Christmas decoration

Last night we decorated our Christmas tree.  I’ve never had a tree of my own before; living in temporary student flats for the past decade meant I never really thought about having a proper tree – and last year, I was in Cuba!  I am particularly fond of this tree because I rescued it from the bin-men.  Someone had put their living, potted tree out with the rubbish just after New Year’s Eve, and I couldn’t leave it there, so it sat in our front room for a little while and then I took it to my parents’ house to summer in their garden.

It’s a small tree, so I hung my favourite large decorations (and a witches’  ball) on a ribbon in the window – and we also have a poinsettia!  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas …

Mince pied

You know that bit in The L-Shaped Room when they paint Jane’s flat, and John says it ‘Looks good, smells bad’, and then Jane thinks the opposite could be applied to his cooking – but that it also tastes delicious?  Well, the same could be said about my mince pies.

They look alright here, don’t they?  But in the oven …

Poor misshapen little pies!

There is only one remedy I can think of …

… plentiful icing sugar and just-mulled wine.  Cheers!

Cheerily cherry

A few weeks ago Nadine and I were discussing the guilty pleasure of looking into people’s houses as you pass by them on the bus, glimpsing lives lived through brief moments at their windows, seconds spent on uninvited house tours.  The other thing I love about travelling by double-decker bus is the people watching it affords.  From the top deck you have a ring-side birds’-eye view of the people waiting at the stop, and I’ve often come home after a simple bus journey inspired by outfits I’ve seen or – even better – knitted items!

The other day I saw a really beautifully dressed girl at the bus stop.  She had her hair piled on top of her head and was wearing large black-framed Prism spectacles, a black pea-coat, skinny maroon jeans and black patent loafers.  (In case I read back over these posts in my dotage I’d better remind my future self that this is what the cool kids are wearing in London these days).  What really made her outfit, though, was her mustard-coloured scarf.  Wide and light, it looked hand-knit in a pattern of simple, graphic rows.  I peered closer.  It was … garter stitch.

So, this is what I’m knitting my sister for Christmas.  She asked for a very plain scarf, and chose this cherry-red wool when we went to Bath’s Christmas Market a few weeks ago, from Wool, a lovely welcoming yarn shop we happened across by stumbling down a cobbled lane.  The simplest possible knit, I am enjoying its repetitive, soothing mindlessness, but it does make me feel like a newbie, knitting row after row of plain garter in this primary colour – and strangely, somehow, incompetent.

I’d better go and make myself a complicated hat.

In search of perfect gingerbread

Tomorrow is my last day at the cancer centre.  On Wednesday night, I start my surgical rotation in a new hospital, where I will know precisely two people – the other house officers who’ve been working with me for the past four months – neither of whom start on nights.  I am incredibly scared.  I am also a little bit sad to be leaving this hospital.  It is disorganised, bureaucratic to the hilt, and full of sadness, but I have learnt a few things, seen much more, and made some friendships – and unlike my colleagues, who I might work with again, or meet in the pub, when I walk out of the door tomorrow evening I will almost certainly never see my patients again.

There isn’t much that banishes the winter blues like the smell of baking gingerbread.  So I made some.

This recipe – dark because it contains cocoa powder – is Dan Lepard’s from his new book Short & Sweet, via Saturday’s Guardian, and sadly it didn’t live up to my high hopes.  It smelled lovely, but didn’t taste very exciting (and, to be fair, although I timed them really carefully the biscuits are also a little bit burnt), so I’ll have to buy a cake tomorrow to say my goodbyes with.  And then look for a better gingerbread recipe.

Do you have one?

I made a draught excluder!

I know, stop press, right?  But I am inordinately pleased with my little door pillow.  Our flat is old, with big gaps under the doors and the heat just creeps out, kilowatt hour by kilowatt hour.  Until today, we’d been folding old towels along the bottom of the front door, and I got fed up with the sadly faded little heap.  I’ve also fallen head over heels with the draught excluders in Tobias and the Angel* and was inspired to make my own.

