Saturday 30th April - Procrastination

 Sooner or later things catch up on one. All the things that should have been done earlier in the week began to tip over from pending to urgent.

I was distracted from getting started by a couple of parcels waiting for me to open - we still leave them in the hall for a day before opening, which is plenty long enough for me to forget they have been delivered;

One hundred and twenty assorted teabags - yes, a tad excessive, but delivery was free if your order came to £20 or over;

 I chose random flavours when I placed the order according to the name (or promise?) on the box; peace, relax, cleanse (no, not a laxative!), night-time, feel new, and revitalize - that's the red box. I just pick one according to the colour. 

And also, Ang's stitching was waiting for me!

  She's created a washing line, even including jeans and a stripy breton top! There were little gifts as well, a lavender sachet with a cross stitch rose, and a curious hand-made gift tag which you can see peeking out of it's hand-made bag.

We are slowly working towards getting our rotary drying line up; it has been a work in progress for about 5 or 6 years, but I'm hoping this year will be the one where it actually happens. The obstacles - like clearing the space for the washing to safely flap around in, and sorting out how to fix it into the concrete slab have been cleared one by one, and the final solution is in sight.  

I made a pot of revitalize tea - it has a marked ginger flavour - and got stuck into the list of procrastinated tasks;

Finishing the last few stitches and ironing the fabric, packing and posting to Ang in time to catch the last post for the weekend, writing two postcards and a letter and packing up another parcel.

The letter entailed copying up some notes first to go in the letter, so I did that, and the parcel was the result of a phone call that was moving from 'soonish' to 'now' to 'do it today'!

There were a couple of lesson notes from piano lessons to write up and send. That's almost everything done, still another lesson to write up and send, and I really should have watered the garden, but too late for today. 

Daily sketching is still happening;

Friday 29th April - Notebook nightmares

 I have too many notebooks on the go;

Looking at the photographs, I realised that the top two notebooks in the first picture don't get used much.. They tend to live at the bottom of the pile. The next one is a notebook swap - a sort of extended letter/musing/thoughts and ideas swap book with a friend that we have just started together, my green paper diary, the moth-patterned postcard embroidery swap book, a plastic covered book for jotting down current notes on a church group that zooms every week, a smaller commonplace book and another writing project.  

there are more... these stay upstairs. Most days I write in all the 'upstairs' note books; the green daily sketch journal, the purple morning pages book, and, in the evenings, I write about the events or non-events of the day.  ;

But they lie around in untidy heaps making at harder to keep a clear work space on the table;

I thought I had found a perfect solution, and sent off for a flat-pack desk organiser. NO NOT BUY THIS! It took us a while to assemble the horrible thin scratchy pieces of fibreboard; eventually we realised that the stubby little screws go into the notches, not the wood, and it became simple to put it all together. This is the back, with all the screwheads protruding. All the edges are unrounded and rough. 

It is entirely unclear from the instructions how the screws are supposed to go; there is also a helpful note saying that it is normal for them to go in crooked and damage the edge of the pieces but not to worry as this will note affect the functionality of the product!

 

From a distance, it look fine - that's why I bought it!

It does a great job of gathering up all the notebooks, and also paper piles and random bits and pieces, into one space,

.

And I now have a lovely clear space to work in, just like my husband's; he uses the opposite side of the table.

There were several moments when we came close to just chucking the whole thing in the bin and starting again. But if you, like me, were wanting some kind of desk organiser, I whole heartedly advise you not to choose this one! 

Monday 25th April - Getting things done...

 I was up and downstairs before 8 am this morning, having cleaned the loo - a usual Monday task that sometimes slips by a day or several, and put away the laundry, done my exercises, listened to yesterday's Bible in one Year chunk and part of today's (that seemed to have slipped by a day), done the sketch for yesterday, and had breakfast in bed.

Wowsers! I'm not usually so quick. However, the plumber was due from 8am to fix both that leak we found under the kitchen sink and also a slow leak from the heated towel rail in the bathroom, so I wanted to have upstairs reasonably clean and tidy, be presentable and ready to stay out of the way in good time.

The plumber arrived at about 10.

Ah well. We were ready for him whenever he came.

He needed to drain the whole system, but once that was done, he was fairly quick. Certainly gone by the time the window cleaners arrived.

And everyone was gone in time to cook lunch.

