Shades of grey

We went to Balmedie beach at the weekend. The photo is strangely dark. It was actually a bright grey winter's day. It was odd to leave a windswept inland farm and come to the coast and find it calm. This place is famous for its sand-dunes, down which the kids jumped and rolled and cartwheeled - yippee!

Then home to my library books. A Persephone novel by Dorothy Whipple. I reserved this using the library's online catalogue after reading about Persephone Press at the Yarnstorm blog. Can you judge a book by its cover? It's a beautiful colour! I could collect these just for their aesthetic value.

And forward-planning. More pre-ordered library books, this time about natural dye-ing. I have this idea that I will grow my own dye plants, and do some natural-sock-dye-ing. Slightly ambitious. First stop the rabbits from eating the seedlings - even supposing I can get them to germinate - and keep them alive for the three years it takes madder to develop chunky roots? Hmmm. Fascinating reading though.

And the results of Friday's mini-shopping spree: two skeins of Claudia Handpaint merino in "Ingrid's Blues" - a lovely blend of blues / golds / browns. Not as tightly-spun as Piece of Beauty or Socks that Rock: it is more like Cherry Tree Hill. I hesitated over "Chocolate Cherry", but managed to be "good". There was such a friendly little personalised note in the parcel, I will definitely be going back to Cnyttanpatterns again! It makes such a difference to have a real communication with a yarn shop, instead of getting the feeling they might as well be selling you something really boring like... oh I don't know, loo roll. (Ha! I bet you are all going to tell me there is a whole art to selling toilet paper, or why would there be such an advert war on tv?!)

You can also see the scarf pattern under the yarn. I was attracted by the description: "The fluid design of the Lead or Follow Lace Scarf is a wonderful study in the behavior of lace knitting when yarn overs are placed in various positions relative to the compensating decrease. "

Ha, ha, ha! * hollow laughter* - this sounds like my Cinderella stockings! I have to tell you it was a difficult weekend for Cinders. I gritted my teeth and ripped.... 5 lace repeats were undone. Gulp. But the good news is - it was worth it! Instead of having this uneasy feeling that all was not right with my leg shaping and its relationship to the lace pattern, I am now feeling rather pleased with myself - the decreases now form a zigzag of eyelets down the back stocking like a fancy seam - oh yeah, baby! I have almost caught up on what I ripped back, and I am buzzing with the excitement!

P.S. OMG! Have you seen the Puss in Boots winners over at Purlescence?! Gobsmackingly amazing!

Ins and outs

It has a week of ups and downs and ins and outs as I have wrestled with knitty maths.

It is obvious really: every "yarn over" is effectively an increase of one stitch, so has to be balanced by a "knit 2 together" or a "slip slip knit" depending on the direction you want it to slant (herringbone weave lace, remember?). So up one, down one, equals a straight piece of knitting.

But when you reach the part of a stocking where you have to decrease 6 stitches over a 12 row stitch pattern, simply knitting 2 together on every second row doesn't do the trick... because sometimes you find you have decreased-away the "knit 2 together"stitches which kept the stitch pattern straight, and kept the "yarn overs" to retain that lovely lacey thing that is going on... so instead of losing two stitches, you have gained them! Aaargh!

So it has been a week of counting. I think I have cracked it. But somewhere in the midst of "Friends" last night I forgot to write down exactly what I did on row 10, and somehow found myself with the stitches set up to do the next row 1 when I thought I was ready to do row 11...

You need your wits about you for this knitting-design lark, I can tell you!

Edited to add:

Oops. There has been a Friday afternoon stash enhancement accident. Just discovered the website of Cnyttanpatterns and discovered that the Heartstrings pattern "Lead or Follow" I had been eyeing up at GetKnitted was only £1.80 instead of £3 (and it was £4 at Angel yarns!).

AND they sell Claudia Handpaint sock yarn! How did I manage to stop at ONE of these delicious colourways?

AND orders over £15 qualify for free p&p!

Oops.

Progress on Cinderella

Cinderella's stocking is progressing.

