A Joyous Knit ...

... and a couple of other small things. 

This is the Glasgow Skyline Hat from the kit I bought at GSoY, so the second of my purchases there to be knitted up. And it's not even December!

It was such a lovely thing to make. Bar the two times I had to take out some of the Mackintosh border because I'd made  a mistake, it was an absolute joy to knit from beginning to end. I love Glasgow, I loved the fact that I could choose my own colours for the kit and could therefore do it in the colours of the Saltire, and I also love the coincidence that I'm showing it off on St Andrew's Day. 

The kit is from Wee County Yarns  and they have some fabulous kits and patterns on their website, as well as lovely yarn. I am already looking forward to browsing their stand again at next year's GSoY. Highly recommended. 

Other things. Well, there's an update on Raisin. He is spending rather more time here than I am comfortable with, only because I feel bad for his owner that he is not going home. Also he eats a lot. I walked into the kitchen this afternoon to find him sitting on the kitchen island with his head, literally, in an open packet of Dreamies. If only I'd had my camera with me. He is still here; we don't have the heart to throw him out as the weather is abysmal. Hopefully he will make his way home when the wind drops and the rain stops. Preferably later this evening. 

And I did some pre-advent advent opening. Both my advents had 'open me whenever' extras, and I chose to open them today, just to get in some practice! From Giddy Yarns there were chocolate treats and from An Caitin Beag some cat themed goodies and - unsurprisingly - a stitch marker. 

Real advent opening starts tomorrow. And the OH is muttering about putting up the tree. 

A Bakers Dozen

 

To get twelve pairs of hand knitted socks in a year is of course enough for anyone I would think , and I had no plans to add another pair for Son No 1's birthday which takes place only a few days after Christmas.

Then I went to the Glasgow School of Yarn and found this skein of wool called Wellington. Now, the Duke of Wellington has been the lad's hero for many many years; he even got married in a copy of a coat the Duke was wearing in one of his portraits, so how could I not buy it and use if for a 13th pair? 

(We'll ignore the fact that when she named her colour the dyer was probably thinking more about wet weather footwear than the victor of Waterloo)

Anyway it seems fitting to round off a year of Canadian Prime Minsters with a British one. So there they are. And I called them - what else but - The Duke.

Baking Subscription November

 

This is described as pecan pie slice. 

There is no pastry.

How then can it be a pie? 

OK, it's not a pie, but what it is, is a rich gorgeous cake base with an equally rich, although quite sparse, caramelly topping full of pecans. With a bit of drizzled white chocolate just to finish. 

I moaned about this almost all the way through, starting off with the brown butter, which I find tricky. It's a bit like my lemon curd which never thickens in the time the recipe says it will; equally the butter in this did not brown in the 12-15 minutes they said it would take. Why can't I just melt it and be done, was the burden of my song while I stood like one o' clock half struck , stirring melted butter. I wouldn't mind so much if it smelt nice, but it doesn't does it? It smells like sick. In fact to my mind they only cooking smell worse than melted butter is hot orange juice. That said, it did give the cake a lovely treacly flavour, so I suppose it was all worth it. After moaning about that I moaned about the fact that, contrary to usual experience, there was not enough topping and definitely not enough chocolate for the drizzling. Moan, moan, moan. Moan, moan, moan. 

But you know what? It was so worth it. 

Last Christmas

 the OH bought me a Dolls House.

I can't remember if I have mentioned this before. A semi-thorough look back at last December/January seems to imply not. This was possibly because. for complicated reasons, it couldn't be delivered to Orkney and therefore went to Glasgow and so I didn't actually see it until March/April this year and we didn't get it back to Orkney until August. 

It was hand built by a specialist company and I spent hours and hours choosing all the details of floor coverings, wallpapers, coving, ceiling roses, light fittings - and so it went on - it got quite exhausting because it was like redecorating your whole house all at once after it had been stripped back to bare walls and floors. 

To use one of my favourite expressions, it wasn't cheap, but then I had wanted one for decades and had denied myself because when you have children luxuries like dolls houses for Mum quite rightly come so far down the priority list as not to feature. It's a different thing when they're grown up and you're retired. 

