Tunnels!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03gvsln
</giggle>

Because

I think this may be all the explanation anyone needs in life.

I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue

As I mentioned previously, I've wanted to see a recording of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue since I first started listening to Radio 4. I can remember realising that people actually got to be in the audience for the show and desperately wanting to be part of that. Tonight I was lucky enough to do exactly that.

What could be better than just getting to see I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue? Well, being there for the first recording of the 60th series was pretty great. But discovering that John Finnemore was
the guest panelist was unexpectedly amazing.

It's not stalking if it's accidental. Definitely.

The recording was at the Playhouse Theatre, Weston-super-Mare. It started at 7:30 and we weren't finished until 10:30 (with a short interval, ideal for sorting out car park faffage). I don't envy the person who has to decide what to cut to get that down to two half-hour shows. Though quite a bit of the time was spent re-recording Jack Dee's lines. Tonight Weston leaned a valuable lesson about the pronunciation of "Danube".

The first show will be broadcast 11th November, listen out for anyone laughing a little more than everyone else and that'll probably be me. It was hilarious. The letter from Queen Victoria to Isambard Kingdom Brunel was my highlight, without a doubt. Though Barry Cryer twerking is something I won't forget in a hurry!

In finishing all I can say is: "Tunnels" Oh. And.... Da-noob

John Finnemore, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Jack Dee, Jon Naismith, Graeme Garden, Barry Cryer.
You'll have to trust me on that.

Pandemic

It's a little late in the day for this recommendation but I've only recently caught Pandemic (Part 1/Part 2/Part 3) in the Afternoon Drama.

Each play tells a story in its own right: Part 1 (Present) about the outbreak of a deadly virus; Part 2 (Future) about an investigation into a government cover-up in the wake of the outbreak; and Part 3 (Past) the truth behind the outbreak.

I love intertwined stories but the fact that these really did stand on their own as individual stories was a testament to how good the overall arc was. I'd recommend catching one, or all, if they're still available.

Blue & White

Rarely have I swung from love, to hate, to love, to hate, to love with the frequency that I have with my most recent project. But neither have I been so surprised by how well something has blocked!

I'll confess I got a little bored with the edging, though that was mostly because I was anxious to crack on with the middle bit. The next version is likely to be a little more fun because, thanks to the amount of practice runs I did, I was bored of this yarn before I'd even cast on.

And if anyone was wondering a) what the benefits of blocking are; or b) why we were discussing sea slugs in work, I'd ask you to imagine this all bunched up on a circular needle:

For the record, this is now the second time I've been pleasantly surprised by Sirdar Country Style (4 ply this time). Though I tend to refer to almost all acrylic under the catch-all category "Nasty Acrylic", I think this one (with its 30% wool content) might be reclassified as an exception.

Glaucus atlanticus

For reasons that will become apparent when I (eventually) post photos of my current knitting project, we were discussing sea slugs in work today.

I still can't quite believe this one is real.

Chain Gang

I didn't follow the 2009 Chain Gang story closely but, by the end, I think it showed everything that is interesting and crazy about the experiment.

If you've not come across it before, the idea is that 4 Extra broadcasts two minutes of a story, then listeners write the storyline (not script) for the next two minutes. This goes on for a dozen episodes, by which point the final story only just about bears any resemblance to the initial starting chapter. The 2009 story jumped around wildly in time and theme but was tied up quite neatly in a live recording at St Pancras station by Robert Shearman.

This year's story seems to be starting out firmly in thriller territory. As much as I appreciated the creative ideas that led to the wilder chapters of the 2009 story, I hope the judges might try to keep things a little tighter this year. A listener-guided story that hangs together as a cohesive whole would be a remarkable thing.

I've not decided yet whether to enter a storyline but I'm a little tempted to use it as a little writing exercise and see if I can write something interesting for the next section in the form of two minutes of script.

Great theory, of course, but in practise I expect I'll just sit back and enjoy the story in all its glorious, unfolding chaos!

I Love it When a Plan B Comes Together

The main reason I posted the rather boring story about my first jumper of the year was so that I could tell the ever-so slightly more interesting story of the second jumper of the year. This story.

