28 June: Woolfest and FOs

As DH had a surprise day off, we decided to go to the Woolfest in Cockermouth yesterday, rather than today, as planned.

We set off towards the A66, and found ourselves heading the wrong way, having taken the wrong exit off a new roundabout. Turning the error into advantage, we drove through some villages we hadn't seen before, and found some pleasant views and countryside previously unknown. Some of our better excursions into the English countryside result from detours from our planned route. There's a lesson there.

Anyway, we arrived at the Woolfest site rather later than originally expected, and parked in a field behind the big shed where it all happens.

My shopping list got off to a good start with fibre - some rainbow merino/silk, a large carded batt of wool/silk in a lovely subtle colour, a good supply of black Wensleydale, and some non-animal fibres - milk protein fibre, ingeo (corn fibre), and some shredded plastic bottle fibre. Natalie at The Yarn Yard had some wonderful sock yarn, and some suitably sober(ish) colours were chosen for DH-socks.

Not many stands had spinning wheels, and I managed to find only one of the bobbins I wanted for my Majacraft wheel - while buying that I had a good look at another Majacraft wheel, which I like a lot. But I have a very good wheel, and don't need another.

There were interesting displays - I especially enjoyed watching a member of the Long Draw Spinners Guild using a Great Wheel, which I'd never seen in action before. Unfortunately, a TV or film crew were lining up their presenter to spin on this wheel - and then they were apparently planning to mention Sleeping Beauty, and she would then pretend to fall asleep. Suppressing the urge to boke, we moved on.

Owen Jones was making oak swill baskets - I would love to have one, but they are very big, and I can't really justify buying one.

The crowds and the colour got a bit overwhelming in the end, and we probably didn't see lots of what was there; we took our cameras, but didn't actually take any pictures!

But I have a couple of FOs to show off - first a pair of striped socks, modelled by DH -

And the jersey I have been working on since April, modelled by me in the back garden -

This started off as the Oatmeal jersey, and became the Choc Ripple jersey. It is seamless; spun, designed and knitted by me, and it's lovely and soft, warm and comfortable. Result!

23 June: Time for a re-design?

We've been living here for 6 years now, and the garden has developed and changed over that time.

This was brought home to me this morning when I went out to remedy the damage done by the high winds over the weekend. Along the fence are 3 climbing roses, and there are wires along the fence that they are tied into. This year the roses were well-fed before the new leaves opened, and they put on a lot of growth. The extra weight and the gales had the effect that one wire broke, and another pulled out its (obviously inadequate) anchoring staple. The roses were flopped down in a wet (and thorny!) heap over the border and path.

After a heroic struggle with thorns, heavy wet plants, and wire - and why is the tool you need always just out of reach? - the roses are upright again and re-attached to their supports. I have wiped the blood away and dried off.

For a tiny garden, it's surprisingly jungly. The original design included a path round two sides of the garden, against the fences and behind the borders; this provides easy access to the fences for maintenance, and allows for wider borders, as they can be tended from both sides. These borders contain trees, birch, rowan, and magnolia, plus 2 buddleias, a viburnum tinus and a spotted laurel, which can all grow pretty big. And they have. It's a bit of an adventure hacking your way round the back path now. There is a range of shade-loving underplants, and the trees make much of the "lawn" shaded and damp, and full of moss. (Well, it isn't at the moment, it's full of bare patches where there used to be moss, and new seed has been sown.)

The pergola was planted with 2 roses and 2 clematis, and they have all amazed us with their ability to shoot up, out, tangle, and sag. They provide cover for the birds, of course, but also for the neighbour's cat, who likes the birds too.

The raspberry canes have died off in one part of their bed, but have colonised an area beyond that, where they are looking good, and so that part of the garden has altered itself. There's a bit in one border where nothing flourishes, and that may be a good spot for a little sit-ooterie.

We have thought about digging up the lawn, and having more planting with wide paths in between. But I am reluctant to make it more complicated and increase the maintenance - I actually prefer sitting in the garden now to working in it. How can it be simplified, but still have lots of summer colour and winter interest? And if we want to move from here at some point, we want the garden to be an attraction, not a handicap.

So sooner or later changes will be made. It'll probably be a case of waiting for conditions to ripen, and then it will become clear what's needed - in the meantime we can gather ideas from other gardens and think about what might be best.

16 June: Socks and patterns

The latest socks to be finished -


Trekking sock yarn, home-dyed with food dyes. They are toe-up, short row toe and heel socks, with vanilla feet, and the stitch pattern on the legs is Lacy Diagonals, from the Harmony Guide Vol 3. And no, I didn't want the spirals going in opposite directions.

