Knitting for little people

Just an excuse really to prove I haven't been totally slacking on the knitting front. I ordered a small stash of stuff from Wool Warehouse and we have been doing more hexipuffs, another dozen or so, but also to knit things for some of my favourite little people. I got this book from the library, Adorable Knits for Tiny Tots by Zoe Mellor:

I did two of the patterns, both were simple and well written, in fact the whole book is lovely with great unfussy designs for babies and toddlers, sizes going up to about 4 years. This Lacy Sweater was done in Drops Cotton Light for Sasha. The yarn was a bugger to work with and kept splitting but I was really pleased with how it came out. I liked the flower design but missed out the weird edging as it seemed very fiddly; it was meant to be knit separate and then stitches picked up along the edge to form the bottom edge of the front and back sections. I just made it a bit longer to compensate. I really liked the lacy sleeves, they were an unusual design feature.

This Daisy Dress was made for the Babe. This was done in Drops Safran which was a much nicer yarn, it is 4 ply and gave a lovely fine soft fabric. I was so pleased, she insisted on putting it straight on when I presented it to her (hope to update later with a photo of her wearing it).

Finally a tiny baby cardigan done with the two balls left over from Sasha's jumper (the colour looks all wrong here, must be the light). My niece Carly had a set of twins four years ago and she just announced she is expecting again, so we are all excited for her. Monday at work I sprained my ankle so, having been bought home in a van I was resting on the sofa with my foot up on cushions and Tish arrived with a baby pattern she had used last year. Since I couldn't go anywhere or do anything but sit, I knitted most of this Monday evening and finished it off Tuesday morning. I didn't have enough of the white to do the little collar it was supposed to have so I just did a border and it came out just fine. So hopefully a baby photo quite soon.

I finished my audiobook yesterday so will do a quickie about that. Am now spending my second day incapacitated so hope to finish my book, 'The Fruit of the Lemon', but have got the last week of the psychology lectures to do and we also have to do peer assessments of our assignment, that should be interesting. Have a great day wherever you are.

the noiseless subsidence of opening pages

I think this may be my longest blogging lull since I started ... sorry. I have started two new Coursera courses and they are taking up rather too much of my free time and the reading has taken a bit of a back seat. 'The Touchstone' by Edith Wharton has been a slow starter at the breakfast table but it is a very brief novella and once I got used to the style it was very engaging.

I actually bothered to read the foreword by Salley Vickers and was glad I did because it gave much food for thought. Knowing what happens in the story is not really that important because it's all about the reactions and emotions of the characters. It reminded me a little of Howards End and the notion of propriety that I wrote about when I reviewed it; they were written during the same period so the social attitudes were very similar even though Wharton is american. What was acceptable behaviour in polite society, and the relationship between husband and wife are scrutinised and unpicked.

The story is of a young man, Glennard, and the unrequited love of a woman called Margaret Aubyn. This unrequited love caused her to continue to correspond with Glennard even after her rise to fame as an author takes her from America to London, where she quietly dies. The book begins some years later when Glennard sees an advertisement by a publisher seeking any unknown writing by Mrs Aubyn. He is currently living in somewhat reduced circumstances (not poverty, just that when he is at 'the club' he scouts around for dinner invitations so he doesn't have to pay for himself) and he is unable to marry the woman of his affections because of this financial situation. After discovering by a roundabout conversation the potential value of the letters he has in his possession he decides to sell them to improve his own fortunes. The ladies of his social circle are both scandalised and unable to resist, they censure the man who offered them for publication but read them voraciously (Mrs Touchett: "I'm positively sick of the book and I can't put it down."); we know nothing of the content of the letters but it is obvious they are emotionally intense and revealing. What follows is a very circuitous process by which he deals with the guilt he feels, and eventually becomes a better person. 

Pretentious is the only suitable word for describing Wharton's writing style; why use a nice simple word if there is a more ostentatious one available. To begin with it enchanted me, it felt clever and intelligent, but towards the end the use of long words became almost predictable, not to mention annoying when I didn't know what they meant. I think maybe it is a sign of the times and the kind of writing that was looked up to a hundred years ago. Having said that it was all part of what gave the book it's particular atmosphere and it adds an intensity that is necessary to the emotional impact that is packed in to less than 100 pages.
I loved firstly this description of Mrs Aubyn:

"Her dress never seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal air, as though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitation of the most approved models; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs Aubyn's plagiarisms, to borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow never seemed to be incorporated with the text." (p.13)

And then how he comes to view her (and her continuing correspondence) after she has left for England and become famous:

