A week of finishing

I have been busy this week getting up to date with a couple of projects. First a quilt I have been making as part of the online Studio11 workshops which Christine is running, having been rather scuppered by Covid. I blogged earlier about the project with Coronavirus as a theme; that is still ongoing as I've been doing too much thinking and not enough doing, which is often a failing of mine. However her "Potato Chip Quilt" project was straightforward, and took much less thinking about to achieve. There seem to be several variants with this name: one is a series of blocks with a square at the centre and a different coloured border on each square; another, similar to the one we made, consists of strips joined with a diagonal seam. The one Christine teaches comprises a pile of fabric strips of a consistent width but differing lengths and a pile of squares the same dimension as the width of strips. You make a long, long, looooooooong strip by alternately stitching strip, square, strip, square at random. The strip is then seamed and trimmed several times until you have a rectangle. Sounds very simple, but you have to get the maths right in order to know how big your quilt will be, and to make one that has sensible dimensions. 

It is all finished, 

quilted with a design I based on some of the fabric, 

 

with some hand dyed fabric as backing

 

I am really pleased with it, and have enough strips left (my poor maths!!) to make another of a similar size, though perhaps with less random and more deliberation.

Then there was my Noro jacket, started back in 2018. It too is finished, though currently awaiting a decision on buttons. 

 

You will see that I ignored the Noro "just make it random" philosophy (be "charmed by the non-uniformity, unevenness, & coarseness of nature"), I prefer to mirror the colour changes. This did involve quite a bit of reeling off from the start of the ball to get a match, but I used those bits in the back to vary the changes where no matching was needed. The yarn feels lovely knitted up and this jacket will get a lot of wear I hope, but I'll probably steer clear of any future Noro temptations. Beautiful as they are, with such a high price I don't like feeling that they are using a bit of marketing BS to cover flaws in both the yarn (which did sometimes fall apart in my hands as I was knitting) and the multiple knots and joins per ball (presumably because the yarn fell apart as it was being spun).

And yes, I am decidedly less sylphlike than the model in the pattern, but hey ho, I am somewhat older than her as well, and did once have my sylphlike moments!! The cat chaps don't mind, so long as they provide biscuits their humans can be any size they like!

Princess of the bins

Sometimes life isn't all rainbows and fairytales

I assume she has either gone out of favour, or is broken beyond use. Or perhaps the Father's Day gift wasn't quite up to scratch! There is something a trifle sinister about her though, isn't there?

Ten years

Ten years ago today my dear little Mum left this earth. This morning Jen and I sat together in my garden and raised a cup of tea in her memory. We both feel grateful to have had her in our lives. She was a wonderful Mum, though not always an easy person, and was a delightful Gran to Jen, known always as Granny Rose, because her name was Rosemary. I printed out a couple of extracts from her diaries for Jen, just to bring her close again and we sat crocheting and knitting and drinking tea, exactly the sort of thing Mum would have shared with us had she been here.

Mum with her Mum, my Ganna

Mum and Dad in their courting days

Mum and Jen in 2003

So, a little bit of that extract which is so exactly Mum, with her ability to recall conversations in detail and her tendency to not "suffer fools gladly" - she could be a harsh judge of folk at times, yet unshakably kind and generous with most. She was 16 when she wrote this in 1942

"To change from the sublime to the ridiculous Mrs Lambert was talking to Mummy over the fence the other day and she has for some time wanted to find out if Mummy has registered to find out her age. She is in collusion with Mrs Harpur. Mrs L says that she has registered which is a lie because for one thing she is no more 42 than I am, for another she told Daddy the day after that she hadn’t registered because it was so full and would she be out to jail and then about 3 weeks after told Mummy that she had gone in there and told the woman that she wouldn’t wait, and of course the woman obeyed her. There’s swank for you! Anyway I am leaving my story. She suddenly said to Mummy “My dear I have my calling up papers, have you yours?”. Whereupon Mummy said “No”. Actually she hasn’t got to register until next month but she wasn’t going to give anything away to Ruby to Mrs Harpur to Cheam. Then the fair lady said “Ah I know why you haven’t got them, because you haven’t registered – have you registered?” This was all done in a high pitched excited voice and is very rude because it is the equivalent of asking a person their age which isn’t usually supposed to be in the best of taste. So truth telling Mummy said “No” and quickly added “not for firewatching” Mrs L “But my dear I don’t mean firewatching I mean the ordinary registration” so Mum said “Oh yes Mrs Lambert” whereupon a steady gaze ensued. Where Mrs L goes wrong is that she makes such silly mistakes like saying that she had all her calling up papers when she couldn’t have even registered for firewatching as it hasn’t come in. Some women are silly."

We enjoyed that

lockdown wanderings

It seems to have become completely normal now, this restricted life in response to the pandemic we are still experiencing. We have settled into a sort of routine: weekly family Zoom get togethers with the Man's family who are spread far and wide; tea, socially distanced, in the garden with beloved daughter, cake or biscuits and crochet mandatory; walking down to the "village" for shopping in a small supermarket which has remained wonderfully well stocked for our simple needs; the Man's trips to the butcher where they bewail the lack of football; my various crafty activities and, of course, Mum's diaries.

