In between colouring myself nearly entirely yellow courtesy of the yellow ochre which we’re using to colour the limewash (remind me to tell you about – wait for it: annual – and singular – scientific  term usage coming up – exothermic reactions sometime, by the way), I have also been revisiting the list of things I wanted to achieve in October. So far, so good, frankly! Here we are, midway through the month which marks properly the arrival of autumn, and today is the first time we’ve lit the stove this autumn. It’s been quite cold, but we are embracing once more the put-another-jumper-on approach, largely because, having run the stove for three years on free wood we’d collected from various people who didn’t want their spare trees and whatnot, we now find ourselves with a rather depleted woodpile. Of course, by most standards, it’s still a Pile Of Shame, but we can tell already that there isn’t enough wood there to get us through the entire winter unless we get back to scavenging on a reasonably regular footing. The thing with all this building work is that it knocks a lot of the things we have to do regularly to the back of the queue. Living in a house like this is not really a sit-back-and-do-nowt existence; the house needs a lot of work, and just to keep things from getting too damp in the changing months between true summer and genuine autumn, bearing in mind that the stove being our only source of heating – and an almightily ample one, at that - we have wood to source, and chop, and store. This means trolling around with the trailer and the chainsaw, and generally going where angels fear to tread in terms of where sane people would drive cars…  (Gratuitous fireplace picture, largely because I managed to hang those lanterns up today, having had the idea festering away at the back of the ol’ noggin for some weeks now; we used the lanterns, plus about fifteen of their friends and family, as table decorations for our wedding bash, nearly four years ago. Each time I light them, I hear a vague strain of chaotic folk music, and I smell the acrid smoke of outdoor fireworks, and I taste the sweetness of icing made by our cake-making helper, and I remember the brightness of Quercus’s smile as we danced in circles with a huge throng of our friends and family.)

We are also embarking on a little time-filler; you know, just the sort of thing to knock off in an afternoon when you’ve nothing else to do. Ahem. Yes. So. We’re building a barn. You know, as you do. And we’re attempting to make it from free timber. That whole project I described blithely as a woodshed.  So far, it’s not going too badly: we’ve got planning permission for it, Quercus having drawn up scale plans and whatnot, and we’ve specified a wooden frame with shingles (wooden tiles, effectively) on the outside, so the most important thing is that hopefully it’ll look like a giant fircone when it’s done. Um. Did I just type that out loud? I was trying to keep at least a thin veneer of serious adult concern over this one. We’ve been collecting pallets as a start – the idea is that Quercus will process them with one or other of the frankly disturbing quantity of giant saws he has accumulated during the extension build, leaving us with planks ready to be cut to shingle-like length, and off-cuts which, provided the wood is untreated, will feed the stove for a while. The only slight shadow on this particular horizon is that we worked out the other day that we probably need to find not one hundred, but probably three hundred pallets in order to get this barn off the ground. Current total? About thirty. (Maybe I should start Pallet Watch 2009, in a desperate bid to keep us motivated.)

I have finished the hat I was knitting for the tiny daughter (it matches the legwarmers I made her for Christmas last year; I can’t stop squeaking when I see her in them together, which those of you who know me personally will know is a distinctly unlikely reaction to one whose favourite word is probably ‘gruntfuttock’). (Picture of said hat to follow as soon as I work out how to distract the tiny daughter long enough to allow both the presence of said hat on the head, and the camera to be within [my] [exclusive] grabbing distance.) I’ve also gained another excuse to take the tiny daughter out for a walk around the lanes – someone might see her hat! and find it as charming as I do! Tiny legs sticking out of brown velvet sling on my back, tiny head whipping around as she peers over my shoulder, both swaddled in knitted confections. Happiness is not hard to come by with such things around the place. Mostly, we’re walking a couple of miles more afternoons than not, helped by the knowledge that when I’m really tired (did I mention the molar-cutting which has been going on at night chez nous? No? Well, that’ll be lack of sleep!) the best thing is normally to Go Out And DO SOMETHING, rather than sit here, flatly, attempting to remember which way is up.

Also, we have now got three coats of limewash on the outside of the house; the render is now protected from frost, and we’ll be happy if we go through the winter without adding any more washes. The colour is just divine – the sort of yellow which speaks – no, sings of golden sunshine, of warm autumn afternoons, and of the glorious and unexpected burst of colour to be found at the very tops of our seven-foot Jerusalem artichokes.

Next up, rosehip jam. We’ve just made our first batch of quince cheese, and it is every bit as lovely as the sample we were given by our friends the other week; I am freezing it in silicone moulds and then storing small whole cheeses for later in the year. Provided I can stop myself raiding the freezer in the quiet anonymity of the night.

So, that’s what’s going on around here. And you?

I’ve been knitting for about three years or so now, and in some respects I’m quite happy with my progress. I mean, it took me about half of that time to learn to cast on, so viewed in those terms, the rather meagre output of projects I’ve actually finished becomes more… justifiable, right? I’ve learned to knit in the round, and have provided the tiny daughter with two hats, two sets of legwarmers (which are perfect when worn over tights if she’s in the sling; her little legs stick out either side but don’t get cold), and a pixie hat knitted flat. I’ve also managed a scarf for Quercus, and a rather appealing Tibetan-style hat, together with numerous scarflets for me, made up from the walnut-sized pieces of wool I tend to end up with when I actually finish something off.

Anyway, having just finished a particularly delightful hat for the witchling (this doesn’t mean my ego has achieved yet unknown altitudes, but that the hat is delightful because she’s in it, I think, and also, the wool! the wool! is just so nice – it’s a Noro yarn, and it looks like autumn in a ball), I am now contemplating something big. Something serious. Something about which no sane mortal should joke.

