Harvest- Mange-tout

Went out to do some gardening today, and found a little harvest waiting for me!

72 grams of delicious, fresh, organic mange-tout. Now, based on information from MySupermarket.co.uk, Tesco sell 150 gram of organic mange-tout for £1.60, working out as £10.67 a kilogram.


So by that basis my tiny haul is worth around 77p. But mine are grown in lovely wet England, using the ever present watering can in the clouds, instead of being grown in Egypt where water has to be pumped from deep beneath the ground, compromising water sources in the region.


Also some of mine had been nibbled:

But a little wash later, and they're tasty all the same. Peas are so easy to grow past germination. They just sprawl everywhere and come harvest time picking your crop turns into a little scavenger hunt where the grand prize is 77p worth of nibbled peas.

New technique- Entrelac

This week I challenged myself to learn something new. Right now I'm working on a cabled baby jumper and it's hard going because there are 26 twists in the cable row. It's been killing my fingers, but I still wanted to knit.


I've been trying to cull my junk, and found a bag full of the odds and ends left over from a single sized crochet blanket I made a couple of years ago. I didn't want to just knit a straight blanket, and had seen entrelac in my Compendium of Knitting Techniques and wanted to give it a shot.


Turns out entrelac is really easy. It's just using increases, decreases, and picking up stitches to give the appearance of knitting sideways. There are tutorials online, but I can't recommend one because I worked from instructions from this book (which by the way, is a fairly wonderful knitting book overall). I'm using a 5mm circular needle and chunky acrylic.


At first it looks really weird and like you've gone horribly wrong and got twisted somewhere:

But after the first foundation lot of triangles, things start to look up:

And here's where I am at the moment:

I am very happy with how it's going and how fast it's growing. Honestly, I'm glad I learnt entrelac, the finish is just so intriguing- it's like an optical illusion of colour changing strips weaving in and out. It also feels lovely and plush, so I'm sure the end baby/pet blanket will be lovely and warm.


Long term challenge? Knit an entrelac bedspread from DK remnants. 

What's black and blue and goes clack clack ding?

I'll give you a clue. It's a toy I've wanted for a while. For a long while. We're talking since I saw the Barbie one in the Argos catalogue in 1995 (the Argos catalogue was in my formative and materialistic years one of my primary literary resources, the other being Girl Talk magazine).


It's been the best friend of writers for over 100 years. It's the save mechanism in my favourite survival horror franchise (Leon always carries a tin of ribbon with him). The protagonist in Moulin Rouge! pawns his to pay a debt to a hooker. It's used as a percussion instrument in a very special symphony.


Okay, I'll show you.

I also tried to type a duck. Use your imagination people.

It's a Silverette II typewriter and I can't find any information on it, but I think it's from the 70s or early 80s. The outside is in pretty good condition, although it's got a bit of a tension problem at the moment which means I can only type about 7cm worth of text before I have to go to the next line. Like this:

My mum's very useful friend phoned her dad and seems to have worked out what the problem is, we just have to open it up and hope a sharp metal spring doesn't fling itself across the room and lacerate someone's jugular. Fun times with mechanical things!

Typing on this is so different from typing on a computer, especially a laptop. I've always been a fan of noisy keyboards, you know, the ones that sound so crisp and crunchy when you clack away at them? Well typing on this is like that times a million. I never knew you had to move the keys so far to get a response. I know it sounds obvious, but it's the polar opposite of a touch screen and, to me, it feels amazing. Feeling that key push down and seeing the little letter hammer swing up and smack the paper is just so satisfying.


I love it, it feels so real.


Maybe it's my poor eyesight and fear of going blind. Maybe I'm overly in-tune with my sense of touch. Maybe it's my paranoia of living in a world where we have been enslaved by robots and live as inefficient batteries in a post apocalyptic world, tricked into thinking we live in New York, but I need things to feel real. I'm a tactile person. I'm the one at museums and exhibitions getting told off for groping everything. I'm the person who hates to buy anything without picking it up, turning it over and feeling every last edge and corner. I'm the one in the art shop trying out soft paintbrushes on my cheek.


I need that grounding sense of reality, and typing on something that smacks the paper so hard it embosses it is exactly what I need.


Plus now I can write passive aggressive notes and look professional doing it. Apart from the spelling. I'm also forced to remain calm as there's no damn exclamation mark on this thing (people in the 70s had very little to be excited about, naturally).


The best thing about being a grown-up is that you can finally indulge in your silly childhood wants. Eating icecream for dinner and dropping a paycheck on a little machine that goes clack clack ding.

Making friends

As it looks very much like I might be trapped living in my parent's house for another few years (boo), I'm trying to downsize some of my junk. So I've been selling yarn and fabric and clothes on Ebay, and trying to sort through my mountains of craft stuff. Apart from the masses of shop bought fabric, I've also got a fair amount of old clothes that are ugly or too big or have a stain on them or a hole in them that I can't throw away for whatever reason.


One such item of clothing was this tunic I bought in the Uniqlo flapship store in Tokyo. It does nothing for me, makes my hips look massive and is just generally not great- but it's SO COMFORTABLE. I only have one photo of my ass in it, and you're not seeing it. Sorry. But here's the tunic monstrosity.

I had the day off work because I'd eaten some dodgy rice, so I decided it was time to say goodbye to this tatty thing and turn it into some kind of monster. I made a pattern out of copies of the compact Independent, "I"...