A bit surprising to be still needing wool socks in June, but there you are.

On my shelves are a lot of not-very-recent knitting patterns and booklets. These Woolcraft booklets were issued for many years; the one top left is the 25th edition. The oldest one, bottom right, is not dated, but is priced at 9d (yes, old money!), while the top right edition is 2/6 (old money), and the bottom left is 30p (6/- in old money). Many of the items appeared in most of them - the spencer and the knee-warmers. I must be getting old, as both of these patterns are starting to look interesting!


Here are two illustrations from the oldest copy. There are jerseys and men's underwear in this picture.

And in this one, socks, gloves, and the knee-warmers.


My mother had a selection of pattern booklets with items for bazaars (many of them bizarre items). Here's a page with patterns for novelty tea-cosies -


And another page of cosies and a crochet cushion -

There are also some old leaflets very nearly held together with extremely old Sellotape.

The pullover and socks were to be knitted for the troops, and the hat and scarf pattern is probably pre-war.

14 June: Not doing

This week has been a week of not doing.

Not doing housework, not going out on my bike, not spinning, not watching TV, and definitely not going to the Regatta in Durham today. Not even a great deal of knitting - well, there's been knitting, but on a jersey that will take a while yet to finish; thin yarn, lots of stitches, and working out the design as it proceeds.

What there has been a lot of is sitting in the conservatory, reading. The supermarket provided me with a couple of books, and another one came from Waterstone's. I only went in there with DH, who bought nothing; I was well into the first chapter, so I had to buy it to find out how it finished. That was The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale, about the Kent murder in 1860. Then I read the other 2 - The House at Riverton by Kate Morton, and Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. Both were "can't put down" books, read almost in one go.

Which is a bit of a surprise, because I'm not normally a keen reader of fiction.

-----------------------------------------------

The house-martins have fledged one chick at least, and now there's a second nest underneath the first one - an extension for a second family?

Enormous quantities of bird seed are being consumed from the feeders. And today I went out to investigate a grey shape on the back lawn (was it a debris from a tree?) and found it was a small chick, very recently hatched, eyes not yet open, no feathers, dead as a doornail. Perhaps dropped by a magpie or the woodpecker. It's been buried near the juvenile blackbird (found dead under the feeder) at the bottom of the garden.

8 June: Busy and quiet

Yesterday I put on my Guild of SWD hat and demonstrated spinning at a local event. After a damp start, the day turned out fine and warm, and hundreds of people attended the event. As there was a maximum of 4 of us, and only 3 for most of the time, there wasn't an opportunity to go and see what else was going on. Not even the Morris dancing, by the side that DH used to belong to.

There is nothing quite like demonstrating a minority activity in public for making you feel you are an expert, even though you are far from it. It was slightly surprising to be asked what we were doing by one puzzled person, but mostly parents were pointing us out to small children - Sleeping Beauty got a lot of mentions!

Curiously, most of the public is totally ignorant about spinning wool, but knows about spinning dog hair!

One of my colleagues made a point of weaving with red and white, to the amusement of some of the Dads, and several people reminisced about spinning and knitting in their childhoods. One man spoke about holding skeins of wool for his mother to wind.

And there were some delightful surprises when teenage boys at that difficult spotty age got fascinated by the mechanics of the spinning wheels, and were able to have interesting conversations. Then there was the poor lad who wistfully said "lovely colours".

During the day I managed to spin 2 bobbins of singles, which I plied together and finished when I got home; here is the skein, with the one I prepared earlier wound into a ball -


Then this morning, early, we went and walked in Hamsterley Forest before the Sunday morning rush. We hadn't noticed this gnarled old tree by the river before -

3 June: Birdwatch

The garden seems to be full of birds, feeding, bathing, squabbling, and singing.

As well as the house-martins swooping all round, there is a marauding flock of starlings which descends on the lawn looking for leather-jackets; they also feed messily from the hanging seed feeders, strewing a lot of seed on the path underneath. That benefits the dunnocks and blackbirds, all trying to feed numerous offspring. The baby dunnocks are really appealing little balls of spotted fluff with bright eyes and tiny beaks - though they grow out of this stage in about 2 days.

The seed on the path also attracts collared doves, and pigeons, which have not visited us before. (It also probably feeds mice and perhaps an odd rat, but, like slugs and snails, this is the wildlife that may not be mentioned.)

