Growing and Making things post

I planted the tomatoes about eight weeks ago now; they have reached the ceiling of the porch (well the big one has):

There are lots of flowers ... and lots of fruits:

They have been joined by a courgette plant and a squash plant; lots of flowers, no fruits yet:

The basil on the kitchen window sill has been joined by a chilli plant, that has sprouted these lovely delicate white flowers:

The avocado pit is coming along well. I have managed to sprout these before but they have usually withered and died once the plant was six inches or so. I have been following these helpful instructions. It did take about six or seven weeks for the root to grow and may take a few more before we get a sprout, the advice is to be patient:

In the garden the apples

and pears are all relishing the sunshine:

I finished my Shalom cardigan in time for Jo and Jan's wedding in May, though it still lacks a button. It is made in Noro Ginga that I bought in the sale from Black Sheep Wools. It is a lovely simple pattern, I have made one previously as a present for mum:

Still working on the grannie squares, more than 100 so far, out of 144:

Still working on the hexipuffs. Monkey has also been making one a day for a while now and I am guessing we are approaching the 400 mark. The pink one with PW on is stuffed with gleaned sheep wool collected on our walk on the Pennine Way. I have a couple of others labelled L and P stuffed with wool collected in the Lake District and Peak District respectively:

Like and Unlike

I know the monkey blanket is finished, but my obsession continues apace and I now have 181 puffs towards a total of 600 that I am doing for my next Beekeeper Quilt. My sister Claire visited this week and we balled up some homespun and home-dyed yarn that has been lying around for several years and knitted a couple. I have been making lots of stripey ones recently so this variegated yarn is great, it saves me having to change the colours all the time. Hexipuffs will always be a 'like' post.

Also liking that I have finally made some progress on my Bute sweater. It has been in the pipeline for more than six months. The front and back are done!!! The first sleeve is underway and it feels like I might get it done just in time for the warmer weather.







On the not so 'like' side of the post is 'The hen who dreamed she could fly' by Sun-Mi Hwang. I nearly didn't bother mentioning it I was so disappointed. I picked up this book almost at random because of lovely things written about it on the cover. I paid real money for it, which is most annoying because I don't buy books that often. Lots of people seem to think it's wonderful. Sorry, not me. I realise it is an extended allegory but I did not find this to be a heartwarming tale of motherhood. I wonder if it is a cultural thing, that in Korea it is expected that mothers sacrifice themselves for their children. It was also the weird mixtures of behaviours and relationships between the 'characters'. We are back I suppose to the anthropomorphism again, if you are going to make your animals behave like people then make them behave like people, don't make it a mixture of animal and human. It's The Animals of Farthing Wood all over again (the kids loved this, I hated it!). The whole book just seemed like a vastly over extended children's story; it should have been 20 pages long and pitched at 5-7 year olds. 

NaNoWriMo and all that

Savage Chickens

Well it amused me anyway.

I am not ready for NaNoWriMo. I am exhausted before I even get started having worked without a day off for three weeks (and anticipate probably doing so again next week). It is going to be a difficult month without Monkey here to keep me on track. As agreed at the end of NaNo last year I am planning a rambling fantasy story that will allow anything and everything to happen, fuelled by random suggestions from the adoption forums on the NaNo website. A starting point might be a decent title but Dunk's automated title generating website was rubbish.

I was hoping to have a photo to share of Monkey in her monkey gear (hoodies and stuff with the theatre logo) but it has not been forthcoming. We have exchanged texts and real letters but I have not got much information about what they do; she says it's too hard to explain and would just be meaningless anyway. They do sessions that are entitled things like 'Voice' and 'Mask' and 'Clown' (Clown is a favourite apparently). Next term they go full time and rehearsals start. She was only there two days and she got herself a job, in a call centre of all places, and it is enough to pay the rent. The second week she texted asking how to cook rice but apart from that she has not needed me at all ... I should be pleased that she has been so independent but I am feeling pathetically redundant and having to fight the urge to offer unsolicited advice.

 This is my Nano writing space, cluttered up with junk and not looking very welcoming at all. I think I am going to be able to procrastinate very effectively on Sunday by spending half the day sorting stuff out. 

Having worked on my fair-isle sweater quite a bit recently I have gone back to knitting hexipuffs. I started a second beekeeper project back in summer 2012 shortly after the first one but is has hibernated all this time. I keep looking at the photographs of the Monkey quilt and thinking how much I really want one of my own, so I have been knitting one every day while we watch Deal  and a couple more at knitting club ... at this rate it will take me about another four years. I am estimating at least 600 because they are smaller puffs. The current total has just reached 100.

