Christmas Presents

I don't usually knit Christmas presents - I know from past experience that it's just creating an extra source of stress in getting them finished in time.  And I have not been much of a sock knitter, either, though for Christmas 2011 I did knit 3 pairs (of which 2 and a half were finished in time).   But this year, I needed a small portable project and decided to try sock knitting again, and to knit a pair for my daughter for Christmas - knitting one pair of socks seemed perfectly manageable.   I bought a skein of lovely Lichen and Lace sock yarn from my friend Sarah Alderson, and her sock pattern, The Chain.   (Sarah designed the thrummed slippers pattern that featured in my previous post.) 

The socks were finished well before Christmas.  They have turned out very well, and the yarn is beautifully soft. 

But meanwhile, my daughter said that what she really needed was a replacement for a scarf that she had lost i.e. she wanted me to knit a plum-coloured infinity scarf, as soon as possible. So I decided that the scarf would have to be for Christmas, too.

It took a while to find some wool of the right colour - King Cole Merino Blend 4-ply in Damson. By this time it was well into December, and we decided that the scarf had to be about 46 in. (117 cm.) in circumference, and quite deep.   I did get it done - I finished it at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve (knitted, ends sewn in, and pressed).  Cutting it a bit fine, I know, but on Christmas Day it was all wrapped up, under the Christmas tree. 

It's designed to loop around the neck twice.   I don't have a photo of my daughter wearing it, but here it is on our newel post. 

I knitted it in the round, with a chevron pattern of eyelets and decreases in the middle and garter stitch borders top and bottom. Basically, a very wide, short tube.

It turned out that she hadn't lost the original scarf after all, but as it's cotton jersey, a hand-knitted wool scarf is much nicer, and much warmer for the winter.  She's very pleased with both the socks and the scarf.  And I'm going to knit more socks - this time for me.  And maybe a Moebius scarf too.

Advent Calendars

In November, a group of knitters from the Huddersfield Knitting & Crochet Guild branch decided to share two Opal advent calendars - these calendars have 24 doors for the days of Advent, like other Advent calendars, but behind each door is a 15g. ball of Opal sock yarn.  There were 8 members of the calendar syndicate and 48 balls of wool, so 6 balls each - sounds simple, doesn't it?  No.  They devised an extremely complicated scheme - before any of the doors were opened, the ball behind each door was pre-allocated to a syndicate member.  Then each member had custody of one of the calendars for 6 days.  Every day she opened the appropriate door and posted a photo of the ball door could see what she was getting.  Here's one of the photos, posted by Ann Kingstone.

 And after six days, the keeper of the cube met the next keeper, to hand it over.

Yesterday was the grand finale, when the syndicate met to distribute the balls of wool to their owners. I wasn't a member of the syndicate, just a fascinated observer, but I went along to see how it all worked out.  They met in Salt's Diner in Salts Mill in Saltaire, the other side of Bradford.

Every member of the syndicate was given a pair of socks with their balls of wool stuffed inside.  Then there was some swapping, so that people could get a selection of colours that they liked.  There was even some discussion of what they might knit with the yarn - the 6 balls will make a pair of (very multi-coloured) socks, though you could mix them with a plain background colour and make something bigger like a shawl.  And as far as I could see, everyone was happy with their share, and keen to do it all again next year.      

By then it was dark, and we went into the village to see the Saltaire Advent windows, which are lit up every evening until January 5th.  Like any other Advent calendar, a new window was 'opened' every day in December until Christmas Eve, though they started with 10 windows on December 1st, so now there are 33 windows to see.   The windows are scattered all over the village, and I didn't have time to see many of them, but I did see some very well-designed and executed displays.  And the very first that we found was this:

   
It's all knitted or crocheted - poinsettias in pots, snowmen, paper chains, a gingerbread house,...

Knitted robins wearing woolly hats on a knitted snow-covered log:

Alpacas wearing woolly scarves (both crocheted, I think) under knitted mistletoe:

 (Alpacas are important in the history of Saltaire because Titus Salt, who built the village for his mill workers, made his money out of spinning alpaca yarn.)

So window no. 7 was a very good start for a party of knitters.  

Another favourite:  window 19, showing Father Christmas in his sleigh flying over the village.

And here's window 9, a display about Titus Salt's rules for the people living in Saltaire:

No pubs; No drinking alcohol; No hanging out washing; No animals in Saltaire.