Jumper one went down so well that I started plotting jumper two. After all, why spend time thinking of a birthday present when you could spend time knitting it! During my initial searches for jumper one, I'd been really impressed with the look of this pattern (Florestan). Okay, large parts of it are a little over-fussy but the main cables look great. Plus, it was in double knit, which means lots of yarn options. I'm ashamed to say that I've become a little averse to buying pattern since discovering the wealth of free ones on Ravelry but I coughed up and downloaded the pattern.

What a disappointment. It takes a lot for me to write about a pattern in these sorts of negative terms but I couldn't believe I'd paid money for such a sparsely written, badly described pattern. The PDF is 11 pages long, great! Only three of those pages have jumper instructions on. Not so great. Two of those pages only have a single column of instructions. Not great at all. The rest is ten photos and three pages of abbreviations and tips and tricks. I'm a reasonably experienced knitter and I found those two columns hard going. And that was only the sleeves...

In parallel to my pattern searching, cable deliberating and general faffing, I had a decision to make about the yarn. Jumper one had gone down well in Rowan Pure Wool so that was the logical choice. I still had four balls left so that was a chunk of the cost sorted already, all I needed was another 16 or so from Get Knitted. Yes, there'd be a risk about the dye lots but I could do the arms in the old balls and the body in the new ones and it'd look fine. It even gave me a chance to start the arms before my order arrived.

As I'd expected for that sort of quantity, Get Knitted was out of stock but promised to order it in. I wasn't worried, why would I be? And then they said that Rowan was out of stock. That's when I was worried. 

To cut an extremely long story short, everywhere that had stock was too expensive (John Lewis). Everywhere that was affordable had to order from Rowan and, when the manufacturer is out of stock, you can be pretty certain that birthday present isn't going to be ready. All this waiting and investigation had eaten up precious weeks and, although I had two Florestan sleeves finished,  I was now less than a month from the deadline with no real hope of completeion.

Time for Plan B!

Fortunately, thanks to jumper one, I knew of a quick and great pattern. Thanks to my swatching, I knew of a reasonable-but-ever-so-slightly-felt-prone yarn that was definitely not out of stock. But no one wants the same jumper in two different yarns so it was time to work out a different cable!

With stitch dictionaries strewn everywhere and half-worked charts, I tried several variations. I have never been so conscious of the fact that every day I spent testing was a day I wouldn't have for knitting. In the end I settled on this (heavily modified from a couple of different sources)

I need to work it through again to decipher my own symbology but, in case anyone is curious, it shows right-side rows only, wrong side is worked as you'd expect maintaining the knit/purls of the previous row. Where there's a dot on a cable, purl that stitch rather than knit it. I will try to work out the detail though as I was really pleased with the result.

Obviously the resultant jumper wasn't as nice as the first version simply because the yarn wasn't as good. However, my tension was better and it's hard not to have pride in seeing my own cables come out so well. Thank goodness for out of stock yarn, otherwise I would have been stuck with the disappointing Florestan.

AudioGO

When Red & Blue returned to the Afternoon Drama slot in August, I googled the series to find out more. I'd heard and loved the first episode of the first series via Play of the Week but I'd thought it was a one-off rather than the first of a series. I was determined to track down more information. What I found was much more than that, I found:

http://www.audiogo.com/uk/

 I've no idea how it took me so long to stumble upon a website dedicated to selling BBC dramas, comedies, audiobooks and just about every other variety of download that you can imagine. I'm surprised and a little ashamed of my own ignorance of such a fantastic site.

I quickly lost hours in searching for interesting dramas and comedies and working out exactly which episodes of McLevy and Pilgrim I'd missed. The range is fantastic and I can't imagine that any radio fan would be stuck for choice. Downloading is straight forward and it was easy to get copies onto both my laptop and PC. There's some sort of points system going on but it's not very well explained and that really is the most negative thing I can say about AudioGO.