Not a half-arsed book review

I have three book reviews sitting half done in the draft folder and not much inspiration to finish them (not that they were bad books, I've just been feeling a bit meh), and then we are off to HESFES on Saturday, so this is just a quick hi and bye post. We have spent most of my spare time in the last couple of weeks getting stuff sorted out for Monkey's grand adventure in the real world (Year of the Monkey) in less than two months. She went to a getting-to-know-you party in London at the weekends to meet some of the other Monkeys, and might even have some housemates organised. She now has lots of plain t-shirts, a dish for macaroni cheese, a wok (£3 bargain charity shop find), a cheese grater, wooden spoons, her own nail scissors and tweezers, the very important notebook that we are going to make a felted cover for, and, most excitingly, nude coloured underwear! 

One issue that did remain was the safe transportation of the Monkey Quilt:

 So this morning I have made it a bag:

 and she is all set to leave home.

Monkey Quilt - the final chapter

It has been a quiet week work-wise but a hectic one on the hexipuff front. I spent the entire of Sunday and then Wednesday sewing together the beekeeper quilt. It was quite a trial, that involved a certain unmentionable amount of picking apart as well as sewing together. We were still two half hexipuffs short but since Monkey had missed Knitting Club on Tuesday when we went to the Tea Hive to celebrate World Wide Knit in Public Day she insisted that she wanted to participate in a KIP and so we went to the park yesterday afternoon to knit them. 

Then we came home and I sewed them into place. 

And now the quilt is finally finished.

The project has taken two years and 29 days. We knitted 414 hexipuffs, but used only 410 of them (it is 21 by 20 puffs), and 20 half hexipuffs, Monkey decided to name them 'trapezipuffs'. Credit also going here to contributions from my sister Claire who was visiting when we started and knitted some, and Tish who has intermittently joined the madness. It measures 5' 4" square. We reckon about 300 hours of work have gone into it. I have no idea how much yarn has been used nor any notion of how much it has cost, but it is worth every penny.

We both had a little cuddle to appreciate its exquisite squishiness:

Then I made her pose in the garden where the light was much better;

I am thinking maybe I should hire it out for interior design photo shoots to help pay for her fees:

We are also considering making a 'beekeeper blanket bag' to protect it and transport it safely (she was a bit iffy about letting me put it on the grass, but I pointed out the carpet in the living room was probably dirtier).

Final details that I neglected to mention are the pockets. There are four: two empty hexipuffs open at one end, one double empty hexipuff for keeping her phone in and this lovely creation with a button fastening for keeping the sweetie stash in

It is comforting to know that whatever adventures may befall her when she leaves home for the big bad world in September ... she will have a constant reminder of how important she is to me and she will definitely not be cold at night:

Linking back to Fibre Arts Friday for craftily sharing.

Adventure in miniature knitting - Fibre Arts Friday

We have finished knitting hexipuffs. 

No, really we have. I'm not addicted, I can give up any time I want.

I have been doing a second smaller beekeeper quilt alongside the main one, but have not been working on it seriously. They are done in 4ply so are significantly smaller:

 I am not sure how the idea came up ... but I decided to try making a really, really tiny hexipuff:

It was knit in a fine 4 ply with three large straightened paperclips; they are about 1mm in diameter:

 For scale, it is a bit bigger than a 50p:

I am in awe of people who knit tiny jumpers for dollhouse dolls. It was torturous and took about 2 hours. I will not be continuing with my plan to knit a tiny hexipuff blanket.

Linking back to Fibre Arts Friday.

Two years on - hexipuffs and holiday socks for Fibre Arts Friday

Just over two years ago we started knitting a Beekeeper Quilt for Monkey. While I have been away Monkey and Tish pulled out all the stops and surpassed our target total of 400 - we may have to knit a few more and make an extra row, or we might miss out a few of the boring blue ones (made with leftover yarn from dad's jumper). However once they are in a huge heap you can spend a good twenty minutes just picking up random hexipuffs and saying "Oooooh, I love this one, it's my favourite .... no, I like this one even more."

The lengthy process of sewing them all together has begun. The instructions suggest joining them only at the corners but I felt that it needs to be more robust than that as she will want to sit on it and pull it around rather than it being draped artistically over the back of the sofa, so I will be sewing all edges. This chunk took me about an hour and a half so I recon it will be several weeks worth of evenings to do the whole thing. Quite a high proportion are striped, either deliberately or caused by variegated yarn, but we decided to orientate them randomly rather than line up all the horizontal lines.

