dozenoaks

Wedding: Knitting II

2012-01-31T03:34:00.000Z

I'd decided, after making my gloves, that everything intended for the wedding should be made in Alice Starmore's yarn. I'm pretty sure I made this decision during our stay in Scotland, because when you're surrounded by that landscape it seems purely logical to fill your life with it. The depth of colour in Alice Starmore's yarn is vertigo inducing and the colours really are of that landscape. We'd wistfully toyed with the idea of having our wedding in Balnakeil when we got engaged, but logistically it wasn't possible - organisation wise or guest transportation wise. It takes days to get there and back. And as much as we'd have liked a party on the beach, it could easily have been storms, gales and deeply unpleasant at any time of year. Using Alice Starmore's yarn at least made me feel like I was bringing a bit of Scotland's landscape south (we did literally bring Scotland south too - more of which later).

The next projects I trained my knitting laser focus on were for 'The Next Generation' - the kids of my brother and sister. My eldest niece is six and wanted to be a bridesmaid beyond anything (she described the day later as the best day of her life - really). My youngest niece was too young for her matching shawl and didn't want to wear it, which was a shame but predictable. My nephew was angelic and looked smashing in his owl jumper, he has a thing for owls so he even liked it.

The two shawls were another Ysolda pattern - this time Ishbel. Scottish yarn + Scottish (in name at least) pattern = much better match for Ishbel than the Debbie Bliss "Pure Silk" I originally made this pattern in for myself, back in 2009. I used Hebridean 2 ply in colour "Strabhann" - turquoise blue that results "when a clear, unpolluted sea comes in over such a pure, pale beach". The jumper is of course owlet, designed by Kate Davies. This time knitted in the Aran weight Bainin in colour Suilven. This is what Starmore has to say about the colour Suilven:

From where I live, on a clear day I can see the whole north-west coast of Scotland from Cape Wrath down to the Isle of Skye. This coastline takes the form of a magic mountain range, seen sometimes in silhouette and sometimes in glorious snowy detail when the weather is cold. SUILVEN is directly opposite me across forty miles of sea: a teal-blue spike of Torridonian Sandstone pointing straight into the sky.

I think we took roughly a bajillion pictures of Suilven in the snow during that Christmas.

Getting dressed. Photo by Laura Babb

Walking down the aisle. Photo by Laura Babb

Failing to convince niece #2 to wear her Ishbel. Photo by Laura Babb

Photo by Laura Babb

One of favourite pictures, just because. Photo by Laura Babb

Wedding: Knitting I

2012-01-29T23:35:00.001Z

Having introduced our lovely photographer I get to finally blog all the knitting I did for our wedding. Woop! When we wrote the first draft of the words for the RocknRoll Bride submission I included far too much knitting information - why I chose the yarn, what the patterns were etc etc. It took a few gentle hints from Dan to make me realise no one but knitters likes that stuff. Now I will indulge myself in all the knitting goodness, because the knitting part of the wedding and knitting in general is important to me for lots of reasons. Firstly, it calms and relaxes me - the repetitive motions are very soothing (I won't dwell too much on what that means for my autistic spectrum tendencies). Secondly, it's a creative release and I've always loved making things. Finally, there's a big emotional factor too.

I love knitting for the people in my life. You've thought about that person for every stitch you've made. I know I'm supposed to be a scientist, but when I hand over something like that - where I've thought about and loved that person for thousands of stitches - I feel like the knitting carries the love and somehow that person should be kept safer for having the knitted thing. The wedding needed knitting, because it needed to be loved. There's no logic in that, but weddings in general aren't logical.

Photo by Laura Babb

The first bit of knitting was my gloves (rav link). The pattern is Ysolda's Veyla. As soon as we booked a November wedding I wanted gloves, and Veyla is so pretty and refined it wasn't even a decision. I knitted most of them during our stay at Balnakiel in April 2011, with wool I'd already stashed carefully away for something special. Dan bought me the wool - Hebridean 2 ply in Pebble Beach - not long after this post by knitting idol Kate Davies was published, extolling the virtues of Alice Starmore's colours. Pebble Beach is as beautiful in person as Kate made it sound and the wool spent a long time in pride of place on the stash shelves, ready to be fondled and gazed at as I walked past it. This moment was also the time I became slightly obsessed by grey as a colour. Because I love colour and grey seemed to have the ability to be all colours at once and yet shift and change through many different shades through the course of a day. I wanted a grey wedding dress. Close friends looked horrified when I told them this. I made those gloves long before I had an idea what my dress would be like, because if the dress didn't go with the gloves, I didn't want it.

Photo by Laura Babb

Wedding: Photographs

2012-01-28T23:15:00.001Z

In last years relentless march to emigration, I just plain forgot to take any decent pictures of the wedding knitting. Half of it now lives in a different country, so the only images I have are from our wedding day itself. Thus, before I can talk about the knitting or any of the other decoration bits and pieces, I have to introduce the absolutely wonderful Laura Babb.

I've mentioned before that we won Laura's services through RocknRoll Bride. For that we had to describe our wedding, why we were doing things a certain way, and put together a mood board. The mood board bit was a lot of fun: trying to write about really personal things without sounding like cringe-inducing-hyperbole-spouting bride-to-be was less so (so I'm not repeating it here!). The bulk of the board was done in a hotel room in Philly whilst we were flat hunting in October. It was so close to our wedding day that it wasn't so much a mood board as a "this is what's happening" board. Laura specifically asked for the images used to be credited properly so she could publish the board, which is obviously very sensible. I don't think she was quite anticipating the scientist's take on that - a full on graphical key. You don't need to tell a scientist about referencing...

The image references:

The Owl Service Plate, from Griselda Greaves’s drawings
The Owl Service, by Alan Garner
Print by Graham Sutherland
Original water colour and ink artwork of an ‘assembled’ owl, by myself
Plant skeleton photograph we took on a Boxing Day walk
Leaf bunting and snowflake lights from our mantle in Autumn 2010
Psychedelic Deer digital art, by TEVR
Original water colour by Ola Liola
Monster drawing on a Post-it by John Kenn
Original illustration by Sandra Diekmann
Wild Catalope illustration by Sarah Barrett
Original water colour by Ola Liola
The MacMillan Hunting Ancient tartan from Lochcarron of Scotland
A man in a kilt, seen on rockmywedding.co.uk (photographs by Elemental Photography)
Our save the date card
Our invitation
A Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell
Woodland table spread, seen on designsponge.com
Autumnal wedding cake, Andies Specialty Sweets
Lichen covered twig centre pieces, StudioChoo for designsponge.com
Our wedding rings from Precious Jewelry Design
Album cover for “A Garland of Song” by The Owl Service
Album cover for “Too Long in this Condition” by Alasdair Roberts & Friends
The Green Man from the Green Man Festival 2010
My wedding dress, from BHLDN
The Owl and the Pussycat, original mixed media illustration by myself

Laura and her partner Pete were brilliant on the day and before. We were so, so lucky to have them there. We had this idea of what we wanted the wedding to look and feel like for everyone and despite having no time we put a lot of effort into trying to make it happen. Somehow - and I have no idea how - Laura managed to capture the atmosphere we were trying to create in her photos. For heavens sake - there's even pictures of us wearing antlers with halos! I had not anticipated the mood board coming to life in quite such a literal way and, sat as we are thousands of miles from the event, the photos are a precious record of a transient moment.

Wedding Stationary: Part III

2012-01-24T02:01:00.001Z

The final paper wedding project was the order of service. For the most part it was made of repurposed invitation and 'save the date' artwork - for visual continuity as much as anything else. The front cover got printed onto brown kraft paper and that came out much better than anticipated.

The first page was a result of inspiration from The Natural Wedding Company blog. A thank you to everyone who was there to witness the service. Our wedding day wasn't just about us. A big part of our motivation was thanking everyone who'd given us so much support through the years. We've been together a long time and we've relied heavily on family and friends to prop us up even when they didn't realise they were doing it, especially during the PhD years. Everyone seemed to have a lot of fun finding their names too.

Front cover

'Thank You' page and 'The Owl and the Pussycat' (Edward Lear) - read brilliantly on the day by my sister and my niece.

The second reading was 'The Marriage of Psyche' by Kathleen Raine - although pulled by us from the 'Ring of Bright Water' by Gavin Maxwell, where the otter sketches also come from.

A snuggled up Killer and Vince illustrated 'Reading the Banns' by Simon Armitage. We made a playlist for before the ceremony and had tracks for signing the register and leaving the hall - we listed them all on the back page.

A detail of 'The Owl and the Pussycat' illustration - this was an adjusted scan of a mixed media style Valentine's Day card I made for Dan in... 2010? I think?

All the text was backed by a grey falling leaf pattern I originally made for the save the date card to stop the page looking so flat. It helped give the pages a more delicate and refined finish that I was quite pleased with.

Vincey Cat hides among the reeds...

Wedding Stationary: Part II

2012-01-22T09:00:00.000Z

Dan gave me 'The Owl Service' by Alan Garner for my birthday in 2011. The story is about a girl named Ali who becomes possessed by a mad owl/flower/women spirit. It's a sixties folk horror classic about... well I'm not sure what it's about to be honest, but we loved it. The Owl Service became the nexus for planning our wedding.

Part of the reason we wanted to send out real invitations (apart from the fact we just like them) was to get people excited and give them an idea of what they might expect. The invitations went out as a little packet in brown paper envelopes - I think we both had in mind those Don't Panic envelopes we used to pick up on nights out as students, which were always full of intriguing bits of paper and card. Our packet included the invite itself, the RSVP card to post back and a mysterious line drawing of a decorated plate printed on tracing paper (the owl service itself).

If I've piqued anyone's curiosity, both the book and the original bonkers/unsettling TV series are available. I also just discovered this amazing knitting pattern whilst hunting for my original sources - I know I'll be casting that on as soon as is humanly possible. The folk band aren't bad either!

scan of the original water colour I made for the invite

the finished invitation

original water colour and ink Owl illustration based on The Owl Service

the finished RSVP postcard

The Owl Service plate from Griselda Greaves's drawings

Wedding Stationary: Part I

2012-01-21T04:02:00.002Z

With the insane tangle of life changing events that 2011 will always be remembered for in our house, planning our wedding was usually the bottom of the heap on the never-ending-list-of-things-to-do (a bit like The Never Ending Story but more stressful and without the cool flying dragons and 80s wardrobe). Probably it was a good thing - it kept the wedding monster inside me in perspective - and meant the process was a happy distraction most of the time.

However little the time and money there seemed to be, we still wanted to create a handmade moment to start our new lives. It started with "The stationary". I was morally against paying anyone to do it for us. This, if anything, was the moment my creatively obsessed kid-self had been waiting for her entire life. The invitations meant more to me than the dress - I knew I had no hope of making my own dress on any kind of meaningful time scale.

It started with a save the date card. A sketch of our two cats hiding in leaves. In between sending the cards to the printer and their arrival on our doorstop ready to post, we lost cat number one. A horrid tweak of fate that got repeated later in the year. I try not to dwell on that too much in case I jinxed both our kitties by drawing them.