Yes.

I want to knit…

A CARDIGAN.

Well, a cardigan for the tiny daughter, anyway. The thing is, though, that things are all good until I sit down and start looking at a pattern. I mean, I know how to knit, and to purl, and, with some thought, to increase and decrease. I can do kitchener stitch, thanks to this last hat effort, and I can knit magic loop-style if need be. But when I read all that k2tog and psso business, something in my head just starts thinking about lemon curd, or purple, or, indeed, anything unrelated to the task in hand. If I can look at a pattern and see how it’s done without having to read abbreviations (shudder), then I’m fine. If not, then I’m a bit stuffed, to be honest. I think I have Knitter’s Fear. The abbreviations maketh me crazy, and dimwitted.

So, with this in mind, has anyone got any recommendations for a s-i-m-p-l-e cardigan pattern for small people, the sort of thing which is done in double knitting and uses, say, 5mm needles? Your prize for suggesting something idiot-proof will be pictures of the tiny daughter in her hat (SO SWEET, although I am aware that I have probably got my maternal goggles on there, and other people may just think ‘huh – kid in hat – and?’) and pictures, rather than a hideously long-drawn-out commentary, of our gorgeous newly-rendered house, which looks like cinder toffee at the moment, courtesy of its first coat of limewash (which we squeaked in just before the first frost, over last weekend).

1. Has anyone out there got any experience of quinces? We find ourselves with a goodly quantity of them, courtesy of some lovely people across t’other side of the village from us (the same folks who have previously donated crab apples, grapes, rosehips, blackberries and mulberries), and having just sampled the quince cheese made by said chaps, I am tempted to make some myself, but am also pondering the concept of quince wine.

2. Am I ever going to get over my adoration of baby legs in stripy tights?

3. How much jam or jelly is too much? This weekend, I appear to have concocted six pounds of crab apple jelly, and about four of bramble, apple and rose. Should I start on a ‘for sale’ sign now, bearing in mind that I still have about three pounds of rosehips waiting to be made into jam, I wonder?

4. Are our chickens in league against us? Having spent the entire summer in intensive relay broody races wherein the Buff Sussex chooks tagged each other, apparently as they left the laying box, for broodiness, one of our Black Rocks is now broody to the extent that she appears to be putting the others off even approaching the empty box. We’ve booted her out for a few days running, and she’s persisting. Egg-count today? Nil. Grumpiness as a result? Plenty. Six hens and no eggs = not fair, particularly as it’s not even daylight-related yet, I don’t think. They are moulting, though, so I am trying not to hold it against them too much.

5. What do you do when your iBook is approaching meltdown in terms of hard-drive space, and you can’t upgrade your hard-drive because there isn’t room, physically? I am contemplating backing up important stuff like pictures and whatnot, and then just wiping the whole thing and starting again. I have about 2Gb of space left out of a forty gig hard-drive; not ideal.

6. Anyone ever installed their own hot-air ducting heating system? We are thinking of doing this; have stove – will burn, sort of thing. Apparently it’s more popular as a concept in North America than here in the UK; the basic concept seems good in that it would let us move excess heat from the sitting room, where the stove lives, to the extension, along the building in a direction which heat doesn’t really move naturally, or at least not to the extent it would with a small fan attached.

7. Ever noticed how ‘tidying’ the remnants of a jam-making session into one’s stomach makes for furry-feeling teeth in next-to-no time at all? Oh. That’s just me, then, is it?

Woo! It’s the first of October! Which means, er, that, um, it’s… October, she finished, flatly. Well. Despite this slightly lacklustre start, I confess that October is one of my favourite months. Not only is it Quercus’s birthday (the twenty-third, since you asked; send extravagant presents at will), but it’s also a month of last tomatoes, illicit rosehips glowing in the morning sunshine, crabapples juicing gently on the stove, and hens pecking around in the warmth of afternoons still light enough to mistake for summer. Oh, and of course, at the end of the month, there is Samhain, or Hallowe’en, if you prefer, to look forward to; our two cats would make excellent hire choices for this particular occasion, being both black and vaguely sinister, though I have to say they’ll be spoken for. This year I am in hopes that the tiny daughter will take a little more notice of the pumpkinage we are sure to acquire; last year’s number came from the post office a mile or so away, and despite the fact that it was most splendid, she remained largely above its charms, being only four months old at the time. Add a year, and hopefully she’ll be up for helping me to hollow it out a bit too.

This month, I thought I’d start out by setting down some of the things I’d like to do in the coming weeks. It’s sort of my October wishlist, because, well, it’s October, and this is… a wishlist. Right. Glad we’ve cleared that up, then. So, in no particular order:

- Finish the hat I’ve started knitting the witchling.

- Stack the chopped wood we’ve amassed in what has become the chickens’ shed, which means emptying said shed of such varied contents as… a washing machine (defunct), a potter’s wheel (very much not defunct, but sadly underused at the moment), boxes of assorted detritus, a large rat (we fear), and fourteen incomplete sets of dustpans and brushes.

- Chop more wood so we’ve got enough to fill said shed, if possible;

- Accrue roughly one hundred pallets as part of Project Free Woodshed (of which more anon);

- Make the witchling a small quilt to go on her cot; I have lots of fabric kicking about, and lots of interest, but sadly bugger-all time at the moment (yet here I am…) because I’ve taken on yet another copy-editing job when I said I wanted time off, and this one’s 23,000 words. Oops.

- Rosehip jam, of which probably six pounds; we have quite a few rosehips kicking about – I’ve already got three gallons of wine going, so I think something new is called for. This jam is supposed to be almost cheese-like in texture, and a most glorious colour, so it sounds worth a go.

