Hello!

Take Another Five.

I've been noodling around looking for the next five websites to feature in the Take Five spot and the more I look the more it confirms that blog-rolls in general must be updated frequently or they are barely worth the space they take up. If I visit a blog, I not only read the words and look at the pictures but I also like to click on links to see what other interests the writer might have. I did this today and found blogs which linked to other blogs which haven't been updated since TWO THOUSAND AND SIX! 

I've also discovered an intense dislike for the blogging templates which offer a single photo accompanied by a few lines of text which is then followed by a "read more" instruction. I don't want to click to read more. I want to read the entire blog post right there on the page. 

Anyway I digress. I do indeed have have new websites for you, click through to the blog if you are reading this as an email and want to get the links.

Garden Birdwatch is the project run by the British Trust for Ornithology. To me, the RSPB get all the money and the BTO do all the work. I am planning to start the Garden Birdwatch as soon as my membership has been activated. Indeed, we have made a start over at Fegrig Airport.

Next, I will show you my geeky side. The Urban Explorer group takes photos of discarded and derelict buildings in the UK. Hospitals, Lido, Cinemas and other public places. Looking at the pictures I wonder if they couldn't be rescued and turned into something useful before they decline into complete collapse and have to be demolished for safety reasons.

Similarly the flickr group called Old Abandoned Buildings records mainly domestic architecture, houses, farms, and schools of the kind Laura Ingalls Wilder probably attended. There is a similar flickr group called Once Was Home if your geekyness takes the same direction as mine.

My Tiny Plot is an excellent UK gardening blog, updated regularly and with wonderful photos (the train set is just a diversion). Have a look at the garden plans for the last few years too. You can subscribe by email, just as you can to this blog. As an observation I have found that gardening blogs are very much in the abandoned-several-years-ago category, maybe because the bloggers are now gardening instead? 

Skippy's Vegetable Garden is an American blog this time, about a garden in Boston, which seems to have had a similarly snowy Christmas to ourselves. I love the succession of photos in the sidebar showing the garden through the years and the seasons (scroll right down to below the books and the blog archive).

I hope you like these offerings. If anyone knows of good gardening blogs please let me know. YouGrowGirl is one which everyone raves about, the photography is good but it does that horrible click here to "Read More" thing which annoys the cabbages out of me, so it didn't make the list. 

n

PS  There may be a comment competition soon. 

Kitchener, but not as we know it.

Occasionally it is useful being a knitter who prefers top down socks and kitchenered toes.

Before Christmas my neighbour came to the door with a brown paper carrier bag and a hopeful expression. He had been to a show at Hopetoun House, and had seen a bargain, a completely gorgeous 100% alpaca piece of drapey cardigan-like wrappyness, yours for the normal price of £135 and his for £30 because of this.

  

 
A nine stitch wide hole.

 

Bearing in mind that this garment was knitted in fine yarn I was doubtful whether I could repair it, but I smiled confidently and offered to try and see if it could be done. 

 

First I captured all the live stitches onto sewing thread and then repaired the laddered columns. You can see in the first photo that some went back four rows. Then I threaded sock yarn through the stitches to secure them. That's the sock yarn (toddy) in the photos above. As you can see the garment-yarn is considerably finer. The hole was not much more than an inch wide, so 9st/inch.

 

These are 2mm Kollage square dpns. 


 

I chose a 1000m/100g British wool laceweight and dyed it the palest stone colour I could manage. The undyed is in the skein above and the dyed yarn is below.

And then I kitchenered.

 

It looks a bit of a dogs breakfast. The ends were woven in to secure them.

The colour match wasn't too bad from the reverse side.

 
But I was unhappy that it was (to my eyes) so glaringly different from the right side.

 

The other problem was that it looks rather uneven. I'm not sure I could have done any better though because there were no ends! What I mean is, when I examined it at the beginning there was no loose yarn. Scroll back up to the first two pictures and you'll see what I mean. The hole is there, but there is no clue as to WHY it's there, no loose threads or snipped ends or fraying, just a bit of puckering on one side. I didn't want to poke about too much for fear of making the damage worse, but there was nothing trailing from the gap... and that's why I had to dye fresh yarn for the repair. 

So in order to make the repair secure I had to "catch" anything which might possibly, maybe, perhaps be the wisp of a loose yarn, and incorporate it into the darn.