"The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as the years went on, became more and more conscious of an inextinguishable light directing its small ray towards the past which consumed so little of his own commemorative oil. The reproach was taken from this thought by Mrs Aubyn's gradual translation into terms of universality. In becoming a personage she so naturally ceased to be a person that Glennard could almost look back to his explorations of her spirit as on a visit to some famous shrine, immortalised, but in a sense desecrated, by popular veneration." (p.16)

I am not sure where she stood on the subject of women, and on the whole she is a little dismissive of them (not that she is admiring of the men, in fact the whole book has a feeling of a social dissection) but there was this lovely little snip, from a social gathering on Flamel's yacht:

"As for the other ladies of the party, they were simply the wives of some of the men - the kind of women who expect to be talked to collectively and to have their questions left unanswered." (p.39)

and then this, rather scathing comment:

"Alexa was a woman of few requirements; but her wishes, even in trifles, had a definiteness that distinguished them from the fluid impulses of her kind." (p.45)

Having agonised over whether his wife knows the truth (the above mentioned Alexa), if she knows why hasn't she reacted, and whether he should confess all, Glennard then takes himself off to Mrs Aubyn's grave, as if seeking some kind of forgiveness, but it seems he is not going to find a solution that easily; lovely atmosphere in this description (having gone empty handed he goes to the greenhouses to find some flowers):

"The hot air was choked with the scent of white azaleas, while lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were white; they were like a prolongation, a mystical efflorescence, of the long rows of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an odour of decay. The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned in the doorway, waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of Margaret Aubyn's nearness - not the imponderable presence of his inner vision, but a life that beat warm in his arms...
The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back and scattered the flowers over the grave. the edges of the white petals shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them, the illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back, frozen." (p.72)

A lovely book, even if stylistically a little old fashioned, it will definitely improve your vocabulary. I was left not sure what he felt or what he wanted, nor what his wife Alexa felt. For some pages they skirt around the issue, talk in vague terms without saying much. It is a game of cat and mouse as he accuses her of having an affair and she tries to explain that she only tried to like Flamel because she thought he wanted her to, it is all very convoluted. It is as if he wanted her to know by osmosis, by reading his mind, and wanted to understand what she thought by reading her mind, there was not a great deal of real communication between them. The final quote kind of sums up the whole of the human condition:

" 'I've imagined that you had reasons for still wishing me to be civil to him, as you call it.'
'Ah,' said Glennard, with an effort at lightness; but his irony dropped, for something in her voice made him feel that he and she stood at last in that naked desert of apprehension where meaning skulks vainly behind speech."

Reading about Crazy People

As soon as I finished 'Gone Girl' by Gillian Flynn I gave the book to Creature, cos she loves books about crazy people, and so I had to snaffle a picture from the interweb. This is a book about crazy people. So we have Nick and we have Amy, and that's pretty much all I can tell you about the book. This will have to be the shortest review ever because I cannot risk giving stuff away and if I start writing about it I might just do so. 
There might be spoilers here, sorry.
Ok, I can tell you that Amy is the girl who is gone, but where she has gone and why she has gone there you will just have to read and find out. I have been in a bit of a funk reading-wise recently. I mean I have enjoyed things but not in a I-have-to-get-home-now-and-get-back-to-my-book way. What I needed to get out of my funk was a *really good* story. This is a really good story. She gives us the set-up, she gives us the disappearance, she gives us the back story, we think we know where it might be headed, we think we might be figuring out what's what ... and then all hell breaks loose. These are two very twisted people and in a lot of ways I think maybe they deserve each other. Part of me wanted it to all end in a magnificent fireball, but it is much more subtle and unsettling than that. It is very clever writing, very clever plotting, you get to think that Gillian Flynn is just as clever and manipulative as Amy. And then you turn and look over at your significant other and quietly ask for some reassurance that normal people don't think or act like this. Read, enjoy, and be glad that you live an ordinary life with an ordinary human being.

Ginger Nut Blondies

Having had such a success with my first attempt at blondies the other day, I decided to experiment; it is a cake format that begs to be tinkered with. Since adding oreos is a routine adaptation of the basic recipe it seemed an obvious move to try adding other kinds of biscuits.

