What we did on our Holidays Part Two...

Strasbourg Cathedral

From Colmar, we moved on to Strasbourg - that's about fifty miles, but we were intent on making stress-free journeys this time.  Strasbourg cathedral has to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World.  We admired it in the sunlight...

And at night, at a wonderful son et lumiere presentation orchestrating dramatic lighting effects to Russian music.  Just a tiny part of me thought this was a terribly populist way to treat such an impressive and important building.

We climbed the tower - all 338 steps of it - and looked out across the ancient town....

and we spent ages looking at all the intricate detailing, from gothic statuary -

to ancient and extremely fine graffiti...

We did our best to sample the local cuisine, although choucroute and three types of sausage did not suit us.  The local tourte flambee - a very thin type of pizza - was more to our taste, and when we saw a version with apple slices bathed in blue flames from the Calvados poured over it, we knew we had to try it.

What we Did on Our Holidays...

Over the years we have tried a few well-known areas of France: Britanny, the Loire valley, the Dordogne, the Auvergne...  This year we were in Alsace, and once again it could hardly be said to be an undiscovered little corner

as almost all the images will testify. 

A typical street in Colmar, Alsace.

We chose to travel by Eurostar, thinking to minimise some of the more obvious stress factors of recent holidays: Swedish road-signs, switch-back roads in the Allier gorges, parking at the edge of a precipice on the Pas de Peyrol in the Auvergne - and it's certainly true that the travel arrangements were very smooth.  Just very long walks between stages of the journey; even the platforms feel long when carrying the wrong kind of suitcase.

Colmar, some forty miles south of Strasbourg, is a small town with many half-timbered buildings and quaint corners - as well as about three hundred weinstubs, bars, salons de the and other eating opportunities.  We sampled as many as we could while there.  The local cuisine reveals the tangled history of the region, with pickled cabbage and varied cheap cuts of pork at the top of the list.  However, we enjoy our food, and several of the meals we had were memorable, not least the one which started at eight and finished with petits fours at gone eleven. 


We were charmed by the stork's nest on the wheel atop the cathedral in Colmar..

but totally gobsmacked by the colony of storks on the townhall in Munster.  We counted twelve pairs on one building -

And these are huge birds.

The little walk we took into the countryside above Munster was a highlight of the whole trip; opening views of the town, mixed woodland paths and the oddest little vegetable plot we had ever seen, set down inexplicably in the middle of a meadow, not next to the road or to any house that we could see.

Above Munster, Alsace

Finally, an image of textile interest: a sign, suggesting that not so long ago linen was on sale here.

Family Gathering

It's a tradition of my husband's mother's family to have an annual get-together, and it was our pleasure to host the event this year.  Present on Saturday were Auntie Gladys, aged ninety-two and Chloe, aged six weeks.

Gladys, a testament to the power of good genes, took up swimming at the age of eighty, even learning to dive, after a lifetime of fearing water.   More recently she has embarked on piano lessons, sustained by the occasional glass of red wine.  Sadly, she is only related to my husband by marriage.

The last few months have been a flurry of DIY and small repair jobs - all those pesky little tasks which have been in the queue for years, suddenly getting done under the deadline of the family do.   Now the house is so clean and tidy we barely recognise it.

Then, the testing of new dishes for the feast. I only have a limited repertoire and bread and butter pudding hardly meets the requirements of the buffet lunch.  So my husband and I were eating Delia's Key Lime pie at every meal for a while.  Very delicious it is too; simplicity itself to make and available on Delia's website.  Even simpler was the Banoffee Pie recipe offered as part of a dinner party menu in the "Times" by no less a personage than Katie Price.  A "Heart attack" menu, as she said.  But the pie, the main ingredient of which was a can of condensed milk boiled for four hours, was actually very lovely.

Tatting

This week sees our tenth wedding anniverary, celebrated here by this beautiful card hand-made for us by my husband's aunt, Hilda Tye.  This is tatting in variegated crochet cottons.  One can't help but feel that a little rebranding of this craft might bring it new fans, since the results are so spectacular.