I am also really pleased with this one, because everything about it (apart from the thread, which I had anyway) was recycled, so I feel doubly thrifty!  The inner fabric was part of an old pillow case, the outer cover made from some red fabric which I think used to be a curtain of my parents’, and the stuffing was cannibalised from an old and quite horrid lumpy cushion which I bought at Spitalfields market for way too much money in my second year at uni.

I’m not going to insult your intelligence by giving detailed recipe-like instructions, but in case you want to make one too, here are some wordy directions.

Measure the width of your door and add about 4cm.  (The ends will pull in when you sew them closed, the stuffing will make it shorter, and you want to be able to tuck it into the corners of your door).  Decide how deep you want the cushion to be.  Mine is 16cm in circumference, which I’m quite happy with.  Add a reasonable seam allowance along all edges, cut your fabric, and then hem, zigzag stitch or pink your edges to stop them from fraying.  Turn right sides together, and sew straight along the long side, seam-allowance depth in from the edge, to make a tube.  Do the same with both pieces of fabric, and then sew one end of the inner pillow closed.  Turn right side out, and decorate your cover if you wish.

Stuff the inner pillow.  I think sand is traditional, but I didn’t have any and anyway I wanted it to be a cosy kind of draught excluder.   Directions on the internet suggest dried foods like rice or lentils, but I was afraid of attracting mice.  The stuffing I used was, I think, made of old plastic bottles; anyway, it was synthetic, dense and fairly heavy, which I think will be good for keeping out draughts. When you’re happy with your pillow, sew closed the other end.

Thread your newly-made pillow into its case.  It’s easier to do this if you haven’t hemmed either end, so you can pull it through.  Then turn the hems in at both ends of your cover and sew closed.

Tuck against your door!

I decided not to decorate mine in the end because I wanted to have it finished by tonight, but I am considering sewing on appliqué stars or buttons.  For the time being, it will keep out the draughts – and it has highlighted how much the door needs painting.  Both, I think, can wait ’til spring.

*Reports that I have bought two cushions from T&A in the past two weeks, and am dreaming of crafty ways I could move in without them noticing, cannot be substantiated.

FOs, finally

Goodness, can you believe it’s nearly December?  The world seems to spin faster every hour, and days pass in a blur of getting up, going to work, coming home, going to bed, week in, week out.  It doesn’t help that I get up in the dark, arrive at work in the gloom and leave when it’s pitch black.  I did manage to grab a scrap of daylight this weekend to photograph some FOs, though, which will be parcelled up and sent to their respective recipients as soon as the week is out.

Greta’s little sweater didn’t get anything exciting at the neckline in the end, as I finished it while off sick for a few days and couldn’t face doing anything complicated.  My sister once had a brilliant jumper with a scarf which grew out of the shoulders, so I’ve kind of imitated that as I way of having a large enough neckline while keeping the neck warm.  I hope it works!

It was not my finest piece of knitting.  The grafting at the under-arms was shocking and the yoke decreases (on DPNs, because I don’t currently have a small enough circ.) look awful, but overall I am quite pleased with it, and was so relieved to send it off to the wee bairn before she grows out of it!  I am definitely looking forward to my next fair isle sweater, and will hide my (hopefully considerably better) decreases in the pattern, next time.

The other thing I finally finished was Suzy’s scarf.  This has a bit of a story to it, and was a real honour to knit.  Suzy’s mum went to visit Suzy’s younger sister in China where she was working, bought some yarn and knit Isabelle a scarf from it when she got home.  The yarn was dark – black, red and orange – and suited Izzy beautifully.  The following year, when she went to visit Isabelle again, she bought yarn to knit a scarf for Suzy, in vibrant variegated blues, greens, and yellows.  They’re not colours I would have picked, but as I knit with them I realised more and more how perfect they are for Suzy, chosen with a mother’s unerring love.  Helen died unexpectedly last year, and staying in her house soon afterwards, Isabelle found the yarn and asked me to knit the scarf which Helen had intended.  Izzy’s scarf was simple garter stitch, knit on fairly large needles.  I twisted it up a bit, knitting a denser scarf with the rows running length-ways.  It makes for a different kind of stripe, and a bouncy, springy scarf which is really comfortable.