Peanuts have been put in a separate part of one of the feeders, but they have not proved popular - tits prefer the seed, or insects on the roses and the birch tree - but this week they have been a hit with a great spotted woodpecker, another new visitor. It's not clear if this bird is feeding itself or breaking up nuts and taking a beakful away for nestlings, but it certainly has been pecking busily at the peanuts.

This morning it was a very wet woodpecker.

31 May: Swings and Roundabouts

The garden has produced an strange combination of successes and failures this spring.

The birch and the rowan that were planted out from pots 6 years ago are now sturdy trees, providing food and perches for the birds. Many of the plants have thrived, but there is one part of the border where nothing prospers. We are thinking of paving that bit.

This spring the wallflowers have been lovely; I particularly like this colour -


But the raspberry canes have suffered a disaster. Very few have grown this year, and several of those which have come up have died off. Only one end of the row is still looking healthy.


I'm now wishing I hadn't taken back the canes that were spreading into areas where they weren't wanted.

Elsewhere a strong pot marigold with several good flowers has keeled over - the local cat who lies in wait by our bird feeders is chief suspect.

On the other hand, the dwarf lilac is now looking less like a bunch of twigs and more like a bush. Here it is swamping some alliums and pressing an acanthus for space -


And this little plant, a sort of alpine thing whose name I forget, was doing poorly in a trough with a couple of other plants. Last year it was tucked into a border, and this spring the conditions must have suited it, as it has had more than its usual one flower -


P.S. Later addition - Forgot to mention the nicest surprise - there aren't many house-martins this year, but one pair has chosen to nest under our gable. Fingers crossed that we don't have a repeat of the tragedy 2 years ago, when I came home from work to find 2 tiny corpses on the drive, then the nest fell down and the last nestling perished. So far we've heard cheeping when parents swoop in, so there are chicks.

27 May: Bank Holiday

We took advantage of the weekend sunshine, mostly in the garden and around the house, but we did get out for a walk round the Botanic Garden and through Blaid's Wood on Sunday.

There were still a few bluebells out.

After I struggled with repairing a saucepan lid, having trouble finding the right tools and a space to work, we decided to re-arrange the garage, so that there is a workbench and improved storage. We got a very posh tool chest from Halfords, and now all the tools have their own place, and we can find them straight away. It was much easier to do the next job, putting bar ends on my bike.

And we took the opportunity to clear out masses of rubbish and odds and ends that have been stuffed onto the shelves, in case they came in useful.

I caught up with some gardening, recognising that the wildflower seeds that were sown earlier have probably all been eaten by the birds - at least they haven't come up - and planting out some violas and lilies instead.

And of course there's some knitting going on. There's been a series of hats made, and this little sheep - in Blue Faced Leicester, of course.

23 May: Tagged - Fives

Tagged by Kaz.

5 things in my bag: I have many bags, some made of string, many containing knitting, but I guess this means the shoulder bag - come - mobile life support system.
money
keys
phone
pen
tissues

Simple, but effective. Sadly, my Swiss Army penknife, with tweezers, scissors, and a tiny tiny screwdriver handy for repairing spectacles, has to be left at home, as it is now an Offensive Weapon.

5 favourite things in the house: (we have more than one room here)

my spinning wheel -


My large supply of fibre and yarn (fabric, thread, buttons, braid, etc, etc.)
The shawl on the back of my armchair (handy when it turns a bit chilly) -

The kitchen Buddha -


And the Mac, without which.....

5 things I always wanted to do:
garden - my own chunk of "nature"
be physically active
be open to different ideas, interests and activities
enjoy the company of others, and my own company
retire - do as I fancy, and they post me the money.

5 things I'm currently into:
spinning and knitting
exploring Hamsterley Forest
lolcats
books by Oliver James - Affluenza and They F*** You Up
keeping it simple

5 persons to tag:
You may all (both?) feel free to pick this up and run with it, past someone or up a flagpole, blue-sky thinking outside the box, expanding the envelope.....

19 May - Adventures in the forest, and a bit of gardening.

Another dry Sunday morning, another walk in Hamsterley Forest. This time even though we took the map with us, we managed to get slightly lost. Failure to grasp the scale of the map meant an interesting detour up a pathless valley, crossing the stream twice, then having to climb up the steep valley side between the trees to get back to a track.

Still, at least we had our lunch with us. This is where we ate -


As we approached the bench, a deer on the slope below turned and looked at us before leaping away.

Today, after a trip to the garden centre, I was able to plant up a tub to stand by the freshly painted front door. I hope that dahlias and dwarf lavender will flourish where they get sun only later in the day.

17 May: Is there anybody there?

You may find this amusing.

