Monthly Archives: November 2009

Happy feet in hand knitted socks

I’m celebrating the completion of a second pair of socks! Despite my little difficulty about repeating myself, I’ve actually made not one but two pairs of matching socks with Christmas presents in mind. I don’t make them for just anybody. They take too long, and the wool is too expensive to give then to the people who look at them askance and then buy multipacks of sports socks from Matalan (you know who you are!) No my socks are for the appreciative people in my life, and for them I am happy to acknowledge the fact that they have two feet and go that extra mile to produce two socks the same. Although the price of a ball of sock yarn to produce one pair is more than that multi pack, I realised today as I was lining up my personal collection for a photoshoot that I am still wearing the first pair I ever made, in 2004. And they still make me happy…

I had a little help with the photography, Higgins wasn’t sure about the lighting…

Electrical Disturbances

A couple of years ago, at the end of a fairly protracted renovation project on our house, we had a house fire. Only a little fire, but with vast amounts of smoke from all the electrical wiring involved, which permeated the entire house with thick black oily smoke. Only the week before I had been taken off to hospital in an ambulance with appendicitis so I and Henry the cat were safely recuperating at my mother’s house on the other side the village at the time of the fire. In my rather fragile state, the state of our house and possessions was enough to cope with, I really didn’t need to hear too much detail about the actual event. Unfortunately, my mother’s gardener at the time was a retained fireman, a garrulous man who delighted in the opportunity to lean on his spade and hold forth. Thus cornered one day he regaled me with the exciting tale of how he had broken down our front door with an axe, and with non existant visibility had gone in wearing breathing apparatus, and crawled around on the bedroom floor looking for my body! These images haunted me for months, and I struggled with settling back into our home for quite some time because of them.

All this is to set the scene so that you can imagine how I felt at quarter to five this morning, with Tim in the middle of the North Sea, waking up from a deep sleep and hearing the crackling of electric wiring shorting. Having established it was coming from the main electrical feed into the house, what to do? I did NOT want a posse of firefighters with axes, even if they were potential calender material. I found the emergency electricity number, and pressed 1 for ‘Dangerous Situations’ and talked to Lee. His answer to ‘Is it likely to cause a fire was “Yes, and no”‘ Hmm, reassuring. His solution was to turn off everything at the mains, and wait for a man to call. We waited, me, Henry and Higgins, in the candlelight. I don’t know what they thought, Higgins had a dog chew so probably not a lot. I thought about all those disaster movies where someone looks at a cupboard and says ‘I wonder what’s making that funny noi…KERBOOOOM!’

Have you ever tried casting on a sock by candlelight? It’s pretty unsuccessful, but it stops you thinking about disaster movies. Eventually dawn broke and I could blow out the candles. The emergency man turned up four hours later, he would have been useful if I had gone KERBOOOM! He replaced an enormous fuse, and apologised for my trouble. I wish I could get my fuse replaced, I have completely fizzled out…

Reasons to be cheerful…

Funny how just a little thing can change how you view the day…Getting out in the garden in dressing gown and slippers with the puppy BEFORE the rain starts is always a good start. Higgins hasn’t got the hang of the fact that the more times you make a run for the door without doing what you came out for just prolongs the agony. He is struggling with country life really, too much weather, he should have gone to live with Paris Hilton.

Todays mail was very exciting… firstly, red polka dot cake tins…

So good, I had to do styling…

…and my Spoonflower fabric…

When I first discovered Spoonflower I was too intrigued to go away and come up with a new design, I went for the nearest jpg file, my faithful pink sheep, and like it so much I ordered a fat quarter as a test run. My pink sheep started life on an invitation designed by my son Thomas Taylor for my Graduation party four years ago and was originally wearing a mortar board. I loved her too much to send her off to oblivion, so with the help of Photoshop she hung up her mortar board and joined me here on Planet Penny. I’ve offered to make Thomas a pink sheep bow tie, but strangely, he’s declined…

I was so excited by all this I initially overlooked the fact that my latest copy of ‘Selvedge’ had arrived…Oh. Joy!..

…with this beautiful image on a card inside.

After a wet morning, a band of blue started to spread from the west, and the wind became a breeze, just right for a spot of exercise. I’ve tried to get round the short dog = cold wet tummy problem with a rather smart fleece jumper for Higgins. Apart from the fact that I could have bought myself two fleeces for the cost of a tailor-made miniature dachshund one, getting it on is a bit like putting skin on a sausage. Then you have the problem of persuading him to get out of bed…

We got out there eventually though…

Even the sugar beet looks good in the sunshine, and you can just see home across the field…

All that was left was to make a cake to justify the fact I had bought not just one, but three tins to put cake in. I had some windfall apples, so a quick flip around Google and…Easy Apple Cake? …yes, we like easy. Well, it was easy enough to put together, but who has a 20cm x 30cm tin to hand? And how would the capacity of a tin you haven’t got compare with the one you have got? So, a round cake instead. Fine. But…how does that affect the cooking time? Answer – a lot. After the allotted 40 minutes a gorgeous crispy crust trembled above a completely liquid interior, another twenty minutes, then ten and then another twenty five minutes before the ‘sod it’ moment when I got it out and decided that was IT.

