Christmas Already

Unbelievably, the Christmas knitting and spinning all got done. It was about 4 am earlier today when I finished the last item, which I can't really put here yet. There are two finished objects and some spinning that require blogging, but that will come in the new year.

But thus far, the flat has been cleaned, the last load of laundry is now in the dryer, cookies have been baked and packed and distributed, presents wrapped, bread baked (only one loaf survived, sadly), stuff mostly packed... the car has been taken for a wash, yarn wound, patterns readied...

Packing up for Christmas seems more complicated when you're a knitter. Suddenly you have to dig up patterns, wind yarn if you're not taking the winder and swift, needles to be matched up, knitting tin to double check... it's madness, really.

But the festive feeling is definitely on now, and since I was granted a little Christmas money, yesterday I kinda went to town.

Medium sock blockers and Sheepaints yarn: the left is Sock'n Go and the right is Marisilk. Both courtesy of Alice at Socktopus. I wonder if she realizes that the sock yarn colourway that I got is called Socktopussy?

For most of the afternoon it was just me, Diane and Alice, so we swapped our Christmas presents - Diane had brought along the one Nick and I had got her - and we opened them together. I'm glad that Alice and Diane were both very happy with what I got them, and I have to say I am definitely gloriously happy with what I got.

Old Maiden Aunt Merino Laceweight in Cinnamon from Alice.

Oceanwind Knits Merino roving in Gaia from Diane.

And mustn't forget the lovely gift I got from the two best bosses in the world at Stash Yarns:

A needle gauge pendant. Yes, I'm wearing it even as I type. 

And as for the gift that keeps on giving, the last installment of the Socktopus Sock Club 2007/2008:

Needless to say, I've signed up for next year, and I've also jumped aboard the Socktopus Fibre Club, which will ship in alternate months with the sock club. It's going to be a fun year.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and I'll see you all in the New Year.

FO: For The Only Grandfather I Have in the World

My father's father died not long after I was born, and my mother's father died when I was about four. I have no memories of the former, given that I was incredibly small, and of the latter, I mostly remember being a little scared of him. When you're only about two feet tall, a tall, dark-skinned grey-haired spindly man would seem rather scary, wouldn't you agree?

I know more about my mother's father than I do my father's father because my mum absolutely adored him. She thought the world of him and did so much for him just to keep him happy. Washed his car, brought him food, get him most anything he asked for. I remember her being very sad when he passed away, and for a long time there seemed to have been a gap in the family.

Nick lost his maternal grandfather when he was 17, about the same age I lost my maternal grandmother, who I still miss a lot of the time. So I never got to meet this man who knitted, made baskets and gardened. Mummy Irish insists that he would've liked me, and that besides, she wouldn't have let Nick marry me if she thought her father might not have liked me.

So I guess that's good news.

Between the two of us, then, we have the one grandfather. This would be Grandpa Irish, who is married to Nana Irish, the recepient of the Clapotis I finished a little while ago. Grandpa Irish is 82, still drives, still potters around the garden when his knee lets him, and made great recovery after heart problems that began not long after I first met him. Daddy Irish used to say that he wished I could've met Grandpa before he started getting sick, because he used to heave his own paving slabs when he was doing up the patio. That's the sort of man Grandpa still is, if he can help it.

Grandpa and Nana only have Nick and his siblings as grandchildren, so I was very blown away when the first time we visited after we got married, both came up to me with big hugs and called me 'granddaughter'. Because with Grandpa, I had a grandfather again for the first time in 17 years.

I told my mother this, and she became quite sad but quite strict. "You must always visit them, and when you visit them you must bring something with you. Never visit empty-handed. It is good you have a grandfather again, so you must look after him." I know she's happy that I have a grandfather again, even though it still means she hasn't got her father, but you know that that sort of sadness never really goes away, so you do what you can with what you have.

That is why Grandpa deserves cashmere.

A simple slipped-stitch pattern on the ends of a tuck-in scarf.

The yarn is pure cashmere 4-ply, from Devon Fine Fibres, which I purchased at I Knit Day earlier this year. Lesley, who runs the business, is such a lovely woman. I wanted to buy her yarn but found that I didn't have enough cash and no chequebook, and she couldn't take card, so she said, "Don't worry, I'll note down what you're taking and you can send me a cheque when you get in." Which I thought meant that once she got a cheque from me, she'd send the yarn I wanted over.