A friend who has been a widow for some years was saying that she'd had a telesales call from someone who sounded Indian (or was doing a Peter Sellers impression); this man asked to speak to her husband, whom he named. When asked what it was about, he said it was to do with some insurance. He was told - "My husband died 6 years ago", whereupon he said -

"Well, can you give him a message"........

14 May: Work in progress

When I was taking pictures yesterday of fibre and recently completed knitting projects, I forgot to take one of the current large project, so here it is today.


This is going to be a lightweight jersey; it's in undyed oatmeal Blue Faced Leicester and what is called black Wensleydale, which is actually a lovely slightly greyed chocolate colour. It's knitted from side to side, so the rows are ve-e-ery long, but there won't be so many of them.

13 May: A bike ride, a walk, and some dyeing

We enjoyed the fine weather at the weekend. On Saturday DH took his newer bicycle in for some adjustments, and we decided to give the old bikes an airing.

Some time ago, we got some maps of cycle paths in County Durham - beautifully produced, nice clear mapping, lots of routes shown. So we thought we'd try out one or two of the local routes.

One track had been spotted because of a tempting sign pointing down it, advertising it as a cycle way. Well, all fine and good if you want to cycle to a gate in the middle of some fields. To go further involved squeezing through a gap too narrow for the bikes (they had to be lifted over), then riding along a ridge across the middle of the field to the main road. Definitely better for the all-terrain bike than for our road bikes.

Then the return from the main road was shown as a "Linking Route", with part of it "off-road section". This bit had clearly been labelled as such by someone at County Hall with a map and a twisted sense of humour. Apart from the extensive and extremely muddy pools of water under the railway viaduct (just by the sewage works - euuwch!), the first part was fine.

Then came a new bridge, with what looked like a dead end. Closer inspection revealed that the path went left from the bridge at sharper then a right angle, and up at about 1 in 4! The narrowness of the following steep and sharp zig-zags and the steps didn't help either.

Anyway, above that was a lovely bit of woodland, which opened out further on into fields of sheep (you didn't think wool was going to be absent, did you?). There were several field gates to be opened and closed, but at least they did. Anyone familiar with country paths knows about the gates with broken hinges and binder twine fastenings.

This brought us to woods we know, so we knew about the steps down to the narrow concrete beam (no handrail) across the stream, and the very steep path up the other side, but we found that the fallen tree across the path, noticed on a previous visit, had been removed.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Encouraged by this activity, we went to Hamsterley Forest early on Sunday morning, for a walk. We intended to do one of our regular routes, but found there was some horse orienteering going on, so turned off up a track we didn't know. One inviting path led to another, and instead of being home for coffee, we returned to the car park about 8 miles later, after 1 o'clock, to find it heaving with barbecues, games of football and tennis, and many acres of unsuitably exposed flesh.

A few miles further into the Forest, we'd seen a deer, a jay and 2 buzzards; there were hundreds of violets out, and a whole field of cowslips!

- - - - - - - - - - - -

And yesterday I turned my attention back to the fibre. The local SDW Guild has been asked to do a demonstration at a Durham Wildlife Trust event next month, and I have volunteered to spin. I thought it might be more interesting to spin some coloured fibre, rather than just plain white, so I dyed some Blue Faced Leicester.

The green and the apricot (behind) were dyed with acid dyes, and the red and orange (at the front) were dyed with food colouring. The original fibre was not white, but "oatmeal", and the rest of the ball is at the back for comparison.

6 May: A bit Mole

The spring thing had been affecting me over the weekend - painting, cleaning, tidying, re-arranging.

Then on my return from a quick sortie to the shops for some varnish to finish off the smartly cleaned, painted, and polished number on the front door, there was a telephone message. Was I coming out to play? You bet.

Bluebell woods. Clear blue sky. Perfect fresh leaves, newly opened this morning. Birdsong. Cherry blossom. Warm sunshine. Huge pots of tulips in pink and purple, orange, red, and double ones looking like little peonies.

May in England is sensational.

(No photos - they can't do it justice. And you've seen bluebell woods before.)

1 May: May Day

I was not up before dawn to welcome in the May.

But it's been a busy morning.

First there was voting - many people put a great deal of effort into making sure we could vote, so the least we can do is stroll up to the polling station and draw a couple of X's. It's no good complaining about MPs and councillors if you haven't bothered to vote for the ones you prefer.