 

Fortunately the hole was inside the beautifully draping collar and also near to the back. As David (neighbour) said, someone would have to be very, very, very close to the back of his wife's neck to see it!

n

Let it snow!

The usual rush of Christmas preparations has kept me away from the blog for a few days and of course, just like the most of the rest of the country we have had lots of snow.

 

The Shed. 

It has snowed quite a lot more since this was taken.

 

Eglu. I hope the snow is acting as insulation because this looks more and more like an igloo, not an eglu as the days go past with frequent fresh snowfall.

 

Steps at the front of the house leading up to the road.

 

The rosemary bush in the front garden.

 

The path to the steps.

 

It looks alpine. Might need to break out the skis!

 

Hard to believe that this intrepid chicken (Faith) was cooped up in a battery house this time last year. She is positively gallus, which is appropriate since Gallus gallus is the latin name for a domesticated chicken, and "gallus" is also an Scots adjective which means daring, self confident, cheeky, stylish and impressive.

I think you'll agree that Faith is all of these things, despite the fact that the snow is giving her a rather wet bottom!

It's Christmas Eve and there are presents to wrap and a trifle to make, so I had better get a bend on.

Many, many thanks for all the Christmas wishes. We at Yarn Yard Base Camp hope that your Christmas is peaceful and that you are with those you love, and who love you.

Natalie, Gavin, Simon and Adam.
      
 

Taking Five

We are all busy people and this time of year is, I think we can agree, busier than most.

At times like this when I just seem to have five minutes here and there I thought it would be fun to have some interesting places to visit for ideas and inspiration. I'm also starting to firm up plans for the new blog and I thought I would  use you as guinea pigs try out some new things to see if you like them.

Blog-rolls and blog-lists can be quite contentious. I have heard of serious spats because Blogger One features Blogger Two, but doesn't get featured in return. Or where Blogger Three is on Blogger Four's blog-roll for a few months and then suddenly finds they have been removed, resulting in feeling rather hurt and wondering what they did to deserve being dropped without so much as a by-your-leave.

With this in mind I have started a Take Five list in the sidebar.

The Take Five list is not a blog-roll. It's a collection of websites, blogs, and photos from flickr (taken by other people) which I have discovered on my journey around the web. 

There may be food, knitting, art, youtube, quilting, or books - pretty much anything and everything.

The most important thing is that it's not going be a permanent list. Instead it will be dynamic and will change often - at least weekly. So if you see something you like, bookmark it quickly before it vanishes! 

If you are reading this in a feed reader or in an email, you'll need to visit the blog to see these delights, I'm afraid. 

n

  

Home!

Just got home after a whirlwind business trip to London of which more another time.

127 emails to answer so If you have sent me a message I will get back to you on Friday when I've had a chance to go through them all. I have answered some using my iPhone from London, but anything that needs to be cross referenced with the website can't be done on the phone without me looking like Clarence the cross-eyed lion from Daktari.

n

The Voyages of the USS Avensis...

... going boldly where no knitter has gone before.

Fegrig has a job which means he covers a lot of miles. 

Planes, Trains and Automobiles. And the occasional Bus and Ferry.

This means that he is given a work-car (with the usual not-a-perk tax penalties). Today was changeover day. The Vectra he has had for the last two years was replaced by a British built car (in support of British industry), and he took delivery of a Toyota Avensis... known hereafter as the USS Avensis.

It's a nice car.

Given the choice he would have opted for a Citroen Berlingo, no frills, totally practical, no fuss. Instead he was given a star ship. He was in Belfast last week and a colleague told him he would need a day with the manual and a Teenager to decipher it before he would be able to drive it, let alone listen to The Archers.

We laughed, oh how we laughed.

This morning the USS Avensis was delivered a little after ten o'clock. 

TWO FULL HOURS later, he emerged from the car with Radio 4 still posing an unmet challenge and the satnav trying to cook a three course dinner in the airbag. 

n

  

Pinwheel

Coming to a screen near you this evening.

 

From the Saffron yarn, clockwise.

Saffron, Mischief, Pine Needle, Wine, Pillar Box, Chocolate Mousse, Knitting Vicar, Emerald, French Navy, and Lawn.

These are all Clan, but some are available in toddy and macushla too.

Really saturated colours rather than multi-toned semisolids. Ideal for mittens or gloves as well as socks.

