I made this for Simon’s colleague Abhinay, his child was named Babhinay and had a Twitter account at 3 months (in utero) and tweets regularly about the day-to-day minutiae of being a baby, you can follow him here.

I’m really pleased with how this turned out in the end, despite appearances it wasn’t a simple knit, you can read the full rant on ravelry if you’re interested in knitting-pattern-based rage.

I really like the yarn, which is the Rico Essentials Merino DK, it knits up slightly smaller than a standard DK but is really smooth and soft and is superwash, what more could you want. Oh it’s only £3.50 a ball, bargain! I also got the coconut shell buttons for 10p each, I think they’re perfect.

I must say I’m getting pretty good at the sewing up these days, the shoulders on this don’t look too bulky and the side seams would be perfect if the basketweave pattern matched up .

I’m considering rewriting the pattern so I can knit it in the round as I do really like the finished article. However,  a better plan might be to transfer the basketweave pattern onto an existing cardigan pattern that I like (thanks Lizzy ).

I’ll post an update as soon as I have an adorable photo of said baby wearing it so we can judge objectively.

Amazingly I started this quilt exactly three years ago today, can you believe it? Three years to make a bloody quilt (and not even a very big quilt)!

I have to say I lost interest in it, as you can tell from the fact I haven’t posted about it since 2009. I optimistically wrote back then ‘I think I’ll need at least 15 squares to make a decent size quilt’. I’ve scaled back my ambitions since then and settled for a 9 square lap quilt.

To be honest, I started this without really thinking about the end design. I SHOULD have chosen two or three fabrics and broken them up with a plain colour, but in my impatience to get started I ploughed ahead regardless. I got to a point where I really hated it, the colours, the patterns, how busy it was, it disgusted me. At this point it went into a drawer and didn’t see the light of day for a good nine months.

I finally decided it had to be finished, even if I didn’t like it I could give it away. To reduce the pain I figured I should just complete it with the nine squares I had already, and be done with it.

For some bizarre reason I then took it upon myself to hand-quilt it as well, ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ eh? But actually that was a really good call, I love how handmade it looks and the bigger stitches somehow make the design less busy, so up to that point every single stitch on the quilt was done by hand. Impressed? You should be!

I finished the edging on the machine last night and I must say that main emotion I feel is relief. Suffice to say I won’t be making a hand pieced quilt again. I do actually quite like it now, but, lets face it, it’s just going to end up as a glorified kitty bed, I hope they appreciate the effort.

As I now mostly work from home I decided I needed a mini teapot, my mum found me this delightfully lurid lime green number which redeems itself only on it’s excellent pouring mechanism.

In order to minimise it’s impact on my lovely new kitchen (and to keep my tea warmer or course!) I decided it needed a cosy. I couldn’t find a pattern for a mini tea cosy anywhere so I made this one up, you can download the Mini Teapot Cosy here.

I used some brown cheap british yarn which is too scratchy for clothing but very warm, so ideal for a cosy. However, it doesn’t really show the cable as well as I would like so I might have to make it again in grey which will look better and match the kitchen too.

Anyway, this does the job for now, I had forgotten how boring making pompoms is, this one reminds me of my Brownie hat. The uniform when I was Brownie age consisted of a shapeless brown dress, a brown leather belt with a pouch on it, a yellow crossover tie and a brown bobble hat. It looked like this:

(This is back in the days when ugly people were still allowed to be in publications)

My mother decided the uniform bobble hat was ‘a rip off’ and that she would knit me one instead. I was the laughing stock of my pack, it was huge, really thick so my head looked too small and it had an enormous pompom the size of my fist which moulted brown wool everywhere we went. If I were a weaker child I would have been bullied for this, but I led the mockery of it so it was fine. For some reason my sister was not subjected to the homemade version and got a bloody normal one. She really IS the favourite child.

Actually this teacosy looks a LOT like it, I’m clearly still scarred by the experience.

Shortbread is, without doubt, my favourite biscuit. Not only is it buttery, crumbly and delicious in its plain form, but you can whip up a batch in about 20 minutes, ideal for a late night bakery craving.

So it could only possibly be bettered by the addition of food-of-the-gods flavour combination: peanut butter and chocolate. I got these from a fantastic blog The View from the Great Island. Sue has a huge array of recipes (the cookies and cakes are especially good) and she also takes fantastic photographs so the blog is droolsome!