- Walk a couple of miles on at least three of the five days a week that I go to work. I’m trying to remember to do this, because since I’ve been working in the mornings, the obvious time to take the tiny daughter out for a walk in the sling has become a slot which Quercus has to himself, mostly. But I don’t want to turn into the Woman Mountain (TM) just because I’m working a desk job for a portion of my week; work, after all, is something I see as a minor interruption to Real Life, so I’m buggered if it’s going to be responsible for any further slide down the hideous slope to the point where hiring oneself out as a temporary roundabout becomes an option. Quercus and I both enjoy walking, so at the weekends I’m hoping that this month, which sees less pressure on us in terms of house work (although if we want a kitchen this side of Christmas, we do need to press on with the work inside; at least for now the outside is weather-tight, again, of which more anon) might find us out for some Proper Walks, which tend to be a full morning or afternoon, and often amount to something like seven or eight miles. But these walks alone will not suffice to escape Woman Mountain status, after all; I need regular exercise, and although I hate to admit it, I actually seem to thrive on it. I feel better. I feel more energetic. I sleep better (!). So, I must do it, and make time for it, because such things are important. (Although how best to manage it when it gets dark at four and we live in the middle of lanes with no lights, I wonder? I used to walk quite cheerily to the station in the dark morning and afternoon when I worked full-time, before the tiny daughter was born, but I feel I’d be living life on the edge slightly to wander about with her in the sling and no lights… Paranoid?)

So, that’s what October, if I manage to retrieve the small shred of discipline I once possessed, may bring me. And you?

It’s happened again, hasn’t it? All that tripe about posting more regularly and whatnot, and yet another week has escaped me and I’ve not even had a sniff of a post. The thing is, this lime rendering malarky – wow. It… well, it really takes A LOT OF TIME. As in, we have been eating, sleeping, breathing (that last is not a joke, come to think of it) lime render for about the last three weeks, once way or another, and now we’re on the fourth coat of four, so the end is sort of in sight, but time is short (I have a job to go to, and freelance work, and a tiny daughter, while Quercus too has a job to go to etc.) and the weather is only going to get colder, and that of course brings worries about frost, which would be fairly deadly to newly-applied lime, as it gets into the water in the render and makes it flake off the walls.

And… breathe.

So, this is just to say that I’m still here, wanting very much to post about such varied delights as:

- Steiner schools – are they all they’re cracked up to be, and, indeed just what are they cracked up to be?;

- Knitting, and why it melts my brain when I look at all but the very simplest of patterns (nearly typed ‘recipes’ there; do you think cooking is perhaps more my natural thing?);

- Wine, and how on earth we can possibly have run out of demijohns;

- Our ongoing – and frankly logic-defying, in view of current circs – desire to build a house ourselves;

And more of all that, with some cocoa fudge cookies thrown in for good measure. I want to come and comment on interesting posts, and I want to say hello and ask about the weather with various chaps out there, but for now, it’s lime, lime, and a little more lime (but sadly no coconut, and no drinking it all up). We’ve got help until Monday (by which time hopefully the streaming cold most of us have had for about a week now will finally have fucked the buggery off), from Quercus’s mother and various neighbours who were too foolish or too slow in their escape to avoid being drafted; after that, come what may, we’ll at least have to change the pace of the work we’re doing, as this is a two-man, and really a three-man, job. Hopefully, at that point, some sense of normality will return…

Oh, and it’s autumn. For us, that means the wind’s changed, the blackberries are bright jewels in the hedgerows (at least, those which haven’t been most thoughtlessly chopped about by large tractors just at the time when I wanted to go and plunder the goodies for alcoholic purposes [though see previous point about demijohns, the lack thereof, for a possible up to this down]), we’re stacking wood ready to light the stove shortly, and I’m crocheting the tiny daughter a cardigan using Cornish wool my mother had in her considerable knitting stash.

And you? What does autumn mean to you?

The rendering is going on at the moment, so the entire house – outside and, regrettably, inside, to a rather large extent – is covered in spatterings of lime. It’s not very lovely stuff – corrosive and burny – but it’s lovely in terms of covering up cob, and with autumn coming on apace, we’re really squeaking in at the last minute. Today we have been aided and abetted in our lime doings by the lovely Mr. Valley, who has lime plans of his own in the near future (we hope); three people makes such a difference, you know, and so much so that we hope to seduce him back to us at some point with promises of such esoteric goodies as, er, beer, and, well, chocolate biscuits.

In other news, I’ve lost my whatsit. My writingy crafty whatsit, that is. I’m not really in a writing place, it seems, despite my best intentions to write more regularly here, and I’m not really managing the crafty bits that I want to start, what with the work on the house and the teething-related tiredness. But I am reasonably happy nonetheless – wine is being made, cooking has been achieved, the house isn’t quite the utter bedlam I’d thought it might be at this stage, and I have plans afoot for various knitting projects which I will begin once this round of teeth – and lime-rendering! –  is out of the way, I think. (That said, I’ve just cast on a new hat for the tiny daughter; it’s called ‘Tubey‘, and is knitted in the round, which I love, and, in my case, using a skein of Noro’s ‘Silk Garden’ which is just gorgeous – it looks like blackberry crumble, with apples and ice-cream thrown in for added loveliness.)

