Baltic beauties

So, a post or so ago I mentioned that we'd been away. Most excellently for us, two of the major conferences in my field were in Helsinki and Tallinn this year and even more excellently, I had some research accepted for presentation and absolutely excellently, the company agreed to fund my trip. Which meant a nice long visit to two places that we hadn't been but were most definately on my list, at a pretty reasonable price. While much of my break was taken up with work-related business, they were both excellent conferences and I was intellectually refreshed and professionally inspired, which is really what these things are all about in my opinion. And networking, which I did pretty well (for me).
So anyway, Helsinki:
Gorgeous; clean; design and function; craft and creativity; the cleanest port I have ever seen; salmon. I managed to find a great yarn store called Oy Menita Ab (I think!), on Korkeavuorenkatu 20, in the city. They didn't speak much English, but who cares- they had lovely yarn displayed in such a beautiful way. There must have been every colourway of the Drops Alpaca and some other Drops yarns, Rowan yarns and some beautiful Finnish yarns. I bought two balls of Pirkanmaan yarn in beautiful blues. At the time, I had baby in mind, but now its home I think it might have to be some colourwork for me - maybe Selbu Modern?

Down at the waterfront there was a daily market with good food (mostly), and crafts (some junk, but mostly good stuff) - woodwork, leatherwork (mostly reindeer) and knitting. Tables covered in bright, handknit socks (for about 12 euros a pair). Lots of people knitting (even if they were selling other things). A lady with gorgeous handwoven things (out of my budget but so beautiful). The stalls changed each day - just after I ran over to the yarn shop in my lunch break, I saw a stall with spectacular hand-dyed yarn in it. Unfortunately, I decided I had used up my yarn allowance, but took a card. The lovely stall holder told me that his wife dyed the yarn with natural dyes, and she had an online shop and would ship to the UK. Her website is http://www.riihivilla.com/, and it really is worth checking out. She has the most gorgeous mitten kits - if I was a mitten wearer (or knew one!) I would have bought one there and then!

Baby yo-yo

Before we went away, I made Baby B a Froeball, designed by the lovely Katie. It was quick and easy to make (although I didn't stuff mine hard enough), and I have to say it is the best travelling toy! Great for a teething boy, lots of lovely scratchy wool to chew on. You can tie it onto your pusher/highchair/airplane seat. You can wave it around and throw it across a hotel room with minimal damage. It has a long tail perfect for practicing fine motor control. I highly recommend, and I have premonitions of many more of these coming off my needles.

Away

We've been away.

It was excellent. It was sunny. It was a combination of work and play, but still fun. There was yarn and knitting (not by me). I'll tell you more when life calms down a bit.

Let me eat cake

I love cake. I make a lot of cakes, and I have to own up to eating my share of them. I prefer homemade cake to bought cake, which makes it easier to keep tabs on my cake habit. While I was on maternity leave, my sweet tooth increased, and the caking making grew to match. I found a couple of good new recipes that fitted my requirements for a general, everyday cake: not too expensive, not too much butter or eggs, preferably some fruit & quick to make. This one is the king of cheap, easy cakes. You can whip it up when someone drops around for a cup of tea (seriously, if you pretend you are a slow tea maker then you really can get it in the oven while they think you are making a pot), and have fresh cake in half an hour. Impressive. Its definately an eat on the day cake, although it makes a good pudding too, heated up with a little icecream. I always intend to make a caramelly sauce for it, but I never do and it doesn't seem to matter! I have no idea where the recipe came from, but here it is:
put 150g of chopped dates & 25g butter in a large bowl (to be super quick, buy the prechopped dates). Pour over 1c of boiling water, & wait until the butter has melted. Mix in 2 tbspn golden syrup, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1 tsp bicarb soda, 1 tsp vanilla essence & 2 cup SR flour. Stir until combined. Pour into a prepared tin & bake 30 - 35 min.
Thats it.
My suggestion is get your tin ready & oven hot first as the bicarb reacts quickly and starts making lots of lovely air bubbles, so you don't want to be mucking around at the end. Mmmmm.
I think I need to go make some cake.....

Bark

Birch, Yew, Pachypodium. All spotted at Oxford Botanical Gardens.

