On Friday it was soooo muggy that I gave up on indoors and spent the afternoon working in the garden shelter, watched occasionally by next door but one’s cat Ziggy and some pigeons. Not at the same time though, as Zig has a well-founded reputation as a mighty hunter and has been plotting to poach our roof-pigeons for quite some time. He sits on our conservatory roof and watches them, and they peer down at him from the guttering. One day he’ll make the leap…
He’s a very beautiful ginger tom who – like all animals – is a sucker for my Beloved and also for the nepeta planted near our pond. The pictures above are a before and after set for his plant love-in. The Chinese rhubarb on the other side of the pond is considerably less battered as Ziggy and the occasional other cat visitor doesn’t luxuriate in it. The nepeta was almost completely demolished but is making a comeback. As long as they leave the newt who has recently taken up residence in the pond alone they can keep the plants!
The pigeons, on the other hand, were mostly side-eyeing me as they stripped the blackcurrant bush of pretty much every last currant. I don’t mind this as we never really do anything with them other than make blackcurrant vodka if there’s enough, and also if they’re nicking the currants they’re not eating the strawberries. I am mostly eating the strawberries and the raspberries: there is nothing like a perfectly ripe strawberry picked in the sunshine and eaten still warm.
The promised thunderstorms scheduled for Friday afternoon and evening failed to appear, though it is at least a bit fresher with some breezes. Today we have the family round for a Father’s Day barbecue, which is causing me to wonder why I am supposed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of what was put in the freezer after the last barbecue in April.
A full moon swim at Redricks Lake on Wednesday night – the water was hovering about 20 degrees, and I was feeling lazy so I mostly dipped and enjoyed the atmosphere. It’s always so pretty with the fairy lights.
And that’s it from me for the week – I’m off for a swim this morning to set me up for the day, then a bit of sewing to finish the prom dress before the hordes descend!
A happy Father’s Day to my excellent dad, too! He may need to re-register his Kindle as apparently we can no longer buy Amazon.com e-gift cards to be sent outside the US.
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Anna Again/My Favourite Mistake – Marian Keyes
Shadowlands – Matthew Green
The Gilded Nest – Sarah Painter
Earl Crush/Ne’er Duke Well – Alexandra Vasti
The Secret Service of Tea and Treason – India Holton
A Demon’s Guide to Wooing a Witch – Sarah Hawley
Hex Appeal/Hex and the City/Hex and Hexability – Kate Johnson
One of the least fun things about any job these days is the performance management process, or at least the annual review bit of it. Don’t get me wrong – I have a lovely line manager, I work with a great team on a fantastic project and I’ve loved every job I’ve had in the sector, even in the tough times – and I tend to assume that if I’m doing anything disastrously wrong someone would have mentioned it. Still, every year I have several sleepless nights before the meeting and feel a terrible sense of impending doom.
For years in a previous role these reviews were a meaningless process, as I was on a spot salary so didn’t get any annual pay rises anyway. The year I did brilliantly, writing a unit for the London Curriculum and being learning advocate on a blockbuster exhibition, they actually took away the unconsolidated rise from the previous two years and gave me a 3.5% pay cut as no one was getting a rise that year. The letter telling me this was waiting for me when I got home from the glowing review meeting. It was also understood that only the people at the main site could get the coveted ‘purple’ grade – which I wasn’t. (For some reason it took this organisation a couple of years to get the Investors in People badge – can’t think why). Another year, they increased my targets by 28% and cut my budget by 32%, so we were set up to fail by a director who refused to listen to what was actually possible (think Boris Johnson in a badly fitting skirt). That director – not the team, the line manager or the job – was why I left that role.
So why, every year, do I spend several nights pre-meeting wide awake and tossing and turning with stress-related insomnia? It’s a complete mystery but I suspect its quite similar to that feeling of guilt you get when you see a policeman even though you know for a fact that you haven’t committed any crimes. Perhaps there’s something they know that you don’t, and they’re waiting to spring it on you. Perhaps there was a target no one mentioned to you and you haven’t met it as you didn’t know it was there. Paranoid? Moi?
My current job is in a small arts organisation (with big ideas) which is headed by actual humans so the review was very straightforward and positive and helpful and I still have a job. Which is nice.
I’m not sure what can really be done to improve this, really: we’re all held accountable to various standards and there has to be some way of measuring this. I think I should just be grateful that the kids haven’t cottoned onto SMART targets yet – they might start asking me to stop burning dinner or putting mushrooms in it, leave fewer random scraps of fabric and thread about the place and rationalise my books and shoes.
The Families in Museums Network meeting at Young V&A this week. Slightly linked to the above – where the amazing Ops team made the Front of House recruitment process radically inclusive and considerably less stressful for the applicants. However, it did make me feel that I’ve been knocking about this sector for a very long time…
Finishing my portable crochet project in time for the cold snap. It’s made of alpaca and it’s snuggly and soft. I’ve also made some progress on the blanket.
Choosing fabrics from the stash and a pattern for a quilt project (though not the one I’d been planning. Go figure, eh?) with puffins on. Here’s the ones I started with,, though not all have made the final cut. Some of them are sparkly.
Today we’re off for an icy swim (water temp was 1.5 degrees on Saturday – considerably warmer than the air though!) and wondering why we do this to ourselves. Wonder if I can take a cat with me to keep my clothes warm?
See you next week, when I’ve defrosted…
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading
Ten Big Ones/Eleven on Top/Twelve Sharp/Lean Mean Thirteen/Fearless Fourteen – Janet Evanovich
I think, if nothing else, the past fifty odd years of my life have proved that New Year’s resolutions are a bit of a waste of time, so having got that thinking out of the way I can get on with 2025 in my usual fashion – doing as I would be done by, trying not to eat too much cake, making a dent in the contents of the sheds and not being too lazy. This all seems doable. As I mentioned last week I have signed up to an event in March, so need to train for that – I love to walk but am essentially lazy so need a target to aim at. As Tan said about me in 2023, wind her up and point her in the right direction and she’ll just keep going.
Of course, there is still a lot of cake left but will try and ration my consumption….
