Double Damask

Some knitting to start with.  This is Austermann Step, in quite a lively colourway, ideal for country socks.  I bought the yarn in a little wool shop of the old school, tucked in behind the main street in Cockermouth.  As the very nice lady said, it would have been good to have a window, but she had wanted to get started again after the floods and this was better than nothing.  Sock yarn always comes in handy.

This week we have tackled the redecorating of the dining-room, another room which has been waiting for some time.  We have several massive items of furniture in there, and far too much junk, so the clearing of the decks was problematic.  In the end we tackled it in two halves, so that we could move items from one end to the other.

In our other recent projects we have chosen light refelective papers of a modern design, but here we wanted something more classic.   The papered walls have to sit against those fifteenth century beams on the fourth wall, after all.  What would the merchant have done all those centuries ago?  Perhaps some lime-wash?  Not rich enough for tapestry wall-hangings...  In the end we chose this ivory paper, in a pattern which reminds me of white linen damask tablecloths.  It certainly brightens up the room, though it is not very medieval.

 



A number of searches recently have picked up my images of our new wardrobe doors in Elephant's Breath and Dove Tail.  On the Farrow and Ball shade card, I would have read these as beige tones.  The tester pots gave a very purplish tinge on the old cream doors.  Now in place, one pair of doors reflects light from the window while the other is in shade. One looks like two tones of mushroomy grey, while the other has a more beigey look.  The point is, though, that the finish, using a roller to apply the top layers, is lovely and the effect subtle and understated.  My husband knocked them up out of MDF, but you would never guess.

Last Wednesday I gave a talk to the Art Group which meets regularly in my village.  I had given the same talk to my Weavers, Spinners and Dyers group last year, and this prompted a member of both groups to invite me to repeat it for them.  So what was it about?  In 1983, the Guild of Lakeland Craftsmen in Cumbria moved their annual exhibition from a venue in Windermere to a venue in Keswick.  To advertise this move they organised a competition, with the prize being created by their members.  I was lucky enough to win the prize, and I was presented with it by their President, Tobias Harrison.

 The prize is itself a kind of puzzle, as, from the outside, it looks like a wooden box with inset embroidered panels, about a foot square.  Inside is a series of nesting boxes, each made by a different member of the guild, in textiles, pottery, leather...  It is exciting to unpack for a new audience as the standard of workmanship of each item is so high.  It has given me lots of pleasure to own it over the years and it was good to show it off to an appreciative group.  Perhaps I will feature some of these pieces here in coming weeks.

Two Shades of Grey

First, the very discoloured cream doors of the wardrobe fitment in our bedroom.  These have been in situ since the late 80s when our predecessors installed them.  At first we toyed with the idea of a large Edwardian triple robe, and, indeed, saw several which would have worked quite well.  Inertia is a strong force for us, however, and the years passed by without us doing anything about it.

Recently, I read a comment from a lady who was downsizing, about how she had had enough of "brown furniture."  That would be "brown" as in "wood-coloured", I suppose.

Anyhoo, we thought the time had come for these doors.  My husband ordered some MDF and, much glueing, clamping and five coats of paint later, we have the "After" picture.  He ordered a narrow, lightweight mirror for the central panel.  We scanned the Farrow and Ball paintchart and chose Dove Tail and Elephant's Breath, not quite realising how these colours read differently depending on what is nearest to them.  Here, they are definitely pale grey and  even paler grey, but we are very pleased with the sleekness of the effect.  My husband did have some fun coming up with alternative names: Monkey's Elbow and Duck's Bottom, for example.

 

 

 

Reflected in the mirror, you can just see the beams behind our bed.

I have been enjoying the "Great British Sewing Bee", although  people sewing beautifully makes less interesting television than eccentrics sewing badly but creatively.  I was constantly struck by the effect of time limits on the tasks.  Of course, sometimes the home-sewer is up against a deadline, and this will induce stress.  I well remember my mother finishing a dress late into the night, sewing a little floral trim on to turquoise organdie.  But often home sewing projects run on for weeks, months, years...