...pinned them to the fabric and cut round them....

...did some mumbjo jumbo magic seams, character formation and stuffing and came out with this:

Isn't he awesome? I'm very happy, although he needs some shorts to hide a scruffy bum seam. He's called Puffy, after the Japanese band, because the tunic I made him from was designed by them, apparently inspired by this song.


I made another friend called Cubunny, but he was hacked together while watching the pretty awful film "27 Dresses" so he's a bit shoddy. Stretch jersey is surprisingly hard to sew with.

New friends! Yaaaaay!


I miss university.

Triple Decker Sponge with Coffee Meringue

Got bored this weekend. Made a standard vanilla sponge (well... 3. I had enough for 3 7inch tins). Found a recipe on the internet for an intriguing looking topping and so: 

Oooooh

Aaaaaah

Oh my.


Okay, okay, here's the recipe for the topping. The base was just a boring sponge cake.


Coffee meringue cake topping
Ingredients:

• 1 egg white
• 90g caster sugar
• 2.5 tablespoons of golden syrup
• 1/4 teaspoon salt cream of tartar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons of water 
• 1 teaspoon of freeze dried/instant coffee
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method:

1. Add the coffee to the water and stir until completely dissolved.
2. Put a pan half full of water on to boil.
3. In a bowl that fits over the pan (bain Marie style) combine all of the ingredients bar the vanilla.
4. Place the bowl over the water and beat the mixture thoroughly with an electric mixer until it forms stiff peaks.
5. Remove from the heat and beat in the vanilla extract.
6. Spread over your cake and leave to set. For a cappuccino effect, sprinkle over cocoa powder.

Gorgeous! x

Baby Steps

I've been back at work for a week and a half now (hooray!), and I've only just got over the "waaah, tiredness" hump. When you're at home all day, even if you're working out or gardening or keeping yourself busy, you forget how tiring going into a stressful office can be. Anyway, after a little adjustment period, I got back my "omg I have to make something I can't just sit here" itch. There were a couple of films I wanted to see on telly (Big- good, Harry Potter 4 A Goblet of New Hope- bad) and I had most of a ball of yarn left from my Granddad's socks, so I knocked out these.

They're not supposed to have standard 2x2 rib at the top, they're supposed to launch straight into cable rib, but for some reason I found Tom Hanks incredibly distracting on the first sock (seriously, it took me about 4 attempts to cast on with a tail at an acceptable length). I messed up so many times on these socks and had to rewind! My brain obviously has forgotten how to multi-task.


The detail on them is a little twist/cable rib, made by just knitting a second stitch before the first one and then knitting the first stitch.

They are so so small though! UNNATURALLY SMALL YOU WEIRD BABIES YOU.

I haven't decided whether I'll try and sell these or give them to my pregnant cousin. My cousin is probably the kind of person who'd refuse to put purple socks on a little boy and who maybe doesn't really like/appreciate handmade, soooo, you know, if I sold them, at least they'd go to someone who really wanted them...

Retro Craft- Sirdar Gemini

Craft, as we know it, hasn't actually been around that long. Before craft was something housewives picked up to amuse themselves, it was the preserve of wealthy girls showing off (embroidery), a make do and mend necessity (traditional American patchwork) or a way of making a living for skilled craftsmen with years of experience and a squadron of apprentices. When mass production and new industrial techniques eliminated the need for so many craftsmen, craft fell by the wayside and became a hobby marketed to women (and to a lesser extent, men) with time to fill. And that's how we ended up with a plethora of horrible horrible craft publications.


Retro craft is going to be a series of blog posts in which I look at some of the craft blasts from the craft past hiding around my parent's house.  


Starting with this gem, which I think I picked up at the Reading branch of Oxfam.


Knitting publications from the past boggle the mind. Did people really dedicate hours and hours to their lives knitting some of these things? You have to wonder what they were smoking back then. This book starts out promising.

Not too bad, but I can't imagine anyone over the age of about 13 wearing that. If you knitted the jumper in a solid colour it could work. Equally, the next few patterns were unremarkable- a short sleeved mint green thing, a horrible shapeless (but warm looking!) jumper, and a plain cardigan. The cardigan is probably the most useful pattern in the book, even if the girl does look rather violated in her posing.

We're still in the salvageable part of Knitsville here. I think if you replaced the baby blue and pink with charcoal and grey, this would actually make a pretty nice guy's jumper.

Then we cross the tracks into the bad part of knitting town. 


What is this?

Tennis wear for snow days? A bust minimiser cleverly designed to blend in on a fishing boat?


The least feminine cardigan award goes to...

Can you imagine spending hours and hours knitting that only to try it on and look rectangular? I think my dad has this in grey somewhere.


My only explanation for this next piece is that it was some sort of deleted scene from the film Grease and the spurned costume designer tried to market the pattern to make up lost cash.

It's just... horrible. And pointless. This thing just should not exist.


The last pattern in the book is what I can only describe as a "fuck you" jumper. A big fat FUCK YOU to everyone with a beloved relative who knits. A FUCK YOU to knitters themselves, who occasionally cling to finishing garments even when they are rapidly heading to a bad taste place of no return.


It's wrong. It's evil. It's the yellow bobble jumper.

The most disturbing thing about this monstrosity is that somewhere out there, there's a hipster who would pay good money for this.


Maybe it's time I tried to source some yellow Sirdar Gemini.