This week was New Year’s Eve and as has become the tradition over the past ten years or so we spent it with our village gang of friends. Our plan was to go early, spend an hour or so and then come home when the grandbaby we were looking after for the night started getting grumpy. What we hadn’t reckoned with was Mason’s night owl habits – he was having a whale of a time dancing, playing with balloons, being cute at people, eating party food and so on. We eventually wrestled him back into the buggy at 1am, much to his disgust, and marched him home to bed.
I was on night duty with him, sleeping on the couch next to his travel cot, and I am clearly out of practice at this, since my lot are all in their teens – I woke at every snuffle and hiccup and by the time his mama rolled in at 8am with Thing 1 after they’d been out to a rave I was very ready for my bed! Mason, on the other hand, woke up at 6.30am, promptly stole my pillow and blanket while I was warming up some milk for him and went back to sleep leaving me no space at all. Needless to say I spent a lot of New Years Day in bed. Still, as I may have mentioned before, there is nothing quite as snuggly as an armful of warm sleepy baby – at least until your arm goes dead.
I don’t think Lulu is quite as fond of overnighting babies – she’s been quite mad this week, but she’s now got a new tower to play with. Toddlers are big fans of cats but the feeling is not mutual…
Apparently the Uniqlo round mini bag has been going viral recently for being lightweight, washable, handy for travel and being able (according to my sister) to fit an entire bottle of wine inside which I can see would be very useful. The social media reviews tend to talk about 500ml water bottles, but she has her priorities, OK?
The Uniqlo one comes in a quilted option, a corduroy option, as a lined version with a sporty strap, and in a whole variety of colours. Tan had bought the black version and kindly demonstrated the booze-holding capacity at the Christmas market in Ealing – I’d already been looking at the red version while shopping on Black Friday but hadn’t bought it as it wasn’t yellow. I like yellow when it comes to bags. When I was buying my parents’ Christmas presents I gave in to the red one as it was still on sale – obviously it still wasn’t yellow but I found a pattern on Etsy for a dupe and spent a couple of days between Christmas and New Year making a couple in different colours.
The pattern was easy to follow (all mistakes were my own, like getting one of the lining panels the wrong way up!) and the outcome was the same size as the Uniqlo original. This pattern has a zippy pocket on the inside which was surprisingly easy to install, two small side panel pockets and a main space which does – just about – fit the bottle of wine in the same way that the Uniqlo one does. All the fabric and zips came from my stash – a remnants bundle of waxed cotton provided the outer fabrics, and some quilting cotton featuring lucky cats and a comic book print from the V&A sample sale a couple of years ago came in handy for the lining.
I did need to buy the hardware as I wanted an adjustable strap but if you always wear your bags the same length you can make it without these bits. You could also make it without the zippy pocket if you were after a quick gift for someone. I happen to have a lot of waxed cotton so can see me making more of these (get your requests in now, people! I have various colours (not purple or teal, sorry M)). I tested it out on my commute on Thursday and it fits my phone, glasses case, earphone pouch easily but not my current portable project but that’s because I didn’t try and squash it in.
Things making me happy this week
The possibility of snow, though I fear I will be let down by Essex weather again
Siestas with warm cats as winter is finally biting (see point 1)
The microwavable boots I had for Christmas I had from the TTS (see point 2)
Quiet day in the office on Thursday where NO ONE was asking me to do stuff. I can be forgiven for being late to both Teams meetings, yes? What were all these other people doing working?
Putting Christmas away tidily till next year
Home made orange, cinnamon and cranberry bread in the bread maker
Finally mastering Yorkshire puddings
This isEngland – I didn’t pay any attention the first time round but am really enjoying it
Wallace and Grommit – Vengeance Most Fowl – No Parkin! on the Yorkshire border side made me laugh out loud
A rainbow of fat quarters for a quilting project just awaiting the purple shades before I can start planning
Quilting this nine-patch ready for backing. I *think* it’s a Riley Blake fabric but it may also be Moda. It’s got stars on and it was charm packs.
With any luck the lake will be frozen tomorrow so we can pretend we’re orcas or polar bears or something – a good ice swim always makes us feel like superwomen!
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
High Five/Hot Six/Seven Up/Hard Eight/To The Nines – Janet Evanovich
BBC Dramatisations of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (Audible)
A wide range of quilt books in search of inspiration!
Disclaimer: before I begin, any typos are the fault of trying to type at an angle due to having a lap full of cats. Attempts to dislodge them proved futile, as they just sat on the laptop. You have been warned.
As mentioned last week, my partner in woolly crime Heather and I were off to the Waltham Abbey Wool Show on Sunday to fondle yarn and to have a go at spinning on a drop spindle – something I have wanted to try for a while. An excuse to have a go at using all those gorgeous piles of fluff and colour and sparkle that are on offer at the shows, and also to learn a new skill.
Led by Michele Turner, aka Craftyheffalumpus, it was 90 minutes of woolly happiness: fluff and squish and colour and interesting crafty gadgetry. Many of these gadgets are surprisingly spiky (hackles and wool combs, for example) and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find them popping up in a gruesomely bucolic (bucolically gruesome?) episode of Midsomer Murders. The Midsomer Weavers and Spinners Guild could be a force to be reckoned with. You read it here first.
There’s also a whole lexicon of new vocabulary: as well as the aforementioned hackles, there are batts, punis, roving, staple, noils, tops, rolags, slubs, and of course the fabulous niddy-noddy. We had a go at using some different types of spindle, working with different forms of fluff (assorted sheep! sparkly things!) and we all went away with small balls of yarn and a new excuse to go and squish (and sniff) different sorts of yarn at the stalls. My favourite was YarnTings with beautiful hand-dyed batts inspired by photos the dyer had taken.
The ‘what the hell?’ stage? A Turkish spindle, apparentlyLumpy but I did it!
I came home with some lovely things to spin, some sock yarns (of course) inspired by Doctor Who, and a spindle. There were some stalls missing from previous years but many new ones – I have some linen yarn to try making some jewellery with, which I haven’t seen before, and it looks as if it may need less starching than cotton thread. You’ll see from this week’s reading list that I have been doing some research, but so far I haven’t convinced my beloved that we need an alpaca/small flock of sheep for the garden.
Further adventures with Evri
Well, the missing parcels finally arrived! Having been declared lost in the previous week, they then reappeared and re-entered the delivery process on Monday with a ‘your parcels are out for delivery’ notification. They were not delivered. Tracking on Tuesday showed them as actually going backwards in the system to the sender’s local depot. They finally arrived on Thursday. Ordering something this weekend, I was offered the option of free delivery with Evri, or £3.50 for DPD. Want to guess which one I picked?
