Shoshiplatypus

What’s On You Workdesk this Wednesday?

Kitty Throw

Still working on the cat blanket. It’s coming on fine. I have been sewing embellishments onto squares most of the week, quickly hiding them away when I hear my hubby coming! They are now all sewn on. Here are some of the ones from the final group of squares.

These are the squares tied in groups of 8, for each of the ten columns of the design. You can see the stitch markers telling me which column they are. The squares on the top left have already been made up into a strip.

I wasn’t happy with my original design for the final square, which has our initials on it. It was supposed to be a heart but came out looking more like an apple! I had thought of adding a leaf to complete the illusion but decided to redo that bit of embroidery.

I’m much happier with it now.

Before making up the blanket, I have to edge the squares with a row of black stitches, making sure they all have exactly the same number of stitches around. This will take me some time.

Purple Circles Jumper and a Touch of Persian Poppy

When my hubby is in the room and I want to be doing something creative while we are watching TV, I have been working on my Purple Circles jumper. I had picked up half the stitches for the second sleeve a while back, and completed this a few days ago, and have started knitting the sleeve down from the shoulder. I’ve done a couple of inches so far. Still quite a way to go but once I get past the straight part and begin the decreasing, it will grow quickly.

I had hoped to get this jumper finished in time for this winter just gone, but the kitty throw took precedence. However, depending on how quickly I finish the second sleeve, there may be enough cooler days to wear it before the summer. It isn’t a particularly thick jumper.

It was unravelled and re-knitted from a tunic top I made many years ago, which never really fitted me properly because I wasn’t happy with the neck, for starters. This isn’t a very good photo (taken years ago) but it gives you an idea of what the original garment looked like.

I unravelled quite a bit of it before we moved here in 2013 so it’s been a UFO (UnFinished Object) for rather too many years! I eventually drafted a basic jumper pattern for it and started to re-knit it, using the same circles design which I really liked.

The method of knitting is simple, designed by Kaffe Fassett after his “Persian Poppies” pattern, which I have also knitted. I made this big jacket many years ago, with chunky thickness yarn, using this design. This garment was knitted in one piece, starting at the bottom of the back and working upwards, casting on stitches for the sleeves and dividing for the two fronts. It was pretty enormous to knit by the end! This photo was taken many years ago, on Dartmoor.

Here’s a close-up of the design. I deviated from Kaffe’s original design by adding dark red and turquoise centres to the “poppies.”

You make up 2 large balls of yarn from varied yarns of different lengths, one in the background colour and the other in the pattern colour. It works best if you graduate the yarns from dark to light and back again. You just tie the ends together as you wind the ball of yarn, and work in the loose ends as you go. You then follow a simple 2-colour design, and the magic happens as the colour varies. Sometimes you get high contrast with very light against very dark and vice versa, and at other times it comes out with a much more subtle effect as the intensity of colour becomes more similar between the two balls of yarn. It’s so simple, yet the results are so impressive and give a real “wow” factor that amazes people – a bit of a cheat really! It also means that it’s really simple to knit, without too much thought, and no complicated colour changes. There is no limit to the number of colours you can include. As Kaffe always says, “When in doubt, add 40 more colours”! It’s also a brilliant way of using up odd bits of yarn.

The Purple Circles jumper is knitted with mostly 4-ply weight or equivalent – some bits are thicker, and some thinner, but with the weaving of the secondary colour behind, it more or less evens out. There are several different textures in this one, as well, which add to the interest.

These two photos are taken from the reworked version. You can also see it in the left-hand side of my blog header – this was from a photo I took of the original garment.

For the ribbing you just work stripes in colours already used in the main body of the knitting.

To make it even simpler, you could just knit in stripes rather than a charted design, or knit two or more stitches of each colour, shifting the design over by one stitch on each row to give a diagonally striped effect. The only limit is your imagination.

It looks super-complicated but it’s an absolute cheat. Easy-peasy!

Kitties

Your kitty fix for the week. A good bit of sleeping, some cuddles and playing in the garden.

Lily’s funny little foot!

This week Ruby has chosen another favourite rock in the rockery. She is going to get the shock of her life if she continues to use this one and my hubby happens to turn the waterfall on!!

Ruby seems to have stolen the limelight again this week.

Food

Nothing new to show this week, but I am extremely busy in the kitchen at the moment because all my supplies of home-cooked ready meals in the freezer are running out. I hate it when this happens because I have to do a lot of cooking all at once. When I do my weekly meal plan on Sundays, I consult the freezer record book and when I see that I am going to take out the last one of anything, I know I need to make some more. I look up the recipe and put any ingredients I need to buy on my list for my online grocery order which I begin on Sunday after finishing the meal planning. Since starting to do this, I have found I have wasted a lot less food than previously.

Yesterday I made some more of the Green Goddess Bowls salad and put my hubby’s in a box in the freezer for him, so that he could take it with him when he left to go out for the day.