You can read more about the rules here.  As far as I remember from a guided walk around Saltaire, the prohibition on hanging out washing was because Salt had provided a wash-house and he wanted the villagers to pay to do their washing there, but it wasn't popular.  Some villagers got around the rule by hanging out their washing on vacant land just outside the village.  And he wasn't against alcohol as such - the rules was really against being drunk, and he didn't want pubs where workers might meet and combine against him.  Philanthropic, but only up to a point.

The windows were worth seeing.  The Saltaire Living Calendar has been happening every Christmas since 2006, though I had not heard of it before this year - I'll go again next year, with enough time to see them all.  

Christmas 1941

Stitchcraft, December 1941

75 years ago, Britain had been at war for more than two years, and on the home front, life was difficult.  Food and clothes were rationed, so Christmas could have been cheerless and miserable. But magazines like Stitchcraft tried to show readers how to make the best of things. The December 1941 Stitchcraft  had a bright and stylish jumper on the cover - it took just 12 oz. (340g.) of 4-ply (fingering) wool, and 1 oz. of contrast.  The magazine also offered a pattern for a sleeveless V-neck pullover for "one of your friends in the Forces", as well as two more knitting patterns for women -- another jumper and a cardigan.

An ad in the magazine illustrates the advantage of knitting your own clothes.  Greenwoods of Huddersfield would supply the wool to knit any of the patterns in the magazine, or would knit them for you.  The wool to knit the cover jumper cost 9/5½ (9 shillings and five pence ha'penny - about 47½p, directly translated into decimal coinage).  But as well as the money, you had to send in 6 of your clothing coupons.  Alternatively, they would supply it "completely hand-knit and ready to wear" for 25 shillings (£1.25) and 8 coupons.  So if you knitted the jumper yourself, you saved a lot of money, and 2 clothing coupons. As the war went on (and after the war too), clothes rationing became more severe, with fewer coupons issued to each person.  Knitting for yourself and your family was essential, to eke out the precious clothing coupons.  

Stitchcraft at that time had a cookery article in each issue, and in December 1941 it was of course about Christmas cookery - or how to cope with limited supplies of everything you might have thought essential.  There's a recipe for an Excellent Wartime Cake, with no eggs, and a Holiday Pudding, described as "a war-time substitute for our usual Christmas pudding - not the rich, fruit-laden affair of former days, but quite a good one, and far more digestible!"   Both the cake and the pudding contain raisins - it seems surprising that they were still available at all, as they were imported, but clearly supplies were much more limited than before the war.

Christmas present giving was not forgotten either - several pages of the magazine are devoted to ideas for gifts, largely made from oddments of wool and scraps of fabric.  There are needle cases, pin-cushions like cacti in pots, a soft toy fox terrier, and an egg cosy "for the monthly egg".   To be honest, these knick-knacks mostly do look like something made out of oddments, though the gloves and scarves would be very acceptable.  And the jumper, cardigan and pullover patterns are appealing, even today.  Overall, the magazine did a very good job of encouraging Christmas cheer.

A merry Christmas to us all.

This Year's Books

Last night, one of my book groups had our annual Christmas dinner, and exchanged Christmas cards.  As is by now traditional (i.e. I have done it for the past three years), I made a card showing the books that we have read this year.     

We usually read eight books in a year.  This year's were mostly novels, apart from Chris Mullin's diaries of the last stretch of his career as an MP, and Michael Ondaatje's memoir of growing up in Ceylon and his family's history there.  The books I enjoyed most, and the ones I am planning to keep, are Stoner by John Williams and Strange Meeting by Susan Hill.  The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields would also be a keeper, except that I borrowed  it from the library.    Chris Mullin's Decline and Fall and Barbara Pym's Excellent Women were also library copies - making a Christmas card means that I have to borrow them again to make the card (which might give you a clue as to why you can't see the title of the Barbara Pym book).   It also means that I am not often tempted to get a Kindle - books on a Kindle would not make a good picture.

We each got a Christmas present at the dinner from our Secret Santa - a book, of course.  Mine was The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.

