Jewel of the North

Beloved

2008-09-03T22:16:00.008Z

I grieve privately. I tend not share my big sorrows or worries, unless it's absolutely necessary. This is necessary. Because she was something else, and you should know about her.

My Aunt Diane, my wonderful, vibrant, Auntie Di Di, passed away this evening. She raised four daughters, ironed hundreds of altar cloths, canned thousands of quarts of tomatoes and other vegetables, made hundreds of pints of jam, bottled gallons and gallons of home-made wine, baked and frosted several hundred cut-out Christmas cookies every year, and cross-stitched god alone knows how many projects, at least four of which adorn my house. She built great bonfires, taught me to swim, and how to put a minnow on a fishhook. She painted my skinned knees with iodine, greased me up with sunblock, and sprayed me with Off before she'd let me out to play in the summer.

Her love was something, as a kid, it was easy to take for granted because it was so obvious you didn't need to think about it.

She buried her parents, her twin brother, and her husband, and then, before she'd really had time to finish grieving my uncle, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. I am not a violent woman, but the first person who asks me if she smoked may well get their teeth knocked out. Yes, she smoked. She smoked and drank and knew how to throw a hell of a party. She had a great, big, dirty laugh, bright auburn hair, and a delightfully crude sense of humour. She was awesome. You would've liked her. I loved her so much.

My husband is a GOD.

2008-05-03T18:51:00.004Z

I've been sniffling and coughing my way through the early stages of a nasty head cold. The weather today is lovely, and but for one quick trip down to the shopping precinct to pick up some micro meals from Marks & Sparks and various cold supplies, I've mostly been poking around online, or sitting in my chair next to the window in the conservatory, making granny squares, drinking apple juice, and feeling sorry for myself. My coldless streak has come to an ignominious and mucosal end, and at this point, I should probably just be grateful the sore throat is mostly gone. (I spent most of yesterday in deep denial, insisting the tingling sinuses and sore throat were obviously allergy-related. Or maybe I slept on my back with my mouth open. But it definitely wasn't aaaaaaaaa-CHOOO! Oh fuck.) I really, really hate sore throats, a legacy of a childhood spent getting one Strep infection after another. As an adult, I've mostly had the robust immune system of a sewer rat, but every now and then, some virus will fell me, and I just have to ride it out.

And do you know what that man did? He went out into the garden, mixed up a bunch of fertiliser and compost and spread it out over the rose beds. All by himself, without any help from his whinging, sickly wife. AND HE WEEDED, TOO. And when I thanked him, he said, "Aw, love, you already do so much around here. Just try to feel better."

If only I could breathe through my nose, I'd thank him properly.

holiday planning

2008-05-01T14:54:00.002Z

Well, the first two weeks of June will be our summer hols this year. Phil booked the time off, but of course, we haven't decided where we're going or what we're doing. We'll spend part of it at home, probably just hanging out and doing some work in the garden, by which I mean, "sitting on the patio, swilling Pimm's or mojitos." We definitely do want to get away though; our long weekend in London last autumn was the first holiday we'd actually gone somewhere in years. I suspect I'm basically a homebody at heart, but I truly am all in favour of going away for a bit, to let somebody else do the cooking and cleaning. I'm not very good at letting things go at home when I'm supposed to be relaxing.

So far, discussions have centred around Edinburgh, York, possibly London again, maybe Brighton -- although Brighton in early June sounds kind of nightmarish for crowds -- or, as an outside possibility, renting a cottage somewhere in Deep Wales. Cornwall or Devon sound tempting as well, but Phil and I are very, very bad at dealing with touristy places in tourist season (this would be why our holidays usually take place in autumn or winter) so we'd like to minimise that as much as possible. Everywhere you'd want to go in Britain is usually thronging with tourists, alas, so probably we should just decide where we really want to go, and then just suck it up and deal with the crowds.

At the moment, surprisingly, I find myself leaning to York. Phil did his undergrad there, and lived there on and off for about a decade, so he has loads of friends there and knows the place well. It's also where we went on our honeymoon, which I really couldn't enjoy at the time, as I was both ill and suffering from post-wedding nervous collapse. Possibly the least sexually-charged honeymoon ever, but I did love the place, and I'd like to see it when I'm feeling well.

Even though I love Brighton, I am not really a beach person, so crappy weather doesn't bother me a bit when I'm on holiday. I can't think of anything more boring than having to slather myself in super high SPF sunblock and then just sort of sit there in the sun. So in Brighton, we walk on the pier, because I must have my candy floss, wander up and down the hills and through the Shambles, and spend a lot of time sitting in nice pubs. Which, minus the pier, candy floss and hills, is probably exactly what we'd do in York, with a trip to the Minster and a walk along the city walls instead. See, now I'm getting very warm to the idea. The fact that I know for sure there is a good yarn shop in York has nothing to do with it.

Naturally.

2008-04-20T10:30:00.002Z

I found my camera this morning. Which is OK! My phone camera is only 3 megapixels, and thus not the kind of thing I'd use for anything other than a convenient snapshot device, and I really do like my elderly Lumix, so it's good to be able to put off buying a real camera for a while. I can always use Phil's D200 if I need to go superfancy or all macro, like with garden photos.

Speaking of the garden, I am dying to get out in it, but the weather just isn't quite there yet. We get the odd beautiful day, and the rest of the time it seems to be either raining or on the verge of raining, and if not actually cold, still decidedly chilly. In spite of my gardening jones being so far thwarted, I am feeling a hell of a lot better in general, due, I am certain, to the increased ~~sunlight~~ daylight. This winter was dreadful for me, in terms of depression and anxiety. It's not the cold, it's not the damp, it's the darkness. I've this bad tendency to think of depression, in myself, as self-indulgence and whining. Other people are depressed? I am very sympathetic. Me? I'm a whinger. I'm not sure why I hold myself to tougher standards than I hold others in this respect, but I definitely do.

This winter really, really sucked, with family issues (illness & injury, mainly) and the crappy weather, and this awful feeling of general malaise, much of which I attribute to how hopeless the news feels. I'm really not capable of being one of those people who can blithely ignore politics and current events, but sometimes, I think it would do me good to unplug from it for a couple of days, just because I reach a point where everything gets viewed through my Oh God, We're Dooooomed filter, and that is just no way to live. For one thing, it's annoying to others. I really don't want to be that horribly negative person who brings everybody else down. Well, yeah, things suck, but they aren't going to stop sucking just because I've got this perverse need to make myself unhappy. Because, you know, something bad might happen if I ever slipped up and allowed myself to be happy and enjoy my life for a minute or two.

So I'm working on that, and the end of winter is very helpful. I can open up my conservatory pretty early most days (the conservatory is unheated, has no electricity and is unusable in winter. It really needs double glazing at a minimum), and being able to sit out there, first thing in the morning, drinking coffee, knitting, and watching the little birds hopping about, does me a world of good. Everything is in bud, or putting on new growth. The daffodils, tulips and grape hyacinths are in bloom, the bluebells and lilacs are coming along, and it looks as if the wisteria we planted our first summer here is finally going to give us a proper show this year. And, oh god, there is so much to do out there. Weeds are everywhere, we need to mulch and turn the compost heap, the patio needs a good cleaning, the bramble is very close to out of control, and that goddamn ivy is making me mental. But those are all things I can do something about, and I will, just as soon as the weather gets a bit better. I'm looking forward to planting my tomatoes and herbs and sweet peas, and tending my little patch of the earth.

The technology report

2008-04-19T15:48:00.003Z

Given that my mobile phone is ancient, and I've misplaced my camera, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and get a camera phone today. It is very shiny and sexy, and I cannot wait for it to finish charging so I can start taking pictures with it. I hope I like it, because I assure you, unless it gets lost, broken or stolen, I will have it for a very long time, not because I'm cheap or dislike spending money (oh, how people who know me would laugh at that idea), but because I get weirdly attached to things, and am not very keen on change. I mean, I love the shiny, sexy laptops and cameras and mobile phones, and I would probably enter into a bigamous marriage with my iPod, if it were legal, but I find the process of changing over from, say, one computer to another, to be incredibly tiresome. I make a very bad geek. I run my cars into the ground, I will baby a failing appliance until it actually up and dies on me, and even if the sky above me suddenly started raining money, I doubt either of those things would change.

Phil's a great geek, because he loves that shit. And because he enjoys the whole setting up/tweaking process, I usually can talk him into doing the stuff I regard as tedious gruntwork. I'll be replacing my elderly Powerbook soon, which I am frankly dreading, even though mine is just about knackered, and I've mostly been using his for a couple of months now. I've got so much stuff on mine, and the idea of moving it all over sort of makes me want to cry.

The good part, though, is that I've recently discovered that once I do make the switch, it's done. The old object in question is now dead to me, and I do not wallow in nostalgia. The mobile phone is dead, long live the mobile phone!

Why, hello there!

2008-04-18T20:22:00.002Z

Dear god, I have had to make so many upgrades and changes between Google/Yahoo/Flickr/Facebook mail accounts that remembering which account is associated with what has driven me to mostly ignore all of them.

I think I have it now. This is mostly just a test post. Still knitting, still running 3WA, still on Ravelry, in a moment of madness joined Twitter, and, oh, taught myself to crochet.

I am still 40.

40

2007-08-25T15:05:00.000Z

I turned 40 earlier this week, and it did not kill me. After all the Drama and all the Angst, on the actual day, it didn't bother me at all. The wine, jewelry and fawning attention from my husband may have helped somewhat, but I suspect my relative calm has something to do with the commencement of a new decade. If my 40s go anything like my 30s did, I probaby won't give my actual age much more thought until I start creeping dangerously close to 50.

Besides, a couple of weeks ago, I was standing in the queue at the offy, and saw one of those old lady magazines with Joanna Lumley on the cover and the headline JOANNA: 60 IS THE NEW 40. Which, by that logic, makes 40 the new 20, and if it's good enough for Patsy Stone, it's good enough for me.

Psssst...

2007-06-25T11:34:00.000Z

I'm over here, with my funny, snarky, super-smart new co-bloggers.

I can also be found here, at the fabulous Ravelry. Get on the list, if you aren't already.

This place isn't going away, though. It'll probably just revert to being mostly about stuff other than knitting. But knitting will doubtless creep in, because it always does.

omg! a post!

2007-05-12T14:35:00.004Z

Boy, have I been busy knitting. And other stuff too, but the knitting is the interesting part. OH SHUT UP IT IS TOO.

I finished the never-ending jumper of torment and pain and stockinette, aka Fenway:

And for all the pain, I'm really glad I did it. It's been about a year and a half since I first knitted this pattern, and it was my first jumper ever, so at the time, it was pretty exciting, since I had only the vaguest idea of what I was doing, and it felt like quite an adventure. It came out really well; Phil loves it to death, and specifically asked for another one just like it, only in a different colour. (The first one is blue.) He is especially keen on the yarn, the oft-mentioned (and discontinued) Rowanspun Chunky, which knits up into a really lovely, soft, yet very durable fabric.

On the second go-round, it wasn't so exciting. It was, frankly, a tedious chore. The pattern is mind-numbingly boring and simple, and since it's a big jumper with plenty of ease, and Phil has a long torso, big shoulders and long arms, IT WAS FUCKING HUGE. And since I wasn't constantly fearing I was going to totally screw it up, the excitement just wasn't there. I'd done it before. I've done a half-dozen jumpers since. I'd now class myself as a solidly intermediate knitter with a fair amount of experience in knitting a wide variety of garments. This was cake.

But it was still valuable, not only because he loves it, but because by going back and knitting over the first major garment I ever made, I got a really good idea of how far I've come. My gauge has loosened up considerably, which is a very good thing, indeed, my confidence in my own judgment is much better than it used to be, and probably most important of all, I've got pretty bloody good at finishing. It took me hours to set in the sleeves on this jumper the first time around, and this time, I set aside an entire day to sew it up and knit on the collar. I didn't need it. I slid the sleeves into place and stitched them in on the first go, and it took me less than an hour, and that was the hard part. Closing the sides and the sleeves in mattress stitch took up another hour. Everything went fine, I didn't have to stop and do anything over. It was simple. Picking up stitches and knitting the neck was easy, too. Last time, it took me something like five attempts. This time, I picked up exactly the 68 stitches the pattern called for on the first try (that bloody log cabin blanket taught me how to pick up stitches, I tell you what) and knit the twelve rounds while watching a Law & Order re-run.

Like I said, this is a stupidly easy pattern. But this time, I knew that, and I was still surprised at how well it went. Due to the looser gauge, it's a bit bigger than the original, but that works for Phil just fine, since he wanted plenty of ease. Which is no excuse for me having not knit a swatch, simply because I was using the same yarn and needles. Lesson learned: gauge can change over time. Knit the bloody swatch.

To break the soul-destroying ennui of the sleeves, I paused and knit up a couple of ball-band dishcloths:

And oh, wow, slip stitch patterns are SO MUCH FUN to knit! My looser gauge made knitting with cotton much less painful than I've previously found it, and the slip stitches are just a total blast. I made these out of two balls of Debbie Bliss Pure Cotton, which is lovely and soft, and then I ran right out to John Lewis and bought six skeins of Rowan Handknit Cotton to make more. (Better, brighter colour choices on the Rowan, I think.)

With all that done, I sat down and started another pair of socks:

My first time using Lorna's Laces, and I am deeply, deeply impressed. Not only is the yarn incredibly soft, but wouldja look at that? Absolutely no pooling or flashing. I'm now done with the heel and on the last few instep decreases, and still, no pooling. Another yarn for me to love and crave. Just what I needed, eh?

catching up

2007-03-31T10:57:00.000Z

Right. So that was a long time. I think it's become obvious, to me at least, that Holidailies sucks the life out of my desire to write, makes me horribly self-conscious about it when I dowrite, and is just not a good idea for me. So I probably won't do that again.

Christmas was fine; Phil got me a pair of the most beautiful pearl and diamond earrings, I got him a fancy-ass new lens for his camera, the food was good, and the company pleasant. And then came a long, dull winter. Oh, my, was it long and dull. I totally jacked up my shoulders and wrists, so knitting took a backseat to recovering from knitting, but now everything seems better, and I may finally be learning to pace myself. I finally finished my cashmere socks, which had been languishing in the bottom of my handbag while I did the Xmas knitting, and oh my, they are gorgeous and soft. They're made from HipKnits 100% cashmere, and I can very highly recommend it. The yardage was stunningly generous; I have big feet and I made a fairly long leg and cuff, and I still have a good-sized ball left that I am sure I will find some way to use.