In case you're interested, my purchases so far have been:

• Giles Wemmbley-Hogg Glastonbury Special
  Genius, can't think that I've ever heard it repeated on 4Extra
• Giles Wemmbley-Hogg Geht Zum Fussballweltmeisterschaft Weg!
  I'll confess to copying that title, as above
• Red & Blue Series 1
  Very good, though the first episode remains the best in my opinion
• Avoid London, Area Closed, Turn On Radio
  An Mike Walker Afternoon Drama set around the 7/7 bombings.
• Coalition
  Interesting premise of a politian under pressure of blackmail
• Brief Lives Series 3
  Very welcome background listening ahead of the recent series, if only they had some of the earlier series
• Pilgrim Series 2
  And suddenly series three made much more sense
• And miscellaneous McLevy
  Excellent, as always

That said, there are some disappointing gaps in the catalogue. I'd love to see more early series of some things (Party Series 1!) but it's hard to complain in the face of such a fantastic range. Do yourself a favour and take a look, there will be something there that you'd like to hear again or missed the first time round. 

Oh, and did I mention? It's all at affordable price. What's not to love!

High Standards

I don't knit many jumpers. That much yarn is expensive and I think I was put off by too many enthusiastic but technically flawed attempts as a beginner. Even now, when I class myself as a reasonably experienced knitter, I just don't seem to be able to get it right. Or at least that has been the case up until this year.

I'm now beginning to think that I'm incapable of knitting good jumpers for me.

Last year I had a commission and, to quote a wise but untraceable Raveler:

"Knitting is like sex. If I like you and you appreciate it, it is free. Other than that, you can’t pay me enough. "

Fortunately, this was the fun and appreciated sort of commission. Unfortunately, the requirements were a little tight. It had to be an aran/cable jumper. White or cream. Machine washable. Warm. Nice yarn. Long arms. Add to that my own requirement (somewhere this side of £100) and hopefully you'll see the challenge.

Machine washable and nice yarn presented an immediate problem. In a defeat for my budget criteria, nice yarn won out on the grounds that "if it's not nice then I won't wear it and it won't need washing in the first place." 

Finding the pattern was tricky at first because I had some strong ideas about what I wanted to make. I quickly but reluctantly abandoned these in favour of what the recipient wanted and I'm very glad I did.  The pattern chosen was a DROPS design, and therefore doesn't have a nice evocative name but rather goes by the sadly utilitarian 85-6. I'll admit to being initially uninspired but it turned out to be an unexpectedly good pattern choice.

The next problem was the yarn weights of the pattern. It's written for two different yarns held together throughout, an aran weight and a sport weight. I really, truly, desperately tried to match this with something that was available in the UK, was machine washable and didn't break the bank. I failed, repeatedly. Fortunately, I tested alternatives and found that two strands of doubleknit held together was a fantastic match! And, with the popularity of doubleknit in the UK, there was no shortage of white/cream yarn to choose from.

So, from there, I swatched like I've never swatched before! Hoping I might still save a little money, I tried a couple of budget yarns that still had some wool content but nothing worked as well Rowan Pure Wool DK. It was squishy, warm, soft and - best of all - superwash! Unfortunately, it also comes with the price tag you'd expect from Rowan.

Enter Get Knitted, yarn shop beyond compare! Their price was unbeaten anywhere, plus they're (almost) my local. I drove up to look at the yarn but found they had one solitary ball on the shelf. Fortunately, the lovely staff ordered it in for me and gave me the wonderful 10% Ravelry Group discount. It's not an exaggeration to say that, without Get Knitted, I never would have made this jumper. Thanks to their generous discount, low price and free shipping, even the amazing Rowan yarn fell into my "extravagant but affordable" price bracket.

So on to knitting. With two strands of doubleknit, you're more or less working with chunky. It's pleasingly fast. The elasticity of the yarn meant it took me some time to get my tension and I will confess that the back came out a rather different length than the front but I was on a time limit (belated Christmas) and there was no time for ripping back.

The pattern is brief, to the point and mainly great. There were only a couple of sections where I had to read things over a few times to check I had understood it correctly. That said, I wouldn't recommend it for anyone making their first ever jumper because I think it does assume some knowledge of a normal jumper construction.

I only made two modifications (other than the extra long arms that had been requested).

• The first is at the start of the front. There's an unusual and striking cable pattern through the front but the pattern starts with 4×2 rib and then cuts straight to the cable pattern in a really jarring way. I didn't get a photo of it but I just couldn't live with it. To hell with time constraints, I ripped back and adjusted the middle section of the rib so that it flowed into the cable. I can probably post a chart if anyone is interested.