That was the year that was: Killer and Vince

2012-01-20T00:13:00.000Z

For better or worse our grand scheme of moving to America included carting our kitties with us. Sadly (very, very, very sadly) for us it was not to be. We were (and continue to be) devastated by the sudden death of Killer-Cat and the subsequent rapid fade of Mr Vince. Our home, in any country, feels sad and quiet without the pitter patter of little paws and the sound track of Killer's constant commentary. It was probably for the best that we weren't given time to dwell on it too much last year. We made them a secret part of our wedding - hopefully the kind of secret that will bind us together.

chocolate covered pretzels

2012-01-18T01:52:00.001Z

We've been living in America for over a month now. It was a slow start, what with not having social security numbers and all that jazz - but we're climbing slowly! We now have WiFi at home, a bank account, an account with the electric company - all the good stuff. We don't have any furniture yet and the apartment is a little sad since the Christmas tree had to go, but it's pay day soon so hopefully a sofa isn't too far away. A course summary of first impressions:
Likes

maple syrup
chocolate covered pretzels
sparrows
scrapple
jerky
ice hockey (go Flyers!)
the ever changing colours of Philly's skyline (and)
the view from our apartment
blood oranges in bulk

Dislikes

social security numbers
bonkers licensing laws
banks
the lack of supermarket online shopping and home delivery options
calling the main course an entree
the price of butter, tea bags and marmite
our neighbours

Things I miss about home (without mentioning our nearest and dearest)

rain
humid air
the dim slanting light of winter
the smell of the undergrowth
furniture
blackbirds and robins
our garden (trying not to think about that one too much)
heating that works
everything!

a geek moment

2012-01-15T15:36:00.000Z

Full of the Joys of a new project and faced with a blank, drab and dreary new desk, I made a graphic CMYK codon usage wheel to stick on my wall and brighten the place up a bit. The letters in the middle are the RNA nucleotides: uracil, cytosine, adenine and guanine. Working from the middle out gives you the first, second and third nucleotide in the codon. The letters around the outside are the single letter code for the amino acid that codon encodes. For example: Cyan, Yellow, Cyan = CGC = R = Arginine.

I was going to make it in a nice tasteful blue configuration, but I was listening to Neon Indian at the time and well.... you see the result!

Click on the image to download and print - offered free to scientists everywhere looking for something jolly for their work environment. Absolutely not to be used for profit of any kind.

New Years Breakfast

2012-01-14T03:09:00.001Z

Before heading out to our inaugural Philadelphia New Years Day Mummers Parade we needed a hearty breakfast. When we gazed into the cavern of our ginourmas American Fridge we didn't come up with much, but we had the essentials of eggs and bacon (really good smoked Amish bacon too). Eggy bread? Boiled eggs and soldiers? Straight bacon and eggs with toast? When we pulled the bread out it had the beginnings of mould. Dan suggesting cutting off the the mouldy bits. For the purposes of this particular story you should now imagine a light bulb going off over my head....

One of my presents from Santa this year was "North Pole Animal" cookie cutters. Stale bread was now wolves, polar bears, sea lions, whales and penguins.... We'll ignore the fact that the manufacturers of these fine cutters didn't know the basic zoological fact that penguins don't live at the North Pole. The Wolf cutter makes up for that.

Step 1: Cut our your animals and soak them in beaten egg

Step 2: Fry gently...

... on both sides

Step 3: Serve with a fine dusting of cinnamon, a decent glug of maple syrup, and fried bacon... mmMMMmm

Wedding-ness

2011-12-07T18:38:00.001Z

Our wedding has been featured on Rock-n-Roll Bride. The incurably curious can click through. We can take credit for the styling (and the knitting - to be blogged at some point), but it was all beautifully captured by our amazing photographer, Laura Babb. I admit we got her for free, but she comes highly recommended from us at any rate!

the long goodbye *

2011-11-27T11:34:00.001Z

Friday night was date night. We crammed in enough London-centric activities to stem the pre-emptive home sickness. Dinner at the Oriental Canteen; beer in a random pub; ice skating at the Natural History Museum; last orders champers at St Pancras whilst ogling the Lego Christmas tree. Then home, where we sank an entire bottle of left over wedding prosecco and a box champagne truffles whilst watching Merlin on iPlayer. I hope we can figure out iPlayer in Philly, otherwise sanity may start to drift.

* This was an experiment in mobile blogging with Dan's iPhone. I'm sat in bed with my laptop. #fail

for our next trick...

2011-11-25T15:26:00.001Z

When I commented back in February that "January 2011 was epic, but the rest of 2011 isn't likely to be any different", it wasn't an understatement. That seems like much longer than 260 days ago. Since then we've been battling through a year with even more phenomenal sized waves of peaks and troughs than we'd expected. As John Cage once said to Ally McSqueal "If you think back, and replay your year - if it doesn't bring you tears of joy or sadness, consider the year wasted". This was not a year wasted - there have been plenty of tears of both sorts, not least the good kind on our wedding day. In fact so much happened this year (and is still to happen) that if nothing AT ALL happens next year, we'll be very happy indeed. To summarise crassly and in list format, key life events so far:

four weddings (including our own),

three funerals (including our cats - yes, they got funerals too),

mega flat maintenance (plaster off, walls injected, plaster back on, painted),

grant writing and interviews,

financial tightrope walking,

finding tenants and becoming landlords,

sorting out visas and contracts for the big move to Philly,

a (weekend) trip to the US to find somewhere to live

Somehow in all of this we've managed to stay sane. For my part that might be down the crazy amount of knitting I managed to squeeze in for the wedding. Right now though, we're standing on the edge of the next big adventure*:

Last day of current job, 2nd of December

Flight to US, 9th of December

First day of new job, 12th of December

I have a shed load of faffing about at work to do so I'm ready to leave, but it's all too dull. Hence sitting here, writing guff instead. This space needs to come back into action though. To relive the peaks and troughs of this year and to savour the adventure as it unfolds in the next.

* The lists have been all encompassing and very long this year. The habit is potentially now irreversibly ingrained. If it's not on a list it doesn't happen.

the dan hat

2011-02-12T17:10:00.001Z

here has been quite a bit of knitting action through these winter months, but there's been so little light to take photographs that most of my works in progress remain undocumented. This hat is special though. For Christmas Dan bought me two skeins of Alice Starmore's Pebble Beach, which is every bit as spectacular as one would hope. He asked to have something made with the yarn and fortunately the Pebble Beach acted as a missing piece in the puzzle. Dan has needed a new hat for a while and I've been ruminating on a tweed stitch for a long time too. I combined it with Rowan Scottish Tweed 4 ply in Blue Mist, Apple and Sea Green from my stash and a mystery brown tweed from a cone I bought in a Kentish Town charity shop. I'm quite proud of the result, so proud in fact that I've spent my free time in the last week writing up the pattern. It's not my first design, but it's the most complete and elegant construction I've managed to date. It's up on Ravelry as a free download.

he pictures of Dan and the hat were taken at Alexandra Palace, just after we bought my very sparkly engagement ring from the antiques fair. Ally Pally was an apt place to get the ring, as it's where it all started for us almost seven years ago at our univeristy Summer Ball.

From disaster to hope: February begins

2011-02-02T08:38:00.000Z

he most amazing thing about a garden at this time of year is how quickly it returns back to life. Even as I was looking at it and feeling completely despondent, that I had let all my previous years of hard work down, things were happening underground. As I've cleared up I've uncovered many things and already the garden looks like the stage is being set for springs arrival. It's hard to express how I feel about the winter honeysuckle, it's the centre of life in our garden and the very first thing to say hello to the new year. It flowers for weeks upon weeks and, thanks to the number of bird feeders hung in it, it's the centre of bird and bee life in our garden too.

s I cleared the leaves from the surface of the pond I found this amazing creature. A very beautiful and very fat frog (with a distinct scottish twang in it's croak of course). Dan and I are hoping that this frog is a girl frog that this will be the spring we finally get frogspawn. She/he was too fat to get through the pond net, so I gently removed some of the leaves and peeled away the net so it could escape into the pond proper.

'm now aware that the world has moved on a little and it's February. This is a relief to be honest, as January was rather crazed. We achieved great things in January - we completed on our flat so it's finally ours, Dan secured a job in Philadelphia and I wrote my first grant application. We also took one or other of the cats to the vet on a weekly basis, but that's another story. January 2011 was epic, but the rest of 2011 isn't likely to be any different. In the months to come this year we are going to get married and then emigrate to the US.

My love is home

2011-01-26T08:42:00.004Z

My love is home and the house smells of winter honeysuckle.

K-cat

2011-01-24T23:15:00.002Z

I couldn't resist these images of our Killer Cat, even if they are out of focus. He's very over protective for a cat. Last weekend when I was trying to catch up on the back log (pruning the roses and the fruit) it was not a particularly auspicious day whether wise. Grey, damp and gusty. Killer doesn't like us being outside in the garden in this sort of weather (stupid humans), so he follows us around shouting at us to get back in the house. Literally. He won't shut up, but he won't go in. When it finally looks like we're giving up he runs inside. (The final picture is me flat out on the sofa: Dan took it while I was asleep because the K-cats position amused him so much. It's the one eye open that gets me...

The Catalogue of Disasters: Part Two, Back Garden

2011-01-23T23:14:00.000Z

hould probably crack on with the catalogue of disaster so I can move on and start sorting it out. Above is the back garden in its half rotten glory. The lawn is more moss than grass and the borders are barren. I know it's not the best time of year, but it could have been so much better. When I pulled out the teasles last year I planted up some brassica in their wake. I'd given up on the 'vegetable patch' as it gets very little sun and nothing ever thrived in it, so I put the empty borders to use instead. Take a look at my veg now:

hat's what you get for not protecting your lovely leafy greens from the slug and snail population. Money (not much admittedly, but still), time and effort wasted. Moving on from Exhibit B, we have Exhibit C - a closer inspection of the aforementioned vegetable plot. The strawberries are alive but that's about it. There were a lot more cabbages here too - but they've entirely disappeared. Note the fallen over bird table in the corner, sooooo this season daaaaarlinks, every garden should have one.

inally, Exhibits D (above) and E (below). We didn't pick the leaves from the surface of the net and then with the weight of snow and ice in December, the net collapsed. Stinky leaves, yum. More on that later. The last image is a Pieris. A grew this as a cutting taken from my Mother's garden. It had never thrived - barely grown in four years - until this summer, when I finally figured out it needed acid soil and started treating it accordingly. It put out a great rush of leaves at the end of the summer and was looking very happy. Now it's new arms have been broken under the weight of snow. I hope it recovers, there are still some intact branches, but I have not made its life easy.

The Catalogue of Disasters: Part One, Front Garden

2011-01-20T08:37:00.001Z

s sworn by myself, the current situation of the `garden'. It is at this point necessary to say I'm not sure I can call myself a gardener anymore - more someone who happens to own a garden. First up, the rarely photographed and much maligned front garden. It's always been an issue, since before we even moved in. The builders/cowboys dumped all the rubble on it and compacted the earth, destroying any vestiges of plant life in the process. As with the back garden we inherited scrubland, but with two fatal flaws: firstly, there's a lot of clay in this patch that's almost impossible to dig; secondly and probably more importantly, as it's on the street it's not a nice place to work - one feels very exposed.

he hedge at the back is the hawthorn hedge we planted 4 years ago, and it grows well. Two summers ago we fought with the clay and grew potatoes to keep the weeds down and break up the soil. It was about 50% successful. This summer we sowed green manure to try and break up the soil more. I'm not convinced it worked at all, but the remains of this sowing is what you can see now because we never had time (or inclination) to dig it in. Dan's idea is to build raised beds and add compost/topsoil/grit over the top. A good suggestion, but I'm worried this will effectively created a clay-pot under whatever we plant and stop them becoming established. Beds would be separated by small paths so we can walk around the square easily, established using membrane dressed with slate, gravel, wood-chip or similar. Also a good idea, but I'm inherently mistrustful of membrane (as is Dan). It's an easy solution to keep the weeds down to be sure, but I dislike the artificial separation between earth and sky it creates. On the other hand, this is basically central London so my feelings on the matter are probably irrelevant; this patch of earth exists surrounded by brick and concrete, if it looked less abandoned it would know doubt be a win for all passersby and it's certainly not supporting much wildlife right now. Opinions?

