october sunshine

It all began on Friday morning, as I was preparing my staple breakfast of muesli with yogurt and strawberries, and I was suddenly struck by the glorious sunshine radiating across the table and into the strawberry box, where it made the fruit glow as though it was lit up from inside. I knew I couldn’t just sit there and munch and hungrily ignore it. I had to race back upstairs to grab my camera and make the most of it before I could take a mouthful of my cereal.

This weekend I went to Cambridge. It was the first time I’d been back since moving house, but I had managed to get more than necessarily nostalgic about the place in only a few months. It surely helped that Sunday was most beautifully sunny, and warm like summertime. On my way down Mill Road on Saturday I saw these fabulous autumn vegetables, the kind that make it OK that the days are getting shorter, as they make one fantasise about warming, autumnal dinners:
On Sunday I went to the Botanical Gardens and watched the ducks and the moorhens (they were definitely moorhens, not coots – anyone who has ever had trouble distinguishing the two need only peruse a copy of this handy rhyming primer) and wandered all the way round and out again via an artificial fen. I was particularly impressed by this tree:
It had turned red all over the outside, but remained green in the centre, and where the sun was coming through its topmost branches it was glowing the warmest colour. Not that that kind of thing ever comes out properly in photos, but I can’t help but try. Now I just need that cosy wooden hut, somewhere up in rural Scandinavia, where I can spend my winter by a fire, knitting thick woolly socks. With moomins on. Time to dream again.

8 bit christmas

As I hinted in my last post, I have recently started planning this year’s home-made Christmas presents. I still have a backlog of long-promised gifts that troubles me deep inside, but as always I am at the beck and call of my immediate whims, and that is how I ended up with such a long list in the first place. So, pleased with my cross-stitched pumpkin, I started to get all inspired about further cross-stitch possibilities, and what better than old school 8 bit computer game characters? The clunky pixelated graphics would work just perfectly in little Xs! So off I went to purchase some new tea towels (and, might I add, I am not best pleased with whoever beat me to it in Boswell’s this week – they were all out of the nicest ones!):

I got started straight away, and after one whole evening’s work managed to come up with this:

OK, so it is the world’s smallest cross stitch. Well probably not, in fact, and I thank my lucky stars I was not born a few hundred years ago so I would have had to make even smaller crosses. But that must account for some of the time. But really? One night? Slightly embarrassing. I hope further tiny figures get faster, or this excellent plan of mine for achieving more than one home-made Christmas present this year might be a serious flop. N.B. I also spent a whole evening prior to this creating cross-stitchable versions of all the original (well, almost original – I remember it in black and white…) Digger icons, so if anyone happens to read this and would like a copy, just say so.

abracadabra! it turned into a pumpkin!

At long last, I mastered the arts of a fairy godmother and magicked my tea towel into a pumpkin. Of course it wasn’t ready on time for its intended birthday. But fairy godmothers sometimes take years to learn their trade, so I count myself lucky. And yes, beware, the following creation is twee, to be sure. I was prepared for this, and yet still drawn to cross-stitch in spite of its reputation. Apologies if it is too sickly for anyone’s good taste.

As with most things I seem to turn my hand to these days, this vegetable took an unusually long time to complete. Who knew how intricately shaded pumpkins were, in five tones of orange and yellow? (Actually, thinking about it, I am thankful that this one is as un-lifelike as it is…) However, its rustic home-made charm warms my insides and makes me feel one step closer to domestic goddess-dom.

The next step is obviously planning one’s Christmas creations in October…

autumn vegetables

On the strength of my completed platypus, I have dived straight into something new: embroidered vegetables. These have always had a strange kind of allure for me; the rich colours and tiny perfection of hand-stitched radishes, and the cosy, warming appearance of vegetables on natural linen. So I decided it was my turn to make some of my own, to decorate a tea towel for my mama (I don’t think I know anyone else who would appreciate a tea towel with embroidered vegetables on). Just choosing the colours for a pumpkin was a hugely satisfying process:

I haven’t got very far yet (ideally I need to finish the whole thing in less than two weeks – eek!), and it is time to start making dinner, but I am so pleased with the look of what I’ve done that I wanted to post a picture right now. So here, a pumpkin’s bottom:
The linen comes from a lovely little sewing shop we found in France last week, in La Charite sur Loire. The lady who runs the shop had decorated all the walls with handmade embroidery that she had designed herself, and it was such an inspiration that we immediately had to rush off home and try it ourselves.

stumpy!

I am back from my summer travels and have begun as I mean to go on: I finished something at last! It’s been so long since I finished anything – it seems that all I do these days is start more and more projects, and this leaves me feeling rather unsettled. However, since I visited the house/museum of Gustave Moreau in Paris last week, and noted the vast quantity of paintings he had begun and not finished, I started to feel that this must be the sign of a great artist.

So, today I finally sewed feet onto Stumpy the hot water platypus (so christened when she still had no limbs, thanks to my mama), and now she is a new platypus!
She can fit a hot water bottle inside her just perfectly. We have grown rather fond of her while she has been here, and it will be a sad day when we let her go and give her to Laura, her rightful owner. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if she would really prefer to live in a household where they called her something more flattering than Stumpy.

elephant gaiters

It’s been a mighty long time since I posted anything up here, so I thought I would celebrate my return to blogging with this wonderful pair of knitted elf boots that I was given at the weekend in return for my first ever pair of socks.

