The Cupboard Was Bare

This is a before (left) and after (right) on my yarn stash.

It all went on ebay apart from a few bits and pieces now in the bottom of the cupboard. Thanks to those of you who bought from me - there were lots of bargains! It was quite stressful packing it all up and I am quite sad when I look at how little is left - but less this be a lesson to us all! Aimless stashing is pointless. You never know when you'll need to flee the country or be flooded or something else. It's not a bargain unless you are going to definitely use it. When I think of all the money I spent on what has gone....ugh. Never mind. Lesson learnt.

I did take a break from parcelling things up to go to a lovely Tea Party at Rachel's house. She and Mr K had baked up a storm.

That wasn't even the half of it. The highlight for me was the jam I had with the scones which they had made themselves. Raspberry, and seriously the best jam I have ever had (hope Mater doesn't read this but it's true). Cucumber sandwiches, gossip, scandal and knitting - lovely! I took my Pop Spots along and since then am just one final repeat from finishing the border.

I think the lace is supposed to go around the whole thing but the outer edge is enough for me. Not the most interesting thing to do - knitting on a lace edging - although quite meditative. Getting back to the tea party...Rachel has recently moved into the loveliest flat and made it amazingly chic and comfortable. It was a proper, adult home.

They have proper furniture that they own that was really nice and not flatpack. I admit I haven't read the book or seen the film but I rather suspect I am Lixie Ripley to Rachel's Dicky except she is the talented one. I have to keep remembering it's not sexy to be jealous and decide to simply admire her instead. If Mr K turns out to look like Matt Damon though...wait, that doesn't work. He'd have to look like Gwyneth Paltrow, and that would just be odd for all concerned.

Discussions continue about moving to Japan for Pooch's new job later this year. Still no date but I do know that when we come back (after 12-18 months) I shall be looking to start my own version of a home. I am feeling very done down by the economy. I earn too much for most schemes, too little to get a mortgage without tens of thousands of pounds as a deposit and it will take me years and years more to get to anything like that. I never thought I'd be 35 and still renting with no end in sight. Ah well. No sense in wallowing.

Things could be a lot worse.

Festival of Quilts 2013

Straight to the good stuff - all my photos are here if you want to have a good look by yourself without my commentary. If you want to hear what I thought of it...read on!

My personal best-in-show? I am going to split it. In no particular order we have Out of Africa.

As you can see in this close up...

...this is made up of triangles sewn into hexagons. However they all use just one fabric print - I love that. So clever! I find this very inspiring. Then we have Little Stars.

I am a big fan of paper piecing and this is diamonds, triangles and parallelograms.

Impressive. I'd not considered paralllelllograms before. Then we have a quilt with a funny name which is on Flickr if you want to know it.

I loved the movement in it. This is also very inspiring - could there be a HUGE paper pieced quilt in my near future?! Another one I mean.

As usual I did look forward to the miniature quilts and I thought this shot gave a good idea of just how mini some of these miniatures really are.

On a tiny quilt...

...you get tiny stitches.

Puts my great gallumphing sashiko stitches to shame! Back to the big quilts and this one is made entirely of old ties.

This one was enormous - that wall is about 10ft high.

I am not going to show any more since they are all on Flickr but I did deliberately take fewer photos than last year which gave me more time to focus on the ones I really liked.

Mumsy and I also managed a little shopping although we were remarkably restrained. I now know what it means to have your fingers itching. There were SO many lovely things and I wanted to bring them all home with me but budget and potential moves kept me holding back. The only fabric I bought was for the ten (TEN) xmas stockings I will soon begin. I didn't want to go with the traditional bright red, gold and green so started off with the snowman print, then added a few others, then a few more until I had the final bundle.

So it is still kinds red, green and gold. But not..I mean..you know...better. I also got a knitting kit for a shawl Mater admired which she tells me is to her only xmas present.

We'll see. On the way to and from Birmingham I was at work on my Pop Pots shawl - the edging will begin soon! Knit, knit, knit...

Fabric

It is the Festival of Quilts this week and I will be attending with my Mum once again. I always take lots and lots of lovely photos and then mull over them in the following year. Last year's are here on Flickr and very well mulled.

It will be a strange one for me this year as I'm destashing. The only thing I 'need' and that is christmas fabric for stockings. So I guess I'll be focussing more on the exhibition.

Despite not adding to my stash I had a voucher for the Fat Quarter Shop which I got before I knew about a potential move. I love that shop as even though they are in America they are very understanding when it comes to posting to the UK. This is what I spent it on.

