FO: Montview

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Just under three months later, it’s done.

I kind of finished it twice. I first finished it a week ago, and I was so excited about being able to wear it to the Knit Night North Christmas party I sewed on the snap closures and buttons as fast as I could and wore it. A few days later I undid all the closures and buttons and sewed them on better; the snaps are still so stiff that I worried that the fabric would pull, so I secured them better and I’m much happier with it now.

There is so much to love about this cardigan. Apart from the fact it’s my first ever garment, it’s also incredibly well-designed and well-instructed, even with the limited space that most knitting magazines give for patterns. This only cements, to me, the genius of Ruth’s patterns, and why I think everyone should be knitting her designs.

Where this pattern succeeds and others have failed to get me to make a garment is I think in the cabling. I can get addicted to cables, and I develop the mentality of ‘oh, just one more cross…’ very quickly. It also gives me something to chase after, which makes the going easier and quicker.

I started with the 43″ size, and then decreased to the 39″ to accommodate my more hippy figure, and it’s resulted in a longer garment as I did the decreases accordingly and didn’t try to do them quicker. I like it this way: hip-length things have always looked good on me, especially if it’s well-fitted. Which this garment is. It also gives the cardi a lovely drape, especially when I wear it unbuttoned.

Princess seams shape the body, the decreases and increases done on the wrong side, which is brilliant because you can’t see them, and also the reverse stocking stitch hides it all so well. The reverse stocking stitch background also gives a lovely platform on which the cables really pop out and make themselves known.

All the garter stitch details – the lower band, the cuffs, the button and neckband – are wonderfully squishy. Especially around the gorgeous collar. Garter stitch, folded over, is possibly the squishiest thing ever. The collar is shaped with short rows, and as a bonus, in garter stitch you don’t have to pick up all those wraps! You just keep going and you get a superb result.

I’d previously never seamed anything before, garment or not. Luckily, Ruth helpfully furnishes her blog with seaming tutorials which makes the job incredibly easy. She also dedicated an entire blogpost to this design, with handy tips and tricks. If every designer did this, we would all be fearless.

While this is my first garment, I will say that the construction has totally convinced me of seams. Yes, I know. I think working in the flat, certainly for a cardigan, means that you can divide up the work much more easily, and you know you can stop at the end of a row. I think I might have keeled over from sheer boredom if I’d had to knit for miles and miles round and round and round.

Seaming also gave me a break from the knitting. I got tired of knitting the buttonband at one point and decided to spend the rest of the day seaming up the sleeves, which was kind of therapeutic, in a weird sort of way. The break gave me the impetus to get on with the rest of the band, because it really meant that there wasn’t much more to do!

Setting the sleeves was a daunting prospect, but thanks to Ruth’s precise maths and my (luckily) good and exact gauge, there were no issues at all. Everything fit into place perfectly: no rucking, no tugging, no fixing. I could never have been more pleased.

I found the buttons at Loop, much to my relief. I didn’t really fancy having to go on a massive button-hunt. The warm black ceramic gives warmth to the colour of the cardi, and are light enough to not weigh down the band but still strong. Again, having a garter stitch band makes it easy to mark a straight line on which the buttons go. That and lots of coil-less safety pins.

The fabric is glorious. It was a sunny but very cold day today, but I didn’t feel the least bit chilly while getting these photos taken, especially considering how deep the cut of the cardi is. It’s great on its own and it layers very well under a coat.

I think the only bit that I wish I could have done better were the sleeves. They came out a little long, but then given what I said about the squishiness of folded-over garter stitch, it isn’t a massive issue. Plus the extra length keeps my hands warm.

I’m very proud of this project. Not just because I actually finished something so big in such good time, and not just because I’ve finally accomplished the one thing that has always eluded me, which was knitting an actual wearable object that wasn’t an accessory.

But I am so proud – so very unspeakably proud – to be able to call such a talented and brilliant designer my friend. Thank you, Ruth, for something so beautiful and so intuitive, and for being so inspiring and encouraging.

Pattern: Montview Cardigan, by Ruth Garcia-Alcantud (www.rockandpurl.com)
Yarn: Rowan Felted Tweed Aran in Dusty SH728
Needles: 5.0mm for the body, sleeves and bands, 5.5mm for casting on the lower band and casting off of the body, 6.0mm for casting on the cuffs and casting off the button and neckband. 