Swimming with the (frozen) fishes
Between starting this post and now, I have been up to Redricks Lake for a swim – well, a dip. The lake is covered in an inch-thick skin of ice in the dipping spot, and we did have to talk ourselves into getting in there today! I went up in my wetsuit for the first time since last March, and then took it off before I got in as the thought of wrestling it off again was daunting to say the least. I wore 5mm boots and my 3mm boots on my hands which looked very silly but meant I didn’t have to struggle getting the winter gloves off.
It was definitely only for the hardy today at a surface temperature of 1 degree and an air temp of -5…! Thanks to another swimmer for taking pics of Jill and I in the water…I have my new sparkly red bobble hat on, made by Jill’s mum, and my skin matched it when I got out! I lasted about two minutes and then made a dash for the hot choc and my heated gilet. My foresight in putting my pants and thermal leggings into my hot water bottle cover was excellent and I feel amazing now, honest…
The hardy icebreakers at workYesterday’s ice on the bankJill with iceberg, me underwaterHad enough, I’m getting out. Ice as thick as the picnic table….
Other things making me happy this week
Kick off meeting to sort out the handling collection before we move back to Young V&A
Starting to construct the Sew Different Sunrise Jacket – happiness tarnished by discovering that I’d cut one set of panels out the wrong way round. There was swearing.
And that’s it – I’m going to go and defrost in a hot bath now!
Last week we ran out of the Furry Fiends’ usual Iams cat food, and as the Amazon subscription delivery was due in a few days I grabbed some Go-Cat from the local Co-op to tide them over. It received the kind of ecstatic welcome I’d expect from the Things if I turned up with a surprise McDonalds. There was winding round the ankles, head bumps, clean bowls and general excitement. Clearly this is junk food extraordinaire for cats: weird shapes, vegetables, that sort of thing.
Considering they are cats and can’t actually speak, they do a good job of communicating their needs to us. Bailey herds us to where we need to be – food, or water – and Ted is very vocal. Lulu is the teenage sulky cat who flops about the place or stalks off in a huff.
All three of the furry landmines came to us as adult cats: Teddy and Bailey from a new blended family where there was an allergy, and Lulu from a home where they just didn’t have room for a cat any more. Ted was four, Bailey was three and Lulu was one. Ted is a lilac haired British Shorthair, Bailey is a chocolate point British Shorthair and Lulu is a dark tortoiseshell domestic shorthair (your common or garden mog, in other words). Much like the Things, they have their own very well-defined personalities.
Teddy and BaileyLulu
Ideally they would all love each other and sleep in adorably Instagrammable furry heaps. In reality, the boys hate the girl so every week we have to swap them between upstairs and downstairs. The boys will walk through any open door, Lulu has to be collected by stealth or physically wrestled: no matter who actually does the swapping it’s my fault and my ankles are at risk for the next few hours. The sight of a bag of kitty litter sends her into hiding as she knows what’s coming. For a cat that regularly falls down stairs when she rolls over on the top step and who has been known to miss when she jumps onto something, she’s pretty bright at times. Ted and Bailey will also walk straight into the cat carrier to go to the vets.
Lulu adores my Beloved and has been known to bring him gifts of unwary shrews that venture onto the catio. Last Christmas it took us half an hour, a wooden spoon and an empty cheese sauce pot to recapture a mouse she’d brought him. At least once she’s handed them over she loses interest, so we don’t have to retrieve them from her. She snuggles up to him on the sofa, can recognise the sound of the van and sit up meerkat-style when she hears him coming in, and she hurls herself at his feet when he approaches. The rest of us get our ankles attacked and our shoulders high-fived when she’s ensconced in her favourite box on the cat tree. The computer chair is her favoured sleep spot, and she’s happy to demand space from Thing 3. She also likes to make her presence known in the night by dotting her cold nose on any exposed limbs, or via a piercing mew close to your ear.
Teddy and Bailey are much more laid back (unless Lulu is within sight). Ted’s turned into a bit of a princess at the grand age of 10, seeking out cushions and comfortable beds. All paper work on the floor is fair game, and all pencils are his playthings. He goes through phases of sleeping on my head in the night, as pillows are his property, which leaves me with a cricked neck. I can occasionally employ a decoy pillow to distract him, however. His favourite trick is to demand attention and then to lie down just out of reach of the person attempting to stroke him. He has a loud miaow, which he deploys when anyone has the temerity to a) lock a door against him, b) be outside in the garden or c) not provide undivided attention on demand.
Both Teddy and Bailey can detect a tin of tuna being opened from three rooms away and can teleport to the kitchen. Pedigree cats are prone to gingivitis, so Bailey had a lot of teeth removed a couple of years ago which has left him with a fang on his bottom jaw. He has a faintly piratical air thanks to this and his bandit mask (like the Dread Pirate Roberts). He likes to stand on his back legs to demand attention, and does a silent miaow at you, especially in the mornings when he knows breakfast is in the offing. He’s partial to the odd Quaver or Wotsit, and also likes scraps of ham. His current favourite spot in the heat wave is under the desk in a dark corner, or on the corner stair next to the outside wall where it’s cool.
These two do collapse in furry heaps together, and I suspect Bailey would be open to a friendlier relationship with Lulu if Ted wasn’t around. We live in a house which has had cats since the 1960s and it felt wrong to be without one!
Other things making me happy…
This week one of my colleagues managed to take a photo of me that I didn’t hate, and Thing 2 also captured one of me in my latest attempt at creating work-appropriate pyjamas. (I haven’t tested them out yet as this week has been heatwave time again.)
This is meThis is also me
The red dress photo was taken at Oxford House, where one of my amazing colleagues organised an event for families on Monday. We had a great day meeting local families, playing with the blue blocks outside in the shade and finding out what makes them creative. They discovered what a curator does, saw some of the new ideas for the museum and designed some picture frames too. A local professional photographer, Rehan Jamil captured portraits of children with props while Will Newton, curator of the Imagine gallery, recorded their stories for the ‘This is Me’ section of the space. Naturally the team got in on the act for some test shots – of course I had my crochet with me in the shape of a new Dragon Scale shawl which is my current tube project. Our colleague on mat leave visited with her gorgeous baby, who is – fortunately – resigned to being cuddled by random museumites – the problem with people going on mat leave, I have found, is that you really want them to come back as you miss them but you also want their mat cover to stay as they are equally lovely.
