A Jumper and Thinking Ahead

I am so close to finishing my long-sleeved TV jumper. Only one more sleeve to knit! Even though it's 4-ply it hasn't taken me long at all. If I hadn't had all the other projects that I made in the meantime it would've been finished months ago. 

I'm already thinking about the next long-sleeved TV jumper (black with red stripes; or red with midnight blue stripes?) and also about my winter accessories for this year: hat, mittens and scarf. I make myself new winter accessories every two years. They always match my winter coat. And this year I have two new winter coats, both from Boden.

 

I bought the above coat (which is a deeper colour than in the photo - more like a redwood) a couple of years ago at a Boden sale in Norwich. And I bought the coat below in last winter's Boden online sale. I never buy Boden full price - it's just too expensive, but their sales are good.

So, I've decided to have the main colour of my winter accessories as orange/spicy ginger, and the contrast colour a violet purple. That way they'll match both coats (I don't want to knit two sets of hats, scarves and mittens!) and the colours themselves will be very warming and cheerful.

That's a LOT of knitting to come!

Progress

My work colleagues bought me the Kaffe Fassett material above two years ago for my birthday. I cut out the pattern straight away, and the lining, and it has hung on my shelf unit in my kitchen ever since, waiting to be sewn together!

I think the reason I hadn't finished the green skirt, was because this other Kaffe Fassett skirt was also hanging on my kitchen shelf unit waiting to be finished. This purple skirt was ostensibly finished. I just had to sew the lining to the zip, the rest was done. Except, I wasn't happy with the way the zip lay alonside the back seam. There was a little kink.

I've written before about how much I love this material. I think I bought it with birthday money my sister gave me a few years ago, and I love it because it reminds me of the hydrangeas that grew in my granny's garden when I was a child. So, I knew that I wouldn't be happy with this skirt unless I fixed the zip/seam problem at the back, which for months (years) I thought it meant I would have to unpick the whole skirt and sew it together again.

It was only during my four days off a couple of weeks ago, that I had the brainwave to unpick the back seam and unpick a little bit of the hem, and just realign that. If you're still following me, it worked! The hydrangea skirt was completely fixed in half an hour, and I could go on to my green daisy skirt.

I have decided to finish most of my unfinished stuff before starting on any new items, except perhaps to allow myself to make my new Amy Butler bag pattern, which I also bought with birthday money :)

Chocolate Fudge and Jam Tarts

I promised my work colleagues last week I'd make a little something to celebrate my birthday. And today I was totally in the mood for baking and making treats. First of all I made chocolate fudge, from one of my favourite books, Christmas Treats to Make and Give. It was super-easy to combine all the ingredients (not much more difficult than melting chocolate), put it in the fridge, and it was ready.

As a contrast I then made jam tarts, from Jane Brocket's book, Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer. Everything I've ever made from CCaGB has been a huge success. The recipes are well-written and turn out absolutely PERFECT, so I was surprised when I took my jam tarts out of my oven after 12 minutes to find them burnt (above are two tarts from my second batch, which I baked for 7 minutes). I also had trouble rolling out the pastry as I'd added two egg yolks (which were listed in the ingredients but not in the instructions! it just said to add liquid) and this made the pastry too wet. So when I tried lifting my beautifully crinkly-shaped rounds they were stuck fast to the table! And I had to prise them off with a spatula and re-roll them! Anyway, they actually taste okay, even though they're burnt round the edges, and I was lucky I had enough pastry left to adjust my times in the second batch.

The meringues are a by-product of making the jam tarts. I hate to waste food and I LOVE meringues! 

Personalised Pairs Game

It's abundantly clear from my blog that I love making things. If I could, I would spend all day, every day, making things. I'd love to learn how to do woodwork and make my own furniture. I love bespoke craft.

I decided before Christmas to make a Pairs Game for our friends and their children. We have so many photos of us all having adventures - exploring castles and at the beach, etc, that there were plenty to choose from.

Above is the entire game.

I overshot my Christmas deadline but managed to finish the game in time for their visit at Easter. First of all I printed out 15 pairs of mini-photos at Boots. Then I designed the backs, as above. 

The trickiest part of the whole enterprise was deciding how to protect the photo and back so they wouldn't get grubby from fingers turning them over. That's why I decided to laminate them all. The laminates can be bought from Ryman's. I'm glad this is the route I chose, however the laminates are pricy.  

It was as I was writing the rules (last pic) that I decided to add this element of deciding who starts the game. Who goes first is very important to children (and adults). I didn't want it to be done with dice so made up these cards that are particular and personal to the Burnses. For example, Some cards are obvious, like The Person Who Has A Cat Called Yeow could only relate to Nathan. And, The Person Who Has A Ukulele, could only be JJ. But I also wanted to add a bit of fun, so The Person With The Darkest Pants On, and The Smelliest Person, will be open to interpretation!

