Christmas preparations

This year, with working part-time and the bank holidays, I've ended up with a 3.5 week Christmas holiday whilst only using up 4 days of annual leave. This is the longest break I've had since I was an undergraduate, and I've had a great time getting things sorted out for Christmas, oh and getting a new shed, but more about that in a later post.

Back in November I made the Christmas cake. This is the dried fruit and brandy soaking overnight.

And the cake when it came out of the oven.

Then I poured brandy over it every week until last week, when I added the marzipan to it. Which I forgot to photograph.
Then today I iced it, using the cop-out ready-made fondant icing instead of royal icing.

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This is batch of mince pies number three.

I also made stollen for the first time ever, and it was surprisingly easy, just time consuming because of having to leave it to rise for a while. I made one batch using the Delia recipe, but that is actually much more complicated than the Paul Hollywood recipe I used for the second batch, which also has more dried fruit it so it a lot tastier too.

As you do, a week before Christmas, I finally got the curtains altered that I've been meaning to do for nearly four years now...

I had these up in my old house, and the windows here are smaller, so the curtains were covering the top of the radiators - not ideal in the winter, so I've shortened them (there's a second pair too) to a more sensible length. This is one of the spare bedrooms ready for Christmas guests!

Think that's all for now. Another post to follow shortly with my finished projects on!
I hope you all have a fantastic Christmas!

Adventures with the slow cooker, or 10 days at home

I enjoyed my ten days at home between jobs. The second week we had builders in installing our new downstairs loo. In the space of a week it went from this:

 Which wasn't great, the taps and pipework were on the leaky side and brown was a really good colour for showing up every single little tiny bit of limescale (and as the water here is really hard there was a LOT of limescale). Plus carpet on the loo floor is a bit, well, gross, isn't it?!

To this:

So much lighter and brighter. Plus we now have a mirror downstairs, crucial for that last minute hair check! And the window sill is bigger now, more room for plants! ;-)

As well as keeping the builders supplied with copious quantities of tea and chocolate biscuits I tried various slow cooker recipes.
This one is Mediterranean Vegetable Casserole (which actually turned out to be ratatouille). Then you just stir some mozzarella and basil in just before serving.

This one is chicken stew with olives. Except I forgot to get olives, so it's chicken stew.

And this one is slow cooked beef with madeira. Except I didn't have any madeira so it's just slow cooked beef. I also forgot to take a photo of it until it was on the OH's plate along with some potatoes.

And finally, I used up some vegetables by making stock. I then condensed it down and froze it into cubes. These can then be used with boiling water in place of using a stock cube.

 So, verdict on the slow cooker is that it's great. Although I've now got a freezer stuffed full of batch cooked meals so won't need to use it again for a while.

Most of those recipes came from the little booklet that came with the cooker, but some are from Antony Worrall Thompson's Slow cooking: easy one-pot dishes for the slow cooker, oven and hob which I found at the library. It's a really good book, with some nice recipes in and gives instructions for a variety of cooking methods, although it does assume your slow cooker is a 4-6 person one, rather than the 2-3 person one I was using.

I'm not sure how much time I'll have for blogging in the next couple of weeks as I start the new job tomorrow, which means a Longer Commute. I'll still be trying to keep up with other people's blogs though.

PS. Can't believe I put pictures of the loo on the internet!

Lots of stuff

Yes, once again I haven't blogged for a while. Life kind of got in the way. We've had an incredibly busy couple of months, mainly getting the new house sorted and moving into it!

The house is looking lovely. We went from this to this in the bathroom:




This is what the bathroom looked like when it was mostly in piles in the study.

We disappeared behind a very large pile of boxes during the packing:

I wound my unknown 4ply wool from the Skep, purchased on Skip North 2007, into balls ready to knit Thermal.

Monkey sat watching monkeys on TV (he claims he did all the packing, but I'm really not convinced).


We found a heart shaped potato when I was cooking tea one night.



Farli sent me a belated birthday present - a ball of Opal Cotton in some rather lovely colours. Oh, and she agreed to preach at our wedding! :-)

I stuck to one knitting project - Thermal - reasoning that I needed something with an easy to remember pattern, in 4ply (so no risk of finishing it any time soon) to concentrate on amidst the chaos of building work, moving house, unpacking, organising wedding and trying to do the boring but vital parts of everyday life, such as going to work.

The old oven at the new house passed its gas safety test, but proved to be leaking heat at a great rate and threatening to damage the appliances on either side. Plus it was coated in about 20 years of grease. So we bought a shiny new cooker. Which has made cooking meals for the two of us SO much easier.

We've done an enormous amount of cleaning (don't worry, I did some too), both of the new house and the old. And are now arguing with our letting agent from the old house who is trying to hang on to some of the deposit on the grounds that we didn't leave it clean. When we actually left it in a better state than we found it. Grrr.



I went for my wedding hair trial. The OH was very rude about it. Apparently I look like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards. I thought I looked like someone from Pride and Prejudice...