In other, other news, um, well, nothing, really. Perhaps that’s partly why I’m not very writingish at the moment; beyond the house stuff, which is of limited interest to those not living with/in it, there’s not a lot on chez Earthenhouse, and that makes for a dull, but busy, Earthenwitch. Also, I’m doing silly quantities of copy-editing, and, despite giving a stupidly high quote to the latest person to approach me, I appear to have landed myself with a further thirteen thousand words-worth of work to do by the middle of September. The stupid quote was pitched at a height vertiginous enough – or so I thought – to put off all but the most determined, and my intention was to claw back some time to do crafty things when the tiny daughter has her snooze; that one didn’t go quite to plan, really, but at least I will be getting a comfortably ridiculous hourly rate with which to console myself, even if the closest I come to craftiness is staring absently at the wool as I read my way through lots, and lots, and lots of stuff on marketing…

Despite all this, though, and despite my generally brain-dead state, I am thinking of joining Mon‘s reading thing. I mean, an extra excuse to read – as if one were ever needed – is no bad thing, right? And the opportunity to discuss books in a way which doesn’t involve marking or being marked? Well, there’s nothing there to dislike, really, from my point of view. Of course, the downside is that it involves buying more books, and, as someone who lives in a tiny house with limited surfaces available for shelving, that’s not entirely a good thing. Wait. What am I saying? That was the practical part trying to assert itself, but worry not: that doesn’t happen often… and I have got the excuse of having sold quite a few of the more boring books associated with my PhD (note: the more boring books – most of them are boring, but some of them are especially boring, so boring that only a very, very, bored person would even think of opening them, never mind actually reading them).

So, that’s life here at the moment. And you?

I have no idea how an entire week has passed since I sat down to whinge about the internal thought process I’m working through about the whole procreation idea. (As an aside, how would one go about having an external thought process? Ah yes – a whingeing blog post.) Yet somehow it has, and here it is, Wednesday again, and me all good intentions about posting a bit more regularly too – I don’t know if it’s just me, but discussions with one or two other bloggers tend to suggest that to call oneself a blogger, one must lever oneself off one’s proverbial at least twice a week, and ideally more frequently, and bloody well write something. This works well with me because when I write frequently, I tend to think of more things to say, and I even remember to plug in the bloody camera and go through the iPhoto-related angst (I have about 8000 photos in my iPhoto library, which means it takes roughly the power needed to light Liverpool for a week to open the app, and once it’s open, it needs another kick, this time of a nuclear-like level, to actually bring the pictures up and let me sort through them, and that’s before we even begin challenges like uploading the blighters to Photobucket) of adding pictures! pictures! to my otherwise blocky text.

Anyway. Where was I? Ah yes.

So, this past week has seen Quercus finish cleaning up the old window frames in the front of the house, cutting in bits of chestnut wood where the rot had got too bad to make the original recoverable. I’ve glazed most of three windows, leaving only the tiny daughter’s to do; we left that one until last so that we’d hopefully have perfected the technique, insofar as we were ever going to do so. This morning, furthermore, will see the arrival of the replacement window catches – the old ones were rusted to the point where their continued existence was just not on the cards, frankly – which may even mean closing windows! with glass instead of board! glass! which you can see through, and everything! this very day. After two or three weeks of living with boarded-up windows in the original house, I’m quite looking forward to the restoration of light.

We’ve also been scavenging about in various hedges, procuring nine pounds of sloes (rough translation: fifteen – eighteen bottles of wine, in about six months), four pounds of rosehips (thirty bottles), shedloads of apples (mostly cooked and frozen for the tiny daughter’s afters), shedloads of blackberries (ditto) and some plums, which are nearing the end of fermentation as I write.

It’s that time of year where you can smell autumn just around the corner; this morning there was a slight mist coming across the fields and a cool breeze coming in from the west, and (annoyingly, for those of us with a scavenger’s eye) the hedges were cut last week, meaning there is a newly-spartan look to the borders around Earthenhouse. How did it get to be autumn again already? It seems only yesterday that we were taking down the wreath over the stove in January, and here we are, contemplating cleaning out the woodstove prior to lighting it for the winter (because in a house where it’s our only source of heat, it basically stays lit until spring).

And oh – we’ve got so much to do on the house before the weather gets colder. The render, for a start. The cob is still bare at the moment because the preparatory work has taken ages (sorting out the windows, the door-frame, the top of the cob walls just beneath the thatch, the fact that someone is now living in the cob wall at about bed-height in our room…), so this coming week, Quercus’s mother (who obviously drew a short straw sometime in a previous life, given that she’s a sixty-odd- year-old woman, and clearly shouldn’t have to spend her visiting time hoiking lime render into a mixer; on balance, though, she is also incredibly, astonishingly, bewilderingly irritating at times, so perhaps it’s a fair trade-off) is coming to help Quercus; hopefully, this will be the time when we actually begin to get the cob covered up again. If we manage to get the render sorted and the windows done, and the guttering on the extension, and the lead on the join between extension roof and cob wall, I shall be a very happy bunny indeed. That only leaves the woodshed to sort out – we’ve now got planning permission to build a large wooden shed which we’ll use for storing the wood we burn in the stove, so all we need to do is, er, build it. Oh, and source the wood – possibly pallets – to do so. So, yes, um, a few bits and pieces to be getting on with.

However: coming soon – crumble topping to beat off feelings of overwhelming chaos, hotly followed by a detailed – yet not depressingly-so – list of works-in-progress I’m going to allow myself to contemplate over the coming few months. Repeat after me: I will not – repeat NOT! – keep accepting copy-editing work which turns out to be written by someone for whom the English language exists only by reputation; rather, I will develop extensive x-ray writing-standards vision which will detect the looming presence of such bedlam, allowing me to decline, politely and in words of one syllable which are not open to misinterpretation, such projects.*  And, of course, stopping taking on work which ends up being rather longer-winded than once anticipated, I will reclaim my evenings, and thus, some crafty creativey whatsit time (hereinafter known as CCWT).

