Giant custard creams, Cambridge and another Puerperium

Well, I'm not quite sure where January disappeared off to, but it whizzed past. I have done various Very Exciting Things, including meeting up with 17 other knitting (or crocheting) librarians in London for a day of coffee, giant custard creams, yarn shopping, librarianly chitchat and then to the pub. We had all "met" via Twitter, and it was great to meet them all for real too.

There were also giant chocolate bourbons, but I decided to stick with the custard cream. Yes, that is a normal sized plate and knife.

We went yarn shopping at Loop (in three batches as there were too many of us to fit in the shop all in one go). It was looovvveeely. I hadn't been there for several years and it seemed a lot more friendly than last time, with more space for gorgeous yarns. I indulged in a skein of Madeleine Tosh sock yarn, to make a shawl with. It is gorgeously squishy, very soft and comes in beautiful colours.

One of the others brought along the knitted archbishop she'd made last year. I hope he likes tea. I think the pattern is from the Knit your own royal wedding book. Amusingly one of the comments on Ravelry about the pattern says that he's not wearing any pants under his cassock!! Another one of the comments said that everyone kept looking up his cassock so she'd knitted him some gold disco pants!!

I have also made two trips to Cambridge. One was just for the day, to do a masterclass at the University Library. I was surprised how much more snow there was out the other side of London. I also had lunch with Caughtknitting, whom I hadn't seen for ages.

Remains of a giant snowman outside the library.

The other trip was for a conference at Gonville and Caius College, so I stayed overnight with KnittingontheGreen, where we stayed up late chatting and drinking wine. It was lovely to see her and she cooked me the most amazing meal of spelt risotto with goats' cheese, followed by homemade ice cream. Of course, I forgot to take any photos whilst I was with her, but here are some nice shots of Gonville and Caius:

I got a bit of knitting done on the trains to Cambridge, although I'm currently reading a book I need to review for a journal by the end of February so that's taking priority at the moment.

I did get my third Beyond Puerperium completed in the nick of time, as the Mum-To-Be appears to be about to go into labour any second now. This took exactly 2 balls of yarn.

And, having got frustrated with the lace shawl (no, I haven't made any progress, as I haven't had any quiet-knitting-time-at-home-when-there-are-no-distractions), someone at the librarian knitting extravaganza pointed me towards the Mini Mania Scarf as a good way of using up odds and ends of sock yarn. So I started one of those. It took me an entire episode of Call the midwife to cast on 500 stitches, but now I'm well away, and enjoying deciding which colour to use next.

I'm aware that I haven't taken any garden pictures yet this year, mainly because the weather seems to be alternating between rain and snow.

Marmalade

We get a veg box (and sometimes a meat box) from Riverford each week, and last week I couldn't resist adding a marmalade kit too, now that I have more time in the week. It consisted of a bag of Seville oranges and a couple of lemons, plus a recipe.

I'd never made marmalade before and had intended to include some more pictures of the chopping up process, but I ended up with two builders in the kitchen at that point so didn't feel like taking photos of oranges whilst they were there! ;-)

It turned out that I could have done with a proper preserving pan, as the largest saucepan wasn't really big enough.

 Still, it set fairly easily and went into sterilised jars (with a bit of splodgy orange goo landing in various places it shouldn't. If I do this again it will involve a proper preserving pan AND one of those jam pouring gadgets).

Knitting-wise I finished my Everyone outta the pool socks and am pleased with the effect of the stitch pattern. I deliberately went for fraternal socks rather than completely identical. It's a nice pattern that I'd definitely use again as it was easy to memorize and fun to knit.

I've cast on another Beyond Puerperium (my third!) for a friend's baby, due in a couple of months. This will be the 6-12 month size, and the yarn is Rico Baby Classic DK. It's synthetic but it feels lovely and soft and not plasticky, as well as reasonably priced.

The lace knitting has stalled as I haven't had much time to sit and concentrate on it - looks like I'm going to have to frog this attempt though as I struggled with the pattern and whether to knit or drop all of the yarn overs in the second section.

And I've realised that I forgot to do garden at the beginning of January  - as in totally forgot, as I haven't even taken pictures! But thanks to the astonishingly mild weather we already have lots of bulbs coming up and here is our first snowdrop:

And the temperature's now dropping down to the minuses!

High water

Back in November the Thames got very high and I took some photos, intending to blog about it and never got round to it. This is the path in the local park leading down to the Thames path. The benches and rubbish bins were just about visible (it had been a bit higher than this).

It rained a lot whilst we were away. Up north (well midlands) there were a lot of rivers that had turned into lakes. North of Bedford the Great Ouse had oozed spectacularly for miles on either side of the road. On the Notts/Lincs border the Trent was so wide you couldn't see the other side. We had a day trip to Lincoln on Boxing Day and must have been one of the last cars over Dunham Bridge on the A57 before the road was closed. Our side of the road was clear at that point, but the other side was under water. There's a picture of it on the BBC website totally under water.

And this is what we came back to when we got back home after Christmas away. I couldn't even get close to the no BBQs sign this time.

And the park seems to have turned into a lake.

I don't think this is what was intended by "overflow car park".

Further up the river, this is Staines bridge, and what was the Thames path running outside a pub with seats for people to admire the river view.

And the Thames path a bit further up again. Yes, the river is usually to the right of the trees and lamp posts.

Fortunately most of these places aren't too near anyone's house, although the river's showing no signs of going down yet, and it's been raining all of today. Our house is well away from it.

Christmas

We had a fairly quiet Christmas, staying with my Mum and eating massive amounts of food (including an entire nut roast just for me. It lasted days). We had a few trips out, to look at kitchen showrooms (!) and to meet up with an old school friend of mine. And my brother's family came over with the nephews, who, of course, are now huge.

I received some lovely presents - some of them are here:

Apron and oven gloves to go in the new kitchen (which we haven't got yet!).
A carving fork to go with the carving knife we already have - I do a roast now every Saturday for the OH and was struggling a bit with the lump of cooked dead animal sliding around on the plate when I attempted to carve it.
Fair trade Palestinian olive oil.
Blackboard style garden labels.

Large box of chocolate toffee (apparently I'm meant to share this with the OH. Hmm. We'll see).
Downton Abbey series 3 blu-ray.
Chocolate shower gel and body butter. (Is there a theme developing here?).
SHEEP SOCKS.

A greetings card organiser (I have big plans to Get Organised this year).
A record book for visiting cathedrals in this country - the idea is that there's some information in the book about each cathedral, and also space to write down details of your visit and your reflections on it. As we seem to visit quite a lot of cathedrals on holiday this seems like a great way of recording our visits!

And a really groovy knitting bag.

Oh, and I realised I'd forgotten to take a picture of my Secret Santa gift at knitting group - some stitch markers:

I got a lot of knitting done whilst we were away, including finishing the first pattern section of the South Seas Stole.

This first part was reasonably straightforward, and I managed to do most of it whilst watching TV (yes, including the Killing with subtitles!), but the charts are now getting more complicated so I'm going to have to concentrate. Luckily I've still got most of a sock to go on the Everyone Outta the Pool socks.

Hope everyone had a good Christmas.