Meanwhile I discovered that a book I had my eye on; Arthur Parkinson's 'The Flower Yard' was on offer for Kindle for 99p!

Instant download, with a view to buying the actual book! And I'm really glad I bought it on Kindle for 99p instead of new for £14.99, because although it is a lovely book and full of beautiful pictures, it isn't exactly what I was hoping for. More coffee table book than the kind of ideas and information that I wanted. I've skim read through, and will go back to peer at the pictures, but if I had been able to get to a bookshop to look at it first I would have had a clearer idea of the contents.

I am plagued by a couple of slugs or snails in my vegetable tubs. Most of them are completely clear, and I think I have dealt with the marauders in the broad beans. I had a brainwave - and transplanted a couple of young lettuces around the base of the peas and broad beans, thinking that the pests would go for these in preference. Success! There was the most humungous snail just about to breakfast off one of the lettuces, so I was able to pick it off and fling it high over the hedge. Not into the neighbours, I hasten to add, but into the common land behind us. I know they are homing creatures, but I put some energy into that throw so that should be that.

To my surprise, I read an article later suggesting that you can protect your crops by planting sacrificial lettuces and marigold between your 'real' crops, as slugs and snails would rather eat these, especially lettuces with soft juicy leaves. 'No greater love hath a lettuce, than to sacrifice its leaves to save the peas...'?

Knitting

Here is the 'Baby Surprise Jacket' so far;

Look below, I think you might be able to see how this is going to end up - the blue, cast on edge, will become the back neck and shoulders, and also the cuffs. The orange stripe goes across the back at the underarms and then round up to the shoulders.

Now the knitting that happens will make the left and right fronts, and the back, all in one go. I'm still increasing by two stitches at each corner (you can see them better in the top photograph, they are hidden by the needles in the lower photograph). In a few more rows I shall cast off about 30 stitches at the beginning and end, to make the neck.

I deliberately used the scrap of blue wool to do the first couple of rows, because once the whole thing is made and off the needles it is quite mind-bending to work out how to turn it into a jacket.

Now, all I have to do is find a baby to give it to...  

I've put it away for the rest of today, as I still have to get this ready to post;

     

Saturday 23rd April - the best laid plans....

 gang aft agley....

We'd planned to meet up with son and daughter this morning, at the usual outdoor cafe midway between their town and hours.

But - a not entirely negative LFT result for one of them has meant that we've postponed it. Sensible, but still disappointing. Ah well. It would have been chilly this morning - this afternoon was much warmer although the wind was, shall we say, bracing? And Fresh?

I spent this afternoon, with quite a lot of assistance from Himself finishing off the next bit of mulching that has been ongoing for a couple of weeks. Vicky, a friend who is now our gardener, has been working her way along the borders in the back garden weeding, watering and then mulching with spent mushroom compost, and yesterday made a start on the front garden. She'd done the weeding and sorting out, and we watered it ready for her to finish off today. However, she wasn't well, and we were at home, so we got stuck in. With the pair of us it didn't take too long, and it was very pleasant being in the sun and out of the wind. It is the time of year when I wage my annual war on goose grass, and I was trying to explain to Himself  exactly which plant needed dragging out of the borders 'oh, you mean robin-run-the-hedge?' and the confusion was cleared up. I've also heard it called 'cleavers'. Anyway, we've removed nearly all of it. There's always a bit left, somewhere.

I've also earthed up the potatoes that are growing in containers. All four pots had shoots about 2 inches tall showing through the top of the earth, so, as instructed by The Book (Huw Richards, Veg in One Bed) I covered them up with another two inches of earth. There's just about enough room left in the pot to repeat this process one more time, before leaving them in peace.

I've been baking;

Hebridean Baker Custard Creams

I made 12 with this recipe, which means 24 little biscuits sandwiched in pairs.

Biscuits;

• 170g butter
• 55g icing sugar
• 170g SR flour
• 55g custard powder

Filling

• 50g butter
• 20g custard powder
• 80g icing sugar

I reduced the icing sugar in both recipes as my friend suggested - they are still very (deliciously!) sweet.

Preheat oven to 180C and lightly grease a baking tray

In a large bowl, cream softened butter and sugar, add flour and custard powder to form a dough.

Roll tablespoons of this into balls, place on the tray allowing room for them to spread a little, and press each one lightly with a fork.

Bake for 12-14 minutes and allow to cool.