* As an aside, working as a proofreader/copy-editor has really pushed my moral boundaries, and I make no apology for the pompous nature of that statement. I keep getting approached by international students who are blatantly failing their assessments, sometimes at PhD level, because their English is simply not good enough. Surely the universities must have known/know what their language ability is? Or is not, more to the point? How can it be right that they are accepted on to programmes they have little hope of completing successfully? Or, worse, how can it be right that they’ll complete, having paid someone to sort their work out for them, or that they’ll complete because these universities give them a free pass in order to keep getting the fees? And where does that leave the qualifications I got myself from these bloody institutions, having spent a decade working, from time to time quite hard, in order to do so? De-valued, surely. On the other hand, I know that if I don’t do this work, someone else will; that’s not a justification for contributing to this system, and it pisses me off to be doing it. And one the other other hand (and yes – we now have three hands), we need the money. And it’s easy work for me. And round we go again, and again, and again… I still haven’t answered this one, in other words.

After a productive weekend, the crapness of last whenever-it-was has just about dissipated, I’m happy to say, though some low-key teething on the part of the tiny daughter means that Quercus and I are once more entering the Sleep Deprivation Olympics. However, the sleepiness didn’t prevent us…

1. Stripping the windows back far enough that we’re going to be able to have them as plain wood inside the house; we’d thought they’d be far too buggered, and had prepared ourselves for yet more gloss painting, so finding that, actually, they’re really strong wood underneath the years of neglect has been a nice surprise; they’ll be painted outside, partly because of the listing requirements and partly because of the weather, but inside, our earthy house is going to be a woody earthy house;
2. Freezing another couple of bags of blackberries, picked in the field behind the house; I can’t decide what to do with them – jam? jelly? wine? cordial? – so I’m thinking pick ‘em while they’re there, and work out the details later, not least as the entire house is somewhat bedlam-ish (and covered in dust) because of the ongoing work on the windows;
3. Making up some lentil, tomato and onion soup, part of which I’ve frozen in individual servings for the witchling’s suppers-to-come;
4. Re-glazing the downstairs window, which now opens after being painted (and rotted) shut for about thirty years – I have come to know the love that is linseed putty, and while I didn’t really think about it when we couldn’t, I find myself delighted that we can now open the window, should the fancy take us;
5. Whipping up a couple of batches of beeswax balm, this one with a mood-lightening effect in mind – I’ve christened it Bright Skies, and it’s got indecent quantities of marjoram, cedarwood, sandalwood, rose and neroli, so hopefully it’ll do the trick, or at the very least, smell gorgeous while it’s trying.

Oh, and then, I discover that Mel has very lovelily (and yes, that is a word) given me an awardy-whatsit, with a very lovely pic to boot. The idea is that one passes said loveliness on to three people who have reminded one of witchiness and, for me, the existence of The World Beyond, so here goes:

1. Doc Witch, whose meditations on subjects ranging from striped tights to the mythical status of fairy-tales are always a pleasure;
2. Mon, whose explorations of astrology continue to pull me in, particularly in combination with her determined attempts to crochet the entire world;
3. LQS, whose ongoing explorations of What It Is To Be keep me fascinated, and all the more-so because I know some of What She Is In Person.

Happy Monday, folks.

Gosh. It’s actually sunny outside for the first time in what feels like months. Now that I’ve written that, of course, a dirty great black cloud will feel it incumbent on itself to slorm over here as fast as the quixotic zephyrs will permit, just in order to throw it down all over me, doubtless, but hey, at least in future years, I can look back to this post and say ‘look! there! it was sunny for at least ten minutes!’.

Anyway.

With the bright morning comes a brighter mood. Thank you for the lovely comments and suggestions on how to rediscover my inner creative mojo; I shall be attempting to put my money where my mouth is over the weekend, and I am already adopting witch of oz’s suggestion that I reframe my view of my current activities and start trying to see them as creative in themselves (cooking, making wine, sorting out the house and looking after the tiny daughter). What an excellent way to look on things which the drudgery of which might otherwise threaten to overwhelm. There is no doubt in my mind that simply working our way through the day in a cheerful, careful, interesting manner is, in relation to the tiny daughter, really rather important work in itself, but sometimes I need to remind myself of this, and to think that, actually, it’s OK if the only thing I do ALL DAY is keep her happy and healthy, because at the end of the day, that’s pretty bloody good going. And most days, she is indeed happy and healthy.

And I think I also ought to acknowledge more often the work that I do which is either creative (baking, cooking, wine-making), or which goes towards allowing Quercus to get on with the big, visible work on the house. I have spent a lot of time recently feeling mildly shifty for not being out there with him, chucking things in a cement mixer and getting covered in a mildly corrosive substance from head to foot, but then I realised the other day that someone has to keep us running, and basically, that’s what I do – with the witchling to look after, someone needs to be clean and presentable (or, at least, as presentable as I ever manage), and as I’m needed for feeds throughout the day, it’s probably the most sense for that someone to be me. Someone needs to make sure there is food in the cupboards, and there are bowls to eat it out of. Someone needs to keep the bathroom clean, and the rugs washed. Someone needs to feed the cats (who have hollow legs at the best of times) and clean out the chickens. Ideally, someone needs to keep the small patch of garden to which the tiny daughter has access, surrounded as it is by woodpiles and cement mixers, free of the usual bedlam, and full of things to look at (currently, lemonbalm, mint, courgettes, potatoes, runner beans, Jerusalem artichokes and sage).

