Hello!

Happy Birthday p/hop

I can hardly believe it's been a year.

Pop over to the p/hop blog and read what's been happening. Jane has offered a new pattern for p/hop (thanks also to Alice for this).

As always, patterns are offered in return for a donation to MSF and we rely entirely on the honesty of knitters to make this work.

Tomorrow I will be blogging over there, and making an announcement so be sure to check in. And if you make a donation, be sure to leave your email address... all will be revealed very soon.

If you would like to blog for MSF, just follow the instructions and Clare will send login and password information. The more people who do this the better, we each have our own readership and this is a simple and effective way of spreading the word.

See you!


n  

Stationery

Most of us collect things. Mugs, stamps, yarn, rhinocerii (yes, mother I am looking at you). 

I'm watching the Antiques Roadshow at the moment and there is a woman on it who is passionate about ships, she has a ship's wheel and huge carved timber pillars from the Mauritania and a chair from the Canberra. This is useful information the next time someone exclaims about the size of your yarn stash. At least you don't collect big stuff from ships.

Of course I have my own collections. 

Double pointed needles. I have far more than could be used up in even the most chronic case of startitis.

Pencils. Coloured. "Lead". Propelling.

Moleskines. The Quadrille ones with squared paper.

And I have what might be called "a bit of a stationery habit".
 

Today I was thrilled - I may need to get out more - to discover a new brand of notebook, the Leuchtturm1917. Catchy name, isn't it? 

Leuchtturm is German and translates as English Lighthouse according to their website. The company was founded in 1917 and has been selling specialist albums for stamp, coins and even the little discs you get on the top of champagne corks which stop the wires from digging in to the cork. 

Of most interest is their range of notebooks. These are rather like Moleskines, but with extra features like detachable pages, numbering on each page, stickers and an index you can complete to make cross referencing easier.

You can see more information about them here. I mentioned this on twitter and someone immediately asked if I would consider ordering them for the shop. The A6 size would be an ideal notebook for a knitter. I have contacted the company, so I'll let you know if I'll be able to stock them. It would be helpful to know if you would be interested - or if my passion is mine alone!

n 
 

 

Postcards.

Dear Chickens,

I know that it's winter and it's dark and miserable, and I know that at least one of you is peri-menopausal and simply not up to producing an egg a day, but it's been five weeks and we have just bought our second half-dozen box in the last four years, and really they aren't the same. Oh yes, and why do you choose to moult in November? It's not the most sensible time to be walking around half-dressed.

Dear Breadmaker,

You are fabulous. You have just produced a lovely loaf made with Dove's Farm Organic Barleycorn Flour, which is stuffed full of good stuff like omega 3 rich linseeds. So why do I feel guilty for using you instead of doing the whole baking bread thing from first principles?  

Dear Gavin,  

I love the fact that you are watching the rugby (Scotland v Australia) on TV with the sound turned off and have the Radio Scotland commentary on the wind-up radio beside you. My Dad used to do this with the cricket. The pictures really are better on the radio, aren't they? - Not that the commentators are at all biased, perish the very thought.

Dear Judy,

Speaking of cricket, I just wanted to tell you how delighted I am that you have been selected to manage the England Women's Cricket Team on the forthcoming tour to Trinidad and Tobago. We clearly have the edge with a knitter in the squad, the ability to see the completed sweater in your mind's eye play the long game when you have only just chosen the yarn bowled a couple of overs will be very useful. Did the selectors know that you are a knitter when they chose you? 

Dear Clouds,

I think we've had enough now thanks.

Dear p/hop,

Are you getting excited about your birthday yet?  A little bird tells me you have some rather special presents on the way.



Dear Yarn Club Members,

I hear that parcels are starting to arrive and that you approve of the colourway this month. It's always nerve-wracking sending them out, despite the fact that I've been posting Club parcels for more than three years. Thank you for having confidence in me. 

Love, n. 

        

Cockermouth

It cannot have escaped the notice of anyone in the UK that much of Cockermouth, home to Woolfest, the biggest and best attended Wool festival we have, is under water. There has been the awful news that a Police Officer lost his life while trying to protect the public when a bridge was washed away. 

Last night water was coursing down the tree-lined main street, flooding shops, restaurants, pubs, and every other kind of business. Not a wee drop on the floors, but a 2.5 metre deep deluge. A torrent where the heart of the town should have been.

As a vendor, I tend to start my work the show an hour before the visitors and finish an hour later, so my time for "browsing" in the town is limited and Gavin and I tend to eat at one of the restaurants and grab a pint of cider at The Bitter End. The walls of the pub are covered in historical photographs of Cockermouth, including images of floods of scary proportions. They are nothing compared to what I have seen on TV today.