What she actually meant was that I could take what I wanted home without paying that day, fully expecting me to send her a cheque when I got in. I don't think I'd ever been so stunned, and so grateful at the same time. She is a gem, that woman.

I hope she likes what I've done with her lovely yarn. It is honestly the most incredible cashmere I have ever laid hands on. It was like knitting with sweet buttered air.

I hope Grandpa will be happy come Christmas Day.

Uncle Bob

It's coming up to Christmas now, and I find myself - as I always do this time of year - thinking about Uncle Bob.

Uncle Bob is, first of all, not really my uncle. It's what everyone calls him. Uncle Bob is a bus driver who works for the student bus service at Southampton University, where I spent 5 happy years. He is probably in his late fifties to early sixties, a small man with thick salt-and-pepper hair and matching thick moustache (he claimed to have been once an attractive strawberry-blonde), gold-rimmed glasses and bright twinkling eyes.

I first met Uncle Bob, or at least had a proper nice conversation with him, at around 5 in the morning one weekday, when I finally got the bus after finishing work at one of the student night clubs in the town centre. I technically finished work at three, but there were no buses running and it was too cold to walk home, so I hung out at the local pool hall that seemed to be open all night and had food available. When I hopped onto Uncle Bob's bus, I was the only one there, so I sat near the front so that I had some company.

Uncle Bob told me that he used to be in the RAF - that earns me anyone's attention for a good half hour - and he'd been to lots of places. Mostly he was stationed in Seychelles back in the day. He'd tell me about aircraft and what he'd flown and where he'd been. He was interested in anything and everything and very often if I got on his bus, we'd have a little chat before he got on with his job and I'd get on with where I was going and what I was doing.

He greeted everyone that came on his bus. "Hello, love." "Evenin', lad." "Hello, darlin'." He was ever the charmer, and with me, at least, was happy to give me a hug and a kiss or a daft joke if I was feeling down. I'm sure everyone at the university knew him, and just as many loved him. He was like an uncle to everyone, because he cared about everyone. He knew me when I was single, when I was pining, when I started going out with Nick. I showed him my engagement ring and he pretended to be sad, saying, "Oh well then. There goes me chance. He best look after you, right, or I'm coming after him!" The occasions when Nick did get on the bus with me, Uncle Bob would tell him to look after me for him.

Once, after Nick and I had married, and I was visiting Southampton, I spotted him in his bus at the bus stop, and I raced up there to show him my wedding ring, and he was ever so happy to see me again. He said he'd seen me running up to the bus and it made him happy that I remembered him.

I miss him at Christmas time because in the weeks leading up to Christmas, he would dress up as Santa and drive around all day in costume. With his white hair and moustache and an extra cushion down his shirt, he looked precisely the part, right down to the gold-rimmed glasses and happy eyes. He would have a collection bucket on his side of the driver's partition, and he collected money from the passengers as they came on board.

All the money he collected, he used to buy toys for children in hospitals and homes. I can't remember the name of the charity he was collecting for; all I knew was that he collected the money, which we students gladly gave, and he kept not a penny. He told me year on year he collected more all the time, and he would buy the toys, load them into a sack and still dressed as Santa, take them around to sick and lonely children. As if it wasn't enough that he made the lives of students that little bit happier every day, at Christmas he'd do the extra mile for children he didn't even know.

It always makes me happy, thinking that he's still out there riding around in his fake beard and Santa hat askew, laughing and calling everyone 'lad' and 'love'. It gives me such hope that there is still such a human being in this world.

Cheers, Bob. Hope you have a lovely Christmas.

Results!

It's Sunday and I have spinning to report!

So remember the poofy little sample of BFL singles I spun at Alice's for Diane's class? That was before we shocked the poor thing senseless by plunging it into hot soapy water, then cold water, then hot then cold again before whacking it about the place to encourage bloom.

This is what it looks like now, all nice and dry:

It's now all smooth and less wayward-looking, and yet still very squishable!

You can just about see the angle of the twist in this photo. As it's a Z-twist yarn, the ideal angle of twist for a low-twist single is about 20-30 degrees, which was what I had most of the time.

Now, what do you think happened to that lovely braid of Falkland I had from Spindlefrog?

This.

200 yards of soft, squishy puffiness at 10 wpi.

It was harder to draft than the BFL, and really needed more predrafting than I gave it. Because of the drafting technique we were using, if the twist caught any of the lumps I didn't draft out well enough, the entire lump would get incorporated into the yarn. It's easy enough to fix - eventually - but very, very thorough predrafting would make this method much, much better. And probably even faster than it already is!