One of the tasks was to make a man's shirt in four hours - but it was a shirt with no cuffs.  When I was at university, two of my housemates were getting married.  It was a winter wedding and the bride had chosen a burgundy fabric for the bridesmaids' dresses.  She planned to make the bridegroom's shirt from the same fabric, but time rolled on and they had booked to go to a ball on the eve of the wedding.  While they were out I took the pieces of the shirt and made it up, working late into the night.  I had no sewing machine, but the ladies' college just across the road, St Hugh's, had a sewing room, which I "borrowed".  I wonder if they still have it.  I do remember that I somehow put the buttonholes on the wrong edges of the cuffs so they fastened back to front.  He wore it to the wedding, though.




 

Spring Harvests

Today, to the allotment, for the first rhubarb of the season, and some of the last leeks.  It has been so cold and wet up there in recent weeks that we are behind with our planting, but we made a start today using our trusty Mantis tiller.  We had already dug the plot through in - was it? - February, so now we are working it up for potatoes.  Onions, too, need to be going in.

We are just returned from Cumbria where we feared to find Arctic conditions followed by that sort of grey drizzle which is the default weather in the coastal towns.  However, although it was bitingly sharp at first, the sun persisted and we made the most of the weather.

My husband, dressed for the weather, wearing his new hat knit to his specifications with enough brim to roll down over his ears in the bitter wind.  This was my knitting for the journey north.

 

This is our usual Lorton walk, including a sheltered lane.  Clearly it had filled with drifts the week before, and not yet melted.  We have done this walk in all weathers, but have never seen this before.

Another day saw us walking along Loweswater to the Kirkstile Inn for lunch.  It is a favourite walk, but the return takes you down the road, which can be busy.  In the brilliant sunlight I suggested to my husband that we follow the path over Low Fell instead - yes, it would involve a climb, but we could expect views and would avoid the traffic.  Both these proved to be true.  However, this image shows not only most of Crummock - Loweswater is off to the right -  but also gives some idea  of the steepness of Low Fell - and this is where it levels off at the top.  To the right is Melbreak, which stands above where we had lunch.  In the distance, you can just see Buttermere, around Rannerdale Knotts.

 

In order to rest our bruised toes, we took an outing by train to Whitehaven.  The line runs right along the coast, between the cliffs, or the industrial wastelands, and the sea.  It is ideal for bird-watchers. 
This image shows the pretty face of Whitehaven harbour, where we actually saw a seal swimming.  Vast sums have been spent on the marina, and indeed it was full of all shapes and sizes of yacht.  This was the town where I went to school, and it was our local shopping town as I was growing up.  However, the actual shopping streets now show the kind of blight which afflicts all these coastal towns - pound shops, charity shops and tattoo parlours much in evidence.

We lunched in what remains of St Nicholas church, most of which was burned down in 1971.  Now, there is a lovely public garden, a chapel and a tea-room run by volunteers, serving food at very low prices.  We pensioners appreciate this sort of thing.

Up the hill is another spectacular church - St James's.  I do remember being crocodiled there for a carol service one December afternoon.  I did not recall the wonderful Georgian interior.

 

Making the most of the weather, we took a bus up the coast and got off at Beckfoot, in order to walk the four miles back to Allonby. This has always fired my imagination since I visited the Senhouse Roman Museum and saw funerary urns, found on the beach at Beckfoot where a Roman cemetery is gradually falling into the sea.  It gave a new impetus to beach-combing.  On this day, though, we saw only the great flocks of oyster-catchers grazing then flying up, wheeling and turning.  Ringed plovers hawked across the beach or stood still, ideally camouflaged against the pebbles.  My husband was amazed to spot a lone fulmar cruising through.  This last image gives some idea of the spectacular emptiness of the Solway coast.



Ice Age

Two treats this week.  First, we tried out the National Theatre Live scheme at our local cinema.  We drove a few miles, parked for free and  settled into our seats in good time.  Shots of the theatre audience similarly settling into their seats added realism.  Then we enjoyed every minute of the play - "People" by Alan Bennett, starring Frances de la Tour - as if we were in the front Stalls at the National.  We had imagined rather static shots, rather creaky transitions but this was not the case.

As for the play itself, it zipped along, fuelled by Bennett's sense of the absurd, and his biting satire on the heritage industry.  It did turn into a rant at times, but what a change from the average film!  And this opportunity was shared at hundreds of local cinemas up and down the country.  No need to trek into London, no problems with trains - we were home within fifteen minutes.

