It tends to be all about the craft in January

 and occasionally walks, but not in our current weather.

Now that Advent/Christmas are both safely behind us I can post pictures of the things I made for the Advent swap that one of the Ravelry groups I'm in organises. Four parcels, one each for the four weekends before Christmas. There's a very limited budget for all the swaps in this group, which is more about recycling, and making than spending money, so four parcels isn't as horrendously expensive as perhaps it sounds. 

One of my parcels was a miscellaneous mix of craft materials so I didn't  make anything myself to put in that one, but the other three parcels had things in that I had made especially. 

There were socks

there were fingerless mitts

and there was a shawl

I gave myself full marks for the shawl because there was an awful lot of wrap and drop stitches which is one of my least favourite techniques; too easy to miss  a wrap in either direction and really really difficult to put right if you go wrong. It calls for a lot of concentration on my part. However I stuck with it because it fitted the theme of the parcel it was in perfectly. 

While on the craft theme, my 'go-through' of Box 1 is proceeding quite well. I may do a 'one month done, one month to go' round up at the end of Jan. 

Weather permitting we might actually be going out this evening! and if we do I'll report on that tomorrow. 

It's the little things....

 ...that grind you down.

I applied for a new passport yesterday. This is supposed to be easier than it was because - ta-dah! you can now do it on-line. When the OH did it a while back you could even take the necessary photograph on your computer at the relevant moment of the form filling. What could be easier?

What indeed? I mentioned that I was planning to do the application to a group of friends on Facebook. Got a couple of horror stories back about the photo.It had taken one multiple attempts to get one that the  was acceptable. Another  had so many failed attempts they gave up and went to one of those booth things. Good grief I thought, can it really be that hard?

I am here to tell you it can be and it was. The form filling bit was fairly easy, but oh! the problems I had with the photograph. You can no longer sit back in your (neutral coloured) office chair and let your computer take this for you. Oh no. You have to take one and upload it. Then it gets checked to make sure it fulfills all the requirements. And then it grades your photograph for the chance of success of being accepted for your passport. 

What a palaver. We really only have one room with neutral coloured walls with sufficient natural light to take  a photo in the winter daytime. It was tricky to find a bit of the wall that I could stand against - we tried several, which all involved moving furniture. Then the machine kept spitting out our attempts; we went from poor to fair and finally to good. This involved retries with various combinations of open and closed blinds all around the room. Personally I cannot see very much  difference between the two that got rejected and the one that got accepted; they all make me look like an ageing, tired and miserable cow of a person but if they won't let you smile...

Anyway in the end it was done. Form completed, photo accepted, fee paid. And then it told me I couldn't get my new passport until I sent the old one back. So my question is; if I have to send them something through the post what is the point of an on-line application process? A friend said it's like the self service check outs in supermarkets; it saves them paying someone to look at the form and put in the data at the other end. 

Well, weather permitting the old one will be off to the post office this morning. And in due course my lovely maroon coloured EU passport will be replaced with a blue one ( which is actually black) and which of course was the sole reason we all went through the trauma that was Brexit. And means that I have heard dozens of people moaning in airports about how they have to join the very long queue marked 'other passports'. I'm often tempted to ask them if they voted for Brexit. Although I don't. 

So, today I have been making ....

 ....cards

I find it time consuming, but relaxing.

Lest you think I am indulging in all this recent not-knitting in an attempt to avoid cleating my wool I can say that I am in fact knitting away with a will and have also managed to unload some of the wool from Box 1 in other directions, and my wool output is much higher than my input this month already. The input wasn't me even buying anything, I got given a ball of sock wool in a swap. In theory my yarn purchases this year will be minimal. 

In other news, my candle burned beautifully but there wasn't enough scent in it, so I'll know to up that next time.

Also the snow has gone. Hurrah! We have a few hours respite before storm Isha/Inna/whatever hits, with southerly winds (hello migraine) of up to 85 mph. 

Well, this was something new to try

 

yes it's a tin. and inside ...

my first attempt at a home made candle. 

I'm quite pleased with this. There were a few problems - like the scent not coning out of the bottle dripper  properly and then fearing that I had blocked the sink with some cooling wax, although I couldn't think how it could have happened. And the top isn't flat. 

But for a first attempt I'm pleased with it. I put enough colour in it so that it wasn't wishy washy and enough scent that it smells and I shall burn it this evening and see how it goes. 

And how did I come to be making a candle at all? I was inspired by a You Tube vlog where a dyer I follow was making candles and so the OH bought me a kit for Christmas. It had four of the tins, and more than enough supplies to make four candles, and four  different colours and four different scents. 

Sadly the jug in which you are supposed to melt the wax doesn't work on our hob as it's an induction one, so that I had to put it in a water bath. And it's also a bit small for purpose. So next time I'll try using the oven and if that's not totally satisfactory look for a small pan, preferably with a lip, that works on the induction hob.