So, my new resolve is to remember that it’s creative to cook meals which mean convenience food never makes it through our door, and it’s creative to think of meals ahead of time so that there are frozen bags of smugness for the witchling’s dinner, and it’s creative to think of next year, when we will be drinking plum wine (three gallons started yesterday), elderflower wine (nine gallons started about three weeks ago), or honeysuckle wine (two gallons started about a month ago). And it’s at least a part of being creative to make sure that the house is clean and clear, because otherwise I get so bogged down in the need to clear and clean that knitting or sewing or making or doing gets shunted so far down the list that it’s not even funny. Maybe this is my fallow period, in terms of actual tangible creative products – and I suppose that’s what I’m missing, really: the knitting project finished, the stitching bound off, the end result toted around by one of my lovelies as an outward and visible sign of my love for them – but that doesn’t mean it’s a fallow period in the bigger picture.

Anyone out there doing alternatively creative things? Found a way to look on the washing-up as all part of the artistic process? Let me know. In fellowship, there is strength (or something equally  communist-sounding), and the knowledge with more people searching for it, We Shall Overcome The Crap And Find A Way To Justify Knitting Instead Of Housework.*

*Obviously your mileage may vary on this one; feel free to substitute a loathsome occupation of your choice for housework, and the scintillating freedom of whatever you choose for knitting.

You know how sometimes you’re all full of good ideas, and one fantastically creative moment after another happens in an uninterrupted stream of productive fabulousness? Nah. Me neither. I’m really struggling with managing to be creative at the moment. All I seem to do is lurch out of bed, knackered and confused, get through the daily tasks necessary to decent (or indecent) living, and pile back into bed, marginally more knackered and confused. Don’t get me wrong: the tiny daughter continues to delight, fascinate and amaze me. Quercus continues to entertain, converse with and divert me. The cats, well, the cats are the cats. But I know myself well enough to know that, while I am very glad that in the last week I have shampooed the downstairs carpets, removed five (FIVE) dead mice from underneath the sofa, and generally pulled the house into a better semblance of order than has been managed for, oh, two years or more, I need something MORE. Largely, what helps me to stay sane, to feel genuinely happy, is to create things. It doesn’t really matter if it’s something baked, some writing on the wall (literally: our house currently sports a quote from John Masefield’s The Box of Delights above the dining room door, and there is an entire verse of a Mervyn Peake poem in our bedroom, put there as a surprise for Quercus’s birthday the year before last), or a knitted creation – I just feel better somehow if I am managing to make, do, or otherwise produce. I have a list of things that I’d like to do at the moment. Here it is:

- Make some more beeswax balm (my fingers have been unaccountably buggered since we moved to this house; kinda like bad eczema but apparently it’s not that, and it refuses to respond to, well, anything, really; I’m trying the balm I made originally for the tiny daughter’s nappy rash, but I want to add some things specifically designed for buggered skin of my particular variety);

- Find a simple pattern for a toddler cardigan to knit for the tiny daughter;

- Turn the old wool jumper I’ve felted into a pixie bonnet and a felted heart monster (don’t ask) for that same tiny daughter;

- Use some of the machine dyes I bought earlier in the year to dye our sad-looking towels, in part to check if they come out half as gorgeous as the colour of the red wall (I have it in mind to dye a pink rag rug to match the wall, but I don’t want to fuck up the colour as the pink is too nice to just throw away on a dodgy dye but at the same time has no obvious long-term home in our house as it’s the wrong colour, if that makes sense).

You’d think that all or any of these things would be simple, and fun, and promisingly tempting. And they are. Yet somehow I’m not doing any of them, and all I seem to manage in the evenings is to clear up after dinner, put the house to bed, and SIT. I’m doing a lot of that, somehow, when what I want to be doing is making things, and gloating as I see a tiny daughter in something I have made her – I have hats that I’ve made for her, and it still cheers me up no end when I see her little personage toddling about in the blue bonnet I improvised earlier in the summer, when there was some actual sun around the place. I keep reading lovely lovely blogs where lovely lovely mamas share lovely lovely patterns/recipes/suggestions for creative things that just make me want to go out and fall down a pothole. I’m not normally susceptible to crafty jealousy, but at the moment, the fabulous goods that the universe keeps showing me seem only to remind me that I’m not managing anything but the bare essentials of living at the moment. How to break the cycle? Suggestions, please, lovely internet.

A while ago I mentioned the ridiculous number of things we’d attempted in a bid to keep using cloth nappies; one of our trials included a home-made bot balm, and, as we’ve ended up using the aforementioned balm for finishing off wooden toys, restoring dry hands, scenting one’s person, balming one’s lips (er…) and generally slathering about the place, I thought I’d share the recipe here.

Body balm
Get hold of…

A small bar of beeswax (ours was about an inch wide, three inches long and half an inch deep)

A (measuring ) cup of oil (I’ve used sunflower, olive, calendula and sweet almond)

About fifteen drops of essential oils to scent (I’ve used combinations of various, or single oils when I was in a monastic mood; I’ve also used calendula oil here too, because I was after something super-skin-friendly. Best scents so far: lavender and valerian for a sleep balm, and geranium, rose and lemon for a daily scent.)

Then…

What I’ve found works best is either to melt the lot together in over a small pan of boiling water, or to wait until you have something in the oven and pop the ingredients in a silicone something-or-other (I used a muffin tray and it worked quite well, not least as you can leave the balm in situ to cool and then you’ve got little poppable-out discs of it, suitable for stashing in a small tin for use as, say, lip balm or solid scent) and shove in for about ten minutes. I’ve read recipes which suggest grating the wax; I did this the first time, and while it may have melted a little more quickly as a result, to be honest, for the general knuckle-grating potential of wax + grater, I didn’t bother after that. Oh, and I found the wax took far longer to melt than I’d expected when I used a pan, hence my experiments with the oven; patience is a virtue, but not one which I possess.

