i've got a little list

I’m not one of those people who live by lists, making them every day and obsessively ticking things off, (though I live with and admire the productivity of someone who does). But neither could I live a completely list-free life. They definitely have their uses for efficient shopping, planning for events such as Christmas and generally making sure that things get done. When I was still working I had a daily to-do list to keep me on track and more recently I have discovered the beauty of what I can only call an aspirational list.

Three or so years ago I made a list of fifty things to do before I was sixty. You can see it here. It was a mixture of things to do, things to do more of, one off special activities, regular commitments and plans for the future. It wasn’t too prescriptive. It was fun to make and it was fun to do the stuff and interesting to revisit and see how I had got on. Clearly life has moved on; I am now retired and so is Steve, so the shape of our days and weeks has changed significantly. Spending eight weeks “home alone” in the summer while S was off volunteering on Iona made it reassuringly clear to me that I enjoy my quiet domestic existence with its gentle routine of one or two regular activities, friends and family within easy reach, sewing and knitting projects to keep me busy and creative. I am generally content to take things as they come and make it up as I go along, but there is always the danger of drifting, of frittering, of getting to the end of a day, or week and thinking “what have I achieved?” or “why did I spend the day on household tasks instead of something I enjoy?”

So I thought it was time to revisit the List and make some plans. I started by going back to the 50before60 list and merrily crossing off the things that were done and dusted, or that time had told me I was never going to do. Then I added in new plans; nothing huge, nothing too difficult, but little things to make the future look inviting and to help keep me a bit more focused.

This time it seemed helpful to divide the list into general headings.

PLACES TO VISIT OR REVISIT

• Cambridge
• St Ives
• Penzance
• Leeds
• Roseland Peninsula
• Exeter
• Cardiff
• Rye
• Amsterdam/Utrecht
• Ireland
• Venice
• Vancouver

HEALTH/EXERCISE/SPIRITUAL

• More walking – including more of what I did recently and which I would describe as a sort of prayer walk; spending the best part of a day walking in the city, stopping off from time to time to read a passage or a prayer from a book on pilgrimage.
• Reduce weight by 5% - yep, still working on this one!

REGULAR ACTIVITIES

• Singing with a community choir
• Knit and Natter

CREATIVE

• Finish “jewel” quilt (more on this soon)
• More indigo prep: (I love the dyeing, but stitching and preparing fabrics for the dye vat takes ages)
• Finish my mother’s canvas-work rug
• Finish my Kantha quilted scarf
• Complete green cardigan currently on the needles
• Chart and stitch some needlepoint cushions from a design by my daughter to go with some newly re-upholstered chairs which belonged to my grandmother

CULTURE

• More theatre.
• Regular cinema
• Read at least two books a month
• Exhibitions and galleries

COMMUNITY/FAMILY/FRIENDSHIP

• Spending time with family and friends: one of the most pleasurable activities in life
• Ithaca (our weekly get-together with friends to eat, talk, discuss a spiritual/philosophical theme)
• Share veg garden with H+F
• Support for local initiatives like the Bristol Pound
• Malago WI
  
  DOMESTIC/CULINARY

• Make another sourdough bread starter. I binned the last one when we went on holiday and never got round to starting another
• Batch cooking for freezer
• Making more interesting meals
• Small chunks of house clearing on a regular basis
• Egg custard!! No, I still haven’t got this one under my belt

the summer in brief

How to break a long silence? A quick catch up.

I provided the admin and housekeeping support for our annual Arts Trail weekend.

The Mister was away volunteering with the Iona community and my photos were not as good as his would have been.

I did a bit of solo travel:

• By car to visit my sister and see the Lichfield Mystery Plays
• By train to Stratford to visit daughter, s-i-l and granddaughter and to see an understudy performance of Twelfth Night (brilliant!)
• By train to Glasgow to visit my cousin
• By train and ferries and coach to Iona for a week’s visit and catch up with the Mister
• And back home again by ferries, coach and trains visiting daughter no. 3 and all of her family in Lancashire en route.

I found that journeys completed successfully alone leave me with a real buzz of achievement. There’s something about it that makes me feel capable and alive.

I did the usual amount of knitting and stitching

  We had visitors:

• From Devon
• From Holland
• From the Czech Republic
• From Leeds
• From South Africa
• Daughter no. 3 and two of her littlies
• And currently an actor friend who is rehearsing and performing in Bristol

 That’s a lot of bedlinen!

