Granny square love...

Get me, two posts in one day!

This one is just a quicky - Jenni at Baa-me Kniits kindly pointed her readers to Sarah London's giveaway - she is offering a signed copy of her new book and 7 skeins of gorgeous looking yarn. Pop by if you fancy a 'flutter'!!

Fingers crossed!

Sx

ranting at the radio...and other things!

Its not very often that I rant at the radio! In fact its not very often that I rant at all, not really my style! But yesterday on the way to pick up son 3 from work and post my granny squares to Australia (finally! More of that later!) I caught a bit of Weekend Woman's Hour on Radio 4 that had me exclaiming out-loud to the car radio and made me actually consider calling in to say I thought they were talking a load of rubbish!

The topic under discussion was that perennial thorny parental issue of children's parties and the general gist was that the whole 'party problem' has escalated out of control. This in itself got me going because the 'sensible' adults in these situations are the parents who, by definition, should be able to exert some control! They interviewed various Lovely Mummies (and I'm sure they truly are lovely mummies, with the interests of their offspring at heart) who spoke of the traumas of having to invite every single member of the class, having your house trashed by 6 year olds, and of finding the carefully selected party bag jewellery (for the whole class, no less!!!) discarded by kids who really couldn't care less. They all kind of acknowledged that this was as much about parent peer pressure as pressure from children and spoke about how awful it would be if your child's party wasn't seen as 'as good' as the next one...

The suggested solutions to this terrible problem were to only invite a few neighbours and children - mummies that were your friends rather than your child's or to hope that your child would be ill on the big day so that the event would have to be cancelled!

For goodness sake! Have these people gone mad?!! Surely the whole point of having a party for your child is so that they can have their friends  to play with??!!! I don't think I got it right all the time by any means but I have 3 sons who had parties every year until they decided they were too big for them. There was only one year when we had more than half a dozen friends (the only time we ever shared a party with another family) and they were never ostracized for having missed any one out. We did all manner of things according to what the Thing of the Moment was - pirates, dinosaurs, pizza, dancing (yes, I had at least one son that loved his dancing), etc etc. They always had home made cake decorated as they chose (some of these were a challenge! For some reason, they never thought the choc butter icing/choc buttons hedgehog of my childhood hit the spot!), they never had trouble picking the handful of friends that they really wanted to come and the kids all happily went home with cake, a balloon and something nominal like pencils or pens. They played games when they were tiny - pass the parcel, musical bumps, sleeping lions (my favourite!!! It used to amaze me that noisy kids would lie perfectly still and quiet if they thought it was a game!!!) and I can't remember ever having tears because kids couldn't cope with not being the winner! The only concession to 'everyone must get something' was that we did have a sweet or other token thing to find in each layer of the pass the parcel - but only one main prize at the centre, surely that's what makes it exciting. As a child, I remember part of the thrill being that slight adrenaline rush at the thought of the possible forfeit you might have to do!

In spite of all that, my boys had (and still have!) plenty of friends, they got invited to lots of parties and kids always came to their parties and seemed to have fun. Of all their complaints (and trust me, there have been a few over the years!), they have never claimed to be emotionally damaged by not having mahoosive parties!  Nobody stopped talking to me on the playground because their child hadn't been invited or because their little darling was disappointed with their party bag! And to be honest, if that had happened, I would not have felt bereft at the loss of that particular friendship...

Now I appreciate my sons are 22, 20 and 17, so maybe the situation has changed beyond all reality in the last 5 or 6 years? But it seems to me that the responsibility for dealing with all this nonsense lies squarely with the very people who are complaining that it is all too much - the Parents!!! As the adults in the picture, we owe it to our children to teach them about what is reasonable and fair; they need to know that every 'I want' cannot be met with instant gratification, that it is ok to choose special friends that you really want to spend the afternoon with and that it is ok to just have fun playing (without needing to win at everything or have a present for everything). Surely our role as parents is to create a safe, happy environment that encourages play? If they only invite their friends, playing is not an issue and the whole thing is a lot less stressful for the supervising parents. If we don't behave like sensible adults, is it any surprise that kids don't understand boundaries and go on to think the most important thing is to have every thing that their friends have, immediately?

Ok... rant over! On to other things'...

I finally finished up all my yarn scraps in granny squares for Sarah London's 'Crochet a Rainbow' and posted these off to Australia yesterday. There are 28 in total and they are slightly random colour combinations as I was trying to use up all my little bits but I hope they will be useful, and not too late!!!

I never thought I'd be saying this, but in true British, 'never quite satisfied with the weather' style... we are a bit desperate for some rain! Look at the state of the grass in our front garden...

I can't remember it looking this dry this early in the year for a while. The flower beds seem to be surviving for the moment...

I'm loving all the purples and pinks of this time of year - flowering thyme, alliums, aubretia (I think?!) and of course lots of aquilegia spread throughout. (Just noticed next door's attractive wheelie bin...oops, should have cropped that out!!!)

Is this aubretia? I can't really remember! Pretty anyway, let me know if you know what its called!!!

And, of course, more aquilegia love...!

I'll save the back garden photos for next time - the peony is in full bloom now and looks fab!

Hope you're all having a lovely weekend... and not stressing over children's parties!!!

Sx

 

daisy blanket update...

Yesterday, I was mostly... hooking and baking!

Well... sort of anyway. I woke at silly o'clock - I'm a bit rubbish at sleeping at the best of times but for some reason yesterday I was awake at 5 (which was really 4, of course! Do you do this too? spend the entire day after the clocks have changed thinking in 'yesterday's time' or 'today's time'?!!).

