signs of spring

For some weeks now, I’ve had my suspicions that spring was around the corner. It all started when I visited the Botanic Garden in Cambridge and came across a whole large shrub (forgive my ignorance of exactly what sort it was) in blossom, and not only that, but with a heavenly scent of summer and sunshine and flowers! It was the first time I’d smelt such a smell in months and months, and the first time I’d not had to rely on orange blossom perfume to make up for it, and it was all the more welcome for that. I stood with my nose pressed to the branches for longer than was probably dignified.

On that same trip, I noticed a funny little cupboard set into the wall of the greenhouses, marked ‘REFERENCE BOOKS’ and ‘Not to be taken to other parts of the building’. Clearly, though, it was empty, with not a reference book in sight. It strikes me as quite reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, as only there would you have such a clearly labelled and yet entirely unconvincing cupboard. I don’t know why I’d never noticed it before.

But going back to spring, it was while I was out walking the dog on Port Meadow yesterday that I discovered the surest sign of spring yet: a rabbit race-track. You know it’s spring when the bunnies start making race courses. I had ventured off the path to investigate some particularly lovely looking daffodils (a dangerous move, I know – it was surely the downfall of Little Red, and highly inadvisable seeing as just half an hour earlier I had encountered a man who reminded me most of Wyndham Earle, the most wily, evil, cunning character from Twin Peaks, who has a habit of poisoning people in woods) and in amongst the trees I found a well-worn track, with series of carefully smoothed humps and angled bends, just big enough to race rabbits on.

Of course, all the rabbits must have left their game as soon as they saw me coming (I did see several hopping away as I headed towards the trees, not that the dog noticed anything). But I feel lucky, nonetheless, to have found such a rare thing as a rabbit race course, and I’m pleased to know that those bunnies spend their time so productively when we’re not looking.

DIY Christmas

Whereas we gave home-made presents to many of our friends and relatives at Christmas, by some strange coincidence my mother and I both gave each other DIY gifts. I’m not quite sure why this is – we didn’t agree it in advance, or discuss it at all. Perhaps it’s just that we spent so much time in the same place before Christmas that we couldn’t possibly have made anything for the other and kept it remotely secret? Anyhow, that’s how it worked out. I gave her a selection of printed fabric in reds and pinks and purples, most of it designed by the wonderful Kaffe Fassett, with which to make a beautiful quilt of many colours. And she gave me two metres of lovely grey and cream checked linen fabric from a shop in Paris (which, outrageously, I have not had the pleasure of visiting) with which to make a tablecloth.

And oddly enough Father Christmas gave me a collection of embroidery threads in nice colours, so as to really drive home the point my mother wished to make. I think they’re in cahoots. As well as these, I also got a very nice book of cross stitch and embroidery patterns that would look nice on a tablecloth. Point made. (Incidentally, the book is written by the owner of the shop in Paris that the material came from.)

The only thing is, I can’t make my mind up how best to combine these elements and decorate my tablecloth. The checks are fairly small, so I can’t decide if I should stick within the borders or just stitch irrespective of the woven pattern. Or if I should follow a regular pattern or if I should do something freer, like little flowers or plants. Suggestions are, as always, welcome. I am, of course, more than a little daunted by the idea of two metres of stitch-able space, as this is far far more than I have ever embarked on before.

Besides this, just before Christmas (I think strictly speaking this was a very belated birthday present actually, but it felt more like Christmas) I received an amazing surprise parcel from Peru (via Hampshire, naturally), containing ten tiny skeins of alpaca wool in five different colours. It was so unexpected, and all the more exciting for that! It came from Laura, who was and still is adventuring her way around South America, and apparently occasionally stopping off in wool shops and posting goodies back to this side of the world. I don’t yet know what I will do with it, but I feel that just as I made the Icelandic wool into something of a Scandinavian nature, I ought to make this into something that would feel at home in South America. So maybe some kind of intensely colourful embroidered creation. Maybe with a llama or two? We shall see. But Laura – this is thank you. I’m most touched that you thought of me when faced with exotic wool 🙂

