heading to the cloud forests in the mountains then the Galapagos Islands. We'll be back in about three weeks' time.

One final anecdote before I go - when I first heard people refer to a clapotis, I had no idea they were talking about a shawl pattern. Eventually I became aware that it must be a famous pattern, but I thought it was called a clafoutis, like the cherry pudding. But the physics term for a standing wave fits the rippling pattern, and my own loves, much better. Science triumphs over sponge!

Adios!

Clapped out

2008-04-27T19:40:00.007+01:00

I have been feeling extremely delicate today after having rather overindulged on the merlot last night at my birthday party. I feel it is grossly unfair that my headache was so bad this morning that I was driven howling from my bed at 7am on a feverish and mercifully successful search for ibuprofen, feeling every one of my wretched, soon to be 27 years. Probably more like 72 in fact.

The venue was the Island Queen, an excellent pub in Islington. Thank you to everyone who came along, and especially for all the lovely presents and for letting me open them even though my real birthday's not til Tuesday. Knitting present-wise, Ting spun me my very own Ginger Lucy yarn, from brown Falkland fibre washed in ginger and orange, and also gave me some gorgeous Posh Yarn Helena in Vamp; Gail made me a little sock bag out of sushi-covered fabric and gave me the Vogue Ultimate Sock Book. Thank you both, you are so clever! I also had a knit-your-own Shaun the Sheep kit from A, which is terribly cute. The lovely Lotta bought me some eyebrow-raising Nippies so that I don't fall out of my corset next time, and some fab chemistry-influenced salt and pepper pots. I also had theatre tokens, body creme and books from my wonderful generous friends.

All birthday parties need a cake, and who better to ask for one than our beautiful Anna from Rate My Cake? The challenge I laid down for the baking goddess was to make me a dark chocolate cake with white chocolate mint icing. I wish I'd taken a photo of the delicious, perfect creation she constructed, but we were far to eager to eat it, so I can only display the remnants:

Yum! You are truly the Mistress Baker, honey. And thank you all again!

So it was well worth the hangover today, although I may have been less patient with all the children in the butterfly house this afternoon than I should have been. At least I got to sweat out some of the toxins.

I've also finished knitting my giant green clapotis! There is still plenty of work to be done in running down the dropped stitches in the sticky yarn I've used, sewing in ends (seven skeins plus several knots = lots of ends) and blocking, but it may even be done before Friday's departure to Ecuador. It's only taken me since July. Pictures to follow as soon as it's done...

Gone to the dogs

2008-04-11T23:53:00.002+01:00

My blogging really has gone to the dogs recently, hasn't it? I have a shameful four previous posts to fill in which are currently only titles, and I haven't written up my New York trip at all. I've had the time, surprisingly, but not the inclination. Perhaps I am just overwhelmed by the number of photos to process before I get it all done. Perhaps I am just too distracted by Ravelry and all the sagas of MCY, Magknits etc. Perhaps I am just a lazy cow. I see many blogs go through lulls so I don't feel all that bad, but it does weigh on my mind that it's not getting done. I will get it all patched up before I go on holiday next month.

I have been knitting though, and have finished one sock today (the first of a pair) and the end is finally in sight on the huge green Clapotis. I still have plenty of boxes to tick on my "clapometer" grid before I'm done, but I'm decreasing and so every row is quicker than the last. I love decreasing, I do. The sock knitting has been boosted by the fact that I am finally brave enough to sit and knit at work at lunchtimes. My colleagues and I always lunch together and generally sit around chatting in the canteen afterwards, so why not knit? The reaction hasn't been as surprised as I'd feared actually, and it really is upping my sock productivity no end.

I did really go to the dogs this week too though, to Walthamstow Stadium to be precise. I'd been to greyhound races before but not this one, which is probably the most famous in the UK. Unlike the gee-gees, dog racing in the UK at least has more working class origins, and is still rather less formal and significantly cheaper. Being really quite risk averse (I don't do the stock market) I like the fact that the minimum bet is 10p, and I stuck to betting anywhere between the minimum and a stonking 60p on each race of the evening. My strategy paid off - I ended the evening a whopping SEVEN WHOLE PENCE in profit! Hoorah! Perhaps it would have been better if my stakes had been higher, you know, earning me something in the pounds rather than pennies, but I'd have been too frightened to do it. At one point I was £2 up which would have paid for my morning soya latte, but I lost it all, sigh. Never mind. Low risk/low reward, that's me. At least I didn't make a loss!

Here are some lovely sleek dogs preparing to madly chase the bunny:

They all looked so happy at the end of the race - they hadn't caught the hare but they were given a biscuit and their tails were wagging.

Walthamstow Stadium has a gorgeous art deco frontage with the neon sign that you'll see on their homepage, but inside it was the most 80's-tastic place I'd been to for ages, particularly the menu in the bit where we were sitting. We started off with avocado and prawns, and it went downhill from there (stylistically that is, it was actually quite tasty) to the finale: the Caribbean Pineapple:

That's right, a huge quarter pineapple, scooped out and filled with pineapple ice-cream, topped with two whole wafers. You don't get that sort of thing in central London any more, and it's a sadder place for it. Walthamstow Stadium, I salute you and your comedy puddings.

Contains Violence

2008-04-09T23:50:00.000+01:00

World famous

2008-04-05T23:53:00.003+01:00

It was the boyfriend's birthday yesterday (happy birthday darling) and his special request was that I bake the obligatory cakes to take in for his colleagues. I don't know why it has become de rigeur these days in offices, at least in London, for the birthday boy or girl to bring the cakes rather than being supplied with cakes by their adoring coworkers, but we must work with modern mores as we find them.

So how to prove to a whole office of people you don't know that you are the champion of cakes? No ability here to warm them up with lemon syrup, chocolate peanut butter icing or any of the other delights with which I have wooed my own colleagues. No, we needed to get hardcore. We needed to get serious. We needed Lucy's World Famous Triple Chocolate Brownies.

The above are some of the few I managed to annex for my own office. As you can see, they are chocolatey in the extreme. The recipe is a jealously-guarded secret from most people, but the batter is made with a lot of finest quality, high-cocoa dark chocolate, and large chunks of milk and white chocolate abound (the white being most obvious in photos). They are a heart attack on a plate, but I guarantee you'll die happy.

Why "world famous"? Well, I've certainly taken them as gifts all over Europe (America won't let me in with them, the fools), and they've been dispatched all over the UK by post. But this really stems from when my dear friend N was out teaching in a remote village near Kathmandu for several months, eating nothing but lentil stew for every single meal. N, already a fan of the brownies, told his fellow teachers and they begged me to send them some as respite from the horrors of yet more pulses. I tried, I really did, but the cheapest courier that would have got them there before they went funny was about £80, and we were all penniless students at the time so no deal, but I did send out batches to any of them who asked when they finished their travels.

Enough blowing my own brownie trumpet, although I heard the boyfriend may be in line for a promotion as a result. To celebrate further, we went to Shunt (again!) and were pleased to discover a bucolic scene filling the club, with real grass, flowers, birdsong, basins of wet sand to make sandcastles, and giant swan carriages. The boyfriend's alter ego, Dobin TheHorse (note spelling) came too, and we all had a go. Here's me as Dobin offering a ride to a random bloke who engaged Dobin in conversation. He didn't seem to mind at all, and Dobin thought it was excellent training for today's Grand National.

Hangover notwithstanding, today marked the first real progress in the Great Knitting Versus Climbing Challenge, with Gail making it to the climbing wall! Now just have to get him to start his scarf...