Hello!

Today is brought to you by the letter C...

I saw this on Jodi's blog.

The idea is that you ask in the comments for a letter and one is sent to you at random. You then blog about ten things you love beginning with that letter.

So, Jodi sent me the letter C.

1. Canada

I first went to Canada about ten years ago, to Toronto, Montreal and Niagara (of course) and then went for a second time about four years later and visited Vancouver and Vancouver Island.
I would go back in a heartbeat. Shame it's so far away.
The quirkiest thing about Canada is the trains.
Picture the scene.
Gavin and I get on the train to Montreal and find seats.
We are approached by the Conductor.
"Good morning, I notice that you are sitting beside the safety window, should there be an accident, this is the window which would be used to exit the train and therefore I need to explain to you how to do it.
First you need to wrap a coat or jacket around your arm for protection and then use the hammer next to the window to break the glass by hitting it in the corner of the pane.
Then use the seat cushions which are removable in this section of the carriage and lay them along the bottom of the window to protect against broken glass. We would be grateful if you would assist other passengers less able than yourself to exit safely."

We listened and nodded.

A second conductor (or maybe a guard) arrived five minutes later.
"Good Morning, I need to explain to you how to exit the train in case of an emergency"
We said we had already had the window-routine talk.
"No, this is about the doors. You are sitting at the end of the carriage and you are nearest the doorway exits so I would like to explain about how to exit safely."
Gavin went with him.
"This is how you open the door if the train stops, breaks down or is involved in an incident and you need to exit using the emergency exits." (He demonstrated how to turn a combination of handles to open the doors if they were jammed or locked.) "And it is important to listen as you open the door and DO NOT LEAN OUT as you do so, in case there is another train coming along the opposite track."

I have to tell you by this time we were looking for the hidden camera, despite it all making perfect sense.
On our way back from Montreal the train was busier and we sat in the middle of the carriage. The passengers at the ends got the safety briefing. We smiled. No cameras.
The conductor approached us.
"Good morning. I notice that you are travelling as a twosome."
We were indeed.
"And you are sitting in a seating bay for four... the train is quiet at the moment, but should it become busier and a party of four join the train, we would respectfully ask that if possible you move to a pair of seats to allow that party to sit together."
We agreed. Who wouldn't?
The train did get busier and we looked to see if there was a pair of seats we could move to, but before we could stand up and do it, several other passengers got in first and spontaneously and voluntarily moved seats to allow families to sit together.

I love Canada.

2. Chest of drawers

When I moved here seventeen years ago, the previous owners left behind a chest of drawers. It was covered in the original dark varnish, had five and a half handles instead of eight, and was festooned with stickers from kids' comics. In short, it looked ready for the fire.
However, I had moved from a small flat with built in wardrobes and had little furniture. So out came the wire wool and the paint stripper.

I had no new handles, and didn't want to drill fresh holes for them anyway, so I used piping cord, which has somehow never needed to be replaced.

3. Cookery Books

An assortment.
This is not all of them.

4. Crisps and Cheese

I know this is two things but it would be very easy to just list ten foods which isn't really in the spirit of the challenge.
Crisps, cheese, celeriac (mashed), creme caramel, cauliflower (honestly, I love the stuff), puff Candy (the middle of a Crunchie, you can keep the chocolate - I'm not a chocolate fan at all unless it's so dark it makes your tongue wrinkle), corn cobs, cinnamon, chowder and ciabatta.
See?
Ten.
Far too easy.

Crisps.
Plain.
Ready Salted.
Kettle hand cooked crisps with salt and black pepper.
If I'm desperate, cheese crisps will do.
All other flavours are upstarts and do not deserve shelf space.

Cheese.
Brie (ripe), especially the rind.
Strong cheddar.
Stilton (not the namby-pamby-stilton-with-apricots rubbish, proper blue veined smelly stuff).
Just about any cheese, really.

5. Calligraphy

One day, when I grow up, I will learn how to do this properly.
Until then I will content myself with stencilling on things like my Ashford Kiwi.

6. Challenges

I was going to say Crosswords, but actually, I am a fraud. I have no chance ever of completing a cryptic crossword, my brain just doesn't work like that.

The Quick Crossword on the back of G2 is about my limit.

