Mad Hair Day

Or not. It’s still chilly here and I’ve been trying to shake off the winter blues by kidding myself that the Winterless North is not just a nasty marketing trick they play on the tourists. In an attempt to conjure up images of tropical beaches, azure lagoons and exotic men in loincloths who bring me flammable drinks in coconuts with those little umbrellas in, I give you:

Well, that divine white fluff was too irresistible. I had a stack of new acid dyes and I wasn’t afraid to use them! The roving was already clean, soaked and in tights so dyeing it was a cinch. I laid out tonnes of newspaper, layers of cling film and prepared the dyes and poured them into old ketchup squirty bottles. Then I went for two colourways - the red, orange and yellow one and the blue, teal and green. Then I enjoyed a little dishwasher dyeing (one day I’ll try a different method but this is so easy it might not be anytime soon!) This was a real mystery project, the tights I was using were black ones which meant that I couldn’t see where the colour was saturated and where it wasn’t. Nor could I tell if the colours were blending or separate. All in all though, I’m thrilled with the result. Once it had dyed, cooled and been rinsed I pegged it out to dry and photographed it with palm trees (that’s my garden! I have palm trees!) in an effort to make this look wildly tropical. I think I succeeded and my camera hand didn’t shake too much from the shivering! The roving is now dry and I’m getting the hang of hand carding as it needs a little combing before it can be teased and drafted.

It is spinning up beautifully although I have been trialling my home-made spindle and it’s painfully slow. I’m awfully tempted to spin it up on my Ashford Traditional but I’m now holding out for my new Pipy Sprite. In the meantime I’ve cast on for some socks.

I’m also planning A Project Of Epic Proportions. It’s not often I want to commit to something which I know in advance is going to age me faster than sex, drugs and rock and roll. But Stephanie has inspired me and I’ve been horribly tempted by the thought of cashmere, silk and the chance to do something absolutely original. More on that later, in the meantime I’m researching and shopping. Talking of which, there has been some more deliveries from my lovely postman this week, I’ll blog on endlessly about it tomorrow along with pictures of my new socks in progress.

Riveting, isn’t it?

I’ve been trying to convince myself that it is spring. Outside it is cold and damp and I’ve had the kind of week that leaves you feeling like you’ve been run over by a tractor. So I’ve been indulging my fibre fetish (to stave off the pangs of jealousy from all the Rheinbeck blogging that is going on out there. Sigh.) and I dusted off my spinning wheel and discovered how out of practice I am. What I clearly need is more time at the wheel…

Or another wheel…

…Yes, I did. I have bought a Pipy Sprite which should arrive here next week sometime. It needs a minor repair but I hope to have that done by an expert. I can’t tell you what a thrill it was to bid online and buy this wheel. Okay, I probably didn’t need another wheel, but this one is small and can be put in the back of the car so I can go to the local spinners meetings and hopefully learn how to spin with more than the one technique I’ve been using so far. Pictures will be posted of my new baby when she arrives.

In anticipation of this new acquisition, I’ve been considering my fibre. When I bought my Ashford Traditional I was given a large bag of roving. At least, I think it is roving. Although I’ve looked it up online and in my New Zealand Woolcraft book, I’m still having trouble telling the difference between roving, tops, bats and bumps. At any rate, what I had was not that nice to spin. The fluff was sticky and sort of matted. It was also the colour of old cardboard and was vaguely reminiscent of earwax. But once spun, skeined and washed, it bloomed into the most marvellous creamy soft fibre. I’ve been wishing it was like that before I tried to spin with it and then came across this webpage which tells you how to wash a greasy fleece. And I thought if you can do it with fleece, then why not roving? So, for the instruction of other spinning newbies, this is what I did:

I didn’t have any net laundry bags so I used a pair of old tights (I tell a lie, they were actually new tights but I was too excited at the thought of fluffy white fluff to hunt down a pair of holey ones!). I cut the legs off the tights and lay out the roving (about eight times the length of the leg). In this photo the flash has bleached the colour of the sticky old fluff - think old wet cardboard box and you’ll be about right. Then I put the pile of fluff, neatly folded like it is in the middle here, into a leg. The leg on the right has been stuffed and tied. It’s amazing how much you can fit in there!