Montview: Nearly There…

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It’s not been as quick as I had hoped, given my mad pace during the Rugby World Cup, but the Montview Cardigan is on the home stretch.

The body was done and blocked earlier this month. The whole thing took two days to dry but it was completely worth the wait. The fabric has softened beautifully and the yarn has bloomed, filling out all the little spaces where I did pick ups and so on. It took a few tries, but I seamed the shoulders up and after leaving it alone for a while I don’t think I’ve done too bad a job at my first ever shoulder seam.

About a week ago, I finished the sleeves and blocked them, too. They didn’t take long to dry at all, and are now all unpinned and folded, waiting for me to sit down to seam them up.

I’ve already picked up the buttonband – man, that’s a heck of a lot of stitches! – and done about an inch’s worth. A couple of evenings’ work and I should have that squared away, and this project has increased my confidence so much that I know that it will only take me a couple of hours to seam up the sleeves, and maybe a couple more to get the sleeves set in neatly into the armholes.

I’m stupidly excited about this project. It’s my first ever garment, which in itself involves a lot of firsts – seaming, shoulder joins, shaping, sleeve setting – and after trying it on sans buttonband and sleeves, it fits exceptionally well already.

It can only get better.

In The Baking

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(Yeah, I know. I’m so clever.)

I taught myself to bake over 11 years ago. I was living in a flat in London doing a second set of A-Levels, and for want of something else to do other than learn English Literature and watch numerous films for Film Studies – which isn’t always fun and popcorn, I promise you – I figured I’d learn to bake.

This is my first ever baking book. I chose it at random, I remember very clearly, from the flagship Waterstones in Piccadilly, because there was a recipe for banana bread in it. That was it. I still have it, and I still bake from it, and nothing in it has ever failed me. I’ve amassed a few more over time, but always for sweet things. I used to bake often when I still lived with Zaa back in Southampton, because there was always someone around to snaffle up whatever I baked.

My problem, oddly, was that while I loved baking, I couldn’t really eat everything I baked. Not that I couldn’t; I just didn’t have the capacity for that many cupcakes, or brownies, or even fruit bread. So unless I had someone to bake for, I didn’t do it very much.

Nick’s the cook; I’m the baker. Sometimes he helps, which is very nice, but sometimes does make me wonder how I baked all those times without a large, tall man helping me. The other nice thing about Nick helping is that he does help with the eating as well, which does encourage me to bake more. But if I kept that up, the poor man will be the size of a house.

So to bread.

Nick was always interested in baking his own bread, more so when we inherited a fantastic breadmaker from my former boss, Michelle. Nick and I don’t eat enough bread to justify buying a supermarket loaf, and whenever we do need bread, we would try to get a good baker’s loaf. Making it in the machine whenever we wanted it is pretty game-changing, especially when it allows us to make smaller loaves that suit the two of us just fine.

We’ve not been too adventurous: usually a white loaf, or a wholemeal one. A few times we’ve done a honey and sunflower seed loaf, which I love but which we haven’t made in a while. But all in the machine. And while it’s game-changing and really very awesome, Nick still wanted to try making bread by hand.

The fact that the Flour Power City Bakery is within smelling distance from our flat doesn’t help matters. When the wind’s just right, all you can smell in the air is fresh yeast baking.

For all his efforts, Nick hasn’t had much success when it comes to hand-made bread. He’s tried a few things, including sourdough with his own sourdough starter, with, um, varying results. He’s not entirely sure why he’s not quite succeeding, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

Yesterday I declared that I wanted to have a go. I figured it’s still baking, and it’s definitely something we would both eat on a regular basis. So Nick got me into my apron – I think it was for him, but it’s obviously Ali-sized and not Nick-sized so I don’t know how anyone thought it was for him – and read me instructions as I went, telling me how he did it before and so on and so forth and checking that I was doing it okay.

(Our instructions come from this book, which is excellent, as well as referencing whatever Michel Roux Jr. said when he was making bread on the Great British Food Revival.)