Lacey garter top? Check.

Eyelets for ribbon? Check.

Glowing hearts? Check.

Herringbone lace? Check.

Warm knees? Only just... there's a long way to go!

Calm before the storm?

There have been incredible wind-storms here. Every night the trees start creaking and the cat flap starts flapping, and the polythene covering on our utility room "window" starts to billow. Sometimes it sounds like we are on a ship miles from the shore.

At the weekend we walked up to the Wood, which is a sort of island of rough ground, surrounded by our farm, but owned by someone else. The owner never ever comes there, but about 15 years ago he put a caravan on the plot in a desperate bid to gain planning permission. A series of access disputes ensued. We won. The caravan has lain empty ever since. This weekend we went up there and saw that the side has been ripped off by the wind. The windows have blown out. The insides of the cupboards are now open to view, even though the doors are shut on the inside of the caravan. It looks like the set of a film, or footage from the scene of a hurricane.

The surrounding wood is a scene of devastation. A couple of birch trees have lost branches, one has been uprooted. Even the rabbit warren looks as if it has been tossed into the air with a pitchfork.

So it has been so tempting just to snuggle into the sofa with my back to the window, sometimes knitting, sometimes just gazing vacantly at the new Boden catalogue (oops!). feeling safe and (relatively) warm.

This week the builders are coming to demolish the old utility room. The one with a feed sack covering the space where the window should have been, rope tying the outside door shut, and eerie scrabbling noises in the ceiling. The ranks of mouse traps have been removed, and the washing machine is now in the kitchen along with a pile of salvaged saucepans (for future dyeing experiments?).

And my Cinderella yarn has arrived.

Deep breath - here we go!

P.S. The German yarn? After an initial order acknowledgement, I never heard from them again. No reply to my email. Total silence. Maybe just as well!

Sampling Cinders

Can you hear the bubbling of excitement?
Look what I got in the post yesterday!

A yarn smile!

Kirsty at Piece of Beauty has custom-dyed some beautiful squishy springy superwash merino samples for my Cinderella stockings!

Can you see all the colours glowing and flickering through the red? There is a beautiful purple, and a firelight orange, and lots and lots of rich ruby - wow! And the grey is just as it should be - not "plain grey" by any means, but full of character, with charcoally depths and silvery heights.

You can tell I am pleased can't you!

I had another late night of knitting on my Cindy sock - I added a couple of inches to what you see here. This is another Piece of Beauty colourway - "Vintage Floral", and I am using the Lantern Moon ebony 2.25mm (US 1) needles I won in the Purlescence competition. The combined tactile experience is rather like the satisfying squeak of a boot on freshly-fallen snow on a crisp winter's morning. No, really, it is! There is a tiny amount of resistance as you slide the needle into the stitch and then it settles itself and slips off again easily. It is a very comfortable, rhythmic knit.

I am so glad I knitted this before embarking on the stockings, as it is clear I need to adjust my stitch numbers for Cinderella's thighs, to allow for the tension of the scalloped top edge. 70 stitches fits me snugly below the calf, but won't go any higher! I do fear I may be casting on 100 stitches round the thigh - gulp!

Now where did I put that leaflet about Step aerobics classes?

Further to yesterday's muttering about Blue Moon's website trouble, I have received an email asking me to check my credit card for a refund and then "try again". Bizarrely, Blue Moon's bank didn't believe the number of high-value orders they were receiving for the sock club and refused all the payments! What kind of a bank turns away a business's customers?!

Bilingual knitting

Today I ordered some sock yarn from Germany.

At least, I think I did.

You see, I do not read or speak German, so I navigated my way through the website on the basis that "Hmmm that looks like a familiar word - I bet it means postcode" or "I would expect the Order Now button to be there, so I will just click it" .
So imagine my surprise when I clicked the final button "Fertig!" and still had not been asked to pay...

Checked a translation website and found this:
"Ich bin völlig fertig.": I am totally exhausted

I do hope that an invoice comes my way - the wool is lovely! and the conversion from Euros seemed very cheap.