Bellissimo Sapone

I don't really like soap. Its nice enough, but I don't use it on my body, and prefer handwash to wash my hands with (I make my own with aqueous cream & essential oils. Bargainous & moisturising). However, I luuurve this soap. I first tried it in Tuscany when we were staying with friends in a villa for a week. And I was sadly resigned to never being able to buy any, until I discovered a large stash at the Oxford Botanical Gardens store!

Nesti Dante soap.

It is deliciously scented, has beautiful wrappers, and comes in extra large, chunky blocks. And it feels beautiful when you use it. I'm not sure why it warrants a blog post, except to share my happiness at having found some, and the little bit of joy I get every time my hands are dirty in the kitchen. Small pleasures.

Best of the Weekend

Best of the allotment:

First pickings of curly kale with sea salt and delicious olive oil purchased this time last year in Baena, Spain.

Best time spent:

One hour of time this weekend = many delicious mornings of blackcurrant jelly on toast

Best hat:

Yes, its a 3month size squeezed onto an 8 month noggin for the purposes of photos, but its still cute. More about it here (Ravelry link). Pattern from Drops design

Best view:

This has been my view of the baby for most of today*. He's finally got the hang of it (and fast!) Right now, though, he's trying to catch the motes floating about in the sun through the window.

*not actually true. He also did lots of crawling towards me.

Edit: unfortunately, I can't claim the pants, they were a lovely (shopbought) gift. But they could easily be knitted (these ones are in cotton). I do love how the stripes match up though!!

Fuschia fairies

Gardening is different in England. Its colder, there's less light for much of the year, and more for some of the year than I'm used to. Plants that I think of as perennial turn out to be annuals or biannuals. It makes for adventurous times in the garden. Last year, I had good fun growing sweet peas in pots. This year, I thought I would try some different potted colour.

When I was small, I had a book about a fuschia fairy - the child 'popped' the fuschia bud (as they are so tempting to do!) and the fairy fell out as she wasn't quite ready. She played with the child while her wings dried off and she flew away. My mum had (and possibly still has) a large fuschia with tiny pink flowers, and I loved to pop them. I always felt a delicious combination of fear and hope that I would disturb a fairy! I have really enjoyed the four that I've grown this year, although they are quite small as plants. They don't have the wow factor or the scent of the sweet peas, but they are very pretty. One of them is a trailing variety, but I didn't have a hanging basket so it isn't shown to best potential.

This is the highlight of my garden though - my neighbours garden! Our back gardens aren't fenced off, so while we take responsibility for looking after our own patches, we get the benefit of feeling like we have a much larger garden and enjoying each other's gardening successes (we got the better deal this year!)

UK Ravelry Day the first (1)

Somewhat after the fact:
I went to UK Ravelry day in Coventry with my friends Caroline and Katie a few weekends ago. It was a rainy old day but I had a fantastic time - it was a lovely, friendly, interesting occasion. The first thing I did was some shopping (my afternoon was pretty full with other events so I got in early, but more on those later). So - the haul!
Jamieson & Smith 2-ply jumper weight in lovely pinky-grey. Enough to make a smallish jumper/vest or something.
Jamieson & Smith sampler pack of Shetland - there was more cream, but I've already spun that up (although my plying was a bit terrible). The plan is to try & spin it up in a consistent weight so I can do a wee bit of colourwork with it. Might be a pretty lofty dream...!

Old Maiden Aunt black Shetland and blue tussah silk. Gorgeous gorgeous stuff - saving this for when I am a better spinner :) This photo does not do it justice - go see Jared Flood's website for better pictures (in a different colourway).

Old Maiden Aunt Massam wool in Storm & Sky colourway. Beeeeautiful. I'm starting to get the hang of imagining what dyed fibre might look like as yarn, but this is so much more subtle and gorgeous than I expected. I am very proud!

And this is my new drop spindle, from Kevin at Whorl drop spindles. Its made of Tambootie elm, which rolls of the tongue about as easily as this things spins.
Oh, by the way - I've started spinning :)

Preservation

I really love cooking jams, jellies, pickles and so on, and I'm hoping to expand this a bit more this year. So, first off the rank, I turned these:

into these:

The lovely little artichokes came from the Stanton St John pick your own farm (although I didn't pick my own, I got them from the shop). The recipe is from here, except I only used half a litre of wine as this seemed plenty to cook the artichokes. I'll let you know how they taste in a week or so.