They are not really elephant gaiters at all, but Franziska, their creator, claims that their predecessors were, and so I suppose I must believe her. These, on the other hand, are beautiful and I love them. Apparently they are made out of Norwegian wool – though I don’t think the photo does justice to their true colour – and I can perfectly imagine sitting by the fire on long winter nights wearing these and feeling snug.

market booty

I am back from my market adventure/revision break with many more spoils than I ever thought I would bring back. Usually trips to the market involve admiring lots of things but not buying any, but it seems maybe I am gradually growing into a market state of mind. Last time I went I came back with four cashmere jumpers and an assortment of mismatching cute ceramic buttons; this time I came back with lots and lots. I got a couple of large Art Deco roast chicken dishes, with Clarice Cliff-esque designs:


They were made in Stoke on Trent by A J Wilkinson potters, where Cliff used to work, but their genuine ancestry is less important than the fact that they will make excellent chicken dishes.


I also picked up a set of four little cake plates with a matching bigger one, with which I and three lucky friends (I am taking applications now) can have tea and cake parties. My mama said she didn’t like them, and I started to think I was wrong to be excited about them, but what’s not to be excited about where cake parties are involved?


On a complete tangent to all this crockery, I also found a magnifying glass with a beautiful chequered wooden handle. I don’t have any great purpose in mind that requires a magnifying glass, but I’m sure a girl is always better off with one than without one. After all, now I can solve mysteries – just think of all those mysteries I’ve had to leave unsolved until today! I’ve just been examining the fingerprints on my laptop… probably all mine.


Needless to say, the books in the photo are part of today’s booty too, though perhaps I shouldn’t admit that, given that they’re in English. Well anyway, we can all gloss over that fact. And finally, I acquired a very fine second-hand small Le Creuset saucepan. Plus all the embroidered bits and pieces that my spoils are sitting on are my mother’s booty for her curtain project-to-be. All in all, a pretty good day’s work! Except that the day’s actual work has been somewhat delayed by this adventure, so I had better get back to it now. Only two weeks to go!

belated happy returns

So yesterday was my blog’s first birthday, and bad blogger that I am, I did nothing to celebrate it. This is partly because I have nothing new to show, since my exams started yesterday and, in theory at least, I have been concentrating more on those than on knitting. But I realise that there are plenty of things that never made it onto here at their creation, as they were all pre-blog, and so it is one of those that I will add now in belated celebration of my blog-i-birthday. (That looked sort of Welsh.) Voici Rhubarb and Framboise, two of my very favourite ever creations:

Rhubarb (on the left) came first, and was a present for my sister because she kept complaining that she didn’t have any kind of cuddly inanimate object in Paris. Then when my mother met him she declared he couldn’t possibly be happy without a girlfriend, which is how Framboise came to be. Fortunately they got on well right from the start, and soon fell in love (as you can see). They are quite self-sufficient – they have a fondness for all kinds of pink and red food (they are like flamingoes in that they have to work to maintain their colour), tabasco sauce and raspberry jam being their absolute favourites, and they happily help themselves whenever nobody is looking. They don’t have an especially large vocabulary: ‘schmoo’ is about all they have ever learnt to say, but they don’t mind.
That dastardly mother of mine suggested hopefully, shortly after the creation of Framboise, that they might start having babies next, but so far we have managed to avoid this happening. Perhaps once I am freed from exams once and for all this might change.

in my dreams…

It’s fantasy time: this has always been one of my favourite buildings in Cambridge, and fairly recently it went up for sale when Bonhams moved out. It used to be a pub called The Golden Rose, and on top of being such a wonderful building in itself, it is situated at the end of my favourite road in Cambridge, Orchard Street, which is lined down one side with an unusual terrace of tiny cottages with lovely squat roofs. Now I can’t help but fantasise about how it would just make a perfect wool shop. It has amazing curved doors, and such big windows!

In my dreams I would like to open a wool & knitting supplies shop, and of course it would be a lovely friendly place where one could lose oneself for hours amongst the wool, planning projects or just knitting and chatting. The little voice of sense and reason in the back of my head, however, tells me it would not be so perfect or fun. In fact it would probably be a huge risk to begin with, followed by a huge amount of work for ever after. I’m sure it would be more rewarding than most retail jobs, as knitting shops tend to be far more personal places than clothes shops or newsagents, but in the end it’s just retail, and I’m not sure if I could handle it. Alas. I wish my dreams would come true.

to be or not to be?

Here is one square of what might in future be a cosy, beautiful throw. The dilemma is whether to carry on with it as it is, or whether to change it. I spent what felt like ages today holding the Rowan Tapestry up against all different kinds of wool in the shop, trying to find its perfect match, and the best I could come up with was this Debbie Bliss Rialto DK in grey. I had originally intended for the complementary colour to be a kind of dusty purple, but such a colour is apparently not to be found. There were quite a lot of paler colours that would have worked alright with the Tapestry wool, but surely then it would just become a grubby blanket in next to no time. Take a look at what there is so far and see what you think:

There is always the possibility that I could reverse the colours so that the Tapestry became the main colour, and the grey the secondary one. Then it would be pinker. Or I could carry on my search for the ideal colour to go with the pink and get something different entirely. Oh I know not what to do. Except I do know that I shouldn’t be thinking about things like woolly throws at a time like this when I should be cramming French literature into my head instead. So maybe that’s what I’ll go and do now, and leave the colour conundrum to mull by itself for a bit.