• The second modification was the sleeve caps. Perhaps my tension as unusual (I don't think so) but, as written, I don't know how the sleeve caps would have fitted without some hefty (and very unmanly) gathering. Instead, I gradually decreased the sleeve caps down until they matched the size of the armholes more closely. I'm so glad I did because the result worked wonderfully.

I'd really recommend this pattern for anyone looking for a quick but really good jumper. There's a bit of shaping to the body which worked wonderfully, the cable is unusual but not overly complex and it turned out to be everything it needed to be. Most importantly, it was appreciated.

2013: The Year of Booze

A couple of years ago, my sister gave me the fantastic gift of a homebrew kit. Delicious cider soon followed. I got a bit out of practice last year but the warm summer seemed the perfect incitement to cider.

In June I made an elderflower cider kit. I'm a strong opponent of fruit flavoured cider (cherry 'cider' is not cider!) but the result is deliciously appley with a subtle extra taste of elderflower. For the first time ever, I actually had enough bottles for the whole batch and I ended up with more than 40 bottles in the cupboard.

In July, I experimented with elderflower champagne. Finding the elderflowers proved to be the biggest hurdle. Burnham was bare so I snuck round to my parents and thieved some from the back field, suffering retribution in the form of extreme hayfever. Although I followed the recipe, the champagne fermented out entirely so I primed the bottles as I normally would for cider. 

The result was interesting. At first I wasn't impressed, probably because I subconsciously was expecting something more like the sweetness of elderflower cordial. But, once it was refrigerated and reasonably sparkling, it turned out to be refreshing and delicious. And, most importantly, non-explosive!

Now it's autumn and time to think about sloe gin. Ignoring the nonsense about waiting for the first frost, I headed out to my secret sloe locations and ran out of boxes before I ran out of sloes. I was raised to ignore quantities when it comes to sloe gin so the recipe is simply: fill a jar with sloes; fill the gaps with sugar; fill the gaps with gin. Wait.

This put me in the infusing mood so, when my mum offered me a reasonably large quantity of plums going spare from her tree, the obvious solution seemed to be alcohol-related. Gin? Vodka? How could I consider anything beyond the fabulously rhyming plum rum! Fortunately, I'm not the only one to attempt plum rum and this blog has a fascinating recipe (plums, rum and tasty spices!).

Due to a miscalculation, I bought a bit too much rum for the recipe. Now spare rum isn't really a problem but I also had a kilner jar spare and spare rum + spare kilner jar = a challenge. Fortunately, this blog gave me the solution (while also helping me use up a spare orange in the process). So now I have a jar of 44 cordial in the cupboard too!

A Lifetime Ambition

Okay, not a lifetime but certainly over twenty years worth of ambition:

When I got an e-mail from the I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue mailing list on Thursday, I did a true double-take as I realised that Clue would be coming to Weston. Followed quickly by an e-mail out to my family to share the excitement. 

My initial plan was to be on the phone as the line opened at 10:00am but, fortunately, I decided to drive over and get tickets in person. Thanks to road closures for a marathon, I was a little later than I'd planned but I was still surprised by the length of the queue when I got there.

09:36

I was even more surprised when the theatre man told us that they were expecting seats to go so quickly that, although they'd do their best, some people in the queue probably wouldn't get tickets. It was a tense wait and, once the doors opened, all the successful early birds had to suffer our envious glares as they left clutching tickets.

My technologically-clued-in section of the queue were exploiting smart phones to their full potential. One man was ringing the box office, I alternated the phone and website, while another updated us on his wife's progress at home (we cheered every time she reported that the website timed out). The theatre staff kindly updated us on the number of tickets they'd sold and, very slowly, it became clear that we were probably going to be lucky.

Some grumpy queuers seemed to feel that everything was taking too long, my section quietly expressed the opinion that it was a very un-Radio-4 attitude and they should be ejected from the queue. We also plotted to cut the phone lines, let a dog into the manager's office to attack the electrics and further jam the phone lines every time we saw the kiosk staff come to the end of a call. 

Fortunately, in the end we didn't have to resort to dirty tricks and I'm now the proud owner of tickets to see I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue! Perhaps the best thing I overheard while waiting was "I'm looking forward to finding out what gender Samantha is." I think someone's going to be disappointed...