My colleague had her baby, who is incredibly cute. And he seems to like his new bootees.

There were boxes everywhere. We've unpacked 97!

This is what happens when you get two book lovers together - vast piles of book boxes everywhere.











Spring suddenly arrived and we realised the garden (which had been handily hiding under a lot of snow for much of January) was looking overgrown and Needed Something Doing With It. I also discovered a lot of ground elder in residence. I'm taking heart from all of the work Liz did last year on her garden. If you follow the link to her blog there's a link to a Flickr album of the same spot in her garden as she worked on it through the year - which I'm finding extremely encouraging at the moment!

I ordered our first meat box from Riverford. I've been ordering their veg boxes for a couple of years now, but this was the first meat box - and I'm impressed! It all came in a sealed box, along with our normal veg box delivery.

And inside the box was insulated with wool! Cool or what?! The packaging is then returned the following week when the next veg box arrives so it all gets re-used.
 I'm still struggling with recipes a bit - they all seem to be aimed at feeding 4, whereas we are a veggie and a meat-eater-who-eats-veggie-a-few-times-a-week. There is more freezer space at the new house, which does help. The meat box was various items chosen from a list, they do various sizes of pre-chosen meat boxes too, but those all seem to involve lumps of meat intended for roasting etc, which I can't imagine we'd get through!

I

Way back in February we celebrated the anniversary of our first date by going back to Putney and wandering around in the cold (just like we had done the year before!). Unfortunately we couldn't totally relive it, as the café where we had lunch then has now shut, as has the wonderful Stash. :-( Funnily enough I didn't mention our first date when I blogged about that Saturday in Putney a year ago!  ;-)




And we fitted in a trip to Claremont Landscape Garden to escape from the housemoving adventure/wedding planning for a while.

Think that's all! Hopefully life will begin to calm down a bit soon...

Long time no blog

I haven't really gone missing, I'm just not quite sure where the time is going. We've been going to marriage preparation classes at church, which are hysterically funny. And also planning the wedding in odd moments of time inbetween doing things to the house. We spent ages getting quotes from builders for the work on the  house, and all the snow delayed things too. Weddings and building work seem to have been the only topics of conversation for quite some time now - maybe people are starting to avoid me?!
This is the current state of the living room:

The end of the bathroom, which did look like this:

has had the wall between the bathroom and separate loo knocked down:

And a new wall built to extend the corner of the bathroom, so we can put a shower cubicle there.

Downstairs we've also discovered where a door used to be, connecting the kitchen with the dining area. Which must have made the kitchen incredibly tiny.

I also got the Stashbuster Spiral socks finished. A really fun knit and a good way of using up some leftovers.


And I've been knitting a Clapotis Scarf for a friend's birthday. It's not completely the drop scarf pattern I've linked too as I've made it wider and longer, just not as wide and long as a proper Clapotis! The yarn is Mirasol Hacho, which I love love love.

Also read some good books, more details in the LibraryThing link in my sidebar, but I particularly enjoyed "Notes from an exhibition" by Patrick Gale and "Engleby" by Sebastian Faulks. And kind of enjoyed "Fault lines" by Nancy Huston, although I found it hard to keep up with each narrator as my brain was whirling around paint colours, bridesmaids dresses, yarn, bathroom fittings and other such things.

No idea when I'll next be blogging. I'm trying to take pics of all the work in progress (whether it's knitting, building work or wedding bits) as it happens, but there never seems to be much time for downloading pictures or writing about it! We're planning to be moved into the house a couple of months before the wedding, so the clock is ticking now.
I have been trying to read people's blogs, but may not be commenting as much as normal, so please don't be offended!

Projects

The WIPs on my Ravelry project page are gradually reducing in number. I seem to be so slow at the moment at finishing things off, but I suppose there's quite a lot going on, so it isn't really surprising.

The Jitterbug gloves that I have so far failed to picture on here are finished. Just in time for the snow on the journey to work. I was very glad I had them then as they're lovely, warm and squooshy.

Narvik is also finished (the last few knitting group meetings I've just been sat sewing in ends and sewing things together). But I've only just got round to blocking it. I cheated and blocked it after sewing it together, as recommended by Debbie Stoller in Stitch N' Bitch.

I can't decide what to do about the wrapover cardigan in Freedom Spirit that I was knitting. I started it when I was living in lodgings nearly two years ago and was feeling very miserable so it has some bad associations. Plus I've put on weight since then so I'm not convinced it will fit. But how life has moved on in the space of 18 months!

On Friday we completed the purchase of our new home. It needs a lot of work doing to it, so we won't be moving in for a couple of months yet. But it was still very exciting to get the keys and have a wander round planning things (and panicking when we couldn't initially get the boiler to do anything!). It needs a new boiler.
It has an absolutely enormous L-shaped living room/dining room, with a lovely parquet floor.