So here is my improvised recipe for 
Ginger Nut Blondies

4oz butter (the consensus is, definitely not margarine) 

6oz soft brown sugar (light or dark to your own preference)

Soften the butter and beat together 

(some recipes melt the butter I guess you can do either)

Add:

2 eggs

(I only had medium eggs, most recipes say 1 large egg)

 teaspoon of vanilla

Add:
5oz plain flour
pinch of salt
1 tsp baking powder
Add:

about a dozen ginger nuts chopped into chunks

(the packet was 250g and I used about 2/3 of it)

(don't crush too small or they will just dissolve)

The mixture should be very thick, spread it in a greased and lined 8" square tin,  

bake at 170º for 25 mins.

It had the result that I hoped for that the chunks of biscuit softened and give a lovely chewy gingery texture. 

A Week of Making Stuff at Home

It's very easy to fritter a week away, and in fact I have frittered large chunks of this last week, but in order to end each day feeling as if I have achieved something I set myself the challenge of making something every day, in the broadest sense of the word 'make'. 

So there were some old favourites, like pancakes for breakfast:

and lemon meringue pie:

One afternoon we had a batch of Honey Oaty Cookies but they were eaten before I thought to take a photo to prove it.

There have been a few experiments like fresh cream meringues (I have got a bit of a thing for meringue), made, against all the advice, without the assistance of an electric mixer. I am no longer sure which instructions I followed as they all had different advice on the subject of beating in the sugar and cooking times, but they came out very satisfactorily:

and Peanut Butter Oreo Blondies to this recipe, which were even more wonderful the following morning:

Creature joined in and made chocolate brownies (who ate all the brownies!):

and wonderful honey cake:

Dunk didn't want to be left out so I took a photo of this delicious Veggie Shepherds Pie that he made for us on Saturday night. It was National Vegetarian Week so we ate veggie all week:

All week I have been knitting stripy hexipuffs, it being over a year since we started the project and the rate of production has dropped off considerably in recent months (total now standing at 238 out of an estimated 400 needed):

Saturday I decided on some felting and made an iPod cover for Dunk:

and a Kindle cover for my sister Claire (Hi Claire, will get it in the post on Tuesday) which was supposed to be done for her birthday but I didn't get around to it. I hope it fits as I had to make a cardboard pattern to check the size as it shrank down.

Then Sunday morning I made a new peg bag (tutorial here)

and experimented with making a felt flower following a tutorial on Felters Journey, only partially successful:

I have recently removed several bloggers listed in the sidebar who were no longer blogging so in the afternoon I decided to make a new 'blog list' that is just a general list of people I visit on a regular basis, it encompasses everything that I find interesting about the interweb.

How to make a (very) simple peg bag

After my foray back into sewing the other week (which I am pleased to find has already had lots of visitors) I have been attempting to keep up the momentum and during my week off this week have been trying to make something every day. I will do a photo post tomorrow of all the stuff but this morning I went out into a sunny garden to hang the washing and had to go hunting for some extra pegs. The fabric bag we had used for several years had rotted away and I had thrown it out, so we need a new one. A quick interweb search will bring up all kinds of suggestions: a 'sunny' peg bag, or a 'pretty' peg bag, or a 'floral' peg bag, or a 'fairy' peg bag?? Anyway, here is my contribution to worldwide knowledge on the fabrication of peg bags, for people with very little time on their hands; including searching for the fabric from my stash it took about 30 minutes.

Most people recommend a child's hanger but I found this one that was a skirt hanger with clips on it and just snapped them off; you could just use an ordinary cheap wire one.

Using the hanger as a guide for width I cut a double rectangle of fabric (you want it deep enough to hold all your pegs but not so deep you have to dig awkwardly down to the bottom to get the last few out.):

I sewed a basic double fold hem on both ends of the fabric and then laid it out like this with the entrance sitting below the hanger, pinned in place and then sewed the side seams:

 

Turned right side out this is how it looked after sewing. Next cut a small hole to put the hanger hook through. You can neaten the edge of the hole if you can be bothered, I couldn't (it just occurred to me you could add a small piece of iron-on interfacing to reinforce the hole a little):

Then I turned the top part inside out again and drew around the hanger with tailor's chalk, sewed along these lines, trimmed the excess material and clipped the curves so it would sit nicely, and turned it back right side out.

Add the hanger and put outside on the line in the sunshine. Add pegs. Voila!

Getting to know myself...

... or am I a figment of my own imagination?
A while ago I was pointed in the direction of the Coursera website, it offers university level courses, for free, to students all over the world, mostly pitched at people without prior knowledge and who are armed merely with a curious mind. So since March I have being studying a course entitled Know Thyself that has encompassed a variety of disciplines, but tutored by a philosopher, Mitch Green.