Last of the melting snow

2011-01-11T11:46:00.000Z

hese images were taken in the deep snow before Christmas, just before midnight I think. London (or any big town or city I imagine) glows orange in the snow, every surface becomes luminescent. The exposure on the camera wasn't even that long to capture these images. This was the prettiest the garden had looked for a very long time, under it's forgiving iridescent blanket. I'd like to say it was the weight of snow which has led to our borders currently looking like abandoned strips of municipal earth, but sadly the neglect goes much further back to at least September. I am setting myself the challenge this weekend of cataloguing the dire straits of the garden, both front and back, and putting together a new year plan of action. This is the year of being organised - there's too much going on to be anything less than hyper-efficient.

Boxing day walk: extreme knitwear edition, with added tweed

2011-01-04T21:39:00.000Z

Last spring's hat, ancient noro scarf, buchanan tartan wool scarf, new wool coat, harris tweed boots, norwegian gloves.

the ice road up the hill (literally)

Dan sporting his new red merino wool long-johns. He's mighty pleased with them.

The view. Pretty spectacular as it turned out. England covered in snow when the haar rolls in.

Other Christmas Craftiness

2011-01-03T11:06:00.000Z

he Christmas cards were done while I was in the recovery phase from a bout of flu that knocked me clean off my feet in the middle of December. Not fun. Poor Dan had to take care of me knowing it was only a matter of time before he succumbed himself. Still, there was other Christmas mischief to be had once I was well. I treated myself to a wreath ring this year. My effort is fairly simplistic, but it does the job well enough.

Christmas cards

2011-01-01T15:12:00.000Z

leaves on the line

2010-11-11T20:44:00.000Z

the leaves fell

and old biochem text books came in useful for pressing a few

before they were strung along an orange ribbon to decorate the chimney breast

the snowflake lanterns are out (Dan's request - not my fault for once) as the're too pretty for only two weeks a year.

Process

2010-11-03T13:25:00.000Z

Trick or Treat?

2010-10-31T22:44:00.000Z

Success and Failure

2010-10-28T15:59:00.000+01:00

ts' grim, wet, windy and cold. The growing season is over. In an attempt to learn from our mistakes, I shall now take stock and recount the successes and failures of our growing year - for which I had such huge aspirations.

Success: Very early sowings of spring peas. Delicious.
Fail: No where near enough home grown peas! I failed again to get good successional sowings going. The first batches I planted in loo rolls in the cold frame did very well. The rest I tried to direct sow when the weather was warmer failed miserably. Eaten by slugs I suppose. We were a lot less diligent on the slug hunts I think than in previous years.

Success: Our first apple!
Fail: Hardly any strawberries. I split last years plants before they were well enough established to deal with it.

Success: Tomatoes in large quantity and four varieties.
Fail: Last year I grew the tomatoes in tiny pots where they struggled valiantly and gave some yield at least. They were very straggly though, and kept falling over in the wind as well as running out of water constantly. This year I bought them massive pots, but they just grew four times as big, became even more ungainly and still toppled over.

Success: Cucumbers (Burbless Tasty). Had quite a few through the summer, think we got the hang of them this year. Probably would have increased yield with better feeding, but I think I failed most things on the feeding front in the latter half of summer.
Fail: Courgettes and Pumpkins/squash, or lack there of. Epic, epic fail. I sowed courgette seed late and most of it failed to germinate anyway. The two that did were miserable things and barely flowered. Good germination with the pumpkins and squash, buckets of flowers in many cases, but never a fruit you could eat. Again, I suspect I failed them on the feeding requirements, in that they didn't really get anything. Bad me.

Success: I grew a variety of miniature aubergines (Ophelia) this year. Much more successful than the fully grown kind and we had several fruits. Highly recommended. Dan's cousin who lives just round the corner grew nothing but aubergines of the larger variety this year and got nothing for her trouble, so there you go.
Fail: Despite the relative success of baby aubergines, there weren't that many. Most came towards the end of the season when there was precious little sunshine to bring them on (a common problem with aubergines). It's hard to know whether they're worth the space given to them.

Fail, fail, fail, fail: Carrots, parsnips and anything else we tried to grow in the "vegetable patch" - the raised area at the end of out garden than in another situation would be perfect as such. As it is, it's too shady by far and nothing thrives. Time to rethink where to grow things.

is cold...

2010-10-25T00:30:00.000+01:00

So, after the big day of emerging from my chrysalis into a post PhD world, I almost immediately got on a plane to the US. Not for a holiday like what normal people do, but for interviews for my next job. September was quite grim in parts here I seem to remember, but the skies of Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia were clear blue in the beginning of October. In fact it was 28+ degrees C in Baltimore, which was hotter than we'd experienced for the majority of summer. This confused me a bit I think, 'cause it's felt bloomin' cold here since I came back. It feels like the dead of winter to me already, like Autumn missed us - which is sad because I am fond of Autumn. I'm still trying to tinge the house with orange nevertheless. I have to decorate the house somehow to stave off my desires to drench everything in Christmas cheer way too early to be decent....

The gnarly pumpkin got a lift home from the farmers market on the back of my bike. Amusing and tragically north London at the same time. In a brief period of relaxation and heady creativity I crocheted some lichen for the dried teasel heads (yes they're still knocking about). I'm sure I got the inspiration for this activity someplace on t'interweb, but for the life of me I can't remember where. There must have been good vibes in the air, because Dan was inspired to take plenty of photos.

Dr. Dozenoaks

2010-10-03T11:41:00.001+01:00

No longer am I "a 27 year old graduate student in the final throws of a PhD". It's all over. I'm done! I wish I had some sort of celebratory picture to go with this, but the state of disorganisation round here is epic...

Teasels

2010-07-23T17:00:00.005+01:00

'm still obsessing over the Bees, but the Bees themselves are currently obsessing over the teasels, to the point where they're pretty much covered in pollen. Quite honestly, from even the most disinterested garden design standpoint, the teasels are a disaster. They're biennial so I've not had them in the garden before now, and it's been a long wait. But they're too huge in this compact London space, and currently choking out more delicate things. I'm still slightly in love with the prehistoric gigantic nature of the beasts, but it's a pleasure I'm going to have to put off for a grander scheme than this. Currently my dilemma is whether to yank them out after the Bees have done with them, or leave them so the Birds get some seed.... hmmmm. Opinions?

Small things I made

2010-07-22T19:31:00.000+01:00

ack in June, whilst there was no gardening or knitting to speak of, I did manage to find half an hour to make these lanterns and decorations for our winter honeysuckle. The strange bits of dangly ceramic were bought in a charity shop for not very much. Not sure what they were originally, but I fashioned some largish hooks out of heavy gauge wire and now they sit in the tree. While I was at it, I finally got round to adding handles to our old jars so they could hang in the tree too. Not exactly glamourous, but pretty enough at dusk.

f course the reason everything was so quiet was that all my energy was going into producing another thing entirely. That thing I made was my thesis. It was finally printed on Friday, bound on Monday and submitted on Tuesday. I'd like to think aspects of it were aesthetically pleasing, but a fair-isle sweater or well maintained veg-patch it is not. This is the start of a strange new world for me to be without it.

Amsterdam

2010-07-15T18:19:00.000+01:00

he first week of July I spent on conference in Amsterdam. I'd never been to Amsterdam before, had very few expectations and left feeling pleased with the place and wishing to spend more time there. It felt very familiar and easy, as well as peaceful and relaxing. The virtual complete lack of cars rendered an otherwise dynamic and exciting city, particularly easy to loll about it - especially along by the canals whilst drinking white beer. I spent most of my time here, in the RAI conference centre:

...but it was Amsterdam, so there were a few floral delights to be had amongst other more serious things. I was most enthralled by the streets giving birth to an impressive range of Hollyhocks that were seemingly growing straight out of the pavement.

made it to the flower market too, but honestly I was underwhelmed. It felt sterile and lifeless. I know I'm a spoilt rotten Londoner with my regular visits to Columbia Road Flower Market, which is a heady (and costly) experience any Sunday of the year. Yet, plant fetishist that I am (and particular lover of bulbs) I left Amsterdam without a purchase. The varieties of tulips on offer were dull and uninspiring, and everything else had 'Do not touch' signs on it. Half the pleasure of a trip to the market (or garden centre) is fondling the foliage and stroking the petals.... I'm not even giving space to the market photos, they can live together in this montage and be done with:

Created with flickr slideshow from softsea.

nyway, regardless of what was a minor dissappointment, here's to a pretty city, and to dreams of going back (still need to check out the Van Gogh museum at the very least, if only for the Dr Who geekery of it all). And if I can entice you further, here's a city guide from 6 music's Laverne show. Just to be ultra obnoxious, I got to go to a pretty cool party at Melkweg whilst in Amsterdam, it really is a cool place...

Poor you

2010-07-01T11:22:00.000+01:00

Poor blog, you are neglected. Just one post for the whole of June - you deserve better! Well consider this a resolution to make time for you in July. I think we've passed through the worst storms of work related woe that came in with June, and time will be made for all things garden and creative once more. On the plus side, there is a whole stock of photos from June just waiting in the wings for you - July will be better I'm sure of it.

Name that Bee

2010-06-12T10:54:00.000+01:00

e seem to have a broad variety of bees in our garden, and whilst pratting about photographing them I started to idly wonder what species they were, in that weird science-y way that sometimes comes over me... Thus, I found my new favourite toy from the always gothically mysterious, Natural History Museum: Bombus. Amazing. And so -

this is B. terrestris, the Buff-tailed bumblebee. Probably a worker but possibly a queen; the tail is quite yellowish.

This is a southerly specific bee, B.hypnorum or Tree bumblebee. Can't decide between queen, worker or male from this shot.

The wings are in the way here and its a bad angle for looking at his/her bottom... I know it's not terrestris by comparison so on that basis I'm going with B. lucorum the White-tailed bumblebee, but I'm not convinced.

the best thing about this game is that I know there's other species in the garden yet to be photographed...

The Unexpected

2010-05-31T20:46:00.000+01:00

our years ago, when we moved in to this flat and reclaimed the garden, very little was left to give that 'garden' feeling. I can list them very easily: winter honeysuckle, two neon pink roses, a leaf of a sedum which somehow grew into a clump, forget-me-nots, bluebells, a creamy peony and a half dead hydrangea. Oh and the one bramble we left in for fruit. That was it - literally. Every single other growing thing was added by us, including the lawn. This short list left quite large expanses of empty borders to deal with.

argely my approach was to dump whatever we managed to beg, steal and grow from seed into the available gaps based on what colours I wanted to see together with a cursory nod to conditions said plant would like to grow. Chaos was added by leaving anything to that wanted to self seed to it's own devices. Now, last year I plonked a load of alliums in, having never grown them before. This has led to a mixed result. Firstly the gloriously unexpected acidic colour combination above: allium purple sensation and welsh poppies. It's actually even better now, this picture is a week old - more alliums and more poppys in flower. I want to improve on this further by seeding more of the prolific poppies under the alliums over the summer. Unfortunately, the Mount Everest alliums did not fair so well. For one, they're midgets and you can't even see them at the backs of the borders and for another one lot is in a hopeless place and have been squished under cat traffic. The picture below is an official reminder to self to move these once they've finished they're attempt at flowering - together with the agapanthus and iris swamped under the unexpectedly huge hydrangea.

hile I'm here giving myself a list of things to do - I need to lift and divide the hostas and flag iris' behind the pond when the time is right:

Summers arrival

2010-05-27T10:26:00.000+01:00

o, my amateurish photo essay is over and no doubt the blog probably takes about 10 years to load up now. I suspect it matters not. The fond farewell to spring was ultimately timely though because summer hit London Town with a vengeance this weekend. Everything flopped in the extreme heat - me, Dan, cats, plants. A mass wilting in the garden. Upside: I managed to wash virtually every textile in the house as each load took approximately 10 seconds to dry in the heat.

here was nothing for it, but to watch the embryonic peas grow and eat barbequed products to excess. We had our first barbe of the season and to be honest, eating was all that happened all weekend. Massive South Indian curry on Friday night to celebrate our 6th anniversary, farmers market on Saturday morning, barbeque Saturday and Sunday evening. We have been eating large amounts of asparagus whilst it's in season, rather decadently for breakfast with poached eggs and stone baked English muffins. It was also the first appearance of strawberries at the market, from our favourite farmer who was the direct inspiration for our egremont russet apple tree. Mmmmm strawberries. They were good, all gone now...

tell a lie, we did achieve something. All the tomatoes, cucumbers and aubergines were potted up into their final positions. I bought a load of these watering spikes that I'm now fiddling with to get the water dripping just right. Trial and error, but getting closer. I think there a bit more lo-fi than their equivalent at harrod horticultural, but their 10% of the price and support Oxfam so I can deal with the minor fiddle to adjust the flow.