Next, we did go up to London to see the Ice Age Art exhibition at the British Museum.  We met my sister and her husband and treated ourselves to the Ice Age menu in the Court restaurant, a very civilised venue.  Now what did they eat in the Ice Age?  From the evidence of the exhibition, which was largely composed of bone fragments, the answer is anything that they could catch.  Probably they did eat small quanties of raw meat and share out the fish between them.  Perhaps potatoes were still somewhere in the future, likewise grain, and therefore bread.  But did they really have red peppers and courgettes with their protein?  Seems unlikely.

As for the exhibition, it lacked something.  The items on display spanned nearly twenty thousand years - a mind-boggling length of time.  Yet we had little sense of the lives of those who made these scratchings on bone - images of running horses, and of reindeer, and many tiny images of the female form.  As archaeological finds these must have been thrilling, but they are underwhelming when presented in a glass case.  More resonant were the modern minimalist stone sculptures presented alongside them.

Remember the garnet-inlaid shoulder clasp from Sutton Hoo?   Millefiori glass in blue and white and garnet inlays in a geometric pattern. This is the pattern charted: one stitch representing one square. 

Intarsia, rather than Fairisle patterning.  No gold of course. 

 

                                     

So now, this is the same chart but with two stitches per square.  The stepped pattern of the original becomes clearer here, but the white still shouts too much.  In the original, the gold base had been stamped in a diaper pattern which showed through the garnets as a chequer-board.  This could be achieved by patterning the red diamond in K2P2.  But still no gold.

For a while I knitted Newfoundland mittens non-stop.  Perhaps the mesh used in these could be done in a metallic yarn to contain the coloured shapes?  The white needs to be toned down to an old white, in the Farrow and Ball sense.  Would the resulting fabric work as the back of a glove, rather than mittens?  We'll see.

 

 

Garden visitors

The Christmas before last, I asked for a bird feeding station from Santa, who duly obliged.  We placed it centrally, for optimal viewing, and waited for visitors.  It took a while.  Was it too exposed? we wondered.  And, indeed, one day we were surprised by a swooping sparrow-hawk,  so we may have been right.

However, "If you build it, they will come," is one of my husband's favourite movie quotes.  And so it proves.  Especially if you invest heavily in sunflower hearts and niger seeds.

Long-tailed tits

 

We have regular resident birds: robin, wren, blackbird, bluetit.  Daily visitors include pigeon, collared dove, starling, magpie, chaffinch, sparrow, great tit.  And now, regularly, we have a flock of long-tailed tits, three goldfinches and a pair of siskins.  Occasionally, we see a pair of blackcaps.  None of these is particularly rare, of course, but they are a joy to watch, especially the goldfinches.  The one thing we miss is a thrush, although we used to have one feeding on the garden snails.

Goldfinch

 

Bedroom furniture - Our redecoration meant we became reacquainted with the items we take for granted in our room.  This first image shows the new mirror we have added, above the chaise longue.  I made the throw some years ago from fabric samples showing the colour range in tweedy upholstery.  I love these pale muted colours.  Also in this shot is a faux-bamboo bedroom chair hand-painted by my husband - and a row of his shoes!

Next, this is my dressing table.  It is an old treadle sewing machine table, from which the machine had already been removed. I stripped down its water damaged surface.   My husband showed me how to apply real veneer to the top - it came as iron-on strips.  Then he explained how to French Polish and left me to it.  After many coats, amazingly, it worked a treat.  However, I used regular varnish on the drawers and carcase, and I cannot see any difference.  The mirror, I have described before - made by my husdand with burr elm fronts to the drawers.

This week, to a fascinating event at Sutton Hoo.  Dr Sam Newton runs day-schools, sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of the ship burial, the stunning grave goods and the culture of the Wuffings.  My friend had booked this event and we sat enthralled as he strummed a replica lyre and chanted in Old English.  It took us both back to the first year of university, where Anglo-Saxon and the study of "Beowulf" was a compulsory course.  But the spectacular artistry of the garnet-inlaid buckles and clasps was inspiring.  Why is it that I am seeing Fairisle mittens?

 

Spring?