Here's a photo that totally does not do the yarn justice:

I went with plain stockinette because I love the colourway so very much and wanted to let it shine, unembellished with a fancy stitch pattern, and also because I find knitting stockinette in the round to be incredibly soothing. I can't recall what the name of the colourway is, but it's all pink and green and cream and reminds me very much of my garden in late May and early June, when the hybrid musk roses go into their first bloom. I have another skein of HipKnits cashmere in a blue/grey colourway I will doubtless knit up soon, except I kind of like having it in my sock yarn stash, where I can gloat over it. This is a persistent problem with me when it comes to cashmere sock yarn in beautiful colourways. It's almost too lovely to knit.

My stash is an entry in itself. I've moved most of it out of Ziplocks in wicker baskets into less attractive, but more secure Rubbermaid tubs, safe from the depredation of my cats. I don't know what it is with them, but there is little they love more than licking and chewing on plastic bags, and while they seem largely uninterested in the yarn itself, content with sucking on the bags themselves, I don't need any ancillary cat spit on my fibre.

I cracked open the Rowanspun Chunky stash (colour: Fern) to make Phil another of his beloved roll neck jumpers. He wears the original (my very first jumper!) constantly, and it's holding up beautifully. Well, other than me having to re-knit the neck and put leather patches on the elbows. Compared to the accursed Cashmerino Chunky jumper (pills! my god, the pills!) it's wearing like iron, and therefore I do not resent the idea of making another one identical to the first in all but colour. Which is a good thing, since I've got another bag of Rowanspun Chunky in grey, which I have every confidence will, in the fullness of time, become a third roll neck jumper. It's a stupid easy pattern that would probably be mind-numbing in its tedium for most people, but I do like that kind of brain-dead knitting from time to time, and while I'm not exactly cranking it out in record time (I'm only about halfway up the back), it does make a great project when I have no desire to count or do yarn-overs. I think I'm done buying chunky yarn, though. The thrill of near-instant gratification no longer outweighs my preference for the look of smaller gauge knitting, so I'm highly unlikely to buy anything heavier than worsted in the future. I've never been a novelty yarn lover, so seeing them slowly diminish in number in my LYSes is a very good thing.

ah, right...

2007-03-03T21:20:00.000Z

...so that's what my Blogger password was.

Just as soon as I finish knitting this pair of socks, I will be back with a photo and a post.

ornaments

2006-12-22T23:03:00.000Z

With cookie dough to mix up and a few other things that need to get done before bed, this will be another photo entry.

This is the first Christmas ornament we ever acquired. It was a first Christmas ornament from my mother, I'm not sure where she got it, (but it does scream "Hallmark!" at me) and it sat in my jewellery box for six years before we had our first tree:

This is a (dark) photo of our newest Christmas ornament. I like to buy a couple new ones every year, and dispose of the boring, cheap-o plastic balls I just bought to fill space with during our first year. Behold, the little tin horsie:

And this is my favourite ornament. I just love it because it's so silly looking. It's a floorwax! No, it's a dessert topping! It's a reindeer! No, it's a moose! Hard to say, but it's definitely made of gingham:

And I love it so.

one hall, decked

2006-12-21T23:31:00.000Z

Well, the oven works, but the broiler is fucked, and after the £35 service call telling us the grill is fucked and replacing it, if they even can, would cost, oh, almost as much as a new oven anyway, we've decided we can do without grilled cheese on toast for a week or two, and we'll buy a new oven in the January sales. My advice to you, without even requiring a £35 service call, is DO NOT BUY A BELLING OVEN.

Eh, screw it. I'm in a good mood, since my Xmas shopping is done, done, done, and I will be able to bake my cookies this weekend in my crappy, doomed oven, so I'm just going to post some photos of my house and be done with this entry.

A better photo of the entrance hall than the one I posted last week:

Going up to the lowest landing:

And going up the stairs:

(You would think, after three-and-a-half years here, I'd have more stuff on my walls, wouldn't you?)

Looking down from the middle landing:

And here's my cat, looking like an idiot:

He does it well, doesn't he?

more bad appliance karma but good stuff too

2006-12-20T20:24:00.000Z

In one of those freakish coincidences that make me believe that god hates me, my oven broke today, the day I was planning to start baking cookies. It broke at exactly the same time last year, December 20th, just as I was about to bake cookies. This could be god's way of saying LAY OFF THE BUTTER AND SUGAR, FATASS, but I suspect it's mostly divine spite and meanness. Or I would, if I were a believer, but whatever, my oven is broken, and I am so pissed I can hardly stand it.

Fortunately, the guys who repaired it last year are coming tomorrow to fix EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEM tomorrow, but you know, I don't blame them, especially since, as it turns out, the "manufacturer" of my oven stopped actually manufacturing ovens a few years ago, and went into the business of putting their badges on cheap, shitty ovens instead. My oven is a piece of crap, and this is the last time I'm going to put any money into it. Next time it breaks, we get a new one. I just want to get through Christmas on this one. It's just the heating element, and it was cheap to fix last time, so I'm not that worried. Phil is going to stick around during the morning tomorrow, since he's waiting for his Christmas present to arrive, and I won't be tied to the house waiting for repairmen, so I'm OK with it.

He's getting a new lens for his camera, which he picked out himself, because we are old married people and long past the point of trying to surprise and delight each other with our holiday presents. He's surprised and delighted that I'm willing to let him buy yet another lens this year, and that's good enough. I will be getting jewellery, not sure exactly what, but I showed him a bunch of stuff I like, so he has the general idea.

I finished up my Christmas shopping this afternoon. We went downtown, I pointed to some pretty, sparkly things I liked, and then we split up. I went to get what I needed, and he took his camera up the hill to take photos of Liverpool. Liverpool has quite a beautiful and interesting waterfront, and he spends a lot of time photographing it. Things weren't too dreadfully crowded downtown, it being Wednesday and still not quite the final, panicked rush point for most people, so I had a relatively easy time getting what I needed. We hooked back up after about an hour, had a cup of coffee, and then went to dinner at our local Italian joint. We haven't been there in a while, and given how good the food is, and how nice the people who run the place are, I have to wonder why. There was an error in the wine order; they brought me a full carafe instead of half, and as this drunken rambling probably indicates, I opted not to send it back, but to drink it all. And now I am merry and mellow and not all that bothered by my crappy oven's inconvenient breakdown. because I've just spent an hour and a half enjoying good food and my beloved's company, and damn, forgive me for being semi-drunkenly sentimental, but I really do love the guy I married. He's sexy and smart and good-looking, and he makes me laugh by quoting Half Man Half Biscuit lyrics to me while I'm trying to drink too much wine, and there is no Christmas gift in the world I could ever receive that would be better than him, not even a pony or Barbie's Dream House.

smells like home

2006-12-17T22:26:00.000Z

I've finally reached the point on the scarf I'm currently making where I think, wow, I've done quite a lot, I'm really getting there. All knitters reading this (and really, who else would?) will know that this means I have now entered a timewarp, and I will be knitting for seven thousand years or at least two days (they will be indistinguishable units of time, trust me) before any more conspicuous progress is made.

This point where time and progress merge and stubbornly stand still is particularly noticeable with this project, which is a scarf knit flat on a 80cm circular needle, so I can stripe many colours of yarn and make a fringe at the same time. 300+ stitches per row, folks. Zzzzzzzzz. Its sole redeeming feature (besides the fact that I think it's gonna look great) is that at least I get to change colours every row. The yarn is lovely, I adore the colours, the fibre blend (50/50 merino and silk) is one I'm inclined to think is the most enjoyable for me to knit with, and it's my favourite weight (DK, how I love you), so it's not total torture or anything, but I will be very glad when it's done.

I had a fair amount of time to spend knitting today, because I had to stay in the house for at least eight hours while the pudding steamed. The weather's been crappy, surprise, surprise, and while there are things I probably should be out and doing, I can't say I regretted losing a day of running around to quietly staying home, with husband and cats, in a house that smells of fir tree and spices. I like this life.

pudding

2006-12-16T22:04:00.000Z

The whole Christmas season thing really hit me today, and I suddenly realised, hey, there's a lot of shit that needs to get done. Phil is likely on holiday until January, although he might have to work a couple of days next week, and once he's off for the year, it starts to really feel like oops, yeah, here's Christmas.

I went downtown and faced the gruesome crowds; for all the papers are screaming about sales being off, you'd never have known it from our shopping precinct today, because it was absolutely heaving. I managed to get one gift and scout out a couple others, so the trip wasn't totally wasted, but after about an hour, I'd had enough and went to Sainsbury's to buy the stuff to make the Christmas pudding. Last year I did a whole (stupid) photo essay about making the pudding, but it, like oh, FIVE YEARS OF MY LIFE, went poof with Diary-X, so I kind of had to wing it. I used Delia Smith's recipe as a guide, but because I sort of loathe dried currants, I reduced the amount to five ounces, and made up the difference with dried cranberries and cherries. I'm not exactly sure why I bothered, since all the dried and candied fruit in a Christmas pudding sort of melds into one big, sticky, yet oddly tasty indistinguishable mass of enamel-scorching stodge, but it will make me feel better about the whole thing to know I'm eating fewer nasty dried currants than I might otherwise. And since I'm the one making the pudding, it's all about me. I also cannot imagine what the hell I'd do with a bottle of barley wine minus 75ml needed for the pudding, so I bought green ginger wine instead, because that I can use.

So that stuff is glopping away peacefully on the kitchen counter overnight, and tomorrow I will put it in a greased basin and steam it for eight hours, then stick it out in the conservatory until Christmas Day, when we will steam it again, cover it with brandy, set the fucker alight, and then slather it in brandy butter and cream in order to eat it. It's way better than I make it sound, honest.

After mixing up the pudding, I baked a loaf of bread, wrapped some gifts, and considered starting on the cookies, but frankly, I'm not quite ready to start the major baking yet. I may mix up the cookie dough while the pudding steams tomorrow, and then stash it in the freezer for a few days, but that, too, might be a bit ambitious. It's not panic time quite yet on the cookie front, but it is getting damn close to panic time on the knitting and other gifting fronts, so I'm not being lazy, I am prioritizing. In fact, I am going to prioritize my way into a comfy chair with a glass of wine and my current knitting project right now.

a petty victory, maybe

2006-12-14T21:30:00.000Z

Guess what arrived in the post today?

I put it together and spun it around, but my current project is being made from Louisa Harding's Grace, which comes in pre-wound balls, and thus has no need for a swift, so I have yet to properly use it. But I am looking forward to it. I am a simple, happy yarn geek, and my needs are few and usually made from all-natural materials.

Oh, I lie. It turns out there is quite a lot of stuff involved in feeding a fibre arts habit, but unlike, say, a smack habit, the stuff you need is perfectly legal. Even the hemp! Not that I've bought or used hemp yarn yet, because we are falling deep deep deep into crunchy granola hippie territory by even mentioning it, and anyway, as I have moaned about extensively before, plant fibres make my hands hurt. So no hemp, or at least not until I see some I like. It reminds me way too much of some of the truly obnoxious people I used to know back at university, people who loved to wear (ugly) clothing made from (scratchy) hemp, and who enjoyed telling anybody who could handle the body odor long enough to listen that Hemp is good stuff, man! It's so much better for the environment than cotton, man! And they are right, and I am totally on their side with the Legalize It! movement, but after the fiftieth time listening to the same lecture, I would find myself thinking, Dude, you're a burnout, and you really don't need to justify it to me, so enough already.

I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've used the word "burnout" in at least a decade, incidentally.

Anyway, in a petty triumph on the consumer rights front, I finally got a reply from Bodum, after one polite e-mail and one mildly irritated follow-up asking why they hadn't answered my first e-mail, and the reply was worth waiting for, because all I was really hoping was that I'd be allowed to purchase a new "unbreakable" carafe for my electric espresso maker, and instead, with absolutely no proof of purchase requested, they are sending me a brand new one next week, when they're back in stock. Now, assuming a) they really do send me a new one and, b) it doesn't disappear into the gaping, thieving maw of the Royal Mail, I will be one very, very happy little consumer. I'm already very pleased, because I actually did something about it, instead of, as usual, just assuming I was screwed, and because a company whose products I generally like very much has not ended up on my vindictive never-ever-again-I-hate-you shitlist without a chance to redeem themselves. This, all joking aside, is a really big step for me, because I am usually such a total wuss when dealing with stuff like this. I provisionally love you, Bodum, thank you for eventually trying to appease me. I look forward to being heavily overcaffeinated again very soon.

now with more crazy parenthetical asides

2006-12-13T21:00:00.000Z

I am impatiently awaiting the arrival of my new yarn swift, and because the Royal Mail, which recently BOASTED of a 80% customer satisfaction rate (Only 20% of our customers want us to eat shit and die! We so rule!), has fucked me over twice this year by losing packages, the fact that it didn't arrive today, when all other things being equal, first class post should arrive the day after being sent, is making me nervous. And that 80% might sound OK, if, you know, everybody weren't totally dependent on them and their monopoly. But no! We are. And I proudly count myself in that 20% of their customers who poisonously hate them. Or maybe it's just because we're less than two weeks away from Christmas and they're really busy, I dunno. They have accrued no goodwill with me this year, so I am assuming the worst. They never even bothered to reply to my many, many complaints, either, the bastards.

And the worst part is that I got one of the last two swifts the place I ordered it from will have until after Christmas, so if it's lost or stolen, I am just plain screwed. But! It could just be the time of year, oh please, oh please, I want this swift so badly, and I want it now, and also I want the other stuff that was in my order, because I truly do need two of those balls of yarn like yesterday, so I can finish off a scarf I'm currently making. Which I then have to entrust to the...Royal Mail. See? They've got me coming and going, and I swear to god, I take back every mean thing I ever said about the USPS, because they never dicked me like this. They dicked me in tiny little ways that never included losing my packages twice in a two-month period. I can live with a lesser dicking, really. (Please, please give me my swift, Royal Mail!)

I will not feel silly for expressing my hatred and angst either, even if it does show up tomorrow (please oh please), because they do suck. They'll just suck slightly less if I get my package tomorrow.

rest

2006-12-11T22:21:00.000Z

Our little town certainly does get bleak and ugly this time of year, so it's a good thing we've got all the fairy lights to distract us. I hate these short days, when the sun isn't properly up until after 8 am and it's back down by 4 pm. Roughly eight measly hours of sunlight a day, and it's not exactly quality sunlight, either. In fact, most days it rains, or at least it seems that way.