I like it very much; I can't wait to spin another yarn like it!

Meanwhile, as it is Sunday, Diane is Spinning-In. So what's on my spinning bookshelf?

Most of what she mentioned in her post, actually.

My first ever spinning book was Teach Yourself Visually Handspinning, by Judith MacKenzie McCuin, which was a Christmas gift from Diane last year. That was the Christmas when I got my first wheel, Olivia, who also came with a copy of the tall green book to the right of the book of Celtic myths and legends, called British Sheep and Wool. It's supposedly hard to find a copy of it now so I'm lucky I have one.

Alongside those I have Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' Spinning in the Old Way for spindle-spinning, Diane Varney's Spinning Designer Yarns and Creative Spinning by Alison Daykin & Jane Deane for clever and interesting yarns to try to recreate, packed with instructions, a copy of Spin It! by Lee Raven that you can just about see - it's a very thin book - and Deb Menz's Color in Spinning, which I'm sure I'll look into more when I learn to blend fibres and dye them.

I also have a subscription to Spin-Off, which is always full of great articles, stuff to learn and galleries and patterns to drool over. Quite often some of the instructional articles are available for download, too!

I am eagerly awaiting - as Diane is - for Spin Control  by Amy King (of Spunky Eclectic) and Judith MacKenzie McCuin's The Intentional Spinner, and I've preordered both so I look forward to them dropping through the post in the near future. I'd also like to try and get hold of a copy of In Sheep's Clothing, too, as well as books about dyeing and Deb Menz's other book about colour.

*sigh* So much to learn, so little time...

A Little Bit of Yarn, A Little Bit of Twist

I have been given credit for getting Artist's Palette Yarns in as Yarn of the Month for Stash Yarns, but really, the fault's all Chantelle's. I can't remember how long ago it was, but she rang me to tell me she'd found a lovely knitting shop up in Malvern called The Knitting Parlour. Which was great because that meant that Mummy Irish would now have a nice knitting shop to go to that is close to her.

I asked her what she bought, and she said she bought some lovely sock yarn that was kept in a basket towards the back of the shop, called Sweet Feet, by the aforementioned Artist's Palette. "They're based in Worcestershire and I think they've got a website," she said, always happy to buy yarn that is made locally. We went to look for the website and found that it was still under construction.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago and we needed a Yarn of the Month. I loaded up the now complete website and showed Michelle and Nathalie. "How about them?" I'd even managed to get Chantelle to show them how the sock yarn knitted up when we ran into them at I Knit Day.

Last Friday, a mighty box arrived with some of the most incredible colours, textures and samples. And twelve of these babies for the yarn tasting evening:

Everyone who attended the yarn tasting got one of these. You can't see it, but near the label there is also a handmade stitch marker. Juliet makes such effort you can't help but love her. She came along to the yarn tasting, too, so it was great to meet the person behind the madness.

And this was what was inside:

One wee ball each - complete with label - of all her yarns.

Let it be known that thanks to her, my stash - already shamefully large - has increased a little bit more.

Cut to this morning, where a small group of us gathered at Alice's for Diane's Single Spun class. Diane had taught me to spin low-twist singles before, resulting in this yarn here, but when I asked her about the Single Spun class, she taunted me with the words, "Well, I haven't taught you everything about spinning singles, you know..."

Talk about a woman after my own heart.

We started with some lovely oatmeal BFL that drafted and spun like a dream, and this was the result:

The technique we were using was different from when I first learned to spin low-twist singles; the fibre hand stays back as usual, but the forward hand doesn't pinch off twist - it sort of just guides it a bit by rolling it around, almost more like flicking the yarn. The twist is also allowed to go behind the forward hand, which I found a little counter-intuitive, but this is so that the twist that is built up draws the fibres from the fibre hand, keeping a lot of the air in, therefore making a soft, lofty single.You can see how puffy the single is in the skein.

We were also given laminated twist angle cards, so that we can keep track of our twist angle in order to get the yarn we want.

The photo above was taken before we set the twist. For singles we gave it a hot bath with Eucalan, then a cold bath, then a hot bath again, then a cold bath again. This is to shock the fibres into felting ever so slightly, enough so that it doesn't come apart from the lower twist. Then we whacked our skeins against... well, just about everything in the kitchen, to encourage the yarn to bloom.

After a break, we finally got to spin the fibre we were given as part of the class:

Spindlefrog's Falkland in Giddy.

