Tuesday 1st August - Knitting Tangles

There is nothing like knitting for learning patience, perseverance, and all sorts of goodly and desirable virtues.

And also for increasing one's vocabulary of unfortunate and inappropriate words and phrases.

I've two main projects on the go.

This yarn is called Bamboozle

It comes in hanks, which have to be carefully laid out and rolled into a ball before you can knit with them. Notice - FIVE little balls of wool beside an the hank. That's because they came from a hank which had four joins in it. Unimpressed.

Here is the front - the yarn has random changes of colour and also of thickness - one moment you are knitting with slippery, silky-soft thin yarn, the next moment it has turned into something more like cotton wool. It is surprisingly easy to manage, though, and I love the finished texture. However, it is extremely difficult to measure how long or wide the piece is, which is why I haven't ended it off, but left balls of yarn attached at the top in case I need to add some more.

Which means I have to knit the sleeves next, in order to lay the pieces together to see if the armholes will be the same size for the front and the sleeves.

I could have shown you a finished sleeve. At the weekend I had almost completed it, but then I discovered a mistake right down at the cuff. And then another mistake right at the start, when casting on the stitches to begin knitting. I went through the usual process;

step 1; stop and consider whether it mattered
step 2; surely no-one would notice
step 3; actually it would show
step 4 rip out the knitting and gather up the mental strength to start again.

No matter. I have another WIP to turn to; a blue medium-weight jumper I started in the Spring. It is knitted using a method called "top-down". You use "circular" needles

 
which means that you can knit round and round in circles. So, for a "top-down" jumper, you cast on for the neck, knit down as far as the shoulders, leave stitches on a holder to add sleeves in later, and continue down to the waist. Then you get some needles joined by a wire, go back to the hole you left for the sleeve and put those stitches on the needle and knit the sleeve down to the cuff. Are you with me so far?

The other way of knitting round and round and round is to use a set of four identical needles, with a point at each end;



you spread your tube of knitting around three (sometimes four) needles, and use another one to knit with. So you knit the stitches off a needles onto the spare needle, releasing a needles to knit the next lot with. I thought I'd try this technique with the second sleeve. Big mistake - I was well down the second sleeve when I discovered that my knitting was now much looser, so this sleeve was about an inch wider than the other one.

Deep breath, and rip out the sleeve. So, my blue jumper looks like this at the moment;

Because of the way the jumper is constructed, you can try it on before it is finished, which I did. I'm relieved to discover that it is a good fit, and I like it very much indeed. Which is just as well, as on Monday morning, after several inches of knitting, I found that I was doing the pattern incorrectly. Sigh. Still, I'm getting good at ripping back the stitches, and then carefully picking them all up again (the secret is to use a finer needle to pick them up). Last night I discovered one incorrect stitch about ten rows back. Sigh. Yes, it will matter. Half-an-hour's delicate work with a crochet hook, dropping the stitch down and working it back up again and all is well.

The advantage of this form of construction is that there will be no seams to sew up - once I have knitted the last stitch and darned in the loose ends, it will be finished. The disadvantage, is that as I knit round and round the sleeve, I have to keep turning the whole garment to untwizzle the knitting. It is also quite a warm thing to have bundled on your lap, which is why I took a break from knitting it during the spell of baking hot weather back in July. I'm hoping I finish it fairly quickly before I forget what I am doing and have to start over again...

Saturday 29th July - "It escapes, irretrievable time"

Time flies, knowledge will increase
An example of the phrase as a sundial motto in Redu, Belgium.

Tempus fugit is a Latin phrase, usually translated into English as "time flies". The expression comes from line 284 of book 3 of Virgil's Georgics,^[1] where it appears as fugit inreparabile tempus: "it escapes, irretrievable time". 

(Image and quote from wikipedia)



BB and I were enjoying a quiet morning and first-coffee-of-the-day. No 1 Son was still upstairs - he's over for the weekend.




I was completely surprised to hear a man sneeze upstairs!

Burglars!

How did they get in?

Then I remembered that No 1 Son is now of the age now that when he sneezes, he sounds exactly like a man.

Monday 24th July - It's Raining

Rain - like I said ages ago, I have a different view of rain now that I have a vegetable garden on the go.

I planted some seeds a week ago, and they have all come up! The radishes were first, but the pak choi, spring onions and beetroot have all got little shoots now.

spring onion

pak choi

spinach

beetroot, I promise...

radish

The peas and beans are growing like mad - we've had several meals of french beans so far. The peas never seem to make it into the saucepan, as we both like eating them straight from the pod. Freshly-picked straight from the pod! That's a revelation! I'm looking forward to home-grown sprouts.

peas

french beans

 

brussel sprouts beginning to form

Slugging, however, is going to have to become a regular activity. As you can see, they have been eating the peas and beans, and getting altogether too bold.