I had a dolls house as a child. My grandfather made it for me one Christmas  or birthday and also some of the furniture that went inside it. I loved it and I played with it lots and one afternoon when I was  playing with it with some friends I left the room for a couple of minutes and when I came back one of them had poked her fingers through every single cellophane pane in the windows on the front. Even now, not quite six decades later I can't help feeling a bit cross and thinking 'spiteful cow. She wasn't a girl who could cope with other people having things she didn't, although of all our group she probably had the most stuff and ,as an only child, was spoiled rotten. 

 I suspect that my wanting a dolls house so badly when I grew up, apart form an inbuilt fascination with small things and a love of social history is to do with my original one getting spoiled like that and also not remembering what happened to it. I expect it was given away when we moved house from the North to the South, which happened when I was twelve. 

Anyway enough of the psychological speculation and sadness tinged childhood memories. here are some pictures. 

Yes it's massive, and will cost a fortune to furnish. I have bought a few pieces for the kitchen and scullery, which I will doubtless show off in a later post. 

And coming back to this a day later I was so horrified by the number of typos I'd made, I have corrected them all! 

Let's Talk About Advents

 Not the season of Advent, but yarn related advent calendars. 

Quite a lot of indie dyers, and some commercial ones, offer 'Yarn Advents'. It's a simple idea, you give them  money and sometime in October/November they send you a box with 24 small skeins of wool, wrapped and numbered, so that you can open them up during December. They're generally themed, some come with optional extras like a full skein of co-ordinating yarn to open on Christmas Day or a project bag that fits with the theme.

I've always avoided these in the past because, quite apart from my non-conformist soul shying away from the thought of the self indulgence it represents, I could never think what on earth to do with 24 small balls of wool. I mean, I have left overs from sock knitting that weigh more than that and I'm so at a loss for what to do with them that they sit around in a drawer doing nothing but taking up space.  

But this year I gave in. Not sure why. Possibly because I'm sick of  not allowing myself to buy things, even though I can afford them, possibly because it's been a hard year and I felt I needed cheering up, possibly because I had an idea about what to do with the wool. Who knows?  Anyway I didn't think too much about which one to get because the Giddy Knits one was themed around The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe. No contest.  

It arrived a couple of weeks ago, and here it is. And no I haven't peeked. That's like cheating at patience, it sort of misses the point.

 

I was also tempted by the stitch marker advent offered by Mara at An Caitin Beag (The Little Cat). Bad year or no bad year, however, there was no way I could justify buying this for myself on top of the wool one, but I devised a cunning plan, by which people bought me gift vouchers for ACB for my birthday and I used them to buy the advent. That also came recently

I hadn't really taken on board that they came in a project bag, but they did. And it's a very nice one too. All the little labels on the envelopes are cat themed; they're so cute. I don't normally do cute, but I love these.

Then, for reasons which are to do with knitting gnomes but are far too complicated to go into here, I did an advent swap with a knitter in Germany; 8 small packages plus an extra one for Christmas Day and that arrived last week .

I guess December mornings are going to be busy with all the unwrapping and associated ooohs and aaahs. 

Bedside Books

 Yes I have finished another one, and it's this. 

the sequel to Winterbirth which I wrote about here

What can I say? I've finished it, it moves the story along, I now feel obliged to get hold of Book 3 and find out what happens in the end. It's not as good as it should be, given the originality of the setting. There's something not quite right about the way Ruckley writes and I can't quite put my finger on it, but what should be a truly compelling story isn't. 

Anyway that leaves me with two books by the bedside. Upside, they're both short. Another upside, one will be a double dip with the the Books to read Poster. Downside, I suspect both will be heavy going. 