I'm also partial to a bit of Boggle.
I know it's a B but it's still a Challenge, so I am going to Cheat and sneak it in.

7. Cuddles

'nuff said.

8. Computer

9. Citroen Berlingo

I wouldn't say I love this. But it is undeniably essential. Almost part of the family.
It has carried boys, dogs, guitars, amplifiers, drum kits, chickens, eglu, shopping, yarn, fibre, logs, a freezer, other furniture, trees (Christmas and otherwise), spinning wheel(s) and everything else you can think of.

It is called Ralph.

10. Colour

I could hardly leave that out, could I?

There were more... Cranfords, candles, Christmas Pudding, Cornflower and cardigans for a start.

If you would like to join in, just ask for a letter in the comments and I'll send one. Leave your email address (it's hidden) so I can do it without everyone knowing what it will be.

n

PS  I have signed up for Twitter. You can see it in the sidebar.

A musical interlude

So, you are standing in the supermarket, minding your own business and the phone goes off.

Not YOUR phone, but the phone of another lettuce-seeking individual trying to decide between lollo rosso and baby spinach leaves with rocket and watercress. You look up and find that all the other meercats shoppers in the vicinity have done likewise. The phone continues to ring and several people are now scrambling in bags and pockets double checking that their phone (which previously played the 1812 overture) hasn't had a personality transplant and become an electric frog in the short distance from the car to the produce department.

I mean, I know what my phone sounds like.

It sounds like this.

I'm not sure where this puts me in the ring-tone-age-test.

How accurate is this?
I used to work with an apparently happily married woman whose ringtone changed one Tuesday morning from the Nokia one we all love to hate to Tom Jones' "Sex Bomb". It gave the attendees at the Team Meeting plenty to talk about over coffee, I can tell you!

So, if I rang you right now, what would you hear?
Are you age-appropriate?

n

Special Orders

I am up to my eyes in receipts and accounts and online tax forms so this is just a quick post to say that I have added a new category to the shop for special orders.

From time to time I do custom dyeing and from now on, rather than using Paypal to invoice for these, I will put them in the Special Orders section of the shop which is under the Yarn category (even if they are fibre, or mixed orders). This will allow you to pay for your order with a card payment, and it makes the accounting side of things much more straightforward for me because I am only looking in one place to retrieve information. It also lets the system generate Packing Slips for me which is more accurate.
Your order will be identified by a number rather than your name, to preserve your privacy.

I do get asked quite often if I will dye sweater-sized quantities of yarn and fibre and I am happy to do this on the understanding that I will use the same dye solutions for all the yarns in one order to get the best match I possibly can, but that I am still working one skein at a time and there may be some variation between skeins. I am reluctant to dye up large quantities for the shop "on spec" because my idea of a great colour for a cardigan or a sloppy joe is unlikely to be the same as yours.
Dyeing sock yarn and lace yarn is not the same, we often want something which is a flash of colour, a chartreuse scarf or a iridescent violet pair of socks and these are colours we may never choose for a whole garment.
I can offer a wider range of colourways in normal shop updates where you are likely to use one skein per item.

If you would like a sweaters-worth of yarn, please get in touch and we can discuss colours.

I know the shop is looking pretty bare at the moment, but the tax-man calleth.
There will be more yarn as soon as I can get the paperwork done, but there are still some bargains to be had so do have a browse.

There are also some new products in the planning stage once I have finished the financial stuff, but they need designing before I can show you them...

n

Reasons to be cheerful, part 2.

You may remember that I was in France in October.
And you may also remember that despite having a wonderful time with lots of new experiences to put "in the bank", I did fall victim to a thief who dipped my day sack and made off with my wallet.
My bank cards were cancelled within half an hour, and the biggest loss was my moleskine notebook and all the handbag ephemera we carry around with us like photographs and little yarn snippets.

Well, yesterday morning, out of the blue, I got a letter.

Not just any old letter.

I wondered if this was a belated "sorry you were the victim of a crime" missive.
Perhaps the Police in Nice had passed on the crime details from the report we filed with them to the Consulate.

Or...

... the only things in my wallet which had my address on were my moleskine and my driving licence, maybe one of them had turned up.

How about that?

I knew immediately that I wasn't about to entrust this to the postal service after being without it for so long. I have no idea what else is still in it, but I am hoping that if the thief didn't think my bank cards and driving licence were worth having then perhaps the yarn snippets and other bits and pieces which are of no value to anyone but me might, just might still be inside it.