These cookies couldn’t be simpler – it’s a basic shortbread with peanut butter creamed in with the sugar and butter and then chuck in some chocolate chips. The genius part of this is the ‘roll and refrigerate’ technique, there’s something very Nigella about slicing perfect circles of shortbread straight from the fridge and 15 minutes later presenting your guests (well Simon) with a seemingly effortless tasty treat.

For the more chocolate addicted, Sue also has an extremely popular Double Dark Chocolate shortbread recipe too. Check it out, and if you make them I want to try, deal?

Zoidberg: Wub wub wub wub wub
Hermes: My god! Soon he’ll be as strong and flexible as Hercules and Gumby combined!
Zoidberg: Gumbercules!? I love that guy!

Around 2 days before Christmas Simon decided he wanted some ‘Professor Zoidberg Mitts’, brilliant.

Now, when Simon announced his requirement for a pair of salmon pink fingerless gloves something happened, something that NEVER happens, I thought: ‘i’ve got the perfect yarn in my stash for that’ AND I DID! Amazing eh?

I used a great free pattern called Man Paws for the base of the glove and I finished these in January sometime, but I also ran out of yarn, ANNOYING. I then had to buy another ball which I put off for a long time as the ‘perfect’ yarn was a fairly expensive Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino, I don’t think he really appreciates the softness…

I made up the flip tops/zoidberg head bit using the pick-up-and-knit method from Ysolda’s Snapdragon fliptops but changed the construction. And the eyes came from Knitty’s Flappy Flounder.

If you imagine Simon wearing these wiggling his fingers and muttering ‘wub wub wub wub wub’ to himself, you get the idea. I’m pretty sure these have a very limited life span being, as they are, a completely novelty (and fairly unpractical) item of clothing.

At the recent Unravel knitting show my mother corralled us into helping her stuff a cushion she had made at a filling station at the event. I must admit I knew she was doing this (vaguely) but hadn’t really paid proper attention so I dragged my feet when she asked us to help her.

The Woolsack project is part of the cultural Olympiad and it’s brief is to welcome every single Olympian to the UK with the gift of a hand-knitted cushion made entirely of British wool. You can find out more here. There is still time to knit a cushion and they have yarn available, you just have to pay the postage.

In actual fact the stuffing was really fun, Amber and I gushed over all the brilliant cushions that had been made and they offered us doughnuts and the stuffing wool was really soft… mmmmm. We asked them how they would decide who got what cushion: would the gold medallist get the ‘best’ ones, and the shit ones go to a first-round-knockout handball team member or similar?  Apparently it’s going to be more a case of getting what you’re given, oh well.

Also the lovely lady who helped us gave Amber and I some wool to make our own cushions, exciting!

I knew immediately what I wanted to do. I had recently seen Polly aka Rubbishknitter’s version of the Paper Dolls sweater with the BBC Micro owl logo as the motif and loved it – it doesn’t get more British than that!

I copied the back from Julie (who I think is the nice lady we met at the event), she has made some lovely cushions for this project and I think the back is really pretty without competing with the front for attention.

Amber used the same basic pattern but used an umbrella motif instead (also very British). We have sent them off with my mum to be filled at a stuffing station very soon.

I guess Usain Bolt will get mine, or maybe Michael Phelps. I can see him now, on the podium, holding my cushion in one hand and a gold medal in the other (because of course he’ll be so attached to it he’ll take it everywhere). He might even cut it into shorts, who knows, wool is very aerodynamic you know.

This is an afternoon project, I knocked this up one Sunday when I had no knitting to do (a dark day). As usual with amigarumi it’s all about the embroidery of the face. This is not my best work, but he’s still cute.

If you can’t crochet or are new to it this is a good starter project, you can’t go too far wrong and it’s a nice gift for a baby I think, they can get their chubby little hands around the bottom, you could even put a bell in the head to make it a bit more interesting.

I had grand plans of making a load of them, all in different ice-cream colours, but, inevitably, I got distracted by another project…

I made these for my friend Nell for Christmas but I utterly failed photograph them before I gave them to her and was therefore unable to post about them, I’m an idiot.

Anyway she kindly sent me this picture of them in action, hurrah!

This pattern is form the Knitting 24/7 book which I got for Christmas last year. Like most of the patterns in this book, it is fairly badly written (which is a shame as there are lots of nice things in it).

For example: It specifies two needle sizes but doesn’t say which to start with, obviously you can work it out but in a paid for pattern I’d expect it to say, it’s also just not very clearly written, which is fine if you’ve knitted socks before but just seems lazy. In addition the book never specifies the yarn weight used, only the yarn she actually used, which is no help at all. Again I can work this out by looking it up on ravelry but should I have to? No.