I have spun half of this; I'm going to spin the rest tonight and hopefully set the twist tomorrow. Expect to see photos of the finished yarn in the next couple of days! I can tell you now that the first bobbin is so super squishy I can't believe I made the singles myself!

And as an extra feature, someone is still knitting:

This photo was taken a couple of weeks ago when we were hanging out at Alice's on a nice quiet Sunday. Nick is a shockingly quick knitter, considering he's doing 1x1 ribbing. What I find hysterical is that he has quite a few of my knitting habits, and whenever he makes a mistake and I fix the row for him, you can't tell where his knitting ends and my knitting begins.

Between taking up knitting and going back to painting models again, he's found that he's more relaxed and less stressed, to such a point that he's actually started losing a little bit of weight, which was unexpected but something he's very pleased about. If ever I'm sitting on the sofa knitting in front of the TV, every so often he would sit himself down with me, grab the bag he keeps his knitting in, and work away. One evening he churned out two inches, and recently he's nearly got the hang of knitting while watching TV.

Well, until he dropped a stitch, but that was no bother.

I just like the fact that even if he has no real ambition past scarves, he is really enjoying knitting and finding it beneficial to his well-being. Though he has professed to becoming rather smitten with the idea of being the one to knit a future baby blanket... but that is a long way off.

Book Meme

Because I've seen this making its rounds - well, around Diane and Emma -  I figured: well, why not?

But I warn you: it will be pitiful.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read.
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (and most of the literature around it, like Tolkien's letters)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (the usual version and The Street Bible, by Rob Lacey)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres Mans
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (and never again, the smug shallow git)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (though I prefer A Little Princess)
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie is even better)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A miserable 27/100.

A lot of them, I'd never heard of. A number of them, I have never been able to quite approach. I have trouble with classic literature, I think; things like Tolstoy and Dickens and Hugo. I try to not let that bother me, thinking that I might be a little less in the intellectual department for not having read them.

On the other hand I've grown up enough now to finally want to read Austen; I'd avoided it because when you do English Literature and 90% of the girls in your course are absolutely simpering over Austen, and insist you read her, you end up running a mile. Or ten, in my case. It wasn't until I watched the BBC series of Pride & Prejudice at Alice's that I decided I liked Austen for her very witty dialogue and her very sharp social commentary. Which I do regret having waited so long to discover. I blame my course-mates because they were into Austen for the romance, which is really not the point. Nice, but not what I would've liked her for. 

I find books and reading a bit of a difficult subject. I wonder and worry if what I read allows for assumptions to be made about me. I know it's daft, because when you were 'the weird kid' at school you worry about that sort of thing. Am I not open-minded enough? Do I fail at being intellectual? Who knows?

I guess these days I'm a little too selective of my reading. I spend more time reading materials that teach me, that I learn from - and this includes Empire magazine, because the articles are so well-written and -researched they're proper essays - and they hold my interest more than fiction. And when I do want to read fiction, I go back to books I love and enjoy. But thanks to the list above, and considering the number of books I underlined, the future of my reading doesn't look all that bleak.

Having said that, by my bed at the moment is Parky, and Jeremy Clarkson's Don't Stop Me Now. While the first is pretty harmless, I wonder what the second says about me...

One Sleepless Night

One colour-coded chart.

One start of another hat.

This happens to me every so often. I go curl up in bed, I toss and turn for a bit, I rearrange my limbs in ways that should not be in order to get comfortable enough to sleep, and nothing. As much as I love wool, the sheep-counting thing never works for me. Nor do most other go-to-sleep soloutions.

So what normally happens is, I get up and I knit. A couple of times before, I've got up and spun, but it's usually knit. I can knit in the quiet, but I very rarely am able to do the same with spinning.

The early hours of Tuesday morning, I pulled out my copy of brooklyntweed's Habitat pattern, pulled out the designated yarn - in my case, Artesono Aran in Pine - and cast on. Repeatedly.

Because I now know that the long-tail cast on is the best one for me (that is, until I learn another one) if I want a good stretchy edge. It's been the best for me when casting on top-down socks, and I figured, best for a hat. What I can't do is gauge how long a tail I need. Especially for something that requires casting on 90 stitches.

Eventually I was ribbing. And then I increased. And then I changed needles sizes. And then... I realized that reading the chart might be better if I introduced some colour. Which did make things much easier.

And then it was four in the morning.

But at least there is a hat. Or some of one.

And yes, I am aware of the time at the point this is being written. I really have no idea what's going on.