The first few weeks as a family of four have passed relatively peacefully; so far Littlest Woolly is fulfilling the ‘placid second baby’ stereotype. Her big brother is still being kind to her, showering her with kisses and bringing her toys to play with. We’re trying to keep his life as normal as possible which means lots of out and about for the newborn; in three weeks she’s been to one barbecue, one dinner party, two play dates, two parties, two official appointments, work twice and the farm park three times. Next week she has two social commitments and her first holiday.

All of this touting a baby around has meant I’ve been gathering compliments, but not all have been for my daughter. She has been wrapped in knitted love for many of her
trips, but none of it was made by me. I’ve been too busy making for other people’s babies. If you’re an artist or a crafter, you’ll understand how this happens.

I haven’t actually been keeping a tally, but my feeling is that the this blanket has had more compliments than the accompanying baby.

Woollydaze Too, you have managed to upstage your cute newborn niece. Ravelry link to the project here. The cute kimono-style jacket that Littlest Woolly is wearing was also made by Woollydaze Too, not for Little Woolly but for a friend’s baby. It’s been  passed on and reused a number of times, which is only right a proper with baby clothes that get so little wear. Ravelry link for this project here.

Over that past few days, a couple of presents have arrived in the post which have delighted me because the people who have made them are learning to knit (aren’t we all, really, but what I mean is that they are mastering the basics). This was sent, with apologies for it being out of season, by one of the vet students who stayed with us during lambing:

Isn’t it great? I can’t wait for the weather to be cold enough to be able to package Littlest Woolly up in this for a trip outdoors. And this little fellow arrived courtesy of a university friend who wrote in the accompanying card ‘Enclosed is my first and last attempt at a teddy’.

I hope not. I’m impressed by the amount of increasing and decreasing that has been done to give this bear his shape, and I love the little buttons on the scarf which are a stylish finishing touch.

We are, of course, grateful for all of the cards and presents and good wishes that we’ve received over the past few weeks. The clothes that have been given will all be useful and Littlest Woolly, could she talk, would be thanking the givers for saving her from wearing her brother’s hand-me-downs and constantly being mistaken for a boy. We’ve been given clothes in a good range of sizes so she’ll be appropriately dressed for her first year.

An aside: In my last post that I mentioned that knitters pop up everywhere; further evidence for this was gathered when Littlest Woolly and I went to register her birth. The registrar was a knitter, and several people in the same office also knit. Together they’d produced a knitted version of the recent Royal Wedding that was tucked into the corner of an office. Sadly I didn’t have my camera with me, but trust me it was amusingly amazing. The Queen was resplendent in a purple dress, and  I wonder who got to knit the corgis? I picked up on the media furore (well, it was a furore in terms of a story about knitting) surrounding this book, but I didn’t expect to ever see a finished version. Is it terribly geeky of me find this funny? No, you don’t need to reply, I already know the answer. I would say that I need to get out more, but we haven’t really been stuck at home.

This project took just under nine months to complete. No, I didn’t do a gauge swatch and the finished result is a little bit larger than expected. Although not as large as I was led to believe she could have been if she had taken a little longer to finish. We didn’t want to know the colour until we met our little person, but this didn’t work out quite as planned.

The last few days have been busy, exciting, scary, painful, happy, exhausting and filled with love. The newest member of the Woollydaze household made her appearance on Thursday, officially nine days early but a well cooked 8lb 7oz.

She had been specifically instructed by her daddy not to arrive on Thursday since it was sheep shearing day on the farm. Mr Woollydaze had quite enough to do shuffling 500 ewes and their lambs from field to field, plus the rams and some sheep from a neighbour. There was absolutely no time for the arrival of a baby. However, Littlest Woolly chose not to listen. This does not bode well for the future.

I had arranged a crafty day with a friend and we were supposed to be doing a show-and-tell of our projects, discussing ideas and inspiration and generally having a jolly good natter. She wasn’t expecting to be the labour partner, but she did a fabulous job of keeping chatting to me in the early stages and of packing me off to hospital when it became apparent that this actually was ‘it’. Poor Mr Woollydaze wasn’t aware there was anything going on until he got called inside to drive. Mind you, I wasn’t really aware until shortly before this point that the pains weren’t going to fade away. Thankfully I had arranged for my parents to visit to cover looking after Little Woolly ‘just in case’. I will be eternally grateful to my mum for saying she thought it was time to go; I would have waited just a little bit longer. That would not have been a good idea.