Woodland memories

I recently finished this cardigan - its a Drops pattern (elegantly named 97-18 Tailored Cardigan), knit in Drops alpaca (7815m petrol green). The pattern is lovely - simple, with plenty of waist shaping and nice increases at the neckline. The bottom hem and the sleeve hems turn up too much though, and I think I might face them in grosgrain to try and combat this - it makes it just a bit too short in both body & sleeve. But the yarn is the star of the show - it looks like moss and woodlands (although a friend said it looked like the sea), and appears to be made up of three strands of green - petrol, forest and a yellowy green - which gives it a good depth of colour. And because it is so light and squishy, it makes for a really warm cardigan that you can squish into your handbag. Perfect for England!

Its a lovely piece to wear, and wear it I do!! Anyway, time to get onto the weekend chores - and a bit of Father's day celebration!

Call me Ishbel...

A bit of catch-up knitting:

For mothers day (the Australian version!), I made my mum Ishbel, from Ysolda's Whimsical Little Knits. I have knit very little lace in the past, but I thought this looked lovely and I had some great yarn that I thought would work nicely. And it did.

This is my mum's Ishbel, knit in St Ives sock yarn (maybe this is Heather? I can't remember, but the names are beautiful). The pattern is lovely - after a few false starts, I worked out what I needed to be doing and it all fell into place. I actually think this project might be without error, which is unusual for me! The central stockingette panel makes it very quick, and the lace pattern is easy to read from the previous row. The yarn was great - I thought it might be a bit scratchy, but after just one wash & block it softened up beautifully. And although you can't see it here, it has a lovely heathery colour, with blues and some lovely purply flecks.

I haven't blocked lace before, and I didn't do very well on the points, but it is a revelatory process! This looks really cute worn as a scarf, the points kind of sit around your neck very prettily. I think there's one due on the needles for me this coming winter....and maybe a matching beret too!

Anyway, I hope mum likes it as much as I liked knitting it :)

Time to go bath baby boy and enjoy the last bit of evening sunshine....

(PS. I also really like this new scarf from Ysolda too! Beautiful).

I'm back, baby...

......hopefully! I have been busy, as you may have guessed.

First, last November, something wonderful finished, and at the same time something so so so much better started:

Which has been fantastic. Its a serious work-in-progress, we are currently up to here:

which is pretty great.

I still haven't decided whether he will feature in this blog in pictorial form, so these might be the only pics you see. Or I might not be able to control my maternal pride :)

There has been much knitting, sewing, cooking, baking of cakes, and general craftiness. I might retrospectively blog about some of it, for I am pretty proud of some things. Having been at home with bubs for the last few months has given me headspace to think about such things more, and I feel like I have really made some progress technically with knitting. And I have taken up spinning (on a drop spindle) over the last few weeks. And I went to Ravelry day yesterday, and came back with a great haul of stuff, a love for my fellow knitter and a brain full of knit facts from the most ace Jared Flood (aka Brooklyn Tweed), who took a workshop I attended in the afternoon. So more on all that to follow!

If you are reading this, thanks for sticking around! Hopefully it won't be quite so long between posts again :)

Last minute knits

I am still home, waiting patiently (or not) in the gloriously sunny but incredibly cold weather, (which is better than the other option of grey but warmer). Evening fires, time to bake bread and cakes, to knit and sew, and clean all those little nooks and crannies that otherwise get ignored...how could I not be happy. And yet somehow...I am becoming impatient!

Anyway, I have taken the opportunity to continue to knit small, warm, woolly pieces for this boy, as it has turned very cold very quickly. And its quite good fun! A little vest, knit in Rowan Purelife organic wool (Tannin and Ivy shades):

The yarn is quite lovely. Its nice enough when you are knitting it, although the Tannin puts quite a lot of dye on your fingers & needles, but after a wash it comes up beautifully and is quite soft and snuggly. Interestingly, not only is the yarn organic but it is dyed with sustainable plant dyes, so it is all very green and lovely. And the excess dye washed out of the yarn pretty quickly, without too much colour change (and didn't affect the lighter yarn at all). I also love the buttons - I think they are perfect!