This lively item  - I hesitate to call it a scarf - is Spectra by Stephen West.  I'm using Noro Silk Garden Lite and Sirdar Click, istead of the sock yarns called for in the pattern.  I have a feeling that this will affect the drape, but my LYS had no Noro Sock.  It is certainly an entertaining knit so far, and the many renderings of the pattern on Ravelry suggest lovely alternative colour combinations.  I saw this first on Not Just about the Knitting, so thankyou.

The Cazalet chronicle continues its serialisation on Radio 4.  What I loved most about it was Elizabeth Jane Howard's ability to empathise with such a wide range of characters.  For example, Miss Millament, the elderly governess, lost her fiance in the Boer War but still cherishes his letters.  The writer gives this ancient affair as much attention as any of the many other relationships in the novel. Guilt is also done rather well.  Food is described in unusual detail, as are clothes.  "Somewhere between Tolstoi and Maeve Binchy" - was it Martin Amis who said that of her work?

This week's task has been redecorating our bedroom.  We moved into this house in 1991 - over twenty years ago.  The people before us had spent their four years taking the front of the house back to its timbers and renovating from the ground up, so every room was freshly decorated.  The only thing we really hated was the bathroom suite - a full-on rendering of "The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady," and a bath which somehow narrowed just at the point where I broaden.  "It will have to go," we both said, but it was eleven years before we got round to it.

So, now we have time to look around us, we notice that our room has not been redecorated in over twenty years.  One advantage of failing eyesight is that you simply don't notice the grime, but that does not mean it is not there.  We shifted a lot of dirt.

Styles in wallpaper move on with the years, too.  The one we have used here has a ruched surface, with the effect of pleated moire silk.  It's in oystery tones, so the effect is quite delicate.  I was also drawn to the Farrow and Ball shade-card - just the names and descriptions: Elephant's Breath, Mouse's Back and so on. These are likely to put in an appearance on some painted furniture, although elephants are scared of mice, so perhaps not those two together.

More on our beams.  These are the beams in our bedroom wall, the upper part of the end-wall of a hall dating to about 1400 - about the time of Chaucer.  A hall was a large  room open to the roof, with a central fire but no chimney.  The experts who visited explained that the upper horizontal beam would have been installed in 1636, when the roof was raised and the first and attic floors put in. 

The thicker vertical timber has filled-in slots where timbers for the front of the hall would have been, some three feet back from the current front of the house.  A detail which I had never noticed before is that these timbers in our bedroom are smooth, whereas the ones in the dining-room have been hacked all over to take a rendering of plaster.

 

Turkey soup

In one of my favourite scenes in  "Cold Mountain," the pragmatic Ruby deals with a "flogging rooster" by wrenching off its head and making of it the yellow stew that Ada has been dreaming about. I always think of this when we have turkey soup.  Not sure that I would be up to killing my own bird, however.  Instead, we start with a turkey leg, eaten as a roast dinner.  Then the rest of the meat, diced and added to a regular vegetable soup, makes the most delicious meal in these bitterly cold wintery days.

This week's task has taken me back to my teenage years.  At the bottom of our garden is my husband's shed.  He had decided to insulate the walls by cladding them with polystyrene and lining them with hardboard. It certainly needed doing.  "Before" pictures would have looked like scenes from "The hoarder next door", as my husband tends to see possible future uses for all manner of unlikely items.  The "After" pictures would show the transformation to a clean and snug working space - like the inside of a cardboard box.

This last week I have been the gofer, locating the tool required and handing it up, bracing items being drilled and basically following instructions.  With only a hazy grasp of the big picture and none of the skills needed, it reminded me strongly of assisting my father with tasks on the farm - milking, calving, haymaking.   In my late teens I spent some time doing each of these, in a supporting role.


My latest weaving project: Last summer I bought a skein of yarn from Susan Heath.  I loved the freshness of the colour combination, although I would never choose these colours to wear myself.
I wanted to see what the effect would be to use this yarn for both warp and weft.  It turns out as a kind of plaid, with a distinctly spring-like mood to it.

Remember this image of the beams in our dining room?   There is a similar arrangement in our first-floor bedroom.   We have been revisited by the team surveying houses in the "Discovering Coggeshall" project.  They have a fascinating web-site.