Spring 2010: Purple

2010-05-24T12:00:00.000+01:00

Spring 2010: Blue

2010-05-23T12:00:00.000+01:00

Spring 2010: Green

2010-05-22T12:00:00.001+01:00

Spring 2010: Yellow

2010-05-21T12:00:00.000+01:00

Spring 2010: Orange

2010-05-20T12:00:00.000+01:00

(I cheated a little, the butterfly is Dan's picture, and the socks are old even if the picture is new. Orange was hard!)

Spring 2010: Red

2010-05-19T12:27:00.001+01:00

Colours: a blog project

2010-05-18T23:13:00.000+01:00

missed garden bloggers bloom day this month (Saturday just gone) as life was a little too hectic to actually blog. I'd taken pictures of the blooms, but there was too much to deal with to be organised in time. No matter though, I had another blog project up my sleeve, and not including the blooms would probably help to that end...

ay way back at the beginning of spring, resurrection fern had a colour a day of spring themed images to look forward to the coming season (I can't find these posts just now, but they were there). This struck me as a brilliant idea because I'm a bit obsessed with colour, but I didn't have a large stock of photos to draw on. Over a few days this idea evolved in my head a little to a season in review. I gave myself a few flexible rules.

1. A week of colour, a colour a day, the colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. In the end, I struggled with the specificity of blue/indigo/violet and split this instead into simpler blue and purple catagories - thus 6 categories. I think now that I might change some of the colours with the seasons.
2. Images used focus on colour - so that colour choice over the set is obvious.
3. As many unblogged as possible (but not religiously).
4. Only new things, be it from the garden or things made or new experiences. The making has been very limited this past season so this time round it's almost all garden shots.
5. A review of each season: Spring, March/April/May; Summer, June/July/August; Autumn, September/October/November; Winter, December/January/February.

'm starting this tomorrow, Wednesday. I meant to start on Monday, but if I wait for an appropriate day I'll miss out again no doubt and it'll be another idea down the tube. And I'm keen on this, I think it'll be a nice experience and a good thing to look back on. So Wednesday it is.

eek!

2010-05-14T19:59:00.001+01:00

One of my pictures made picture of the week on Fennel and Fern, pretty exciting (This made my day when it popped up in my google reader). Check it!

I finally figured out what to knit

2010-05-10T15:26:00.000+01:00

ocks! I started this pair for Dan a long long time ago, one was even finished. A bit of mindless stockinette and a turned heel later and here we are. Dan has new socks, by brain feels a little better and I have solved my casting on problem. Small projects that don't require instructions is all my head can cope with right now, but I need the knitting action. It's not that I find knitting hugely relaxing in and of itself, but somehow it helps me think. If I'm not *doing* anything whilst living through a stressful situation, my brain gets too noisy and stressy and thinks too much. It gets on top of me. The knitting occupies enough of it to keep it under control during necessary fragments of down time, while other quarters finally figure out how to describe receptor endocytosis... (hopefully).

Wildlife

2010-05-06T15:40:00.001+01:00

e shifted the pile of rotten wood at the end of the garden over the weekend to make way for some autumn fruiting raspberries and we found a couple of friends :)

ast spring Dan and I carted frogspawn back from Scotland (we couldn't find any close to home at all - we tried!) to try and populate the garden with some slug busting help. We'd not seen any frogs/toads around at all and given our situation in a tarmac island with high walls, thought we were pretty unlikely to get any unless we helped out a bit. The frogspawn hatched and the froglets eventually left our pond. Periodically we'd find them on our midnight slug hunts through the dank summer of 2009. We thought we'd lost them though this spring. No sign of them anywhere till our neighbour told us he'd found some under his folded up greenhouse plastic. Then when we shifted the wood, down in the rotten leaves, one of our scottish frogs, all grown up. But... he'd also made a friend in Mr. Toad.

bad blurry photo due to lack of light

here was another larger, greener, frog under a second pile of wood we moved too. This pile was one of my purposefully built "habitats" for which I have endured a substantial amount of ribbing from Dan (and others). I did a short stint as a volunteer in the Natural History Museum wildlife garden as an undergraduate and they used to build wooden towers out of prunings and fallen logs for things to live in. I'm quite glad my silly habitat's have genuinely turned into homes for the creatures. I now want to crack open the one next to the pond to see if it has become a home too, but I shall resist and leave potential residents in peace.

A bit of a rant about "science" in gardening

2010-05-04T21:22:00.000+01:00

say "science", because what I'm referring to here is the misuse of scientific language in disseminations produced by two of this nations favourite gardening institutions. Gardening institutions that should, perhaps, know better. Whatever I might pretend in this space most of the time, I'm a scientist in my day job and my love of gardening is essentially linked to by love of biology and biochemistry. I like watching things grow and understanding that process - I get a kick out of it. I am a science geek and usually, when I'm not dealing with writing my thesis, I love it.

orticulture is a science, because horticulture is essentially biology. Scientist's have a lot to answer for I know, because most of them are so poor at translating their research to the less scientifically minded public. It's an issue I'm aware of. But there is also the issue of scientific buzz words leeking out of the science bubble and getting thrown around a lot by the media, without being properly explained. The two incidents that riled me were performed by the RHS and the BBC. Given the status of both these institutions I find it unbecoming, and because this is my blog I'm going to have a good old rant about it, because I can.

irst up, the RHS. One of their regular columnists, Ursula Buchan, upon bringing to her readerships attention that the pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) genome had been published in PLoS Biology, had this to say:

As even we non-scientists have come to realise, mapping a genome is an important step in making possible the modification of undesirable (to us) genes. Can it really be that I can contemplate, in my lifetime, caring for a garden with significantly reduced numbers of aphids in it? I do hope not.

ortunately, dear Lady, I doubt it - as your statement makes no sense. Agro-pharmaceutical companies will, no doubt, try and use this information to make pea strains resistant to aphids, or a pesticide specific to aphids. Should this be successful and either of these products made it to the point of public consumption in this country, you will have the choice of whether to buy them. If you choose not to, you can happily live in your aphid infested garden non-the-wiser. Scientists modify genes in the lab, largely to try and figure out what the protein products of those genes do. Just knowing a gene and deeming it 'undesirable' does not mean it disappears - just look at all those people who still have inherited genetically transmitted disorders (a couple tip of the iceberg suggestions: Huntington's Disease and Cystic Fibrosis). Knowledge of a gene does not instantly conjure up a ray gun to obliterate it at will. And to complicate matters, those genes you're targeting are usually essential, it's just a minor mutation that's rendered them 'undesirable' - obliterating them completely would ultimately kill you outright just as effectively. Perhaps you are confusing embryo selection in IVF with 'modification of ... genes". As far as I'm aware choosing which embryo to implant does not delete the gene in question in either or both of the parents, but gives them the choice not to pass it on through the application of mendelian genetics (which, incidentally, was developed by Mendel whilst studying peas - see, I'm almost forming a nice circular narrative). Good for them. If I carried Huntington's Disease alleles I'd do the same. Unless of course you're proposing that all the embryos of the pea aphid will be screened in some way? Given their short and prolific life cycle, this seems like a complete waste of man hours...

econd up is the unfortunate Toby Buckland of Gardener's World. Toby used the peculiar phrase "the same genetic age" when referring to a basal cutting of a sedum he'd just made. This phrase means nothing in this instance. His point was that his large cutting, with lot's of leaves and roots, was likely to flower that same year. And indeed it would have the same genes because he'd effectively cloned the parent plant. That's what coning is: multiplying something whilst keeping the genome identical. His cutting had the same genome, and it had a good chance of behaving like it was a similar age to the parent, because of it's established root and leaf systems. "Genetic age" though? If he'd taken a single leaf of the sedum and made a cutting, it would still be the same age as it's "parent" - it just would take a little time to grow up and flower. A lazy and inaccurate use of terminology does not help anyone.

Rant over

Gin tasting

2010-05-01T15:09:00.000+01:00

e tasted the home made sloe gin for the first time in the week. It was really really good. Dan wants to give some away as Christmas presents. I'm not convinced we have any to spare...

End of the month garden view: April 2010

2010-04-30T10:17:00.000+01:00

ack again for garden view the second, hosted by the Patient Gardener. The daffodils are over now, I dead headed the last few on Wednesday, so it's all about the bluebells with support from the forget-me-nots, and some tulips trying to steal the show. Working from the top of the garden down:

bove - veggie patch is coming to life. First set of peas started flowering in the last couple of days. Carrots, parsnips, radish and broad beans have all finally germinated properly. In fruit corner (below) I think we're gonna sort out this twiggy mess at the back here and think about raspberries. Is it too late to plant raspberries? We'll find out I guess...

bove: The winter honeysuckle has leafed out and is casting a huge shadow. Gonna have to sort that out a bit me thinks, but the bluebells and forget-me-nots are making a very pretty seen closer to the house. This corner in the bottom right is supposed to be turning into a pretend wild flower meadow, but it's doing nothing right now... hope it cheers up soon. Below: I forgot to take a picture here last time, probably because there was nothing to see. The peony is up now though, and the tulips are trying to brighten it up (they are very pretty). Very obviously there's a lot of space though, so we're going put some runner beans etc climbing up the fence this month - Alys Fowler style.

his corner is filling out now, which is very exciting - so much to come from here!! In the opposite corner (below) I had to show this just for comedy. The bluebells immediately under the compost heap are HUGE - almost two feet long and not stopped gaining height yet. Under those, the overall view from the backdoor looking out. To my eyes the view is very blue at the moment, but for some reason all those tiny specks loose their impact in a photo.

Appreciation

2010-04-28T21:25:00.001+01:00

vidence that no one appreciates a bit of handmade blanket quite like Mr. Vince. I'm painfully aware that all making activities have come to a halt. I'm not even into my stash buster afghan right now. Any scant free time is spent in the garden at the moment, trying to keep our veg cultivating plans up to speed. I have the familiar itchy fingers and creative desire, but no real creative energy and no time to indulge what I have. I wouldn't mind a quick mindless knit project right now to dip into and make my mental fatigue fade a bit, but I can't figure out what to cast on.

Blossom News Flash!

2010-04-28T20:11:00.000+01:00

Dan took this picture of the blossom in Regents Park (where my branch came from) on his ride home tonight . Pretty cool :)

Cherry blossom

2010-04-28T12:48:00.001+01:00

n the cycle home on Friday evening, after sitting in on a recording for Radio 4 in town (it was much funnier than that sounds... The Museum of Curiosities), we passed around the outer circle of Regent's park heading towards the bright lights of Camden Town and our ultimate destination - KT. In the gloaming (there aren't many street lights on that stretch) we spied a fallen branch of Cherry tree. I came to a screeching halt (okay, not a screeching halt - I wasn't going very fast) to pick it up and strap it to the back of my bike. Dan laughed at me but shepherded me and my wavering branch home so we didn't get hit. I spent a few happy moments on Saturday poncing about with the camera taking silly photos. The blossoms have faded now, a bit like me - I'm exhausted from the stress of helping to get the bosses deadline met the last couple of weeks. Back on the thesis at home now...