We have celebrated some birthdays

 

We have had a reunion of college friends some forty years on

We have visited Devon for the Preview of an exhibition by friends

 

We have been to a “secret” gig

Seen a couple of films

Visited Stratford again to see the Comedy of Errors

 

We have watched the Olympics on the telly (and now the Paralympics)

 

I have watched these sunflowers grow painfully slowly to (finally) produce a tiny flower!

the hat that makes grown men cry

Something of an exaggeration of course, but it seems that this little baby hat is cute enough to render my husband slightly misty-eyed.

I’m so happy to be sending it off to a sweet baby girl who probably won’t be big enough to wear it for some time to come. I mentioned in a post at the end of last year that we were receiving regular bulletins on the progress of twins born 14 weeks early. Sadly, one of the little girls died at twelve days old, but her sister has kept going against the odds, surviving several crises in the process. She still only weighs 4lb 11oz, but is now well enough to go home with her mother and father to continue the adventure of living in this beautiful, if occasionally frightening, world. We wish them well with all our hearts.

modelling for the seriously camera-shy

It is well-known that I have a very bad relationship with the camera. The camera doesn’t like me and I’m not at all fond of it being pointed in my direction.

How, then, to illustrate the hat I have just knitted?

Without showing my face, that’s how.

The pattern is Fugue by Kate Davies, knitted in Corriedale yarn by Old Maiden Aunt. It’s an interesting piece of colour-work that needs close attention to the chart, but rewarding, and I really like the Vikkel braid.

babies and knitting: great conversation starters

Hannah and Felix are temporarily based in London and, making the most of the capital, they also went to visit the Grayson Perry exhibition at the British Museum on Friday evening, taking eight week old daughter (aka the little bear) with them. They stopped off for some food at Wagamama around the corner. Apparently the little bear behaved in exemplary fashion, had a feed herself and smiled nicely. As they were getting up to leave a diner nearby – a man of around 60 – greeted them and, having admired the baby, went on to ask if that was a handknit she was wearing?

She was, of course, wearing the cardigan I had made for her and when Hannah pointed out the cuff-to-cuff construction a knitting conversation ensued.

Turns out this man has recently learned to knit and is a new member of a knitting group in which he is not just the only man, but also the youngest member. He had already clocked the fact that it was knitted crosswise, which was I think the thing that intrigued him. Clearly another obsessive for the cause!

I was delighted to be able to report this adventure to the knitwear designer who blogs as knitsofacto. Who knows what can happen to a design once it is set free in the world.

hoodie

My latest finished project. A hooded cardigan for myself. The pattern is the ubiquitous Central Park Hoodie, which I already made a couple of years ago for Hannah. It's always such a relief when a garment I've spent time on actually fits and does the job I wanted it to do!
The yarn was a total bargain - bought in the Hospice Charity shop for £4.50! I think it was pretty cheap even before it was given to charity and is 100% acrylic, but was actually quite pleasant to knit with - didn't have that static crackle that you sometimes get with synthetic yarn.

Anyway, I'm pleased to have a useful garment that will go with a lot of my other clothes. (The colour in the first and last photos are more accurate).

Unmatched buttons from my mother's button box.

made in 2011/plans for 2012

I started a post yesterday to record all the things I had made in 2011. Unfortunately I bored myself to tears trying to record it all and find the appropriate photos. I will therefore restrict myself to showing a couple of photographs of things I made for others that didn’t get blogged at the time.

A wrap/shrug for one little grand-daughter

and a little cardigan for the newest family member . The pattern for this one kept me on my toes as it is made cross-wise from wrist to wrist and uses provisional cast-ons and lots of stitches held on spare needles. (That link is to a pattern on Ravelry. I'm not sure if it will work if you're not signed up).

Inspired by a pattern idea on the Purl Bee website I made a swaddling blanket for the same baby.

Now, I'm concentrating on projects for 2012. First I simply must finish the cabled cardigan I used to illustrate my last post of November. The process, though enjoyable, is no longer enough; I want to be able to wear it. Equally I want to be able to wear a colour-work hat that I already have yarn and pattern for, so that's next on the needles.

And I have a sewing project that I want to make progress on. It was inspired by paisley quilts that I saw at the Quilt Museum in Lampeter and is going to make use of a Liberty print shawl that I gave to my mother as a Christmas present at the end of the eighties.

back to the knitting

Finally the last day of my November blog-a-day extravaganza has arrived and I’m very relieved! I have enjoyed the challenge and the responses, but it has been hard coming up with something every day. In fact I didn’t quite manage it. There was nothing on the first because I only found out about it at the end of that day, and I missed two other days because I was without inspiration or couldn’t make the words work.