Three Men In A Boat

When I was younger, I asked my mum what her favourite book was. I don't know what I expected the answer to be but "Three Men in a Boat" was a little perplexing. I'd never heard of it and I couldn't for the life of me imagine how a story about three men in a boat could possibly be as interesting as books about dragons and spaceships and adventures.

I'm sorry to say that I never made the effort to find out. So, when I saw that there was a Radio 4 Classic Serial version coming along, I knew I had to listen. Even more so when I found out that it starred Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis and Julian Rhind-Tutt <insert swoon>.

I truly laughed out loud when listening and I'd recommend giving it a go if you're similarly ignorant. Now I have to know how much of that is down to the dramatisation and how much to the original material. I may not have had the sense to take my mum's recommendation when I was little but Three Men in a Boat is definitely on my reading list now.

A Little Fun

I pass no comment, I simply state that this happened over the summer.

 

Minley

Third time lucky. Following some extensive testing, I was pretty sure I had my new pattern sorted. Cascade 220 has something of a reputation amongst my knitting group (okay, amongst me and my friend) as the why-would-I-try-anything-else yarn. And that's a well deserved reputation.

It comes in a stupefying range of colours that is guaranteed to make the most decisive yarn buyer hesitate. It's 100% wool, so it blocks wonderfully. It's reasonably priced and I've never had problems with knots or quality. If you've not tried Cascade 220, do yourself a favour and give it a go, you won't be disappointed.

Anyway, I'd initially ordered a nice dusky purple for my final (definitely, definitely final) draft of my scarf but it was out of stock. I was pleasantly pleased with the duck-egg blue I got instead and enjoyed giving the skeins a good squish before I got started. 

As I mentioned before, the pattern is quick and in next to no time I had my final, finished scarf. And after quite a lot of fighting and testing, it was finally the right shape, the right size and generally all-over right.

The scarf is modelled here by my colleague Elspeth in front of out lovely office atrium. The photo might have looked a little better had we not suffered a fire in the office (hence the weird plasterboard hoardings onto which we have drawn fish).

So all that was left was a name. With my other patterns, that has come along with the pattern itself and that was more or less the case with this scarf. 

There's a stately home called Minley Manor in Hampshire. It's a quite remarkable building that now serves as the officers' mess attached to Gibraltar Barracks. It's a warren of hallways and contradictory architectural choices but it is stunning. The wikipedia page has a photo that hardly does the beautiful, elegant building justice. The initial house has been added to over time and things don't always add up well but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And I like to think the same is true of my scarf. 

As with Minley-the-house, I started with an idea and then just added things until I was finished. I don't think I could have named it anything else.

Inspiration, Friend and Foe

Who knows where ideas come from? For me, the answer is occasionally yarn.

Quite some time ago (because this is a very belated post) someone brought some spare yarn into work. I know, spare yarn. The concept is strange to me too. I took away a couple of balls of Freedom Spirit in earthy browns. I'd seen it in my local yarn store a few times and the colours interested me. What interested me more was the 100% wool content. Mmmm blocktastic.

I think it was that which made my brain cry out: "LACE!". To which my more rational mind replied: "Worsted?" But my impulsive, ambitious mind continued to cry "LACE" despite my reason's best attempt to point out that I hate lace in variegated colours.

I think it's the fact that the balls were free that gave me the freedom to try things I wouldn't have attempted with yarn I'd purchased. It's not that I always buy expensive yarn, just that it's nice to have something out of the blue that I've not already planned something for. That and the 100% wool.

I've been fascinated by the idea of lace in worsted for some time so I enthusiastically dug out my stitch dictionaries. I was particularly drawn to a German one I bought in Loop last year and quickly found something I liked. The fight to get it into a pattern I loved was long and arduous and, as it turned out, fraught with failure.

I haven't posted pictures of the resultant scarf on Ravelry because, quite frankly, it would be a cruel and humiliating offence to a perfectly good yarn. Needless to say, I learned a lot from that experiment.

The bit I was least happy with was a weird knot/cable combination that could not have worked less if I had tried. The next version of the scarf was held up primarily by my attempts to refine a 8×6 section of the pattern just before the lace joined the short row section of the scarf. I must have tried two dozen variations before I returned to my stitch dictionaries and found something that worked. More than that, it perfectly blended the two sections together.