I have read it before, from the library, and enjoyed it very much.  It's great to have my own copy (and a very nicely-produced copy, too) and I'm looking forward to reading it again.   I knew when I read it that Barbara Kingsolver must be a knitter, and I subsequently read a feature on her in Vogue Knitting.  Here is her account of a non-knitter (her character Harrison Shepherd) talking on a long car journey to another character, Mrs Brown, about her knitting:

 "... I thought it was an indigo porcupine."
 She had a laugh at that.  She has eleven nephews and nieces, I learned, and meant to outfit the tribe on this journey, working through socks from top to toe, all from the same massive hank of blue wool.  The coming holiday shall be known as "The Christmas of the Blue Socks from Aunt Violet."  She worked on a little frame of four interlocked needles that poked out in every direction. as she passed the yarn through its rounds.
"Aren't you afraid you'll hurt yourself with that?"
"Mr. Shepherd, if women feared knitting needles as men do, the world would go bare-naked."

And later Mrs Brown knits Mr Shepherd a pair of gloves for Christmas, taking the measurements from a grease stain he left on a piece of paper,  He is astonished because he has never had a pair of gloves that he can wear comfortably before - his fingers are extraordinarily long.  But she has made a pair that fit him perfectly, in pure merino wool.

 A good read.

Season's Greetings

As it's Christmas Eve, here are two vintage Christmas postcards, featuring people wearing knitting,  from the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection.  

The first postcard is not dated - although it has an address and message, there is no stamp or postmark - but I guess it's from before 1920.  The little boy is very winsome, with his blonde curls peeping out from his hat. But let's focus on the important part - the knitting.  Knitting patterns usually show individual items, and so we don't see how they were worn together, as we do here.  The boy is wearing a knitted hat, knitted jumper and knitted gaiters.  I can't make out what he's wearing between the jumper and the gaiters - possibly shorts.  The gaiters are held under the shoes by elastic, probably (there is a pattern for gaiters in Woolcraft).  I don't know how they stay up over his knees though - there is no sign of any fastening or elastic.  Friction?  Willpower? 

The second postcard is postmarked 1913, and shows an attractive young woman, again wearing a lot of knitting and some crochet.   I think her jacket is knitted, and of course her hat is - a very large and floppy tam with a pompom. Her collar is crocheted, probably Irish crochet, which was very popular at the time. But she's not a grandly elegant Edwardian lady, more the girl-next-door, it seems to me.  Very appropriate for sending Christmas greetings. 

 Happy Christmas.      

A Mug for a Knitter

Yesterday, we went to Waitrose in Sheffield to get most of our Christmas food shopping, and I saw some coffee mugs with an embossed design to look like Aran knitting.    They are really nice, and I bought a couple for myself - how could I resist?

Waitrose mug with knitting design 

The design of the Waitrose packaging  for their own-brand Christmas was also based on knitting. A cable pattern with ribbon threaded through was printed onto the box of Camembert we bought - ready prepared to bake.  (Sounds delicious - I hope it is.) 

And there was a Fair Isle design with Christmas trees,which appeared on several of the things we bought, and around the store as well.  Today being the Winter Solstice, I had a mince pie with my coffee (in my new mug) - it was very nice.    

Team Knitting

This week I went to the usual Thursday knit-and-natter at Spun in the Byram Arcade - this one was special because it was our Christmas do.  We all brought in food and drink, it was all delicious, we had a great time and even got some knitting done.  And during the party, we gave Lydia and Ash a knitted blanket for their baby, due in January - knitted by all of us in the group.  It is a patchwork of 24 squares in two designs - we each knitted three of them.  Except Lydia, of course, who didn't know anything about it.   It has been a bit tricky keeping it secret at times, because the wool and patterns had to be distributed in the shop, and then we  handed back our completed squares in the shop, too, but we managed to pick times when Lydia was busy and didn't notice.  Here are my three squares, one with a pear design, for Lydia and Ash's last name,  and two with a double heart design.  (I tried to take a photo of the complete blanket, but there wasn't a lot of space and the photo has a closeup of someone's foot in the foreground.  It looked very nice, believe me.  The blanket, not the foot.)  

The Byram Arcade was looking festive, with Christmas lights strung along the balconies.  The things hanging in the central space are origami birds - a whole flock of them, in different colours and sizes.  It looks wonderful.

Another Year in Books

This week, one of my book groups met for our annual Christmas dinner, and for the third year I made Christmas cards for the other members showing the books we have read this year.