But I don't have a French bank account, and a bank draft is not the easiest of things to organise on a snowy Monday, so I got to thinking... and I emailed someone (she knows who she is) who graciously said she would help. I was all set to put fifteen euros in an envelope this morning when I got a second email suggesting a donation to p/hop instead.
Wasn't that a lovely thing to do?

n

Reasons to be cheerful

Today, according to radio 4, is "gloomy Monday". The day in the year when we are most likely to be miserable.
So to counteract this I will show you some of my current "reasons to be cheerful".

This is a terrible photo taken in the kitchen with no proper lighting, however...

This is my current radio station of choice. Birdsong is a 20 minute "loop" of singing, whistling, the occasional cow (or maybe a horse) and bizzarely, a snatch of classical music (an oboe, I think) and a few bars of what sounds like classical guitar. It was first broadcast in 1992 and is now on all day. I find it quite uplifting.

A slightly out of focus second sock. A few rows here, a few rows there.
Nothing like Jane's epic knit-a-jumper-in-a-week extravaganza, but I am enjoying it immensely.

Yellow Chrysanthemums. These are a week old now, but the colour makes me smile inside whenever I look at them.

The amaryllis is doing what amarylli do best, growing at a prodigious rate.
As you can see, we now have a flowering bit.
Very exciting.

This is my new sock book.
Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn by Carol J Sulcoski.
These are the Herringbone Rib socks by Kristi Schueler.

And these are the Corrugated Stripe Socks by Courtney Kelley.
I'm not sure about the corrugated rib "ribs" which look a little tight, but I love the vertical striping.

Ian Dury's original list of "Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3" is here.

So tell me, what are your top three reasons to be cheerful today?

n

PS  It's snowing.

Primavera

The first sock is done, and I have already cast on for the second one.

The remains of the ball with one sock knitted.

NB  This is NOT the Club colourway, but the Club yarn is in the same style.

Primavera is a seriously good pattern.

I did 20 rows rib instead of the suggested 15 because it seemed a bit skimpy.

I found only two minor issues.
The first is that my M1R is much tighter than my M1L, so the pattern is not as symmetrical as I have seen in other examples. I will leave it the same for the second sock, but when I knit the next pair - and there will definitely be a "next pair" - I might try a lifted increase on the right and see if it makes it more symmetrical.

This, I hasten to add, is not the pattern, it's my knitting!

 

The second is that the sock leg is knitted on 66 stitches and then it reduces to 64 for the foot.

This works out as 33 stitches on the pattern section and 31 stitches on the sole. The pattern doesn't tell you to transfer one of these stitches from the top of the foot to the sole before you start the toe decreases, but you do need to do this otherwise the toe won't be the same on the top and the bottom.

If the yarn was knitted in plain stocking stitch, the sole shows the sort of effect created by the dyeing method.

The Sock Club yarn this month was designed with this pattern and other textured patterns in mind. I think there are times where we would like a textured stitch but a solid just doesn't seem interesting enough.
I tried several colour combinations before choosing the one which made it into the parcels. The rest will be going into the shop later today.

This was the runner up contender for the Club, I intended it to look like a snowy garden visited by little birds, Sparrows, Starlings, and perhaps a yellow flash of Siskin.

Before reskeining it looks like this.

 

Black Forest fruits with greek yogurt?

 

And this is the same technique but on a different coloured base-dye.

These will be in the shop later today.

n

PS. I discovered at the end of the foot-photo-shoot (it's Adam's foot) that he had kept his own black sock on underneath! This actually makes it easier to see this stitches so I might ask him to do the same thing next time too.

Singles.

Before Christmas I added some "sweater packs" of fibre to the shop, and also did a several custom dyed orders for sweater quantities of fibre. Many of you were enthused by the idea of hand dyed semi solids, and were pleased to see something a little more subtle available.

I have now broken up the remaining 5-braid packs into single braids so that everyone who would like to spin a single braid, perhaps as a lace yarn, can have one to play with. These are all BFL superwash and will spin into an interestingly textured yarn which is quite unlike anything you could buy ready made.

I have put them in the shop. They have the same numbers as before so they don't appear as "new" items.