Then I took it to visit my own Mr Washie. I have an unhealthy passion for my new washing machine. It is only one month old and it has spared me many grey hairs and great chunks of my life. It is a sad fact of life that small front loaders cannot cope with the massed laundry of 5 people who all seem to wear three sets of clothes a day (and I swear the neighbours are sneaking their dirty smalls into our Laundry Mountain as it can’t possibly be all ours!) when the only person who can work the machine is trying to juggle full time work, two pre-schoolers, one teenager, two committee positions and a relationship with someone who can bully entire networks of computers into obedience but claims that a simple wash cycle is beyond him!

Whoops, sorry. That rant kind of snuck up on me.

So, I filled the machine with hot water, added detergent, made sure the machine was switched OFF so that there was no chance of the paddles moving the sausages of fluff and then I plunged them in:

Ewww!

No wonder it was no fun spinning with this stuff. The lovely lady who gave it to me told me that she had had it for some time. Quite a long time, I think. I let it sit in the water for about 30 minutes once I got all of the air bubbles out of the wool sausages (Note to self: do not plunge bare hands into boiling hot water. Unless planning to rob a bank and wish to avoid leaving fingerprints.)

I drained it by lifting the sausages into a colander and pressing VERY gently to squeeze out as much of the brown water as possible, then I drained and filled the machine and repeated the wash. Then drained, rinsed and spun the sausages. Finally I filled the machine up with clean hot water and a good dollop of fabric softener. I left the sausages to soak overnight and drained and spun them the next morning.

This is what I got:

Ahhh. Now isn’t that better? It’s as soft and fluffy and creamily clean as a baby’s bum. Stay tuned to find out what I did to it next!

I’ve been swearing at myself all day (guaranteed to get you a seat on the bus) because I had THREE knitting opportunities and I didn’t have a sock with me! I got cross in the bank, in the car and at the doctors because I had to sit and wait and I’m not one of those naturally patient, zen-type, laid back mothers who can cope with doing nothing. Instead the little voices in my head list all the things I could be doing right now instead of waiting for some idiot to move his car which has been abandoned instead of parked and is blocking the only exit from the car park! (Stress? What stress?)

So I tried to be calm and decided to write a shopping list to replace the one that I had carefully written out this morning and then left on the kitchen counter. That is when I found that my children have obviously eaten all the pens that normally live in my car. No pens. Lots of dust, but not even a single crayon.

Then I try to find some clean tissues to dust my dashboard. There are no clean tissues in my car. There are plenty of revolting tissues in my car. But no clean ones.

So I look for an empty plastic bag to gather up all the fossilized snotty hankies and, wouldn’t you know it, my car is totally devoid of bags. It is, however, ankle-deep in toys, drawings done in felt-tip pen on backs of envelopes (but where are the damn pens they used to draw them?!) and single socks. Not hand knit ones, you understand. The ones that are the lonesome twins of the dozen or so that live in the bottom of the ironing basket. I have no idea why only one of each pair has taken up residence in my car. My daughters are obviously hiding underwear as part of a plot to drive me insane. I don’t know how they know that laundry is the direct route to the nerve which causes the twitch in my eyebow. I don’t know how I can take them to daycare fully dressed and find them sockless at hometime EVERY SINGLE DAY! Nor do I know who Jonah is (although I do know that he is 3-4 years old as I read the laundry label) or why my daughter is wearing his vest.

I guess I picked bad day to give up chocolate.

Okay, I admit defeat. This is a rare moment, people. I am generally acknowledged as a tenacious, goal-driven, resourceful and indeed bloody-minded woman and I REALLY hate to lose. But the god-awful blue chunky cardigan has defeated me. It eats yarn. 7 balls out of 10 knit up into the shoulders, sleeves to elbow length and body to just-under-the-boobs. And it wasn’t even a large size! It was chunky wool on US6 Denise needles in mind-bogglingly boring stockingette and, after an unwise number of Sav Blancs I bit the bullet and yanked out the needles. I killed it. And I can’t say I’m sorry. Let’s think of it as euthanasia; putting me out of my misery.

On the bright side, this means that I have finished knitting everything that is actually ON the needles! (We are deliberately ignoring the plaintive nagging of the pink cardi who will remain trimless until I can face grafting and decision making. That calls for more potent Dutch courage than a mere chilled white).

And when I have empty needles I have a new project opportunity! Yippee!

Now, if you’ve been reading any of my previous posts you would realize that this leaves us with a little problem. For those of you passing by or looking for a chocolate pudding recipe (have patience, it’s coming) I’ll explain that I have a teensy problem choosing between one thing and another. So, in an effort to be more decisive, I’m making a unilateral decision - I’m going to let someone else decide.