'm not a pink girl in any way - I can't bear to wear it. Cherry blossom is the exception that proves the rule. I have a deep seated love of cherry trees, especially the pink ones, from childhood. When I was little we had an old large cherry tree by our back gate whose branches spread over the wall onto the street. I used to climb up and lie along the branch amongst the leaves and blossom and watch the people walking up and down the road. In the spring, if the weather was right, it would carpet the road and gutters with pink blossom. This tree was cut down by my Dad so the gate could be widened in order to fit in some new vehicle or other. I was devastated, my Mum promised to buy a new tree to put in exactly the same spot (albeit a couple of feet to the right) to help stem the flow of tears. A few years later we took a trip to the garden centre together and picked the tree and planted it together.

he best blossom trees in London are found in a small graveyard in Fulham, off Munster Road. Dan and I both lived in close proximity to this spot and spent a happy spring day there once. I've not been back since we moved NW, but if anybody who might read this is in the area over the next few days, now would be a good time to find the spot.

Garden invaders

2010-04-19T14:42:00.000+01:00

on-native pests are very common in our garden. Spotted today, the infamous Lily beetle. I suspect if I grew lilies I would have descended into hysterics at this point. My (large) rosemary bush is also home to a colony of Rosemary beetles - they've been there a couple of years now. I read somewhere (can't remember where) that they were unlikely to cause extensive defoliation so I left them. I figured there wasn't much of a battle to be had in London, but my rosemary bush is looking pretty battered and nibbled this spring (see the bottom image). I think it might be time the invaders took a long walk off a short cliff...

A tale of two Rhubarbs...

2010-04-16T13:00:00.001+01:00

hese pictures were taken on the same day (yesterday). The first is Rhubarb 'Timperly Early', a common variety for early crops. I saw over on Diary of a Mad Gardener that Rhubarb likes a cold winter - as it seems to be growing at a vast rate of knots, I think this must be true. To give an idea of the rate of growth, flicking back to my garden view at the end of March (a whole two weeks ago) reveals Timperly Early to be only just clear of the ground. Dan is thinking of taking a couple of sticks this weekend for a wee pud. The second image is a Rhubarb with no name we brought down from Dan's family garden in Scotland last spring - where there was evidence they produced the biggest Rhubarb stands ever seen. It appeared for the first time only a day or two ago - I was convinced it had disappeared. I've decided to dub this no-name Rhubarb variety (which looks dramatically different from Timperly, even when up) 'Balnakeil Late' from now on. I think this pair neatly demonstrate the need to grow different varieties to extend your eating season!

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day April 2010

2010-04-15T16:03:00.000+01:00

y second GBBD, hurray! I've been kind of ill these past few days, so hopefully a post full of flowers will get my immune system heading back in the right direction. First up, the daffodils. My golden trumpets are on their way out, I had to start dead-heading over the weekend. Dead heading the daffodils has always been my job, ever since I was little and my Mum would send me out to do hers. It's not a particularly labour intensive job, but it is a sad one. I spend weeks watching their slow ascent very impatiently, and then they're gone. There are still one or two left to enjoy for now though.

he very early red tulips are also taking their last bow, petals bent right back and giving a rather revealing show. Their are stands of white, yellow and red tulips waiting to take the stage though. Dan noticed I'd snuck a couple of red tulips into the blue corner over the weekend - I never could stick to a colour scheme.

he swathes of forget-me-nots I have draped around my flower beds are turning blue at the tip one by one. Forget-me-nots are up on my list of all time favourites, I suspect I give them too much leave in the garden, but I love the billowy clouds of green and blue - always have, from the time I first dead-headed daffodils in fact. To a lot of people I suspect they're a weed, but I can't be without them.

his is the first year for grape hyacinths in the garden. These were salvaged about this time last year probably, from the old family garden back home. These are another favourite, from foliage to flower. There was always great drifts of them in my Mum's garden. The first thing that Dan said to me on the subject of grape hyacinths was that he hated them when he was little, because he always thought they were going to be bluebells (his favourite), but was eternally disappointed when they weren't. I love them for almost the same reason - because it takes forever for bluebells to turn up and these were always early, with a more concentrated blue.

ow, we hit an issue. Both the pictures below are some variety of primrose, also salvaged from my Mum's garden. This first I've had three years now and I've split it two years running, so I have a fair approximation of a drift - all profusely flowering this year, which I was a bit surprised at cause I thought I'd been quite mean to them with all my splitting. Now I thought these were primrose, and those below I thought (when I grabbed them last April/May, based on the seed heads) were cowslips. But you can see that the flowers aren't umbellified. I am pretty darn confused about this, so if anyone passing by wants to enlighten me, that would be great.

n more productive quarters of the garden - from top to bottom - we have, gooseberry flowers, apple blossom and blackcurrant flowers. Tasty treats to come. And to finish, for Dan, the first signs of the bluebells. First open flowers this weekend I should think.

Garden thoughts

2010-04-09T17:48:00.000+01:00

life in the cold frame

he sun has been out the past couple of days and the forecast is good for the weekend. Walking out the back door into the warmth and bees and flies and birds is about the only thing stopping me harrumphing around the house about thesis writing. Almost over, have to keep telling myself that. Have to keep stopping myself from playing in the garden too. I could spend all day out there and not run out of entertainment right now.

e watched Alys Fowler's "The Edible Garden" last night on iPlayer and now all I want to do is sow more pea seeds... It was a very inspiring show really, apart from having a bit of a girl crush on Alys. Basically she mixes in her veg with her flowers and everything lives together. I've been heading towards this way a little, which is why I've got garlic in my flower beds right now, swiss chard in the cold frame for colour in the borders, and artichoke plants waiting to be delivered.

riginally I was inspired by reading Dennis Cotter's description of a friends garden he visited in "Wild garlic, gooseberries... and me", hence the chard - which I've not grown before. The artichokes were bought to replace the cardoons I had originally. I love cardoons and their ridiculously exuberant silver grey foliage, but the ones I grew from seed were subject to the worst blackfly attacks I've ever seen on anything for two summers running and havn't returned this spring. I reasoned that trying again with artichokes - given that they look near identical - was probably better on the feeding us stakes.

ow all I have to decide is where to put the runner beans... I shall not fail for a crop two summers running!!

New hat and awesome knitwear

2010-04-06T10:55:00.000+01:00

his fell off my needles a little while ago and has been on my head since. Couldn't effectively take pictures of my own head though, so I had to get Dan involved. A combination of nice light and time was achieved on an Easter Sunday ramble up the Heath. His instruction from me was "take a picture of my hat, but don't get my head in." - I think he performed admirably!

am pretty darn chuffed with the hat, the temporary difficulty of separating the two strands to float a band of colour over the top was really worth it for me - you get to admire all the colours in the Alchemy Haiku without being overwhelmed. Such a great pattern too, the Waffel hat (rav link). It's nice and big and slouchy, fits over my hair and still covers my ears AND has some seriously elegant decreases in the top. So simple, but brilliantly effective. The girls at Pickles are doing very cool things indeed. My project is ravved here.

y endpaper mits got some new nice shots too, and Dan was wearing his favourite socks. It's now almost impossible to go out without wearing a hand knit of some description, a happy place to be.

Spring terrarium

2010-04-05T12:06:00.001+01:00

ncluded in the spring time decorations over the fire place is this wee feller. A spring themed terrarium, happily egg shaped. Dan thinks it's a bit odd, but I've been after the perfect vessel for a terrarium for a while - finally managed to find this blown glass egg shape in one of KTs fine charity shop establishments. Terrariums are all the rage on the design type blogs, and the gardening ones too. You can still open up etsy with a good chance of seeing funny little mushrooms and other more eccentric miniatures for decorating your moss. Dan ain't seen nothin' when it comes to the weirdness of terrariums out there...

t's not a particularly complicated offering of terrarium design. A convenient place to put some of Dan's rock haul from our day trip to Aldebrugh for his birthday. A lump of moss from the garden (not short of that either). Placed a few of Dan's smaller stones on top and nestled in my Wade lamb for a touch of spring time fun. I doubt it will live in this form long past the end of April. There might be some retro-inspired air plants in it's future.

Egg-tacular

2010-04-04T12:21:00.000+01:00

Worlds collide

2010-04-03T10:39:00.000+01:00

hat happens when a Dan and an Ali come together. Hardly a collision, we've been living together for three and a half years, but a chaotic coexistence. Planting schedules and seed packets up front, Bob (the bike) magically suspended in mid-air by Dan's new bike stand. The bike frame collection and sewing machine in the background.

End of the month garden view: March 2010

2010-04-01T12:53:00.000+01:00

n line with the number of gradening blogs I've been trawling through recently I've decided to join in with The Patient Gardener's end of the month garden view - mostly because it's a really brilliant idea! So here we are, these pictures are actually from today, the first of April, because I forgot that I wanted to join in until the post popped up in my Bloglines feed. Besides, the sun is shining today.

bove - The current stars of the show are the daffodils, and they're really putting it out there today. The last few have opened up in the sun and there's almost a carpet of gold. Below - the veg patch is coming into it's own, new paths are looking good, radishes are germinating and the peas are climbing....

bove - fruit corner is coming on apace. Buds are broken on the currents, apple tree and the gooseberry bush. Rhubarb is rising rapidly and the alpine strawberries of putting on fresh growth. Below - from the back door to the end of the garden. At least with a slender long city garden you can fit it all in one shot!

inal picture. Really looking forward to the things to come from this corner this year. The iris have passed but the grape hyacinths are just warming up and there are lots of new things waiting to be enjoyed for the first time, as well as the golden oldies that survived in the garden. The cold frame is packed with yummy things to eat later in the year...

Present to self

2010-04-01T12:25:00.000+01:00

his oh so fabulous and aesthetically pleasing creature is the new water butt. We don't have an outside tap, so regardless of the environmental disaster that is watering with tap water, this baby will save us traipsing through the house with the watering can, and thus general muck spreading involved therein. Dan's key disappointment on it's arrival though was that it was too small for him to get inside of it and pretend to be a Dalek. Water butt was necessarily a slim line model so we can still sit out on the patio with it. Better luck next time love x. Dan did get to buy a new drill bit to install it though, and there are few things that make him grin more than a new drill bit...

he butt is actually fuller than it looks in this picture and working rather well. Dan was dubious we'd get much water from the small bit of roof it was attached to, but you should never underestimate the British climate... There was an even more auspicious event over the weekend. The first harvest - so here's to fresh salad leaves from now until October.

April Showers in March

2010-03-27T13:49:00.000Z

The crocus and iris have disappeared, but the daffodils are here, bravely attempting to face off the rain.

Birthday treats

2010-03-26T17:46:00.001Z

t was my birthday this week. Another birthday and still no thesis! Nevermind, I'm working on it. It also means this blog of mine is two years old. Well done blog. We had a slow start, but I feel we've come to know each other rather well in recent months. I wanted to post up a picture of my birthday cake in the same way as it all started, but I was forbidden from taking a picture of my cake this year as it didn't turn out as Dan planned it.... (not that he made as much mess as me when I made his last September) never mind blog, here's some other birthday treats for you:

chocolates from Cocoa Mountain

a silly owl for your hair

and a book about you!