I’ve decided that I like baking bread. It sort of suits me, as there are a few days where I am just rattling around at home, and this would be perfect for me to do while doing whatever else I’m doing while at home. I like that the bread dough is alive and doing stuff while I’m not looking, like, you know, growing. I like how it smells and how it feels in my hands and I like shaping it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s therapeutic, but it is very nice to do.

Nick was a very proud man when I pulled out this loaf last night. It had flattened a little just before it went into the oven because I had to lift it from where it had been proving onto the baking tray; the solution is to probably find a couple of flat baking sheets, without a lip all around, which won’t be hard or expensive. But luckily it still rose, and after ten minutes it had gone a lovely pale gold, and we readjusted the temperature and waited.

There was a lot of waiting, even till this point.

The loaf came out light, but not as light as I’d hoped – to me, it weighed about as much as it did when it went in. According to the book, that would be because the bread was underproved, a show of impatience. Must do better. On the other hand, it made a good hollow sound when we rapped the bottom, and the crust held when we poked it, so it looked like a good bake.

Maybe more importantly, it tastes like a decent bake. It tastes like a white loaf if we made it in the breadmaker, except maybe mine is a little on the dense side. I’m not entirely happy, but it will be perfect with stews and soups, and that’s okay. I think if I started the process sooner – i.e. noonish instead of after four in the afternoon – I would have given myself and the bread more time and it would have been better.

Which is what I’ll do at the weekend. This stuff is kinda addictive.

Bread. My bread. I made it.

A While

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I can’t entirely blame a month-and-a-half long absence purely on the Rugby World Cup, though that did take up a good chunk of it. The All Blacks won, but not before Wales completely won me over once more, just as they did during my first ever rugby match – Six Nations 2010, Wales v Scotland – which was the match where I utterly fell in love with the game. I backed the Home Nations through the World Cup, but in this order: Wales, Scotland, and equal last Ireland and England. And that is purely because Wales and Scotland were the teams who led me into the game in the first place.

But meanwhile, not a lot else has happened. It’s been a very rough six weeks, mentally and therefore emotionally speaking, but helped along by the fact that I started college again, and this time for a fully practical course. This makes me fantastically happy, as not only do I have an awesome no-nonsense lecturer, but also because every time I come home from college, I feel that little bit more like a gardener. With every week, I feel like my practical ability as a gardener is catching up with my more intellectual, theoretical ability. So that’s always a good feeling.

It’s the last day of October, which always reminds me that NaNoWriMo is about to begin. I attempted it once, years ago, and failed miserably. Apart from my assignments for my OU Literature and Creative Writing Diploma course, I haven’t actually been successful at writing anything, and I haven’t really stopped wondering if I was ever meant to write at all. I keep having ideas and aspirations, but they always eventually fade, and they seem to fade a lot quicker since my depression became apparent. Holding on to ideas is already hard enough, but shaping and colouring them from scratch seems like a task well beyond me at the moment.

Aside from blogging, I have missed my ability to write. I wonder where it’s gone, and I wonder if it will come back.

Two years ago I took part in NaBloPoMo, the blog-posting sibling of National Novel Writing Month. That went all right, but I couldn’t help but feel that I was merely blathering, and not really engaging anyone with it all. So I have yet to try again.

But just like when I previously discovered new ways to cope and new weapons to use, I have a new tool which may help.

Yes, I have abandoned the good ship Apple.

I now have an HTC Sensation XE, and it is a delight to use. The more affordable contract doesn’t hurt either, but now I have a phone that I am very comfortable using with the Posterous app. Hopefully this means I get small bits of writing done, accompanied by on-the-go photos that I rarely ever remember to share with anyone. I have been jealous of Vignette users for ages, and now I get a go.

(Somewhat on a related note, it’s also helped that I recently walked into the Lomography Store at Spitalfields and found the people there extremely friendly and enthusiastic, which is somewhat making me itch to get my Holga out and get involved again. If only film processing didn’t cost what it does…)

There have also been quiet twitchings of wanting to redecorate the blog. Nick and I are still working through a few ideas, but there may well be a new look in a couple of weeks and I’m hoping the new look will be more relevant to the content and to my life as it is at the moment.

But for now, here’s a photo of me standing on the edges of RHS Hyde Hall, marvelling at the big skies of Essex.