 

I found  The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson a bit tedious (even though it has sold over 3 million copies world-wide, according to Wikipedia), but the book I really didn't like was  A Short History Of England by Simon Jenkins.  It was inevitably superficial, since it attempted to cover so much ground in a single book - not even a particularly long book.  It starts with the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain and ends more or less at the present day (although the last part of the book is of course about the United Kingdom and not just England).  Jenkins writes about important men (hardly any women) and significant events and ignores the rest of the world entirely, except as adversaries or allies of England in war.  It's  history as "just one damn thing after another".  For me, it didn't convey any sense  of what it might have been like to be living at a particular time in history, which is what I find interesting in reading about past times. 

When it was my turn to propose the book that we should read next, I chose Shakespeare's Restless World by Neil MacGregor  as an antidote.  Fortunately, we all enjoyed reading it.  It is full of fascinating detail about life in Shakespeare's time, and beautifully illustrated - the book is structured around surviving objects from that time.  It describes a very different world, when Venice was a world power and the King of Morocco was extremely wealthy,  while England was a not very powerful country on the edge of Europe, under threat of invasion from Spain for much of the period.  London was an unhealthy place to live at the best of times, and there were frequent outbreaks of plague.  There was huge political uncertainty too - public discussion of who would succeed Elizabeth I was forbidden (I didn't know that).   Reading about the concerns of Londoners in Shakespeare's time makes it even more remarkable that his plays are still relevant today.   

I have had to keep all the books that we read during the year so that I could photograph them for the card.  But now the Simon Jenkins book and The Hundred Year Old Man are going to the nearest charity shop.  I enjoyed reading the others and will keep them.

Let It Snow!

This week we had the December meeting of the Huddersfield branch of the Knitting & Crochet Guild - a Christmas craft-along.  We made snowflakes, either knitted or crocheted.  The knitted snowflake pattern was reported to be a bit fiddly, so I tried the crochet patterns instead.  It is many, many years since I did any crochet, so I sat with a "How to Crochet" manual open at my elbow.  But I managed to complete two snowflakes, with some tutorial help with the pattern along the way.  The stitches are not as even as a competent crocheter would make them, but for Christmas decorations they are fine. (I made the small snowflake on the right first, because it was simpler, but I much prefer the other.)   

I am very proud of my finished snowflakes.  The most complicated crochet I had done before was a cushion cover and a waistcoat in  Afghan squares, in the early 1970s.  (The waistcoat was in cream and camel wool, and I wore it with a cream and camel tartan kilt and a cream shirt - we were very keen on co-ordinating colours in those days. A very smart outfit, I thought at the time.)  I'm surprised, and gratified, that I was able to remember how to do it, with a bit of revision.  But  apart from snowflakes, I think I'll stick with knitting.

Alpaca and Other Christmas Gifts

Auld Mill Alpaca yarn

I was given some very nice presents for Christmas this year - several books, and some alpaca yarn, amongst other good things.  The yarn is from a farm in Scotland, near Elgin in Morayshire - two 100g. balls of it.  Each ball-band names the alpaca the yarn came from: Jasmine is a sort of cinnamon colour, and Eartha is a slightly darker brown.  (The Auld Mill Alpacas web site describes Jasmine as "mid fawn" and Eartha as "light brown", which seem very boring colour names, but evidently they have specific meanings to alpaca farmers.)   The yarn is so, so soft - it needs to be worn next to the skin, so I'll knit something like a scarf with it.  I'd also like to show off the two different colours - it needs some thought. 

Christmas books (and DVDs)

One of the books is Sandy Black's Knitting: Fashion, Industry and Craft.  I have coveted it since I saw it at the In the Loop conference in September.   I was also given A History of the World in 100 Objects, by Neil McGregor, Director of the British Museum, based on the series of radio talks he did in 2010, and Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel.  That is a seriously hefty book - I'll need a big, straightforward knitting project to do while I'm reading it.  There are a few more on my Christmas pile, too, not to mention the books I'm reading for my two book groups - I'm looking forward to a lot of reading and a lot of knitting.

Happy New Year.

Mazy Mitts

Now that Christmas Day is past, I can write about a pair of fingerless gloves/mitts that I made for my daughter as a Christmas gift.  I have made her fingerless mitts before, with a single opening for the fingers, even though she asked me for fingerless gloves - I said that knitting four little stumps for the fingers would be far too fiddly.

But then I came across a (free) pattern in Issue 41 (Deep Fall 2012) of Knitty    Phalangees by Jodie Gordon Lucas  allows you to have separate finger openings in fingerless mitts without breaking the yarn.  A brilliant idea, if you ask me.