 

Our house was shown to have been rebuilt in 1636, reconstructing an open hall, to put in a first and attic floor.  The current theory is that this end wall dates from about 1400, linking it to the house on one side with which it shares a passage-way.  All of these houses were used by merchants and clothiers in the wool-trade, spinning, weaving and marketing the woollen cloth for which the area was famous.  As I warp up my little loom, or as I sit at my spinning wheel, I can almost feel those earlier inhabitants looking on in amazement, that what was once sweat-shop labour is now a leisure activity.

Dusted Damson

What was it William Morris said?  "Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful"?  How he managed that, I have no idea.  What about items previously belonging to parents or in-laws which one cannot just throw away?  Anyway, the gas fire in this picture comes decidedly into the first category and the mantlepiece into the second.

 

 

This last week we have been up to Cumbria for a spot of renovation and decorating.  Like others of its vintage, our cottage has rising damp and the chimney breast was particularly afflicted.  My husband constructed this fire surround, using a rather lovely piece of oak  for the mantlepiece.  BandQ provided the large mirror, for the remarkable price of £25. 

I chose the colour for the hardboard backing: Dusted Damson  -  just love the name.  This picks up the colours in a vintage blanket which covers the sofa and manages to look surprisingly sophisticated.

We spent most of the week scraping off wallpaper, pasting and painting, enjoying the transformative effect of white gloss and clean, silvery paper.  However, the weather lifted twice.  At Allonby the tide was full in.  Criffel has never looked so distant or so lovely as it did with its snow-cap here.

Later, we drove into Lorton for our regular walk across fields and through lanes.  Again, the snow still sat on the tops, and snowdrops were much in evidence.

 

These dull wintry days have been much enlivened by the brightness of this lively colourway.  These may well be going into my present drawer for later in the year.

 

Baking day

Each week, while I was growing up, my mother would have a baking day.  She was what was once called "a good plain cook", and in fact worked as a cook in her later years, at an approved school for boys, knocking up batches of stew and rice puddings.

Baking for Cumbrian farmers' wives was then, and is still, not a matter of making a few cupcakes.  The calorific demands of heavy manual labour are considerable, and cake was one way to meet this need. 

My mother would make traybakes: currant cake, German cake, nutty, which was a kind of flapjack, and gingerbread.  Sometimes the German cake would be jam buns - she never made rock buns.  Neither did she bake bread, although she remembered this from her own childhood with wonder - how did they bake once a week and still eat it at the week's end?  She always had a fruit loaf on the go - vinegar loaf or bran loaf.  When her memory began to fail, she still remembered how to make bean cake with Rice Krispies, marshmallows and toffee.

Strangely, I did not learn to cook from my mother; in fact, when I left home to go to university I was completely ignorant on the subject.  My mother always said that we could not risk wasting the ingredients.  This is strange, because she never once said that to me about fabric, and she spent lots of time showing me how to sew.  Now, I think it must have been that she did not want to relinquish what she saw as her central role, as the provider of the food. 

Today, inspired by Mary Berry's cookbook, I produced this chocolate cake, destined for the Spinners and Weavers AGM.  Producing the loaf of bread, in my trusty breadmaker, was a much simpler enterprise, so simple that I make one virtually every day now.  I use a mix of two cups of white flour to one cup wholemeal to make a firm textured loaf.

This second picture shows the cake iced with a chocolate ganache, made by melting dark chocolate into double cream.  How could that not be delicious?  I used apricot jam to sandwich the layers together.

 

Snow Flowers

Ah, the wonders of the Kindle!  I finished the Cazalet quartet of novels by Elizabeth Jane Howard and spotted her autobiography, "Slipstream".  No sooner spotted than downloaded, and within seconds I am reading it.  I will never get used to the magical way in which this revolutionises access to books.  The facility with which you can pursue a train of thought, or follow a whim!  And books on Kindle seem very reasonably priced.

"Slipstream" itself was a revelation.  Of course, one expects writers to draw on their own experience, but large sections of  the Cazalet novels are identical to Howard's own life - and what a life!  Did people really have serial affairs in this manner?  Or perhaps they still do... When asked to organise a literary festival, Howard was able to draw on an astonishing back-catalogue of lovers. 