Delighted to report that after the OH dismantled the bits of pipe beneath the sink he couldn't see any wax blocking anything and the liberal application of some hot water to the pipe outside seemed to cure the problem so possibly it was frozen. Which really wouldn't be surprising, given the temperatures over the last few days. 

I am not so delighted to report that we still have snow, although it is rapidly turning to slush and ice, which is in some ways worse, and we are forecast high winds developing from this afternoon until at least Sunday. With rain. Oh joy. 

It Is Done.

 

And I think in a couple of days I will be over the trauma and just be pleased with myself for persevering and producing something that actually is quite amazing. 

There is a matching hat and I have sufficient wool left over to knit it, but I don't think I'll be tackling it for a while.  Maybe for next winter? 

Jusr a quick one today

 about jigsaw puzzles.

Last time we were in Glasgow we picked up a puzzle my sister was lending me which she had left at the flat and I managed to get it finished a couple of days before Christmas. Which was a good thing as we then needed the table for Christmas dinner. 

I got several new ones at Christmas and I have already completed this one. A sister to the Dinner with Monet one that I did a while back this is Dinner with Matisse. It was interesting that it was a degree more difficult than the Manet one because I'm not as familiar with Matisse's work as I am with Monet's, so that the parts of the puzzle that are basically reproductions of his pictures were unknown and so had to be looked at harder. 

I'm currently working my way through anther one in the same series Dinner with Frida. I can say it's a riot of colour, in fact such a riot its a bit painful on the eyes to be honest. I know nothing about Kahlo beyond the fact that she had thick eyebrows and was Mexican so possibly I should put in a bit of research. Picture to come when the puzzle is done.

Meanwhile 

We still have snow. In fact we have more snow. I managed to get to the hairdresser's yesterday and came away feeling ten years younger, and looking it too I suspect. But from tomorrow basically everything is shut. So we'll just have to hunker down, keep the fire going and sit it out. Still better this month than next, given that we have two trips south boked in February. 

Also despite all intentions to the contrary I  picked up the Finnish jumper again. The too tight neckband has now been taken out and the next thing to do is to decrease to a more sensible and larger number of stitches for it, and then reknit it. I may look at it again today. Or I may not. We'll see. I know it's almost finished, but I don't know how sanguine I could be if I tried and failed a third time. 

 

Not the Post I'd Planned to Write

 So I was expecting todays' post to be a very celebratory one because I thought that yesterday I would finish the Finnish jumper for the OH. All I had left to do was graft the underarm stitches and weave in the ends and bingo! the job was done. 

Well things didn't go according to plan. Grafting live stitches is not my favourite job, nor is it one I'm particularly good at, because whenever I can I substitute a three needle cast off instead. So I don't get the practice. Three needle cast offs are not particularly useful for underarms though. I went wrong twice. Once was relatively easy to put right. The other wasn't. It took some heart-in-the-mouth cutting, some knotting, and some fudging, but in the end it was done and won't, I hope, unravel. 

Thrilled to bits I called the OH through, told him the glad tidings and got him to try it on. Well, try trying it on, because in the event, despite my having cast off with a needle a size larger than the one used for knitting, it wouldn't go over his head, because  ( I thought) the neckband cast off was too tight. I was not thrilled, especially as I had cast off in rib, and that's a real beggar to take out; and that was after the ten minutes it took me to find my woven in end and tease it out. I took out the cast off, and two more rows, and redid them with a needle one size larger again - and with much the same result. By now I was almost crying with frustration and I balled the whole thing up, threw it in the bag where it lives and said I was never   going to look at it again. 

Of course I will. I need to take out the whole neckband and the decrease row just underneath it and redo it with rather more stitches. Hopefully the OH will have the tact not to complain about the neck being loose once I finally finish it. I'd already had a monumental struggle with it, because when it was almost finished a few weeks ago he didn't like the neckline ; too low, too wide, so I had had to delve into Google and rummage around You Tube to find out how to recalculate all the yoke decreases so that it would end up high enough and narrow enough for him. Only to discover, as mentioned above, that it is in fact too narrow. 

I know Mr Kipling (not the cake baking one, the poetry writing one) recommends that you 'meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters both the same' but I don't have it in me. I don't get carried away by triumph, but disaster floors me. I had a hot chocolate and a whole bag of mini eggs, to help me recover my equilibrium and actually only succeeded  in making myself feel sick. And  obviously it did nothing to put right the inadequacies of the sweater neck.

It will be a while before I can face this mess once more but in the meantime, because we've been feeding birds regularly for a few months and because it has snowed the last couple of days, we now have something a bit more exotic than the usual murmuration of starlings arriving by the sunroom window to be fed. 

Not a good picture but he was running away at the time, having seen me through the window. I'll try for  abetter one another day.