Happy Birthday Blog! x

Emergency Jammin'

2010-03-20T10:46:00.004Z

o, the Sloe Gin mentioned in passing recently was, obviously, somewhat out of season. Dan and I picked 3kg of sloes when we went to visit my Dad last Autumn. Enough for 6 liters of gin if we wanted it! We dumped them in the freezer to try and get the best out of them with the plan of getting gin in the duty free. Sadly, at the point I passed through O'Hare International on the way home I was broke - I bought a bottle of gin, but it had more immediate requirements in the house and a slow maturing sloe gin was out of the question...

ell, we got the sloe gin on finally, after a bit of recovery in the monetary department. We only used 1.5kg of sloes though. Then, when the freezer broke we had 1.5kg of sloes thawing as well as another 1kg of miscellaneous summer fruit. When life hands you lemons/broken freezers, the only option is to make jam. And lots of it.

estimated reduced pectin because of the extended freeze, so made a pectin stock with the peels and cores of cooking apples and put the chopped up flesh in in the jam. So the recipe as it is...

800g cooking apples
150g blackcurrants
300g redcurrants
200g blackberries
1.5kg sloes
1.5 pts of water
2.5kg of sugar

eel and core apples, and boil the peels and cores in 1 pint of water for 45 minutes. Save the water. Chop the flesh up finely. Cook the fruit and apple flesh with the peel/core water and an extra half pint, add the sugar. Skim the sloe stones off the top as they float to the surface after the sugars added. Bring to setting point and jar.

looks quite a lot like special effects from Shaun of the Dead...

ood news: I estimated the amount of pectin required pretty well and got a really nice set. Bad news: sloes are tart and I was prevented from adding more sugar (it needs at least another 0.5kg if not a kg). My friend Laura was like this when we made the damson jam too, fortunately I won that battle at the time. Sloes also have stones, lots of 'em, and the're small. Dan and I succeeded in fishing out about 90% at which point we decided we could live with spotting them as we spread. A hedgerow jam with faults then, but still edible - might be quite nice in brie sandwiches.

Madness on needles

2010-03-17T11:03:00.000Z

There's still knitting round these parts, it's just crazy person knitting. Writing up has made me incapable of following any pattern I cannot immediately memorise, or make up as I go along. Charts are out. Prime example number one:

Who doesn't want tweed headphones?

This is the Pickles Waffle Hat. Not crazy in and of itself, but I became obsessed by splitting the layers. This involved a lot of picking up stitches in the silk/mohair skinny strand from the fat strand. On interchangeable circulars, so skinny got trapped in the join. Hmmmm

Weekend in review...

2010-03-15T16:41:00.001Z

It starts here:

he crocus lawn at the entrance to Hampstead Heath, on the way to the Parliament Hill farmer's market. There's snow drops too, but once the crocus kick in you can never see them. It does this every year - a crocus display to rival Kew. It's a shame it wasn't a sunny day to make the photo even more spectacular. Sunday morning arrived with the discovery that our freezer was broken and defrosted. For some reason this brought us great merriment (and a GIANT vat of chilli to use up the thawed mince). Sunday morning also involved a trip to the 'recycling centre' (aka 'the tip') to do some, well, recycling - thrilling, I know - but I did score these (for free!!):

aka - Eastern European Basket, £32.

ur own crocus lawn is coming on apace, it's pretty much peaking at this very moment. I think Dan and I have liked this even more than we thought we would. It's sort of, unexpectedly great. We didn't get that many bulbs, but they're all putting up multiple flowers. This might have been down to the extra cold winter, as crocus displays everywhere seem good.

he veggie patch is starting to look purposeful too - helped by spades and forks here admittedly. Dan laid a new path so you can actually reach the four quarters without becoming a gymnast. Weeding later in the season is a possibility now. Sowed carrots, parsnips and radish's and a second batch of peas (the first are hardening off a little before going in the patch.)

View from the veggie patch in the early Sunday Evening (imagine blackbirds singing)

he evening culminated in dinner from the giant vat of chilli and a quick dash on the bikes over to the Roundhouse to watch Grizzly Bear. The Bear were great, even played 'deep blue sea' which made Dan and I very happy indeed. The event was slightly tinged by being surrounded by psycho girls, culminating in one of them dumping a pint over a guy before running off - his crime was being tall. But the stage lights were pretty enough to be distracting - like jars of fireflies

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day

2010-03-15T15:55:00.001Z

've been reading a lot more gardening blogs recently and I thought I'd join in with this. My first time with this blog meme, hosted by May Dreams Gardens. Here we go... Crocus, Iris, Hazel and almost, almost a daffodil, but not quite.

I should credit the picture of the hazel to Dan though! (x)

Germination

2010-03-15T11:36:00.001Z

t's hard to stop getting over excited every time something germinates....

Pollen

2010-03-11T17:36:00.001Z

A movie of the successful shots of pollen leaving the hazel catkins. This took a surprisingly long time to get right and in the end required "sport mode" on the camera...

Spring

2010-03-11T11:31:00.001Z

his weekend, in my infinite wisdom, I decided it was Spring. More through optimism with having a few sunny days rather than anything to do with temperature or the time of year, but I'm going through with this conviction. I mean, it must be spring - I have daffodils in the house, and pussy willows, Dan and I had our first trip of the year to the flower market, and I'm attempting not to fall into a seed sowing frenzy.

have diligently put the majority of the pussy willows in a vase without water, so the pussies don't fall off - top seasonal advice there from the knitting blogosphere, you never know where the useful bit of information will come from. I did sneak a couple of the smaller twigs in with the daffs to see if they would root. Probably not sensible - I doubt there's room for a willow tree of any variety round here...

unday in the garden was almost intoxicating with sunshine. As well as the daffs and willow we also indulged in half a dozen more pots of Iris from the flower market. At £5 for six pots and such a deep colour, it was hard to say no. Apparently I'm now obsessed with these things. There were also some pale indigo ones on another stall, very delicate and pretty, but the saturated purple won me over.

I don't generally approve of pictures of me in general, let alone on here, but I liked the way my green cardigan makes the Iris look even more purple. Needless to say this photo was taken by Dan.

omato seeds were sown and many cuttings were potted on. Dan dug over the vegetable patch ready for peas and carrots. We even got the Sloe Gin on, finally. All in all, a successful weekend.

Endpaper

2010-03-05T18:44:00.001Z

fter the success of Dan's mittens I immediatly cast on Eunny Jang's Endpaper mitts. These have been on my knitting 'want' list a good few years, but I'd never had the courage to take the plunge with the stranded colour knitting before. A bit too daunting. Glad to have a pair of these finally, though - I think they were my new favourite gloves before I'd even finished the first one. It's still pretty chilly round these parts so I'll still have plenty of opportunities to wear them.

Jackson Mittens and Endpapers on the way home on the bus after Wild Beasts at KOKO: Wild Beasts = Awesome

frequently wear my Noro fingerless mitts, made eons ago, under my Norwegian mittens for extra warmth - I get very cold fingers - so I hatched a plan for a matching pair of mittens to slip over the top of these. I have stacks of this yarn left too - part of the Great Kentish Town PDSA Yarn Haul of 2009. I was a little nervous about the finish with this unknown wool/silk tweed, but it blocked really well for my endpapers, evening out the worst bumps at the seam edges just fine. However, it doesn't make great mittens. They're quite thin. I finished this first one very quickly, mainly because I was eager to see how my own chart would come out. They're wearable for spring or autumn, but they don't fit over my endpapers as I'd wanted - my own fault for doing them on the small chart instead of the large. Still I'm quite chuffed with the end result of my chart (and proud of my deer) so I think I'll rework it into the larger size and knit in something thicker for winter.

Prancing Deer Mittens (Rav link)

Closing note: The colours and pattern combined reminded Dan and I both strongly of Victorian floor tiles, so I'm sort of waiting for a trip to the V&A or other suitable venue for a proper photo shoot for the endpapers.

Spot the difference

2010-03-04T15:12:00.000Z

February

March

The daffodils are coming...

work in progress

2010-03-03T20:22:00.000Z

started this rippled crochet afghan a little while ago, but these are the first photos I've bothered to take of it. It's only old stash yarn I'm trying to get rid of, but I'm hoping to make the colours snap non-the-less. I picked it up again this week after a period of hibernation under the coffee table, not sure why.

not helping my mood

2010-03-03T16:17:00.000Z

very time I see his pathetic sad face I feel guilty. He can't get comfy or get out of the cat-flap and he just looks so miserable. Maybe if I knitted him a lions mane to fit over the inflatable collar he'd be more enamored with it.

Sunshine

2010-03-03T12:09:00.001Z

esterday, for the first time in - what felt to me at least - several millennia, the sun shone down on London town. Quick! must photograph everything in actual real light, immediatly. So in a bid to cheer myself up a bit, current garden highlights in sunlight...

ast weeks pea sowing are this weeks peas sprouts. They emerge with the heads bowed and necks exposed, pale and slender. They rapidly fatten up and turn green and continue on their upwards trajectory. I had to move them outside into the cold frame today as the roots were escaping from the bottom, before the leaves have even opened.

the golden cups of our first croci in the lawn

our new witch hazel (Hamamelis intermedia, westerstede), purchased with Christmas garden tokens. A welcome addition in our bereft winter garden

Iris pixie. One of the winter flowering bulb Iris varities - one of the best £2 I've ever spent. I'd happily get another truck load. We happened upon some in Regents park the other weekend and I had to have some.

snowdrops, finally stretching their wings in the sun.

p.s. the reason for extreme close ups is to try and hide how barren the garden really is at this time of year - working on it though.

Garden action plan

2010-02-23T15:29:00.000Z

was going to take pictures of the barrow-full of new plants we've bought for the garden recently, but there's currently some variant of sleet or snow falling from the sky - it's neither sleet nor snow, but it is white - and I have a cold as it is. Just looking out the window at it makes my head ache a bit more. Instead I will be content with the garden inside the flat. I bought some Tete-a-tete and a forced hyacinth bulb to cheer us up a bit inside, and on Sunday I managed to sow some sweet peas (night and day mix) and eating peas (the very early variety, spring) in toilet rolls to get us on track for eating in 2010.

op tip for toilet roll sowing - tie them together in groups of three so they don't all fall over like skittles when the cat wonders past. The precarious position is a result of necessity, not desire: we have one window sill in our flat, one! And it's tiny! I dream of a kitchen with long, deep, tiled, window sills..... and every winter I would fill them with paper whites and hyacinth bulbs.

lso managed to sit down for an hour or two and plan the garden for next six months or so - as in what to sew when, depending on what we want to eat. Next jobs on that list:
- sew green manure on the front plot (get a green waste collection from the council first!)
- get a first line of carrots and parsnips in
- pot on a few lettuces I've got and sew some more under cover
- sew purple sprouting broccoli
- and broad beans
- and leeks
- AND aubergines when the seed arrives
(and some morning glories)
- transfer the strawberries to their new bed

The Owl and the Pussy Cat

2010-02-19T17:03:00.001Z

've been in a bit of a funk lately. I blame writing my thesis and spilling wine on my laptop, amongst other things. Fortunately my laptop recovered (almost unbelievably) and even more fortunately I didn't loose any data (hurrah!) - so I'm gradually cheering up a bit. In the mean time it was Valentines Day, and now the event is over I can put up some pics of the Valentine I made for Dan. I was keen to make sure I equalled last years effort - which I was pretty chuffed with - and I think I managed it.

he Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

In a beautiful pea green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

And sang to a small guitar,

'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are,

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!'

Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!

How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

But what shall we do for a ring?'