The work appropriate pyjamas are actually the Zadie jumpsuit by Paper Theory – online reviews were mixed on fit, and the PDF pattern was a nightmare to put together but the result was great. I used another 100% cotton fabric that I’d bought as an end-of-roll bargain last year.
Fab lollies. Fab lollies are great. Although this week my beloved’s response to being asked if he’d like a Fab was ‘what time is it?’. That’s on a par with saying ‘no thanks, I’m not hungry’ to the offer of a chocolate. Weird.
Trialling a giant pig in a blanket version of last year’s tree decorations. Chunky yarn!
And now I’m off for a swim! See you next week.
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
More Tales of the City/Further Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin
Well, that was a week of unparalleled misery, quite frankly – topped off by Thing 3 testing positive for Covid on Thursday. Thing 2 was off with the dreaded corona the week before last, I was knocked for six by labyrinthitis (which is not, sadly, a surfeit of David Bowie’s startling trousers) and now Thing 3. Enough already!
Labyrinthitis is a definite -1,000,000/10, do not recommend. It was so horrible I didn’t pick up a crochet hook for a week, or even a book for several days. That bad. NHS 111 recommended taking something called Buccastem, which is supposed to relieve nausea and vomiting related to migraine, and other people recommended Stugeron which made things infinitely worse. A tweet from a lovely museum person crediting my blog from a few weeks ago with making her feel reassured about her upcoming colposcopy made me cry, but so did the lovely Norwegian postal system’s Christmas advert celebrating 50 years since Norway decriminalised same-sex relationships.
Furry nurses are the best
It was Wednesday before I started feeling semi-human again, and Friday before I felt safe to go out of the house. My Beloved did a most excellent job with laundry and keeping the Horde alive, and the furry fiends did an excellent job of keeping me warm. Friends were amazing at relaying Thing 3 home from school, which at least we don’t need to worry about this week as he’ll be off with me isolating.
Lack of new output does, however, mean I can share a piece I finished a while ago but which only got handed over this week – despite the fact that I have seen Heather several times. We were supposed to have a ‘Grumpy People’s Supporters Club’ night out on Friday (well, they did, I stayed on the sofa watching Cowboy Bebop): the last time we saw each other all together was on the hen night back in June! The pattern can be found here and the seller was kind enough to offer to chart the names for me to personalise it as well. I’m told the bride liked it – she loves Art Deco and had a 1920s car to take her to the service, so it should be a good reminder of the day.
Finally managed to hand this over!
When I did manage to pick up a book again, it was with the intention of working through some of the digital shelf of shame on the Kindle – in the mood for something easy, I chose Colin Watson’s Flaxborough novels which were published between 1958 and 1982. Police procedurals which would probably be tagged with the awful ‘cosy mystery’ label these days, these are witty and terribly British, featuring the Viking-like Inspector Purbright and the eastern town of Flaxborough. I had three on my Kindle already and luckily the rest were cheap as I quickly got addicted.
Lying in bed unable to do anything meant I had a lot of time to do mental crafting, which is at least cheaper than the normal kind. I have a head full of ideas and no way to get to them, as my crafting space (OK, the dining room) is still full of stuff we haven’t put back after the heating was put in. My beloved has taken the opportunity to do small jobs upstairs while the place is already in chaos. I’m not saying I’m getting itchy fingers here but I have things that need making! Things 2 and 3 want new pants and there’s Christmas making to be done. This Hobbit Hole piece needs finishing, too: the pattern is by Vetlanka on Etsy. It’s been a while since I’ve worked on such a high count fabric, but the effect is so delicate.
I’ve taken the opportunity to set up a Facebook page for this blog as well, where I can sell the various bits and bobs I make that aren’t destined for gifts, at least from me. You’ll be able to find it here and I really need to take some photos to get things online! Watch this space.
Anyway, I must head off – there’s PCR tests to do and a book to get back to.
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Speaking in Bones – Kathy Reich
Coffin, Scarcely Used / Bump in the Night / Hopjoy Was Here / Lonelyheart 4122 / Charity Ends at Home / The Flaxborough Crab / Broomsticks over Flaxborough / The Naked Nuns / One Man’s Meat – Colin Watson (Flaxborough series)
Normal service resumes after the last couple of weeks! It’s September after all, with the new school year kicking off: new shoes, new bits of uniform ordered if not actually delivered thanks to the shipping delays, driver strikes and shortages that definitely aren’t anything to do with Brexit, good heavens no, timetables downloaded, last minute coursework that Thing 1 assured me all summer she’d done, and so on.
Last weekend I braved Westfield (is it only me that feels the need to shout ‘Westfield! in a bad Radio 1 DJ sort of way?) with Thing 2 in order to buy school shoes. She has very very wide feet (an I fitting) so I knew Harlow at the end of August really wasn’t going to provide what we needed. Instead we had a mum and daughter day out shopping. We also needed school trousers, as we haven’t been able to find the particular style she wants online – the Next ones came up like thick leggings, the George ones were too high waisted, the suggestion of the Banner or Trutex ones either earned me a withering look or weren’t in stock (ditto New Look, Very, Tu, Morrisons, Matalan – everywhere!).
Tim Westfield! Westwood. WestWOOD. Not field.
Thing 2 has been, from a very early age, a child who knows her own mind. In many ways this makes me proud. In other ways it makes me want to slug gin in my coffee and leave her to it. Despite Westfield’s (Westfield!) many shops, we failed to find either shoes or trousers so I ended up buying shoes we could both live with online and she can either alter her thinking about the kind of trousers she wants or wear skirts for the year. I too can be stubborn. We did have a lovely lunch at Wagamama followed by bubble tea for her, and she chose some new clothes at Primark and New Look as well as some bits and bobs from Flying Tiger. I bought some more notebooks – I do love some stationery!* I took her over to the less shiny side of Stratford too, as she wanted some baskets for her bedroom: after Westfield (etc) I think the old Stratford Centre came as a bit of a shock to the system. I used to shop there when I first lived in London as it was the closest place to Forest Gate. It hasn’t changed much, really, in the last 25 years. The planners tried to make it look pretty by installing shiny leaf sculptures (or possibly fish) in front of it in 2012 in case tourists happened to glance in that direction on their way to the Olympics, but it didn’t really help. I suspect some actual investment might have been a better idea, except that just didn’t happen, and what they were left with was an island of Poundlands and Shoe Zones.**
The ‘Stratford Shoal’ by Studio Egret West in 2012. It’s not so shiny now.
