Socks

My home town has a historical link to hosiery. Sadly, the factories have closed now, and there's very little hosiery production - if any - left. We do have our 'Sockman' though, a quirky statue in the market place who sits admiring a single sock on his outstretched leg.

I'm doing my bit to keep the hosiery link alive though, as I've had a bit of a binge on the old sock-knitting front recently.

People often say they must be complicated to knit, and I'd have to say that yes, it takes a while to get to grips with creating a sock, but once you've got the knack, it's really quite easy. I have one pattern that I use over and over again - I know exactly how the end result fits my feet - and I've mastered the art of holding the four double ended pins so I don't get in a tangle.

They're an easy project. Portable, quick (I can knit a good half of a plain sock in an evening while watching TV), and rather addictive. There are so many beautiful colourways, they seem to grow really quickly when the wool keeps changing colour. I now have so many pairs of hand knitted socks, I can do a complete wool cycle wash, just for them! They are so much better for my feet - I have had chilblains perhaps twice since I began knitting socks about ten years ago. Previously, it was every single winter... Woollen socks (most are 75% wool) last a lot longer too - I've not thrown any out yet.

Also - complete bonus - they give me thinking time when I'm stuck on my writing.

So, if you're interested, here are a few I've made since the autumn...

The wool for these were all gifts. The centre and right pair are the most beautiful merino wool, so very silky to wear, and hand-dyed. The rainbow striped ones have a very thin silver lurex thread, which makes them sparkle. 

All of these have lurex thread in, too. The blue-purple I knitted for my mum for Christmas; had to undo the toes and take them back a little, as I'd guessed the size slightly wrong! But that's the beauty of these socks - they take very little effort to make them fit correctly. The red-green, I knitted for Squidgeling J, also for Christmas. The final ball is a purple-grey-pale lime mix that I'm going to knit for myself at some point. Have decided you can't beat sparkly toes...

I've only knitted one purple sock so far - that wool was a pressie at Christmas. The West Yorkshire Spinners random green was picked up on the way to Bristol; we have to stop to plug Sparky in to get us all the way there, and there's a shopping outlet with a charger AND a super little wool and yarn shop. So each time we've stopped there, I've been tempted by new colours and have succumbed to a ball. Or two. I liked the fact that in the case of WYS, I'm supporting the British wool industry as well - not many places hereabouts stock this particular brand. 

Now these have a story behind them; I was asked whether I'd be willing to make a couple of pairs for someone. She preferred handmade socks but was unable to source them from the family member who used to knit them for her. And - this shocked me SO much - she'd have to pay around £20 a pair if purchasing via Etsy. Seriously - £20 a pair! (Mind you, if the wool costs around £8 a ball minimum, it doesn't give the knitter much per hour of knitting...) I said yes, checked her shoe size and knitted up a pair of odds-and-sods fairly quickly. Forgot to take a pic of those, but she loved them, they fitted - hooray! - and I agreed to knit up two more pairs from wool she'd already bought. They're the ones in this pic. (The blue-grey ones are cabled, but shhhh, don't tell her! She's not picked them up yet.) 

Before you ask, no, I'm not going to make a habit of knitting socks for other people!! For a start, most people's feet are bigger than mine, so it takes longer. Secondly, if I'm knitting, I can't write. And thirdly, my fingers can get quite stiff if I do too much in a period of time (like two pairs in a week). 

I enjoy knitting socks, but I'm going to have to ration buying the wool. I have a bagful of leftovers - I could probably keep myself in odds-and-sods socks for the next ten years, without adding any extra colours. 

See what I mean? I did use some of the stash to knit little stars to use as decorations on my brown-paper-wrapped Christmas gifts this year, but it's not made much of an impression on the pile. 

Maybe I can allow myself to buy one ball a year? Oh, and if I'm bought a ball, I won't refuse it! 

Diary of a Rookie Silversmith: Part 1

Tail end of last year, I saw a jewellery workshop advertised in a shop in town that I thought only did picture framing. (Gallery 18 if you're interested - also sell lots of lovely cards and gifts as well as hosting the workshop.)

I thought it looked interesting and picked up a flyer, thinking yeah, I'll get round to doing that. One day.

My Christmas present from Mr Squidge was - the course! Ten weeks, learning how to make jewellery with an experienced silversmith, Alexandra Watt. I was understandably somewhat chuffed, and as this year Mr Squidge and I celebrate our silver wedding anniversary (25 years - blimey!) I started to think of all the lovely things I'd make that were silver.