I have more fibre ready for the shop but I need to get the Club yarns out today and the Fibre Club (I hope) on Saturday or Monday. That has to come first.

Occasionally parcels go missing. They vanish into the ether somewhere. It doesn't happen often, and I always replace them. I rarely go through the rigmarole of claiming for them... in terms of £ per hour the amount of time and effort it takes to claim just isn't worth it.
This morning I had a parcel returned via the Lost Parcels Department in Belfast. It was posted on Nov 18th and the PO claim to have left a card with the intended recipient - who has now moved house and tells me there was a history of "I left a card-ness" at her old address.
It then went to Belfast on Dec 15th for sleuthing. They didn't open the parcel, just the Documents Enclosed sticky, and they sent it back to me.
I emailed the rightful owner and am pleased to say that it is now on the way to her (I hope she has better deliveries now). I would have replaced it before, but she was too polite to tell me it hadn't arrived...

So, a round of applause for the sleuthing department at Belfast, please.

Back to the packing...

n

Amaryllis II

There has been knitting (of which more later).
There has been spinning.
And there has been growing.

My cut-price amaryllis which has such an unpromising start is a source of daily delight.
I think that if I stood still long enough I could actually watch the cells replicating in the growth tips.

Isn't it amazing?
All that growing in just 12 days.

I also have other progress to show you.

Meet Euridice.
She is a fleece I have had stashed away for about a year, waiting to be turned into a Gavin-thing.
Originally I thought she would be a jumper, but now that he has one of those, knitted by my own fair hand, she is going to be a waistcoat instead.

She was carded on the drum carder using the no-system-at-all method and has become a rather interesting thick and thin rustic yarn. This is the first 100g, about 170m, varying from sockyarn to aran in a single skein, which is entirely intentional.

He has put in a request for a simple waistcoat, and after seeking the advice of my own personal knitting advisor I'm not going to knit it on circs, but in pieces, because the side seams will add some stability and help to stop it drooping. Which has to be a good thing, really.

There has been other knitting but I can't reveal it until later in the week because it's with the prototype sock club yarn and it would completely give the game away if I showed it to you... I can reveal the pattern, which is for the the Primavera socks, and it's lovely. I always thought that stocking stitch socks were my kind of knitting because they let the yarn (and the dyer) do the work, but these are just such fun to do. The pattern is free.
I find myself doing "just one more repeat" - which is only six rows - and they are fairly flying along. The heel is turned and the gusset decreases are half completed.
There will be photos later in the week, probably on Friday.

I will leave you with the last Amaryllis photo.

Look!
A second shoot has emerged.
How wonderful.

n

PS  Check out the totaliser in the sidebar (I am a Blue Peter kid at heart).
£308.13.
Over 60%.
Thank you so much to everyone who has donated.
Ruth is having a blogiversary raffle with excellent prizes linked to p/hop donations. Why not download the Primavera pattern and donate 50p... go on, you know you want that pattern, and every 50p will make a difference to the life of someone who really needs it.

Secrets

I'm back in the land of the living, thank you for all the lovely emails and comments.
I watched "Goodnight Mr Tom" with John Thaw.
Cried Buckets.
Had a good shuftie at all the hand knitting in it in preparation for my next Gavin-Garment which will be a waistcoat in undyed handspun from a fleece I just happen to have...

The latest Solid Yarn Club parcels have gone in the post this afternoon.

And I have a real surprise for you in the main Sock Club mailing... Just wait until you see it... very unusual, never been yarn like it in the shop, totally different... oh and it takes at least five times as long to dye (per skein) as regular sock yarn. It might not look like it does, but trust me, I'm not kidding.
Don't say I don't spoil you.

There were no Updates in the Shop this week because I was poorly but I'll make up for it next week instead.

Have a lovely weekend.

I will be knitting new socks with the new Club yarn prototype. How about you?

n

PS  My mum is knitting Cranfords with her handspun Christmas present...

Poorly

I am poorly.
Sore froat.
Sore head.
Weary.
I'm not going to fight it, I'm going to sit on the sofa under a quilt.
Yesterday I watched Miss Marple.
Today I will find something else to watch.
I don't even want to knit.
Gavin is bringing me plenty of cups of tea and has banished me from the dye room.
I'll be back when I'm better.

n