FYI it’s an aran weight, I used some lovely Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran which was soft and smooshy and perfect!

That said the pattern on the sock looks lovely and now I’ve done it once I would definitely make them again, a good quick knit for a lovely warm pair of socks.

On Sunday my hangover and I dragged our sorry arses down to Farnham for the spectacular knitting show Unravel. I was lucky enough to win a free ticket from the lovely Clare at Nimu Yarns but sadly in my morning alcohol-addled confusion I forgot the ticket (I’m sorry Clare, I din’t have the guts to tell you when we saw you at the show, I was ashamed) so had to spend £9 on the door, what a loser!

But it was worth it! The show was much bigger than I though it would be and was entirely wool/yarn craft based (none of those poxy card making stalls or any of that crap. They also made such a huge effort to make it look great, balloons covered in knitting lined the bridge to the show, the cafe had knitted tea-cosies galore and the whole interior of the show had been yarn-bombed to within an  inch of it’s life.

We spent the morning looking around the main marketplace, there were loads of smaller artisan producers so you were looking at different things all the time and lots of people had made the effort to bring loads of samples of their patterns so you could see what they are like in real life. We also did a lot of yarn touching, so soft…

We had lunch outside in the sunshine and pissed everyone off by laughing raucously and generally ‘causing a scene’ whilst people around us sat quietly knitting.

Things we bought:

Susan Crawford‘s mammoth vintage knitting pattern book ‘a stitch in time’, we got a cute eco bag with it and had a good chat with her stall buddies who were very cool. They also teased us about the secrecy surrounding her coronation collection (due out in May) and wouldn’t give us ANY hints, the meanies

I bought the Purl Alpaca’s Neptune Cardigan pattern which I have been lusting after for ages and mum bought two balls of their DELICIOUS alpaca yarn, it’s so soft I just want to smoosh my face in it! The woman from there was lovely and told us all about keeping alpacas and that they make great pets so we have decided to buy some (you have to get a few as they are pack animals). We are going to get three boys and call them Richard III, Lord Corston and Dumbledore. Mother will look after them of course I will just reap the yarn bounty.

Mum bought two skeins of Nimu Yarn’s Seatoller which is a fantastic luxury yarn and was a show sale – we LOVE a show sale –  in a beautiful acid yellow colour and Amber got her the 3/4 Hap Shawl pattern to make with it, it’s going to be beautiful. Also very impressed that we could pay via PayPal with Nimu, 2012 techno-bonus.

We spent ages at the Millamia stall cooing over their fantastic patterns and bought their book, Wonderland. I’m planning on making the Alexander sweater for a little boy soon. My mum and sister bought the yarn and pattern to make their adorable fairisle cushion too. They also had a show sale on all their yarn the clever people!

I bought some british 4ply yarn in grey, cream and tomato for an as-yet-undecided fairisle project from The Mary Kilvert stall.

Some bits and bobs form the vintage knitting accoutrements stalls and other random yarn. We went home laden with bags.

Things I didn’t buy but want:

A curly, rare-breed, grey sheepskin rug from Well Manor Farms, they were ever-so-slightly out of my price range but worth every penny!

So, in summary, it was great and we will definitely be going next year, see you there

In a bid to eat less crap I have decided to try and make my cooking less full of butter and sugar (by which I mean less fun), and so I thought it would be nice to make some granola for healthy, fruity, yoghurty breakfasts.

Now I’m aware that making granola does not really count as baking, it’s really more assembly, but it was still fun and so easy I could totally do it every week. My friend Hannah gave me a recipe from a book she bought called ‘Domestic Sluttery’ but to be honest you don’t really need a recipe, (if you really want one there are loads online of course).

Basically you mix oats nuts and seeds with honey and vegetable oil and add spices (I used cinnamon and nutmeg), bake all that in the oven for about 20 mins stirring occasionally to make sure it all gets nicely browned. Then once it’s cool add dried friuts of your choice.

I used, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, pine nuts and pecans, sour cherries, golden sultanas and dried blueberries. It is pretty fucking delicious and note NO sugar needed. I’ve been eating it with some plain yoghurt and sliced banana for breakfast and it’s perfect.

The great thing about this is that you can personalise it and make it differently every week. I recently went for breakfast at The Albion, Simon and I have been there a few times but this time I had the most amazing dried apricots which had been soaked in vanilla so I might try making some of these to go in next week’s batch.