I have of course read/listened to quite  a lot of other things recently, although nothing really remarkable. The last two Saturday Slaughters efforts have been a near miss and a total fire in the air and the arrow goes nowhere near the target miss. The first was by Robert Goddard and was called The Fine Art of Invisible Detection. I had a friend who was a big fan of Robert Goddard and so I read one once. Literally decades ago. That will tell you how keen I was to read this. In the event it was a fairly quick but not very satisfying read. It was a thriller -well I didn't find it particularly thrilling  IYSWIM - but that was the genre. The problem with Goddard for me, and for the other hardy souls who braved a truly awful day weather wise to struggle to the library to discuss the book, was that it was plot driven not character driven. The plot was OK, bits of it were even original, but the characters were cardboard and the motivation for the one who set all the events in motion was totally lacking. It went from Japan to London to Devon to Iceland, and as far as the Iceland sector went we all felt it was a bit 'I'd like to go to Iceland, I wonder if there'a a way I can get the coast as a tax write off? Oh I know, I'll call it a research trip ...' 

The current one, which was in my house for rather less than three days, was truly awful. I can't even tell you what it was called because it had one title on the spine 'All the Girls here are Nice Girls' and a different one 'Are you a Nice Girl?' on the front cover.. It was one of those North American college set books. No-one in it was a nice girl, and the boys weren't nice either. I read the first 100 pages, and then the last 15. and then I took it back to the library. It was all about people being nasty to other people just  for the fun of seeing what would happen, and then getting their comeuppance decades later. I can;t help wondering, if American College life is as awful as it is portrayed in so many books, why people go?  And how so many survive the experience?

A Wee Jaunt

So back in September, just about the time the fuel panic started (!) we took ourselves off for an overnight stay in Strathpeffer. It's a mall highland town. developed as a 'tourist gateway' in Victorian times and it has a certain Victorian charm. However we hadn't taken ourselves there on a whim; we went for the Scottish Opera Highlights tour performance there. 

We booked a nice looking hotel near to the venue, part of a small chain and as always there was a 'loyalty scheme' you could join which we don't often bother with, but this one promised an upgrade if you joined so the OH signed up and I persuaded him not to book the most expensive room on the grounds that we were only there for one night and the standard rooms looked fine if the upgrade didn't materialise. 

In the event it did, and our room was huge, that's about a third of it! 

and with lovely views 

We discovered when we checked out that it was the honeymoon suite! and we hadn't known. We had a very nice dinner in the hotel and as the OH wasn't driving again that night we ventured to have a glass of rose, it was so nice we bought a bottle to bring away with us. Never done that before! 

The Highlights program was very good; quite often there's too much I don't know, and there were some this time that I wasn't familiar with, but that's fine. I don't expect it to be all bleeding chinks of the bits 'everybody knows' but sometimes the balance tips too far the other way. 

The singers were the three Emerging Artist singers  for the current year, plus a baritone who had been on the program a few years ago and who we had sponsored so it was good to see him back. It's early in the program for the EAs to be performing something like this, another thing to thank/blame covid for. It's the first time we've heard them sing before deciding who to sponsor and I was pleased to have the opportunity to do that as there was one who for us was a stand out and who we have subsequently 'adopted'. A video chat arranged through SO, because we're not able to meet in person,  confirmed to us that we had made the right decision as the person concerned is not only very talented but also a charming and likeable person. 

This is Raisin

 

Raisin is not our cat. I cannot stress strongly enough that he is not ours. Yes that is a series of photographs of Raisin edging his way into our kitchen eating food that we have bought from one of our bowls. He is still not our cat. 

He does visit quite a lot. At one stage there was some thought that he had been abandoned when his owners moved away from the village  but it turned out that was not the case. So the movers must have taken their cat with them after all, which is a good thing. 

We're not sure why Raisin wanders about so much, we are not the only recipients of his visits to judge from the local community Facebook page, although I have a good idea why he wanders in our direction, which is that the OH feeds him. For a while he just hung about outside, but as you can see from the above he is now confident enough to sit on the sill outside the kitchen window until you open it,. after which he deigns to  eat on the bench. He then generally jumps down and scarfs whatever our cats may have left on their plates. 

He's a friendly affectionate little thing and now that our cats have got over the howling growling phase whenever he makes an appearance I don't mind his visits. I will however object most strenuously should he show any signs of wanting to move in on a permanent basis. Because apart from my No More Cats diktat, his real owner loves him dearly. 