I played a sample game myself. The cards are laid out in a 6 x 5 grid. I think there are enough cards to carry a game, but not too many that it is overwhelming and impossible. However, for younger children it is easy enough to reduce the amount of cards.

Two Darth Vaders!

The lovely thing about the game is it allows you to remember the fun, good times while you're playing. The Burnses and The Haggartys all like adventures. 

I tried to keep the rules as simple as possible. I particularly like the last instruction, "Everyone must then say something really nice about the winner."

I'd love to make the game again for my nephews' children. My idea to make this game originated when I gave a shop-bought pairs game to my great nephew Keigan for his birthday one year. I thought how nice it would be to personalise it. When he's at my parents' house he's always naming people in the photographs on the wall. Anyway, it took me about 8 months to get this game together, so maybe I'll wait until my other great nephew is a bit older and do a game for them both.

One bit of advice I would give to anyone considering making this game for themselves is: it's crucial to make the backs of the photos exactly the same. It must be impossible to tell from the back which photo it is, otherwise players could use this knowledge to their advantage. When I was putting the photo and back into the laminate I had a template drawn onto paper, so I could place them in exactly the right place in the laminate. I also used the sticky side of the laminate for the photo, so that the backs would all be indistinguishable from one another. (Laminates have one sticky and one non-sticky side.)

A Gardening Update

It's been an extremely busy month, begining with my parents' 50th Wedding Anniversary, through to having our friends and godsons here for a week, then it was my birthday, building up to Hagos going on tour again. I'm only just getting caught up with everything.

I'm in the middle of four days off, at home, by myself. After the intensity of the month I felt very odd on Saturday morning, waking up with no plans, no social engagements. So I've been doing what I love doing most - pottering.

Hagos bought me a mini-greenhouse for my birthday and I couldn't wait to put things in it. For the first time ever I bought PEAS and LETTUCE! I'm very excited about the peas. And even though Ba is kindly giving me the exess tomatoes she's grown from seed I couldn't resist buying the same tumbler tomatoes I bought from the garden centre last year.

Peas

Lettuce

Courgette

Tumbler tomatoes

Garlic

First earlies: Swifts

Chilli plants: Cherry Bomb and Ring of Fire

My other chilli seeds didn't germinate. So I've sown more and am trying again. I find vegetable gardening extremely exciting. It's the first thing I do every morning - go outside to check all my plants. I have a lot more plants than I did last year so I hope I can keep up with them all.

More, non-gardening, updates to follow. 

How does your garlic grow?

My French Garlic is already sprouting! As are some of my chilli plants (below).

Tomorrow I plant the rest of my potatoes.

Chillies!

So, these "Jiffy plugs" were given to us as a Christmas present to plant chilli seeds in. They're all from the South Devon Chilli Farm, and were given to us by Hagos's brother's family. They usually send us chilli chocolate every year too, and I have to say, they make some of the best chocolate I've ever tasted (and there were a few years when I tasted chocolate daily from all over Europe).  

This is them in their little propagator. It's very cute. I have it in Hagos's studio at the moment as it's warm and sunny (but not direct sunlight) in there.

And these are the types I've planted. The Cherry Bomb looks particularly exciting.

I haven't had much success with chilli plants. A couple of years ago the aforementioned brother-in-law gave us 20 packs of chilli seeds - far more than we could ever hope to grow, and I wasn't even a gardener then - and our gardening expert friends Janie and Ba adopted them all and their whole house was covered in chilli plants in little pots. They gave us one back to bring home, we put it in the bathroom (it was only about 8 inches high) and it grew into a GIANT BEANSTALK!! It took over the whole bathroom, grew up and along the beams, and it didn't give us a SINGLE chilli. I had to throw it out in the end because I noticed it was attracting little flies to it, and then when I looked at it very closely I noticed lots of little white things crawling all over it! Yuck! Immediately it was chopped down and put in the outside bin.

So, I'm hoping for more luck/success with these. Janie and Ba gave us another (normal-sized) chilli plant last year, which we grew outside and that produced THREE chillies, which I used in cooking and they were delicious.

These are my gardening bibles. I consult each one intensely about everything I'm planning to do, and then I email Ba to double-check everything with her. She's given me SO MUCH advice and help. I'll have to make her some extra-special tomato relish this year as a thank you.

Gardening is just great! During my daily morning tub-check I noticed that my garlic is already growing!!!

Gardening Season Begins!

It's so lovely to wake up in the morning, to know the sun is shining, and to jump out of bed, excited to rush outside and see how the vegetables are growing! Of course, having just planted them I know nothing will have changed so far, but it's exciting to look nonetheless.