This is what the finger openings look like.  Essentially, you knit a round that creates the finger openings in a figure of eight fashion, and so joins the front and back of the hand together between the fingers, and then you cast off in a similar way.   (Although I didn't do it in quite the way that the pattern specified.  I also made the finger openings different sizes, as you can probably see from the photo - the second finger opening is a bit bigger than the others and the little finger slightly smaller - in the pattern they are all the same size.)

I did find it very tricky to knit the joining rounds and finish off, I must admit.  It was maybe partly because I was using double pointed needles - I prefer them for knitting small things like mitts, and I didn't have any circular needles of the right size.  The pattern recommends one or two circular needles- that might have been easier though I'm not sure that it would.  At one point I was using a small forest of DPNs (14 of them) to go round the figure of eight curve....

So it was awkward - but not as much work as knitting the fingers separately.  I did the thumb in the conventional way - the method specified in the pattern seemed a bit obscure and required breaking the yarn anyway, so I just did the usual thing. 


The two-colour maze pattern is from Phalangees too, though you could use the technique with any kind of stitch pattern on the palm part of the mitts.  The maze pattern is very striking, though, and I wanted to see how it's done.  It's simple to knit - it looks as though you knit with both colours at the same time, taking the colour not in use across the back of the fabric, but in fact each round is worked with only one colour, using a slip-stitch technique to skip over the stitches that should be in the other colour.


I am really proud of the finished result - I think they look very good and will be very warm.   And they fit, I am glad to say.

Another Year in Books

Last year I made Christmas cards for one of my book groups with a photo of some of the books we had read.   It made a nice card, and several members of the group told me that they had kept theirs as a record.  The card created an instant tradition, and this Christmas I made a similar one, showing all the books we have read in 2012.

This year's books were:

• Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
• Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
• Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
• David Lodge, A Man of Parts
• Raymond Carver, Beginners
• Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game
• Beth Gutcheon, Still Missing
• Marina Lewycka, Various Pets Alive & Dead

Of the nine books, my top choice would be Still Missing. I can't say that it's an enjoyable read, because it deals with a parent's worst nightmare, a missing child. But it was gripping and very convincing in portraying how the parents and the people around them got through the aftermath of the disappearance as best they could.  The edition that we read is a re-issue by Persephone, and so was beautifully produced, a pleasure to hold. 

Happy reading in 2013. 

Happy Holidays

Yesterday, a large box arrived through the post from the U.S.,  with our Christmas cards and gifts from our daughter and her girlfriend.  (Slightly late, but never mind - it's nice to get presents over several days.)

Everything was beautifully wrapped in thick paper.  There were:

- several kinds of exotic chocolate (chocolate almond sea salt bark, ...) and some smoked salmon.

- a really useful miniature wind-up torch - I have a little torch on my key ring which was very handy until  it stopped working.

- a book of drawings (bought from an actual artist in an actual art gallery), How to Draw Your Family by Gabriel Liston, with useful advice, like "... once an event occurs you will want to draw it.  While you are drawing it other moments will be happening and you will miss them forever because your eyes were down."    I can't draw, but that certainly happens with photography, if you're not careful .

- and Peter Ackroyd's Venice, which we shall enjoy a lot.  We have been reading about Venice ever since we got back from our holiday - we shall have to go again.

We are very fortunate.
     

It's Christmas! Socks!

Now that Christmas has arrived, I can reveal - tada!- that I have been knitting more socks, as Christmas presents.  (The pair of fluffy socks that I wrote about here were also a Christmas present.)  I made one pair from the sock yarn that I dyed at the workshop I went to at Spun in November.  They are photographed straight off the needles and look rather weird without feet in them  I used plain stocking stitch for the foot part, to show off the colours of the yarn, but introduced four little cables into the double rib around the ankle, to make it more interesting.  I am very pleased with them.  The yarn is very soft , and should be hard-wearing too, as it's merino and nylon.  I have enough yarn left to make myself a pair of fingerless mitts, I think.  
 



I have also knitted another sock (only one so far) in Cygnet 4-ply yarn, in a lovely blue-purple colour. The pattern is a modification of Wendy Johnson's diagonal lace socks. 