We arrived at the hospital with ten minutes to go before the birth. No thanks to the white van man who smugly drove in the outside lane of the dual carriageway next to another car and blocked our way. I hate being a cliche, but I hope he realised quite why a 1.4 diesel car was driving at such a ridiculous speed and what a *&^%$£! he had been. I stand by every single swear word I threw at him at the time. I wasn’t the most dramatic entrance of the day; apparently somebody else gave birth in the lift on the way to the delivery suite, which makes it seem like I had plenty of time.

The biggest surprise of the day for me was the sex. I had a late scan where I was knitting when the sonographer called me in, and it turned out she was a knitting fan too. They turn up everywhere, you know. The sonographer referred to the baby as ‘he’ and asked me if I was going to teach both of my boys to knit. Despite knowing that I thought I knew the colour, Mr Woollydaze resolutely didn’t ask; I’m impressed by his self control on this issue. A boy or a girl would have been equally welcome so I’m not at all disappointed, just happy to see her and pleased that she and I are healthy and now at home.

So if the next few months contain fewer blogs from the Woollydaze household, I’m sure you’ll understand why. It’s not because I don’t want to, it’s because I’m a little busy right now. But I will try to check in regularly and I do have things planned, and we’ll just see how it all goes.

I have/had a cardigan that I have/had been knitting Since Time Began, or ‘for the last 5 years’ [I remember buying the yarn from Knitwell Online, shortly after discovering that one could buy knitting stuff online (thanks, Woollydaze): that was the beginning of what I can only describe as an epiphany in my life]. Unusually, I bought the yarn recommended for the pattern, and not unusually I didn’t swatch (I’m not sure I really knew that one was supposed to swatch for gauge before starting a garment (I know, the naivety of youth/inexperience). And I merrily knitted the back and two fronts, finishing the second front with a flourish and the decreases in the wrong direction (it sloped inwards from outside edge to button band). What followed was at least five attempts to knit the sleeves, foiled by:

1)      This being my first ever go at lace knitting.

2)     An inability to follow the pattern despite having (mostly) knitted the arrowhead lace back and fronts.

3)     A complete lack of understanding of how to increase in a lace pattern, resulting in any increases being swallowed up in the follwing row of lace and one puzzled and frustrated knitter. Now I know that I should have increased in stocking stitch until I had enough stitches for the lace repeat.

4)     Starting a new job that rendered me unable to think, or at least knit lace patiently, for the first 6 months of employment.

The weekend just gone was a rainy bank holiday here in the UK, and I’d weeded the garden before the rain came so had accrued some knitting time. Having just finished a wee jacket for some newly parented friends, there was space to think about how to fix this cardigan. And I realised that I didn’t want to.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a pretty pattern and a good quality yarn and (despite not swatching) I was producing a garment that would (probably) fit me. Despite this, I couldn’t picture myself sitting down and knitting those sleeves, and having knitted and finished it, I couldn’t see myself wearing the cardigan. While this was the right pattern to knit 5 years ago, I’ve learned more about what suits me and how to knit items to fit, and I couldn’t get excited about finishing this one off.

So I didn’t. Oh, I love that when you frog a project and tag it as such, Ravelry moves it right down to the bottom of your profile. Out of sight, out of mind…

Like many crafters, I suspect, I’m happy when people admire what I’m making. For me, this is one of the big attractions of Ravelry. I like listing the projects that I’ve finished, the story behind them and the trials they’ve caused me. Writing up an entry provides a tidy finish, otherwise it can feel like the item is gifted and disappears from my life without a proper send-off. Of course, there are many other great benefits of Ravelry, including the ability to search for hours for the ‘perfect’ pattern or the ‘perfect’ wool to use for a pattern. But collecting ‘favourite’ hearts on projects is definitely one of my hobbies.