I have to say that the parody of "Slipstream,"  published in "The Guardian," is also very entertaining.  She does focus on name-dropping, although she had the names to drop.

After the first fall of snow, we had a brilliantly sunny day, so we revisited the arboretum. It was bitterly cold.  Every trunk was outlined in white, giving a curiously dramatic effect.  There was an intermittent crackling as ice fell from the foliage of the thicker trees.

Approaching a fine stand of trees, we saw a flickering and realised that the branches were alive with a huge flock of siskins, a species which we last saw feeding on thistleheads in the Whinlatter Forest.

We were amazed by the Chinese witch hazel.  Every golden tuft now bore its crust of snow, dampening the strong perfume.

I added this little panel to my lace sampler.  It is Mrs Montague's pattern, which Barbara Walker says was used to knit stockings for Elizabeth 1.  Franklin reminded us that the actual stockings can be seen in Hatfield House.

 

Dead of Winter.

Winter: first we had weeks of rain, so that it was barely possible to venture out for walks.  Then it became strangely mild, but with waterlogging and quagmires everywhere.  Now, it is bitterly cold, with snow forecast for the next week.

I have been re-reading the Elizabeth Jane Howard quartet of novels on the Cazalet family, triggered by catching an extract from "The Light Years" read on Radio 4.  What a treasure these books are!  So many wise observations about the nuances of relationships - and such an enormous range of relationships covered.  Strangely, I remember some of the plot from my first reading, which must have been when they came out in the 90s, but I remember nothing of the tv series at all, yet I must have watched it.

Looking at online reviews of the tv series, it appears to have been a bit of a turkey, although  how it could be worse than the plotlines and characterisation of "Downton Abbey" I don't know.

Not much knitting going on, once I had completed two pairs of socks.  The yarn was not one I had used before, and I was struck by the lovely variations in the greener of the colourways, so much that I began a Multnomah scarf with it.  However, on longer rows the variatons became less interesting - less like landcapes - so I ravelled it out.  Designers of sock yarn must be thinking of a certain diameter.

Today, we wrapped up warm and took a turn about the arboretum just north of here.  We had heard that there were siskins to be seen near the Honywood Oak, an 800 year old tree in the park.  We did not see them.  Instead, we were pleased to see a heron in flight over the lake.

Last week, when we walked around the perimeter, we had caught a whiff of a really cloying scent.  At a different time of year this could have been beans, or rape.  But we could see no sign of anything in flower.  Seeeing a minibus of infants from the Montessori nursery, we concluded that it must have been the perfume of one of the staff. 

Today, however, we were walking up the side of the lake, planted with the deep red stems of dogwood and the slender white trunks of Betula utilis, when we came across the source of the heavy scent.  Groups of shrubs were in full yellow bloom, a real treat on a day too grey to prompt us to bring cameras.  It was Chinese Witch hazel.  I hope it survives the snow.

 

Spam

Together with more visitors to the blog, I seem to have gathered some rather odd spam.  One of these sounded like a comment, warning me of the dangers of becoming too personal in my posts - to the point that another kind soul reassured me that she enjoyed hearing my opinions.  Quite why I am a target audience for on-line supplies of valium and viagra I do not know.

My last FO - a cowl and hat for me, using a different colourway of the James C Brett Marble chunky.  This was a very satisfying knit, the cowl on a long circular in bands of moss stitch and stocking stitch and the hat in K2P2 rib, which makes for a snug fit.  The colour variations are more subtle than shown here.

We had the sort of quiet Christmas a deux that those with extended families to entertain dream of - pheasant for lunch, smoked salmon for supper, game of Scrabble, glass of wine....  But, as usual, be careful what you wish for.  With rain almost every day we reached the point where a trip to the supermarket became a treat rather than a chore.

 

New Year's Day saw us driving up to Felixstowe to lunch with old friends who were staying there.  We lunched at the Ferry Boat Inn which was doing roaring trade serving the hundreds of walkers making the most of the sunlight.  Outside, the air was bracing to say the least.

This rather unusual structure is Martello tower U, now a private residence.  How wonderful to live so close to the lapping of the waves in a structure which has endured since Napoleon was a threat.



Finally, a wonderful sunrise, promising better things weather wise?