I set myself a little challenge to put together a bundle I could make a complete quilt with in a colour range that I liked but wouldn't usually go for. I think I got it ok although I'm not sure about that green one. It's always so hard to tell on screen.

I haven't felt like doing much crafting this week other than plugging away on the popspots shawl. There are more than 500 stitches per row now so perhaps it makes sense that in contrast I've turned back to some Sashiko.

This is one of the pre-printed squares you can get from EuroJapanLinks and other places. I do prefer the ones with curves and find it aids Mindfulness (deliberate capitalisation there) and reflection. The only thing is what to do with them afterwards! I feel this one might become a bag.

Weekend of Giving and Receiving

My epic stash sort out and second round of book listing has resulted in 70+ lots being listed on ebay. Everything starts at 99p so go and grab yourself something wonderful. This is the stash pre-clearout.

I'll show you what it looks like in 10 days time.

With the way Royal Mail now calculate postage, anything more than 8cm thick costs over £5 to post. So all those 100g single balls were never going to sell plus there were various bits and bobs I thought others might enjoy. That saw me with an IKEA bag full of stash and notions heading to the Romford Group today. I came home without it which is a win for me! Plus the people there got a few goodies each and the rest has gone to EssexGirlKnits's school group. I didn't come away empty handed though. My birthday present from Nickerjac!

So many amazing embroidery transfers and in *excellent* condition despite being more than 70 years old. I still need to go through them all properly this evening but a few jumped out at me.

Book 1 and 2 plus this initial book. Gorgeous! Plus you see a lot of versions of the grown up bonnet lady - but this is the first I've seen of a junior version.

I am soooooo lucky!

I was rather delighted to get these. I found them very comforting. I had been trying to explain how it made me feel to be having such a drastic destash of my stash as well as my books. I can remember buying all of that yarn and the aspirations I had for this skein or that skein. I had expected to use it up gradually over the next decade or two and to add to it as time went on. It was a history of things I had done and places I had been over the last 10+ years. Once it's gone it's as if those memories have gone. I needed to mourn the loss of all those potential items I would have knitted. Pooch did not understand. "You can get more." was his response. And yes, if it was just yarn and not memories too then I could. I guess it's hard for anyone who doesn't knit to get it. And for any sewer reading this, it'll be my fabric stash next. Although that isn't emotive and there isn't as much to go through. Maybe I should have done that first?!

In the Olden Days

When we were little my Sister and I would occasionally ask my Mum questions about "the olden days" - usually taken to mean anything that happened before our birth. Looking through some of the photos in "The Commons" (a Flickr project to make image archives publicly available) I was reminded of this. There are some amazing images! Click on the ones below to get the original which often has a good description attached to it. Or visit The Commons and search for what interests you. You're encouraged to add information to each of them where you can.

Beautiful ambrotype.

Scarborough herring girls.

US Wounded Soldiers

My retirement as I envisage it.

You'd never be stuck for where to keep your knitting with a stovepipe hat.

From Rykjavic. These ladies have more stuff than even me.

There is lots more besides. For instance - who can resist this photo from the New York Public Library Collection:

Divine!

Which Has Been Poked More?

Me or the pin cushions I've made? Now there's a question... ;)

Here are some of the ones I've made. 

I was pondering them while considering what to make for the bloghop I've signed up for in September. I also looked further afield.

1. pin cushion caddy finished, 2. Pin Cushion, 3. Pin cushion, 4. Pear Pin Cushions, 

5. Cathedral Windows Pin Cushion, 6. little waves pin cushion

I do like the look of the pin cushion caddy, top left, for which there is a tutorial here. The pears are also lovely and there is a free pattern here for them and apples courtesy of the Guardian and Molly Makes. I've always wanted to make a fabric apple. 

The reason I suggest it could be Me is because I went to the Physio again this evening and he poked me mightily in a very tender spot on my back and then flipped me over and started prodding my stomach. Now this is not an area I've ever had massaged and it was odd. He was looking for the Psoas muscle (that's a wiki link) which I hadn't heard of before. It is essentially a kind of guy rope between the lower spine and the front of your hips. Always learning, me.

Angel Niece

Last week my sister sent me this photo of Jasmine, as she put, if she had been in Fame.