We still have a few hardy roses hanging on in the back garden, and whenever I happen to glance through the kitchen window, I see them and feel better. From a distance they're lovely and remind me of those glorious weeks in June and July when the garden just explodes with roses and sweet peas and lillies and jasmine and honeysuckle, and when we open up the conservatory windows and the French doors the fragrance is so strong and sweet it fills the whole house. When freshly washed white bedsheets hanging on the line reflect back that beautiful sunlight. The still, hot afternoons when the lavender is thick with honeybees, and the blackbird sits up on the uppermost peak of the rose and wisteria arch and sings out his claim to our garden.

Up close, of course, the roses look tatty and the garden smells of damp earth and leaf mould, and I need to remind myself that this season of quiet decay is inevitable and not a bad thing, it's just part of the cycle, and soon enough the first crocuses and snowdrops will be popping up and the days will be getting longer. The long nights are good for sleep.

bad appliance karma

2006-12-10T17:49:00.000Z

So both of our overpriced coffeemakers are currently out of commission. I've got a service call on the fancy-ass Italian espresso maker, the most beautiful piece of REALLY BAD design you've ever seen, and I'm still waiting to see if Bodum will ever respond to my e-mail asking them how in the hell I can get a replacement for their unbreakable polycarbonate carafe, which broke on Thursday morning. A few months ago, I boxed up my old French press and buried it deep in the cupboard under the stairs, and can't find it. A Monday morning without coffee is not to be contemplated, and as I am so very tired of being burned by pricey coffeemakers, so I went out to Argos -- utter madness before Christmas -- and found a very cheap and ugly drip coffeemaker for the amazing low price of £4.99. I predict this coffemaker will never, ever die or give us a moment's trouble, which is why I passed on the extended three year warranty for £1.99:

Cashier: Would you like an extended warranty for only £1.99?
Me: On a five quid coffeemaker?
Cashier: Four ninety-nine, ma'am.
Me: I think I'll just go ahead an live dangerously, thanks.

God, I'm an asshole sometimes, but I don't buy extended warranties anymore, because when I do, it seems like whatever inevitably takes down my expensively warrantied appliance is the one thing the warranty doesn't cover. I think I just have bad appliance karma. The Italian Job does actually work OK, as long as you don't mind a a completely unreliable thermostat and some leakage, and the need to turn it off immediately after making a shot of espresso, because of that completely unreliable thermostat. It cost enough that it's probably worth fixing, and having a back-up drip coffeemaker for people who, unlike my husband and me, prefer a mellower cup of coffee, instead of the heart palpitations that come with five shots of espresso before noon.

Argos was horrible. I don't really like the place at the best of times, but it was a zoo today. I actually had to queue to use the electronic catalog, and then ages to get through the payment queue, where I charmed the doubtless very tired and stressed out clerk with my snotty riposte about the warranty, and then into the queue to pick up my cheapo coffeemaker. All told, about half an hour, and every minute of it was totally sucktastic.

But then I got to come home to this:

And this:

Flash loooooooves the Christmas decorations, and spends a lot of time making me nervous by looking as if he's going to eat them, although all he actually does is rub his cheek pads against them, while making munching noises. Forunately, he doesn't seem hugely interested in the tree, although it is a stop on his patrolling route. He stops, he sniffs, he moves on, unlike Pix, who enjoys sitting under the tree, just out of reach, and batting at the ornaments on the lower branches. The cheap, plastic ornaments on the lower branches, because I am on to her. She hasn't knocked one off yet, but she will. When she's determined to be irritating, nothing will stop her. Just like her mommy.

festive

2006-12-09T19:58:00.000Z

We got the tree today, a seven-foot Noble Fir. After looking at practically every tree available at the nursery, I naturally managed to pick the one that sort of leans to one side. It also happened to be the prettiest one, so after propping up two of the tree stand's legs with a plank, it's mostly straight, and that's good enough for me. I was tired of wrestling with it at that point, and wanted to sit down and not think about Christmas trees for a few minutes. After letting it rest for a few hours, I decorated it, put up one more string of lights on the French windows that lead into the conservatory, swapped out a palm and an aspidistra for a couple of poinsettias, and pronounced the house decorated. I bought a wreath yesterday as well, only to discover that the super suction hook I bought wouldn't work on the outside of our front door, because of the leaded beading on the stained glass. It works on the inside well enough, though, so screw my neighbours' view of my house. It looks pretty in the entrance hall. It's so goddamn festive around here I can hardly stand it.

As a pleasant change to my usual experience when I get all the fairy lights out, none had mysteriously died over the course of the previous year. This is a first for us, since usually the decorating of the tree is delayed by my discovery that my lights don't work, the swearing because my lights don't work, and the debate about whether we can make it to the shops on time before they close to buy new lights that probably won't work when we get them home. (This has actually happened.) So I was fully prepared for the worst, considering that last year, instead of very carefully wrapping the lights up and putting them away in a safe place when we were done with them, I stuffed them into an old plastic carrier bag, and shoved them in the bottom of the ornament box, saying, at the time, that they weren't going to work when I got them out again, so why bother with the usual caution? Clearly, it pays to be lazy and careless, so I will make sure to do the same again this time.

So, all is well with the slightly-crooked tree, except the angel won't sit straight on the top, and even if we trim the tip of the tree, I don't think it's going to work this year. We started kicking around ideas for what else we can use in lieu of the angel (who looks very pretty sitting on the shelf just inside our front door), and I mentioned to Phil that Jennipur had Cthulu on top of her tree, and he immediately became madly jealous, because we have no Cthulu to spread tentacled holiday cheer and terror. So I'll be looking for something else, and if only I thought they'd arrive on time, I'd go for one of these, because what's more seasonal than the common cold or stomach ache?

what passes for thrills around here

2006-12-08T20:37:00.000Z

This is how lame I am: I get ridiculously excited when I find out a yarn I've read a lot about, and seen used in many patterns, is going to become available in the UK. Like right now, Woolly Workshop is claiming they will soon have Mission Falls 1824 wool, and I am almost beside myself. I'm pretty sure this is just a very nice, basic yarn, so my excitement is all out of proportion to this news, but I'm thrilled anyway, if only because it means I won't necessarily have to substitute the yarn in some patterns I've liked. I'm all like Steve Martin in The Jerk, yelling, "The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!"

The last time I was this excited about yarn was when Get Knitted started stocking Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride and Cascade 220. Perfectly ordinary, nice enough yarns, but there I was, getting stupid about it. I'm knitting the second of a pair of Fuzzy Feet right now with the Lamb's Pride, and sadly, it hasn't lived up to the ridiculous hype I created in my own mind. It's very nice. I'm sure it will felt beautifully. It's just yarn. My life is unchanged. I have yet to feel slightly let down by the Cascade, but I'm sure that day is coming. Koigu and Cherry Tree Hill and Lorna's Laces all totally lived up to my expectations, though. It is worth noting that these are all fairly expensive yarns, and I don't think I've yet encountered an expensive yarn I didn't love passionately. This does not surprise me in the slightest.

And all of this is just a lead-in to the latest heart-pounding thrill in my increasingly pathetic life: I'm about to order a swift. Over dinner tonight:

Phil: Blah blah blah, work, blah blah blah, new Nikon stuff, blah blah blah, enough about what I've been up to, what did you do while I was gone?
Me: Oh my god, I found two places selling swifts!
Phil: Huh? Birds?
Me: No! Yarn swifts!
Phil: Uh, knitting stuff, yes?
Me: Yes! Isn't that exciting?
Phil: Oh, certainly, yes, very exciting.
Me: You have no idea.
Phil: No, I'm sure I don't.

My husband, the terminal phlegmatic. Fortunately, he's cute, and even more fortunately, he has an obsessive hobby as well so even if he doesn't quite get what we refer to as 'the yarn thing' around here, he's agreeable enough about it for a man who is in imminent danger of losing wardrobe space to my stash.

admission

2006-12-07T21:11:00.000Z

I'm in the middle of my first candy cane of the season, and feeling somewhat relaxed, for the first time in about a week. My dad had some sort of bad reaction to some medication he's on, resulting in what looked like, to my panicked mother, a stroke, so he went in for an EEG late last week, and it came back fine: no stroke, no seizure, no brain tumour, none of the ten million things I've been using Dr. Google to torture myself with. Bad reaction, the doctor is adjusting his meds, and now maybe I can stop worrying until the next crisis. He had a very mild stroke last year, so we're edgy about these things, mom and me. I hope she's feeling better, too. Her latest e-mail sounded perky enough.

Phil's still away, and won't be back until tomorrow night. I haven't told him I've got the Christmas lights up, since it'll be a nice surprise for him that way. He told me how much he loves coming home from business trips this time of year, and seeing the house all lit up and welcoming, and frequently smelling of lovely things to eat. I'm pretty sure he appreciates the beer in the fridge, as well. I did the grocery shopping today, so everything is ready for a nice weekend, without the need for one of us to run out and get something. I'm not sure what we're going to do this weekend, other than get the tree on Saturday, and I'll probably make the Christmas pudding on Sunday, but we're not anywhere near the oh-my-god-must-hurry point, so a relatively lazy weekend sounds great to me, especially if I can fit in some knitting time, because I am sort of getting near the oh-my-god-must-hurry point with that. I had to basically take a week off from knitting, due to some fairly severe pain in my wrists and shoulders, which, as it turns out, probably wasn't caused by knitting, but by the crappy chair I sit in to use my computer. Chairs are easier to replace than wrists and shoulders, so this is good news. Phil's been after me for a while to get a decent desk chair, and I've blithely ignored him, so while seeing me struck down by pain for my arrogance isn't exactly satisfying to him, he does enjoy pointing out that he was right all along, so there. So for the record, I do hereby state that my husband was RIGHT and I was WRONG.

He'll probably print that out and keep it forever.

because it makes me happy

2006-12-06T22:32:00.000Z

On New Year's Eve last year, I cast on for my first sweater:

I didn't think I could do it, but I was going to try anyway. I had never knit anything more complicated than a hat and one lousy mitten at that point. I was wrong; I did it, and it wasn't even that hard. Since then, I have made six sweaters; three cardigans, three pullovers. OK, two of them were baby sweaters, but still, that's, on average, one sweater every two months. I've also made socks, gloves, more mittens, a blanket, a lace scarf, baby booties, and many other things I can't remember right now, as it's been a long, busy day, I am tired, and I have maybe had a drink or two. I have a huge stash of yarn, a gigantic vase full of needles, a shelf full of knitting books, and a couple of drawers full of knitting sundries. I keep them in my little pink office that looks out over our street, where I have marked the change of the seasons with the Victoria plum tree in my neighbour's yard, in this whole year I've been learning this craft.

I bought a darning mushroom today, because those socks were hard-won, and my husband has an uncanny ability to wear holes in lovingly hand-knit socks at an astonishing pace. I am not throwing them away. I am not possessive of the things I knit; I give most of them away. But I am protective. I knit with love and care. I am the best person I can be when I am knitting something for somebody I love, and for all my moaning about the inflexibility of cotton and the ache in my shoulders and wrists, I do not regret or resent a moment spent knitting. I have met some really wonderful people through knitting. I have knitted my way through depression and worry and a lot of happiness as well, and it's all been good for me, and good for the people I love.

I think this hobby is going to stick.

sparkly

2006-12-05T21:15:00.000Z

I started getting out the Christmas decorations this evening, and naturally, one of the boxes was at the very bottom of the huge pile of crap in my guest room. My all-but-unusable-guestroom-please-god-nobody-visit-very-soon, that is. The cats have mostly taken that room over, anyway, and the guest bed duvet is covered thickly with cat hair. We are pure class around here. We have some vague notion of cleaning that room out over the holiday break (Phil has a couple of weeks of holiday time to use up) and making it into a guestroom-cum-office for him, since the crappy room in the back of the house he's been using for an office would make a much better storage room, and anyway, it'd be nice to have our respective offices on the same floor of the house, so we might actually talk to each other more frequently. As it currently stands, we both tend to get busy and absorbed, and hours can go by without us communicating at all. This isn't a marriage problem or anything, it'd just be kind of nice to be able to talk to each other without having to traverse the entire house, since our offices are as physically distant from each other as it's possible to be, while still being in the same building. Laziness has, on at least one occasion, compelled me to call him on my mobile rather than get off my big lazy arse. We're also thinking of putting a sofa on the landing (our uppermost landing is huge) so we could make it into more of a social space. We get beautiful light up on the landing, and there are four big bookcases within a few feet, so it'd make a great place to splodge out and read.

This is all a very great idea, but we'll have to see if we can shake off our annual holiday break sloth long enough to actually do it.

Anyway, I got the decorations out today mostly because while I was out earlier, I was strongly tempted to buy a few more things, and was only able to stop myself by deciding I needed to look at what we already had first. Every year, I go a little bit further over the top with the Xmas decorations, although I do confine my decorative jollity to the interior of the house itself, and refrain from putting crap out on our front lawn, or anything like that. Except this year I hung some lights on the big windows in the front hall, but they're tasteful little white lights, I swear.

I usually only decorate the front hall, the staircase and the dining room, but I think I'm going to make my first incursion into the sitting room this year. We put our tree in the front hall because that's where it looks best, and there's enough space for it without having to move a bunch of other stuff, but that also means that when we're in the sitting room, we have no tree to look at. I am not mad enough to put up more than one tree, but I am, in my dotage, getting obsessive enough about the Christmas decorating that I'm happy enough to suck another room into the swirling vortex of tacky my house becomes in December. I've given up. I'm not even trying to maintain an ironic front any longer. I love the sparkly red-and-green-and-goldness of it all, and I don't care who knows it.

I crack and talk about knitting

2006-12-04T20:03:00.000Z

Could somebody please explain to me who is knitting all these hideous fun fur and eyelash yarn shrugs? And perhaps more importantly, who is wearing them, other than the same few models in, oh, practically every single issue of Knitting magazine I have ever purchased? All of whom look like they're wearing luridly coloured gorilla suits, minus the heads? And while you're at it, please explain why the hell I keep buying this sorry piece of crap magazine, because I sure don't know.