The workshop is teeny - probably half the size of my kitchen - and has six workstations. They may be compact, but everything you need is close at hand. There are separate stations which have polishers and blowtorches and where you can bash metal flat.

Everything you need - including a cuppa and a notebook

I was made to feel very welcome by Lex and the two other ladies on the course. They have both had some experience already, so they just got on with things, which meant that Lex gave me pretty much one-to-one tuition in how to make a plain band ring.

I had not realised how technical working with silver is, but I did my best to take notes as we went along. By the end of the first session, most people will have completed their ring, but I didn't. The main reason was, I think, that I chose to make a pinky-ring, and selected a 2mm square wire to make it from.

Now, my hands are not very big (would look a bit strange if they were, considering I'm only five feet tall!) so it was going to be a very small thing to make. In hindsight, I should've chosen a thinner wire to work with. Or a bigger finger! Thumb ring, maybe? But that's OK, because with Lex's help, I still managed it, and learnt lots of different essential techniques along the way.

So...let me take you through the process to make my first ring. I took a few pics, but as one process naturally moved into another, I didn't always have time to take them for every stage.

1. Size your ring - Mine was 15mm internal diameter. 

2. Work out what length of wire you need (ugh - maths! Internal diameter x Pi + metal thickness and a bit of wastage. = 51mm. Told you my fingers were small!)

3. Cut the wire to the required length, making sure to file the end if you need to, to make it flat, and then saw through at the right point. (Apparently I was a natural at sawing...though not at filing. I forgot to do it!)

4. Using a ring mandrel and a rawhide mallet, bash your wire, turning it all the while until it's pretty much circular. (Mine...wasn't. It stayed horseshoe shaped for quite a while.)

5. Anneal the metal - heat with a blowtorch until orange-red, then quench in water. (Hitting metal makes it harder, so it needs annealing to make it pliable again ready for the next stage.) Dry the ring.

6. Pickle it. Not, not like chutney! It's dropped into an acid mix kept at temperature, until it goes white. Rinse and dry.

7. Close the ring - you push the ends together, but end up with a V-shaped gap. You have to make several passes with a saw (I had to do three) to remove this V and enable the ends of the ring to really butt up across the whole end face. Need to point out here that my ring was twisted - so there was an extra stage of flattening involved! Much banging followed, along with a warning so the rest of the folks could put their ear-plugs in... Tension the ring to make sure the ends really do sit tight together.

Decidedly unround...and unflat!

8. Seal the join with flux. This was a very complicated stage, but if you've ever soldered a join before, it's exactly the same, except I used small snips of hard solder rather than a wire.

9. Anneal the ring again, before working it into a perfect circle on the ring mandrel.

Rounder - and flatter!

10. Sand flat faces (the sides of the ring) - work up the grades of sandpaper to flatten the surface and work out any imperfections. I had to use a figure-of-eight motion on a flat surface and it took FOREVER, because although Lex had helped me flatten the ring as much as possible, it still wasn't perfect. When you think it's really, really flat through sanding, you switch to a straight sanding movement, move to the next finest grade of sandpaper, and repeat the figure-of-eight move until all those straight scratches have disappeared. Then you repeat the straight sand on the finer grade and move to a slightly finer paper again... Repeat for finer grades of sandpaper until the ring is smooth and satiny!

This was the most time-consuming and labour intensive phase - I did some at home and found myself redoing it because I could still see deep scratches I'd left in my hurry to get on with it! I think patience is definitely the word to be applied to this stage.

11. Sand the outside and inside faces - at this stage, the outside edges of my square wire ring were champfered with an emery stick to take the sharp edge off, and a sandpaper-wrapped dowelling used at a 45-degree angle to take off the inside edge.

12. Add texture if required. The other ladies were showing me rings they'd made with textured finishes, and I quite liked them, so I went for a ball hammer and started banging again...

Texture on three faces

13. Polish with a fluffy mop. Nothing to do with kitchen floors, but a small rotating head with a very soft brush which you dip in wax to lubricate and use at high speed on the ring until it shines... (Not too much though, or you can polish out the texture you've just added.)

And voila! After three hours (over two weeks) I had a finished pinky-ring. My first item of handmade silver jewellery - hooray!

My next project is a pendant design. Look out for Part 2 in a couple of weeks time, or whenever I manage to finish it!