I did at least manage to finish the first sock in time to show it to the recipient (by webcam) on Christmas Day.  I think I have mastered a good set of techniques for toe-up socks - magic cast on, short-row heel, 'surprisingly stretchy bind-off' - although I this was the first sock where I was happy with the look of the short-row heel.  So now I'm getting bored with knitting socks.  When I've finished the second diagonal lace sock, I'll knit something else for a while.


The hand-dyed socks were for my daughter, and we also sent her a Henderson's Relish t-shirt (black with an orange design, to match the labels on the bottles).  She has never tried Henderson's Relish, but she can relate to the slogan (Strong and Northern). 

By the way, we noticed Henderson's Relish on sale in Waitrose in Sheffield when we were there to buy Christmas food.  (For overseas readers, Waitrose is an upscale supermarket chain.)  According to the Henderson's web site, this is the only branch of Waitrose where you can buy Relish.  We were pleased to see that the locals had been stocking up on Henderson's for Christmas - the other sauces (Lea and Perrins, HP sauce and the rest) were untouched, but there was hardly any Henderson's left.

A Computing Christmas Tree

Yesterday I went to Leeds University to meet some friends I used to work with.  There was a Christmas tree in the School of Computing which I much admired, decorated with computing paraphernalia.   The yellow streamers are paper tape and the pink bows are made from (un)punched cards. There are floppy disks and a few CDs (nice and shiny) hanging from the branches and keyboards strewn around the base.

When I first got worked in computing, paper tape was on its way out and punched cards were the main input medium, although I don't recall ever using pink ones.  Someone must have kept a secret stash of them for the past 30 years or so.  I am very envious.  After they became obsolete, I acquired a box of unused cards.  They are excellent for shopping lists, but we used them all a long time ago.  And now floppy disks are obsolete, too - and not much use for anything except hanging on a Christmas tree.

It's a splendid display.

Bookish Christmas Card

Yesterday, one of the two book groups I belong to had its Christmas dinner, and I made Christmas cards for the other eight members showing a stack of some of the books we have read.   The group has been running for nearly four years, and we have read  about 30 books over that time, so only a small proportion appeared on the card - I had to choose from those that I still have copies of.  The books I bought but really did not like have gone to charity shops, and a few books I borrowed from the library.  We borrowed a set of 9 copies of one book (Pyongyang, a graphic novel by Guy Delisle) from the Readers Group support section of our excellent local library service.   And I have lent my copy of the last book we read  (Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch) to a friend.  What's left is a fairly random selection.  

We have read quite a variety: mainly novels, but also non-fiction, short stories, poetry, .... One of the good things about belonging to a book group is that you read a wide range of books, and find that you enjoy some that you wouldn't normally have chosen to read.

And the photo makes a nice card, if not especially Christmassy.  The message is more:  "Happy Reading in 2012".

Knit, Natter, Have a party

There is a knit-and-natter session every Thursday at the Spun shop in Huddersfield, which opened just over a year ago.   Yesterday, the  knit-and-natter regulars had a Christmas party.     Everyone brought some food  (all excellent), and there were Christmas crackers and mulled wine.   Lydia had made up a goody bag for everyone from the shop, with knitting patterns, some buttons, a magazine, a balloon, ....    And several people had brought hand-made gifts and cards for everyone, which was lovely.     We all got Christmas tree ornaments and a pair of stitch markers (the colour chosen to suit each person, so mine are purple - I do knit quite a lot of purple!)

Good food, good company, and we even did some knitting - it was a really good do.

Christmas 1940

A friend read that I recently bought a 1934 copy of Stitchcraft magazine, and sent me a Stitchcraft from December 1940 that she found amongst her mother's things. So exciting! It gives a fascinating view of how people in this country were living at that point in World War II.

There are patterns for two jumpers, including the one on the cover, and some small items suitable for Christmas presents. Clothes rationing was not introduced until 1941, though I assume that materials were already in short supply. There are frequent mentions of using up small quantities of wool, as in the coloured cables in the cover jumper.

The magazine had a continuing feature on knitting for men and women in the services. The Dec 1940 issue has a balaclava helmet. The pattern is for two sizes, to fit both men and women, though it must be said that even with make-up, it's hard to make a balaclava look glamorous.

In the same feature, there is a pattern for a pair of mittens with two layers, an inner layer knitted in wool and an outer layer crocheted in string. The idea is that the string layer gives a good grip on wet ropes, etc. on board ship. Quite ingenious, I suppose, though it makes me think of how dreadful it would have been to be on deck in a North Atlantic storm in midwinter, with U-boats after you.