This was their Christmas Glitz! issue, so I had no excuse for being surprised, I guess, but yeesh, it was even worse than I expected. Not only was it cover-to-cover eyelash yarn horrors and vile cutesy-twee crap, but there was a definite emphasis on that Glitz! thing, because most of it was sparkly. Oh, I can just imagine how good that tinsel-and-acrylic blend feels against the skin. You might as well be wearing Christmas tree garland. I mean, I can sort of see why some people might like the odd, reasonably restrained eyelash yarn scarf, but a cross-over bolero? Yeah, exactly the kind of figure-flattering thing I want to wear to a Christmas party.

Still, it did help me kill fifteen minutes while waiting for my coffee, but this time I mean it: I'm not buying it again. And if you think I'm being picky, you should've read the letter to the editor from the crazy guy who had a list of demands for how the models should pose to best display the garment from every angle, the better to help him decide what he wanted to knit. Dude. It's a knee-length novelty yarn cardigan. It's a horror. There are no good angles.

Anyway, other than getting taken for £3.45, yet again, it's been an OK sort of day. Phil is off on business, so I'll have the house to myself for a couple of days, and with any luck, I won't be struck down by laziness, and manage to get some work done. We're getting the tree on Saturday, and I'd like to get the rest of the holiday decorating done before we get it. We've been eating our way through the stuff in the freezer so I will have room to make up cookie dough in advance and stash it, so maybe I can have a slightly less exhausting seasonal baking frenzy this year. It would be good if this time I remember to label the stuff going into the freezer, so I won't have the troubles I had this week, when I mistook the ciabatta dough for pizza dough and the ham stock for chicken stock. It wasn't a disaster or anything; the pizza was just a little puffier than usual, and the ham stock didn't ruin the risotto, but I got pissed off at myself both times anyway, because it's just stupidity and laziness on my part.

I'm sure my Christmas spirit will arrive with the tree. I sound all grumpy, but I will buck up once the house is looking pretty and there are cookies to eat.

into the woods

2006-12-03T21:24:00.000Z

The weather here today has been absolutely dreadful, so naturally, we decided to go for a nature hike through Storeton Wood. Normally, I don't really do nature. I show my appreciation for it, and desire to see it preserved from harm best by staying out of it. But, hey, sometimes you have gale-force winds and occasional bursts of extremely cold rain, and this strikes your spouse as ideal weather for a nice walk, so you tell yourself it's a fine excuse for breaking out that cute hat you knitted last winter, and it! will! be! fun!

And actually, it was. It was windy and wet, but not all that cold; I was certainly comfortable enough with my hat and a light, waterproof jacket over a cotton turtleneck, especially since we were walking briskly over uneven ground. There was a bit of misunderstanding between us at first, since we were shouting at each other to be heard over the roar of the wind (and I am not exaggerating even a tiny bit about that roar) but once we figured that out, we relaxed and had a really good time, wandering about, taking photos, exchanging greetings with the other people insane enough to be out in the woods in a gale, and trying very hard not to calculate the odds of a tree falling on us. At one point shortly after entering the woods, we stopped to fiddle with our cameras, and were interrupted by a very loud CRACK, causing us to look up into the trees to see which one was about to crush us, and then look at each other and laugh slightly hysterically. I strongly considered demanding we go home, but then I looked over to my right, through the trees, and saw this:

Sheep! I love sheep, source of my beloved wool. So I forgot all about imminent death, swaying in the wind above our heads, and went down to take a couple of pictures of the sheep, who were not even slightly bothered by the stormy conditions, or the madwoman behind the fence, taking pictures of them. Phil was immensely patient with my ridiculous delight in a bunch of, let's face it, profoundly stupid animals.

Eventually I was persuaded to stop trying to get the sheep to look at me, and we carried on down the path, running into more crazy people and friendly dogs, and god, there is nothing that makes me want to add a dog to our family more than seeing happy mutts out running around in the woods, obviously enjoying themselves. Our very enjoyable walk would've been at least twice as much fun if we'd had a dog along with us. We carried on along the edge of the woods, looking out over the very pretty, if somewhat austere farmland of the Wirral:

And then near a very typical for this area country lane:

Before walking deeper into the woods, to go out the other side, because my god, the wind was getting terrible. We came back out near a really good little country pub, where we had a couple of pints, which may have been a mistake on my part, because I forgot to eat breakfast, and a pint of cider on an empty stomach quickly put an end to the day's adventure. I was fine, just in absolutely no condition to walk home through increasingly foul weather, so we called a taxi and went home in comfort. I really am glad I overcame my natural slothfulness and went out, because it reminded me of exactly why we left London, and why, in spite of the usual lack of big city excitement, we live here.

as yet unmoved by the holiday spirit

2006-12-02T21:43:00.000Z

It's been one of those useless Saturdays. I mean, I got a lot done, but not nearly as much as I'd hoped to do. For once, I got up fairly early, bathed, baked a loaf of bread, did a little bit of knitting, and ran some errands, but seriously, I do not know where the time went. Yes, there might possibly have been a nap in there, but it was a late-afternoon nap, when the useful part of the day was long gone, since it gets dark at four these days.

The shopping precinct, where I very unfortunately had to go to get Phil some Euros for his trip to Germany next week, was scary busy. Since we don't have Thanksgiving over here, for obvious reasons, I'm starting to think our equivalent of Black Friday is the first Saturday in December. The bellringers and charity baggers are all out, and while I'm perfectly happy to chuck some change in their buckets, please, people who are bagging for charity, don't help me. I will pay you not to help me, no please stop putting my stuff in that plastic bag, I've brought my own bags, and I like to pack them myself, no, god, don't put the bottle of wine on top of the tomatoes....OH FOR GOD'S SAKE, HERE'S A QUID. GO AWAY. And yes, I know I'm being a bitch, but since I have started carrying my own cloth bags, the enormous pile of useless plastic carrier bags in my pantry has slowly been beaten back to a reasonable and useful amount, and I like it that way. Good for the environment, good for my sanity, good for my unbruised tomatoes, good for the circulation in my fingers, since I no longer have to suffer the pain of plastic handles, stretched by the weight of the bag to thin, wiry strings capable of breaking the skin.

Once I got everything done, and got to sit down in the decent coffee shop near the taxi queue, though, things improved, because that place is the best for people-watching. I can sit there, knit, drink coffee, and judge the poor fashion choices and parenting of my fellow Wirrallians. The fact that I was wearing a pair of yoga pants and a long-sleeved tshirt in public and I have no kids in no way stops me from this unkind self-indulgence, because I can always reassure myself that A) my yoga pants and t-shirt are clean and well-fitting, with nary a hint of exposed belly flab and butt-crack, B) I might be a terrible mother otherwise, but I'm pretty sure if my kid were spitting on people, I would at least apologise profusely and take him home before beating him, and C) I have no kids to embarrass by wearing yoga pants in public.

But the real reason the coffee shop is such a joy at this time of year, other than the coffee and the sitting down, is that it is directly across from our very small, seasonal ice skating rink. I'm from Michigan. I know ice. These folks are from the generally mild and usually ice-free northwest coast of England. They don't even put enough ice in their Diet Cokes. Watching them try to ice skate is interesting, to say the least. The skaters were mostly kids, mostly mean, and mostly having a good time, trying to push each other into the rink walls. This view, while not pretty, at least provided the second-best reminder of the day as to why I am so very glad I'm not a kid anymore, because, trust me, I'd have been one of the kids getting shoved into the wall. The best reminder, of course, was the bottle of wine we had with dinner. I may not be as limber as I used to be, but at least I can drink decent wine.

december? already?

2006-12-01T16:29:00.000Z

I'm pretty sure I just finished taking the tree down like last week.

This has been a year when a significant number of my friends have had babies, concluding with two born this week. I have been churning out booties and cardigans at a steady clip, which is fun, because they're tiny and quick, and there's nothing I enjoy more than imposing my taste upon innocent newborns too tiny to stand up and assert their right to cartoon character embossed t-shirts, which I irrationally loathe. They've all been boys, though, and I selfishly want somebody, anybody to have a girl, because I have a really great matinee coat pattern I am dying to knit. (Well, somebody, anybody I like well enough to knit for.) Dear friends: Your babies are just vehicles for my handknits. Take pictures. Itchy-kitchy-coo.

The latest baby arrived in Paris, to one of Phil's oldest friends. A.'s a nice guy, but imagining him as a father, when I know way too much about his, er, history, is kind of difficult. When we heard the news he'd got married, a couple of years ago, there was a long moment when we just sat there, looking at each other and blinking. Finally, P broke the stunned silence by observing, "Well, now I know how my friends felt when I told them we were getting married." All the same, he's happy and appears to be excited about fatherhood, even if his friends are going to think it's all an elaborate joke until he shows us some photos, and possibly the results of a DNA test.

I'm actually all on the ball this year, and my gift-making and -buying is going according to schedule. I've got two things to make that need to get across the ocean in time for the holidays, and I think I just might make it. I'm knitting my father a pair of slippers, and I hit Google to find out what his shoe size translates to in inches. As it turns out, in his case, shoe size translates pretty directly to inches, so yay, that's going to be easy. I typed "american men's shoe size in inches," into Google, and bang! First hit gives me a chart. Very good. Of course, the second hit was "Shoe Size - Penis Size Conversion Charts," which is really not the kind of connection I care to make when it comes to my Dad, but thanks anyway, Google. It's always good to get confirmation of my belief that whatever the subject, SOMEBODY will create an obsessively detailed web page about it. This one is apparently supposed to be humourous, and when I was twelve, I doubtless would've found it hilarious, so it's just a shame that I'm older than the hills and there was no WWW back then.

And now I know how my parents felt when I was amazed that TV was brand new when they were kids. Phil and I actually had a conversation about this the other night. He's seven years older than me, but still was born well into the age of television, and he can remember when they only had BBC1 and ITV, and then only for relatively few hours a day. So if you were home sick, after the morning's grim social engineering educational programming, you had the option of reading a book, or watching the test card. The test card was apparently more diverting than one of the six or so cheap-ass documentaries they had on rotation, the only one of which he could recall was "The History of Paint," which he estimated he'd seen at least 150 times.

"That sounds really kind of horrible," I told him.
"At least I was born after rationing ended," he replied.

Thus ended the evening's cultural exchange.

About that Summer Tweed vow...

2006-11-27T21:41:00.000Z

Well, this photo speaks for itself:

Yes, yes, I know. After all the bitching about the HCOH, and the swearing it would be a long, long time before I used Summer Tweed again...blah, blah, blah. What can I say, it's a baby sweater, it's unbearably cute, it's for the baby that will be arriving soon for one of the people I like best in all the world, and it only took me a couple of days. I had a fair amount of the brown yarn leftover from the HCOH, and the pattern only required a bit for the contrast, and two skeins of the main colour, so, what the hell. I love this sweater, it's a great pattern, and are those buttons cute, or what? So I made a baby cardigan in a silk/cotton blend. The mother-to-be will doubtless have plenty of practical things; I wanted to make something special. And I think I did.

I'll be updating every day in December, due to my annual participation in Holidailies, which also means I will be downplaying the knitting content, for the most part. My old DiaryX site (thank you SO MUCH for losing five years of my personal history, Stephen Deken) was much more of a general, old-fashioned online journal (hi! I'm old!) and that's probably what this place is going to look like for a while, anyway, although my knitting obsession is such that I'll probably be unable to resist the urge to blither about that, as well.

In other news of crafty import: I bought a sewing machine. Help me, for I am now acquiring a fabric stash as well. I really do need to get around to photographing what I am grandly calling "my studio," so the seriousness of my sickness will be evident.

Project-wise, I have made a pair of men's gloves in some yummy Yorkshire Tweed DK, which will be an Xmas present for my father-in-law, I have the first of a pair of Fuzzy Feet, for my dad, on the needles, and I am struggling my way through my first self-designed project, a tank top for my mom. Knitted in, god help me, Rowan Handknit Cotton, in a lurid shade of coral. Coral, she believes, is Her Colour. And she's right, and as she's my mother and prone to hot flashes these days, I have sadly concluded that anything I knit for her, beyond scarves and hats, had better not be too warm. I love her, but not enough to knit sleeves in 100% cotton, hence the tank. I really wish I enjoyed knitting with cotton more, since I do like the way it drapes, and the easy care, and damn, there is a lot of beautiful cotton yarn out there, but it is a challenge. It's helping me to loosen up on my death-grip gauge, though, so I'm getting something out of the experience besides tendonitis and the warm glow of filial devotion.

I need wine. And a hot bath. And for my Christmas knitting to be done. My knitting goal for 2007 is a wonderfully selfish one: I want to knit things for me. I will have my long-desired Clapotis, and I will have a jumper of some description before I knit a damn thing for everybody else next year. I've earned it.

did you hear the sonic booms?

2006-10-23T19:49:00.000Z

That was me, doing this:

Nine days. A whole jumper, from cast on to sewing up done in nine days. Booyah! There is something to be said for large-gauge knitting, and that something is that it's quick. There's something else to be said of it: OW OW OW. My wrists and shoulders don't much like speed demon knitting on 8mm needles, at least not so much of it, in so short a time. Proving, once again, I should never make any assumptions about what it is I like until I've had plenty of experience with it, it turns out all that lovely bulky and chunky yarn I bought so much of last year (but it was ON SALE!) is going to be a bit of a problem to use up, not because it isn't gorgeous, but because it seems I like smaller gauge knitting quite a bit more than I thought I would. I'm not going to give it away, god forbid, or not use it, again, god forbid, but my future yarn-buying decisions will be somewhat more informed.

It is great yarn, though, and that jumper is far nicer than that snapshot indicates. I have no regrets, especially since it's made from Rowan Plaid, purchased at half price at the John Lewis summer sale. It's amazingly soft and lofty, and if plied a little loosely, it's ok, because it didn't give me much trouble at all. There's something like 30% acrylic content in it, but you'd never know, and trust me, I have some pretty damned exacting standards when it comes to acceptable amounts of acrylic. It was so very soft and springy to knit, and after blocking it with a good soak in cold water and a tad of fabric conditioner, it got even softer and springier. It's going to be a very warm sweater, but it's also quite lightweight, and I do hope my mother-in-law, whose Christmas gift it is to be, will like it. It's definitely her style -- neutral colour, high-ish collar.