Christmas 2017

This year at church, we had an Advent Flock which travelled around the Parish. At every home the flock visited, a little lamb was left behind, to be reunited with the flock on Christmas Eve at our Crib Services. Our children were invited to make extra sheep too, so the flock had grown somewhat by 5.30pm after two services. 

This Christmas, if,  like the shepherds and kings and our Advent flock, you are coming to the stable - or you find yourself in a situation you did not expect - remember that God is with you, now, two thousand years after the birth of Jesus. 

In the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, may your Christmas journey lead you closer not just to the heart of Christmas, but to the person of Jesus whose birth we celebrate.

Happy Christmas, everyone. xxx

A Community of Christmas Trees

Our local Parish Church - the big one, in town - is holding its annual Community Christmas Tree Festival. As usual, my own church set up a tree, decorated by our Starting Rite members. (Starting Rite is a 5 week course for parents and their babies, which explores baptism, and their logo is apparently feet!)

So, not too many words in this blog - but a few pics of some of the trees I admired the most. Have to say, though, they are all brilliant for different reasons - and there were 120 to see!

To start off, here's our St. Mary in Charnwood tree:

All the babies who'd been on the Starting Rite course gave a sock, and had their name added to it.

The teeniest, tiniest toes were Charlotte's - right at the top of the tree.

Keeping with children - this was one nursery's egg box and cereal packet tree...

If I remember right, this was a school's craft club...lots of very clever ideas on the one pallet tree...

There were two 'book' trees, but I liked this one because it was made out of thick tomes which described all you needed to know about every aspect of citizen's rights, supplemented with tags describing people's responses to the help they'd received from the Citizen's Advice Bureau...

Lots of guiding trees in evidence, but this was my favourite - a treeful of Brownies, made out of plastic cups...

And where there are guides, there are usually scouts! A tent tree - complete with papier mache scout, cub and beaver heads peeking out of it...

Huge tissue paper flowers on this Gardening Group one - each large flower's about two feet across!

Now to a treeful of angels. Book folding seems to be a big thing at the moment - I'm torn between loving the finished product and hating to see pages creased. But this tower of angels looked amazing.

You've heard of the Great British Bake Off - well there was a tree decorated as the Great British BISQUE off, by the pottery club of the Grammar School. I have never seen so many gingerbread men. And I loved the bunting made from cake cases...

Now, my favourite tree of the lot. Made by a group called Charnwood Threads, the idea was simple - here's a white triangle of felt/fabric. Now decorate it using needlework.

Biggest triangles are probably 4-5" from base to tip

Oh my - I could've posted so many more photos of the individual decorations, because they were all exquisitely stitched. But here's a flavour...

Frayed fabric strips...

A string of felt tree lights...

Minute patchwork hexagons...

 

Simple threads...

 And the prize for the biggest variety of tree types in one submission? This one  - a winter wonderland of trees made from knitting, paper, felt, card, books...have I got them all?

In a break with Squidge Christmas traditions, I will be putting up a tree Chez Squidge tomorrow - mainly because I'm cooking an early Christmas dinner for eleven (!) on Saturday so we thought we'd better be a bit festive. Pictures will follow...even though it's only about three feet high.

Right, I'm off to defrost a 12lb turkey. See you later!

Wishing readers of the Scribbles a blessed and peaceful Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

Crafting for Christmas

I like to make things at Christmas. Only trouble being, there's never enough time to do everything I want to!

However, this year I've been forced to take it easy. The chest infection I wrote about recently? Well it came back. Another dose of antibiotics for twice the number of days, more feeling tired, more feeling - strangely - hungry, which I think is down to the antibiotics.

The upside was that as I didn't have energy to go into town and 'do stuff' for Christmas, I had to take it easy at home. Which gave me a good excuse to be creative.

Squidgeling J and myself began the Christmas crafting with a wreath. Dead simple to make; take one polystyrene 'polo', cut what feels like millions of 2" squares of fabric, and push said squares of fabric into the polystyrene with a metal nail file. Simples. And very effective. We opted for mainly green with some splashes of red to make our faux wreath look more like the real thing...

Next on my list was a quilted runner for my Christmas dinner table, made from two-and-a-half inch mini squares which I bought last year but didn't do anything with. It's bordered with the-wrong-side-out of a fabric which was exactly the shade I needed but couldn't find on the right-side-out. Unfortunately it turned out too small for my dining table, so it's on the hearth in front of the stove.