In other lyrical news, how is it that now that I have the opportunity to listen to lots of music (my iPod is a constant companion in the morning shift at work), I’m bored bored bored with everything I own? Now, here’s the thing: that whole buy-nothing vibe is still very much at the forefront of my mind, so while I’m keen to expand the ol’ musical sensibilities, I’m also keen to do so without the outlay of a wodge of cash. So, anyone fancy doing a CD swap? I was thinking it might be entertaining to come up with a topic* (say, ‘travel’), and a collection of random tunes to suit, and to do an exchange. New music for the price of postage (and yes, I am certainly up for international exchanges – the more the merrier). Thoughts? Criticisms? ‘Are you having a laugh’? In the comments box, please.

*I owe this idea to Peaceable Imperatrix, who did such an exchange some time ago; it was good fun, and I got a v. g. mix CD from her imperial self.

This weekend I have A Plan. It involves large glass bottles, lengths of tubing, indecent quantities of sugar, and some hot water. It also involves tramping through a few fields with Quercus, armed with a long stick of some sort for hoooking purposes. (At times like these, I’m glad I’m beginning to get the hang of carrying the witchling on my back; we recently acquired a mei tai carrier in brown velvet, and it’s quite good for popping on and off, though I hate to say it, but I think perhaps, despite the time and faff of on and off, I am perhaps more comfortable in the woven wrap. Is that a woman i.e. ‘I have breasts; please do not attempt to flatten them with fabric’ thing, I wonder?)

Where was I? Ah yes. Alchohol.

We’ve realised lately that it’s been a bloody long time since we last made some wine. Last year, I got some sloes on the go when I was first pregnant, but then nothing else really made it after that; I s’pose knowing that one isn’t going to take part in the fruits of one’s labours (an oddly appropriate saying, bearing in mind my pregnancy) meant that I sort of forgot about it. And now, after a year of construction and general builderyness, our supplies are quite depleted – somehow, three demijohns of plum, three of sloe, one of ginger, one of lemonbalm, one of elderflower, one of crabapple and one of coffee wine have disappeared, leaving us scratching about with a few dodgy-looking bottles of vintage who-knows and some cobweb-covered I-wouldn’t-if-I-were-you.

So this weekend it’s time to rectify this situation. The field behind Earthenhouse is covered with elderflower, and there are more trees to be found in the lanes hereabouts, so that’s the first port of call. Then I’m considering a bottle of the ridicoulsly idyllic-sounding honeysuckle champagne, as the hedges are full of flowers at the moment, and – if I can avoid the poisonous foliage and berries – imagine what a thing to make.

Sadly, the first bit is always the worst. No, not the picking. No, not the taking of the flowers from the stems. Worse yet: the cleaning-out of last year’s demijohns. I’m not a complete slattern, so I do normally give them a perfunctory sluice when we empty the last few drops down our necks, but still somehow the intervening time seems to bring forth a plethora of mouldy whatsits and disgusting so-and-sos, and I’m sure that the strangely-shaped demijohn brush will be pressed into service once more, despite my attempts to avoid it… Oh joy. But I’m sure it’ll be worth it, right? When, in a few months’ time, I’m sitting and swigging the odd half-glass down?

Stymie
tr.v. sty·mied d), sty·mie·ing also sty·my·ing -m-ng), sty·mies -mz)
To thwart; stump: a problem in thermodynamics that stymied half the class.n.
1. An obstacle or obstruction.
2. Sports A situation in golf in which an opponent’s ball obstructs the line of play of one’s own ball on the putting green.
3. A weighty instrument used primarily in frustrated – and normally foolhardy in the extreme – craft projects.
See also kill-joy (n.), thwart (v.), fart-arse (v.), despair (v.)
Also consider: to suck the life out of (v.), to infuriate (v.).
Origin: twenty-first century Devonian (dialect).

Yes folks: I’ve temporarily lost my marbles once more, which behaviour led me to forget – very temporarily – that to approach the sewing machine – or the stymie, as we now think of it – without at least an entire bottle of gin as a back-up plan is complete lunacy. I’ve been making the witchling a blind since about, well, December. So far, it’s one-all; the stymie has successfully defeated many attempts to finish four simple seams, but I prevailed – sort of – today, and managed to get the front! and the back! together! Sweet lord. However, I fear the stymie may have the last laugh: approximate quantity of thread used to achieve seams of roughly six feet in length – so far, nearly an entire bobbin, and about half a new reel. (Is that right? ‘Reel’? It looks… wrong, somehow. Perhaps that’s guilt by association?) The seams, thankfully now hidden away, have literally dozens of short bobbin threads per stitch. It’s an interesting effect – kind of the Glam Rock approach to sewing: ‘Now with added fringing!’. Not quite what I had in mind, but see earlier statement re hidden away… Why? Why does it do this, I ask?

Or at least, so I am told. I have no idea where this week has gone; surely yesterday was Monday, yet somehow, five days have elapsed and it’s Friday again. Five first-thing-in-the-morning feeds, five shared bagels, five mid-morning cups of camomile tea, five standing-up-while-holding-Mama’s-hand sessions, five Mama-attempts-to-create-the-perfect-baby-snack no-sugar cookies, and five now-she’s-asleep-I-really-should-put-her-down moments. At least.

And talking of the quickness with which time flies, which we weren’t, exactly where has the year gone since the witchling arrived? Surely last week I was still pregnant…? Yet somehow, the buttercups in the field across the lane are out again – and especially glorious this year; I keep meaning to put up a pic because they look so fab – and it’s nearly June, and the weather is warming, and they’re harvesting the fields around Earthenhouse, and… and… and the tiny daughter will be one on Monday. June 1st. Monday. MONDAY. How? How is this possible? 