The most obvious thing to do was to get out my sock yarn (from Sophie’s Toes on Etsy, I love this yarn, it is gloriously coloured and beautifully soft. I don’t know how she gets so many colours in there.) Then I dragged my three children in and asked them which one they liked the best:

You see my problem? Which would you knit next? Send me your opinions quickly, before I’m tempted to buy something else because I can’t make up my mind! I went a little mad this weekend and bought myself a second spinning wheel and I’m now on a yarn diet (although being drip fed by Posh Yarn’s sock club).

Just to add insult to injury, I’m on a real diet too. So, in the manner of irrational chocolate-deprived hormonal creatures everywhere, I gave myself a little send off:

It is a well known fact (known to me, that is) that you have to empty the house of everything fattening before the start of your diet. Some call it sabotage, some call it insane. I call it common sense. I can’t eat it next week so I’ll have to eat it now.

Lurking in my freezer was a bag of chocolate cake. Now normally chocolate cake doesn’t make it as far as the freezer. In our house chocolate cake would be lucky to make it as far as the cake tin. (Don’t look at me like that, I have help eating it!) This particular bag of cake was the trimmings from a gargantuan double layer chocolate cream cake I made for a family party. The two cakes rose wonderfully, peaked and gorgeous, but it was completely impossible to sandwich them together without the entire confection rolling off the plate and onto the floor (this would not have prevented our eating them). I had to trim off their domes to make flat discs. The scraps, valiantly defended by yours truly, escaped the ravening hordes and were zip-locked into the freezer where they have been getting in my way ever since.

I have a cookery book which was a reference book when I studied Home Economics back in High School. It contains all sorts of recipes which seen antiquarian when compared to the Jamie Oliver type concoctions common today. Suet pastry and chutneys, steamed puddings and ragout, they are all in my tatty old book. Well, I remembered a recipe called cabinet pudding which is made with sponge cake crumbs. With a little tweaking, it went like this:

Chocolate Pud

2 eggs

1 cup milk (250ml)

2 heaped tablespoons sugar

a teaspoon of vanilla essence (or any flavouring that rings your bell)

2-3 cups (or a few handfuls) of cake. Stale sponge cakes are perfect. If your cakes never get the chance to get stale then the dry un-swallowable cake that somebody else baked will do nicely!

Put all the ingredients into a blender. Whizz till you can’t see any lumps. Grease a dish it will fit into. Cover with greaseproof paper and wrap the whole thing in foil (or use a steamed pudding basin with a very well fitting lid). You don’t want the moisture from the steam getting in there or you’ll have chocolate soup.

Steam (any way you like - I use a steamer but putting it in the bottom of a slow cooker, bain marie or a large saucepan with an inch or two of water will do nicely) cook for 1 hour. Keep warm. Serve.

The pudding will be set more around the outside of the dish and creamier in the middle. This would be fabulous made the traditional way with plain (ie not chocolate) sponge and some fruit in the bottom of the dish or even jam. You could also bake it but it would have to be on low heat - then it would be more like a bread and butter pudding, I suppose.

The leftovers were fabulous the next day. So I’m told. I didn’t get any. I’m on a diet.

Look! Look! I’ve finished my very first pair of socks. They aren’t perfect. But they are comfortable. These were knit toe up, Magic Looped, on Addi bamboo circulars 2.5mm with Opal sock yarn (no idea what the colourway is) and I’m thrilled to bits to have finished them at last. They have been my travelling socks and have been up and down the North Island of New Zealand with me.

Now I bet I know what you are thinking. “But… but… they aren’t the same!” And you’d be right. They aren’t the same. You see, I suffer from a very low boredom threshold and I utterly loathe doing the same thing twice. So much, in fact, that it is nothing short of miraculous that I have three children. However, I digress. So, why the difference? Could it be because my gauge was catastrophically off? Perhaps I dropped many stitches and didn’t notice and there is a flaming great hole in the back side of one of these socks? Did I forget to read an entire section of the pattern? 

No, it is because in a futile attempt to combat Second Sock Syndrome I decided to make this a Learning Experience. One of the many things I love about the Internet is the way you can look things up, get dozens of different ideas and techniques for any one project and then bastardize your own creation from the many possibilities. And this is what I did. Twice.