Knitting that's not socks ( well not socks for Canada anyway)

 I have managed to knit some things other than socks for Son No 1 this year but as always I have fallen sadly behind in chronicling them here. So a quick round up seems in order. 

Fingerless mitts in DK. It was lovely to be using DK again after a very long time of knitting almost exclusively with 4-ply. These are gorgeous and I wear them a lot. Yarn from Helen at Giddy Yarn, from the Christmas Eve cast on box for 2020. (No I'm not getting one for 2021. Possibly because I have ordered her yarn advent and it's sitting on a chair in my study, waiting for the 1st December. 

Yes I know these are socks but they weren't for Canada, they were for the OH. I cast these on while watching the men's final from Roland Garros. I'm not going to say where the wool came from because although it is very pretty the OH has worn out the heel completely which I can only think is down to the yarn. Although it was marketed as sock yarn. If I had not already given up buying from this person, for a different but equally irritating reason)  I would have done it after seeing what happened to these socks. 

This is part of a scarf I made from some wool sent to me several years ago by a friend in New Zealand. Vintage Purls is the dyer and she's very good. I have another shawlette thing that I made with Vintage Purls yarn, the first thing I made when I got back into knitting a few years ago, and it is also lovely. 

A pair of fingerless mittens made for a friend from some scrumptious yarn which included silk and alpaca. They were very cosy. I'd had this in my stash for so long that the company who produced it has gone out of business. 

This I have to say was a bit of a disappointment. The colours are lovely but it was a lesson in perhaps not revisiting patterns. I'd made this before and it was bigger; this came out a tad on the small side. Giddy Yarns again, one of this year's Fairy Tale club yarns. 

More stash busting. I knitted this very quickly in response to Orkney Library and Archive's 'A Hat for George' appeal, which was to mark the centenary of the birth of George MacKay Brown. You can read more about the project here and it also shows all the hats. I was quite pleased that I managed to use up not only yarn (the origins of which are lost in the mists of time) but also some beads. Also that my hat sold on the night as it were. A few lingered, but they were all sold in the end and my latest information is that something like £2500 was raised. 

I bought this yarn last year in Pittenweem; it's by Iolaire Yarns and called Gigha. Lots of silk content. I made these for an advent swap project and I hope the recipient loves them. I have enough to make another pair and I might make some for myself later on. Or I may not. I was very tempted by one of their shawl kits at the Glasgow yarn show but resisted. See, sometimes I can say No! 

This was a bit of an experiment. The yarn is form Claire at Cookston Crafts and is called cupra, sometimes referred too as 'vegan silk'. It's made from side products of  cotton processing. It's light and has a nice drape and sheen, but I wasn't over struck. I'm glad I've tried it, won't bother again.

And finally yes, socks but these ones were for me and another stashbuster. I would be sooooo proud of all the wool I've used up this year, if I didn't still have quite so much left. 

I have four pairs of socks to finish before we go away in December, but I'm also in the process of knitting up a hat kit that I bought at Glasgow and I'm also looking forward to the new year when I can look at my wool and think - which bit of this would I like to play with next? And not knit socks with! 

Right up there with the Kermers

Long term readers may remember the occasion when I was ordering the gown for my Ph D graduation ceremony and was momentarily stymied by being told that the girl on the phone needed my height in kermers. (Full account here )

This morning in the post office I asked for 'a dozen second class Christmas stamps, and the youth behind the counter looked at me and said 'A dozen? Is that six or twelve?'

Oh. My. 

There again, I suppose it's not so surprising because if everything is taught in base ten at school why would words like a dozen be needed? 

Back to Devon (2)

This was our last day and it was the OH's turn to choose how we spent it. so we went to the Eden Project. He'd been there a couple of times before when down in Devon doing stuff connected to his mother, but I'd never been.  

I have to say it is totally overwhelming on a firts trip. So much space, so much info, so much to take in. The weather wasn't the best we'd had all week but at least it wasn't chucking it down like the day before when we'd been to Greenway but it was damp and grey and occasionally it drizzled. but to be fair equally occasionally the sun shone. Many of the catering outlets were closed or running at less than full strength too.