*as it turned out I did not need to buy notebooks as I came home with many many new notebooks from the Digital Accountancy Show I worked at later in the week. Ah well. Still, you never know when you’ll need a notebook. Or ten.
**I could go on about the regeneration of Stratford for 2012 at length, but I won’t because it makes me quite annoyed.
Making and doing
I had a few days to recover from the ordeal of shopping with Thing 2, so obviously this involved fabric and leaving pins all over the floor, crochet and cross stitch. After the challenge of making Irish sister’s 1920s skirt I gave in and bought the Japanese Haori and Hapi pattern from Folkwear that I have been ogling for several years. They are not cheap patterns, but come with wonderful histories of the garments and traditional detailing information. They are also adding more and more of their paper patterns to their PDF catalogue, which makes me happy indeed.
I used a gorgeous fabric from Kanvas Studio – Moonlit Lilypads from their Moonlight Serenade collection, and for the lining some tie-dyed cotton that was sold as a star print but when it arrived the print was distinctly…. herbal. The fabric is a one way print which the pattern isn’t suitable for but I rather like how its turned out despite that.
I made the Haori option – a lined, mid-thigh length jacket which comes up quite long on me. The pattern was occasionally a bit confusing to follow, with hand drawn illustrations, but as long as I took it slowly and did a lot of pinning and tacking it wasn’t too bad to construct. My hand sewing is shocking, so if I ever decide to enter the Sewing Bee I’ll have to work on that, and I cheated by machine stitching some of the bits I should have slip stitched but hey, I’m the one wearing it. I love the sleeves, and this is quite cosy to wear so I think it should get a lot of use.
Continuing the Japanese theme, I used some of the leftover koi fabric from making a Simple Sew Lottie blouse to make this Nori Kimono bag. I lined it with some ladybird print polycotton fabric that was an ebay purchase, and it’s had a compliment or two already. I haven’t worn the blouse yet! I love this fabric, it’s so colourful.
As ever I have been cross stitching and crocheting: the temperature tree is up to date, the Hobbit Hole is finished, the Build Your Own Beehive Shawl and the socks are ongoing, and I took a break to make a chicken sweater as one of my lovely colleagues adopted some commercial laying hens (not battery ones!). These are all the bits I haven’t shared with you in my last couple of sensible weeks.
Temperature Tree…
…high of 23, low of 16 in August. Call that a summer?
Front…
…and back
Chicken sweater!
Morgan jeans – pockets
Button fly
Morgan jeans in black denim
Bigger on the inside
Uniqlo Tate Play in the Turbine Hall – please draw freely
The chicken-adopting colleague, myself and two others also visited Tate Modern to see their summer activity – drawing freely in the Turbine Hall as part of the Uniqlo Tate Play programme. The artwork is amazing and it was great fun adding our little bits to it! I really want to make something out of one of those banners!
The latest thing I have been up to is dabbling in Dungeons and Dragons for the first time in about three decades – I filled in for someone who couldn’t attend a regular game on Friday and managed not to kill his character off so hopefully I’ll be allowed back! The host (Dungeon Master) and his wife have a beautiful gaming table so dice trays are very much the order of the day – I played around with an online tutorial yesterday, and using things from in the craft shed I made a collapsible fabric one and another using a shadow box frame. I’d forgotten how horribly velvet frays so I shall have to do something about the edges but it was quite quick and fun to make.
It’s been a very productive few weeks, as you can see! I’ll see you all again for week 77…now I must go and do the ironing I have been putting off for months.
The wish ‘happy new year’ has quite possibly never been said by so many people with so much fervency (is that a word?) as it has been this year. Don’t get me wrong, there have been some bad years before: 1994 was pretty horrendous, as was 2003, but those weren’t universally bad. I was glad to see the back of them but felt pretty hopeful about the future. And, to be honest, announcements of vaccines this week are giving me hope for 2021.
Have a cat, because there’s about to be a lot of text.
And 2020, despite all the challenges, hasn’t been all bad. Yes, there were the cancelled holidays, the various levels of lockdown, Covid-19 as a thread across the year, worry about my nurse friends and my vulnerable family members, Christmas without family and so on, but to end the year I’m going to share the things that gave me joy. In no particular order, I give you…my top ten of 2020:
I’ve had six unexpected months with the Things, which is the longest time I’ve been able to spend with them since maternity leave. Maternity leave is wonderful, but you have a tiny baby, no sleep, you’re juggling any other children you have, and trying to remain an actual person at the same time. In my case, too, I had post-natal depression with both Things 1 and 2 which made the whole experience somewhat frightening, especially with Thing 1, when I didn’t know what was happening to me. So, six months with my children, spending time with them now they’re independent, finding out what they love to do, going on walks, learning new skills with them: thank you 2020, for giving me that.
The glorious summer! Can you imagine being in lockdown without that wonderful weather, in a typical rainy British summer season?
The garden. My beloved and I were both furloughed, and had we not had the garden we’d have been under each other’s feet constantly. We are lucky to live where we do, and the garden at the end of this year – thanks entirely to my beloved – looks amazing. It’s filled with birds at the moment: as I look out of the window I can see an enormous rook, wood pigeons, collared doves, a robin, blue tits and great tits. We have goldcrests, dunnocks, sparrows, nesting blackbirds, occasional woodpeckers and jays. This year I have learned to love the noisy, scrappy, playful brood of magpies that hatched in a tree behind the garden – and to have great sympathy for their put-upon mother.
Open water swimming. We came late to this, starting in July, but it’s been a sanity saver for all of us. Swimming in the summer was wonderful, surrounded by the coot chicks and the grebes, but if anyone had said to me then that I’d be looking forward to getting in a sub-5 degree lake on New Year’s Day I’d have laughed. I never thought I’d take up an extreme sport but apparently this is ice swimming – and I love it. I’m a head-up breast stroker, not a front crawler, but at Redricks this is fine: everyone is made to feel welcome. The mental health and physical benefits have been heavily documented by other people in much more learned spaces, but I have to agree with them!