I am really grateful to have been given the opportunity to knit this.  I learnt a lot – about love, I suppose – and I hope that it keeps one of my dearest friends as warm as can be.

Babies are prototypes

I have been knitting this little sweater with a fair-isle band, my first attempt at said technique, on the train to work for the past few weeks.  It is destined for a friend’s new baby, sister to Jellybean.  Normally I would have swatched like mad, but seeing as I didn’t cast on until some time after she was born, and if I were to do my usual planning and prevaricating she’d be in three-year-old clothes before I’d decided on a pattern, I threw caution to the wind and knit around until I thought it was time to add in some patterns, then took Alice Starmore’s Book of Fair Isle Knitting with me on the train and knit a few peeries I liked straight in, reading from the book on my knees.

Truth be told, I don’t really like it.  The section I’d knit before beginning the patterns is too long, so this might be more of a tunic than a sweater, and I don’t like the way the peeries I’ve chosen work together and in the yarn colours I’ve used.  They look so different in the v-shaped stitches from the round dots on the page!  The fair isle section pulls in a bit, as you can see, in spite of trying to keep my floats as loose as possible along the back, and because of keeping them loose it looks a bit scrappy on the inside too.

That said, I am inordinately proud of it and I have been loving making it.  Knitting with the two colours at once, and seeing the pattern take shape beneath my needles as I went, induced the same kind of awed joy and wondering realisation ‘I made that!’ which I haven’t felt since my first cabled project or first sock, and the concentration it required was wonderful.  One of my registrars at work has started knitting recently and was telling me evangelically about the almost meditative quality of it because you have to concentrate so hard, and I thought, ‘I really miss that’.  Well, I may have found it again!

I’m about to start making some wee (unpatterned) sleeves, and then I’m going to knit them together with the body.  Could I ask for your advice on what I do next?  I am basically following the instructions of the EPS yoke sweater, but I know that babies have big heads and I don’t want to decrease until the hole is large enough to fit easily over her head and then leave a large and draughty neckline.  I am considering dividing the front and back again just before casting off, and making a kind of button band along each edge to make shoulders which close with buttons.  Or should I make a vertical Henley-type neck opening?  What do you think?  Answers in the comments please!

I ♥ Knitstable

The hottest October day on record calls for a trip to the seaside.  I’d been to Whitstable once before with my sister and loved it, so yesterday seemed like a good day to go back.  It is just under an hour and a half on the train from Victoria and has pretty much everything you could want from a British seaside town.  The harbour has a wet fish market, and stalls offering oysters, whelks, dressed crab, or whitebait and chips…

On hot days there will be ice cream vans – or there’s handmade ice-cream on the high street, if you prefer …

… and many handsome old pubs, if that’s the way you like to quench your thirst.

(There is actually a Whitstable Brewery, but the pubs serving their pints were absolutely heaving.  Something to look out for next time!).

Whitstable has a wonderful mish-mash of architectural styles, from old fishermen’s cottages to Victorian villas, with wood-clad sea-front houses …

… and quiet residential roads ….

And of course, there’s the beach!

I have a postcard lying about somewhere from my last trip to Whitstable, with a picture of balaclava-clad knitters sitting in deckchairs on the pebble beach, underneath the caption ‘I ♥ Knitstable’.  I think it’s left over from the 2008 biennale, when the guerrilla knitters Incogknito covered the town in knitting.

There are still some remnants of knitted ‘graffiti’ in Whitstable –

and of course I soon homed in on a yarn shop, the lovely Buzz 4 Wool.

They have a great range of buttons, haberdashery supplies, and yarn, including Noro, Rowan, Debbie Bliss, Louisa Harding, Sirdar, Wendy, Triana and Millamia.  I bought some Sublime Baby Cashmere Merino Silk DK to make jumpers for the two new babies: British, washable, and marginally cheaper than the Debbie Bliss.  The owner even amazingly kindly popped home to pick up two more balls of a colour I wanted!

We had a wonderful day, bookended with tea, knitting, and Scrabble on the train.