Mix together the filling ingredients to make a buttercream and spread thickly on half the biscuits (which are very fragile at this stage) and sandwich with remaining biscuits.

I found that these are incredibly crumbly the first day, and much better the second day which the cream and the biscuits had firmed up. Next time around I shall make them a little smaller... they are very rich. 

These will ruin you for bought custard creams. You have been warned!

I've kept the drawings going - here is a selection; (I don't know if I have posted any before)   

I'm enjoying doing them, barely more than a doodle, but just enough for me to think 'Oh Yes, I remember that!'. 

What is really weird is that they remind me of the scribbly illustrations my grandmother used to add to her letters - in a very similar style. The one of her black poodle puppy when he managed to tie himself to the pedals of the piano with a ball of red wool that she was knitting with has stuck in my memory aftr over fifty years!

Tuesday 19th April - In other news

 I mentioned that I was knitting, and un-knitting;

The 'Baby Surprise' Jacket took a couple of restarts, but is now underway;

I have knitted this pattern twice before. At this stage it is impossible to visualise what is going on. The blue line (deliberately chose to be easily identified once I have finished knitting!) will form the cuffs of the little sleeves, and the top of the back. Somehow. At the moment I am knitting in towards what appears to be the centre, decreasing by two stitches at each of the diagonals. Eventually, once I am down to 90 stitches from the original 160, I will increase by two stitches along the diagonals, creating a weird 3-dimensional shape. By some magical sleight of hand, the lower edge of the blue strip will be folded up and over, and something sewn to something else to make shoulder seams, and hey presto - a jacket! It worked the last two times so I am hopeful.

The cardigan that I was ripping out is almost completely unravelled; 

One thought I have is to just knit up another 'Surprise' jacket, following the same instructions with thicker yarn and larger needles, to see if I get a me-size jacket. A better idea might be to get hold of the book 

 which has the pattern written up to make a number of different versions in different sizes. It is rather expensive though... The annoying thing is that I remember cutting the pattern out of the Sunday Times magazine about 35 years ago, and throwing it away about ten years ago. It just goes to show that you should never throw anything away, ever. Not never.

The weather was so warm on Friday that we spent a lot of time sitting out in the garden under the tracery of the apple tree branches, just coming into blossom. I took my tablet out, intending to read, but the light was too bright, so, using the stylus and a fairly primitive drawing program produced this instead;

I've not really got my head around how the different 'pens' in the program (called Bamboo) work, so it was all a bit hit and miss. Sadly the following days grew progressively cooler, until today it really wasn't warm enough to sit outside. The scattered pink dots of blossom have given way to a complete canopy of white petals, and the big old oak at the bottom of the garden, always the last to realise that it is Spring, has suddenly burst into leaf.

Yesterday we finished the Hot Cross Buns, and tomorrow we will start on the Simnel cake. I do like to make a celebration last as long as possible! 

 

 

Monday 18th April - False Alarm

 I started by washing up after lunch, and one thing lead to another so I washed up the thingy that the washing up liquid and spongy whatsit live in, and behind the sink, and saw the state of the kitchen windowsill... this required something stronger than a wipe with a damp cloth so I ferreted among the various bottles under the sink for the 'power' cleaner. 

We keep the various types of cleaners in separate plastic crates, at least, they are sorted when we sort the cupboard. Over subsequent weeks they all seem to shuffle around somehow so it took me a moment to find the bottle I wanted. Horrors! It was dripping wet, and further inspection revealed that the crate was half full of water!  

I called the Man of the House to come and lift out the heavy crate and do the grovelling under the sink bit. The whole cupboard, apart from the crate of bottles, was bone dry. What must have happened is that when we had a leak at the end of last year, the water must have all been caught by the crate and we didn't notice. Usually the water from washing machine and dishwasher leaks goes straight through the gaps in the floorboards and into the six-foot deep void beneath our house (which is why it can take us a while to realise what is going on). 

Everywhere was bone dry so all is well. Meanwhile we took the opportunity to rearrange the contents of the other crates, including disposing of several ancient and rusting cans.

I can strongly recommend using crates to store things under the sink, even if you don't discover the leaks for month after the event!

Knitting

I have been doing knitting related activities of one kind or another most of the morning and afternoon. I have decided that this cardigan I made a couple of years ago really is a complete failure, and so am 'frogging' it to recover the yarn for something else.