However, I do make things that don’t fit into the knitting/crotcheting sphere of Ravelry, and this is where the Woollydaze blog allows me to show them off. Whilst the name of the blog and the strapline suggest the subject is wool, regular readers will notice that we (or rather, I) often veer away from this topic depending on what else is being made at the time.

So here we have a post about cross stitch and latch hooking. I was slightly embarrassed *ahem* by my admission a few weeks ago that I had so many unfinished projects littering the house, and so dug out a couple of them to finish off.

This cross stitch, done approximately fifteen years ago and tucked away in my sewing box since, is a kit from DMC kit from the Lanarte Life Style Collection, and is called ‘Secrets’. It would probably be classed as a vintage item now. My father-in-law tells me that he’s seen the image as a print, but I’ve not. I still like it but it’s not something I would put up on my wall, so I thought it would make a heritage gift for a friend who has recently had a baby girl. Framing it in blue has brought out the colours in the picture and I like the simple limewashed style of the frame. I hope it will be treasured.

Then – happy first Christmas Little Woolly (oops, only two and a bit years late) – I’ve finished the tractor rug. I only had the edging to do, and it did take longer than I thought it would. Lots of hand stitching around corners. However, Little Woolly came to look as I was sewing it and declared it was ‘nice and soft’, and it’s now next to his bed so he can scrunch it underneath his feet in the morning and the evening. Apparently it’s ‘tickly’. That’s the sort of positive feedback that I wouldn’t have got had it been finished on schedule. Ironically, the latest tractor we have on the farm is actually red rather than green, but we’ll skate quickly over that fact. Little Woolly was running down the hallway with his nursery bag on his back last week pretending to be a tractor with a trailer, and I asked him if he was John Deere or Massey Ferguson. He said John Deere (green tractors), so I think I’ve got away with it.

There are a few other FOs (wool based this time) hanging around but they’re all for babies who are not yet born and so haven’t yet been gifted. So I’ll leave you with that tantalising tidbit of information, and the promise that you will see them as soon as possible.

We’re looking at lambing from the ‘phew, we’ve made it’ end. We’ve processed nearly five hundred ewes through the lambing pen in the past three weeks. There are about twenty-five of them left, milling around, enjoying the space, silage and regular sheep nuts. They might be under the impression that this is a fine, five-star little holiday, but eventually nature will intervene, the lambs will pop out and then they’ll be back in the field with their flock-mates, enjoying the sunshine.

The weather over the past few weeks has been remarkably kind and, according to the ol’ farmer’s wives tales, probably encouraged the speedy arrival of all the lambs. We were anticipating that the busy time would be less frantic but last for longer, but since that first Monday when things really kicked off they never really slowed down again. And so although I had every intention of wandering around the lambing pens and taking photos and talking you through how our lambing system is organised, all I’ve had time to do is my ‘real’ job (the one I get paid to do), cook, clean, care for Little Woolly and sleep. Mr Woollydaze does the lambing night shift, working a sixteen hour day from lunchtime to just before breakfast, and is no good for anything other than talking about sheep. And just to make things extra-special fun this year, the three of us in the Woollydaze household came down with stonking coughing snotty colds of the type that mean you can’t breath and sound like a sixty-a-day cigarette smoker; there was no time for illness or sympathy so we just had to get on with it.

Any weekend over lambing will see us inundated with visitors, and we’re happy to see them because lambing is a lovely, happy time to show people around the farm. Two weekends ago I had faraway friends visiting; at the same time there was a Buddhist monk wandering around the farmyard. One friend queried why and I admitted I had no idea and promised to find out. The past weekend was busy with different visitors. I invited a few of Little Woolly’s friends from nursery, and as a result I know that showing a group of two-year-olds around a farm is a guaranteed way to make anyone appreciate the basic charm of where we live. So many children’s books have farming as a theme that it’s something the average city-living young child can understand. Show a group of them some real sheep and some lambs, various tractors, the chickens (and allow them to pick up the eggs), and then run them around the garden and you’ve got a group of happy, exhausted children. Fortunately it was a beautifully sunny afternoon, and the farm appeared almost picture book idyllic. It felt like good, old-fashioned, clean-living, distilled Enid Blyton.