The garden has continued to grow despite the lack of rain, and we were on the list to be part of the open gardens scheme for our local hospice this month. Instead they are having a virtual open gardens on their Facebook page and asked us for some photos that they could share. I thought you might like to enjoy a few of them as well

Early morning sunlight just catching "Mum's maple" - given to me by her some 25years ago and finally planted in the soil when we moved here

 a beautiful rose that came from my son in law's grandmother's garden. I love it that gardens can speak to us of people through the things that grow in them

New shed, new maple and new slate pathway which leads to ...

our new seating area, where tea and cake are taken and plants from the greenhouse are nursed along before planting out

 the Man's domain, where vegetables are produced and badgers are battled - they being rather partial to bean seedlings and other vegetable delights!

and finally, Down in the Dell where the badgers dwell, looking green and thriving

For my walks I am lucky enough to have the sea within five minutes drive, or fifteen minutes walk from the house. The weather has been so glorious, and our beach has, so far, remained thankfully unvisited for the most part, just a few locals taking the air

A friend wondered how we'd managed to escape to some hot Greek island, but no, this is the place we call home

I am everlastingly grateful to live here

More sparkle

Well my first attempt at Or Nue is completed. I am pretty pleased with it, despite the slightly suggestive bulge at top left where I tacked down the thread on the back at an angle rather than across the back of the border threads - just don't think of Mick Jagger in tight trousers and you'll be fine!

It has now been tucked into a small box frame and sits on the good man's mantlepiece in his study where it catches the light coming through the bay windows and reminds him that I love him every day, not just on our anniversary. And yes, I did manage to get it finished for the special day and, yes, I did have enough of the gold thread to finish, so didn't have to investigate the scrambled muddle of "less gold" gold thread.

I really enjoyed stitching this, though I'd probably work any future projects in slightly slower time: all that peering through an illuminated magnifier and stitching for long periods resulted in a migraine and very stiff neck and shoulders once it was done. The combination of simple stitching with attention to the finer detail felt very mindful, and listening to my playlist of medieval music provided a lovely and appropriate background. However, enough stitching for now. I have returned to a knitting project that I started more than two years ago - remember that lovely Noro yarn? I lost confidence when I got to the sleeves; the increases in combination with a lace pattern, not something I've done before, so it got tucked away. But I needed something big for my eyes to focus on so out it has come again and I have promised a friend and fellow knitter that I will finish it in time for our next meeting for tea and cake, whenever Coronavirus allows.

I was right though, the increases on the sleeves are rather tricky, but I won't be beat this time!

A little bit of sparkle

The pleasure of watching Rachel's patient stitching on her Dreams of Amarna project has revived my interest in goldwork. She is now up to episode 7, so if you'd like to spend a gentle 20 minutes or so listening to her thoughts on embroidery and watching her design take shape you can find her here.

Yes, I do have far too many other projects on the go that need my attention - in fact an overwhelming amount, but I found myself going back to a deserted piece that was begun in a lovely workshop we had with Becky Hogg four years ago. I had abandoned it because it was not as well stitched as I would have liked, but when I got back to it I thought, "hmmmm, that's really not too bad" and having finished it I am rather happy with the result. You have to understand that this woodpecker has not preened his wing feathers recently, which is why they are a bit askew! He has also failed to peck the hole in his bit of tree trunk, I assume he is a lazy woodpecker! You can see how he really should look here.

Rachel's current project uses a technique called Or Nue, a very old technique using rich gold and silver threads couched down with fine silks to create pictures that glitter seductively in the light. Mary Corbet has a rather nice piece about it here. Rachel is using a spiral thread, where the gold begins at the heart of Akhenaten and spirals out from there. Having decided that I would really enjoy this meditative stitching, and having a wedding anniversary approaching, I thought I might devise my own, very simple design, and work it in time to give to my dear heart.

Spiraling looked a bit too scary, so I am running the gold thread from side to side on the fabric. This came from a rather louche bundle that was part of Cecil's stash - definitely not the way one should store goldwork supplies. This is the tidier bit, and I am hoping there will be enough because the untidy bit (for which read something that looks like a large bundle of knitting wool that a kitten has been over enthusiastic with) is a slightly different gold.

So, I set to yesterday with much enthusiasm and little understanding and have got this far by this morning.

I am using embroidery floss rather than silk, because my dry skin turns any length of flat silk thread into something resembling Gonk hair. The eagle eyed among you will notice my basic error; I am running the gold thread across in singles rather than in pairs. This means twice the stitching so it will go slowly; unhelpful since our anniversary is in three days time! It is only our second anniversary, though we have known each other 22 years now. Traditionally gifts are cotton, but I think the linen ground fabric is an acceptable substitute.

Wish me luck

beauty and silence

The weather is almost heartbreakingly beautiful at the moment, as though we are being rewarded, or perhaps gentled along through this great pause that has been forced upon us. Yet that awareness is always balanced by the knowledge that there is heartbreak across the globe as more folk die of this contagion.

Here in the garden and in my trips to the shops for necessities I am aware all the time of the background silence. It extends the physical space that surrounds me, by giving access to distant sounds, normally drowned by the constant buzz of traffic and other human generated noise; crows in the trees across the valley, "thank you NHS clapping" in the streets surrounding us on a Thursday evening. We are five minutes away from one of the main routes along the south coast, in fact the only route West from Dover unless you choose to go up to the M25, so not some delightful rural backwater. Our home is in the outskirts of a conurbation that basically stretches across 3 small towns at the edge of the sea. Even more so, I am struck by this silence.

I noticed today that I was being tickled by the sense of some echo of this silence within myself, a deep feeling of rightness about it. Then I realised, this is what the world sounded and felt like in my childhood; there was so much less traffic that you could actually hear; rather than living in a state of constant unconscious filtering, you could truly feel the space you were surrounded by.

Even more beautiful just now is the expanse of the night, as the young moon nestled in darkness watches Venus throwing her clear light down to us.