And it was.

Delicious…

…eventually…

Old Faithful R.I.P.

It’s sort of been one of those weeks. There’s been a bit of this and a bit of that and all that tangly wool and the WEATHER …! I had just got excited about some rather pretty shopping and thinking I had time to photograph it and write about it and my camera died. I felt like I’d lost the use of an arm. There are wordsmiths out there who write beautiful blog posts and paint their own word pictures, but I NEED to illustrate my ramblings. First thing this morning I set off through the rain and wind to Norwich and the London Camera Exchange clutching my Fuji FinePix F650 with the lens well and truly jammed. It’s been making a weird graunching grinding noise for weeks (months?) and I’ve been trying to ignore it. Apparently the thingy has worked its way off the helix and the whatsits had worn (you can tell I know exactly what I’m talking about) and the price of repair was far more than a new camera… so that’s what I’ve got, a natty little Olympus FE-4000.

So now I can write about my shopping expeditions last week with full colour illustrations. I know I should be working hard to finish the hand dyed project, but when it got a little derailed last week it sent me off to socks. Socks have been popular in the blogs I read lately, both Vanessa, of ‘Do you mind if I Knit’ and Jane Brocket have succumbed to the spotty lovelies to be found at Boden, but I have been indulging in the meditative appeal of sock knitting. There is something about the smallness of the work, the little needles feel like extensions of your fingers rather than separate tools, everything tucks into your encircling hands, and the whole thing can be popped into a pocket and taken on the bus, the doctors’ waiting room or even, if you are not actually turning the heel, to the cinema! My only problem with socks is that you have to knit two the same, and I’m really bad about repeating myself. I have got round that by having more than one pair on the go and alternating them, deliberately creating even more odd socks than my washing machine does! The final reason for extolling the joys of sock knitting are the glorious colours in which the sock wool is dyed. Sitting in the warm with a handful of Technicolour sunset is the perfect antidote to the wet darkness outside.

The second shopping trip took us to Anglia Fashion Fabrics. This is the place to go in Norwich for everything you could possibly need for sewing and making, and now it has opened a second venue called Make Place offering tuition for complete novices to learn how to sew, which is a brilliant idea. On this particular day there was also a MakePlace Market with stalls selling beautiful bags and clothing made from recycled items, felt hats and scarves, jewelry, al sorts of yummy things, but alas, no camera! Having been inspired by this, it was essential to go next door and check out the actual shop where I succumbed to this..

polka dots

because I’m having a bit of thing for polka dots, especially red and white ones…this..

stash

Because no-one who sews can possibly turn down the chance to have a fabric called ‘Stash’ …and this..

Well…you can see why. There are dachshunds, how could I resist? I think this will probably end up being a bag to keep all his stuff in. For a small dog he does have a lot of stuff!

So I think the time has come to step away from the laptop and start being creative, so I’ve got something to tell you about later in the week!

The Sheep Dog

I suppose when you’re only pocket size…

A whole herd of sheep…

…is a bit of an undertaking. So much better to wait until they have been reduced to a managable size…

and then round them all up.

Normal service will be resumed…eventually …

Not amber, but blue…

These days I get a very early start, with an alarm clock which goes ‘WUFF’ rather than the traditional buzz or ring. At this time of the year every glimmer of sunshine is precious so I bounded up stairs with a cuppa for Tim, not quite with a ‘Hi-de-hi, campers’ but to suggest a trip to the beach to enjoy the early morning brightness. The baleful eye that glowered from under the duvet made me realise that not everyone does the ‘lark’ thing. However it was even more off-putting to get back from the shower to find a second pair of eyes peering out from under the covers, just as determined to stay snug and warm. Given a choice of whom to wrestle out of bed and get into the car I went for the eight inch tall option rather than the six footer.

It was worth the effort. Coming up over the dunes, out of the shadow and into the bright blueness of the sea, sky and crisp air and on to the deserted sand was an exhilarating feeling.

The North Sea has a reputation for being wild and cold, but catch it in a benign mood and it’s as lovely as any far flung ‘Paradise’ shore.
As I’m sure is the coast of the Baltic, where my sons have been staying. From their description all the wildness usually associated with this time of the year has been there in full force. Thomas talked about amber, and the petrified forests under the sea, and on investigation I found the amber found along the Norfolk coast comes from those very same forests, brought here from Scandinavia by the glaciers.

So as we walked we looked for amber too, my little sea dog and I, and we didn’t find any either!