One of the nicest things about knitting is that I can make sweaters that I think are beautiful, but know full well would look absolutely terrible on me, because I can give them to somebody they will flatter. I would look like hell in that sweater; my shoulders and bust are too big for that style, and the larger gauge wouldn't do me any favours. I can rock a V-neck, a cardigan, a scoop or a square neckline, but crewnecks and turtlenecks are not a good thing on me. The Wall of Bosom effect is one I'd just as soon not display.

Finishing the HCOH, and a couple of other languishing projects did so much for my self-confidence. One, I learned I actually can be persistent with this knitting thing, and I can finish a project I'm hating if I want it bad enough. Two, I learned to trust my instincts when it comes to dicking with patterns; I didn't like the stitch pattern originally called for on that cardigan, so I just went ahead and changed it, having faith in my own taste, and my ability to, you know, do the maths. Three, I now believe I could go ahead and make something without a pattern, if I wanted to, and I will be wanting to someday soon. Using patterns has been a terrific help in teaching me how to knit. I get basic construction; I know when to choose an ssk and when to choose a k2tog when shaping a neckline, and yeah, it's just right/left slant, but the point is, I would've been afraid of an instruction like "knit other side of neck, reversing shapings" until just recently, because what the hell does that mean? Well, I know now, and I also know what to do if the only instruction I'm given is to increase/decrease one stitch at each edge. Even three months ago, I'd have gone into a panic -- HOW? WHICH STITCH DO I USE? HELP! -- but now, no problem.

One final example of my increasing self-confidence: tonight, as I was cooking dinner, Phil came into the kitchen, wearing the first jumper I ever knit. This is not an unusual thing to happen, because he wears that sweater all the time. I have to wait until he goes out of town for a few days to wash it. Anyway, I noticed that the cast-off edge of the neck had a break in it, and it had laddered down a couple of rows, unsurprising, because Phil loves and appreciates that jumper, but he's kinda hard on clothing he loves. One too many times jerked over his head, and bam, something gives.

Instead of freaking out, because my precious first jumper has a hole in it, I thought, hmm, I never was completely satisfied with that collar, anyway. Now I can rip it back, pick up the, er, right number of stitches (I picked up about seven too many, and by then, it was like the twelfth time I'd tried it, and I was too tired to do it YET AGAIN, so I went with it) and do it much better this time. I made him take it off, and I'll frog the collar later, and knit a new one. I am totally unafraid of doing this, and you know why? Because of all those bloody stitches I picked up on that bloody Log Cabin blanket, that's why. No painful knitting lesson is wasted.

More bliss

2006-10-08T01:24:00.000Z

SQUEE! The Tigers just totally fucking wasted the Yankees. SQUEE!

You can take the girl outta Michigan, but you can't quite take Michigan outta the girl.

Fuck the fucking Yankees.

oh, the sweet bliss of a clean knitting conscience

2006-09-20T17:54:00.000Z

Two major albatross-like (TM wench) projects, finally complete. The first is the log cabin lap blanket:

Why only a lap blanket, you ask? Because my wrists were giving out from the sheer, stonking weight of this thing. For some reason, I bought a metric shitload of discontinued Debbie Bliss Merino Chunky at last year's post-xmas sale at John Lewis, because it was going so cheap, and such nice wool, and also, I was just really getting into the crazy knitting thing then, and didn't know any better. And then I didn't have enough of any one colour to make a jumper, because I didn't know then just how puny Debbie Bliss' yardage usually is, so it sat in my stash, silently reproaching me for the better part of a year, until I got a copy of Mason-Dixon Knitting, and decided it would make a swell log cabin blanket. And it has; it is snuggly and warm and did I mention very heavy? And did I also mention that I still have lots of it left, although not in those colours?

Some (again, wench) might object to all the mind-numbing garter stitch and the picking up of TEN BILLION stitches, but it was pleasantly mindless knitting, at least until my wrists started to quiver every time I picked it up. And yes, the picking up of TEN BILLION stitches sucks a big one, but given that picking up stitches is something that had previously made me nervous, I have to tell you, this was like stitch-picking boot camp. I got real good at it, real quick, and I am now pretty fearless about it, so it was worth it. Just. Also, I kind of like boring stitches, and they don't get any more boring than garter stitch.

And...and...and...I just got done finishing...drum roll, please...the Hateful Cardigan of Hate!

Oy. This sweater had an evil curse on it from the very beginning. First, there was the impulse purchase (sense a theme, here?) of Summer Tweed, led to me needing to do something with the Summer Tweed, which led to me buying the Summer Tweed pattern booklet from Rowan, and led me to an almost right cardigan, which I thought would make a good birthday present for my mum. Once I switched the reverse stockinette stitch to stockinette, made it longer, and changed the closure, since I wanted something schmancier than the plain single button at the top. Which was easy enough, and only required a bit of fiddling, except everything went wrong, starting with the nasty sensation of knitting with Summer Tweed, which is full of vegetable matter and feels like dirty twine. And is completely inflexible, but hey, whatever. It does soften beautifully, upon washing, and the resulting fabric has a truly lovely drape to it. In fact, I would probably, masochist that I am, use this yarn again, the fabric is so soft and lovely when done. Right after I use a whole bunch of other, more cooperative, yarns first. Then I had to frog and re-knit one of the sleeves, and gah, it was just a mess, until it came time to sew it up. I like finishing, so I go into it with a pretty good attitude, and here is where I made the great discovery: raglan sleeves? OH MY GOD, SO EASY TO FIT. It was like my reward for gritting my teeth and forcing myself to finish this goddamn sweater. They slid right into place, stitched up evenly and gorgeously, and huge lover of set-in sleeves though I am, I will cheerfully knit raglans again, because it was just that slick and smooth and easy.

To my eternal regret, my mother wears only gold jewelry, and is fussy about things being matchy-matchy, so instead of the lovely pewter clasp I wanted to order from Purlescence, I had to go with fake old gold, which I found in John Lewis' haberdashery department. It looks fine, but I still would've prefered the pewter. But that's OK; it's not for me, so my views in this matter don't count. Stick a fork in the HCOH; it is a final blocking and one trip to the post office away from being out of my life. Whee!

Ashley Olsen?

2006-08-28T17:00:00.000Z

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

you spin me 'round like a record, baby

2006-08-25T14:58:00.000Z

So there's my first two skeins of crappy handspun, made entirely by me, with the use of some really, truly bad, very nearly illiterate instructions that came as a part of my Learn to Spin kit. How bad were these instructions? Well, for a start, they were for a bottom-whorl spindle, and the kit came with a top-whorl spindle. A bad, barely-finished top-whorl spindle, but eh, it was good enough to get me hooked, and bad enough that I am highly unlikely to ever deal with the company I got the kit from again, particularly since the kit took a long-ass time to get here, and they didn't respond to my increasingly-frantic e-mails. However, I found some clear, concise spinning instructions, as narrated by an adorable child, who, alarmingly, seems to be much smarter than I am, which had me up and spinning within five minutes. Not spinning particularly well at first, mind, but at least I understood what I was doing horribly wrong.

A close-up of my crappy yarn, which I swear to god, in parts isn't bad at all, and if it weren't overspun so badly here and there, wouldn't really be any worse than, say, Point Five. It's rustic. Yes, rustic. And its destiny is surely as something felted, but dudes! I made yarn! And I am going to make more, oh yes. And I am going to get a decent spindle, too. This is less a case of a poor craftswoman blaming her tools than it is a simple desire to have a genuinely beautiful spindle. Beautiful tools inspire me, just as beautiful yarn does. And maybe a beautiful spindle will keep me from buying a wheel before I'm good enough to justify it, because that's where this is headed, you know. Today a spindle, tomorrow a wheel, probably after that, sheep. OK, probably not sheep, but this fibre arts shit is addictive. Knitting is merely a gateway drug.

And there's some real yarn, as bought for me for my birthday, by my darling. The sock obsession continues, with skeins of Schaeffer Anne, Cherry Tree Hill Supersock, and Fleece Artist, all of which are beautiful and feel lovely to the touch. There are three skeins of Alchemy Haiku as well, which will eventually be made into a shawl for me, once I find a pattern I like, although, frankly, I'm tempted to just whip out the stitch dictionary and try to come up with something on my own, since I sort of know what I'd like, and just haven't seen it anywhere yet. A new pair of Addis and some Clover Takumi circs, and a pile of new wool tops completed the wondrous birthday present, and frankly, if my birthday presents are this good, getting TOTALLY FUCKING OLD, OLD, OLD isn't so bad.

this is not happening

2006-08-23T17:09:00.000Z

I am thirty-nine today.

mock at will

2006-07-28T15:28:00.000Z

I just ordered a spinning kit. Yes, I have turned into one of Those knitters; no longer content to simply buy vast quantities of yarn, I am going to learn to make my own. The spindle and roving are my reward for working on the HCOH. I am now 3/4 of the way done with the second front panel, and have only one sleeve, assembly, neck and button band to go after that. I will probably live to regret saying this - oh, hubris! - but I actually kind of like finishing. Well, except for weaving in the ends, but I've been doing Russian joins when I add a new ball on the HCOH, so I won't have as many ends to weave in as I might otherwise. It's not quite as easy as spit splicing wool, but I'm very glad I learned to do it, and I'll be even gladder when I'm finishing this bad boy.

And here is my second pair of socks:

I loved making these. They're made from Cherry Tree Hill Supersock in the Moody Blues colourway, knitted on 3.25mm Brittany DPNs, and they took me about a week to make, with plenty of non-knitting busy-ness in there, so they didn't consume my every waking moment. Heh. Until I turned the heel on the second one, at which point I became obsessed and just knit like fury until they were done. I am sticking to a very simple pattern for a while, mostly because I either plan on knitting socks for Phil (who isn't exactly the lace type) or I'll be making them from variegated or self-striping yarn so beautiful I don't think it needs a fancy stitch pattern. The colourway is a bit deeper and darker than it appears in that photo, which I took in very bright sunlight. One thing this very hot, sunny weather has been good for is rapidly drying wool, 'cos those suckers blocked in about two hours flat. I am deeply in love with Cherry Tree Hill Supersock; I don't know how well it's going to wear, but it is just pure heaven to knit with, especially now that I have some wood DPNs to work with. Aluminium needles, in most cases, are just not for me, since I'm a tight knitter, and I need that little bit of flex you get with wood or bamboo.

I am going to finish the second front panel of the HCOH tonight if it kills me, so I can cast on another pair of socks in that Koigu I've been hoarding.

uh oh

2006-07-25T18:09:00.000Z

Still hot. Still very hot.

Unable to locate more Rowan Chunky Print in the appropriate dyelot, so I trudged, in the heat, over to JL in Liverpool today to see what they had in similar gauge/colour/fibre still available from the sale. Found plenty of Rowan Chunky Plaid in a similar colourway, and even though it has some of the dreaded acrylic in it, it's mostly lambswool and alpaca, so it'll do. (This is for a funnel neck jumper for my MIL for Christmas.)

Came home, drank ice water, finished the instep decreases on the current sock -- it's just way too hot to knit anything big, but the sock is OK, heatwise. Decided to knock off for a bit, went upstairs to check e-mail and look at still more yarn online, because that's what I do.

DISASTER! WARNING! DANGER!

Stash in Chester (my fave semi-LYS) now has - gulp - Debbie Bliss Pure Cashmere in stock. Let me repeat that: Pure. Cashmere. 100%. Pure. Cashmere. No microfibre, no merino, no blend. Just aran-weight cashmere. Pure. There is now a mainstream source of cashmere I can personally fondle before purchasing. This is bad. This is very bad. 25g for £9.95 with a mere 45 metres per ball, which suck-diddly-ucks, but it is cashmere. I have very little self-control around cashmere. And for a Debbie Bliss yarn, that's actually cheaper than I'd expect. I am withholding judgment on the colours until I actually see them in person. And I probably won't see them in person until the weather cools down just a little, because there is no fucking way I am going to risk sweating on any yarn that goes for ten quid per 25g.

Mmmmcashmere.

heatwave

2006-07-17T18:02:00.000Z

Holy crap, it's hot. Yes, yes, I know, I know, this is wussy English heat, and thus I am, well, a wuss, but I'm telling you, it doesn't take long to adapt to the generally mild English climate, and when you do, your notion of extreme changes entirely. 30 C is bloody damn hot, people, particularly in a nation where your basic climate control device is a window. Back in the fiery pit of summer hell known as the upper midwest, I would probably have considered this a nice day once, but nine years have passed, and I am more delicate now, and I want my weather in that blessed zone between 10 and 20 C, thank you ever so much.

As it happens, I've also adapted to the metric system, so it's not all pure wussery.

Fortunately, our house is pretty well designed to handle hot weather, so when the afternoon heat is at its absolute fiercest, I can retreat to my north-east-facing lair on the first floor, turn on the fan, and wait it out. Inevitably, Pix appears when I do this, and plops herself directly in front of the fan, blocking a fair amount of the breeze as she makes herself as comfortable as possible. Cats are charmingly self-centred like that. If they had opposable thumbs, they would always drink the last of the milk.

Let's see. Cats? Check. Knitting? Check. Neurosis? Oh, definitely check. The other day, I asked Phil if it ever seemed to him that I was a born spinster who'd somehow accidentally got married. He laughed a lot, and it was not laughter of the 'oh you silly girl, don't be ridiculous' variety, if you know what I mean. It was more the laugh of ironic appreciation. I mean, he's OK with it, and it's nice to know I'm not just imagining it, because it really does explain a lot.

food & yarn

2006-07-16T00:23:00.000Z

So there's the itsy-bitsy-tiny cardigan I made for Casey & Josh's new arrival. The baby is so wee that it will doubtless be months before he grows into it, which is fine. May he wear it in good health and happiness.

I got a sleeve done on the HCOH, and started the other front panel. (I knit things way out of the suggested order as written in the pattern. Having to do two sleeves in a row sounds vaguely depressing, so I split them up.) I've been doing so much smaller gauge knitting lately that the 5mm needles felt huge and awkward in my hands at first, and though I did more or less adjust to them after a while, it felt really good to cast on and start another sock. My new sock is being made in Cherry Tree Hill Supersock's Moody Blues colourway. I LOVE this yarn forever and ever, and second sock syndrome will definitely not strike me, because I love knitting with the yarn so much and can hardly wait to wear the socks. Phil's already worn his; we had a cold spell last week (why yes, this is northern England, and cold spells in July are nothing unusual) and he was very grateful indeed for the snuggly new wooly socks.