The experience has increased my admiration for journalists who come up with a regular comment column. Frankly I just don’t have enough opinions to keep up at this rate for any longer.

I will carry on though, just not at the same frequency and I hope to get back to more of the knit, stitch and dye of my original intentions.

knit and natter: a very good yarn

After a morning of technological meltdown yesterday trying to reinstall my wireless printer (unsuccessful so far), it was a relief to leave the house for the refuge of Wednesday afternoon’s Knit and Natter group.
We meet at Paper Village our local craft and yarn store, owned by the redoubtable Vicky - all round artist, crafter, trainer and social entrepreneur.

She welcomes a mixed group of knitters and crocheters every Wednesday afternoon just for the cost of a cup of tea. People come and go over the course of the afternoon and the range of projects is even wider than the range of people working on them (not exclusively women, by the way).

It’s hard to say what is so enjoyable and just plain right about sitting around yarning in the company of others, but it is – give it a try.

childcare and more domestic goddessry

Today was a childcare day and as Steve was playing golf with friends I was holding the fort alone!

This child is obsessed by scissors. Given the chance she will spend the entire day snipping little pieces of paper from bigger pieces of paper. She hasn't got a great deal of control yet (especially given that she consistently uses her left hand and the scissors are all right-handed), but making a series of diagonal cuts and then trimming them off seems to hit the spot at the moment. Papercut artwork is everywhere at the moment so perhaps she's picking up the cultural trend?

There's quite a lot of picking up to do afterwards.

Luckily for my sanity she still has a lovely long nap in the afternoon, so I busied myself making mincemeat. It's probably obvious that I love all the heavily-fruited, spicy mixtures that feature in so many of the traditional Christmas foods, but I haven't previously felt it was worth the effort to make mincemeat. This is a non-traditional recipe, however, with no suet and heavy on cranberries and apple as well as the vine fruits. Looking forward to some mince pies now!

Now we have that very rare thing, a good telly evening - University Challenge, Only Connect and The Choir - and probably a bit of knitting.

enough is enough

Having been brought up to believe that you shouldn’t start a new project before you finish the previous one, it came as a bit of an epiphany for me about twenty years ago when someone giving a talk on creativity suggested that it was actually good to have more than one project on the go at the same time. Some people might suggest that I have taken this advice too literally and gone a bit far in the opposite direction.

On the whole my creative stash lives in my workroom in the basement, but knitting and crochet are sociable crafts that can be practised sitting on a comfortable chair while watching the telly. This has meant that my yarn craft project bags were beginning to silt up at one end of the sofa. It was getting difficult to find what I wanted and generally stressful. So a large part of today has been devoted to sorting out this horrible space.

In the process I discovered that my main current project was in a bag far too small for it, so extra balls of yarn were lolling around here there and everywhere. That has now been sorted into one large bag.

There's a large bag full of the knitted squares for blanket-making that I blogged about last week. These need to stay at hand or I will forget to do anything with them.
I also found at least three bags of random/leftover/spare yarn; a scarf project started and (probably) abandoned; and a bag with two colours of recycled sari yarn which I have yet to find the right project for.

Then there was the bag that holds my in-between-other-projects/use-up-leftovers project - a crochet sampler blanket that will eventually be sewn together in strips.

This is definitely not abandoned, but needs to be on the back burner at the moment because of other things on the go. That and the random bags have been relegated to the basement depths.

As has this little project bag with the yarn and pattern for Fugue tam and mittens by Kate Davies. I have actually knitted one of the mittens, but it came out too small so I need to start again. I can't risk relegating this one for too long or I will miss the hat and mittens season.

Also begging to be sorted was my needle bag and another tube of needles. When it's organised this bag is incredibly useful as it also contains a ring binder for patterns. While Steve was at the cinema this afternoon I sat on the floor with all the needles and a needle gauge sorting out pairs and batches of double-ended needles. All my printed-from-the-internet patterns are now in plastic sleeves in the ring binder.

Hiding under all sorts of other stuff was a jar of buttons that I didn't know was there and would definitely have been looking for sometime soon.

There were also two sewing projects that had come upstairs for one reason or another and now need to go back below stairs.