Swoon. She's so cute! And she's really got that whole smiling thing going on. My sister's NCT group did a questionnaire at their last meet up to see what kind of baby they had. 'Spirited' meant grumpy and then there were a whole load of others but Jasmine came out as an angel baby. She is *so* well behaved. (Can you tell I'm one of those really proud, gushy aunts?) She sleeps from 7pm til 5am most days with just one feed during the night. She hardly ever cries and she's very happy to be cuddled by numerous fawning family members such as myself. We took her to lunch yesterday at a Marco Pierre White place in Somerset.

Angel baby. Even Pooch admitted she was a lovely child although every time she looked at him she frowned as if she couldn't quite work out what he was. She loves the stars on her car seat canopy.

And Astrophysics is one of my particular interests so I shall be looking to encourage this in the future.

As always I asked if anything was needed that I could make for them. Sian requested a play mat that turns into a bag (NCT Mum envy apparently). Pooch was initially interested in the project while he thought she was talking about some kind of Transformer, but less so when I mentioned drawstrings.

A little research and...

This seems to be the kind of thing she meant. I envisage the inside as a circle with grass, flowers, a road (for cars - obviously), a house and a tree. Oh and of course a sun. You know the kind of thing.

But in fabric.

The Pear Tree Inn (the lunch place) was very nice by the way and we had a main each, two puddings between three and soft drinks for £15 a head. I'd recommend it if you happen to be in the middle of nowhere.

Books 2013 #20 - #34

Wow, no reviews since April. Some of my tube time (i.e. reading time) has been snagged by my hopeless attempts to learn Japanese. However, I have managed to read a few books along the way...

#20 Extreme Office Crafts
Jimmy Knight

I wouldn't suggest you go so far as to buy it - unless you see a second hand copy - but it is actually a better example of this kind of thing. There are some pretty elaborate things in here and some really subversive ones, but then pretty much everything seemed highly doable in my current office setting. Admittedly, in my office we play 'hide the cow' and if someone is wearing headphones it is acceptable to throw paperclips (and once, a stapler) to attract their attention, but still.

#21 The Beekeeper's Apprentice
Laurie R King

#22 A Monstrous Regiment of Women
Laurie R King

 Clearly the cover illustrator has not read the first book. A picture of Miss Mary Russell would certainly not bear much resemblance to that lady. Better job on the second although the quote on the cover "A novel which challenges the cliches of history" is wrong unless you think Sherlock Holmes was a real person. These are the proper first and second books in the series that I read a free kindle short story of in my last post. I am now on the third book so it makes sense to review these two together. Miss Russell meets Sherlock in his retirement cottage as she lives nearby with her mean Aunt. They meet and recognise intelligence in each other and he effectively takes on her education. Naturally a case then appears and so the story goes on. The author emphasises that Holmes is not of retirement age, but about 50 when they meet. But still...I dunno. It's like with the Robert Downey Jr films. If they had not based them on the Sherlock character I probably would have liked them better, but then I suppose most people would never have bothered to watch/read them. The second book was much more engaging than the first and could be read as a stand alone. In it Miss Russell gets her degree from Oxford (in Theology) and gets in with a group of women who stand in awe of a kind of spiritual leader. I could believe in the character in this book, right up until the end. And now the third book has picked up from there and I just can't accept that...well...it would be unfair to say it I guess. All in all a worthy read if you like the original Holmes character and aren't ready to accept him as a historical reference.

#23 The Roman Hat Mystery
Ellery Queen

Why did I read this? I read one of these in 2009 and should have learned my lesson. The idea is that they give you all the information you need to solve the crime and then the book pauses about 2/3 of the way through to let you work it out. My arse. Plus the story was very of-the-time racist ad sexist which normally I would just put down to the age of the book but in this was just annoying. To summarise - guy dies in theatre during a sell-out performance. Turns out he was a blackmailer with lots of hats. Who killed him and why?

Bleh.

#24 Hilda Hopkins Bed and Burial
Vivienne Fagan

I reviewed the first (free) one in this series back at the start of the year. This is the second and was rather funny. Hilda has escaped from prison and is on the run, longing to take up machine knitting again. She manages to get a job and it's not long before she's back to her naughty ways but it all starts to go wrong. How will Hilda get out of it this time? Having said that the story is about a machine knitting, murderous pensioner it may seem odd for me to say that this story had a bit more realism than the first. It was again a novelette and a good way to while away a few hours.