I rang the B&B we stay at this morning to see if they were OK. They are near the centre of the town but on a slight hill, and they told me that the flood water is about 2 metres from their door. They had of course had cancellations for this weekend. I expect other B&B's have had the same experience in the last 24 hours.

Woolfest next year is on June 25th and June 26th.

I will be there as will many of my fellow dyers and other woolly businesses. 

Please put it in your diary. 

And when you get to Cockermouth in June, let's support the local businesses which have managed to re-open - I expect there will many which could still be closed.

I booked my B&B today. 

See you there.

n

  

100 days

Josie Long, comedian, writer and MSF supporter has just launched "100 days".

ONE thing, done ONCE each day, for ONE hundred days.

The website says...

"All you have to do is decide on a project to do every day for a hundred days.

It can be the same thing every day or working towards something big. The only thing is that it has to be towards improving yourself. Make yourself friendlier, stronger, wiser or just sillier!"

It starts on December 1st 2009 and runs until March 10th 2010

I've been thinking today about what I could do for this because it's one of those simple yet perfect concepts, a bit like the famous SYP teapot.

 

 

So, what could I do for 100 days? 

The website suggests that it should be recordable, blog, tweet, photo.

• Blog. I'm doing it for 30 days in November so I could just continue. It makes me read the paper and take note of what's around me a bit more than usual, so I suppose you could say it's improving.
• Knit. I don't knit every day, and perhaps I'd have a few projects to show if I did.
• Be vegetarian. We are told it's better for the planet. I couldn't be vegan, I wear leather shoes and knit with wool.
• Give something up. Wine. Crisps. Cheese.... perhaps not cheese. I'm not sure that this is the point of 100 days. It seems to me that this event is about doing something rather than not doing something.
• Do something in the garden every day. This would provide both exercise, fresh air and be useful but what do I do when it's like this?

 

Would you like to join me in the 100 day project? 

n

PS   Pete (from MSF) is going to knit a row (or two) of his scarf every day.

PPS   The website is here. 
 

Following a trail.

I started off on one of my favourite blogs, and then clicked on one of their favourite blogs and then did it again and again and again.... and this is what happened.

Rebecca at Poshyarns. 

This is a gentle, crafty, and inspiring blog, with knitting, sewing and baking - check out those biscuits!

It has a very clever feature. The "Tiny Selection of my Favourite Places" isn't so tiny. It changes when you refresh the page. So you may not see the same links that I saw...

I went to Twisted Knitter. Which Ewe are you? 

 

I'm a Finn. 

"Finns' resilient nature makes them practical and straightforward, a quality these mediumwools balance with curiosity and a zest for life. Fastidious in personal appearance and reliable, Finns stay true to their flock and make loyal friends." 

Not sure about the fastidious bit, I'm not known for my tailoring...

You can see which Ewe you are too.

I notice that the owner of this blog is reading Outlander, as I am.

From here I briefly visited Spelling Tuesday which is fascinating, all about fungi dyeing. Her blogroll didn't seem to work, so I went back to Twisted Knitter and clicked on an Australian blog, Green Olive. She has fabulous parrots in her garden!

My journey continued to A Little Hut, the blog of a paper enthusiast and graphic designer called Patricia from Houston, Texas.

And finally to How About Orange. And there I stopped because I wanted to go back and revisit all the places I had been and savour the creativity I had found.

Thanks, Rebecca!

n 

p/hopping on Twitter

This evening I put some yarn up on the p/hop group on ravelry. I had five skeins of Clan in Electric which were mis-dyes with a few darker spots of dye which meant they weren't perfect. I left them for about an hour and then it occurred to me that I could tweet it with a ravelry link.

Less than five minutes later they had been claimed. 

So, I'm now wondering if Twitter could be a venue for p/hopping.

We would need a hashtag, that # which goes in front of a word to make it searchable.

Twitter won't permit p/hop or p-hop because it doesn't recognise the / or the - in a hashtag, so we need to think of something else.

p/hop is already on Twitter as @msf_phop, so should we use the same hashtag or is it a bit of a keyboard-full? 

Would phop be enough? Short and sweet.

If you aren't on ravelry, or if you are, but tend to use Twitter more, perhaps you might like to destash or make a request on Twitter, just be sure to add the link to the Just Giving page to your tweet.

http://www.justgiving.com/theyarnyard

At the risk of sounding like a stoned Canary - Who wants to be tweet the #phop hashtag first?

n 

 

Birthday Blogging.

Guess what?  -  p/hop is year old.

It doesn't have an actual birthday. I had the idea in July 2008, and started speaking to Pete from Médecins sans Frontières about it a few weeks later. And then in October, sitting at the kitchen table one Saturday morning, it finally got a name.