All has now been reorganised and restored. To the casual observer it probably doesn't look too different, as there are still two large project bags and a work basket in the corner, but I know what's there and I can lay my hands on it, so this post it brought to you with a smug sense of relief and I can spend the evening knitting!

cuddly blankets

Finishing off other people's work seems to be a bit of a theme in my life at the moment. I have just handed over these two completed baby blankets.
St Mary Redcliffe Church have an active group of people knitting squares for blankets which are then sent to Ukraine. They were short of someone to sew them together, so I volunteered.


I have completed three so far (didn't photograph the first one) and have just picked up several more bags of knitted squares which I calculate should make another three. I have to confess that it's more time consuming than I imagined as there are lots of yarn tails to be sewn in before assembly can begin. Putting the blankets together can be fun, though. I played with colour-blocking on this one

and went for a more traditional patwork-style with this one.

I'm using crochet to seam them together and adding a crochet border.

made in bristol

I didn't blog much of my knitting and stitching in2010 and have been reviewing everything I have made over the course of the year. This post has taken me a couple of weeks to write, partly because it's quite long with a lot of pictures, but also because it seems rather boring. By comparison with many of the bloggers I read, I have made very little. However, since the intention of this blog is for my own "makerly" encouragement, I have decided to stick with it - post and bore the pants off them! (Having posted this blog I find that it's dated 1 January, which was when I started it. It was actually finished and posted on 16 January 2011.)

The year started with two projects that should have been made in time for Christmas 2009, but didn't quite meet their deadline.

First Hannah's cowl neck sweater, which doesn't photograph well, but I know has been much worn over the course of the year. The reason it took so long to knit is that it's a strange honeycomb rib made by purling one and then knitting the stitch below. This makes for a lovely cushiony fabric, but takes forever to grow.

Then the lovely Elijah (blogged here) for Rosa.

For Ruth's birthday in March I used some lovely fabric from Fabric Rehab to make an "art-to-go" travelling sketchbook and pencils set. (Previously blogged here).

Later in March after my own birthday I made three quick crochet flower brooches for my lovely daughters who had worked so hard to give me a wonderful party. I didn't photograph them, but they were similar to these, with the addition of pretty buttons bought at the Tobacco Factory Market. These crochet flowers came later in the year when Malago WI had a "learn to crochet" evening and I made up a few samples to show what might be achieved.

I made myself some cosy socks in a soft ethical yarn I had bought in St Ives on our holiday in 2009. I loved them and then felted them beyond use in a 40 degree wash (boo)

For the Southbank Arts Trail last May I made a few felt tea cosies and some coffee pot cosies.

June saw the long awaited completion of my Cortona quilt. (Previously blogged and photographed) and I made little cardigans for the family's newest baby and her older cousin. I've managed somehow not to photograph them.

After that my woodland scarf came off the back burner and was finished in time for scarf weather. This was followed by the alpaca scarf that I started making at the beginning of 2009. Once finished it was admired consistently by daughter no. 2, so I have given it to her - though it is modelled here by her husband F.

I very nearly missed the Christmas deadline again with my final knit of the year. This time it was Ruth's turn for some complicated hand-knitting and I finished the Fiore di Notte armwarmers on Christmas Eve! (This terrible photograph was taken in a great rush on my own arm, before hastily wrapping)

My sewing machine had some serious problems this year and I finally took it to be expensively mended in November. Despite this it managed a few bits and pieces (and I also borrowed R's machine.) The giraffe bag made for D's October birthday

was closely followed by a lion bag for his brother M.
I'm hoping that now it's mended, with a needle that drops correctly onto the fabric below, I will make slightly quicker progress on the quilt I have started to make from fabric I bought when we were in St Ives in 2009. The fabric from a stylish retro shop was designated "vintage", but I balk at describing sheeting I can remember from my teens and twenties as vintage, so I'm trying to think of it as simply recycled!

scarf weather

It's scarf weather and I've finally been able to wear my woodland scarf. It's been on the needles (interspersed with other things) since April last year.

I'm pleased with the result, though it's definitely a scarf whereas the pattern implied a shawl. I will probably get more wear from a scarf and it's lovely and long.

Statistics:

1 skein fyberspates scrumptious lace 2ply, which is a merino/silk blend

3.25mm needles

pattern: Woodland Shawl by Nikol Lohr

catch up

A bit of a catch up of finished objects, completed during the past few months.

This is a travelling sketch book set made for Ruth's birthday in March.



And this is Elijah, made for Rosa:


It was his delicious feet that made me fall for the pattern.
And his wise eyes.