Our local countryside – I live in North Weald in Essex, and I do a lot of walking anyway, having trained for and completed a couple of walking marathons. This year there are no events, so I have been walking for the sheer joy of it. Being at home for most of the year and being able to just ramble, watching the hedgerows and wildlife, not having to be anywhere: it’s been so mindful, just slowing down and watching the world and the seasons change. On any walk I may see rabbits, red kites, muntjac and fallow deer, and hares as well as fields of horses and cows, friendly cats and lots of dogs. It’s cheaper than therapy, too: my friends and I put the world to rights, and when Thing 2 joins me we spend time looking for tiny fungi and mosses.
Zoom and WhatsApp: I may not have been in Wales with my family but we can still see each other and chat. This year we have had a wider clan WhatsApp chat which gets very silly at times, I have conversations with my sisters and with the whole family. We can still share the things that make us laugh, and then we realise that the whole clan shares the warped sense of humour.
This blog! It’s been such a cathartic experience: sharing when I am down or angry or frustrated, talking about the things I love to do, taking you all on a journey through my creation processes. It’s not a curated lifestyle blog, or a foodie blog, or a crafty blog: it’s just me. I try and be honest, whether that’s about my mental health or my reaction to government policy. I try and be wry and look sideways at disasters. Hopefully I succeed! I use Facebook as a daily microblog, too – keeping a count of the days, with three highlights, positives or disasters of the day. In work writing these days tends to be figures, and proposals, and reports – I have loved the chance this year to write because I want to – and to write what I want to.
The people I work with: Microsoft Teams has kept us all in contact, as has Zoom for those social moments. I am so lucky to work with a core team of brilliant people – we are tightknit, we care about each other, and we have felt supported by each other throughout. The museum we are creating is going to be amazing, and I can’t wait for the days when Monday meetings are round a table and not on screen again. I genuinely love my job.
Making, of course. Crochet, dressmaking, cross stitch, quilting: 2020 has given me time to hone old and learn new skills. Obviously there’s still more to learn, but the act of creating and sharing my creations has given me such pleasure this year. Designing my own cross stitches and sharing those has boosted my confidence, too. I just need to get back to work now to wear all those clothes….
My friends: socially distanced coffees in front gardens, people to walk with, to see over Zoom and Houseparty, to make plans with for ‘when things are normal’. I have never been that mum at the school gate as I have always been working, but this year I have really appreciated the chance to walk up daily with my neighbour and their puppy, to see other parents, and to feel part of village life.
Staged, with Michael Sheen and David Tennant. A comedy that perfectly captured the 2020 zeitgeist: Zoom, spending so much time at home, turning our focus locally, working so differently. And Season Two starts this week! OK, so that’s 11 – but this programme is definitely a bonus!
So, 2020 – thank you for all the above. Thanks also to the key workers – not just the frontline NHS crews who’ve really, really, really earned a pay rise rather than claps, but to the retail staff, the cleaners, public transport people, and – the unsung heroes – the teachers who’ve been juggling conflicting and frankly bonkers government advice, online and in-person teaching, pastoral care on unprecedented levels, given up their holidays to care for key worker and vulnerable children, who are now spending this holiday trying to plan mass testing, remote learning and more while being abused by the red-tops for ‘laziness’ and ‘cowardice’. The two schools my Horde attend have been brilliant throughout and their care and dedication is being echoed across the country.
I am not given to New Year’s resolutions, but if I were, mine would be to take the positives from 2020 forward into this year: to slow down and watch the seasons change, to appreciate the time I have with my children, to keep being creative and learning new skills, to keep writing and swimming and finding the positives.
It’s not Christmas without a Dalek
One of the things I like to do between Christmas and New Year is a big jigsaw – you may remember this one from my charity shop trawl before Christmas. It took three days, and those Daleks were trickier than they looked. Things 2 and 3 dropped in to help occasionally, and I took up most of the table, and thankfully it didn’t have any pieces missing – not bad for £1.75! And all finished in time for this year’s Doctor Who special on New Year’s Day which was fantastic, to quote Nine – sad to see Bradley Walsh and Tosin Cole go, but bringing John Bishop on board is going to be interesting. Catherine Tate was surprisingly good once I put enough distance between her and her sketch show characters, as was Matt Lucas, so why not John Bishop?
In crafty news, I’m still working on the Hobbit cross stitch… and have so many more geeky patterns on the to-do list! Not much crochet has happened, but it’s not going anywhere.
Do you think he knows about second breakfast?
Facebook memories threw up a quote I’d shared a couple of years ago the other day, and it inspired me to create pixel people of the family and to design a new pattern – I started with squared paper and pencils, as I’m not confident enough to work directly into StitchFiddle yet, and then transferred into the software afterwards. I made a lot more use of the floss chart, too, but need to test it against the swatch book as soon as I remember where I put it this time.
Pencil on the left, digital on the right
The pixel people templates came from here, and the fonts were from a book I bought a few months ago and this set on Etsy as I wanted to use a range of lettering. I am not sure about using the coloured dots in the ‘Friends’ font (the word ‘nice’), and I might go back to the original one from my pencil drawing. The idea was to incorporate some of the things the kids have enjoyed – Thing 1 binged Friends earlier this year, and Harry Potter is always a favourite.
The final pixel family – the kids love their minis, but my beloved thinks he should have a swagbag over his shoulder. Note that Lulu is next to him, as he’s her favourite human!
I’ve also done a lot of walking – very muddy, very icy, very beautiful.
The last four are from Dial House, home of various members of the punk band Crass
I’m looking forward to my third dip of the week later this morning – we swam on the 29th and on New Year’s Day. We didn’t have to break the ice in the end, despite being a bit concerned as the temperature didn’t get above one degree on New Year’s Eve! It was so cold, but we felt amazing afterwards. The outside temperature right now is two degrees, but it is only 7am.
New Year’s Day at Redricks
On the subject of temperature, another new project I’ve decided on is a temperature cross stitch using this tree design, where you stitch the high temperature for each day. I’ve just seen that someone is doing two trees, one for highs and one for lows…. must. Resist!