Today I shall be making wraps with hummus and roasted veg for supper, some more Middle Eastern quinoa stew with butternut squash, and a large pot of carrot and coriander soup. On Thursday I shall make another batch of sweet and sour vegetables. On Friday I shall be busy with other things and don’t intend to cook, and on Saturday I shall be making a Thai green curry (one of my favourites).

This week I also received my latest whole-foods delivery – not quite such a big box this time. I had to sort this and freeze the nuts and stow the other stuff away in Mum’s kitchen cupboards in the flat, and make up my list of what I’ve got in stock. Their free offer this time for spending more than a certain amount was six tins of coconut milk which will come in useful.

Can good come from a scam?

I had a scam phone call this week purporting to be from Sky, which provides our satellite TV, phone and internet. They were trying to get me to make a minor change regarding my IP address which they said was visible and not secure. I began to smell a bit of a rat but it seemed harmless since they didn’t ask me for any details. I said I had to ring off because something had come up, and they wanted me to phone back in half an hour, which I did not. Instead, I phoned Sky and they were grateful that I had reported the scam call and made a log of it, together with the details I gave them. They said that this was quite a common scam and other providers’ customers had been attacked in this way too; the first approach is very softly-softly to lead you in, and following this, they ask you to download some software to “sort the problem” which of course introduces malware onto your computer and ultimately gives them access to your precious funds.

I never respond to unsolicited calls like this. The Sky man said they would never approach customers in this way and would have no idea if my IP address was secure or not. They said that they would always respond to customers phoning them, though.

While we were on the phone, he remarked that I hadn’t phoned them for quite a while, and that my package was out of date. He said they could do much better for us now, with an updated package which included additional material, and reduce the monthly charge by nearly £10! I told him I was watching mostly Netflix and Amazon Prime video these days and less live TV. I hardly ever watch the BBC now and really resent having to pay the TV licence – I would stop this if it wasn’t for the fact that my hubby watches it. I prefer to get more balanced and honest news online – there are many excellent news outlets and independent journalists, interviewers and commentators here and internationally on YouTube and I keep up to date pretty well with what’s going on in the world, and obtain information that our mainstream media prefer to keep us uninformed about because it is contrary to their agenda.

The man from Sky asked me if I had a Netflix account and I told him I was a subsidiary member of a friend’s account, and that I was aware that Netflix were about to introduce a rule to tighten this up and from then on, all members of the account would have to be living in the same house. He said he would add Netflix to my contract free of charge! I now have my own account and have set up my hubby as a member too, although he has never learnt how to use our rather complicated TV system. (He’s a complete technophobe…) He can always watch on the laptop though, and he will be able to make his own custom list of favourite shows if he wants.

The free Netflix add-on and the discounts he has set up for me will last the full 18 months of the renewed contract, after which I will presumably have to pay the full amount. I asked why he was being so generous and he said, “It’s in my discretion.” I said, “Discress away! This I like!” and he laughed – he told me that I had joined Sky over 20 years ago and they were grateful for my loyalty. Having had letters recently informing us that all our other household bills would be increasing from April, this £10 a month reduction comes as welcome news indeed.

Funny how things turn out, isn’t it. I am actually really grateful to that spam caller from India who was trying to fleece me. As a result of his call, I contacted Sky and ended up saving myself nearly £120 a year and getting more from my money than I was before! I almost phoned him back to tell him…

Health update

Nothing of note to report on my long-awaited operation which I am increasingly coming to believe will never actually happen. I am still waiting for my new pants to arrive – they usually take about 4 weeks.

A few days ago, one morning after I’d got up, I began to feel increasingly unwell, quite nauseous and with the beginnings of a headache, and I went out to the outhouse to get something out of the freezer, and had to get down on the concrete floor because I felt as if I was about to pass out. I managed to get back indoors and again had to get down on the kitchen floor. I retreated to the sitting room with a bowl in case of eruptions and felt perfectly dreadful. It was quite scary because it came on so suddenly. By this time my head was splitting. My hubby came in and was very concerned – he is obsessed with Covid and immediately assumed that this was what I had, despite my reassuring him that I had none of the standard early symptoms, which reassured him a bit. (He is convinced I am going to die of Covid – it’s just a matter of time!) Anyway, I soon realised that I was having quite a bad migraine. I looked up on the Internet to see if fainting/passing out was ever a symptom of migraines, never having had this before although I’ve suffered on and off for many years with migraines, and found that it was indeed the case, although it is relatively rare. It also mentioned dizziness associated with migraines, which I have never had, but someone recently told me she had had this.

I have never had a reaction to chocolate before and can only assume it was coincidence that the previous day, I really indulged myself in the gorgeous Easter egg my hubby had given me! I do hope I haven’t set a precedent… I don’t eat much chocolate at all nowadays – only as a special treat for example at Easter of Christmas or birthday, and I certainly don’t want it to give me such an unpleasant payback as this!

By the following day (in fact late that same day) I was fine again. Migraines are a pain. In more ways than one. Someone once asked what it was like to have a migraine, and the person replied, “It’s like being at a football match.” The enquirer said, “That can’t be too bad.” The sufferer said darkly, “Try being the football.”