The back three planters have potatoes in: 1st earlies Swifts and Pentland Javelins. The yellow planter at the front has onions, and the big tub beside it has garlic!

These are my Swifts before being covered up. I'm impressed with the planters I have them in actually, they have little pockets at the side so you can pull the odd potato out without upsetting the entire sack.

And the garlic I planted midweek last week. I love garlic, and I've never grown it before, so this is of particular interest to me, especially as it's French garlic, which tastes better than any garlic I've ever tasted. My half-French friend brought me some back from France once and it was amazing, so I hope mine will be amazing too.

I also sowed my chilli seeds. I didn't photograph them, and now they're snug in Hagos's studio so I will have to photograph them and post another time.

Happy Spring!

Shake and Bake Friday!

It was my turn to bake for our Shake and Bake Friday this week at work. I wanted to try something new, of course, and chose these triple chocolate cookies from Linda Collister's gorgeous book Christmas Treats to Make and Give.

They were good fun to make - melted chocolate combined with whisked eggs and sugar, a little flour, and chopped chocolate and walnuts thrown into the mix before putting splodges on a baking tray and baking for ten minutes until they were just baked.

The photo above is taken from the book itself because, uncharacteristically, I forgot to take photos of my finished product. My biscuits turned out darker, possibly because I used golden caster sugar instead of white. I also didn't bother drizzling chocolate over the top, so stricly speaking my biscuits were double chocolate cookies. Really, they didn't need any more chocolate! The house and oven smelled delicous for a day, and my work colleagues LOVED them, which is always gratifying.

Friday's Shake and Bake is turning out to be something we all look forward to, and it's a great shared experience. We're all interested to see and know what each other is making or thinking of making. 

After the momentous task of finishing the boys' jumpers (which they were chuffed with, according to their parents) I have now leisurely picked up my own stripy, long-sleeved TV jumper. I'd finished the back and front ages ago - at the beginning of winter! The pattern has short sleeves, and as documented in this blog I've already made three short-sleeved versions, but I realised I rarely wear them because it's usually either too cold to wear a short-sleeved jumper, or too hot to wear a short-sleeved jumper. I'm using the sleeve instructions from a bolero pattern, which is in the same book (Vintage Knits) and have only had to make a slight adjustment to the sleeve top to fit it into the body. 

I'm having a great Saturday so far. Hagos and I went to Cafe Rouge in town today for breakfast. We both had cafe complet - croissant, jam and butter with orange juice and coffee, and I read the Arts section of The Times, which had a piece by Jeanette Winterson in it. I always like reading her journalism though I've only read her first book Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, years ago, for some reason. I should try another.

Happy Saturday! (photo above of Meg contemplating the outside - she's loving the arrival of spring and the spring-time birds!)

The Finished Jumpers

The jumpers are finally finished. Never again will I attempt to knit two jumpers at the same time, with the same deadline.

I got up at 7.30am on Sunday, set myself up at the kitchen table with my laptop and the audio book of Pride and Prejudice, and sewed.

Sewing together is my least favourite part of knitting. I have to be in the right mood to do it and I'm rarely in that mood.

I also decided, because it had been part of my original idea, to re-knit the pockets with each child's name or initials. Nate was shortened to N8, as above.

And JJ of course was easy. The picture above is fuzzy - probably due to tiredness and feeling delirious that I'd finished - but you get the idea.

They are packaged up, ready to post tomorrow.

I'm also nearly finished making the game for the same family (everything I decided to make instead of buy at Christmas had problems. In fact, I don't think any of my home-made gifts were finished on time, jumpers, pavlovas, Yule logs, games...). I'll post photos of the finished game once the family has received it. I'm quite pleased with the concept and, of course, I hope they'll like it too.

Saturday so far

Lunch at Frank's Bar with the beautiful iitalla mugs.

One jumper finished (thank goodness).

One jumper to sew together (my least favourite part of knitting).

It is a beautiful spring day here in Norfolk. The washing is on the line, the sky is clear and sunny, and I have an urge to buy daffodils.

I'm just about to sew together Nate's jumper. I'm so looking forward to posting these off on Monday. It's taken me too long to finish what was supposed to be Christmas jumpers. I just hope they fit the boys and they get a good amount of wear out of them (and that they like them!).

Happy Birthday Hagos!

It was Hagos's birthday yesterday, and I decided a while ago to make him Bishop's Cake from an old family recipe his mum had. Bette made us Bishop's cake at Christmas, and on Christmas Day evening we had an Enid-Blyton-esque tea of home-made soup, Bishop's Cake, chocolate and ginger pieces, wine and coffee. It really was my kind of tea! We were so impressed by the Bishop's Cake that we took a copy of the recipe. Hagos said he used to have the cake when he was a kid, and there was an association of visiting his uncle Bill who had a grocery store. 