The amount of space is amazing! Just think how much yarn I could fit in here! (did the OH read that bit?).

It needs totally re-wiring and the bathroom is a real 70s avocado delight.

If you think those tiles are interesting you should see the downstairs loo...

There's a small garden too, although we're a bit hampered at the moment by the sudden snow. The flat roof has a leak and needs replacing but is currently hidden underneath all the snow! But there should be room to grow some vegetables and have a compost bin.

I'm won't be online over Christmas and, as usual, I'm massively behind with blog reading. I hope everyone has a great Christmas!

In which many houses are sold, a book is given up on and someone gets stuck in a wedding dress

The OH and I (and the rest of my family) have just finished a completely mad round of house moves/sales/purchases. My Mum sold her house last week, which was the home I lived in until I was 18 before I left to go to university, and where I temporarily lived again for a while in my mid-20s. This is the last bowl of pears I'll have from the pear tree that was planted in the garden when I was born.


I wasn't there when she moved out, so the last time I saw it was in August, when we were up in Lincoln and got engaged. So it feels slightly odd knowing that it isn't there any more to go back to.

And to add to the chaos/stress/impending feeling of a little bit too much going on, the OH completed on the sale of his flat on the same day as Mum sold her house, and I completed the sale of my house five days after them. So a bit of a manic whirl of solicitors, estate agents and utility companies, not helped by the Royal Mail going on strike and holding half the correspondence up. But all is now finished! We'll be looking round for a house to buy now that we've sold both places and, of course, this means that wedding plans can inch slightly further forward too.

Before anyone gets too excited, wedding plans so far have consisted of me reading various insane books about wedding planning and getting very annoyed with them. Oh, and trying on a dress last week in Monsoon and getting stuck in it.

And speaking of books... I've just been attempting to read "A short walk in the Hindu Kush" by Eric Newby, and I can't get into it at all. I dragged myself through about 100 pages, as it's my next reading group book so I wanted to show willing, but just had to give up when I realised I was actively avoiding picking the thing up. I'm not sure what annoyed me so much. The jolly hockeysticks feeling of the writing? The slightly fuzzy typeface? The blurry maps at the beginning (it's a travel book, surely the idea is you can see where they're going?). Anyway, not the book for me, so it'll be interesting to see what the rest of the group made of it when I see them next week.

Cuddly yarn

See, person in recovery from swine flu experiences a rapid easing of the symptoms on receiving 15 balls of yarn in the post. And also starts wearing a slightly silly grin.

Thanks to the sale at Celticove these did actually arrive a fortnight ago when I'd just gone back to work after swine flu and was totally out of umph. They really helped to cheer me up. 15 balls of Mirasol Sulka in sage (which is actually green, even though it looks blue in the photo below). It is SO gorgeous and soft and cuddly. I think I want to make Lima from the Mirasol first collection with them, but as I've got various other projects started now that won't be just yet.

I've finished off Suri (also from Mirasol book one) and the OH photographed me wearing it. The knitting isn't wonky, it's my shoulders, they always come out wonky in photographs.

I loved this yarn (Mirasol Hacho), it's very soft and squishy, and the way the pattern came out. It was easy to remember but more interesting than just doing plain stocking stitch!


During my swine flu recovery we visited Ham House one Saturday. We took the train to Richmond and walked along the Thames to the house about a mile and a half away.

The house itself is beautiful but there was something we couldn't quite put our finger on. We had lunch in the Orangery restaurant in the gardens, then went round the house.

before heading off towards the shop. Where we saw a large pile of DVDs on sale. Of course, this was "Kensington Palace" in the Young Victoria film, which we'd only just watched. No wonder it all looked very familiar. When I got back home I discovered that Yarnstorm had also just been there too.

By the time we'd been round the house I was getting rather tired so we had to get the bus back to Richmond before getting the train home!

I have some new commuting knitting started.

Don't worry, I didn't accost a total stranger and demand to have my photo taken on the train. My OH caught the same train to work as me one day so I got him to take it! Look at all the empty seats - plenty of room for knitters! These are the Sunday Swing socks from Knitty, and I'm actually using the yarn in the pattern - Lorna's Laces, as I had some in my stash. The colourway is "Valentine" and it's been hanging around in my stash for at least three years now. The groovy needles are my Knitpicks DPNs bought at Get Knitted back in May. And I LOVE them.

I've also started another project to knit at home. Narvik, from Rowan 42 - I bought the yarn at Get Knitted last year when I did the learn to crochet course. The yarn is Rowan Cocoon, another beautifully soft, cuddly yarn, although it does tend to "fluff" everything it comes into contact with.

I won't be around for a bit and I won't be reading blogs for about 10 days now as the OH and I have got a week off work to go up to Lincoln. He'll be meeting my Mum and we'll also be putting my house on the market whilst we're up there, but we should get some time to relax and do some touristy things too! And if you know anyone who wants to buy a house in Newark do let me know...