The first thing that the course has given me is a profound awe for the human mind. It is oh so much more sophisticated than most people appreciate. Secondly I feel cleverer just studying philosophy, and I discover this is because the concept of 'philosophy' is positively somatically marked, the word is linked in your mind with all sorts of associations that imply intelligence. We started the course with the work of Socrates and the notion that 'the unexamined life is not worth living', or as an alternative translation suggests, is 'not to be lived', taking pains to point out that Socrates probably was not advocating a cull of thoughtless people, just that their lives lacked some quality if they went about never considering the what or why of their thoughts, beliefs or actions. As a philosopher I am not sure he is such a great example, he tends to live up to the stereotype of the aloof, 'disconnected from the real world' kind of philosopher, that had given philosophy an undeserved bad name, but he was prepared to die for the idea that he should be allowed to question everything, so all credit to him in my book. Descartes on the other hand was a bit of a chicken and having made a very convincing case for the existence of a human consciousness as the basis for all knowledge (I think therefore I am) he then goes and spoils it by arguing that god exists, mostly because saying that he didn't was not socially acceptable at the time. I found myself at odds with the dualist notion of the separation of the mind and the body, influenced partly by the religious overtones but also by my reading of 'Still Alice' at the time; where Descartes says the mind can exist beyond the death of the body, but not vice versa, what I learned about Alzheimer's Disease seems to imply that the body is perfectly able to live even when everything that makes up the human mind, the thoughts, memories, instincts, wishes, all cognitive functions, have ceased to operate.

Lots of different theorists have different views on what constitutes the human mind; for Descartes our mind is our ability to reason, for Gilbert Ryle we are made up of a collection of 'dispositions' to behaviour, then for Freud our minds are made up of the Ego, the Id and the Superego. The study of the brain has often focussed on learning about it's function by seeing what happens to it when things go wrong, either with physical brain damage or mental illness. But many of them came back to the idea of introspection, Socrates' notion of an examined life, that to understand your own behaviour and actions you must examine your thoughts and attitudes. Although much of Freud's theories about human nature have been discredited psychotherapy remains an important mechanism to understanding the human mind. Different theories emerged about the unconscious and our ability to understand what goes on in the part of the mind that we are often unaware of. What emerged also was the notion of the interdependence between mind and body, between thoughts and actions, each impacting upon the other and also between our supposed rationality and our emotions. It has only been much more recently that  neuroscience has progressed and we have more and more knowledge about the inner workings of the brain on a cellular level.  I am still reading Antonio Damasio's book 'Descartes Error' which turns on it's head the idea that human beings should or do make decisions based on rationally choosing the best outcome and that allowing emotions to intervene is necessarily a bad thing, but this book makes use of  knowledge about the functioning of regions of the brain for different purposes (review coming of this book at some point, hopefully soon).

Having morphed from a philosophy into more of a psychology course and drifted briefly into neuroscience, we went back to examining the idea of deception and self-deception, not just in terms of lying but more subtly in terms of your internal spin-doctor who helps you make the best of life when it's really not that great. And finally to Buddhism and Zen and how it is more in rejecting the notion of 'self' that we can come to any sense of meaning.

I have been trying to write something of an overview of what I learned but find that although I enjoyed it the ideas were all very discrete, different views at how we humans have considered our own minds. There is a 'Cartesian View' or a 'Freudian View' or a 'Buddhist View' of the human mind, they are separate paradigms and do not lead one to another, nor did each necessarily help in understanding the next. I found that the most helpful thing were the questions that Mitch posed at the beginning and end of the course, that he told his students to always ask about any idea: What do you mean? and How do you know? You should be able to challenge yourself to question the theories and ideas that you hold and reason with yourself about them. I especially like the concept of 'Occam's razor' which states that 'among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.' The human mind is an amalgam of all the assumption it has acquired through experiences, many of them very flawed, and trying to figure out which is most of the battle. I am left with the feeling that to know your own mind certainly could be the work of a lifetime, and if you focus inwards too much you might be both tying yourself up in knots and missing something much more important outside.  What I liked most was that it felt like real studying; video lectures prepared specifically for the course, suggested reading, online discussions and feedback. It had to be done within the course schedule and there were weekly tests to see if you had paid attention and understood the concepts in the lectures so you had to treat it seriously if you wanted to 'pass'. Of the 70,000 odd who signed up apparently less than 10,000 were still actively participating at the end. Creature and I have since begun an Introduction to Psychology course together and will be starting 'Introduction to Art' next week too. I have several more in the pipeline that start later in the year. I would highly recommend it to anyone either just wanting to try something new or interested in getting back into formal education.