On a spontaneous trip to Cardiff I bought some luscious Rowan Creative Focus Worsted. Soft and lovely as the yarn is, the truly remarkable thing is the gorgeous range of colours it comes in. Being single ply it was a little splitty but nowhere near what I'd expected, it comes highly recommended.

The result was this:

(thanks to my sister for modelling it)

It was very close to right. But the short row section was still on too large a needle and the points curled irritatingly as soon as I wrapped it round anything. I returned briefly to my practicing but, fortunately, both these problems were easily solved. By casting on plenty of extra stitches then decreasing every row rather than the original every-other, the cast on edge gains the extra stretch it need to wrap more flexibly (with some very pointy points).

Now with added pointy

By this point, I didn't really feel like knitting it again but, fortunately, it's extremely quick to knit so I trawled Get Knitted for exactly the right shade of Cascade 220, cursed loudly when it was out of stock, then waited patiently to start draft number three. Which I will save for another post...

The News Quiz

Last year I was lucky enough to see recordings for a sketch show and two sit coms, previously I'd seen the Now Show but last night was my first panel game.

Back in November, despairing at my chances of getting Cabin Pressure tickets, I also applied for a News Quiz recording. Months passed, it was clear I'd got nowhere with Cabin Pressure and I forgot exactly what date I'd requested for the News Quiz. It fell completely out of my mind.

So when an email arrived from the BBC a couple of weeks ago, I assumed it must be one of the newsletters I'm subscribed to. One comedy double-take later I realised my mistake. So I found a hotel bargain and booked my train tickets.

I did a little research on the internet beforehand about how early the queue starts and my paranoia soon grew. I was lucky enough to have some company last night and my "get there before 6:30" advice soon changed to "the earlier the better".

At 5pm I joined the queue and, for about 15 minutes, the queue consisted of two of us. The BBC have made some changes and they now let people in a lot earlier than the time on the ticket, something I was exceedingly grateful for considering the temperature yesterday evening.

We were let in at 5:15 but I lost out on a number 2 sticker because they'll only sticker a ticket for people who have arrived. I lingered outside with a growing band of others waiting for sisters, husbands and friends.

There was some disagreement over how best to describe Portland Place (apparently "head towards Regents Park, look for the glass building framing a church spire" is no good, the better description is "the massive building lit with blue light") but, after convincing the security guard that I definitely didn't have anything sharp - no, not even keys - we were in.

Number 20 & 21!

The biggest difference between the News Quiz and everything else I've seen is that there were no retakes. None. Not the linking bits, not cuttings, nothing. The whole recording was long, we didn't finish until 9:15 and I'm very curious to see what's made it onto tonight's show.

The panelists were Jeremy Hardy, Mark Steel (who looked like he might be coming down with something), Katy Brand and Daniel Finkelstein. It was fantastic fun and everyone in the audience enjoyed themselves no end.

I know that News Quiz tickets aren't easy to get but it comes highly recommended. I fully support Mark Steel's proposal that there must be room in the digital spectrum for a sweary version of Radio 4. Now that I've seen the sweary version of the News Quiz I just don't want to go back.

Fasten Your Seatbelts

With the exception of the entry linked to from the BBC and another post that (for no good reason) became popular with comment spammers, my most successful blog post has been about John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme try-out show. While I'd love to imagine this was due to the fact that I'd composed a particularly interesting blog entry, or perhaps the entertaining quantities of gin I'd consumed when I wrote it, it's pretty clear that the key is in the words "John Finnemore". Cheesecake among strudels.

So it'd be remiss of me if I failed to point out something significant in the schedules this week: Series Four of Cabin Pressure begins tomorrow.

I won't go into details about the lengths I went to in an attempt to get tickets for a recording but, suffice it to say, the ticket unit might have frowned a little. Like the (very) vast number of applicants, I was unsuccessful so I'll have to content myself with enjoying it tomorrow at 6:30.

I'm not going to sing the praise of Cabin Pressure today. After all, many of you know me and have therefore received this lecture many, many times. All I will say is: if my highest recommendation and the prospect of an episode called "Timbuktu" doesn't incite you to listen then you are a lost cause.