I also found this lovely little kit for a fabric heart at Quorn Country Crafts, so that's hanging up too.

Squidgeling J took on decorating our Christmas cake, with a precision cut snowflake and the most wonderful blue glitter.

I have to say that this week, I have begun to feel a lot better, so I'm looking forward to tomorrow...

Bit quiet on the Scribbles front...

No, I've not been kidnapped by aliens or tied myself up with tinsel or given up writing...but blogging posts are definitely a bit thin on the ground this month, thanks to a recurring chest infection that is making life rather difficult at the moment.

In spite of being 7 days into a 10-day course of antibiotics, I don't feel much better than when I started them. What I've been getting up to recently (reading, sleeping, watching really bad Christmas movies, knitting) doesn't really bear writing about.

So for now, the Scribbles are a bit quiet while Squidge takes the time she needs to recover. I'll be back blogging as soon as I can.

In the meantime, enjoy all your preparations for Christmas. It's not long now...

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!

AGES since I last blogged!

Christmas is beginning to loom large - part of the reason I'm not blogging so frequently - and I've had a massive helping of Christmassy things over the last week, which I thought I'd share.

First, it was the Community Christmas Tree Festival in the town's Parish Church, All Saints and Holy Trinity. I had help with our church tree this year, and between myself and Liv, we took on a music and craft theme to look forward to the Nanpantan Festival which happens next year.

There were a few other trees that caught my eye - here are a few of them;

British Heart Foundation - Rainbow Hearts

A hairdresser's tree. Don't think it was REAL hair...

Tatted Angels - last year it was snowflakes

The War Memorial Poppy Trees

The Rainbows Hospice tree

Then it was off to Germany for the weekend. Without the children. Which was a whole new level of nervyness for me - the first time they'd been left home alone, even though grandparents were on call just up the road...

Anyway, the reason for the trip was that every year, with our very good friends, we cook a Christmas meal together and dress up in DJ's and posh frocks. It's a tradition that - we think - has been running for thirty years, with only a couple of years off in all that time. Our friends in Germany more often than not come over to England, but this year we travelled to them instead.

While there, we visited a genuine German Christmas market - small and intimate, in streets between pastel-coloured beamed buildings twinkling with lights under the eaves. There was Gluwein and wurst and gingerbread, Advent wreaths and baubles and Christmas candles. And a minecraft-style Nativity scene inside a giant snow globe. The photos are a bit blurry as I forgot the camera - Mr Squidge took these on his phone as the light was fading.

The biggest Advent calendar I've EVER seen...

And here's the whole gang - though I think you can only see the top of Nicola's head, cos she was taking a photo too!

One thing I hadn't realised in Germany is how important Advent wreaths - or Adventkranz - are. I know what an Advent wreath IS - we have one in church, and light a new candle on the four Sundays before Christmas, with a special one lit on Christmas Day.

In Germany, most homes have an AdventKranz too. Apparently they were a way of bringing evergreen into the house in advance of Christmas Eve, which is traditionally when the Christmas tree is decorated. Nicola had made two:

White and silver, to complement the antique glass baubles

Glass birds with feather and fibre tails. This wreath is about two feet across!

I like this idea so much, I think I will make an Adventkranz for Chateau Squidge later this week, because our tree never goes up until a week before Christmas and it would be nice to have something Christmassy (apart from cards and wrapping paper!) before then...

Stars play a big part in the Advent preparations too. Very popular are paper star lampshades for inside and out.

All set for dinner...

Although our hosts had prepared and cooked everything, Mr Squidge couldn't resist stirring the gravy...

One other difference this year - apart from being in Germany for our Christmas meal - was our dress code; black tie, posh frock and Christmas slipper socks! 

Look closely and you'll spot the sequins!

The weekend was finished off by a walk through the forest behind the house on Sunday morning, to see the view over Darmstadt and visit an alpine hut for frikadellen before flying home to the Squidgelings.

Somehow, this was the best meal ever. Thinking about it afterwards, I wondered if it was due in part to the fact that it wasn't JUST an evening meal with our friends. It was a whole weekend, with time to talk and relax and leave all the 'normal' stuff behind at home. We've all got some wonderful memories from a very special forty-eight hours.

Next year, I think we'll be back in Blighty. I'll offer to host it here, assuming we manage to get our new kitchen in by then...