I’ve been thinking a lot as her birthday approaches. It’s such a time of changes for us. Quercus will be working part-time from next Thursday so that he can look after the witchling while I go back to work for five mornings a week (which is of course the most enormous change in itself). This weekend, while Quercus continues to recover from his horrible throat infection thingy, we are painting the kitchen; from drab bare plaster and a decidedly work-in-progress look, we’re going to move to crimson distemper on one wall (breathable for the cob wall we’ve lime-rendered) and cream one the others. We’ve got a plan for the kitchen Quercus is going to build, and we think we know where the wood – oak, obviously, given his, er, name – is coming from. We’ve planted things in the garden, albeit in the only tiny corner which isn’t covered in building chaos, and they’re coming up – beans, courgettes, taters and some herbs, as well as the Jerusalem artichokes which, let’s face it, are going to come up whether we like it or not (they have actually grown through the spoil heap, which is nearly solid clay, which is about ten feet thick above where they were planted the year before last).

Things are changing, growing.

Especially the tiny daughter. She is delighting in more and more flavours and textures – everything from fish, fruits, baked beans to velvet and wooden spoons! – and her favourite thing du jour is to stand up while holding on to a thumb or two; she isn’t very interested in crawling, but clearly wants to walk. Her hair is growing apace; very fine, very fair, from a distance nearly invisible, but the curls remind me of my mother, and we wonder if it’s from her or from Quercus (whose hair is… a little wild). She laughs when I throw her up in the air, and she giggles as we dance an impromptu tango across the kitchen. She talks to herself as she settles down to sleep, and she sleeps for increasingly long periods, prompting me to savour the midnight feeds, at whatever time they happen. How is it that things can be so happy, and yet still remind one of the transience of life? 

Anyway, let us not allow the morbid to prevail; of course, at least part of what I’m thinking at the moment is gloat-worthy, as I survey the haul of presents which we’ve got lined up for the tiny daughter – the corduroy owl I made back in the darkness of the winter, a stacking wooden lighthouse, a pull-along Fresian cow (wooden again), possibly a knitted vest (if I finish in time!), and, possibly best of all, a set of wooden animals which Quercus has made for her, consisting of an elephant, a warthog and a, well, er, a Moomin. They are delightful; I drew him some simple silhouettes and he cut, sanded and waxed them (using a beeswax-based balm I made a few weeks back; I’ve been meaning to post the recipe, come to think of it, as it’s the good stuff (best hissed in a drug baron voice, that last bit), and works well on everything from post-shave soreness to, well, yes, your everyday wooden animal needs).  So, all that’s left is for me to decide on which sort of cake says ‘I’m one today!’ best. Any suggestions, anyone? Preferably of a non-dairy nature?

Some time ago, I acquired a patchwork quilt courtesy of the aged parent. Said quilt was made by my mother, with help from the aged, before I was born, and was in need of refurbishment – about thirty patches had worn away, while others had come loose at the seams, and the fabric used to back it had disintegrated in various places. Now, I am a patchwork numpty. I like very much the look of quilts like this, and I have a collection of Kaffe Fassett books which I regard as patchwork porn, but beyond that, I know nothing (except, obviously, a keen desire to fiddle about and produce something gorgeous which involves no time, no experience, and no expenditure; modest in my ambitions, aren’t I?).

See, I had wanted to make a patchwork to go in the witchling’s room. (Nothing like having a small person about the place to bring out the crafty impulse, is there?) To start with, I wanted one for her bed. Then I quite fancied one for the chair we sit in when I feed her. That was what I decided on, in the end, as her cot is quite diddy, really, and I was imagining making something using large patches, as I thought that would be the easiest in terms of instant gratification. Patience? A virtue, I am sure, but one with which I am unfamiliar. But then there I was, in possession of this quilt – an already-made, acceptable-as-made-by-one’s-own-mama-and-thus-not-constituting-buck-passing quilt – which needed only a little TLC to restore it to its former, ahem, glory. Or so I thought…

Anyway, I found, to my slight chagrin, that up-close and personal, repairing a patchwork quilt is a little bit daunting. Not least when you find that it’s a cleverly shaped one which consists of those little … is it hexagons which have six sides? Maths has never been my strong point. I attempted to make a dooberry. You know, one of those little shape whatsits which you cut round to get the desired patch. I failed miserably, as I was basing it on the quilt itself, and somehow, the fabric didn’t want to stay in position long enough to ensure an even-sided template. (Template – that’s the word I was fumbling for, isn’t it? Although I’m still thinking there’s something beginning with M. Or is it an F? I give up.)

Eventually I settled on sticking the fabric in the gap created by taking out a buggered patch, and sort of making it up as I went along. It seemed, on balance, to work out fine. I replaced all the dodgy-looking ones, and I sorted out bits where my aged parent had haplessly stitched a patch into the backing fabric, and then I realised that what had been troubling me the most was that, despite my love for this quilt, and my appreciation of all the hard work my mother had put into it (and, yes, the work my aged had done too), I didn’t really like the overall result. For a start, there were some (to my eyes, at least) lavishly ugly fabrics involved. I’m talking orange, brown and white asymetric blocks. And bright green, pink and orange flowers. It was… well, quite hideous, if I’m honest. I mean, there were corners which I loved – lots of little be-sprigged patches, small patterns of flowers, tight stripes and plain blocks – but the overall effect was a bit like an accident in a dolly-mixture factory.

So, I resolved to dye the entire thing. Bold, I know. (God, I need to get out more, don’t I?)

And, as might already be obvious, I’m pretty chuffed with it.