Mr Wabbit

Big drama in our village last week as smoke poured out of the roof of the centrally placed pub, The Cricketers.  Soon we were part of the gawping crowd as the gallant fire brigade used a massive cherry picker to access the roof-tiles.  Flames were seen at various points on the roof, breaking out in one section even as the hoses deluged another.

Word had it that the electrics were dodgy, which they might well have been, but now the local paper reports that arson has been confirmed.  The village is currently conducting a dating survey - of roof-timbers, not of social habits.  This pub, once the site of the House of Correction to which all unmarried mothers in Essex were sent, was said to contain some of the most historic beams, inaccessible in its loft.  What remains of them will be easy to dendro now, no doubt.

Itty-Bitty Toys

A blankie in chequerboard pattern and a white rabbit from Susan B. Anderson's book "Itty-bitty Toys."  Both of these are for a colleague's infant.  Recently, I was surprised to see another babe in arms, at five weeks, dressed in denim jeans and a brown kaftan top.

So much for the matinee jacket and all that knitted lace once de rigueur for babies of either sex.

 I thought to err on the side of plainness here, although I can't decide whether Mr Wabbit looks cute or like a rather sickly elderly gent.

We've taken some lovely walks recently, some along the reaches of the Essex Way around Good Easter.  Green lanes, field paths, jam and honey for sale in the village, and cream teas accompanied by a flautist in the church.  The head of Tesco may believe that village England is finished, but Good Easter would disagree.

Today, to the Boot Fair, in search of garden plants, notably two Gauras, one pink, one white.  But the lure of the boot fair is the serendipitous, and so it proved.  Two pounds for a Record Album containing eight 78s, previously owned by a person of very discriminating taste: Kathleen Ferrier, Peter Pears, Paul Robeson, Myra Hess and Pablo Casals.  My husband was in hogs' heaven.

Full Bloom

Wisteria in full bloom in our garden, strangely paler than we remember it from other years.  The hot weather saw us eating lunch at the bottom of our garden where the trees provide shade.  Although our house is in the middle of a village at the front, the back is one house away from open country.  We are watching with amazement as a pair of blackbirds attempt to rear a brood in a rambling rose, in full view of hungry, prowling cats.




















A third Swallowtail Shawl by Evelyn Clarke, this time in laceweight.  In fact, I started this one first, then lost heart as it seemed to take forever and I was concerned that it would be too small to be of any use.  It is knit in cashmere laceweight from Devon Fibres who were doing brisk trade at the i-knit London wool fair.  Now it is complete, it has a lovely drape to it and the extra repeats make it more than just a shoulder shawl.





Last, a blaze of glory from the laburnum at the end of the garden, above my husband's workshop.  It is doubly precious to him as his mother raised it from a seedling at their old family home.

Spring Greens

Second Swallowtail Shawl by Evelyn Clarke.  This one was very enjoyable to knit as the pattern now made sense, on this second try.  This yarn, from Yarnsmith, is dyed in a virulent mix of acid green and yellow, which somehow works better for the pattern than the Pankhurst colourway, as it reads as a semi-solid.  It looks very dramatic over black.  Two weeks of desultory knitting, one £7 skein...what more could one ask?

Last Sunday it was wet early on so I made up a batch of jam from the last of the blackcurrants in  the freezer.   Nothing like fresh jam to give that intense fruit flavour.  I use my mother's jampan, always thinking of the top shelf full of jam she kept going.  Curiously, I don't remember it tasting different as it aged, but I'm sure it must have done. 

On the allotment, many weeks of dry weather have allowed us to get everything planted:  potatoes, onions, leeks, parsnips, carrots, swede, lettuce.  The rhubarb we grew from seed is now well-established, but, curiously, has decided to flower.  I don't ever recall seeing rhubarb in flower before.  This year's new project is to establish some raised strawberry beds, using black membrane to suppress the rampant mare's tail.  One box is already in place; the second, in progress.  The big success has been the purple sprouting, which we had never grown before.  After almost a year it is in full production, and very sweet and delicious it is too.