#25 The Skeleton in the Closet
M.C. Beaton

I spent the first half of the book under the impression MC Beaton was Alexander McCall Smith. Once I'd worked out my mistake the boring everydayness of the story and the predictability made sense. Man works in menial job having had to leave school early to look after semi-invalid parents. Parents die. He discovers lots of money. Story continues. If you like Agatha Raison you may well enjoy this. I find her too annoying to read anymore and although this book is very different the writing style is close enough for me to find these people annoying too.

#26 The Colour of Magic
Terry Pratchett

I have always wanted to read the whole of his Discworld series in order, to see how the characters and storylines develop, so this is a reread of an old favourite. I am so glad that Death changed later to become the character he is in books like Reaper Man. And that I know we revisit Twoflower later on, although I can't quite remember when. And that the Luggage remains the same intimidating piece of wood throughout the subsequent Rincewind books. If by some chance you haven't read a Discworld book I would start with something like Guards, Guards or perhaps Maskerade. Oooo, I've got so many wonderful books to reread ahead of me!

#27 This Night's Foul Work
Fred Vargas

Adamsberg has got over his stupidity regarding Camille but although he is playing his part in bringing up their son, she has had enough and is looking elsewhere for honey. This was one of the best ones in the series so far. I was really compelled to keep reading on the tube, at lunch, before bed, just to find out what was going to happen next. Adamsberg has a snooty pathologist to contend with, a possibly haunted new home and a potential rival - a man he has some shared history with from when they grew up - something that neither of them is comfortable with although it's not straight forward. But then you don't expect it to be really. A great read.

#28 Death at Gallows Green (no.2 in the series)
#29 Death at Daisy's Folly (no.3)
#30 Death at Whitechapel (no.6)
Robin Paige

Robin Paige is my Murder She Wrote in book form. I know they're not great but they're very comforting - like Heinz Ravioli in tins. They do have a small amount of historical accuracy too, although only a small amount. I doubt Winston Churchill's father was ever really thought to be Jack the Ripper. Or that Beatrix Potter was quite the profiler she is made out to be (different books). Still, they keep my mind occupied and are relaxing to read.

#31 When Last I Died
Gladys Mitchell

I am a Mrs Bradley fan (not the TV series - yuk) and this was a good one in the series. Mrs Bradley's grandson finds an old diary of a woman who was involved with a death and some disappearances - or were they all murders? She was tried and acquitted but there was doubt. Mrs Bradley looks into it and finds it concerns a local boys approved school where young criminals are sent. These are clever books which are occasionally brilliantly read on BBC radio.

#32 But He Was Already Dead When I Got There
Barbara Paul

This was an unabridged recording from Audible read by Chris Kayser. I don't normally bother giving the reader but in this case it is relevant since his issues with accents meant I spent the first half an hour of the story assuming various people hated each other from their tones and inflections. Turns out it was just his voice. The story revolves around three couples who are all involved in some way with a high end bespoke jewellery shop. There is an evil uncle who dies and it turns out pretty much all of them lie quite elaborately at some point or another. The poor detective (who coincidentally has a side-kick who keeps doing an awful fake accent) has to peel each of these away before finding the truth. I cannot recommend the reading of it but the story is good so the book is worth keeping an eye out for.

#33 Death and the Maiden
Gladys Mitchell

Another Mrs Bradley and a really good one. Lots of excellent characters get involved in the story, all with different backgrounds and interesting hang ups. This was also an Audible recording and Patience Tomlinson reads these very well.

#34 An Elegy for Eddie
Jacqueline Winspear

My cousin gave me this and I tried very hard to like it. I realised as I read that I had read the first in the series when it came out in 2003 and remembered it as being a bit mawkish. However, this kind of series can often take a while to get going so this one having appeared nine years later was bound to be a different kettle of fish. But then the barrow boys she'd grown up with (before she got educated) came to see Maisie about the death of a man born in a stable who was a horse whisperer and my hopes were dashed. When I was a young teen I worked in a bookshop that sold a lot of books with titles like "Only a Factory Girl" or "Billy Come Home" full of sentimental stuff about growing up on the poverty stricken streets where you might be poor but the table was well scrubbed.

 

I tried really hard not to think about those books as I read, but I failed. I could not like Maisie. I couldn't care about the penniless mother Eddie had left behind. I could not be interested in whether Maisie would accept a place in society by marrying her rich young man. It wasn't a bad book, but it made me itch.

I hope someone finds these interesting! I am well into the third Mary Russell book and looking back at my books from 2012 has reminded me of a number of authors I want to check to see if they have produced a book yet this year. Meanwhile the weather on my holiday is on the cusp and we are in for a few days of rain - perfect weather for reading!