Speaking of Phil, yesterday was his birthday, and while I haven't got his pressie yet (though I think all the stuff I've made for him of late should count for something, and we're planning on hitting the camera shop sometime next week so he can pick out what he wants), I did bake him an awesome cheesecake. I make maybe two cheesecakes a year, and one is always for his birthday. I go totally over the top with the birthday cheesecake, because he loves it so, and I very strongly believe everybody should get the birthday cake of their wildest dreams. Me, I like a plain cheesecake, pure and innocent and unsullied. Phil? Bring on the freaking chocolate ganache, man. So I did. One layer of dark chocolate ganache, made with Valrhona, topped with a layer of Lindt white chocolate ganache, and then I melted some more Valrhona and drizzled it over top of the white chocolate layer. This was the cheesecake of wretched excess, and even with my loathing of white chocolate, I have to admit it was fantastic. I think the double cream in the white chocolate ganache tempered its inherent sickly sweetness, and the fierceness of the dark Valhrona balanced it beautifully. I'd never choose to put white chocolate on a cake that was made mainly for my benefit, but it worked and Phil loves it, so it's all to the good, really.

In other news of gustatory delight, I picked the first ripe cherry tomatoes on Thursday, and we had them in a salad yesterday. There is very little in life that beats a good, hard-grown heirloom tomato, at least when it comes to food. I marinated a couple of chicken breasts in lemon, garlic, ginger, soy, spring onion and coriander for a good long time, then cooked them with quartered chestnut mushrooms in a little peanut and toasted sesame oil in a heavy pan. When the chicken was cooked through, I pulled it from the pan and left it to settle while I deglazed the pan with soy sauce, lemon juice, and a bit more toasted sesame oil. I sliced the chicken breasts thinly and placed them on a bed of mixed baby greens, sliced sweet peppers, spring onions, the cherry tomatoes and a handful of cashews and raisins, and then I poured the mushrooms and slightly-cooled pan sauce over it all for a dressing, and goddamn, it was good. It was one of the best salads I've ever made, and with some nice fresh bread and a glass of wine, it made a wonderful dinner. Next time, I might add some water chestnuts for a bit of crunch, but I think it'll be pretty hard to improve upon this salad otherwise. Freestyle cooking is so satisfying when it works well.

P's on holiday all this next week, and while we have absolutely nothing exciting planned, we will definitely be enjoying the garden and the fine weather, and may make the odd day trip. It's just nice to have him at home when we can just relax, sleep in, play with the cats, potter around in the garden and spend some time together. The longer we're together and the older we get, the more I think those are the best holidays of all, which doesn't mean for a minute that he's getting out of taking me somewhere for our 9th anniversary in September, of course. Ideally, somewhere with a good yarn shop.

victory is mine

2006-07-06T20:17:00.000Z

But the socks are for Phil. I finished them yesterday evening, blocked them overnight, and put them out in the sun today to finish drying. When P got back home this evening, he obligingly tried them on, proclaimed them a perfect fit, and I've since put them away for cooler days.

My first sock, the cuff of which is pictured in the post below, was only a success in the sense that I learned a lot while doing it. It's recognisably a sock, all right, but it would take a very strange foot and leg to fill it, because I jacked up the decreases after turning the heel. But that's OK! I did the hard parts perfectly -- the heel went smoothly, and let me tell you, the Kitchener stitch ain't that hard -- I just made the leg of the sock waaaaay too narrow, due to my insanely tight knitting (I was so nervous I had a death-grip on the DPNs for most of the process, and also: gauge swatch? what gauge swatch?) and then fucked up the decreases after the heel, as noted above.

After finishing the mutant sock, I decided to go for something I could knit on somewhat bigger needles, to compensate for my death-grip gauge, and also, not to waste any of my good sock yarn on my second attempt. (I graciously gave myself permission to indulge my second sock syndrome, due to the fact that the first sock was, basically, unwearable anyway.) The successful pair of socks were made from regular ol' Jaeger Matchmaker Merino 4-Ply on 3.25 mm DPNs, and even though they're just plain grey wool socks, they were so much fun to knit! The Jaeger is really soft, springy wool, very forgiving, and these will be seriously cosy winter socks. I don't know how durable they'll be, since they're a fairly loose gauge and 100% washable merino, with no added nylon or polyacryl, but you know, I just don't care. It only took me six days to knit them, at a couple of hours a day, max, and more to the point, I was working with a fibre I absolutely love, and knitting with it was pure joy. It also helps that MM is fairly inexpensive, readily available, and comes in very many colours; I could see these socks becoming a winter wardrobe staple around our house, since we definitely have plenty of draughts.

Learning to knit socks was great fun, and gave me a terrific sense of accomplishment and confidence in my own abilities. I would say that if I can knit socks, anybody can, and it would be true; not because I am a barely-competent knitter, but because I now believe I'm actually a pretty damn good knitter, and the odds are, if you want to knit socks, you probably are too. It's really not hard; it just requires patience, perserverance, and desire, all three of which you will need while you're wrestling with those first few rounds on the DPNs.

Hear me: Until last November, I had never in my life knitted anything more than a garter-stitch scarf. Since then, I have made three sweaters, two pairs of baby bootees, several hats, mittens, more complex scarves, taught myself to cable, to do short rows, learned to read and follow a pattern, how to correct (or cover up) my inevitable errors, how to use double-pointed needles, knit lace, and many other things I can't call to mind at the moment, but suffice it to say, there are lots of them. I love this. I'm good at this. I will never run out of new things to learn, but I know for sure I've learned the most important thing I need to know: it's just knitting. There was no need for me to be nervous and quite literally afraid to knit those socks with those scary DPNs, and all that tension and death-gripping and whatever. It's knitting. Who the hell cares is you screw it up? You can tear it out and start over, or decide it's just too much of a pain in the arse to bother, and do something else instead. I do this because it gives me pleasure to knit, and it makes me ridiculously happy to see somebody I love wrapped in a garment made by my own two hands.

Learning to knit socks also had two happy side-effects. The first is that I now love fine gauge knitting. I used to regard it as one of those things I'd never have the patience for, because it would take so long, but I was wrong, wrong, wrong. The smaller needles make me knit much faster because they're so much easier to handle, and I am looking forward to doing a lot more work with them. The second thing is that knitting those socks refreshed me, and I'm now back to working on the HCOH, with the plan of doing ten or fifteen rows a day until it's done, which should let me finish it within a couple of weeks. Right now I'm in that delicious phase where I get to plow through my patterns and books and peruse my stash while deciding on a new project. (My stash was hugely enhanced this past weekend at the John Lewis sale; pictures to follow.) I'm also going to cast on a new sock, because socks are the most fabulous on-the-go knitting project imaginable -- I took those socks with me everywhere last week, and all I had to do was toss them in a Ziploc bag and throw it in my purse.

If all this hasn't convinced you (I'm looking at YOU, cee-dub) to try socks, I have one more wonderful revelation with which to tempt you: Number of ends to weave in? Two. Beautiful.

Note sexy legs. Phwoaaaar!

Wherein I pick up the crackpipe

2006-06-09T13:35:00.000Z

sock,
originally uploaded by tricoteuse.

I got the cardigan done alright -- the baby cardigan that is not the Hateful Cardigan of Hate, but instead the Somewhat Delightful Cardigan of Delight & Also Done. It's dead cute and winging its way to its recipient, and I no longer fear button bands and all that stuff, so probably breaking down and putting the HCOH away for a while wasn't so bad in the long run, since I got a full cardigan-making experience and really boosted my confidence in my hypothetical ability to complete the HCOH. Except I'm not working on it. I just can't quite bring myself to pick it up and figure out where I left off yet. Maybe I should make my mother a Clapotis instead?

Ah, no. I am incapable of completely abandoning a knitting project in the middle. It will get done, right after I finish smoking that rock pictured on the left.

How is it that just under two inches of the most frustrating knitting I have ever attempted has left me totally addicted to making socks? I'm not even quite done with the ribbing yet! I'm nowhere near the dreaded turning of the heel. I have at least seven inches of stockinette to knit after I finish this ribbing before I get to the scary heel, and yet, after nearly a year of longing to knit a sock, but being utterly convinced I'd never be able to do it, I am almost sanguine about it. I am, after all, knitting with motherfucking DPNs, and I tell you, I thought I would NEVER be able to do that. Ever. Even circulars are still kind of scary to me.

I contemplated knitting flat and seaming, but somewhere in my stubborn knitter's brain, that feels like cheating to me, and anyway, it would screw up the self-striping pattern of the cool sock yarn. And I sew enough seams already (see: cardigans, pullovers, etc.) and goddammit, why not try, fail, and just shrug it off?

So I got a simple sock pattern (the Basic Sock from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's Knitting Rules), cast on (loosely! I remembered to cast on loosely!) got all my needles going in the right direction, and started awkwardly knitting. And totally jacked it up, but semi-fixed it, after taking a couple of deep breaths and creating a new mantra:

It is totally OK if this sock looks like ass. Just keep knitting.

And, you know, that worked. Every time I try something new with my knitting, if I can just shut up my inner perfectionist, it's OK. It works. I learn, and the next time, I do better. I made a strategic decision to sacrifice this ball of Opal sock yarn and the many hours it will take to knit it, just for the sake of learning how. Nothing bad will happen if I make the world's ugliest, worst-fitting sock. I'm enjoying myself, I am figuring something out, it just doesn't matter. Keep knitting.

Ladders at the joins? Got 'em. A few extra stitches appearing along the way? K2tog, baby, and keep going. DPN slips out of its stitches and hits the floor with a loud clang? Hold your breath and try to get the stitches back. Yeah, that looks like a stitch. Close enough.

This is so much fun. Once I get these socks done, the perfectionist will come back and demand I make my next pair right, but for now? This is fingerpainting in kindergarten; I'm just here to have fun, learn, and make something that will be beautiful to me, if nobody else.

All you sock-pushers were right. This is crazy good fun, and it does totally get easier once you get the first dozen rounds or so done and the needles stabilise. And sock yarn is, in fact, several orders of magnitude more addictive than crack. I'm not even done with the first cuff yet, and I just ordered two skeins of cashmere from HipKnits.

What? I needed it. Just shut up and pass the crackpipe back over here.

Hard! Rock! Hallelujah!

2006-05-20T22:44:00.000Z

Heh. Best Eurovision ever; the cheesy Finnish metalheads won, warming the cockles of my camp-loving little heart. Day of Rockening! The Arockalypse! Monsters! Giant boots! What's not to love? I especially loved the part where Terry Wogan had a bit of a meltdown when, during the point count, the queeny Dutch guy was flirting clumsily with the presenter. Jeez, Terry, what's the problem? Is the Eurovision Song Contest just a little too gay for you this year?

The problem, of course, was that in order to get to the cheesy Finnish metalheads, we had to, you know, watch Eurovision. And, as Phil so neatly put it, "Every year, I sit down thinking I'll be in for a night of ironic, sneering pleasure, and about two songs in it is just so excruciatingly bad I eventually have to flee the room."

But hey, I had a bottle of cheap plonk, so it helped take away the pain of the non-Lordi acts. Phil ran out before the whole tacky shebang started to get beer, and asked if I wanted anything. I told him to just grab me a bottle of wine, he asked what kind, and, knowing how limited the selection in our local offies is, I just told him, "Oh, something like Chardonnay. A basic white. Whatever's in the chiller cabinet." He came back with a bottle of, I shit you not, Bulgarian Chardonnay.

Ana: "Bulgarian Chardonnay?"
Phil: "They had much nicer-looking stuff, but that was the only chilled Chardonnay."
Ana: "Well, I didn't mean it that literally. I'm not even that nuts about most Chardonnays. They're kind of like the wine equivalent of Diet Coke. I just said 'Chardonnay," because I figured you'd recognise it." (He is not a wine-drinker.)
Phil: "Oh. Well I didn't know that."
Ana: "No problem. It's just Chardonnay. I wasn't expecting anything wonderful. Please tell me this cost at least two quid."
Phil: "If that."

I can report that Bulgarian Chardonnay isn't as awful as it might sound. It's a perfectly drinkable cheap white, and if it's not sending me into transports of oenophile bliss, it's getting me pleasantly buzzed. For all I know, Bulgaria may produce some truly excellent wines, and in fact, probably does. I just wouldn't expect to find one at our local Co-Op for mere pennies. And we didn't, but like I said: pleasant buzz.

More knitting has happened, but no more progress on the Hateful Cardigan of Hate. I broke down and told mom last week that it wasn't going to be done in time for her birthday, and it won't, but I will keep plugging away at it, as frequently as I can bear. I'm doing some fairly small-gauge knitting in Baby Cashmerino at the moment, and I'm surprised at how much I like it. I normally am very dubious about going much lower than 4.5 mm needles, but this is knit up mostly on 3 and 3.25 mm needles, and I am really liking it. Progress is way faster than I would've expected, and I think that's probably due to how light the needles are. I usually like hardwoods the best, but damn, bamboo is light and easy on the wrists.

As my sickness deepens, I am strongly contemplating getting into spinning. Soon, Phil is going to ask me what I want for my birthday, and I fear "a spinning wheel," is going to be my answer. Unless it's a swift and ball-winder. I probably shouldn't ask for a wheel until I've tried a drop spindle first, but oh my god, I want one. And a couple of alpacas to go with it, too. Maybe some sheep and angora bunnies. A llama. I like to think big.

Baby boom

2006-05-19T20:41:00.000Z

no, i'm not pregnant,
originally uploaded by tricoteuse.

Bootees! God, bootees are adorable, and a lot of fun to knit.

No, I am not pregnant, but it seems like most of my friends are.

In my desperation to knit anything but that endless goodamn cardigan, I have been working on a series of small, fun projects that I can do very quickly, just to get that finished object buzz. These are my first bootees, and oh my god, they are so very adorable. And so very soft, being made from cashmerino superchunky. Which is also machine-washable, something I gather is kind of important when you are talking about tiny little babies who can spit up and/or excrete three times their own body weight, or so it seems to me, based on my not-very-extensive baby-sitting experience.

This may be my favourite part of having a lot of pregnant friends. I get to knit stuff and it's all very, very small, meaning, of course, I am seldom more than a day or two away from completion of most baby-related projects. There's an almost immediate payoff in knitterly satisfaction. Unlike, of course, THAT GODDAMN CARDIGAN.