There is also an ad for Lux soap flakes with a nice photo of a smartly dressed young woman wearing trousers and carrying her gas mask case, with the caption "Prepare for action in this cosy knitted Norfolk jacket". You could send off for a free pattern for the jacket. It's knitted in camel hair wool for warmth and softness, though you would think that camel hair might have been hard to find by then.

Stitchcraft had a cooking column, too, though it seems a bit outside its remit.  In this issue, it is mainly concerned with how to do your Christmas baking without the ingredients you would normally consider essential, like eggs, butter and sugar.  There is a recipe for a Christmas cake "using no eggs or sugar". It uses a small quantity of margarine or lard instead of butter, and some black treacle and quite a lot of dried fruit for sweetening - a very meagre mixture.

Alongside, there is a half-page ad from the Ministry of Food, exhorting people to eat healthily, by eating lots of the vegetables we can grow in this country, with small quantities of protein. A sort of medieval peasant diet, with added potatoes. I especially like the little rhyme:

Those who have the will to win

Eat potatoes in their skin

Knowing that the sight of peelings

Deeply hurts Lord Woolton's feelings.

Lord Woolton was the Minister of Food at the time, famous for giving his name to Woolton pie, consisting of vegetables mixed with a little oatmeal and with a pastry topping, which sounds very bland and stodgy. He would have been very pleased at the current popularity of baked potatoes, I suppose, though the fillings available now would have been far too rich for 1940.

I wonder if Sue's mother ever made any of the things featured in this magazine?

Boxing Day Walk

We have been staying with family in Kintbury in Berkshire over Christmas, and went for a walk on Boxing Day (26th December) when it was very cold, but fine, with a hazy sun. The fields and woods looked wonderful in the snow.

I especially liked the dead cow parsley heads outlined in frost.  They reminded me of Angie Lewin's prints - I got a lovely book on her work for Christmas - a complete surprise and very well-chosen.

We passed a small plantation of Christmas trees, looking almost artificial with their dusting of frost.

And for canal fans, here is the Kennet and Avon canal, completely frozen.

Boxing Day was the last snowy day, at least for now.  Yesterday the temperatures got above freezing for the first time in about two weeks, and today most of the snow has gone. It's very grey and damp - easier for travelling, but nothing like so picturesque.

Christmas Presents

Now that Christmas Day is past, I can write about the things I made as surprise presents.  I sent my daughter and her girlfriend a pair of mitts each.  They are in Oregon, so we spoke to them via Skype on Christmas Day (evening here, before breakfast there).  We have webcams at both ends, so I could take a snapshot of them wearing their mitts. 

One is a pair of convertible mitts, with a button-down top, in merino DK.

 The other is a pair of fingerless mitts in Manos del Uruguay merino/silk DK. The pattern is Nalu, which is free on Ravelry.   I love the way that three stitches break away from the wrist rib, skid across the back of the mitt, and then end up soberly as part of the top rib again.

Both very successful, I think.

I asked J for something knitty for Christmas, but he said he wouldn't know what to choose, so I bought some yarn, put it in a gift bag and showed him on Christmas Day what he was giving me.  Who says romance is dead?  Apparently, I gave him a 4-volume regimental history of the 7th Hussars.  

The yarn is Rowan Felted Tweed DK in Grey Mist.  I already had one ball in a soft green (Herb?) that I acquired two years ago when two Rowan people gave a talk on the company at the local Oxfam shop.  They handed out pairs of knitting needles with a ball of yarn and 20 stitches cast on, so that we could knit while listening.  They retrieved the needles at the end of the session, but we got to keep the yarn, and the perfectly pointless piece of knitting.  It is very nice yarn and good to knit with, so I have been looking for a use for one ball of Felted Tweed ever since.  (They also had a wicker basket full of odd balls of Rowan yarn that we were invited to help ourselves from, so I am looking for a use for several other single balls of lovely yarn, too.)

Louisa Harding's Old Moor jumper

When I saw Louisa Harding's Little Cake  book, I liked many of the patterns and thought immediately that the Old Moor pattern would be suitable for my odd ball of Felted Tweed. It is designed for Willow Tweed,  which is also DK, so I think the pattern will be adaptable, and it uses one ball of a second colour.  So that will be my next project.