I am usually quite small, but damn…

Making Monday: a Work-in-Progress

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The Rugby World Cup 2011 started on Friday. I’ve been very excited about this, given that this is my first World Cup and my first chance to watch the New Zealand All Blacks play. There are loads of games I want to watch, but I’m largely focused on the Six Nations teams because I know them and I know which players are which, but I’m also watching NZ and Australia play to see what the fuss is about.

So far, New Zealand have not disappointed. Extra bonus point: they have quite a few cuties.

As the matches are all in the small hours of the morning, with the most sociable ones kicking off at 9:30 am, I’ve had to record a lot of matches. Which means a lot of catching up.

Which seems to suit my knitting.

Because on Thursday, the day before the start of the World Cup, I decided to cast on my Montview cardigan. This is my second attempt at a garment, the first long ripped out after only a couple of inches of round-and-round-dying-of-boredom stocking stitch. But I’m feeling pretty comfortable about this one, because I’m a little more experienced now, and also, the pattern is by the lovely Ruth.

And you, too, would be confident knitting this pattern, if you had a blogpost’s worth of advice, like she has provided here.

I swatched for it a while back, doing the proper thing and washing and blocking the swatch, because Rowan Felted Tweed does bloom beautifully, and that messes around with gauge a bit. I got the correct gauge on my second try with a 5.0mm needle, so I was all set.

I’m a slow knitter. Not only am I slow, but I’m also easily distracted. I put it down readily and go off and do something else. But this project seems to be different. This is likely because:

a) it’s Felted Tweed.
b) it has cables, and I’m the sort of person who goes, “Oh, just one more cross….”
c) I have a lot of rugby to watch.

Three days later, this is where I am:

Last night I had to make myself stop because I hadn’t realized I’d knitted so much that my left hand was starting to hurt.

The garter band was a bit of a beast, because it kept changing length every time I measured it. First it was too long, then I took out a few rows and it was too short. Eventually, I got to the nearest measurement and declared: Fuck it. It’ll sort itself out. And it has.

I’m starting with the third size to accommodate my hips, but decreasing to the second size to fit the rest of me properly. My extra decreases will make this a little longer than the pattern calls for, but I prefer it like that. Hip-length stuff always looks good on me, so I’m not going to fix what ain’t broke. At this current point I’ve knitted the required three inches of body after the garter band pick-up, and I’ve done four decreases out of the nine I need. And I’ve also reworked the math for how much I have to knit even before the increases accordingly.

I love cables. To me they’re visually easy to do; it’s only a matter of the number of stitches and which way you’re going. I’ve never done cables on a reverse stocking stitch background before, and it’s really making them pop. I can’t wait to see how they’ll look once it’s washed and blocked.

Now here’s the thing: the Rugby World Cup ends on October 23. I’ve knitted as much as this in three days of rugby viewing.

Might I have a finished cardi by then? That seems a little crazy. But I’m pretty sure I’ll at least have finished the body by then and working on the sleeves. I’ll have to block the body and sleeves separately because I won’t have enough room to block them all together. Still, this seems to be working up at – by my standards at least – quite a silly rate.

World-class rugby and excellent knitting. I’m in danger of being in a good mood for weeks.

The Things That Help

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This is annoyingly going to be a photoless blog post, which I hate doing, but I felt the need to blather.

We’ve lived in London for five years now. And as we all know, lots of stuff goes down in London. Fun stuff. So much stuff that it’s always really hard to choose what to do. Over time Nick and I worked out the things that we liked doing most.

Those things are comedy gigs and the orchestra.

(I suppose at first glance they seem like really opposing things together, but after Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra and Tim Minchin hosting the first ever Comedy Prom this year, I think we can agree that this really isn’t the case, and thank goodness for that.)

Nick isn’t big on crowds. The one time we went to a stadium concert, he was utterly miserable; music volume he can deal with, but crowd screeching – and this was a Bon Jovi gig, so the screeching was pretty epic and worryingly of age groups above mine – I think melted his poor eardrums. So this level of music gig is kind of out.

I don’t know if he actually likes going to the orchestra, but he likes taking me. Because I get stupidly excited. I am a relatively fussy audiophile, and will worry over my speaker settings until it feels exactly like I’m being swallowed up. I don’t have to worry about such things with an orchestra, because that’s precisely what they’re supposed to sound like.