Also, I get to buy small quantities of really soft, high-quality yarns, which is the cost-effective way of getting my luxury fibre jollies, not to mention being able to use up those odds and sods of fancy yarn left over from my big projects.

The big problem, though, is that those bootees are so goddamn sweet and darling that it's all I can do not to EAT them. Yum.

wooly madness

2006-05-10T15:49:00.000Z

wooly madness,
originally uploaded by tricoteuse.

OK. OK. I HAVE A PROBLEM, ALL RIGHT?

But do you seriously know how hard it is to find Noro around here?

I have hit a new low

2006-05-02T23:22:00.000Z

Stockpiling. I have started stockpiling yarn. And what's more, I stockpiled it in a fit of irrational, possibly hormone-fueled rage, because some total do-gooding bitch revealed my secret source of extraordinarily cheap and incredibly DISCONTINUED Rowanspun. On probably the biggest knitting discussion board on these here internets. So I had to buy enough for at least one more of Phil's beloved Rowanspun Chunky sweaters, before it all disappeared FOREVER. Nevermind that I currently have at least one more sweater's worth of said yarn sitting, entombed in cellophane wrapping, right here in my study. It's discontinued, which means eventually it will all be GONE, and oh my God, then what? All Rowanspun Chunky is rightfully mine, or rather Phil's, because do you know how hard it is to make a sweater he loves as much as he loves that one? And it was my very first sweater, and it fits him just perfectly and he loves it to death, and I felt like a fucking genius when he put it on and there was not a goddamned thing wrong with it, so I am all emotionally attached to it. (God, I wish my period would just start already.) Mine. The Rowanspun Chunky is MINE, and I would appreciate it if y'all would just stay away from it. I would totally be willing to consider staying away from your favourite discontinued yarn if you would leave mine alone. Maybe. I am not a very nice person when it comes to yarn, unlike that person who, being kind and thoughtful and entirely better than me, chose to rat me out, with nothing but good intentions and knitterly camaraderie.

Ah well, at least, as mentioned, the yarn was cheap, and since I was there anyway, some Jaeger Luxury Tweed going for the ridiculous price of £1.25 a ball fell into my shopping cart, because, well, do I really need to explain why I bought enough yarn to make a whole sweater for the low, low price of £12.50? I had to buy it. 65% merino lambswool and 35% alpaca. I am physically incapable of resisting a fibre combination like that for, I repeat, £1.25 per ball.

As it turns out, I am pretty good at resisting the fibre combination in my mother's cardigan. I did really well, until Saturday night, when I just couldn't stand it anymore, and decided to use up the couple of skeins of black Cashmerino Superchunky I had leftover after making Phil's most recent sweater. I made a silly hat with earflaps, pointed kitty-style 'ears' at the top, and a really quite nifty stitch pattern that is mostly lost in the stygian black yarn, but hey, I know it's there. And it made Phil laugh and laugh when he saw me wearing it, but in that nice way he laughs when he thinks I am being adorable, and that makes me feel very loved. And in spite of my reckless refusal to knit a swatch, it came out only very slightly too big, but I don't care, because sometimes, you just have to knit a goofy hat that makes you feel good.

Gah, cardigan.

2006-04-13T23:22:00.000Z

Holy mother of god, how I hate this cardigan I am currently knitting. I am only about halfway up the back of it, and, were this not my mother's birthday gift, which must be in the States no later than the 25th of May, I have every confidence this would be my very first Unfinished Object, left to languish for a long, long time, possibly forever. I love the yarn. I just hate knitting with the yarn. I have tried every pair of 5mm needles I have, rosewood, bamboo, plastic and aluminium (I think that leaves cassein, which I don't have, probably wouldn't make any difference, and am not buying for this bloody project), and the sad fact remains that this goddamn yarn just doesn't have enough give to make knitting with it a pleasure. I am just going to have to suck it up and suffer my way through this cardigan, and all I can say is she better goddamn love it.

On a happy note, I finished the Airy Scarf, and it is very pretty. There are a couple of errors in it, but ripping back mohair is a nightmare, so I just fiddled with the blocking, and when I wove in the ends, I faked a couple of dropped stitches, and it looks fine. It is as light as a cloud, very, very soft, and doesn't itch at all. I think, since I have a ball of cream(ish) kidsilk haze that I will make my mom one to go with the %$£@! cardigan, which is a lovely rich, fudgy brown (really, the yarn is gorgeous, even though we hates it forever) and that way I have her mother's day gift taken care of as well. The other half of the ball will make the same scarf for my mother-in-law. They live five thousand miles apart; the odds of them wearing the same scarf to the same event are, to put it mildly, highly unlikely.

So now I am working out my reward for making it through this sweater. My reward will probably be yarn. Sock yarn, I am thinking, because I desperately want to teach myself to knit socks, even though I fear double-pointed needles. Sock yarn is just so damn beautiful, and the longer I chug along on this cardigan, the more I come to appreciate the concept of small projects. I am on a mad, mohair-conquering high, so I think I'm ready for socks. And more lace. There are so many things I want to make, and this sweater is not among them. I love knitting for other people, in fact, I probably enjoy it more than knitting for myself, which always feels vaguely selfish, but socks? I need socks. I deserve socks. Socks are nearly Puritan knitting, so wholesome and practical are socks. OK, so I plan on buying some incredibly extravagant ebony dpns and cashmere sock yarn, but eh, they're still just socks. The whole 'use cheap stuff you don't really like while you're learning' philosophy has never worked for me at all. What got knitting to stick for me this time was firmly rejecting the crappy acrylic and buying some nice merino. There is a place for acrylic, I concede, and that place is usually baby stuff, because the little buggers puke and crap and drool all over everything, and you need to be able to just throw their stuff in the washer. Also, you can practically watch them grow in real time, so yay, acrylic. I guess.

Oh god, I want to knit something other than that cardigan. Help me.

Oh, rubbish.

2006-04-11T21:48:00.000Z

While my in-laws have been on holiday, I've been filling up their wheelie bin, as well as our own, every week. See, I've finally got around to clearing out the guest room (also known as the "crap room"), which I filled up with, well, crap, when I cleared out the old crap room, which is now my study/knitting room. We moved into this house, oh, three years ago, and I am just now finishing opening the last of our moving boxes. They were full of useless crap, for the most part, which is why they were able to sit there, peacefully gathering lots of dust, for the last three years. I have now condensed most of the crap down into five much smaller boxes, which I will go through at my leisure, and that surely means they will sit in the guest room, vaguely irritating me and gathering dust until we actually have houseguests about to arrive, when I will probably just pitch them into our bedroom for the duration.

You see, I am slowly and reluctantly coming to the conclusion that my husband will never see the error of his packrat ways. Our house will never be entirely free of clutter. We live in an Edwardian semi-detached house that, while lovely and very spacious, is completely lacking in closets. As in, there are none. I'm not exaggerating for effect. We have NO built-in closets, and only two free-standing wardrobes, both of which are packed to bulging already. Add to this the fact that every single radiator is stupidly located, the doors and windows and other furniture take up almost all of the remaining wall space, and we have thousands and thousands of books (none of which, no matter how crappy, stupid and unlikely ever to be read again they are, will he consent to give or throw away) on many large space-hogging bookshelves, and it would be fair to deduce that we will never have any more wardrobes.

He really doesn't see this as a problem. You should see his office. Part of the reason his office is such a fright is that I have taken to throwing the piles of crap he leaves in the rest of the house into it. If it were solely up to me, I swear to god, we would hire a skip tomorrow and toss out tonnes of what I consider rubbish, and what he considers potentially useful, or has some other highly idiosyncratic reason for not wishing to pitch. I love to read, and I love books, and I look at our overflowing bookshelves, and I am seized with the almost overwhelming desire to build a bonfire in the back garden. Don't get me wrong; very many of these books are mine, and in most cases, I, too, am reluctant to part with them. I sympathise with his acquisitive and possessive nature where books are concerned, since I share it, too. But if I find one more crappy airport thriller stuffed in a box, I think I'm going to start screaming hysterically and not stop until the men with the butterfly nets come and drag me away.

Lacy goodness

2006-04-08T21:12:00.000Z

Stop the presses -- I am knitting a (very simple) lace scarf in mohair. The Airy Scarf from Last Minute Knitted Gifts in Rowan Kidsilk Haze, to be precise. I had three balls of Kidsilk Haze in my stash (more on my stash, later), bought on a whim, and which I thought I'd probably never use, since my one previous experience with mohair was not successful. It was, in fact, so horrible that it put me off knitting at all for a while. I totally hated it, found it agonising, and after about twenty incredibly painful rows, quit, and gave the yarn to my mother-in-law. The texture was icky, it stuck to my needles, and it had no give at all. It was some Sirdar blend of tiny amounts of alpaca and mohair and huge amounts of nasty acrylic. Hated it with a passion.

Fast forward, oh, two years, and I have three balls of Kidsilk Haze. Soft, oh God is it soft. 70% kid mohair and 30% silk, leaving exactly NO room for acrylic in the blend. I love this yarn, I pet it frequently, but I assume I am waaaay too new at Real Knitting to even dream of using it yet, and anyway, I'm still traumatized by the Sirdar experience. I place an Amazon order for some knitting books I've wanted, one of which is Last Minute Knitted Gifts, and there I find the Airy Scarf, which actually looks easy (although, for some stupid reason, I feared yarn overs) and more to the point, is listed as a 4-hour project and requires precisely one-half ball of Kidsilk Haze. As I am currently in the early stages of knitting what is shaping up to be an incredibly tedious Summer Tweed cardigan for my mother's birthday in late May, the idea of a four-hour project, one I think I will probably fail to do in four hours, and in fact will totally jack up, has its appeal: I'll hate it, fuck it up, and go back to the comfort of my easy but boring cardigan. Perfect.

Except this is fun! After struggling through the first five garter stitch rows and getting used to the feel of such a fine, lightweight and did I mention mohair yarn, I hit the first row of lace eyelets, and after k2tog'ing, I attempt a yarn over. And I did it right! It worked! And then I did ten more, and they all worked, too. The k2tog parts are a little tricky, since getting my 6mm bamboo needle (alas, I have no polished hardwood 6mms, and I am not cocky enough to go with slippery aluminium on my first real mohair project) through two stitches of a laceweight yarn is not easy, but hey, I persevered and did it. And no way am I getting this scarf done in 4 hours, but damn, this is fun. I can't get over how light it is. Since the pattern repeat is stupid easy, I might just go ahead and use up a whole ball of KH, since the pattern, as written, is for a pretty short scarf, and I like my scarves kind of on the long side. Which will still leave me with three balls of KH to make a shawl from, since, er, I decided, before casting on, that while I love my black KH stash, I really needed to go over to John Lewis and buy the pale pink KH used in the book, since it was just so pretty. And while I was there, well, I needed a couple more skeins of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk to make a tank top with, and damn, if this scarf goes well and quickly, I can make one for my mother-in-law's birthday present, and she's very fond of brown and cream, and look! They make KH in a lovely cream colour, and about ten minutes later, I come to at the cash register, and my £6.50 ball of pink Kidsilk Haze has morphed into, well, a considerably larger purchase than that.

What can I say, the stash is a demanding mistress, but I love her so much it's hard to deny her anything, although at the moment, I'm working on convincing her she can wait a little while for sock yarn. I can't possibly learn to knit socks until I finish that bloody cardigan, I don't care how much she whines for a little Koigu or Lorna's Laces. They will be her reward after I make it through all this goddamn awful Summer Tweed.

It's not that Summer Tweed doesn't make a lovely fabric, because it really does. My swatch, after washing, has a beautiful, interesting texture, and very attractive appearance. Knitting with it is just kind of unpleasant; cotton and silk do not make for yarn with much give, and I am used to using nice, giving wool. This is kind of like knitting with nubbly dental floss. I'm getting better at it; my gauge is very close to dead on, and I've learned to loosen up a little on the tension, plus I switched from a pair of 5mm rosewoods to aluminium needles, so I'm getting some much-needed glide, but really, I just want to be done with this thing, so I can move on to something fun. My first two jumpers, knit for Phil, were made of Rowanspun Chunky (discontinued, dammit, but I've stockpiled some that was going cheap) which I adored, and Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Superchunky, which is really soft and nice and buttery (and has a good proportion of microfibre in it, so don't think I'm a total natural fibre snob, in spite of me snarking at the hated Sirdar above), and was lots of fun to knit. I suspect I'm just not a big cotton fan when it comes to yarn. I am, however, a total convert to the glories of kid mohair and lace. Time to finish up this scarf and get done with that goddamn cardigan so I can feed the stash some sock yarn.

Farmer's Market

2006-04-01T15:36:00.000Z

Phil's been on holiday all this week, so of course it's been raining, and we haven't done much of anything. Can't really go anywhere, since his folks are on some monstrously long cruise around South America, and I'm keeping an eye on their house for them. Bee has about ten million houseplants, and it takes forever to water them all. Plus, they have this new alarm system, which is so stupidly easy to turn on and off -- it's this little gizmo like that I've Fallen & I Can't Get Up thing, you just press one button to turn the alarm off and the other to turn it on -- that I am, naturally, frightened that it's just too easy to use, and that I'm somehow going to accidentally set the alarm off, and then I'll have to deal with the security company and possibly the cops, and man, I just don't need that. My utter, animal fear of authority can be triggered by fucking rent-a-cops, for God's sake. How lame is that?

Yesterday, though, it was good. Flash woke me up at the ungodly time of 6.20 a.m., by headbutting me and purring loudly until I finally gave up and went downstairs and pelleted him. See, that's how Flash gives you a wake-up call; he's all friendly and affectionate and TOTALLY FUCKING PERSISTENT, like a furry, benign terminator or something. Pix will stand just out of reach and howl at you, or she'll do this thing where she sits right next to you and pick-pick-picks at you with one of her nasty little claws until you just give in, because you're going to lose your mind and possibly some blood if you don't. Flash, though, he's just annoying you by an excess of likeabilty and joie de vivre, so you're the bad guy if you get pissed off, the little bastard.

Anyway, I got up, and the sun was just dazzling. Beautiful, clear blue sky, a few fast-moving fluffy clouds, very nice. The local farmers' market is on the last Friday of the month down at B'head market, which is one of those big all-purpose markets, where you can get everything from eggs to orange pleather stilettos. The farmers, though, they only come in once a month to sell their expensive and gorgeous organic stuff to the vile, semi-moneyed hippie scum like us. Not that we're particularly rich, mind, it's just that when I look at how much money I spend at that monthly market, I feel kind of ill. Yeah, I smoke, but I'm afraid to eat meat that doesn't come directly from the hands of the guy who raised and slaughtered it, and who can give me chapter and verse on its pleasant, if brief, existence.