Came down for a cup of tea at 6 and watched a bit of the Grand Prix with B. Have never really been into motor sports but since he came home from uni have kind of got sucked in! Much more tactical than I ever realised and its nice to share it with him. Plus it gave me an excuse to do a bit of early morning crochet!

My daisies are growing now and I am at that point where I just want it to be finished! Its not that I'm fed up with it - I am love, love, loving it - but I can't wait to see it finished; really looking forward to doing the border! Does that sound a bit mad?

Of course, I couldn't ignore the boring jobs for ever and then spent pretty much all morning trying to juggle money from one account to another so that I can cover all the bills this month. I do know that on the scale of things we are pretty fortunate - we both have jobs etc etc but I can't believe that 24 years into marriage we still struggle if we try to do anything other than the day to day stuff! We have no savings (not for want of trying) and so every time there is a big bill or an unexpected expense we are scraping the barrel again. I keep being reminded I have just been away and yes that was an unusual expense, but I did do it as cheaply as possible - cheap flights, cheap accommodation, next to no spending money, cheap time of year... Its not as though we have ever had annual big holidays or anything. We have just never been able to do it. Seems every time we begin to get straight we have to spend money on the car, or the boys, or the house... Last month should have just been my holiday (which believe me was an essential!!) most of which I paid for a while ago anyway - then the boiler packed up (£198), I had to have 2 tyres (£70), had to pay for gas refill (£230 - LPG, outrageously expensive downside of living in the sticks) plus extra driving lessons (an eye watering £21 per hour! please God let him pass next time!!!) and an extra driving test (£62). End result? Come payday - virtually everything is spent already and we are scrimping til the next one! Good job my boys will eat lentils...

Anyway, this wasn't intended to be a moan - just that after getting all that lot straight I decided I needed to sit and have some quality hooking time! So I did! A bit decadent but I spent most of the afternoon rattling off daisies! 

I've been hooking a few, fitting them into place and then sewing them up so it feels as though it grows in fits and starts, but it is big enough now to be really cosy on your lap!

I am loving making this blanket. There is something quite challenging about the randomness of it - because, of course, its not really 'random' in the true sense, as it has been quite a puzzle at times to get it to fit together. I deliberately didn't plan ahead as I wanted to just see what evolved but I found at the beginning that I was inadvertently stretching some squares as I sewed them in. So its not the most even of blankets - some of the squares look a little 'squished' and some a bit elongated - but overall I don't think it matters. It just looks 'homemade-y' to me - which is fine!

What I am trying to do now though is make a pile of different sized and coloured daisy squares, then lay them out so that I keep the edges more or less in line. Otherwise I thought I might end up with a very tricky edge to put a border on!!

I had to take it upstairs to take the photos, partly to try and get some better natural light and also because I wanted to see how I was doing for size laid out on the bed.

What do you think?! I'm aiming for big enough for a single bed so I reckon I'm about 2/3 of the way there? Plus the border. Yay!

I had to stop as I was running out of the deep blue so decamped to the kitchen for a bit of a baking session. It ended up being a bit of a cobbled bake as the cupboards were a bit sparse for ingredients (have been for a badly needed shop today!) but one lemon drizzle cake, a dozen pecan and coffee muffins and a tray of toffee oat slices later and the whole house smelt yummy.

Lemon drizzle is a bit of an old favourite - basic ingredients made delicious by a bit of sugar and lemon juice!

The coffee and pecan muffins started off intending to be coffee and walnut but in the absence of walnuts... and they are not bad at all!!

The toffee oat slices were an attempt to make an alternative to flapjacks (I always make flapjacks!!!) and were basically an oat, sugar, flour (gluten free in this case) and butter crumble with a layer of caramel in the middle. Seriously, not one for the waistline but boys seem to need to put away shed loads of calories just to keep going and given that half of the tin had gone before I could take a photo, I guess they are ok!  The only problem is that they are a bit crumbly so not quite the lunchbox snack I'd had in mind - back to good old flapjacks for that I think!

When I sat down again in the evening I didn't quite know what to do with my hands - couldn't make any more daisies, couldn't face more granny squares for Sarah London's appeal ( I am up to 12 so far & I will do some more but I do find plain grannies just a bit tedious after a while...), don't really want to do any more of my big ripple til I've finished the daisy blanket as I'd pinched some of the colours... 

I don't really enjoy the TV much, there's the odd thing I don't mind watching but there's very little on that makes me want to fully turn all my attention to it so I prefer to be in the room with whoever's watching doing a bit of crochet or something. At Christmas I was given this book...

...and this yarn...

The colours are gorgeous so, partly inspired by Alice (and her Mum!) I thought I'd have a go at some socks with it. This is my first attempt at knitting socks and although there are some really lovely patterns in the book, the instructions are a bit vague and all the needle and wool recommendations are American so this may be a bit hit and miss!

You knit both socks at once on circular needles so its a bit fiddly to begin with and it feels as though the yarns are going to get completely tangled but I'm making a bit of headway now and loving the way this yarn knits up. Its Stylecraft Life DK in 'Volcano' and is a wool/acrylic mix. Although it says it is DK it feels a bit finer than the acrylic DK I've been crocheting with and I'm using a smaller needle. I have already found that the pattern doesn't quite work for this yarn - if I'd kept increasing as I was suppose to I'd have ended up with two small hats I think! So it might all get tricky when I get to the heel, I may have to make it up when I get to that bit! The plus of this method is that you do end up with two socks the same - whether mine will even remotely fit remains to be seen!

I'm hoping they'll at least be house-worthy! But I suspect not up to Alice's Mum's standard!!

Will let you know how I get on!

Sx