Tomorrow we say goodbye to the last of our lambing visitors; my parents who have kindly been travelling down once a week to look after Little Woolly on the day of the week that technically Mr Woollydaze and in reality my mother-in-law usually looks after him. Our lambing students (from Canada, the US, London and just up the road) have been waved off with the usual grateful thanks. One of our willing friend-of-the-family volunteers had the grace to wait until now to break her leg. We’re working our way through the last of the cakes that a very kind local friend made and delivered when things started to get too much. I’m a bit of a cake snob and refuse to buy it, but cake and lots of it is a necessity to get everyone through lambing. Life can get repetitive as the days pass with the same routines and yet more lambs appearing. Different cakes mark the changing days. To be fair, several family members and friends brought cake and pudding-based gifts and I thank them all for their contributions, but this one friend gets this year’s morale-boosting-baking award for providing five cakes in one week including the most stickily gooey chocolate cake it would ever be your misfortune to meet.

So what now? For me, as much sleep as I can possibly get away with for at least the next week. I’d planned to start the regime already but this morning was woken before my alarm clock chirped by Mr Woollydaze getting a phone call about next door’s burglar alarm going off, and then shortly afterwards Little Woolly yelling in an upset voice ‘Mummy, I’ve done a poo’. I don’t think the rest of the Woollydaze household are quite on board with my plan.

As I mentioned in my last post, our farm worker and his wife had a little baby girl at the beginning of lambing. Obviously we’ve known that she’s on her way for quite a number of months. So how come her handmade knitted present was, as usual, being made at the very last minute? Mr Woollydaze is very tolerant of the ‘I must knit 10 rows a night!’ proclamations and has learnt to make encouraging noises at suitable moments.

I think problem number one was that this is a special baby who required a special present. This means research, thought and planning. Searching of Ravelry. Conversations with Woollydaze Too about the suitability of a pattern or the wool. Eventually something clicks – in the case when Brooklyn Tweed published his Umaro blanket pattern in December 2010 – and I knew I’d found the right gift.

Problem number two was finding the right wool when I planned to use completely the wrong wool. I did start off looking for a super chunky or chunky wool but couldn’t find anything that was machine washable, so in the end I went to my local wool shop and bought two big balls of cheap and cheerful aran in an ‘earthy’ shade.

Problem number three was the other knitting that needed to be done first. Things that perhaps aren’t so interesting or challenging, but have closer deadlines. Christmas present knitting, winter knitting, and ‘I must finish this before I start something else’ knitting. All must be completed.

Eventually it dawned that the due date of the baby was now about six weeks away and that, really, any responsible gift-giver would have the item finished, washed, blocked, dried and wrapped by now. And so the pattern was scrutinised, the needles were found, the first tentative casting-on was done. This is a lace pattern that uses techniques I’ve not used before: yarn overs between knit and purl stitches, for example. After knitting about 20 rows, it was clear that I wasn’t doing it properly and anyway, I’d lost track of where I was in the pattern.

So the whole thing was tinked and the clock was still ticking. I cast on again, consulted Mr Google about how to knit, and figured out what I was doing with the pattern. Then the midwife proclaimed that the baby was going to be early. Early? EARLY? There was no time for this baby to be early! And so the frantic knitting stage began.

Knitted in a super chunky wool as the pattern is written, this blanket would knit up quickly. In aran, it takes longer. I had increased the number of stitches width-wise and repeats length-wise and calculated that each row took about six minutes to knit, so an hour of knitting a night might get the job done in time. Mr Woollydaze, ever practical, reminded me that the present didn’t have to be finished for the birth of the baby. I claimed that was not the point, whilst knitting.

By about repeat three of eight, I had the gist of the pattern and it was rattling off the needles quite nicely. Time was the only factor; why must we work? Why can’t we sit and knit all day? Does Little Woolly really need a bath tonight? Minutes were clutched whilst drinking tea, whilst waiting for potatoes to boil, whilst driving to a work photoshoot (although that last one wasn’t a great plan as the roads were windy and I ended up feeling car-sick).