The only ingredient I couldn't get locally was Angelica. Next time!

We had a really lovely day, and went out to Pizza Express in the evening.

This is my new Thermos Flask! from the great people at Amazon. It means I can have non-stop coffee (well, two coffees is pretty much my limit anyway) while working in my shed. And in the afternoon, after I've been to the gym I can have a decaf earl grey tea waiting for me! And we can take it on picnics, or car journeys. It's so versatile :)

Saturday Projects

I'm so very nearly finished Nate and JJ's jumpers. Sewing the bits together is my least favourite part of knitting, hence why it's taken me two weeks between knitting all the parts and sewing the shoulders together to knit the collar (which I did mid-week - two full evenings!). Yesterday I did charts for their names/initials as I want to embroider (if that's the correct term?) N8 and JJ onto the pockets, which will then be sewn onto the left sleeve. The 'JJ' was easy to chart; 'N8' not so much! But I think it will be fine. I WILL finish the jumpers entirely by mid-week and am hoping to post them off by Wednesday. 

Hagos and I had such fun fixing our oven yesterday. It's been bust since before Christmas. First the fan spectacularly blew up (while baking bread), then the element broke too. So we've been without an oven, without home-made bread and biscuits and ROAST CHICKENS, for too long.

When we started out cooperating yesterday it initially wasn't going so well. I think we're both used to being in control and figuring out the best way of doing things, and our styles were clashing. But once I understood the mechanics of what we were trying to do (instead of just holding a screwdriver and following orders) we got on much better and pooled our thinking and problem-solving skills. Something we're good at. It took us a good hour and a half and we laughed a lot.

So I had to test it out and quickly made these Mrs Beeton's chocolate chip cookies. Having an oven is such a simple thing and something we take for granted, but being without really made me appreciate what having it means.

The cookies were ready for our nightly episode of the wonderful FIREFLY. Delicious!

Postcards from Penguin

So, I love books and I love stationery. You can imagine my excitement when I discovered 100 Postcards from Penguin - postcards of book covers! What a blisteringly great idea. 

They arrived this morning, and I love them all. There are postcards of book covers for every occasion.

I tried to choose four of my favourites to photograph, and had to stop when I reached eleven. I really love the old-fashioned simple orange and (off-)white covers with the title and author, but also the more progressive covers. The colours are beautiful. And aesthetically, this is what book covers should be. Not awful, scrappy-montage rubbish on shiny paper, but covers designed with only the book in mind, using wonderful colours and a matt finish.  

One of the postcards even matched my favourite mug! There are a few postcards I don't think I'll ever be able to part with. The postcard of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, and Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl are so distinct and easily-identifiable.

Okay, I need to calm down and get back to work :)

A wet, cold, muddy exhilarating bike ride

I've been wanting to get back out on my bike for the last week or so, and this morning - unusually for a Saturday - I woke up full of beans and determined to get out before Hagos and I went into town for brunch. It was so amazing to be out in the fresh air as the countryside whizzed by. I'm really looking forward to spring and summer.

After we'd had lunch at Frank's Bar (again) Hagos and I went our separate ways to shop, before meeting back at the car to come home again. I wanted to spend some time in the library looking for all things Martin Amis*, but I took a detour down a street that had an Oxfam shop on it, and in the window were a load of Ladybird books. I've long wished my very generous mother had kept my books and toys instead of giving them away, so I was really excited to come across this version of Sleeping Beauty, that I had as a kid.

I was trying to get a photo of the bride at the end, which I thought was beautiful at the time, but my ever-present 'helper' had to stand on it, as she stands or sits on everything I do. She is gorgeous though.

*Martin Amis has just published The Pregnant Widow, his first fiction book in seven years. I read Time's Arrow a few years ago and really loved it, and I read his memoir, Experience, too, and I dip in and out of The War Against Cliche, but I haven't read any other of his fiction, and I really want to read The Pregnant Widow, based on several interviews I've seen and read with him recently. So I got several of his books out of the library today and will make my way through them. I think I might still have to order his latest from my friends at Amazon though.

Potatoes aplenty!

I was very excited to collect my potatoes from my friend Ba yesterday. She had researched, deliberated and chosen the best varieties - did an amazing spreadsheet - and was kind enough to ask if I wanted 'in'. 

So we have 1st earlies: Swift and Pentland Javelin; 2nd earlies: Wiljers and Charlottes; and main crop: Pink Fir Apples. VERY exciting. I can almost feel the heat of spring and summer just looking at them (while sitting in front of the fire).