After that I dyed some sock yarn, and while that was steaming gently on the stove I cabled together some rather dull thin handspun bamboo yarn with some cotton yarn from Texere (can't remember what it was bought for, but it was the same thickness as the bamboo.) Here's a rather dim picture of the skein -


Then out into the garden between showers, to sow some seeds. 2 packets of seed - cornfield mixture and butterfly mixture - have been scattered on the bed under the apple trees. The neighbour's cat will probably be delighted, thinking that I've raked the bed over specially for him.

And none of the gardening experts mention that when the lawn squelches underfoot is the ideal time to pull out dandelion roots - they are particularly easy to spot at present, as they are just opening flowers.

And talking of flowers, here are a couple of pictures of the lilies on the kitchen window-sill -


They smell good, too, though perhaps they are the reason we were both sneezing this morning .

And just in case you thought I've been slacking -

29 April: Birds

The first house martin has arrived, and is swooping about checking out all last year's nest sites. It may be finding some insects too, as it's been warm all day.

At Minsmere last week, we saw a swallow - it perched on a signpost conveniently close, so that a person more expert than us was able to tell us the differences between it and a swift, which wouldn't have perched anywhere anyway. The swallow had already built a nest, we were told.

And all week we were captivated by the actions of a blackbird family in the back yard of our holiday cottage; the nest was in a hydrangea petiolaris on the wall, and 3 fledglings were in different stages of learning. One was quite a bit behind the others, and spent most of its time lurking in dead leaves and other debris under the hydrangea and the neighbouring honeysuckle, emerging to shout loudly and open its still-yellow-lined mouth whenever Father Blackbird arrived with a beakful of worms. Luckily there was an area of well-tended allotments close by, which seemed to provide an ample supply of worms.

Oh, and in the woods here and there was a light wash of blue from the earliest bluebells.

Back at home, my Mother's Day lilies are flowering - huge pink blooms on the kitchen window-sill.

27 April: Holiday!

We've just got back from a lovely week in Suffolk. The weather was mostly kind, and we got out and about every day.

There was an interesting castle at Framlingham -


- with Tudor chimneys purely to impress the neighbours. Inside the walls the buildings were very un-castle-like -

I actually managed to overcome my fear of height combined with open space, and walked all the way round the top of the walls.

A visit to Southwold is always required. This is the pier -

- and it's compulsory to photograph the beach huts -

We went a couple of times to the RSPB reserve at Minsmere, though all the birds avoided my lens. The power station at Sizewell couldn't escape, though.

And on Dunwich Heath I was very lucky to switch the camera onto full zoom and snap this deer before it melted away as its 2 companions had just done -


We visited the Natural Dye Studio, and I was very restrained in my purchases. There may be socks....

We had lots of good walks in wonderful countryside; we browsed round fine old towns, and lunched in pubs mostly called the King's Head.

Amazingly, although we ate every bun, cake, shortbread, and loaf that we could, the scales tell me I've put on precisely 1 pound in the week.

13 April: Squid and socks*

Recently knitted this little creature -


I also have patterns for 2 octopuses/octopi, and a cuttlefish.

And socks continue to emerge from the TV knitting basket, even though not much TV is being watched -


These are slightly subversive ones for DH. When worn with shoes and long trousers, only the grey bits will show. He wouldn't think of wearing them any other way, of course.

* Not a recipe currently popular?

8 April: Not the string bag

Finally finished the felted bag that's been in progress for what seems like ages.

After felting in the washing machine, of course the pattern lost its definition - and all the time and effort that went into drawing up the design, and then working it! (In real it's more blurred than in the photo - a nice reversal of my usual photography.)

Then it took ages thinking how to make a suitable strap, and what sort of closure to do. I'd previously made a similar felted bag, from millspun yarn, for which I wove an inkle strap, and used a braid tie for a closure - and didn't like them; the strap not chunky enough, and the closure inefficient and fiddly.

Eventually I knitted and felted a strap, and sewed in a zip. I made a tag for the zip from a boxwood acorn off a blind I took down from a window in a house 30 or so years ago - the little hoard of odds and ends does come in useful sometimes!

Here's the new bag with the older one -

4 April: Spring is here

Yes, the birds have competition from the builders making plenty of noise at the crack of dawn.

Yes, the surplus crumbs have been shaken out of the keyboard, the dirt on the windows has been noticed, the DM boots have been returned to the wardrobe and the DM sandals brushed off.

Yes, the garden's been checked over, and bare patches of earth have had plants crammed into them. There are primulas, white -


purple -


and traditional -


DH's favourite fritillaries are flowering -


and the hellebores are still providing food for the newly emerging bumble bees -

And the Mother's Day lilies are budding in the freshly painted kitchen -