The market traders are all really nice, though. You get your usual run of meat/poultry farmers and butchers from Cheshire and North Wales, and your basic organic vegetable farmers (not much beyond root veg and brassicas at the moment, sadly), but also small, independent brewers and cheese-makers, a man who sells the most beautiful olives, stalls selling homemade chutney and jam and bread, all of which I make myself anyway, but I still love looking at their stuff, and then, occasionally, a real oddball, like the Catalan lady who had made a bunch of Spanish food, and was selling it. I bought a potato and caramelized onion tortilla from her, and brought it home for lunch. I thought it was lovely, but Phil's not mad keen on potatoes, and he was somewhat less enthusiastic than me.

Shortly after I got home, the rain came back, and after filling my freezer with all the meat I bought, I went and took a nap. No spring lambs haunted my dreams, thank God.

My mother is nuts

2006-03-25T16:36:00.000Z

But she does crack me up. She's had all sorts of gruesome health problems over the past year or two -- really unpleasant, if not life-threatening shit -- but still, she maintains her own weird sense of humour. A couple of days ago, an envelope stuffed with newspaper clippings landed on the doormat, and when I opened it, I found two things:

A) A newspaper story from our hometown's newspaper about a local surgeon, complete with a full-colour photo of said surgeon, and the following handwritten notation from my mum: "This is the guy who ripped my ovaries out. Hysterectomy doc, stingy with pain meds."

B) An advert, again from the local paper, for a neurosurgery practice. The three physicians who own the practice are all featured, as is my mother's commentary on two of them, complete with numbers, arrows and circles, to wit:

Surgeon Number 1: "This fucker is the one who had to re-do my back surgery. Stingy with drugs." (She has had issues with being given sufficient pain meds, and is understandably resentful.)

Surgeon Number 2: "This guy is my doctor now. I am reserving judgment, because he is better-looking."

I just hope he gives her more drugs.

OK, I remember now why winter sucks.

2006-03-13T21:54:00.000Z

Because of all the goddamned snow. Two days is clearly my limit. Yes, it was very pretty, and then it was grey and slushy, and goddamn, can we have spring now? My crocuses (croci?) and snowdrops were blooming when the snow hit, and now I think they're probably dead. Fuck you very much, winter.

still winter

2006-03-12T14:29:00.000Z

still winter,
originally uploaded by tricoteuse.

Winter is making what I am guessing will be its last stand today. When I looked out the window before I went to bed last night, a bit past 1:00, there was only a light dusting of snow on the street and our hedge. This morning, I woke up when Phil opened the bedroom curtains and commented, "Wow. Winter wonderland out there."

And so it is. Cloudy and snowy though it was this morning, our bedroom faces north-east, and our curtains and bedding are all blindingly white, so we didn't need the sun to fill the room with light. It was all so very cosy that it wasn't hard for me to go right back to sleep, feeling smug and happy. I only slept for another hour and a bit, though, before Flash managed to chivvy me out of bed to make breakfast.

I like Sunday mornings like the one we had today. Phil was playing with his new camera (although I took that picture with my own little snapshot camera) while I cooked, and our house felt very peaceful and warm. I baked a fresh loaf of honey-whole wheat bread last night, specifically because the toast it makes is so crunchily wonderful, and we had it with eggs, bacon and big portabella mushrooms, then we sat at the dining room table for a while and drank coffee and talked.

Now a lazy afternoon and evening stretch out in front of me, and other than a quick trip down to the shops, the only thing I have to do is decide whether I want to spend my time reading or knitting. Every Sunday should be like this.

Why didn't anyone tell me...

2006-03-11T23:11:00.000Z

...that Georgette Heyer is so much fun? Seriously, I picked up a couple of her books at WH Smith today, on a whim, because with all the knitting I have not been doing so much reading of late, and I miss it, and also the books were on Special Offer, and I love a Special Offer, and I am only about two chapters into Friday's Child, and already I can tell that I am going to love Georgette Heyer.

This is good! She writes well! The mother of the Regency Romance actually could, you know, totally fucking write! Unlike my somewhat pathetic Victoria Holt/Jean Plaidy addiction, I don't think I'm even slightly embarrassed to be reading Georgette Heyer. She's more like Patrick O'Brian than your standard crappy historical romance novelist, and believe me, I know from crappy historical romance novelists. Mind you, this doesn't mean I don't thoroughly enjoy a good trashy historical romance novel, but I wouldn't feel compelled to hide the cover of this one, which is more than I can say for something like My Enemy the Queen.

It could be worse. I could still be reading V.C. Andrews, an author I thankfully outgrew by the time I was in single-letter cup sizes, and whose ghost-written oeuvre I revisited in a brief spasm of nostalgie de la boue a few years ago, only to be stunned by just how terrible Flowers in the Attic actually was. I was embarrassed for myself, especially when the incestuous rape scene that the first three quarters of the book is merely killing time leading up to turned out to be so much less enthralling than I had remembered.

You really can't go home again.

Your hostess

2006-03-11T20:45:00.000Z

after breakfast,
originally uploaded by tricoteuse.

I was all dubious about P buying yet another digital camera, until he took this photo of me, at which point, I decided it was a Miracle Camera (akin to the Miracle Bra, of course) and it magically had the ability to make my hair look good. So that's all right then.

Expect lots more pictures, if not necessarily of me, certainly of my yarn stash.

So I totally fuckin' made another jumper!

2006-03-05T23:57:00.000Z

second sweater,
originally uploaded by tricoteuse.

This was planned to be my Knitting Olympics project, and it was, but I just overestimated my knitting speed, and the amount of free time I'd have to actually sit down and knit, so it ended up taking me four extra days to finish it. But that's still One Whole Jumper done in just about three weeks, meaning I shaved just over a week off the time it took me to knit my first jumper, and this one was a slightly more complicated pattern, what with the ribbing at the hem, wrists and crew neck. And I boldly deviated from the pattern by subbing a different yarn, fucking with the gauge, and changing it from a polo neck to a crew neck.

In other words, I rule.

The details:

Pattern: The Compromise, adapted from The Yarn Girls' Guide to Simple Knits

Yarn: Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Superchunky (the pattern called for something long-discontinued from Noro) in black.

Needles: Lantern Moon Blonde 8mm straights and Addi Turbo 8mm/40cm circs.

I am just so chuffed. I love knitting. Having always had crafty aspirations combined with a low threshold for boredom, and a tendency to not believe in my own abilities, I am so happy that I've taught myself to knit. I have a long way to go -- this is all just pretty simple stuff so far -- but I'm starting to think I might have the potential to be quite good at this. I'm already frustrated by the constraints of other people's patterns, and soon I'd like to try to either seriously adapt from an existing pattern, or just, you know, design something of my own. The worst that could happen is that it just wouldn't work, yes? I'd have to frog it all, and that would be sad, but hell, it's knitting wool, it can be re-used.

The really insane part of this knitting madness is that I'm already day-dreaming about learning to spin and dye my own yarn myself. I think I'll probably get quite a few more completed whole garments under my belt first, though.

OMG teh snow!

2006-02-28T11:53:00.000Z

OMG teh snow!,
originally uploaded by tricoteuse.

It snowed like hell for about fifteen minutes this morning, so I ran upstairs and got my camera to record it for posterity, since I knew it was going to melt as soon as the sun came out. Which it duly did, and now we have a cold but beautiful sunny day. We get so little snow up here that I tend to get disproportionally excited at the first sign of a few little flurries.

Back in the day, when I was living in the midwestern snow belt, I dreaded and feared the arrival of snow, since that meant both treacherous roads, and the necessity of digging my car out of huge snowdrifts in order to go risk my life on said treacherous roads. Now that I live in the UK which has plenty of public transport, bad though it often is, snow has become a treat I get all too infrequently. I'm sure three days of a ferocious Michigan winter would quickly cure me of my snow nostalgia, but god, that first thick snowfall is a beautiful thing, and I miss it.

I actually got to bed at a reasonable hour and got a decent night's sleep, so I was up pretty early, and I've had an efficient morning. A load of laundry done, a couple of rows knitted, six pictures hung, and after I finish this, I'm off to Liverpool to look for more picture frames. Our house is finally starting to look properly decorated and lived in, except for the mostly bare walls, which are seriously getting on my nerves. We had some stuff from the London flat that just needed to be hung, I've acquired a few things, and one of these days, we're going to have some of our own photos up as well.

I also got a start on clearing out the guest room last night. Yes, we still have packing boxes and just piles of stuff that needs throwing out or putting away. I want to redecorate the guest room, since my mum and auntie will likely be visiting this spring or summer, and anyway, the room looks like something you'd see on How Clean Is Your House?, minus the animal faeces, mouldy food, years of dust and cobwebs, and staphylococcus colony, of course. Proper hoarders and squalorees would snort in contempt at my definition of squalor, but it bugs me. It's just full of boxes and bags and cat fur tumbleweeds, and I'd like it to, you know, not be that way, so I have a safe retreat when Phil's snoring becomes unbearable.

And now I'm off to hack the dust out of my lungs, and get some more shit done.

Please, go away. Please?

2006-02-27T15:26:00.000Z

This woman is bugging the shit out of me. She's the (formerly) non-famous(ish) person who won Celebrity Big Brother, which I didn't watch, and was only vaguely aware was happening at the time. I do not watch a lot of television, not because I'm all culture nazi or anything, but because I just don't. I do manage to absorb a fair amount of television-related pop culture simply by walking around and existing and stuff, though, because hardly a day goes by without me seeing the covers of many, many lurid tabloids and interchangeable gossip magazines. Those things are everywhere. Even Marks & Spencer has a magazine and newspaper rack now, for heaven's sake. So I am following this woman's fifteen minutes of fame via headlines and tacky cover photos.

Apparently, this (formerly) non-famous(ish) person was planted in the house by the producers to fool the C-listers into thinking she, too, was marginally famous. And she did. And she won. And now she's a C-lister in her own right, hooray for her. I am so goddamn sick of looking at her, though. She seems to have a beau named Preston, or something like that, and every twist and turn of their ginned-up attention whore relationship is being communicated to me through the covers of such fine publications as Heat and OK! and oh, whatever the hell the rest of them are. Who the fuck is Preston? What does he do? Why should I care that, as Chantelle assures us, "YES, we're sleeping together!" Never mind, don't tell me, I don't care. Glad you're getting some, Chantelle, now please shut up and go away.

I'm perfectly happy to hear lurid celebrity gossip, but, you know, I prefer it to be about real celebrities. I don't think Britney Spears is exactly loaded with talent, but she's legitimately famous for actually doing something, so I'm OK with reading all about her trainwreck marriage. Go, Britney. Chantelle...eh. What can she do, other than look cheap and tacky? Unless you count standing still long enough to be photographed as a talent, in which case, she is slightly more talented than my cats, she really doesn't seem to do anything. God, please, let it be 14.5 minutes and counting, because while I don't really need a new chav celebrity to despise, it would at least be a change.

Into the ether

2006-02-26T02:44:00.000Z

I found a precious handful of posts from my dead journal on The Wayback Machine. Oh God, I'm actually crying, because I've lost so much. It's not that my prose is so deathless, or I'm deluding myself with the mistaken belief that I once had the Best Online Journal Ever, it's just that pieces of my life are missing, things I really cherish, and just saving the scraps of the literally hundreds of days of my life I wrote about makes it horribly clear that there are memories gone forever. Funny things my husband and I said to each other, holidays we took, meals we had at our favourite restaurants, visits from friends and relatives, our earlier married life, little vignettes about various Camden street crazies, stories and photos of one of our beloved cats who is now dead...just vanished. And I won't get more than this small fraction of them back.

I am just numb. Why did I entrust my memories to somebody else's keeping? I should've made my own back-ups, I know that, but...

At least I have my 2000-2002 Diaryland entries safely backed up, thank God. I am so angry with myself for ever moving from Diaryland to Diary-X, just because I was able to get the journal name I wanted at D-X. There's a huge mistake I'm going to regret making for a good long time. And, oh, how I remember how many people used to tell me that Diaryland sucked, and that Diary-X was so. much. better. Ah, yes. I have almost nothing left to show for that genius move on my part.

The Wayback Machine salvaged this for me, though, and I am so grateful, because it is a quote from my husband which I hope I never forget again, because it will make me laugh on my own deathbed:

"Sam Gamgee is Tolkein's revolting ideal of the faithful retainer, so cringingly obsequious and aware of his fuckin' place that he makes Hudson from Upstairs, Downstairs look like a hardcore, raving Bolshevik, and he makes me want to puke."

That is just so Phil, I can't even tell you. And there are dozens and dozens of things like that I will never see again, and probably never spontaneously recall. Gone. Disappeared. Into the ether.

how much for those kitties in the window?

2006-02-26T02:12:00.000Z

how much for those kitties in the window?,
originally uploaded by tricoteuse.

Another test post, this one to see if the awesome combined power of Flickr and Blogger will triumph. Those are my cats. They are not impressed.

And that's all she wrote (at Diary-X)

2006-02-25T23:20:00.000Z

Yeah, so like many thousands of other people, my journal, formerly located at Diary-X, got totally fucking hosed, as in gone for fucking ever, thank you ever so much Stephen Deken. I am feeling kind of bitter, as you might imagine, but you know, I'm also feeling kind of free. I lost the written history of the last 4 years of my life, which sucks oh so fiercely, and with great, juicy, gulping noises, and if I think too hard about that, I want to cry. But I am also in the position to make a fresh start. Tabula rasa, baby. I'm no longer tied to the old journal format, which, truthfully, I was starting to find kind of confining. Now I can feel free to work on getting bored with the old blog format.

There will be knitting. And gardening. And photos of my knitting and garden. And politics, probably. And more of life as an American expat in England. I have no way of finding the majority of my old readers, but you know, I'm OK with that.

The most painful part of this is losing my entries about my years living in London, in many ways the happiest years of my life. It may the kind of pain that makes you stronger for living through it, though, because when I'm sitting here, wishing I still lived right in the heart of the best city on earth, at least I can't go trawling through my old archives, making myself even sadder and more depressed.

Fresh start. That's the ticket. Stay tuned! (I just hit the cliche trifecta!)