I am uploading now so it will be at least 20.30 and more likely 21.00.

n

  

Not Pantone 2685c

The new dyes I ordered arrived yesterday afternoon, and I couldn't resist diving in and doing what I love to do right away. I never use a straight-from-the-manufacturer colour, there's always a little alchemy involved otherwise I might as well work on a production line. And after a couple of hours, this was the result, dyed from an experimental blend of three different manufacturer's dyes.

 

And after I had dried it - and panicked a bit because it does funny things as it dries with the still-wet sections looking completely different from the almost dry parts - I realised that I had just dyed something rather similar to the now infamous Pantone 2685c. Infamous because a certain chocolate manufacturer has trademarked the colour!!!

This isn't exactly the same. And I certainly didn't intend it to be so similar. I just wanted a good strong purple and blended the dyes (which I do all the time) to try and get one.

 

In fact, it's even more saturated than this...

It will be in the shop tomorrow along with some other equally gorgeous colours. I'll post on twitter and ravelry when they are on the shelves.

n
 
  

 
 

Holiday shopping

Usually, when we are on holiday, I subject Fegrig to visiting knitting shops. Why are you not surprised? I have an eclectic selection of dpns from North America, Japan and various European cities. This craft-souvenir shopping is not a new addiction habit, I used to collect fabric which was equally small and portable and relatively inexpensive - and of course, useful.

Tucked away in the pages of the unlikely AA Brussels guidebook we borrowed from my in-laws, was the suggestion that it might be worth visiting an art shop which produced its own pigments.

I was expecting a small arty type shop but instead we found what can only be described as an emporium of colour. 

These are iPhone photos taken fairly discreetly because I wasn't sure they would be happy about photos.

The shop was like Awkrights. 

  

Except that it was about five times as full of stuff.

Each of the side windows you can see was full to a depth of about a metre. And there was a corridor about a metre wide up the centre, with not enough width for two people to pass. And to the left of that was a counter which ran the full length of the shop, also about a metre wide... and every centimetre was piled high with colour. 
 

  

Paints, pencils, dyes, you name it, they had it.

  

 

You want raw pigment? They had that too. This is just the sample chest.

They don't just sell it, they make it.

  

 

The front window was stuffed with huge jars of powder, as if it was a sweetie shop - which of course to me, it was.

  

 

Not a lid in sight.

Health and Safety? Clearly they LAUGH in the face of Health and Safety!

Behind the counter was a small walk-space, flanked by a wall which was covered in wooden drawers from floor to ceiling with a ladder to reach the higher ones, a bit like an old apothecary shop. The sort of shop which is in another world (they have no website and do not do mail order). 

I was entranced, it was a truly magical place where nothing short of alchemy was happening.

And yes, I did buy some dye, but I had a difficult task because there were forty-eight hand made colours from which to choose.
 
It might have been a bit of a busman's holiday, but it was a wonderful place.

n

Before I was a knitter...

... I was a quilter.

At first there might seem to be little in the way of similarity. One is created by chopping up the textiles into small pieces and then sewing them together again - an activity which Laura Ingalls found to be particularly stupid. 

The other is concerned with trying NOT to chop the textiles up unless you are extremely cross (as I was with the Brainless socks a few months ago when scissors and temper got the better of me).

But there are similarities; pattern, colour, design and even an empathy with those who have gone before, a drawing on skills passed down and on patterns remembered and recreated or given a new twist.

  

 

This is one of my quilts. It was made from Fat Quarters collected from various quilt stores in Seattle, Vancouver and Toronto, and was sewn on my 1897 treadle sewing machine with a needled cotton batting giving a low-loft look which has the benefit of being able to be chucked in the washing machine, and it has a pattern of continuous line pentagram stars. This quilt has covered broken ankles, knackity knees, ill children (even though they thought they were teenagers and far too cool to be wrapped up in a patchwork quilt on the sofa). It's a double and it lives on our bed.

  

 

We discovered this beauty on the bed of a B&B we stayed at in Chicago.

  

 

And on the wall of the flat we borrowed at the weekend in London, I found this. I think all the fabric is silk and it's been hand quilted, which just goes to show how a simple pattern is sometimes the best, a bit like stocking stitch I suppose. Or 3x1 rib. 

I bet EZ would approve.

n

PS  There will be more quilty pictures soon... we found the quilt stash in the attic!