Rubies, Roses and Procrastination

 

Last year I took three very different evening courses: VBA, scriptwriting and sugarcraft. Of the three, sugarcraft was the least rewarding but the one that has been of most practical use to me so far.

This year is my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. With only the small sample bouquet from my sugarcraft course to go by, they asked me to make some flowers for their anniversary party cake. Even though my skills are restricted to roses, carnations and some generic foliage.

They asked in October so, naturally, I only started in earnest on Christmas Eve, four days before the party. My Christmas was a quiet one and I spent a few hours each day on the arrangement. I finished it up in plenty of time: the night before the party.

Buttontastic

There are two patterns that I would (and frequently do) recommend frequently to new knitters: Christine Vogel's Drop Stitch Scarf and Amy Duvendack's Big Button Hat.

I love being able to tell people that, so long as they can knit and wrap the wool around a needle, they can make the drop stitch scarf. No purls, no decreases, nothing complex. Considering how effective it is (especially in a variegated yarn) it's so easy for beginners to make something that looks fantastic and surprisingly impressive. It also teaches the most important lesson of all: the only hard part of knitting is the counting.

The genius of the Big Button Hat is, primarily, how quick it is to make. I can complete one in two hours but even a beginner can see results as soon as they start. I do tend to talk people through a flat version rather than working in the round but that's the other beauty of the pattern: it's worked in the same way as I teach knitting. Knit to start off with, then rows of stocking stitch as they learn purling and, finally, some basic decreasing. Hat!

In October, with our annual Christmas sale for WaterAid growing ever closer, I returned to the Big Button Hat with a vengeance. And buttons. Beautiful, beautiful buttons.

For the interested, the yarn is Wendy's Serenity chunky (lovely colours, amazingly soft and stunningly good value). But, I think you'll agree, the buttons are the real attraction of the hats.

Size Matters

This year I received my most challenging commission yet: A request for slipper socks for my niece (not on behalf of my niece, actually from my niece, a girl with absolute faith in my omnipotent powers of knitting).

Socks should be fairly straightforward, after all there are hundreds of sock patterns on Ravelry so you would have thought that I could have come up with something pretty quickly. But, with my usual picky standards in full force, I rejected dozens of candidate patterns. Then my niece found some socks I'd made for her last Christmas and suddenly I knew what to aim for.

The problem with these socks (taken from Cute Knits for Baby Feet) was that they were too small for my niece even before I gave them to her. Cute as they were, the largest size on the pattern was 18-24 months. I thought about trying to adapt the general patterning for a generic sock but I never quite got round to it.

Then, after a couple of months of subtle nagging from my sister (caused by less subtle nagging from my niece) I was struck by a revelation. I didn't need a different pattern, I needed bigger yarn. After all, these were slipper socks, not regular socks.

So I needed something chunky-ish, I needed pink and I needed white. But there's a lot more variety in double knit than chunky and, thanks to another project I was working on (more of that later) I had figured out that double knit doubled is pretty close to chunky.

In the end, I knitted the smallest size in the pattern with some fairly generic Patons double knit, doubled. I had to lengthen the foot but that was all. To say that I was happy with the result is an understatement.

The only problem I had was that distinction between the two colours wasn't great because the pink was so pale. That's when a local craft shop came to the rescue with some irrationally girly ribbon/edging that was both the perfect colour and stretchy.

I'm extremely pleased with the finished socks. And, more importantly, so is my niece!

2012

So this blog is over a year old. Who would have thought? When I started it just before Christmas 2011 I was wondering whether I'd actually keep it up. Well, evidence would suggest no. That's not to suggest that it hasn't been fun to write, quite the contrary, nor that I don't intend to pick it up again, only that 2012 was the oddest of odd years.

One of the reasons I started the blog was the fact that I had time to think and I figured I might as well put that thinking into writing stuff down. As the year progressed, I had less time to think and less time to write stuff down. For a while I wasn't even listening to much radio and even my knitting dropped off for a bit.

While I've been going through my quiet phase I missed the opportunity to write about some top quality radio and the months before Christmas are probably my most high-volume time for knitting in the build up to our Wateraid charity sale. I've got a lot to catch up on.

I know it's a little late but I'd like to wish a happy new year to everyone that took a look at my blog in 2012. May 2013 be wonderful.