Slug on outside - us on the inside! 

I grab them with the silicone tongs and drop them into the garden recycling bin. Every time I open the lid, I discover them clustered around the rim, but they are too slow to make a dash for freedom.

The last lot of spinach bolted (I read that hot weather makes this happen) so I'm about to plan more, and some lettuce as well as we have actually had to BUY lettuce this week.

And how about this tomato! What a beauty!

The bay tree is surrounded by tomato plants which appeared from nowhere - proof positive that tomato seeds can survive composting. I've yet to see any evidence that they will produce fruit.

Vegetable gardening has been fun - so far - even with all the watering back in the dry weather.

Sunday 23rd July - A Whole Month since the last post!

Where has the time gone?

In increasing chaos as the end of term rushed towards me like some kind of Dr Who - Science Fiction - Special Effects - whirly-whirly-whirly thingy.

Every lesson I taught seemed to generate changes to the diary and a flurry of urgent emails and phone calls. At the end of the day I was in no fit state to attempt to type any coherent sequence of words. But at last, I have finished all the school lessons (and end-of-term assemblies and instrument checks).

                                                           


I've got six more piano lessons, two end-of-term socials and a drumming workshop scheduled for this coming week, none of which require any forward planning. That is, apart from turning up at the right place at the right time with the right accessories - be they sheet music, djembe drum or money.

I'm awaiting the results for three piano exam candidates. I don't hold out much hope for two of them but the third should be a properly good result. I've gone through all the results of all the exams I've entered pupils for since 1997 and discovered that, on the whole, my results are good enough, all things considered. So I'm not going to get upset over these two. I did as much as I could - that's my side of the teacher-student relationship.

Anyway - after nearly three days of  zoning out, saying and doing almost nothing, going nowhere, neither listening to nor watching anything much, I'm beginning to feel human again. Blogging will recommence!

(All clocks copied from www.awamon.co.uk)

Friday 23rd June - Nearly a Day Off

Apart from a piano pupil at 4pm, my diary was clear! That must be a first since Term started back in April. (Slight guilty conscience - I realised too late that I'd forgotten to warn the other members of a drumming group I lead that we weren't meeting this evening. Oh whoops)

So, what did I do?

I redeemed my voucher for a free drink and cake at Waitrose (Americano with hot milk, and a slice of lemon drizzle).

I ate sushi for lunch, bought from the new sushi counter at Waitrose. It was OK.

I did gardening. That took up most of the afternoon. I have these plants, bought on Monday, waiting to go into a newly/nearly cleared border.

 One of them is about four feet tall - slightly tricky getting it into my car.

Two were bought from a garden gate plant sale near a school I visit on Monday mornings. I took pictures of the detailed labels, as they had to be left behind. The tall one, with little purple flowers at the top, won me over with "... hardy...self seeds, self stakes, flowers over a long period".

The main attraction of this little silvery plant was the magic description "good ground cover in dry sunny places - SPREADS!"

So this blog will act as a reference when I've forgotten what they are called. The other two plants in the blue tub are geraniums, of the cranesbill type, chosen for "thrives in a poor soil". One has while flowers, the other purplish-pink.

Here's the flower bed; stage 1

stage 2, after he has attacked it with a sort of claw-hoe implement

and stage 3, after I have spent an hour digging over it with a hand fork, as I can't manage to drive a border fork into the compacted earth.

I'll ask him nicely to do the "dig a hole twice the size of the pot" business, and hopefully get the plants in before the end of the weekend. I've also got various pots of variegated ivy that I will put in, and then cover the whole lot with a fine bark mulch. Then any plant that appears subsequently will be considered to be a weed and removed with extreme prejudice. That's plan, anyway.

After a cup of tea, I turned my attention to the dining room table - it's got itself into a state again, somehow.

There's a bit more clear space now, and the heaps have been slightly reduced and squared up. That will have to do.

Nearly a day off?

Wednesday 21st June - New Look - Invisibility

I collected my new glasses this morning and have been wearing them all day.

For the past four years, every sing I started wearing varifocals full-time, from the moment I wake up, until the moment just before I turn out the light at bed-time, I have been wearing frameless glasses pretty much like these..


I thought it was time for a change. My new glasses have Metallic Purple/Red/Pink Frames!
Maybe a bit more red than the pink in this picture.

I have taught seventy-five children and worked alongside at least ten adults today since I put these glasses on.

The glasses appear to be invisible - I've only had one comment, from a child; "Have you just started wearing glasses?"

No dear, I've been wearing glasses for a long time now.

Does that mean the glasses are so unexpected and unsuitable that everyone is remaining tactfully silent? Or does that mean that they suit me so well that no-one has noticed?

I shall see what happens over the next few days.