And then suddenly, almost magically, the lace patterning was done, the moss stitch edging was done, the blanket was cast off. I washed it (in the washing machine), blocked it, photographed it, wrapped it, and twiddled my thumbs waiting for the baby to arrive. She was not early. She was not particularly late. She was practically on time. And once she decided it was time, she really got on with it. And I’m delighted that her present was ready and waiting. I almost feel like I planned it that way.

Ravelry link here.

Every year, come snow or shine, the lambs start to arrive. It’s the hardest work in our farming year, and the happiest time. Each year there’s a sense of wonder at new life, and the reminder that life is precious and precarious.

The weeks leading up to lambing are always hectic. There’s all the preparation, which on our farm means setting up the lambing pens in the sheds. We aim for the maximum number of lambs so we look after each and every ewe as well as we can; this means lambing inside, each ewe being put in a pen shortly before or after her lambs are born, and somebody checking up on them for as much as is possible of the 24 hours in the day.

A few weeks before the official start date of lambing is the time when problems start; ‘abortions’ (actually miscarriages), prolapses, twin lamb disease, and sometimes a ewe that is so large she rolls onto her back and is unable to roll over again. Sometimes a plucky little early lamb will be born alive and fight. Occasionally one survives.

Then suddenly there’s the morning where Mr Woollydaze goes to feed the sheep and comes home with some live, healthy lambs, and that is officially the start of lambing. This year it was three days before the official start date (blame the nice weather over the weekend). We usually have a slow few days where we can ease ourselves into the familiar routines and Mr Woollydaze can prepare for the idea of working until 5 a.m., but this year the lambs starting popping out like corks from champagne bottles on the day before the official start date. We have a willing and well-trained group of friends and family who come and help out, providing labour in return for cake and company. I do not know how we would cope without them. We also have vet students from various universities who come to do their lambing placements and uncomplainingly work 12 hour shifts. All the cogs work together and together we get through it, one day at a time.

And this, fellow wool-lovers, is how it all begins. Although wool comes to you as a product off a shelf in pretty colours, it has a living history. Our lambs are produced for meat, but some wool is spirited away at shearing by Woollydaze Two to be transformed on her spinning wheel. This wool made its way back again in the form of a felted draught-excluder for my parents-in-law, who have tended this farm for most of their working lives.

And to heighten the emotion of this lambing season, there’s been an added human element. Our farm worker and his wife had a baby girl on the crazy champagne-cork lambing day. She made a hastier-than-expected arrival and was therefore born at home. In our sleepy little village, such excitement is rare. We’re looking forward to meeting the dinky new arrival and welcoming her into the mostly fun, occasionally fraught, always special world of growing up in the countryside with a farm as your playground.

This post is dedicated to friends who recently lost their cherished baby girl shortly after birth:

A little soul scarce fledged for earth

Takes wing with heaven again for goal

Even while we hailed as fresh from birth

A little soul.

(A Baby’s Death by Algernon Charles Swinburne)

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, I love planning a project, I like doing a project, and I’m terrible at finishing a project. I lose interest just before the finish line and wander off, looking for a more interesting race to run.

Yes, the tractor rug is still under my bed. No, the drop stitch scarf isn’t finished.

At the moment, lying around the house in various places, I have various unfinished bits of craft work:

Some have been a WIP for longer than others. The most extreme of this bunch has been on the ‘to do’ list since roughly 1994. I’m determined to finish that one in the next few months, because it’s going to be a gift. For a baby. Who will not appreciate it for his or her 18th birthday.

My cold office cosy cardigan has suffered from this fate, only I’ve done the unforgiveable and started to wear it before it is finished. It was so close to being finished. I washed it, blocked it, sewed it together, tried it on, and decided it was too short.

Since I had spare wool and it’s not a precise pattern, I picked up the cast on stitches and knitted downwards for a few rows. I then bought some bias binding to sew into the seams to define them because the edges were a bit sloppy. In the process of buying the bias binding, I managed to find some ‘perfect’ buttons that were soooooo much better than the buttons I had originally bought (which were acceptable, really, just a bit plain).

I sewed in nearly all of the bias binding, and didn’t do the last tiny bit. I pinned it in, then took it out again when I wanted to wear the cardigan.