Border Country

A Swallowtail shawl by Evelyn Clark, knitted in Yarnsmith's Pure Alchemy in a colourway called Pankhurst, since it uses the suffragette colours.  This took only one skein of yarn and was an easy knit once I had mastered the nature of the pattern sections and realised how the nupps worked.  In this double knitting weight yarn on 4mm needles it moved along nicely.  I can see a few more of these in my future.

Plain socks for my husband in Regia Silk.  These have already seen some wear, although I was not very happy with the Kitchenering of the toe.  I feel it may prove a weak point.

 

How about these three?  We saw lambs in all stages of development on our recent trip north, but none so cute as these, on our stroll around the Howk at Caldbeck.  My husband even had a turn as the Good Shepherd, rescuing a lamb which had got itself trapped on a ledge under a bridge.  He did turn a bit pale when I explained to him the meaning of the word "scour", but he agreed that it had to be lifted out of its predicament.

We also saw plenty of ruined abbeys: Jedburgh, Dryburgh, Kelso...but Melrose took the prize for most interesting remains. 

 

Lots of intact masonry, carved capitals, statues, structures...much more than elsewhere.

Each day we tried to fit in a walk.  One, through muddy woodland, was to the Waterloo Tower, which had fantastic views. - from the base, as the tower isn't open.

Next on the list was Smailholm Tower, a pele tower just outside Selkirk.  Here there was a delightful surprise: a collection of brilliant costumed figure, too dramatic to be called dolls, by a maker called Anne Carrick.  Each tableau encted a scene from the old Scots ballads, "Sir Patrick Spens", "The Wife of Usher's Well", "Tam Lin".  The tower was on the land of a farm where Sir Walter Scott had recuperated from his chilhood illness, hence the link with the ballads.  The wonderful detail of the figures and the use of fabric in the costumes was an unexpected treat for me.

Finally, to our base on the Solway coast where unexpectedly good weather awaited us.  Lovely walks in the clear air, and magical sunsets.

Global Warming

My husband, wearing the cover sweater from Alice Starmore's "Sweaters for Men."  I knitted this about five years ago, but it has seen minimal wear since then.  This is because I made it after a particularly bitter walk around Buttermere at Christmas, and it is intended to be worn over another smaller jumper.  It has taken this year's inclement weather to bring it out of the cupboard. 

It has a lovely soft handle and drape, but it does look as if it belongs to someone bigger than my husband.

In 2000, we got married after many years together.  We both dislike hot weather so we booked a holiday in Shetland, after our August wedding.  We knew to pack warm clothes, but had reckoned without the wind-chill factor.  We each had a summer jumper and a heavier walking jumper with us.  On the first morning, which was bright and sunny, we found ourselves needing both jumpers at once, as layers.  Starmore seems to have that climate in mind in this sweter.

I have been very pleased with the comments on my Celtic Throw.   It is knit in strips, with the blue ones measuring seven inches and the cream ones five and a half inches.  This makes it abour five foot by forty-eight inches.  Knitting it in strips made it ideal for long journeys in the car and for traffic jams in particular.  Family commitments have meant that we have seen a lot of these this year.

Last week. we were able to plant our onions and two rows of early potatoes. We were pleased to find the soil light to work and friable.  Whether this is the result of frost and snow on autumn-dug  earth, or of worm action in response to the FYM we spread on it, is hard to tell.  Whichever, it is certainly more enjoyable than our first year on this plot when it was so waterlogged and heavy the soil would not drop off the spade when dug, then baked into bricks before it could be worked.

Cromarty Throw

Last Sunday, I  summoned the resolve to finish the final inches of my Celtic Throw.  This has been on the needles since July 2008, before we went to Sweden on holiday.  I had been much taken by Elsebeth Lavold's "Viking Knits", where she translates the interlaced patterns from the borders of Viking picture stones into knitting.  How hard could this be? I thought.  What's more, I had some Viking inspiration in mind, thinking of the cross at Gosforth, and the gravestones in the church at Dearham, in West Cumbria.

The answer turned out to be, more challenging than you would think, even when some of the interlacing is identical to very simple cabling.  But, of course, Alice Starmore's St Enda provided most of the solution.