They sailed away, for a year and a day,

To the land where the Bong-tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose,

His nose,

His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

III

'Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'

So they took it away, and were married next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

Edward Lear

I got a bit carried away with my flax before I realised the boat should be green, but never mind. I could see myself making a whole set of these - One for each verse.

the first garden exploits in 2010

2010-02-04T15:39:00.000Z

The first snowdrop

Daffodils in the lawn

A confused, and no doubt chilly (blurry) bee on the winter flowering honeysuckle

Snow flakes on sedums

Bicycle love

2010-02-03T17:41:00.001Z

had a pretty successful weekend on the knit front - two more FOs to my name. My own anthro scarflet fell off the needles and the (much needed and long awaited) mittens I've been making for Dan for over a year (bad me) were finished off too. No photos for my scarf yet, and my model for the mittens was feeling shy I think because I was only allowed one quick snap on the way to the corner shop.

he colours of the mittens, though perhaps not to everyones taste, were specifically chosen from the vast range available at Jamiesons of Shetland to match Dan's much loved Bob Jackson bicycle frame. There were several reasons the mittens took so long:

1. they were my first real colour work project and I only got the knack of knitting with two colours at the same time when I picked up the second mitten about a week ago. Something clicked and I suddenly had the ability to hold both colours in my right hand at the same time, instead having to drop one or the other strand the whole time and get tangled and cross. At one point during the first mit I even tried knitting normal and continental at the same time (as was recommended in one of my books), but this was awful. Me and continental style knitting do not get on. I must have an inner Shetlander hidden away somewhere, cause I've no explanation as to why it suddenly started working.

2. Whilst having a break after the slog of the first mit, something terrible happened to Bob. Dan hit a london pot hole too hard on his way home and his seat tube cracked. The frame is repairable, but I feared the site of me knitting his gloves inspired by the frame would depress him further - so I held off until the new bike was up and running at least.

Bob (and my Nova) in happier days

he completion of the gloves marks, for me at least, the end of a long period of shame regarding Dan's gloves. The ones he had were grim, cold and definitely not handmade. And, honestly, nothing screams "My Girlfriends a Knitter!" quite like these bad boys...

P.S. Matching seat covers and handlebar bags over on etsy. *love*

new favourite hangout

2010-02-02T10:40:00.000Z

olk Object

I did say almost

2010-01-31T21:49:00.000Z

wanted to put the Christmas cards I made this year into my online scrapbook. I bought matt brown card blanks with envelopes from paperchase, then made a six pointed star template of holes to get the snowflake shape when embroidered with crochet cotton. I was quite pleased with the effect.

hile digging out the photo I found this snap of an early Christmas present to myself. The stitch patterns are genuinely intriguing and I'm excited about having a bash. Need to pack off a few more FOs first though.

Definitely almost the last post about Christmas

2010-01-28T00:54:00.000Z

hristmas duties have been dragging on a little late this year, owing to one half of dans entire family going on a four week cruise over the period. Last weekend was the first time to see them since they got back , and the first opportunity to pass on their Christmas gifts. (I admit that if we were hyper organised we'd have had everything ready to give them before they left - but seriously, we'd barely even imagined Christmas was on the horizon that first weekend of December, never mind shopping for it!).

owever, this did present me with the ideal opportunity to snap the christmas wrapping for this year - because the pre-christmas wrapping was too close to the events to actually have time to think about that kind of thing. I'm obsessive about wrapping presents and it gets worse every year. This year saw the arrival of double sided tape (because selotape is ugly) and decorative pom poms.

nd now I get the chance to store a few links for my favourite homemade wrapping decorations for future use:
- A super quick pom pom tutorial (I kept mine loose and shaggy rather than trimmed)
- Quick paper flowers (easy even without the pro-scissors)
- German paper stars (which I stuck on all the gifts the year before)
- I made the labels up in Adobe illustrator using a tag template I'd made previously and some random eps images of russian ornamental designs I downloaded a while ago.

he presents included a second scarflet for Dan's mum (which I think she appreciated), and I'm now cranking out the third for myself. I really recommend this pattern. Although if your making a choice on yarn, my vote goes for Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran (red) rather than Rowan RYC Cashsoft Aran (purple). Not that I ever would have thought it possible, but the extra 2% cashmere in the Debbie Bliss seems to make a difference. It's less shiny looking and seems to have a better haze and touch. It also holds it's ply better when being worked making the stitching look neater (to me at least).

rooting for spring

2010-01-20T18:32:00.000Z

race and patience have left London town with the snow it seems. I was back on my bicycle this week for the commute after bad weather stopped play and I was almost squashed last night and this morning by white vans. Nobody wanted to give any room if it interrupted their journey for 10 seconds. Half the problem on Monday night was other cyclists in a traffic jam. I'd moved through the jam to turn right onto a side road (and I was indicating too) thinking it would be easy as everyone was stood still, when a bunch of them (clearly irritated by a girl being in front of them and their far superior cycling skills) had followed me and then proceeded to overtake me on the right, trapping me where I was so I couldn't turn and then was left marooned in the middle of the road once the traffic started up again. Horrid. With a bit of luck they'll all evaporate again when the New Year fever to be fit dies off.

The downside to cycling in January is the cold. Specifically my face. Once you get moving the body is self warming, and I have some heavy duty (albeit ugly) gloves for my fingers. But my face! and ears! Currently I'm contemplating knitting some sort of giant snood/balaclava that goes over my helmet and covers my ears and chin. The only wool I have for that is black though, which doesn't seem very safety conscious. What I need is some sort of reflective yarn for stripes... it exists, but I've no idea how to get hold of it. There's always the ear warmers I guess, but it still leaves the problem of my face. While I'm on the subject of knitting cycling accessories though, I could also make some handlebar hand warmers to match.

Decode in the courtyard

o, moving on from weird cycle knitting, the weekend was pleasent one - spent in a fug of cider and ale in our favourite public house. Also managed a trip to South Ken and the V&A. The intention was to see Decode, but we got there too late in the day and it was sold out (boo). I think the torrential rain and dark skies might have forced everyone indoors in pursuit of enlightenment. Still, we had entertainment enough in the new galleries, which are pretty fabulous - stolen from space that used to be outside the building and housing a complete medieval staircase and half a house frontage

The light boxes are movement activated and reflect your image back to you in LEDs. As you watch they turn back to white.

One of the new spaces inside the V&A (what used to be the sculpture gallery).

even had a little toddle down the garden path, looking for bulbs coming up after the snow thaw. A few promising tips are flashing green - signs of daffs, tulips, bluebells, grape hyacinths and snow drops. So I'm now gunning for spring and hatching plans for veggies. I want tomato seeds from www.victoriananursery.co.uk and must remember to use this discount code

(this post was brought to you by a brief moment of silence and solitude in the office)

A big day

2010-01-13T22:22:00.000Z

oday is a big day in my scientific life. I feel I should mark it in some way here. This is the front cover I made for the journal that my article is published in. They didn't use it, so I might as well stick it here as anywhere!

Catch up

2010-01-12T22:28:00.000Z

o, having not blogged the knitting for so long there's a reasonable amount to catch up on. Having actual free time over Christmas meant I got some serious action in - which is quite unlike me!

irst up, baby kimono from Mason Dixon knitting book the first. Which is a great little pattern, but I screwed up my seems (below) so I'm going to have to rip that out and do it again before it makes it's way to niece the second.

ext, baby denim jeans for nephew the first. I finished a leg over the christmas break but I had to abandon the project halfway to switch to more pressing gifting matters (for receivers old enough to notice if they didn't get a christmas present on time). Reasonably quick, but all the extra knitterly details in the construction, whilst making a better finished garment, produced extra construction time I hadn't allowed for.

hen there was the anthro scarflet (photographed in fresh London snow a couple of days ago). I made the first one for my sister and I've just cast on an identical one for Dan's Mum. I liked this design in the shops, but I really liked knitting the pattern. A very satisfying neat result, as well as super quick. I didn't intend making one for myself, but I bought some wool in the sales to do just that in the end. I wear scarfs a lot and feel pretty naked without one when it gets too warm in late spring.

nd finally, an improvised Wolf hood for my eldest niece, niece the first. I should probably, at some point, stop buying and making her things I secretly want myself, but I'm not entirely sure I can justify (or give space to) a collection of story books and matching accessories. She even looked pretty cute in it before she got too hot and had to take it off. We finally went to see Where the Wild Things Are at the cinema last Wednesday. I cried for most of the last 20 minutes, but I did enjoy it. It was a very complete world and absolutely nothing jarred as out of place, which is a huge achievement I reckon. So many films are spoilt by niggly things that aren't done well enough or don't fit and snap you out of your suspended disbelief at the crucial moment.

also bought her this story book, which I saw first on Drawn!. Very very cool, but probably not to her taste really...

ell that list has made me feel a little better. My knitting efforts seem so insubstantial compared to a lot of the knitting blogs I flit through. One day I'll be rich enough to afford yarn and time enough to sit and knit fabulous things. Until then, this will have to do...

May your embers still glow in the morning

2010-01-07T10:53:00.002Z

here's a lot of poetry on my favourite blogs at the moment. Elspeth Thompson's blog features "Twenty blessings" in her New Years post. The last line in particular:

May your embers still glow in the morning

resonates having spent the Christmas period with a coal stove as the 'central' heating - central because the stove stands in the middle of Dan's living room. Dan lit the fire every morning, a task much quicker and warmer if the embers still glowed. I was a chicken and stayed in bed till it thawed out a little.

nd Kate Davies at needled had Wallace Stevens’ "The Snow Man", which I enjoyed a lot. I think I must always have had a mind of winter, I've been trying to go north for as long as I can remember. I'm not even sure why. It's very fortunate I have a Dan who can take me as far north as you could want to go without getting in a boat. Going to Durness during the big snow was so exciting and beautiful, it felt like some magic other world to me. Beach, ice, snow covered dunes, cliffs, frozen lochs and snow covered mountains as a backdrop - it was almost too much all in one place. With any luck, if our resolutions come to pass, we will be spending a lot more time there soon enough.

'm going to keep with the poetry theme that's around me now. Dan gave me this Ted Hughes poem to read while we were sat next to the fire one evening, because it reminds him of his house.

Wind
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Christmas and New Year

2010-01-06T14:52:00.002Z

appy New Year blog! The period before Christmas was fraught and then followed by radio silence as we went on our Yuletide journey the length of the UK and back again. No t'interweb at the final destination, or mobile phone signal for that matter, so communication with the outside world was cut to a minimum (hurray!). To abbreviate the Christmas epic I've composed a photo essay of sorts that covers most of the bases. It starts with a map of our journey:

he journey North: point A, Home, 21/12; point B, My Dad's new house, 21-23/12; point C, Assorted Uncles, Aunts, cousins and a Grandma belonging to Dan, 23/12; point D, a kind friends house in glasgow where we stayed the night, 23-24/12; point F, the final destination, 24/12-02/01. The journey South (through snow): point E, fish and chips in Ullapool (very important), 02/01; point D, back to glasgow to stay in the kind friends house while they were actually there, putting up with us despite their jet lag, 02-03/01; point I, my brother, his wife and the teeny tiny baby who made it home from the hospital on the 27th (hurray!), 03/01; finally - point A, Home again!, 03/01. 1445 miles (According to Google)

The wedding that my Ishbel was knitted for was grand

and the wedding also featured a handsome man in a kilt

start of the road trip: my Dad's two donkeys in the snow

traveling north

The view on our Christmas Day walk down to the loch

Balnakeil beach

furious Christmas knitting in action

Cat in the snow (yes they came with us...!)

the first moments of the New Year, a full moon and snow. We walked out to try and set off chinese lanterns, but the wind was too strong. The ethereal light was worth it anyway.

playing on the beach

the view down the hill to Ullapool (and fish and chips)

home again, with our new tankards to celebrate

mince pies

2009-12-09T21:28:00.000Z

spent last night making mince meat and mince pies. I should have made the mince meat weeks ago but a lack of brandy in the house meant it got deferred to the last possible moment. I prefer it to bought still anyway, even without maturation.

have honed my mince pie making skills over the years, using my Grandmother's mince meat recipe (with vegetable suet instead of beef suet - there's too many conflicting religious and personal dietary requirements in my acquaintance to make them anything other than vegetarian) and my Mum's short-crust pastry, the way she taught me. Having both of their most used cookbooks out is a warm if slightly emotional feeling. Neither of them are with me anymore. As well as that it's Christmas, so all those associated family memories are at the surface.

he tools of baking are precious to. I always use the tart tin my Mum used to use to make me jam tarts on Sundays (which I ate with top-of-the-milk), because I didn't like apple pie when I was small...