So Happy New Year, everyone! Catch you at the end of week 42.
I am not good at Christmas – well, I’m not good at the build up to Christmas. I am tense. I am stressed. The mere sight of a Christmas tree before December 1st turns me into the Grinch. My family – bless them – have been asking me for weeks what the children would like for Christmas. I don’t know. Ask them! Ask their father! He is good at Christmas. He has ordered presents. I have not ordered presents. I have not booked my Christmas delivery slot at Tesco (other supermarkets are available).
I have not done Christmas cards for anyone but family for the last several years – work colleagues in a normal year get a tree decoration, and I donate the cost of cards and postage to charity. This year it will be a food bank charity. Until last Sunday I was in deep denial and we ended up dashing to Tesco to buy advent calendars (which we eventually got in M&S, as everywhere else was sold out)
And don’t even get me started on that bloody elf. He could stay on the shelf for all I care, but Things Two and Three come downstairs and look for the stripy little sod every morning. The first year we had an elf, the kids went into hysterics and I had to promise to send it away. I rehomed it, but that didn’t last and their dad bought a new one in Poundland a couple of years later. I salute my neighbour who has two big elves and three baby elves, which is a whole lot of work. Luckily our elf – dubbed ‘Candycane’ by the children – just does what it says on the tin and sits on various shelves rather than getting up to twee mischief.
I am mellowing slightly, however, and Christmas lights are allowed to be put up this weekend. The tree goes up two weekends before Christmas and I am not budging on that. I have noticed that Thing Two has persuaded her dad to get their ‘bedroom tree’ down already, but I’m ignoring it. Teddy the cat was thrilled to catch his first bird as a result of this, however, and proudly dragged the fake robin downstairs to show us… he was practically strutting for the rest of the evening.
Teddy’s first bird…
This year – of all years – I am enjoying the Christmas lights on the way to school, and one of my neighbours always goes all out to decorate their house.
There is one thing that’s guaranteed to make me feel a bit more Christmassy, luckily, and that’s a Christmas movie (Christmas music, too, but we’ll do that another day). Thing Two refused to allow us to watch any before December 1st, but now it’s open season and I can indulge. So here, in no particular order, are my favourite festive films.
1.The Muppets’ Christmas Carol. Michael Caine in possibly his greatest role ever. Excellent ghosts. Muppets. It truly has everything.
2. Scrooged. You can’t go wrong with Bill Murray in anything, and this also has one of the best Christmas theme songs ever in the shape of Al Green and Annie Lennox’s ‘Put a little love in your heart‘. It’s not Christmas till Carol Kane has thwacked Bill Murray with a toaster, frankly.
Scrooged
3. Miracle on 34th Street – the 1934 version is my favourite, but I am quite fond of the Richard Attenborough one too.
4. Elf – The best way to spread Christmas cheer is to sing out loud for all to hear.
5. It’s a Wonderful Life – my dad’s favourite. James Stewart is wonderful as the frustrated savings and loan owner whose life never goes quite to plan. He’s so human, and if anyone deserves an angel its him.
It’s a Wonderful Life
6. The Christmas Chronicles – a late entry by this Netflix original, with Kurt Russell as a great Santa. Goldie Hawn needs to lay off the Botox though. Plus, a guest appearance by Miami Steve (Steven Van Zandt). The sequel is brought down by the really naff ending.
7. The Hogfather – I reread the book every year, and although this isn’t strictly a film its still part of my Christmas watch list.
HO. HO. HO.
8. Arthur Christmas. Another new one, but a great voice cast.
9. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. If only for the cat.
There are others, of course, but for me its not Christmas until I have watched this lot. (For the record, yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie.)
I feel more festive already.
Lost: one (crafty) mojo
This week – quite apart from it being December – has been a bit challenging, to say the least. Thing One was already isolating after contact with a Covid case in the last week of November, and then on Monday we received an email telling us that the whole of years seven and ten now had to isolate as the number of cases had risen among both students and staff. Back to the home learning then, and I made the decision to work from home with them. While I could leave Thing One alone for a few hours in between my beloved leaving for work and me coming back, it wasn’t fair to expect her to supervise the (very determined) Thing Two. And yes, mum, I know where she gets it from!
Thing One had a great virtual parent/teacher conference this week which told me what I already knew – my daughter is brilliant – and she has worked really hard this week. One of her English tasks was to write a speech, and she spent far longer on it than the allotted lesson time as she was so passionate about her subject. She was writing about mental health; as someone who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety, this is really important to her (and to me, as someone who lives with depression) and I am really proud that she is engaging with this in her work.
Thing Two is a different matter. She is still getting used to secondary school after six months at home, and unlike her big sister she is not a self-motivator. My work week has been punctuated by demands for assistance with geography, history, English and science (though she did at least get on with the maths by herself). The only plus was that she did the art homework she’d been resisting while avoiding her geography. I have found meetings having meetings with a bad-tempered little presence in the room quite tricky, especially as she’s a curious little bird and likes to come and see who I am talking to. Really I should invite her to the design meetings as she’s the right age and we could pick her brains!
I am tempted not to send them back for the last few days of term, to be honest: the infection rates are highest in the 11-16 age group, as secondary schools didn’t close during lockdown, and keeping them safe has to be my priority. I don’t want whatever Christmas looks like to be spent watching them for symptoms of the virus – Thing One is already fed up of me pouncing on her and feeling her head for signs of a temperature. Poor Thing Three is having to go to school still, as the girls aren’t showing any symptoms, but I suspect he likes the escape.
Having to wear the mum head and the work head at the same time is tiring, as you need to have separate brain spaces, so by the time we finish for the day and I have fed the horde crafting is the last thing on my mind. Dinner is nominally 6pm, but I am flexible as to time zone: it’s six o’clock somewhere, to paraphrase the song.
The very quick stitch I started last week is mostly a frame and some wording, very little has happened with either blanket and the sock is positively languishing in my work bag.
Sometimes when the crafty mojo vanishes it’s good to pick up something different just to get the hands moving, so I delved into my Ravelry library yesterday evening and whipped up a weeping angel amigurumi which will end up on the tree next weekend. The photos were taken on the kids’ mini tree which is lurking upstairs (yes, the one where Teddy ‘caught’ his robin).