'Frogging'?  Ripping it out, so called because of what a frog says; 'rip it! rip it!. Undoing the cast off edge was a tedious process, but watching the tail end of Shrek helped pass the time.

Noah's Ark

Friday was the raven, released by Noah after the rain had stopped.

Saturday was the dove, released by Noah after the raven didn't come back. The dove returned bearing an olive branch.  

I was expecting Easter Day to be a rainbow, but it is a family celebration - Noah and all the family.

I hope you all had a Happy Day on Easter Sunday - we have been so lucky with the weather. Our friends in Canada have just sent me a photograph of their back garden with fresh snow!  

Friday 15th April 2022 - Always an odd kind of day

 Good Friday is always a strange, unfocussed, unsettling day. In years past I have sometimes been swept up into all kinds activities - church services, walks of witness, bandstand services in the town centre, helping to create the Easter decorations in church.

Recently, more so with the 'stay-at-home' nature of this year, and last year, and the year before, there has been none of these events and distractions.

So I pottered slowly in the garden, sowing sunflower and marigold seeds, potting on other seedlings, re-potting the half-dozen cuttings that have survived the winter. It was hot and sunny, like a Summer's day. We had our morning coffee under the apple blossom, ate out lunch outside, and returned to the dappled shade of the apple tree for after-lunch coffee.

We chatted to neighbours, I wrote, and Himself posted the last few letters and cards. (Yesterday I took some post to the post box - a round trip of just over half a mile, but the first time I had gone for a walk since the end of February. Today my legs begged not to repeat the walk so soon!).

All through the day I felt as though I was waiting for it all to be over, for 3pm when traditionally Christ is taken down from the Cross; 'Consummatum est' - 'it is done', or 'it is finished'. I do think it is necessary for us to remember how barbaric, how cruel, human beings can be, and how low we can stoop; whether or not you are Christian or religious in any way. 

Noah's Ark

A raven today - after all, the calendar is based upon Noah's Ark, and we are nearing the end of the story. 

"After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up."    Genesis 8; 6-7

Sewing

I can reveal my designs for the last 'postcard swap'. I've made a 'postage stamp'; it is a copy of a stamp that Ukraine issued using a design by a popular artist called Maria Primachenko. There is quite a lot about her on the internet. Her art was in the news recently because a museum in Ukraine was destroyed by Russian bombing, and many of her works have been lost.  

I also added a clock, with the hands set to 8 o-clock, a national time of prayer for world peace. This is an international movement, with other countries praying at different times.

Ang sent me this Easter triptych, representing Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter Day. It is beautiful.

Knitting

Ang also asked about the wool I used to knit my latest jumper; I promised I would post the details.

Good Friday - 15th April 2022

 I came across this poem in an anthology complied by David Winter called 'The Master Haunter; poems about Jesus'

He is the Lonely Greatness

He is the lonely greatness of the world - 

    (His eyes are dim),

His power it is holds up the Cross

    That holds up Him.

He takes the sorrow of the three-fold hour - 

    (His eyelids close).

Round Him and round, the wind - His Spirit - where

    It listeth blows.

And so the wounded greatness of the world

    In silence lies-

And death is shattered by the light from out

    Those darkened eyes.

Madeline Caron Rock

It has been set to music by Arthur Benjamin, for unaccompanied choir.

Wednesday 13th April - Tea, coffee, ginger biscuits, bread and wine

 This morning our vicar came to bring us 'Home Communion' - the first time we have taken part in a service of Holy Communion since March 2020.

He's a good friend of ours and we have known him and the family since the 1990s when we joined our church. It's strange, thinking back to when the children were young, and our hair was still brown, and none of us wore glasses. Ah memory, memory.

So we sat round the garden table as the sun slowly warmed through the clouds. We started with tea, or coffee, and ginger biscuits made yesterday, catching up on church and family news. Then we pushed the teapot and mugs to one side, and brushed the biscuit crumbs off the table and continued seamlessly in the church service, complete with Bible reading (John chapter 14) and even a 'sermon' - if you could call it that, a few comments on the words. 

In the spaces between the prayers the breeze fluttered the table cloth, the glowing colours of the tulips and daffodils and the birdsong added to the sense of peace. A special moment, worth waiting for. 

In the past I always felt that a Sunday morning church service was incomplete without Communion being a part of it. Now, having waited so long, the experience seemed fresh and new, like the very first time over fifty years ago.