The pattern is from Drops Design - romantically named 'a sleeveless jumper'. Its simple and easy (I knit it in the round to avoid seaming), I just added stripes and a little pattern that I took from a lovely little book about Estonian mittens that I was given a while ago.

I've also started a lovely little alpaca cardigan, but given the weight of the yarn and the size of the needles (both very small!) it is like knitting a pretty, tiny, waft of cloud, and is taking its sweet time. But it might be done by the time he gets here....if I keep knitting!

A change in seasons

I love England in Autumn. Love it, from start to finish.

We went for a walk on the weekend in the lovely Oxfordshire countryside. It was clear, crisp and beautiful, and Simon saw a hare (I was taking a photo of him at the time, so all I saw was a hare's bum disappearing into the undergrowth).

Requisite bump photo - not the best picture of me, but you get the idea and I guess that with 2 weeks to go I have an excuse...

Also, cows moving from their summer pastures to ones closer to home. Ah, the country.

Quiet times

So after a week of maternity leave I finally get around to blogging! Terrible stuff. Doesn't mean I haven't been doing things...slowly. But the motivation to photograph them and then blog post them is just a bit lacking. So here is a catch-up of all the knitting stuff thats been going on. There were going to be other pictures too, of walks in the woods and so forth, but the camera has just run out of batteries, so I need to go and recharge them before that happens - maybe tomorrow.

But on with the knitting:

Firstly, baby knitting - socks and hats. There is also a vest, which is waiting to be washed, blocked and have buttons. The socks are very fun to knit, and look so cute! I need to start making bigger sizes, I think. The hat is much greener and cooler than in the picture - I think there needs to be a baby shot to show you it properly.

Then there is the Jo Sharp jacket - finally! Apparently, it took me a year to knit this, according to Ravelry. Actually, it took me a few months to knit it, decide it was too long and unflattering, leave it in the cupboard for a few months and then unravel the body down to the cables and reknit it. I'm so glad I did - it is perfect for wearing over the bump, and toasty and warm.

I started knitting this gorgeous silk/cashmere yarn from Posh Yarns - its will eventually be a scarf. Its going swimmingly - nice pattern, pretty yarn, all good.

I also have been knitting S a vest (at his request) from this nice New Lanark wool - I'm ready to split it into front and back for the top part now, which I should do this afternoon (plus some knitting maths to make sure it fits his stringent requirements), but the scarf is just so pretty I'd rather knit that! Ok, so thats all the knitting that my batteries let me take pics of. Its my one area of productivity at this point, so there has been a fair bit of it, but there has also been jam making, cake baking (and eating) and general enjoyment of the autumnal changes. Also, our wood arrived, and sitting down in the evenings with your knitting and a fire is one of the delights of living.

Welsh Adventure

Sorry about the delay in posting...things just seem to be getting away from me! But a quick post about our recent little holiday in Pembrokeshire. It was ace. We stayed right on the beach in Broad Haven - the view from our room was spectacular (so good, I didn't take any pictures! Oops). It really is a glorious part of the UK, and we had a lovely 'wind down' time. Then off to Bristol to say goodbye to a friend, which was good fun (and included sunshine! Amazing!).

One of the most interesting places we visited was Castell Henllys, a recreated iron age settlement. It was very cool - and they had yarn (see picture above)! There was a lady weaving (well, talking to other visitors when I was there), and they made amazing blanket/cloak things (second picture below - odd picture I know, but the only way I could edit it not to have people's faces in it). The looms were all made by hand - it was fascinating. Also, they were cooking and had woodworking tools out and all sorts of things.

Also, requisite bump picture - me at Tintern Abbey.

Thanks to Riggwelter for your very kind offer of a catch up for coffee - unfortunately, I didn't get your message until we got home thanks to computer gremlins, but maybe next time!!

Woodland Festival (Again)

Yep, that time of year again - the woodland festival at Harcourt Arboretum. It was cool - a bit bigger than last year, more spinners & yarn dyers, and a lot more rain. We bought cake. It was fantastic (also, it was last weekend, but we didn't do anything interesting this weekend!).




I have been doing lots of knitting of small things (I feel a jumper or cardy building up somewhere...), so I will try to get some shots this week, if I get around to washing & blocking & taking pictures of them, and if it stops raining!