It is an evenly self-striping "Missoni Color" - a double-knit weight that is a great combination of blues and greens - NOTHING like the offensive blue soup sock! I saw this yarn at "Web of Wool" last year but hesitated so long that they sold out.

Other news - Blue Moon is unable to accept my international payment for the Sock Club due to trouble with their new website. Is this an omen? Should I save my £s (or Euros) for local socky goodness? (Answer - "Probably".)

And I have been unable to calm my itchy fingers. Cinderella has a little sister. Her name is Cindy and she is a sock rather than a stocking. They are definitely siblings, but Cindy is more innocent. She likes a little bit of lace, but nothing provocative. Her take on herringbone is tweedier, more closely-woven than her big sister, and she would never, ever have her heel tattooed! Pictures will follow!

Knitty dreads

Over the holidays, I undid my daughter's 30-or-so mini hair braids, because they were starting to get "fluffy". But I left it so late and it took so long to undo, that we set off on a week-long holiday away from home with "big hair" loosely plaited in a single hank. Without conditioning it. She then went swimming every day for a week. And we were being so relaxed that I just left it like that... for a week. So at the end of our holiday, the day before she was due to fly to London to visit her dad, I realised I would have to tidy her up a bit... (Mothers of curly-haired children know what is coming next...)
There are no pictures. No pictures of the single matted dreadlock that her beautiful waist-length hair had become. It took a couple of hours to tease apart. There was a lot of crying, there was an enormous amount of patience, and a scarey moment when I offered to cut her hair off at shoulder level, and she almost said "yes". But we got through it. She had the best part of a litre of olive oil poured onto her head, and a plastic bag tied on top in an attempt at "deep-oil-treatment". And it worked. Hair saved. Neatness resumed. A lesson learned. Phew.
But this weekend I was faced with a very similar scenario involving a skein of luxury sock yarn. "I will just wind this into a ball quickly, then take my boots off, have a cup of tea, and start swatching..."
Pah! Insert a Dracula-like hollow laugh *here*.
There are pictures, but they are too gruesome for your tender eyes.
Firstly, the colour was not what I had expected - I decided this was the fault of my PC monitor at work, and settled down to work with the colour I received, after the initial surprise, even though it was not "right". The "contrast" yarn colour was too close to the "base" colour and the whole thing was way too.... blue. I had planned charcoal and purpley-red. I found myself with denim blue and lighter blue with purple - maybe I misread the colour chart? It was a lovely colour but it wasn't "Cinders and flaming hearts"! But the first mailing of the yarn had got lost in the Christmas post and I was feeling frustrated - I wanted to crack on with the project, and this would "do".
But...after three hours of gentle attempts at unravelling over a chair back (my usual fool-proof method) I was holding a small ball of yarn with regular fluffy bobbles, and in my lap was a large mass of tangled, matted, spontaneously-felting nightmare. At one point I had to pass the ball of yarn through a split in the loosely-plied yarn - that can't be right, can it?!
Cinders will not be going to the ball just yet.
Was it just me? Am I fated to turn silken tresses into dreadlocks? This was not the fairytale I had envisaged!
I am trying to be charitable about the original yarn - maybe it was a dodgy batch. But this just did not feel like the sort of yarn anyone would choose to knit a sock with - too "flabby", loosely-spun, and generally lacking in "fibre". Candyfloss. Yet it was described as "sock yarn" on the website.
Another lesson learned - do not select an unfamiliar yarn for a major project without requesting a sample first.
And really, why was I planning to "make do" with a colour that didn't make my heart sing?

Negotiations are underway for a custom-dye job of my favourite yarn. Tightly-spun supersoft yarn which does not felt or bobble before it even reaches the needles. Mmmm!
Patience, dear Cinders, your dream stocking yarn is brewing in a dye-bath in the Highlands...

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Lots of exercise, lots of good food, and lots of knitting - the perfect holiday!

But now I am back at work and have to keep it all going…. Hmmm.