I didn't take photographs. But you can see the biscuits;

My husband makes them, to the recipe his mother used. I asked if he could make small ones as well, for me to have with morning coffee. So he did.

Noah's Ark; Hen and chickens

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not.

There are only a few windows left to open on the calendar.

We added hot cross buns and mini Easter eggs to this week's on-line order, and they arrived this morning. As did also an extra half-order due to a mix up. Our mix-up. We usually have next week's date booked and secured with a minimum order, and then go through adding and deleting as necessary, but if there are too many distraction during this process things can go wrong. So our fridge and freezer are overloaded with a week and a half's worth of food, and we sent our vicar on his way with our thanks, and some tomatoes, some lettuce and a pizza.

Tuesday 12th April - Printing, and posting, and other news.

 I turned the dining room table in to a card-making factory this morning

I though the cards with their black edges tooled a little sombre, and used some of the first tries for experimenting. 

Water colour worked a treat, until I discovered that although the stamp pad I used for test prints used waterproof ink, the actual printing ink was decidedly not! Colouring pencils will be the way to go. Something along these lines. 

The first six reached the post box this afternoon.

My 'bonus treat' when I am lino printing is to use up the last ink on the tray to make mono prints. I lay a sheet of A4 printer paper directly on the ink, and draw with a pencil. The pencils lines pick up the ink, transferring the design. You can get a more textured background by lightly smoothing the paper onto the tray. Next time I might skip the lino printing stage and go straight to mono printing! 

   

On Sunday evening I finished the jumper that I started back in December. It lay untouched for several weeks at a time, sometimes because I had more urgent things to complete, other times because I needed to work out how was going to solve the problems I met along the way (wrong yarn and gauge for the pattern for a start!)

I have been wearing it all day yesterday and today.

   Noah's Ark

Palm Sunday was always going to be a donkey! I learned an interesting fact on Sunday; donkeys were not thought of as such a humble ride back in Old Testament times; when kings arrived in a town they would ride a donkey to show they came in peace; horses were saved for war. If the king arrived on a horse then you could be sure his intentions were not peaceful.

"Lo, your king comes to you, triumphant and humble is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey."   Zechariah 9.9 

Monday - hares; "You shall not eat the hare, for even though it chews the cud, it does not have divided hoofs."      Leviticus 11.6

Tuesday - "Spoil was gathered as the caterpillar gathers."  Isaiah 33.4

So not a butterfly then!  

   
  

Monday 11th April - Oh no! Scheduling Error

Easter is this Sunday, and I realized I had 19 Easter cards I would like to send. I don't have any Easter cards at all. Oh. 

At first I wondered if it would be possible to make some deep theological reflection upon Easter if I reused the 2021 Christmas Cards which I still haven't recycled yet. You know, 'this is how it all began'.

I thought better of that plan, so, now for plan B.

I had spent a couple of days last week looking at Easter cards and pictures on the internet, and then started drawing;

This was quite time consuming to draw if one increases the scale, and my card blanks are about 12.5 cm square. The only way I was going to be able to make enough cards in time to post them on Tuesday or Wednesday, was to print them. I suppose I could have printed them off on the computer, but, Aha,! A chance to do some lino printing!

First I tried several drawings, all to scale;

I drew the design onto the lino, and after lunch took everything out to the garden to start cutting.

Cutting the design took most of the rest of the day. I needed a break after half an hour or so to straighten up. It was soothing and absorbing process, most of the time, once I got the rhythm back. You have to keep your attention on the job; I was discovering that once I had made a cut, the next cut would have to be slightly altered to take into account what had gone before.

After about an hour or so, I inked up some of the block and printed it to see how it was turning out... 

Eventually, around five o'clock, I finished cutting, and could make some test prints. I was using a small stamping pad, dabbing it over the surface of the lino, rather than getting out the printing ink and roller. I did some tests on sheets of paper, and also experiments with colouring the paper first. I should have let the paint dry before printing, but I was only looking to see if I liked the effect.

Finally I tried a print on a spare card; the right hand image on the card shows what it will look like, the left hand image on the same card was to check how to make it line up on the card.

Tomorrow I shall cover the table with newspaper, and my clothes with an apron (!) and set up a production line. They will need to dry, and hopefully I'll get them in the post first thing on Wednesday.