worth getting out of bed for

This morning I broke with my customary weekend habit of switching off the dreaded alarm (I’m not exaggerating about the dread – it often haunts me through the day) and enjoying a rare moment of luxury in bed with no reason to get up, so that I could go on the Oxford Asian Textile Group‘s first outing of 2011 to see Japanese textiles at the Ashmolean Museum. And I’m happy to say that it was definitely worth skipping a lie-in for. We got a guided tour of a fascinating selection of textiles – kimono, fukusa, bits of embroidery, a screen… all sorts. One of the most wonderful things, in my opinion, was a huge (C19?) pattern book, full of all the different stencil patterns that could be printed onto fabric to make into a kimono. I had never seen one of these before, so it was quite a discovery.

We also saw some original stencils such as would have been used to make these samples. They were made out of several layers of mulberry paper, and glued together with persimmon tannin. It must have been such an effort just to make the stencils, let alone print the fabric as well. Similarly amazing, I thought, was a folding screen, which, from a distance looked like a perfectly ordinary screen with little figures embroidered onto the panels.

The four panels contain figures to represent each of the four classes of Japanese society, from the warriors on the right to the merchants on the left. There are several little scenes on every panel, in which people are depicted carrying out the typical activities of their class. However, it was only when you got up close to the screen that you suddenly realised that the figures were not simply 2D embroidery, but 3D appliqued elements, with such realistic human faces that they were almost creepy.

I hate to think how complex these people must have been to make: their features and contours are all picked out perfectly just using the stuffing behind the faces and a few stitches, and their clothes are all folded and draped, just as they would hang on a real person. Quite incredible. All in all, then, I am so very glad I got out this morning. It’s worth breaking with tradition every now and then.

winding like nobody’s business

Although I started the new year with the vague intention of not buying any more new wool (I wouldn’t like to say it was a new year’s resolution, as that would make it sound far too serious and deep in my heart of hearts I know there is a very high risk of me going back on this decision), I made no such promises with regard to knitting accessories. So here we are in the third week of January, and today the postman brought me a wool swift of my very own. (This makes it sound as though perhaps me and the postman are close friends and he bought me a gift, but no, I paid for this myself and he was just doing his job.)

It arrived first thing in the morning, so I had to tear myself away from it to go to work, and then impatiently endure the rest of the day until I could go home and set it up. Since coming home I have wound an impressive (or some might say this was just pure sad) total of fourteen balls of wall. You can see the little wall of wool I was building up just in the background of the picture above. Never before have I wound wool at such a speed! I was expecting to be impressed by this thing, but truly it is a more wonderful invention than I imagined. I’ve wanted one for yonks, but have always been put off by the extortionate price labels that accompany these gadgets. A week or so ago, (and with the encouragement of my ne’er-do-well mother), I managed to put all my concerns behind me and bite the bullet, and I must say I don’t regret it. Nor does my mother – now she wants one too. Plus I like to think that perhaps it was worth the excessive cost, as it is a pretty sturdy thing and ought to last a lifetime or three. (Whether or not anyone but me will have any interest in adopting it after my lifetime is another matter.)

One thing that never ceases to surprise me when winding wool from skeins into balls is how very different the colours look depending on the way the wool is organised. The two kinds of wool in the photo above are exactly the same, but look entirely different as a ball and as a skein. As a skein it looks as though it might be dyed in short sections that chop and change quite frequently, but as soon as you wind it into a ball you suddenly realise that they are long, slow-changing colour sections. Anyhow, this toy has kept me well out of trouble tonight, and will probably continue to do so for a good long while. There are plenty more skeins where these came from!