The Hexed hat came out rather small – baby-sized in fact. My own fault for not checking the thickness of the original yarn compared to the Maya I was determined to use. But it is very cute, and I am sure I will find a home for it.




The macedoine socks? Ah yes. Well, remember in Bridget Jones’ Diary, how Bridget cooks a special celebration dinner for her friends and ends up with blue soup? That’s what these socks remind me of. I present: Bridget’s Blue Soup Socks!


Somehow I overlooked the effect of the blue “string” in among the vegetables. These are not my ideal socks. My First Love is being very polite about them, but the kids are not mincing their words: “They are horrible. Especially the squashed satsuma under the heel.” Sigh. In their favour, they were a very quick knit. Begun on Christmas day, they were almost done on New Year’s Day.

Vital statistics: Lana Grossa Meilenweit Fantasy, colour 4820, on size 2.5mm dpns. The pattern is the Madder rib from “Knitting Vintage Socks” (Nancy Bush).

Another dubious seasonal project: the gingerbread house kit. It arrived beautifully bubble-wrapped, and the kids were so excited at the prospect of decorating it with jelly tots, dolly mixtures and mini marshmallows, but when the box was opened, the scene was one of devastation. Gingerbread rubble. After a valiant attempt to reconstruct the walls, with icing as mortar, we realised it would never bear the weight of a roof. So we moved towards more creative architecture and mosaics…



Moving forward, I discovered the perfect recipe for apple streusel cake. I have for so long wanted to find a recipe for the apple cake I used to buy at “Studio 10 ½ Café”as a very special treat when I was a student in Hull. This might not be identical, but it is delicious: layers of dense appley softness interspersed with layers of crunchy almondiness, a hint of cinnamon, and moist but not soggy cake. Perfect with coffee on a sunny January morning! I had to adapt the original recipe to fit the ingredients I had to hand, so I can claim this as my own!



Apple Streusel Cake

For the streusel:
50g flaked almonds
2 tbsp plain flour
30g soft light brown sugar
½ tsp ground cinnamon
20g melted butter (or non-dairy margarine if I make it when the kids are here)




For the cake:
75g butter, softened (as above)
125g granulated sugar
2 large eggs
150ml plain soya yoghurt
200g self-raising flour
½ tsp baking powder
3 dessert apples (mix of Granny Smith and Macintosh Red)

1 - Heat oven to 180C (160C if fan assisted oven) or Gas mark 4
2 – Line round 20cm cake tin with greaseproof paper
3 – Make streusel by mixing ingredients together in small bowl
4 – Cream together butter and sugar until pale and fluffy.
5 - Add eggs and yoghurt gradually – I used a food processor and had to scrape the butter mix off the bottom to get it to combine properly – maybe I should have put all these ingredients in the mixer at once.
6 – Sieve together the flour and baking powder, and gradually fold into wet ingredients.
7 – Peel and core all of the apples and thinly slice half of them.
8 – Pour half of the cake mix into the prepared tin, spread level.
9 – Scatter over half of the streusel mix, then arrange the sliced apples on top of this.
10 – Quarter and thinly slice the remaining apples.
11 – Spread over the remaining cake mixture, arrange the quartered apples on top of this, and finish with an even scattering of the remaining streusel mix.
12 – Bake in the centre of the oven for 1 ½ hours. Check after an hour, and cover with greaseproof paper if the nuts are browning too fast – mine were fine.
13 – Allow to cool before removing from tin and peel off paper. I forgot to unpeel the paper, so it was only easily-removed by the second day. By the third day it was eaten…



Progress on Cinderella’s stockings - I have charted out the pattern from the thigh as far as the ankle, but need the yarn before I finalise the leg shapings. I do not trust my ability to guess gauge! The stitch pattern I have chosen is… err…challenging. A lot of concentration is required, much note-taking, and absolutely NO setting-aside mid-row if your brain is anything like mine. But I think they will be lovely! I can imagine these gracing the legs of a bride. Cinderella’s wedding stockings?