The first of the two socks was the top one in the photograph. I knit this by casting on 32 stitches in a crochet cast on, knit up and over the short-row toes and then unzipped the crochet stitches, picked up the original 32, making 64 in all and knit up to the heel when I realized that it was too tight over the instep. Now at this point any sensible person would realize it wasn’t working out as expected, frogged back and re-thought the process. But, as we have established previously, I am not a sensible woman, so I frantically increased on every row (because I was adamant I was not going to frog and I was in a car at the time without pattern or internet access). Then I short-rowed a heel and knit up to the cuff. When I cast off I had 88 stitches.

The second sock was cast on straight away and, because I was so thrilled with the crochet cast on and short row toes from the first sock, I repeated that part exactly. But in the meantime I had received the Yarn Harlot’s book Knitting Rules and now understood the whole gusset concept. So I winged it by knitting a gusset on the heel half of the sock, before the short-row heel/ankle section. Unfortunately, I didn’t start soon enough and the sock is still somewhat tight over the instep. In addition, this different technique of picking up the stitches and knitting them together meant that I had a different number of stitches at the cuff when compared to the first sock. In fact, when I cast off, I had 64.

THAT is why one sock is bagged around my ankle with extra folds à la Nora Batty (perfect for those puffy ankled days, as Him Indoors so gallantly points out) and the other is snugly gripping my other leg.

I don’t care. I love my socks.

I’ve been trying to work out why I am utterly knackered and why I have the distinct impression that I’ve been run over by a tractor or put through a mangle. Possibly because I’ve been working all week but still find myself surrounded by a Matterhorn of paperwork. Possibly because I spent 8 hours travelling (and knitting, it must be said) to attend a conference (more knitting). Here is the second sock. It’s boring me senseless but it is STILL less boring than the hours and hours of technical seminars about software that were going on in the background of this photos:

Mostly I’m knackered because I’m working full time when I have three children, two of whom are not even at school yet. Are all mothers this exhausted? And if so, why aren’t more of them slumped over their supermarket trollies or to be found draped comatose over their desks and snoring into their keyboards?

There should be a women’s commune where frazzled mothers and working women can come and sleep while someone else takes a turn at looking after the children, putting on the laundry and making packed lunches for all. Where we can sleep in if we have been rocking babies till dawn, where those who make the mess clear it up. Where, just for once, it is someone else’s turn to change the poo-ey bum. Imagine a world where no-one ever says “I don’t ‘do’ vomit” - like there was actually point in parenthood where you got to opt out. Where you can pee in peace because SOMEONE doesn’t send the children in to ask Mummy where the baby’s socks are kept even though underwear is and always has been put neatly in the same damn drawer. Imagine a world where there is someone to say “Sit down dear, let me do that.”

I have a dream.

I have a dream that we will have time on our hands to pluck our eyebrows but not as we run out of the door 20 minutes late.

I have a dream that I can and will visit the gym again before my membership runs out and that when I do my mobile will not ring to summon me back home.

I have a dream that my children will know that Daddy can operate the dishwasher, the microwave and the dryer and that he can teach those skills to them so that they too can help.

I have a dream today.

I’m clearly bloody delirious.

And now I’m off to lie face down somewhere that isn’t covered in shoes, toys or laundry. Wish me luck, I think that only leaves the oven.

I love my postman. I really do. Not in a get-yer-Stubbies-off sort of way, I have a big hairy man of my own for that sort of thing. Come to think of it, I love him too.

The reason for all this wild emotion? It’s a box. A plain cardboard box. Well, not entirely plain. It has the word Ashford written on it.

Gary (The World’s Nicest Postman) has delivered a parcel to my partner/father-of-my-children/man-I’m-shacked-up-with (The World’s Nicest Boyfriend) and I’ve turned into a thing possessed.

I’ve been dropping hints like bricks for weeks. I’ve made them hold my skeins of yarn till they pleaded for release. I’ve built tools from Meccano, Lego and toilet roll tubes. And I think, just think, that sometime, somewhere, someone finally listened.

It’s a month till my birthday. They’ve emptied the box and hidden the contents. I have the urge to ’spring clean’ the house (and that’s never happened to me before!) when I might, just by chance, find the mystery object. It’s going to drive me nuts! Who would have thought a reasonably (note the subjective adjective) sane woman could be tormented by a simple cardboard box!

Don’t get me wrong, I love surprises. It’s the suspense I can’t stand.

The nervous and the seamstresses amongst you should be warned that there is panic and ugly things ahead.