I discovered a problem with the ‘perfect’ buttons, all to do with the fact that I had bought three then WoollyDaze Too had reminded me that it’s wise, particularly when buying expensive ‘perfect’ buttons, to have a spare. The extra one I bought was clearly not from the same tube as the original three.

 In the past few days I’ve made an extra special effort to sort all of this out and officially finish this cardigan. So here it is:

Ta-da!

The irony is that the temperature in the office for the past fortnight has been hovering around the 24 degrees Centigrade mark, so really I should be knitting cotton summer tops.

WoollyDaze promised you wool, and wool you shall have. More specifically, you shall have alpaca.

Cast your minds back to last summer, when Woollydaze suggested that we visit Toft Alpacas. (What do you mean you don’t remember … oh, wait … you weren’t there.) She didn’t need to suggest twice and so one sunny afternoon we bundled Little Woolly and our Mum into a car and drove to Dunchurch to admire the alpacas and stroke the wool. It transpired that Woollydaze had an ulterior motive as she and Mr Woollydaze visited the Alpaca Centre in Penrith while on holiday, and had been fortunate enough to have a good chat about keeping alpacas. They can be kept alongside sheep, where the young males will guard the flock, protecting it against predators such as foxes. If there’s one thing Woollydaze and Mr Woolydaze are not short of, that’s sheep. Our visit to Toft Alpacas culminated in my purchasing a lightweight felt beret kit (garments are available in kit form, or knitted up for those who prefer their garments less nascent) and a seconds bulb bag in fully felted form.

The beret pattern was simple to follow, and the yarn was a joy to use – so soft and smooth. The felting was accomplished in my front-loading washing machine (always a nervous moment), and I was pleased that the hat turned out exactly the right size (a tad on the small side for me = would fit my mum perfectly. Christmas present sorted!).

Version two [Ravelry link] of the beret, with added stripes, was embarked upon while still reeling from the success of version one. This second version used stash alpaca purchased from eBay about 5 years ago (green), and a complementary colour purchased for the occasion (cream). The intention was to present this to a work colleague as a Secret Santa gift, therefore the yarn had to cost less than £5 to satisfy the conditions of the swap. I did pay slightly more, but used less than a full ball on the project so reasoned that I wouldn’t get hauled off to account to Secret Santa for overspending! While knitting version two it became clear that the yarn, although allegedly DK-weight as the Toft Alpaca original, was thinner and once felted it was evident that the hat would best fit a child, and a young one at that (it has since found a good home with a four-year-old girl of my acquaintance, and a replacement Secret Santa gift was hurriedly procured).

When the photos were taken, shortly before Christmas 2010, daylight was in short supply (the oft-heard complaint of the knit blogger). I was fortunate to procure the services of a hat model at very reasonable rates (payment in honey), though the styling does rather remind me of Citizen Smith…

So, what exactly is a sail shelf? Imagine you live in a family where the mother would like to display books, the father would like room for a subwoofer and the child would like somewhere for his toy boxes (if he were able to articulate his opinion). How do you cater for all the different criteria?

Answer: You stumble across this on the internet, steal the idea and as a consequence make these: 

Aren’t they great? I love, love, love them. Possibly more than the shelves in the bedroom, if such a thing is possible.

They’re made solid oak and yet look like they’re floating. This has been achieved by drilling some very large holes in the wall and the shelves and cementing in very large steel rods. Occasionally, living in a house with solid walls has advantages, although at least one drill was destroyed in the process. The ‘sail’ on the end is very visible as you walk into the room; whilst it’s mostly decorative it does make the shelves into a feature. 

And so, at last, my books have been unpacked and dusted and put on shelves. They have never been on display before, having spent their life in stacking boxes. When Woollydaze Too and I lived at home home we shared a bedroom, and in the centre competing piles of stacking boxes grew until my mum told us asked us to not buy any more books until we had our own homes to put them in. It’s only taken me a decade and a half to achieve this.

Mr Woollydaze, here’s a heartfelt ‘thank you’ from me. I know that you called in the professionals to help out, but you listened to my ideas, thought them through, designed the shelves, sourced the wood, directed the show, sanded and stained. I keep sneaking a peek through the doorway and thinking ‘wow’ at the finished result. You’ve done a fabulous job.

Coming up next time: back to wool. Promise.