Don’t blink….
I dragged Thing Two out for a muddy walk yesterday, through the woods to the rope swing. We tested out our new wellies, and looked for fungi and mosses. The winter sun was golden and lovely in the trees, and we followed deer tracks through the mud. There has been a lot of rain this week, so it was good to get out into the sunshine.
So that was week 37. Winter has set in with a vengeance, with sub zero temps – the lake was 5 degrees yesterday, so hopefully it won’t be too much colder this morning. We didn’t get to swim last week as the police shut it down as a ‘gathering’ despite the social distancing measures that Redricks had put in place. Is it weird to be looking forward to getting into freezing water?
See you at the end of week 38, when the tree will be up and I’ll be well into my list of festive films. Which ones have I missed out?
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Crochet Hacking – Emma Friedlander-collins
The Dark Archive (Invisible Library) – Genevieve Cogman
Forged (Alex Verus) – Benedict Jacka
The Third Nero (Flavia Albia) – Lindsey Davis (Audible)
I, like many of my friends, seem to have spent the latter part of this week in a state of rising fury: first ignited by the government’s decision not to extend the provision of free school meals to families in need over the holidays and then fanned by the increasingly terrible excuses for their decisions. This high profile campaign to help families through a period of unprecedented need has been spearheaded by professional footballer Marcus Rashford, who was given an MBE for services to vulnerable children only a couple of weeks ago. 322 MPS voted against. Some abstained. One MP resigned after defying the Tory whip and voting for the bill.
“Speaking to BBC Breakfast about being made an MBE, Rashford said: “It’s a nice moment for me personally but I feel like I’m still at the beginning of the journey that I set out to try to achieve.I think what I would like to do now that I’m in this position is just speak directly to the prime minister and really ask for the vouchers to be extended until at least October half-term because I think that’s what the families need.”
Marcus Rashford (image by Sky News)
Rashford is right: families need food.
There’s the usual self-righteous bleating about ‘poor families’ spending their vouchers on unhealthy food, about ‘absent parents’ needing to ‘take responsibility’ for their children, even – against all evidence – that children were being helped by the government pumping money (a ‘pledged’ £9bn) into the welfare system. That feeding needy families is ‘nationalising children’. The ‘uplift’ for universal credit claimants of £20 a week amounts to £1000 a year – and that’s £1000 they won’t have next year. Food has also become more expensive this year, so how far does £20 a week go to feed a family of five? There’s two of us working in this family, and there is still a lot of pasta, omelette and corned beef hash at the end of the month.
Well, here’s the thing; according to the Trussell Trust, the UK’s biggest food poverty charity, the huge surge in demand for foodbank use can be explicitly linked to the introduction of universal credit. With a five-week wait for the first payment, people are expected to survive on air, and when you have kids that really isn’t an option.
Here’s another thing: ‘unhealthy’ food is often cheap food, and it’s easy food, and in more and more cases the people claiming universal credit are not Waynetta Slobs sitting on their arses all day, smoking a fag and watching daytime TV. They are families where both parents are working, often full time, and they still can’t make ends meet. And they are tired. They come home from work and the last thing they want is to start peeling bloody carrots and whipping up a Jamie Oliver-approved vegetable-stuffed spag bol.
Free school meals are a lifeline, because they know that at least one meal that day is taken care of, it’s a hot meal and so they can perhaps get away with something smaller in the evening. This year – when the government has forced closure on businesses and expected people to survive on 80% of the wages they couldn’t survive on before – it’s been even more of a lifeline. The persistent Tory prejudice that people are on free school meals because they are single parents is deeply, deeply offensive, as is the idea that single parenthood is some sort of stigma.
I had coffee last week with a friend who works in a Tower Hamlets primary school and she told me that not one but two food banks were active in their school. Gone are the days when the food collected at Harvest Festival would be sent to the local old people’s home: now, increasingly, they are going back to children in the school. Food bank collections used to be a Christmas event, now the crates are next to the tills in every supermarket.
Before I moved into museums I was a teacher in Tower Hamlets and Hackney, in the days before universal school meals for primary school children in Tower Hamlets and for KS1 everywhere else. One of my clearest memories was opening a child’s lunchbox for him and finding a crust of bread with margarine, and nothing else. His sister had the other crust. This child’s mother worked and didn’t qualify for free school meals, but there was no other support. Both children were on the verge of malnutrition but social services were so stretched that they were slipping through the net. Another child used to sneak into the classroom at breaktime and search for food to eat. We would save the milk from the nursery and send it to other classrooms. Free fruit at playtime was a start, free meals were even better.
Back then, those children were the exception. Now schools are dedicating chunks of their ever-decreasing budgets to providing many more children with food parcels, with clean clothes, with helping parents to fill in forms to claim benefits so they can get help. Period poverty, in 21st century Britain, is a thing: girls missing school every month as they can’t afford pads.
I pray that every selfish decision by our current selection of MPs is another nail in the Tory coffin. I am not suggesting that Labour is the answer, but I believe it’s time the people in charge start caring for the people they are in charge of. And thank you to those in the hospitality business who are among the hardest-hit this year, who are stepping up and feeding people anyway.
It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Douglas Adams
The rest of the week
It seems a bit reductive to now turn to everything else this week, really, but it might help me calm down a bit after that rant!
I have FINALLY finished the Coast blanket, which I am telling myself I started four years ago but I suspect it might be five. I have even woven in the ends, and never have I congratulated myself more for at least starting to do this as I went along.
It fitted in a bag…just
I think Teddy approves
Neat ripples indeed!
The tiny squares of the Zoom blanket are piling up, and all the remnant balls from the Coast blanket will be added to that – I WILL get through the stash.
Next up will be the Hydrangea Blanket, also by Attic 24, although I am thinking about making a wrap rather than the whole blanket as – apparently – we have enough blankets. Is that even a thing?
And that’s me for the week. Half term is here and my beloved has most of the week off, so I will be the one in the very dusty classrooms decanting the learning collection. Let’s see what treasures week 32 brings!
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
The Zig Zag Girl/Smoke and Mirrors (Stephens and Mephisto series) – Elly Griffiths
Saturnalia/Alexandria (Falco) – Lindsey Davis (Audible)
What Kirsty did next 