To all those on dial-up, I’m sorry. This is a tutorial and there are lots of photos!

Imagine, if you will, a more-than-slightly harrassed working mother. Now this mother is spending the day at home with her daughters (four and two years old) and running a business from home. Imagine that those two little girls have been more than usually grumpy and are rather clingy. Imagine that the phone just keeps on ringing. The children are cross and arguing. It is raining on the freshly pegged-out laundry.

Feeling your blood pressure rise yet? Now imagine that this mother, who likes to make things, plans to wear a new skirt to a formal dinner she is attending tonight. She has known about this ‘do’ for some time now and shopped for it last week. Just for once, she is wondefully organized. She has a nice top to wear, has excavated the antique cosmetics from the back of the bathroom cabinet and has even checked that she has shoes to wear, you know, ones without scuffs, broken heels or the ability to cripple the toes and gouge the skin off your heels.

Ask yourself… what has she forgotten? She has to leave at 5pm. It is now 2pm and she has yet to make several bucketloads of macaroni cheese to appease the hoards before they will let her leave for her frivolous evening.

Yes, gentle reader, she has forgotten to actually MAKE the skirt.

General opinion around here (yes, I asked) is that I am indeed a relatively intelligent woman. I have a lively imagination but have not yet (until today!) confused imagination with reality. Today, I lost my remaining marble. If anyone finds it, I’d like it back.

I’ve been planning this skirt for a week. I found the perfect fabric (black, with a gorgeous print border) which was ON SALE (can’t tell you how happy that makes me. I love a bargain!) and I bought the zip and thread too. I had the pattern at home, knew what I had to do and could picture the entire ensemble in all its slimming elegance. I thought about it so much that I somehow, God only knows how, thought that I had actually made the skirt. I can only plead insanity brought on by years of disturbed sleep, non-stop toddlers and a huge backlog of overwork-related stress.

Now any sensible woman would have flung herself screaming into the wardrobe and dragged out every piece of clothing she could possibly wear and found something, anything, to put on and dress up for this dinner.

Clearly, I’m not a sensible woman. I do, in fact, have 4 black skirts in my cupboard. (I just went and counted) But I had pictured myself wearing this skirt. It would be gorgeous, I would look 10 pounds lighter, 10 years younger, 4 inches taller…

And I had a deadline. Never let it be said that I don’t like a challenge. So, does anyone want to know how to make a skirt in two hours? I had an email requesting details after my previous posting (where I mentioned making my own pattern) so for those with the stomach and the time, here is the tutorial: How to make a skirt in two hours by ignoring all the things your needlework teacher taught you.

Start your watches folks, the time is 2.30 pm!

1. Try to find your tape measure. Fail. Decide you can manage without.

2. Get fabric out, throw everything that is on the dining room table into a corner. Bribe children with videos and biscuits to leave you alone for *a few minutes*

3. Lay fabric on table, folded in half, right sides together. Lay paper pattern on top (make pattern by taping together several sheets of newspaper, lay your favourite skirt on top. Draw around it. Then, with a different coloured pen, draw around it again leaving an inch gap between the first outline and the new one; this is your seam allowance. Cut it out). Make sure the pattern is straight and that the grain of the fabric is running up and down the length of the skirt. If you have a fabric with a bit of stretch to it, then you will want the stretch to work widthways - so you have room to sit down in it. Stretch fabric = good. This fabric? Not stretchy. Oops.

4. Decide you don’t have time for all that cutting. Remove pattern. Fold fabric fold-to-edge again so it is four layers deep. Fold pattern lengthwise too, place on top of fabric with pattern fold along the fabric fold. Look for pins. Give up looking for pins. Place sewing box on top of pattern to hold it in place.

5. Cut out pattern shape with pinking shears. Realize you didn’t match up the printed pattern so the join will show on the side seam. Swear horribly.

6. Explain to small children what the words meant. Or not. Actually, bribing with biscuits will have the same effect - they will not mention them again (giving false hope that they are unscarred by terrible mothering)… until their grandmother is visiting.

7. Find pins in the first place you looked. Accuse passing innocent bystanders of hiding pins.

8. Pin the skirt front to the skirt back, right sides together. Pin very well, just in case.

9. Get sewing machine out. Accuse small children and bewildered teenager of maliciously hiding all the extension cables in the house. Telephone partner to demand he supply one immediately. Meekly follow instructions to unplug extension cord from the hairdryer. Where it lives.