Then there are the animal heads.  When not just used as a border, the cabling is often the body of a grotesque serpent or dragon.  But even Lavold hesitates to offer a pattern for the animal head on her design, Bryha. 

Then I realised that I had committed myself to knitting two of each panel, as the eye seems to seek rhythm and symmetry.  So then, would the unique central panel look out of place?

The yarn was the least of my concerns.  The cream is knit double from a charity shop cone marked 100% wool.  The duck -egg blue was bought as a batch from Kerrie's yarn mountain at £1.00 a ball.  Probably the whole thing cost no more than £20.00, a fact which will always enhance its value in my eyes.

Both the repeated cable patterns come from Alice Starmore's "Celtic Knitting".    The bodies of the snakes are from her book "Fishermen's Sweaters," where they appear as elements in other designs. 

The cables on the cream panels are from Barbara Walker's "Treasury": a partial cable and a Jacob's ladder.  I included these to give a vertical continuity to the design, and to contrast with the elaboration of the blue panels.

Only the animal heads are my own design.  I just opened out a cable, made it up as I went along and then embroidered on some extra details.  I was rather proud of the conceit of making the second serpent face the other way.  It took me a longish while to figure out how to do this, but I am pleased with the result.  As you may imagine, I had plenty of time to think about each of these design issues as I knit these panels.

Celtic dragons

Winter Sunshine

A quick knit, this simple scarf in Jaeger Merino Aran.  The double moss stitch gives a nice tweedy fabric which doesn't curl and the five fifty gram balls  knit up to the length my husband needs to provide a loop of face coverage in the frosty weather.   Very satisfying to have the right amount af a suitable colour in the stash, instead of having to buy more yarn.  Also in evidence is the taupe sweater I was knitting when I started this blog.  This has a simple geometric texture, but somehow looks modern because of a tiny design feature - garter stitch for a couple of rounds after picking up for the neck-band.

Home-made marmalade.  One of those seasonal tasks as the year turns, storing the fruits of the season in the old way.  It never ceases to amaze me how so few oranges can produce so much marmalade.  In terms of effort this is quite unlike the blackcurrant jam I made some weeks ago from our own frozen currants.  Each one picked by hand, then topped and tailed by hand. But both preserves have that unmistakable intense flavour of fruit. I remember being given blackcurrant tea for a cold when I was little - just blackcurrant jam diluted with boiling water.  So the belief lingers that it is a health food - and I suppose it probably is rich in vitamin C.

Snow Days

Ah, the pleasure of the unexpected snow day!  Aside from coaching my IB students by e-mail, and mugging up on their next text - "A Doll's House" - I settled in to a regime of cooking, sewing and knitting. 

First, I re-covered this little stool with some classic William Morris fabric.  Then, and less photogenically, I made thermal linings for the living-room and bedroom curtains.  One forgets how much physical strength is needed to wrastle lengths of fabric into position.  Then, the horror of realisation, as it becomes obvious that you have sewn it together back to front or upside down.  Very easy to do with white fabric with no obvious grain.  But curtain linings are very forgiving - no one will see them, after all.

Next, another pair of gents' mitts, this time in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino, lovely to handle, but oddly splitty.  These are in single moss stitch which made for a firm fabric.

Then, my husband requested a long scarf, long enough to wind around the face at least once.  This need has never arisen before, but it certainly did on our winter snow walks this year.  What a pleasure to be able to locate a suitably manly yarn in one's existing stash.  This is a Jaeger Merino Aran, bought from Kerrie of Hipknits after she and her partner acquired the complete stock of a yarn-shop.  They were in Essex and the shop in Scotland, but nothing seemed to daunt them and the yarn mountain had to be seen to be believed.

Some years ago, my mother-in -law passed away, and I inherited her sewing-box.  This fine piece of cabinet work had been made especially for her as a gift from a great-aunt, and, over the years, her unrivalled collection of Hooks and eyes and other notions has been very useful.  however, I'd never emptied it right out until now.  What meanings do we read into this item, still in a paper wrapper with her own mother's writing on it, so clearly a present of some kind? 