My first orchestra performance was when the London Symphony Orchestra – in my mind, the greatest orchestra in the world, for all the film music it has recorded since 1935 – performed a free concert in Canary Wharf, playing a selection of sci-fi music. I immediately fell in love. For my 30th birthday we got tickets to watch the LSO at its home at the Barbican Centre performing a huge catalogue of film music that it has recorded, including just about everything John Williams has ever composed.

They opened with Superman. I swear, I was in tears when the first notes came up. There might have even been faint, high-pitched squeeing.

No orchestra has a brass section like the LSO. I can honestly say that I can tell when it’s the LSO or not. That’s how much I love their sound.

Much as I am an LSO fangirl, last week we found ourselves at the Royal Festival Hall, home of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Our good friend Martin linked me to discounted tickets to a concert they were doing, and the reason he linked me to it was because it was a concert of video game music.

I never said I wasn’t a geek.

Considering my state of mind these last few weeks, it was a relief to both me and Nick when all I could do once we were seated was quietly squeal, repeatedly, “Orchestra!” I hadn’t been so happy or excited in a long time.

But music has always been regarded as one of the best healers; I’m not about to argue. I love that London has two great orchestras, and I love that I’ve actually been in the Royal Albert Hall about half a dozen times already. I’ve even been in the Royal Opera House, and considering I know bugger all about opera, I loved it when two very knowledgeable and  patient friends took me to see La Fille du Regimént. I love that it’s all there for me.

Nick has promised me Prom tickets next year. But in the mean time, he’s done pretty well on the comedy front.

We go to comedy gigs largely because it’s something Nick gets as excited about as I do, and there are always comedy gigs going on in London. We both love comedy and we both laugh a lot, maybe because we like to think we’re funny people – who knows, maybe we actually are. Any time there’s a stand-up show on telly, we’re on it. We’re not really sitcom people; we’re more the Mock The Week/QI sort of people. Fast, loose, clever, surreal sort of stuff.

In our time living in London, we’ve done two Bill Bailey gigs, including the magnificently funny Remarkable Guide To The Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, two Russell Howard gigs, a Dara O’Briain gig that nearly killed me and a couple of other smaller gigs. Criminally we’ve been missing the Greenwich Comedy Festival, but not this year: we have tickets for this Saturday!

One year we’ll do Edinburgh, though I fear that if we do, I will insist on going every year.

Our only other gigs to come are the Uncaged Monkeys – again, not apologizing for the geekery – in December, and Jack Whitehall in November. It’s good going, but we have such a list of people we want to go see live. It’s crazy.

I’m going to end this blather with something of a morality tale.

Some months ago Nick and I scored tickets to be in the audience for a recording of Chris Addison’s new show called Show and Tell. Even though it’s going to be showing on E4, it was being recorded at the BBC Television Centre in White City. So already I was stupidly excited. I’d been to studio recordings before, once for Top Gear and another time for QI, but going inside BBC Television Centre was something very special.

Unfortunately with these sorts of things, sometimes you’re not lucky enough to get into that particular evening’s recording. So it was that Nick and I were unlucky, after standing in line for some time, and several other people behind us were unlucky.

But here’s the morality tale.

If you wait quietly, and listen to the guy that tells you he’s very sorry, you won’t be getting into tonight show recording, but he’ll come back to you  in just a second, instead of whining and bitching and ranting about how it’s so stupid that you can’t get in and what you think you might deserve because you’re so used to instant gratification, and then stomping off in a huff, you might get what we ended up getting.

Priority tickets. To any show we want. Whenever we want.

So we’re going to a recording of Live At The Apollo at the end of the month.

I have every good reason to laugh.

Five Years

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Half a decade.

That sounds like a long time, even though it really kind of isn’t. But five years ago yesterday on August 26, Nick and I were married.

We figured, it being five years and all, which sounds a bit like a milestone, we ought to do it properly. So he took the day off – and to our surprise, we forgot there was another Bank Holiday left to go, so we inadvertently ended up with a longer weekend than we expected – and we went to plan.