I can’t wait to go back.

A trip to Chapel Market

I love a farmers’ market.  There is something very affirming and restorative about them.  I can barely grow herbs on my own windowsill, so the earthy beauty and joyous plenty of a market full of food, sold by the people who planted, tended and harvested it, is something both salutary and sybaritic.

I love meeting the people who grow and nurture the food, learning from them about its provenance, how the weather has affected things recently, why they chose that particular crop, and how they would cook or eat it.  I also find it very grounding – or at least, I like to think it puts me in touch with the seasons and the wider earth in a small way, even if that’s just noticing that there are now apples alongside the tomatoes, or the sudden appearance of nuts, first green, then brown.

Chapel Market is not my local farmers’ market – indeed it’s not really a farmer’s market at all – but it has a farmers’ market, and that happens on a Sunday, which I like.  There’s something comforting about the ritual of shopping in the morning and cooking in the afternoon for the week ahead, shoring up provisions against whatever the week may bring, and I like doing that after I’ve had a day of weekend to kick up my heels and let my hair down.  The other thing which is brilliant about Chapel Market is that it has the normal street market at one end, and the farmers’ market at the other, so you can find anything from fabric and cheap cosmetics to unpasteurised cheese and spelt bread.  There is also a great-looking Pie and Mash shop halfway along the street, which I noticed today is now open on Sundays!  I am definitely looking forward to planning that into one of my future trips.

This morning, I went with my sister, who is more interested in food than anyone I’ve ever met, and a great cook.  We laughed a lot and argued in the way that only sisters can, and I came home with herring and smoked mackerel, baby plum tomatoes so ripe that some burst on the way home, purple cauliflower and green-skinned pumpkin, Lincolnshire Poacher cheese, Windsor and Bramley Seedling apples, asters, a gammon joint, beetroots and raspberries.

It’s been a mixed couple of weeks.  Two of my friends had babies – one in three hours, in a birthing pool in the kitchen of her new house, with her daughter asleep upstairs, the other, with an emergency Caesarian section, after sixteen hours, followed by a major haemorrhage, a stay in ITU, a perforated bowel, an emergency hemi-colectomy and another stay in ITU.  I, meanwhile, was working for twelve days in a row, and began to feel slightly delirious at some point on the Sunday evening of the middle weekend, unable to support either of my friends, or indeed do very much else.  Today’s trip to the farmers’ market was just the thing after such a fortnight, and for it I am very grateful.

Vegetable crumble

Roast some vegetables.  Make a white sauce, or a cheese sauce if you’re so inclined.  (I usually am).  Make a crumble topping – or some breadcrumbs if you’ve any stale-ish bread lying around.  Pour the white sauce over the vegetables, spoon the crumble evenly on top of that (and tip some melted butter over the crumbs if you’re using breadcrumbs).  Bake until the sauce is bubbling and the crumble topping browned; about twenty minutes in a hot oven.

This one is breadcrumb-topped, so I suppose it’s more of a vegetable crisp!  I used peppers (red and green), courgettes (green and yellow), and a squash, but most vegetables will sit quite happily under this topping as long as they’ve been roast until sweet and edibly soft first.  I usually deseed tomatoes so that they don’t make the crumble too sloppy, but it’s not essential.

This is based on a dish my friend Olivia and I used to eat at the Vaults Café sometimes when we were revising.  Come to think of it, I think they called it a gratin.  Anyway, the Vaults is a really lovely place to go for brunch, lunch or tea if you’re in Oxford.  It’s right next to the Radcliffe Camera, in the vaults of the University Church, St. Mary the Virgin, and has a little garden where you can sit and drink your tea while gazing at Brasenose, All Souls, and the Rad Cam, if the weather’s fine.  Inside it’s beautiful, and is somehow a very calm, wholesome place – even if you go there for your pre-Coffee Concert coffee early on a Sunday morning (which you should) when the choir are there getting ready for the service and there are plenty of small children buzzing around while their parents enjoy the Sunday papers.

I feel quite wistful just telling you about it!  Roll on the weekend.  I hope you have some good things planned.