10. Realize all bobbins are full of bright pink thread, yellow thread, white thread. Try to convince yourself that it won’t show.

11. Unwind and throw away miles of pink thread from bobbin. Search for black thread to fill bobbin. Find two empty bobbins lurking in the bottom of the sewing box.

12. Fill bobbin, adjust tension. Offer sacrifice to the Sewing Gods in gratitude for lovely new Bernina sewing machine. Sew side seams. Yes, there is going to be a zip on the hip seam, don’t worry, just sew the side seams all the way up. Trust me.

13. Wrestle the ironing board, plug in iron. Press open the side seams. Fold up the bottom edge (it is a selvedge, you should really trim it off. Don’t.) Fold up bottom edge again to form bottom hem. Press well. Forgo pinning, hope for the best.

14. Sew up hem. Refuse offers of help from small children who want to stand on the foot pedal and “look after the pins for you, Mummy”

15. Locate zip. Bribe small child to relinquish zip by offering biscuits, more Bob the Builder and assorted menaces.

16. Lay closed zip FACE DOWN on inside side-seam of either hip. Pin like a woman possessed.

17. Miraculously find zipper foot in the first place you look. Sew in zipper, going back and forth across the bottom of the zip a few times (yes, sew zipper in over the sewn seam. Trust me). Realize it is now 4pm and you still haven’t cooked dinner.

18. Shout instructions to 14 year old on how to boil water and where you keep the pasta.

19. Shout AT 14 year old for not being able to find things unless they jump up and bite him.

20. Realize you have entirely lost the original presser foot.

21. Accuse partner (newly returned home) of moving the presser foot. Refute all allegations of hysterical behaviour. Cite completely unrelated instances of previous misdemeanours as proof that he might well have taken said foot.

22. Thank small child for finding Mummy’s presser foot under the dining room table.

23. Turn down, and press with hot iron, top edge (waist) equally all round. This can be done by measuring with a tape measure. Should you be unable to find a tape measure you could: a) blame anyone daft enough to still be in the same room as you, or b) get a pen, mark an arrow on the side of your hand, measure from tip of finger to ink mark thus:

24. Sew in place about one inch down from top edge, starting at the non-zip seam. This means you will sew from (example) left hip seam to right hip seam across what-will-be the front of the skirt. And then you will go back and sew from left hip seam to right hip seam across what-will-be the back of the skirt. You will find, if you are shaped anything like me, that the waist-band hem is not quite the right shape to sew down if you match up the seams. This is because the seams are not parrallel (not in my skirt anyway, this is an A-line skirt and I go in slightly at the waist) You will be turning down the waist band at the top of the zip. (Yes, the zip is still behind the sewn up side seam. Trust me.)

25. Trim off excess fabric from waist band hem. Pinking shears are your friend. Not only do they remove the need for overlocking in slap-dash sewing but they can also help you to make pretty gift tags from last year’s Christmas cards. I am a woman of many talents.

26. NOW you can unpick that side seam to expose the hidden zipper. If you sewed back and forth across the base of the zipper a few times then it doesn’t matter if you just snip the threads thus:

27. Try on skirt. It will probably be floppy around the waist. This is normal. You need darts. Fold the skirt in half longways, stick pin in the middle of the back waistband. Fold again, stick two pins in the back waistband, halfway between original pin and side seams. Unfold. The two pins you just put in mark the position of the back darts- they are equally spaced between the centre of the waistband and the side seams. Pinch together the fabric either side of the dart, my darts are about 2 inches wide. Pin them and sew them 4 inches deep. Like this:

27. Attempt to locate hook and eye fastener to sew in by hand, above the top of the zipper. Realize you don’t have any. Sob. Remove safety pin from the unmended trousers in your wardrobe. Pin top of waistband together. Press skirt. It is now 4.30pm.

28. Put clothes on and apply make up while assembling macaroni cheese.

29. Apologize to family for being horrible. Assure them you love them all. Scream as small child covered in macaroni cheese attempts to hug you and your new black skirt.

30. Notice the time. Locate handbag. Realize carkeys are missing. Accuse family of hiding keys…

Well, hello everyone! I’ve had 16 visitors today and while that might be laughable to the lucky bloggers who have hundreds of hits a day, I’m wildly excited. Admittedly, it doesn’t take much to get me wildly excited but that’s never been a cause for complaint in the past!

