Monday 27th August - "Just 2 kinds of stitches" part 1

Anita laid the knitting on the table and carefully measured its length. Just about one metre - perfect, time to cast off the stitches. The completed scarf lay in a loose coil on the table, the autumnal colours glowing gently. She ran her fingers over the fabric, enjoying the soft, springy texture, before taking a sewing needle and her personalised label to add the finishing touch; "hand knitted for NewCreations by Anita".

She folded the scarf and added it to the collection that was growing in the hamper in the corner of the workshop.

"How many is that now?" asked Lizzy,
"Ten, I think," replied Anita. Lizzy pulled out a ledger from the shelf nearby, and turned up Anita's page.
"No, that brings it up to a dozen," said Lizzy. "Do you want to do another the same, or try the new style?"
"Let's go for it," suggested Anita, looking as though she was preparing to do battle. "I'm sure I'll be able to get the hand of those cable patterns now."

The NewCreations workshop was an inspiring haven of warmth, colour and activity in a corner of the shopping mall. In one corner there was a row of hampers containing different hand knitted items; scarves, shawls, even whole blankets. There were shelves with baskets of yarns and tubs of knitting needles. Around the edges, a random variety of chairs were arranged informally in conversational groups, leaving space for a worktable in the centre. A few toddlers were playing with toys om the floor.

NewCreations had only been open for a month, and already it was getting a name as the new place to be. It was the brainchild of Lizzy, who had roped in some friends to get it going. The plan was to set up a group to help find work and employment for local people. Lizzie had settled on knitting as the basic medium as the raw materials - knitting needles and yarn - were easy to source. Her friends had been press-ganged into the enterprise because they they really knew how to knit. Lizzie was under no illusions about her own skills in that area.

Ideally there should have been months, or even years, of research and discussion before NewCreations opened, but that just wasn't Lizzie's way of working. She had gone round the shopping centre, eyeing up all the empty shop units, and then plunged into the management offices to cajole them into letting her have one on a temporary basis "after all, isn't it better to have something going on in an empty unit, if only to attract people to the shops either side and help them to keep going?"

A structure for the group was needed. There had to be some kind of way of agreeing a basic level of acceptable quality, and maintaining standards. A range of goods for NewCreations had to be agreed. Sue, one of Lizzie's friends, put up her hand for that, and put together a small portfolio of patterns, suitable for different skill levels. Lizzie wanted members to be able to start contributing as soon as possible after joining. Using the test swatches to create blankets and throws was a simple way to achieve this. The personalised labels was another of Sue's ideas. It made sense to give the knitters a personal connection with the group rather than turning them into anonymous workers.

The other local charity shops were a source for acquiring knitting needles, so the main investment had been the yarn. Newcomers to the group were given yarn and needles to either demonstrate their skills, or learn how to knit. Once the quality of their work was suitable, they started working for real, using the beautiful yarns piled enticingly on the shelves at the back. This was where Lizzie, Sue, and the other founder members had to put their hands into their pockets, and start committing their own money as well as their time to the project. Suddenly, it all became frighteningly real, frighteningly immanent.

to be continued

Sunday 26th August - "fitzing"

That's what my husband calls it - I don't know if he made it up, or if that is a "real" "technical" "term".

It's what he calls all that fiddling around with fonts and text centring and bold and italic and lining up and preview and what-have-you before you decide that the report/post/printout looks right.

Finally, after a long, long time, you press print or publish or send.

And then you spot the typos.

That's life.

Hay-on-Wye - Even further back in time

We arrived in Hay-on-Wye on the Friday afternoon, after a torrid journey through tedious holiday traffic (what else can you expect in August!) Having made careful enquiries about whether it was possible to turn up before the official time of 4pm, we were delayed and finally unfolded ourselves out of the car at 5pm.

Saturday was taken up by a round trip to Birmingham airport, to collect the fifth member of our party who was flying in from elsewhere. On the way back we stopped at Leigh Park Barn -

- look here - I may as well put you straight now. I am not going to post a chronological diary of the holiday. Just the bits I feel like writing about, when I feel like writing about them. OK? If you want a proper timeline, you will have to cut and paste and re-arrange things later for yourself.

Right, where were we.



Sunday was a non-car day. Thank heavens. We spent the morning pottering around the town and  I bought a couple of postcards to make sure of sending them off before we finished the holiday. One with a picture similar to this caught my eye:


It is a dry valley in the Gospel Pass, the highest paved road in Wales, a very old way through the Brecon beacons from Hay-on-Wye to Abergavenny.



  
Joy of joys, there was even a stone circle at the top.






The kind with little stones like this one in a rough circle.

 
It seemed to be a friendly little circle, more "domestic" than awesome. It felt quite - approachable, understandable. When I was younger, I remember visiting Stonehenge when you could still get upclose and personal - and a little scared - by the size of the whole thing.

 
 The views were breathtaking. (So was the wind).

 

I took the picture of the dry valley a little further on, before the long descent through increasingly civilised farmland down to Abergavenny (and the long, long wait until they could manoeuvre the broken-down tractorish kind of thing that was blocking the single-track road into a gateway to let us pass. "I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with... G". "Grass" "Yes, your turn"....)

Hay-on-Wye - Back in Time

It is only relatively recently that I have become a fully-fledged member of the internet community. That is, in my own small way.