Inside, against multi-coloured foils, are sixty sewing needles, all in pristine condition.  Whoever would need sixty needles, no matter how keen a sewer they were?   She did teach housecraft, but this is very much a personal piece of kit. Since there were many other packs of needles elsewhere, I will never need to disturb this collection either, yet what a fantastic resource.

Does the road wind uphill all the way?

Wintry walk up Sale Fell in Cumbria.  At the snicket leading to the fell we were met by a rugged-looking chap with a young collie dog.  He was wearing crampons.  It was treacherous up there, he said, and we should put on our crampons if we had them.   We pondered on this for a moment or two, then gave it a go.  Packed snow on the paths had turned to ice, but we were fine on all but the lonning at the back of the

hill where water was running over the ice.

                                    

Another day;another frosty scene.  Bitterly cold wind and a white frost in the sunlight, even at noon.  This is the remains of a salt-pan at Crosscanonby, just below the Roman Fort.

Finally, some knitting.  The last strip of my cabled throw is now half-done.  I summoned the resolve to experiment by opening up the cables to produce the serpent's head, then embellishing with a few embroidered details to add the eye, ear and lip.  I'm still wondering about fangs.  The serpent is to be imagined chasing the two bodied beast ahead of it.  These are all very simple cable designs, but copied directly from details of the Viking Cross at Gosforth. Cumbria.  This new spell of snow and enforced idleness

should see this project complete.

Winter Wonderland

My back garden, under snow.

The quaintest of the five pubs in the village: The Woolpack.

The village church.

And the little chapel by the old abbey on our favourite short walk.  Just a pity that it is painfully cold and treacherous underfoot.  Ah, to be six again, when snow was an unalloyed pleasure.

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire...

Eighteen years we have lived in this house, yet I doubt  if we have lit this little stove more than five or six times.  Some early experiences involving a lot of smoke, and the presence of perfectly adequate storage heaters, have made it seem like a waste of time.  Still, as the temperature drops outside, what could be nicer than to bask in front of an open fire, enjoying buttered crumpets and mince pies?

Note, among the brassware, a piece of utilitarian laundry equipment, which I remember my mother buying new.  Called a "poss," it was in weekly use alongside the dolly-tub, boiler and mangle during my childhood.  And now here it is decorating my hearth.

Another little sampler from my collection.  In this case, a mystery item from a junkshop.  The imagery speaks of the Twenties or early Thirties, but it is still very much a sampler (click to embiggen)

Saturday brought an unpleasant surprise.  My husband having just collected a batch of timber destined to be our new dining-table, set off for his shed anticipating a few hours of pondering and pencil-chewing.  But, through night, a large, high, storage shelf had collapsed, scattering a scrow of debris over his workbench.  Thus began several hours of final reckoning and a trip to the tip.  When did I think I would ever complete a macrame lampshade, started in the early Eighties?  His shed is much improved by this enforced de-clutter.  Only this little owl survives from the macrame enterprise.

Stored Goodies

More Christmas preparation in the form of spiced preserves from Delia's Christmas book.  Pears in one jar, with lemon slices, and clementines in the other, both drenched in wine vienegar, brown sugar and cloves.  The kitchen certainly smelt like Christmas as these simmered.  In January, they are lovely with cold cuts.

Delia's Christmas food programme on tv, however, was like a voice from another age.  Who now slathers on the butter and double cream with quite such a free hand?  Though it is true that her Luxury Fish Pie was lovely because of the unctuous nature of the potato topping.

Our loft was recently much admired by two chaps from the local historical society, because its unimproved state allows full sight of the rafters with their many centuries of alterations and road -grime.  Stashed up there I have all those items bought at textile fairs and boot-fairs and charity shops, knowing they would come in one day.  That day has now arrived for a piece of tweed woven from sari silk scraps.  It's so long since I sewed anything for myself that I was unconvinced by this, but in fact, with skirts, it is a question of hitting a length which is currently in vogue and matching that with what one's figure will stand.  It looks very lively with a bright top picking up one of the colours and the obligatory black tights.