... and my favourite mixing bowl, which was a Christmas present from Dan several years ago now, has also been incorporated into the ritual.

So after my spell of baking I read this post on Milkmoon about the Grandmother memory, so perhaps it's a seasonal thing. Doing things I know they did every year too, makes them feel a bit closer for a little while. These objects are some of the most precious things I own.

December in the garden

2009-12-09T17:00:00.001Z

t was a relief to know I wasn't the only one battling over-enthusiastic autumn bulb buying in December. I'd had this whole plan for the front garden that involved a barely field with alliums and cow parsley poking through - and then I changed my mind. Really the earth would be better put to vegetables as it was this year, because the patch out the back is not very big at all. I'd already bought the alliums though: 50 drumstick, 10 Christophii, 15 purple sensation and 10 mount everest. Managed to get them in the borders without digging up too many of the tulips I planted two months ago and forgot about.

Other finds: surprisingly successful fushia's planted last year without much thought

The first ever catkins to appear on my contorted hazel (long story...)

And most precious of all, some very healthy looking (hibernating) tree peony seedlings

let the yule tide ring

2009-12-09T11:49:00.001Z

hristmas decs went up round here last weekend. A tad early, but we're going away from the 22nd onwards so we wanted to enjoy the house all pretty-fied for a couple of weeks. I was never allowed to decorate the old family home until at least the 23rd at the earliest when I was little (and not so little) and I can never contain myself to wait that long now I make my own rules. Decorations are a mish mash of handmade, things Dan and I have bought since being together and the odd inherited. The tree is decorated in a true British Imperialist style, but no tinsel. We are not a tinsel household.

his was all achieved with several Gin & Tonics and accompanied by our best Christmas music CD, a bit extravagant perhaps, but I like the Christmas Spirit(s).

'm sure Kirsty wouldn't agree with our lack of tinsel given last nights episode, but I've always done a homemade christmas and I happen to think mines a lot better than hers. I've been watching her run of shows because they're the only thing craft related on telly at all, but I'm finding her increasingly irritating/patronising with every episode. I spent hours making great bowers of evergreens to hang over the mantelpiece every year, but nobody ever told me how - it was just something I did. Maybe I find this programme patronising because I'm not the target audience, but if I'm not, who is?

Karen O

2009-12-05T20:07:00.002Z

eedless to say Karen O and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were awesome, visually as well as sonically. Not seen them live before, so was slightly blown away by the Christian Joy costumes. Various head dresses and capes and the famous leather jacket. This all in one PVC catsuit thing kept reminding me of the Faun from Pan's Labyrinth though... not sure why...

he only place you can buy Christian Joy is on etsy - Awesome :) My favourite piece of the night though was this crazy sheet thing. It was three panels, the red/blue zig zags on either side and green jagged bursts on the back panel (which I can't find a shot of anywhere). It basically looked like just a flat sheet of printed fabric with two vertical slits in between the red and green vertical panels for your arms. It looked like such fun to wear though... I want one.

ther interesting things to keep in mind include the V&A pattern references. There's gonna be a whole series of them I think, these are just the first. As much as the whole set is lovely, I especially like the fifties pattern set. Not entirely sure what I'd ever use them for if I had them, not being a designer or anything, but they're still cool...

Philip Pullman

2009-11-30T21:30:00.000Z

licking around t'interweb after looking at Philip Pullman's site found this: À Outrance. The battle between the polar bears... The rest is out of my price range well and truly, but I might have to find £50 for a print of the bear fight. I struggle to decide on a favourite character, but Iorek is in the top three, maybe even top two.

Gauntlets

2009-11-30T21:20:00.000Z

log has been quite of late, a combination of busyness and lack of
inspiration (laterly), I feel like the inspiration is starting to creep back in though. It's been an interesting couple of weeks gadding about London town. Saw the Brute Chorus at the Bath house, Philip Pullman at the Southbank and Malcolm Middleton at Bush Hall. Tomorrow
nights activity is the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Brixton Academy. Malcolm Middleton is responsible for the current desire to make Dan some Red Traveling Socks. Plain red with cables of some description I reckon.

esterday I managed to put together a decent attempt at a pattern for gauntlets to match my blue silk Ishbel. The 2nd full attempt with some adjustments along the way, but even so, very quick to make up. They'll need some serious blocking I think, but I'm going to crack on with the second one ASAP. I'd still quite like to develop this pattern further into two-part mittens, but that's not going to be before the wedding in question - there's not really time and I don't have enough blue silk yarn either, and honestly, I think a mitteny version should be woollen.

mit the first

original dicey preliminary sketch

And America, Seems an awful long way to go

2009-11-13T16:03:00.001Z

(It’s so many miles and so long since I’ve met you
Don’t even know what I’ll find when I get to you
But suddenly now, I know where I belong
It’s many hundred miles and it won’t be long)

more lessons

2009-11-11T19:12:00.001Z

ontinuing the theme: Things I've learnt since yesterday evening.

ne, I quite like having bright red nails, almost as much as I used to enjoy having permanently black nails when I was 18/19.

wo, my theory about territorial spraying killing one of my new plum trees (and almost killing the other) proved correct. All my plants in that area have been badly damaged and look sickly. I heard the distinctive sound of foxes screaming at each other last night and when I flicked on the back light there were two of them in the garden looking straight back at me, obviously having an argument over territory which they get into at this time of year. We watched each other for a little while and as they jumped over the wall one of them took a good long sniff of the dead tree. The die back started off as just damage to the leaves but then the whole lot went very quickly not to be recovered. The graft was slightly open and I think their sent marking went into it, killing the top half very quickly. (nails to tree grafts in less than a paragraph, how north london am I....)

hree, The Wedding Date is indeed a terrible film....

our, my new fabulous boots from Clarks I bought at the start of October are in this months Glamour magazine and are now completely out of stock. I have worn these non stop since I bought them and I'm very glad to have them, spending another winter without vaguely appropriate (waterproof) footwear was not an appealing thought and I've not seen anything else I liked so much as these. Well, except maybe these that I found today... Now, where to find £109 from? *sigh*.

losing my head

2009-11-10T22:14:00.000Z

ot entirely sure what happens to my brain when Dan leaves town. I seem to excess on girl things I couldn't usually give a fig about whether I get to do or not. This evening I painted my nails bright red whilst reading Glamour magazine (a guilty pleasure of some magnitude, is it okay if I only look at the pictures? I don't like the words...) and I have chocolate ice cream in the freezer (it's okay love, I am eating properly - yes I know you're reading, you're the only one who does - I had baked aubergine with our tomatoes, garlic and chorizo for dinner but it wasn't as nice as yours and I'm sulking about that). I've an awful feeling the evening is going to end with me watching 'The Wedding Date', no doubt one of the worst films in history, simply because it's on telly.

ast nights evening was somewhat more productive. I finished my Ishbel (rav link) during a marathon of Merlin episodes (which I've now decided I like, but does not compare to the excitement of the new doctor who episode this week) interspersed with an episode of Spaced (not the same watching it without you, love). Sadly the pictures of the finished product are pants because of the terrible light that's been around the last few days. The shawl is in fact a deep bright blue with one row of contrast edging in a sort of turquoise-y shade I don't have a name for.

wo important lessons were learned during this sprint to the finish line. The first: I wanted to wind two centre pull balls to finish this, but my current loo roll method was too slow (very pretty wound balls though). Ten minutes with google yielded the thumb method, so me and my swift got to work. This also has the unexpected side benefit of giving you a giant comedy thumb like a cartoon character. The second: underfloor heating makes your wet blocking dry really really quickly, definite unexpected bonus for wintertime knitting.

Right-O, time to crack open the ice-cream....

links to interesting things

2009-11-09T11:19:00.000Z

ome interesting things that have caught my eye this morning. Firstly the Persephone Post (the blog of Persephone Books - a great book shop which is situated 5 minutes from where I work and which I am yet to frequent despite reading their blog, and in their own words "prints mainly neglected fiction and non-fiction by women, for women and about women.") had a great picture from the City of Edinburgh Museum and Art Galleries called The Fair-isle Jumper. Dan's been getting into his fair-isle recently, he wants a fair-isle jumper. The hat in this picture is pretty killer too though, those pom-poms are awesome....

ther interesting finds - I had a flick through "blogs of note" on blogger. Last time I did this it didn't yield anything to my taste, but this time I got Darkmatters, a stop motion animation blog which is home to some very cool stuff. Cool in my world anyway, possibly a bit dark and creepy in other worlds, but I enjoyed my visit.

purple spuds

2009-11-06T20:42:00.003Z

'm just trying to distract myself from the horrendous (and unjust) bank charges I've just discovered in my bank account (which, rest assured, someone will be getting an earful for on Monday), so I'm going to think about potatoes instead. The front garden of our terraced flat was basically a weed patch. I'd optimistically installed a hawthorn hedge when we moved in (3 years ago), and a few other scraggy bits of hedging have found their way onto the patch since then, but basically it was heavily compacted complete with some serious clods of clay. It annoyed me that the land was wasted (and ugly), but at the same time it was a tough habitat to start with and not very relaxing to work on, being on the road. I concocted a plan...

e spent a considerable amount of time weeding the patch and something had to be planted to keep the weeds down so our work wouldn't be wasted. Because of the compaction though there was really only one candidate - potatoes. They'd break up the soil and hopefully keep the weeds down a bit, who knows, we might even get a crop (not that we got anything out of our new potatoes on the veg patch after the cats dug them up and killed them).

o I went down the new fangled minituber route - grown in a lab. Three varieties: 5 tubers of Fortyfold; 5 tubers of Champion; 10 tubers of Congo. The patch isn't great, doesn't get much sun, and the spuds were almost entirely neglected once put in. No extra watering, no fertiliser of any kind and only one attempt at some half-hearted earthing up. However, surprisingly enough, we did get crop! 2.02kg of Fortyfold (the star performer), 1.16kg of Congo (0.58kg relatively) and 0.85kg of Champion. Unclear whether Fortyfold was so good because of plot position (getting the most sun) or variety, but I'm pretty sure Congo is not a high yielding variety - it's more for the intense purple colour, which runs right the way through.

straight from the ground.

in the pan, turning the water bright green.

a better view of the spectacular blue-green colour. Sadly my inexperienced clueless dying experiment with a scrap of unbleached muslin (shoved in a pot of the water) yielded no stain.

teeny tiny baby

2009-11-06T13:22:00.002Z

ycling home through London last night was a bit like cycling through a war zone, a great many bangs and whistles and flashes of light. Fireworks have certainly been going off a lot round here in the metaphorical sense. It's never bloomin' quiet round here it seems. My brother's wife had her baby ten weeks early on Wednesday, but things are going well it seems like and baby and Mum are getting stronger. Baby was so early Mum and Dad hadn't got as far as names for her, so she is just Tiny Baby at the moment, all 2lbs 6ozs of her. I've just about managed to stop feeling incredibly anxious about the whole thing and started to feel excited about having a new niece, gonna crack on with some teeny tiny baby hats and boots asap.

he Ishbel shawl is whizzing along nicely. I hate hyperbole, but I do love my new Knit Pro symfonie wood interchangeable circular needles I bought this year. Expensive, but brilliant to use: very smooth and light and just the right kind of pointy-ness. They literally make me smile as they slip through my fingers. I'm using Debbie Bliss Pure Silk, which I'm kind of undecided on as a yarn generally. The deep jewel tone colours are very tempting, as is the overall gloss of the skein. It's nice to work with certainly and drapes very well, but it seems to lose some of that magic as you work with it and it develops a light fuzz.... hmmmm....