Like many ideas, it draws from a number of sources. My friend Jane wrote about the Honesty Box way of paying for things on her blog and this was added to the feature list for p/hop. I have just spent ten minutes searching Jane's blog for the original post and can't find it, but it's a well known country custom in which people leave out baskets of surplus eggs, vegetables, fruit and preserves along with a box to collect the payment. You select your pot of jam or pickle and pay an appropriate amount into the box. Like p/hop, it relies entirely on the decency and honesty of the person who wants the goods.

The original idea was simple. 

• Original knitting patterns donated by the designer.
• The pattern would be available for a donation of whatever the knitter feels they are worth. 
• The design must use a generic yarn-weight, not a yarn from a particular company or dyer. 
• Knitters are honest and will donate if they download.

The Saturday morning idea has grown and grown. There are ten patterns now, and more in the pipeline.

MSF has taken p/hop to every major woolly festival. Knitters have had the opportunity to meet fieldworkers, doctors, nurses and logisticians, and they in turn have had the chance to meet us. We have even tempted a few of them to knit!

And you have given. We have seen 10p pieces and £10 notes pushed into the collection boxes. 

Every donation is welcome.

We.... not me... WE have raised £6000, about $10,000. 

To give you some idea, £500 per month is roughly what is costs to keep a member of staff "in the field". So WE have managed to pay for a whole year of a person doing the most amazing and necessary work.

Or, a weeks supply of Plumpy'nut - a complete food for a malnourished child - costs £7.00. So WE have fed almost a thousand children.

Or, WE could have immunised 60,000 children against Measles. That's right SIXTY THOUSAND. In the areas in which MSF works, Measles is not a childhood inconvenience, it's a killer.

So for p/hop's birthday, we are asking you to donate. If you would like to donate money, that would be fantastic, but this time we are asking you to donate your blog post for a day. It doesn't have to be about knitting, or p/hop.

You can read all about it on the p/hop blog. 

n 

PS  There will be cake!

PPS  Please spread the word, by blog, by tweet, by ravelry. 

One finger, one thumb, keep moving...

Every so often I come across a new yarn which begs to be knitted.

 

A nicely plyed DK weight yarn, dyed in a similar colourway to last month's club yarn.



 

I always use a longtail cast on which untwists the ply a little, but it has good stitch definition in the twisted rib department.



 

44 stitches on 3.5mm dpns. 

This is the generic glove pattern from Ann Budd's book, The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns.

 

 

Doesn't DK knit fast? 

This is not much more than an evening of scattered knitting, half an hour here, 20 minutes there. Better go, I have two fingers and a thumb calling me.


n    

  

Friday

So, we went to Glasgow. I spent my teenage years in the suburbs, heading into the city at the weekends on the Blue Train and getting myself lost in the city centre for as many hours as I could manage to reasonably escape for.

In those days the city was not as cosmopolitan as it is now and I spent time mooching on Byres Road and Sauchiehall Street and treating myself to puff candy in Lewis's (not John Lewis). I also spent endless happy hours fondling the fabrics in the treasure trove which was Remnant Kings.

These days Glasgow city centre is much more sophisticated and I much prefer the city to the rather staid old lady which is the capital on my doorstep. We were through to go to the Proclaimers concert at the SECC. Going "through" is a linguistic peculiarity where one travels "through" from Glasgow to Edinburgh and vice versa. This is on occasion shortened to 

"Are you going through?" 

with no requirement for the actual destination.

We went through with enough time to go to Wagamama for tea.

 

 

Choices, choices...
 


 

We parked the car and walked the last wee bit to the concert venue. This is the new BBC Scotland building on the opposite side of the Clyde. The plum coloured lights at the top change colour which is rather striking, though I do wonder (quietly) about the lights being left on... I mean do they need to have those satellite dishes lit up all the time? Interestingly the next building but one is the STV offices, slightly smaller (but still with every light blazing)... and with MUCH smaller dishes. Perhaps a case of "mine are bigger than yours are"?

  

 

Then we walked around the Armadillo. I'm not sure if this is really what it's called, but it was beautifully lit.
 

 

This is the inside of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, a huge building used by everyone from Take That to the Knitting and Stitching Show.
 

 

You'll just have to take my word for the fact that it was brilliant!

The performance was a mixture of new and old... and "500 miles" brought the house down.

I was also hugely impressed by the security/marshalling/yellow jacketed staff. One particularly large and muscular gentleman, the sort you would not want to mess with, bore the legend "Ask Me For Assistance" which, given his size I took more as an order than a suggestion.

We were in the seated area and in the banked sections on either side of us, at two separate times, two people collapsed. Well boy did these guys move. They RAN, they had First Aid people on the scene in under a minute and they extricated the injured in almost-darkness with an expertise which was seriously impressive.

We drove home in pouring rain. I would see The Proclaimers again in a heartbeat. If you get the chance to go, grab it with both hands!


n