I’m almost ashamed to admit that I’ve nothing terribly exciting to blog about. My knitting continues, stocking stitch after stocking stitch, sucking the joy out of existence with the tedium of it all and making the little voices in my head louder. “Cables,” they whisper, “lace… you know you want to…”

Still, most of the inner demons can be silenced with food. This might account for my previously blogged difficulty getting skirts that fit. Or it could just be a good excuse to turn a mound of these:

into a gallon of marmalade. We are lucky to be in citrus growing country, and during harvest time, we are presented with carrier bags full of fruit almost daily. Just how much marmalade can one family eat, do you suppose? 20 jars, 50? I’ve made orange, mandarin, tangelo, lemon, lime, mixed citrus and grapefruit so far. Full sugar, half sugar and practically diabetic. And I’m not alone, around here you can’t give the stuff away and you daren’t invite friends over in case they bring you a dozen jars. Or more oranges.

I’m baking more bread (courtesy of Clarence and his little yeasty friends) in the hope of tempting the family to try the latest batch of preserves. I’ll have to keep hiding the peanut butter until they have cleared some room in the larder. I have space issues with my jam stash!

I’ve also been getting on with my spinning as my yarn diet continues and the urge to go shopping grows. I’m trying to finish spinning the fibre that I was given when I bought my wheel. It is carded and ‘in the grease’ and it washes up a beautiful creamy white. I’m winding some into a ball before plying as I only have two bobbins at the moment. Then I put the balls in large mugs and ply the yarn back onto my bobbins. I don’t have a skein holder or ball winder despite my heavy hints so I have commandeered the Lego and built my own. It’s adjustable, it rotates, it is fragile and it is irresistible to toddlers. Ask me how I know.

Look, see how clever I am:

I thought this would give them ideas about birthday presents. I thought wrong.

“Hey Mum,” said my teenager, “you don’t need to get one of those umbrella things, you’ve built one of your own!” I pointed out the lack of a ball winder. He offered me the Meccano.

Sometimes I’m just too resourceful for my own damn good.

It’s been a funny sort of week. I’ve been knitting but have nothing to show for it as both my projects (socks and doomed chunky blue cardigan) are at the dull acres-of-stocking-stitch stage with no end in sight. With the exception of the blue yarn, which is running out at an alarming rate, this is likely to be a very cropped cardigan. But, like a car crash in slow motion, you can see it coming, you can feel the fear, but you just can’t stop…

I have been sewing though. An activity I generally save for the summer months when it is too sweaty to hold yarn for long. I was driven to it by the absence of skirts in my size and a suitable style. I could generally be described as plump. Very plump. And long A-line skirts suit me. Could I find one ANYWHERE? Being the proud owner of a new Bernina I bought some fabric (cotton twill/denim with a hint of stretch) and looked for a pattern. Same problem. Clearly I am too fat and too unfashionable. So, I made my own pattern by drawing around my favourite skirt and cutting out the silhouette. I folded it in half, placed that on the fold of the fabric and cut two panels - one for front and one for the back. I added a couple of little darts  to make the waist fit, added a zip at the side seam and Presto! Two skirts exactly my size, my favourite shape and they go with the rest of my wardrobe. All for under $60.00. I’m feeling a little smug. I’ll show off with some photos once they have emerged again from the laundry mountain.

There was also some of this:

Meet Clarence, my sourdough starter, posing proudly in the bowl. I’ve been baking a lot lately but keep running out of yeast (because I keep losing my shopping lists - one day I will empty my handbag and find hundreds of scraps of paper and old envelopes with all my lists on the back) so I looked sourdough up on the Internet and began my starter. I lack the patience or faith to catch my own wild yeast (which brings to mind images of running around in the undergrowth swiping wildly with a butterfly net) so I used a teaspoon of dried yeast I had left in the cupboard. I let it sit overnight and it frothed up wonderfully (note to self: next time do not put lid on small jar filled with hyper-active starter unless you want an incentive to clean the kitchen…) According to the many sites I read, you should throw away a cupful of goop each day and replace it with an equal quantity of flour and water for four to five days. I didn’t follow that instruction exactly, I used the cupful of goop that I  took out, this is one of the loaves that resulted.

One week later Clarence is producing bubbles and hooch and is the proud parent of eight loaves of bread. I’m feeling awfully pleased with myself and am starting to feel brave enough to don pith helmet and butterfly net and go yeast stalking in the Great Outdoors.