We started with brunch at the London Particular. Nick had never been even though it’s a brisk walk from home but it’s a favourite meet-up place for me and Emma of loumms. They make lovely food – Nick had mackerel and tomato salsa on toast; I had mushrooms, goat’s cheese and spinach on toast – and gorgeous coffee and yet till this day my one crime is to never having quite had any of their delicious-looking baked goods. This needs rectifying.

The food was so yummy I forgot to take photos. Rest assured everything looked as good as it tasted.

Then we went off to an exhibition at the British Library.

I’d never been here before, so I was pretty excited, regardless of the foul weather. Oddly enough we had torrential rain during our last anniversary, too.

I know a lot of people aren’t keen on it, but I quite like the architecture. It’s pretty hard trying to stand out when you’re right next to the elegance that is King’s Cross, but I think it’s very attractive. I like the idea of lots of people with books in their hands hanging around the massive open courtyard area.

It’s very attractive on the inside, too. I felt both as though I could stay there forever, and that I perhaps wasn’t quite intellectual enough to be allowed to stay.

We were here to see the science fiction exhibition, Out of This World: Science Fiction But Not As You Know It. Nick’s a big sci-fi geek, and has spent our years together educating me on the best and most rewarding of sci-fi literature. Many of the books and texts that were on display, he’d read or had long known about. Everyone that was important to the genre was represented: China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, Phillip K. Dick, Ian M. Banks, Arthur C. Clarke, H.P Lovecraft, Margaret Atwood, Mary Shelley… It was amazing to see them all there, and more so to see things like Angela Carter’s handwriting, the score for the original Dr. Who theme and Arthur C. Clarke’s original paper on satellite communications, which he wrote about 25 years before it became a reality.

We also discovered that the Brontë sisters were perhaps the first ever real tabletop gaming group. Alarming, odd, but true.

But without sounding arrogant, and this is only because Nick and I talk so much about everything, we came away from the exhibition with only one real question.

Me: You know how it’s called, Science Fiction But Not As You Know It?
Nick: Yeah?
Me: Um, didn’t we know it was all like that all along?
Nick: Pretty much, yeah.

Much as I love being a geek, it’s even better being married to one.

We celebrated our geekery and took shelter from the rain by running into the cafe and having a couple of treats.

I had a jammy dodger because really, I’m about five years old.

Nick had a banana and toffee muffin. This man will not touch a banana with a ten foot pole, but bake it into something and he’s on it like a shot.

(The glasses are new. The optician said that it’s to help stop his sight from deteriorating, what with him working with computers all day long. He was told to wear them when he’s in front of a screen or reading. The optician didn’t understand that with Nick, that’s all the time.)

We started to make our way home so that we could get ready to go out for dinner. We only get to do the fancy dinner thing three times a year – each birthday and our anniversary – so we were going to do it properly. But me being me, going home via the Northern Line from King’s Cross does make me point out that my Local Yarn Shop, Loop, is one stop away, on the way home.

So Nick got me some yarn. And a pattern to go with the yarn.

Three skeins of Classic Elite Yarns’ Mountaintop Vail, and the pattern for Cladonia by Kristen Kapur

I realized that I was terribly sneaky about it, and so declared to Nick that I would take him to his Local Friendly Gaming Store, Dark Sphere, the next day, and buy him some more models for him to paint and add to his army. It made him very happy.

Our journey home was slightly hampered by fantastically tropical rain, rather reminiscent of home, really, considering the drop size, level of commitment – it did not let up for a good half hour – and the fact that it took about two minutes for the drains of London to fail to cope. We could have canoed home.

But by the time we were dressed and ready to head out to Arbutus, this year’s restaurant of choice, the rain had stopped and the sun had come out.

For such special occasions, we like to do the dinner out properly. Get a bit dressy, go somewhere nice, have three full courses and have a grown up moment at the end where I have a cup of coffee. Except, of course, I ruined that moment by, having been offered coffee and ordering it, I immediately said, “Yay! I’m being a grown up and having a coffee!”

Just as well Nick wasn’t having anything, because he would have snorted it out.

And so good to my word, today we headed out to Waterloo after a brief lunch diversion through Borough Market – I have by this point eaten way too much in 24 hours – and bought him these:

Since we’ve been home, he’s been really rather quiet, at the dining table, happily assembling them.

It’s the simple things.

Happy Anniversary, my darling Nick.