Although I started a blog several years ago on Livejournal, I was frustrated by not being able to put pictures up, so rarely added to it. Last year I started www.themusicjungle.co.uk for various reasons, not the least for sharing (and thereby saving) music teaching thoughts, resources and ideas. that has now been going for a year and a week, three posts every week, updated every Friday (except when circumstances intervene).

Illustration for "My hat, it has three corners"

A feature of The Music Jungle is the artwork - I am lucky enough to be able to call upon the services of a talented artist from time to time!


One this has led to another, and now I am a blogaholic, both reading and writing them.


Facebook followed, and then I discovered Twitter! Oh, wow, how much time it takes, keeping up with all my friends (54, all people I know personally) and people I'm following (34, mostly people I've never met)

Well, Hay-on-Wye made a lovely change. Quite often the weather was good enough for us to sit out on the decking and admire the view from our self-catering "cottage" (think four-bedroomed town house). Quite often the weather was more like the picture.

The town was enchanting; a maze of old-fashioned streets, alleys and houses, some of the best craft shops I have EVER been to (and I am a bit of a craft shop junkie), and, of course, The Book Shops. Also, with disastrous consequences to my credit card, a Rohan shop. If you know about Rohan, you will know exactly what I mean.

Only one thing was lacking - internet.

No internet.

No blogs to read.

No possibility of writing up posts.

No twitter.

No facebook.

Aaaaaaargh!   

However, it was a very good holiday. More to come.

Later on Tuesday 14th August - progress, mostly forwards

Since this blog claimed to include "To-Do" lists I thought I'd better either change the description  or add a to-do/done list. This list deserving of a cup of tea, a piece of cake (except that the tin is empty) and a bit of a gloat.

Done:

So, I lifted the potatoes. I was wildly optimistic about the size of the bucket that I would need. If it were down to me to ensure our family's survival by the work of my hands and the sweat of my brow, then we are all doomed. Moral of the potato harvest - you get what you put in. I put a dozen or so potatoes that had got all over-excited in the potato bag, and left them to their own devices. At least I can eat these potatoes, the the exercise of foraging for them has probably done me some good.

When I was about 10, my grandmother gave me a year's membership of the Children's Book Club as a birthday present. Every month a hardback book would arrive through the post. This is how I came to read "The Runaway Settlers" by Elsie Locke. It made a big impression upon me, and left me with a vague hankering, even at that age, for self-sufficiency, growing-your-own.

Only a hankering. Only vague. I'm a big fan of Waitrose.

The washing is in the machine. And the next load is waiting... but for how long? Who knows.







 I finished the blanket square, and reached the base layer of the dining room table.  
On the way to the base layer of the table, I discovered all the instrument inventories from the different schools I worked in last year, updated the spreadsheets and files the paperwork. I also excavated a couple of cardboard boxes waiting to be used for something useful, and relocated them to the garage.







The cake is in the oven (yoghurt cake - it's the only one I make at the moment because it is so very, very quick and easy). Chocolate this time - replace half a pot of flour with cocoa powder, and dollop in what might be about a tablespoon of baking powder, and use half and half dark brown sugar and caster sugar. I'm not including a picture of it baking in the oven until the oven has been cleaned. There are limits to what one is allowed to exhibit to the unsuspecting reader. 

Tuesday 14th August - To do, done, not going to get done

 Done:

(Writing "done" things on a "to-do" list is a cheat, but it makes me feel better.)

1. Sort out hospital appointment
2. Phone the people about collecting the bed (they are out)
3. Put an email round about getting hold of an IKEA catalogue - you can only get the hard copy by collecting it from a store - "otherwise you have to browse on-line"
4. Deliver another four bags of stuff to Age
5. UK - they take dressmaking snips and snaps - hooray! (It's a bit depressing that delivering 10 bags and boxes of stuff to various charity shops in the last week has made no appreciable difference in the amount of clutter in the house)
6. Sort out the number of stitches you need to cast on to knit a 6 inch square (to make blankets to give to the Red cross) using 4mm needles and double knitting wool (yeah, my needles may be metric but I'm still Imperial. You may bow or curtsy if you like.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Do:

1. Knit the flippin' square for real, now I know that it isn't 50 or 30 or 35 stitches that are needed - the organiser blithely estimated 50 stitches, and I believed her. To help out, I've knitted a few trial runs to work out what's right. Her plan is to produce blankets for the Red Cross which I will thoroughly approve of when I am restored to a better frame of mind. It's 33 stitches.
2. Tidy the dining room table - again, again, again. I nearly bought an "inspirational" book for my Kindle called "The Fifteen Minute Rule", or some such. I looked at the preview, and the "inspirational" idea is - pretty inspirational; any task can be chipped away at, from tidying to tax returns, in fifteen minute bursts. The writer is so upbeat and optimistic. It worked for her.
3. Which reminds me. The Tax Return.
4. Washing. nearly out of pale clothes, which could be catastrophic or embarrassing, or just irritating.
5. Make cake.
6. Choose flavour of cake.
7. Lift the potatoes
8. Weeding and general garden warfare.

Not going to get done:

1. Probably the Tax Return.
2. Most likely the dining room table.
3. Garden warfare. I feel a pacifist phase coming on. And the nettles and briars are truly triffidous. I expect they are good for wild life. As are the slugs and snail under every leaf.   

Omissions:

Nothing about music practise here
or ironing.....................
or housework................

Oh well.

"Tomorrow is another day"