2010: a stitch odyssey

I thought it would be nice to have a little retrospective of the year 2010, to summarise, in pictures, everything I made last year. N.B. this only includes things I started and finished making in 2010, so anything that’s still a work in progress is not allowed to feature here. Which amounts to quite a substantial number of things. But it’s probably best not to dwell on all the things I haven’t finished at the start of a new year… that’s just not the right attitude.

So, from top to bottom and left to right, we have 1) an Art Deco tea towel; 2) a roll-up case for double-pointed knitting needles; 3) a baby-sized crocheted Cthulhu; 4) Icelandic-style socks; 5) sunset-coloured cabled socks; 6) a pumpkin tea towel; 7) Stumpy the platypus; 8) a spotty cushion with embroidered detail; 9) a moo-cow tablecloth; 10) a Space Invaders tea towel; 11) a Nordic Christmas stocking; 12) a reupholstered chair seat; 13) a Digger tea towel. All in all, not a bad year. I am very happy with my output, especially considering the amount of moving around the country I did, and the fact that I managed to fit finals in somewhere in the midst of all that sewing and knitting. So maybe this year will be more fruitful still!

how to be a domestic goddess

Recently whilst out Christmas shopping, I somehow found myself acquiring some highly necessary cake baking and decorating equipment for myself, such as a whole box of squeezy icing tubes with five different shaped nozzles, and these cutesy little heart shaped cake cases:

One night at Sewing Club, since it seemed like the perfect occasion to experiment with a large amount of cake, I made a batch of heart shaped cupcakes and iced them with light pink, orange-blossom-scented mascarpone and ricotta icing. And gave my three-tier mini cake stand its first outing:

Sadly we lost the last three, as the cake stand comes apart, tier by tier, and when picked up from the top, well you can imagine what happens. But since I had so much fun icing these, the inspiration struck me to plan a special Christmas edition of Sewing Club, and make seasonal nibbles for the stitchers to eat while they sewed, and play jolly Christmas music.

So out came the reindeer cookie cutters (and the Christmas sheep, of course…) and I made some spicy dough. Next came a terrible shock when I discovered that we had run out of silver balls, and yet another terrible shock when I found that you can’t seem to buy edible glitter anywhere in this town, for love or money. I have eaten the most beautiful cupcakes, sprinkled with edible glitter, and have lusted after this stuff forever after. But I was reduced to buying Barbie sprinkles this time, in desperation, as it was all I could find that vaguely resembled the glitter of my dreams. (What on earth is edible glitter, anyway?)

And I think the resulting Christmas biscuits did alright.

nordic knitting

For my birthday (a few months ago now), I received a wonderful parcel of Nordic goods from my lovely neighbourhood geologist, aka the volcano enthusiast for whom I made the socks earlier this year. Among other things, in this parcel were four beautiful balls of undyed Icelandic Lopi wool, each in a different shade of sheep colour – cream, grey, faun and charcoal. I love the colours of undyed sheep, and am always amazed at what an incredible range of shades there is before you even think about adding artificial colour to the mix.

Anyway, I wanted to make something suitably wonderful from this wool, but I couldn’t think what would be most fitting. Until I hit upon the idea of a Christmas stocking! I made one a couple of years ago in red and white, which had ‘JOYEUX NOEL’ knitted boldly around the middle. So I chose some jolly Norwegian knitting designs from my book on traditional Scandinavian Knitting and set about combining them into a stocking that Father Christmas would be proud of. It meant of course that I had to re-master the art of the Latvian Plait and the two-colour continental cast-on, neither of which is any mean feat when you’re me (we have a difficult history), but I managed it in the end.

Just as I eventually managed to work out how to make the stripes line up when commencing work on the foot – it drove me crazy for a whole evening, and I had to ignore this project for several days in a frustrated grump, until I realised that Christmas would take me by surprise if I wasn’t careful. But I finished it in time to give it to the original wool donor as a Christmas present, who will be taking it to spend Christmas in the Seychelles (lucky bugger). I even attached three little jingle bells to the cuff, for added seasonal effect.