Which is all a long way of saying that it took me a while to warm up to the place. And some bits of it appealed to me more than others but that's OK because if I go to an Art Gallery some periods appeal more than others and when I read some writers I enjoy and some I don't. We don't all like everything. 

But I must have loved some of it because I have reams and reams of photographs. They're mainly from the Mediterranean biome but some of them are from the other one that was Africa and  Latin America. It was hard to choose which ones to post really. 

Definitely worth visiting, but best for people who live locally and who can take advantage of the fact that your ticket allows you access for a whole year, which means you can take your time to really get to know the place.

And that was the week in Devon. Our British holiday next summer, covid willing naturally, is in North Wales in July, largely because The Gaskell Society Conference is in Caernavon. We've booked a cottage for a week and we'll be joined by the OH's brother as it's excellently placed for many of Wales' narrow gauge railways. He and the OH can enjoy themselves riding old trains to their heart's content while I'm at the conference and hopefully they'll have had their fill when I join them and we can do other stuff. Because personally, I'm not a big train fan. 

Back to Devon (1)

 I'm very aware that I never finished describing our adventures in Devon. I'd got as far as Wednesday. Thursday it was my choice of where to go and we went to Greenway. The OH''s brother had been before but opted to go again so we had another day with him which was nice,.The eplace now belongs to the National Trust but it was purchased by Agatha Christie as a 'holiday home' for herself and her family. It's set in very lovely grounds and there is a boat house to explore as well ( this actually features in one of her books and was used when it was filmed for TV). Sadly the day we went it was lashing it down with rain and exploring grounds was right out; in fact I was rather surprised that they let anyone into the house as by the time you'd walked from the car park to the door ( which was quite a distance) everyone looked like the proverbial drowned rat. 

They did let us in though and it was lovely. As writers houses go I'd say I prefer Abbotsford but Greenway would be lovely to live in, although very much more grand than most of us would think of as a holiday home. That said, although it's quite big, it's very homely. You were allowed to take pictures, although I didn't take many because it was such a dreich day that I wasn't convinced they would come out all that well. I've got one somewhere of the living room, but I can't find it. That's what happens when you take pictures with your camera and your phone and they gret uploaded to your laptop at different times! But anyway, here's a couple of pics of where she worked.

The house was requisitioned by the military during WW2 and one of the officers billeted there took it upon himself to paint these murals high on the dining room walls, of some of the campaigns he'd participated in. Honestly, who does that? Is allowed to live in someone else's house and paints pictures on their walls? Christie either liked them or it was too much hassle to be rid. I took photos of these two because they represent two of the campaigns GCH, of Ph D fame, took part in - North Africa and Italy. 

After seeing the house, visiting the gift shop (which I have to say was lovely) and realising there was no chance whatsoever of getting anything to eat in the small on-site cafe we took the ferry over the River Dart to Dartmouth and found a very nice pub to have what turned into a late lunch/early dinner. 

It was a good day; I thoroughly enjoyed myself. 

Well, it made a change from socks

 

I'm about to put up  a picture of a whimsical bit of knitting that I did, the piece that drew so many ribald remarks on Facebook from friends who I thought would have known better. 

It was all the worse because I'm not known for whimsy and I was really quite pleased with how this uncharacteristically whimsical  piece turned out - which means, much better than I expected. 

However, once bitten twice shy and all that so before I put up the picture I'm going to say what it is. It is a female gnome,  from a pattern by Sarah of Imagined Landscapes. Sarah is a Canadian designer who  has made something of a speciality of producing patterns for cute gnomes and running KALs for people to knit them to.

This is Vigdis, who was my 'practice' gnome. I've got another one  part finished; she had to go on the back burner while I made more and more socks, plus a rather special present of which more soon, but I will be getting back to work on her very shortly. Which is a good thing because there is an Advent Gnome KAL starting on 1st December and I'd like this one finished before that one starts. 

Meanwhile here is Vigdis

New Nails

 Yes the pretty pink sparklies have gone, to be replaced with these

Reaching for my inner goth. 

You can click on the photos to make them bigger and see them in more detail. Not sure which is my favourite, although the roses, the witch and the web  are all up there.