My holiday project was a pair of socks, and this is the sum total of my efforts, the vast majority of which was done on the plane journeys. They are being done to the Jigsaw Socks pattern on Pink Monkey Knits. Pop over to Fibre Arts Friday and share your projects or show some appreciation. 

Monkey's Beekeeper Quilt for Fibre Arts Friday (not an A to Z post)

We are coming up to the two year anniversary of starting this project and are on the home run for our Beekeeper Quilt; the total currently stands at 335. We decided to lay them out to encourage ourselves (and to lie on it because it is just so fabulously squishy). We do have until September to finish when she will be going to London to be a Monkey.

They vary in size quite considerably, being knit in so many different yarns and with occasionally random size needles. Some are stuffed fat, some have hardly any filling:

and some are peculiar shapes ....

all of which will be included no matter what.

We made some minor adaptations to the pattern: we added extra rows sometimes if the hexipuff seemed a little 'squat' and then started doing the increases and decreases one stitch in from the edge, it gave a nice neat edging. Then Monkey decided to try increasing down the centre instead of at the edges, and this is what happened:

 This one, amongst so many, is one of my favourites; it is done in a lovely delicate soft angora blend, it is quite a fine DK so it is one strand of pink and one strand of purple knitted together, giving this wonderful mottled effect:

Pop over to Wisdom Begins in Wonder for Fibre Arts Friday, share your fibre projects and check out some others.

Hexi-halves for Fibre Arts Friday

Our Beekeeper Quilt is on the final push, Monkey has been working on them and the total is down to 80 hexipuffs left to make. With this in mind I started making some 'hexi-halves' to fit along the edge of the quilt, to give a nice neat straight edge, I estimate we will need 30 or 40 :

Tish has been needle felting and has made some beautiful beaded flower brooches but my favourites are these two adorable little bees. 

We are planning another Etsy shop to list them all, so watch this space.

Lots of crafty stuff going on this week I'm sure, pop over to Fibre Arts Friday to visit some of the other fibre creations.

A mountain of hexipuffs

A heap... a load, a mass, a stack, a mound, an accumulation, a stockpile, an agglomeration? I am searching for an appropriate collective noun for hexipuffs. There are now officially 'a lot'. Two hundred and seventy nine to be precise. I cleaned and tidied the living room this morning and gathered yarn from under the little tables and kept finding hexipuffs in amongst it, and so decided to do an update on the count. There are also sixty three for the 'Baby Beekeeper' project. We have been doing them in fits and starts, abandoning them completely for weeks at a time and then adding a dozen.  

My current favourites have been these, done with something fluffy striped with pink silk.

Thinking about how lovely they felt when creature and I laid them out on the floor I think maybe I've found the right word ... how about a squidginess of hexipuffs?

A Week of Making Stuff at Home

It's very easy to fritter a week away, and in fact I have frittered large chunks of this last week, but in order to end each day feeling as if I have achieved something I set myself the challenge of making something every day, in the broadest sense of the word 'make'. 

So there were some old favourites, like pancakes for breakfast:

and lemon meringue pie:

One afternoon we had a batch of Honey Oaty Cookies but they were eaten before I thought to take a photo to prove it.

There have been a few experiments like fresh cream meringues (I have got a bit of a thing for meringue), made, against all the advice, without the assistance of an electric mixer. I am no longer sure which instructions I followed as they all had different advice on the subject of beating in the sugar and cooking times, but they came out very satisfactorily:

and Peanut Butter Oreo Blondies to this recipe, which were even more wonderful the following morning:

Creature joined in and made chocolate brownies (who ate all the brownies!):

and wonderful honey cake:

Dunk didn't want to be left out so I took a photo of this delicious Veggie Shepherds Pie that he made for us on Saturday night. It was National Vegetarian Week so we ate veggie all week:

All week I have been knitting stripy hexipuffs, it being over a year since we started the project and the rate of production has dropped off considerably in recent months (total now standing at 238 out of an estimated 400 needed):

Saturday I decided on some felting and made an iPod cover for Dunk:

and a Kindle cover for my sister Claire (Hi Claire, will get it in the post on Tuesday) which was supposed to be done for her birthday but I didn't get around to it. I hope it fits as I had to make a cardboard pattern to check the size as it shrank down.

Then Sunday morning I made a new peg bag (tutorial here)

and experimented with making a felt flower following a tutorial on Felters Journey, only partially successful:

I have recently removed several bloggers listed in the sidebar who were no longer blogging so in the afternoon I decided to make a new 'blog list' that is just a general list of people I visit on a regular basis, it encompasses everything that I find interesting about the interweb.