I really love the finished stocking, and I think it was the perfect use for this wool. It seems right to use Nordic wool with traditional Nordic patterns (and we can gloss over the fact that I blended the products of two entirely different countries in this one project). I only hope Father Christmas can find it in time.

the more it goes (tiddly pom) on snowing

When I woke up this morning, the only reason I knew to jump out of bed and open my curtains straight away was because I had a text message from my driving instructor telling me to stay under my duvet as we wouldn’t be driving today. So I was both surprised and not so surprised to find this outside my window:

At this point there were about four or five inches of snow already, and that was at least half an hour ago. It has only kept on snowing and settling since then, and our tree has now ceased to look delicately dusted as if with a generous helping of icing sugar, and now looks decidedly overloaded and weary. I quickly came to terms with the idea that going Christmas shopping in town today was probably not the best plan after all, and so I (rather happily) have resigned myself to a day of knitting, sewing, tea-drinking and possibly baking at home.

And to begin with, a serious catch-up session of blogging from my bed. I have done so much of late that has not made it anywhere near my blog, so this must be rectified.

four moocows make a herd!

Just like three fruit trees make an orchard, or so I heard. Anyway, back to the moocows. These were a sly project that I created in secret to adorn the four corners of a lovely vintage red check tablecloth that I had to hijack from its owner for this purpose. Evidently additional home-made decoration is not at the forefront of just anyone’s mind as they purchase tablecloths/tea towels/other cloth goods. Only mine. (I should probably sort this out, actually, as it could get me into trouble, i.e. infinite lists of practical things that ‘need’ embroidering. Oh wait. That’s already happened.) So here are my moocows; a different one for each corner:

(Please note the hastily and messily constructed ‘moocow montage’ image – I’m sure there must be a better way to do this than the way I did it, but it was my first ever attempt!) I worried for such a long time that they would be considered overly twee by the owner of the tablecloth, who has fairly strong feelings on this matter. But he appears to still be speaking to me, so I can only imagine that all is forgiven.

Originally I had been planning four different farm animals, but it took me too long to work out what a chicken’s chin ought to look like, and so I gave up on that one. Half way through sewing the cows I thought perhaps I should have been sewing reindeer, but I didn’t think the addition of antlers would have been sufficient transformation. So cows they are. And I rather like them. I can perfectly imagine a hearty rustic dinner atop such a cloth, or indeed a well-laid picnic. It has left my hands now, so I’m still waiting, and imagining…

the summer of creativity

This is something I meant to post about months ago, i.e. when it was actually still the summer, and therefore relevant. But fortunately for me the creativity did not come to an end with the summer, and in fact appears to be enjoying a surge with the onset of autumn and winter. On my return to Oxford in June, I brought about the creation of the weekly joy that is known as Sewing Club (the name is to be interpreted loosely, as knitting, embroidery and pretty much any textile-based activity is welcome there).

Throughout the summer, attendees mostly consisted of myself and Beehive (aka Old Faithful), but recently numbers have shot up, and last week there were six sewers, not including myself! I was so pleased to see this rise in popularity that I requested pictures of the event to mark the occasion (thanks to those who humoured me and took these photos).

Last week’s Sewing Club achieved much fixing of old clothes (sewing up rips and patching holes) and a wallet (reconditioned using a collection of colourful festival wristbands for the exterior), a new initiate to the gentle art of knitting, a large section of a lovely knitted scarf with cables, an almost complete new pair of trousers using found fabric, a new cover for a worn-out chair seat and some embroidery on a tablecloth (details to remain secret for the time being). What a success! And it looks as though next time will be even more popular! Long live Sewing Club!

UPDATE: anyone who’s interested can now see photos of all the things that have been made at Sewing Club on my Flickr page. This will be updated as and when – if you have photos of things you’ve made and want to see them up there with the rest, let me know.