It’s an Incus cowl (you can get the pattern – part of a collection of three – here). Mum chose the pattern and the yarn – it’s Manos Silk Blend in Aurora – and I knitted it up. The pattern is lovely – once you’ve got the stitch pattern set up it’s mindless knitting for 9 rows, then a teeny bit of concentration to cross the cables, then mindless knitting for another 9 rows. The yarn is heavenly – absolutely gorgeous to knit with, and a lovely sheen.

The variegated yarn makes the cabling a subtle detail rather than a big style feature – I am tempted to knit myself one in a solid colour for comparison purposes. I have a skein of yarn I’d love to use, but it’s the wrong weight, so I’ll need to do some sums to adjust the pattern and do a bit of swatching to work out if I have enough.

I have some other projects on the go – the monochrome crochet, a nice simple knitting project that is currently not impressive enough to show off, and a more complex one which I can’t show off because it’s for someone who I know reads the blog. But I will say that I have already used more than 1000 metres of yarn this month, so that resolution at least is off to a good start!

The first is that I was given a sewing machine of my very own. It’s very old but it’s new to me, and so I’ve decided that it’s time to get over my sewing machine phobia. The phobia is quite deep seated and results from a girl in my textiles class – when I was 12 – sewing through her thumb. Lots of blood and disgusting nail death and that sort of thing. I have occasionally used a machine but not often enough to completely get over the fear. But I fully intend that a year from now I will be confident – if not completely competent – in the use of my machine. So, that’s resolution one.

The second resolution came as a result of big clear out Chez S&S. I have been decluttering like a mad thing, and at the same time, we’ve been doing some home improvements – including in the room where I store my yarn. Yes, I know I’ve mentioned the ‘too much yarn’ problem before. And yes, I have had plans to deal with it, which have come to nothing, or little. But when you combine emptying the room with the yarn in with decluttering the house and moving all the yarn in baskets and project bags scattered all over the place, so it’s all together – well, suffice to say that it made me feel a bit queasy. I knew it was bad, but it was worse than I thought. Much worse. So this year is going to be a stash reducing year. I have decided on the following rules. It’s useless to make myself promise to knit/crochet a certain amount. My life is unpredictable and it’s bound to go wrong. It’s also useless to make myself promise not to buy any yarn. Because, well, if I could do that I wouldn’t have a yarn stash that threatened to exceed my life expectancy.

So Rule 1 – as I use yarn up, I can replace it – with half the amount. For every two metres I use, I can buy one.

Rule 2 – yarn is only ‘used up’ when it’s in finished objects. No starting lots of things and ending up with dozens of half-knitted things lurking in corners, because we’ve been there before. 

Rule 3 – no staying completely in the comfort zone. Yes, there can be some repeated projects or mindless easy projects, but some of the projects have to be things I’ve not done much or any of before.

And as I can’t imagine not being able to buy yarn at Wonderwool, which is in April, I need to get cracking.

This is my current project, which is a nice bit of crochet. The white Christmas tree and white Christmas cake seem to have propelled me into a bit of a white phase – but I rather like it.

As usual, I used Nigella’s recipe, fed it with brandy, and then marzipanned with golden marzipan. I adore marzipan (Mr S&S doesn’t) so I am winning the children over to marzipan love by feeding them the scraps from the cake. It seems to be working. I didn’t have the energy or the time to faff with royal icing, so it was packet fondant all the way. The white Christmas tree obviously set off something in my creative subconscious, because the cake was similarly minimalist this year:

When I was growing up, the TV was known as ‘the box’, as in ‘Is there anything on the box?’ (or, inexplicably, the cod-French ‘Est-ce qu’il y a quelque chose sur le boite ce soir?’). One of the things that surprises people about our house is that we don’t have a TV. Well, we have a TV, but it’s not connected to receive broadcast. We can watch DVDs, but if we want to watch broadcast TV we have to go to someone’s house, or, for BBC programmes, use the iPlayer and watch them on the computer. Which means that we don’t watch much broadcast TV at all.

We didn’t make this decision deliberately, in an attempt to be ascetic – we moved into a house with bad reception and didn’t get round to fixing the dish. For months. After which, we realised we didn’t really miss it, and decided not to bother. By this time, not having a TV had become normal, so we weren’t prepared for how odd people would find it. We frequently get asked if we miss it. (No, or we’d have a TV). What do we do in the evenings? (We talk or read or knit or sew or play games or have a bath or… um, put a film on). Don’t we feel we’re missing out on the good stuff on TV? (Not really – we spend our TV licence money on DVDs, so we invariably catch up on the good stuff eventually, even if we’re a year or so behind.) Don’t our kids miss out? (I hope not. They do have DVDs, so we can choose their viewing, and as well as the contemporary stuff, they love Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, Willo the Wisp and the Clangers. They watch some TV at their grandparents’ house, but thankfully they stick to CBeebies so they don’t see too many adverts!.) Several people assume that we think we’re terribly intellectual, or somehow superior, which we don’t – we’ve had TV for most of our lives and I can readily imagine that we may well have it again, but it’s interesting that this perception surfaces.

We get our news from the radio – Radio 4 is on almost all day if we’re not working – which means that I’m quite well informed but sometimes I don’t know what a key player in current affairs looks like until I see a picture on a news website, which is quite disconcerting. We both work from home so we don’t have the issue of the ‘water cooler’ conversations about what was on TV last night, but on internet forums and at social occasions I notice – in a way I never had before – how much people talk about the television. I also notice that when people complain about something (an election, the football, the Olympics) being ‘everywhere’, they might not know it, but they don’t really mean ‘everywhere’, they mean the TV – I’ve never felt that sense of something being ubiquitous since I stopped having one.

When I watch TV at other people’s houses I’m always taken aback by how strident adverts are – I have definitely become more sensitive in 5 years without a telly. It took a year to convince TV Licensing that we don’t have a TV – they are incredibly reluctant to believe that anyone without a licence could be that way because they don’t have a TV. But we’ve heard nothing from them for nearly 4 years, so they have probably put us on a list of dangerous subversives.

Go and see Katy to check out the other Weekworders!

When I do a two-colour tree, I do one colour first and then the other; that way I don’t end up with it lopsided and with pools of one colour that I notice later and then have to rearrange. So I got all the white stuff on and thought, ‘Actually, I quite like that as it is.’

So here’s my all-white (apart from a little red and white bird which snuck on courtesy of my daughter) tree.

Did I mention my bows? I bought 15 metres of cheap uber-synthetic satin ribbon; I didn’t want to splash out too much until I knew the idea worked. And my goodness, it’s hard to tie that stuff into proper, even bows. I managed it in the end, by devising a two-ribbon and needle and thread loop-loop-stitch-pinch-tie process.

I am very happy with them.

Here’s the recipe for the biscuits, by the way:

Vanilla Spice Biscuits

175g butter, softened.
200g caster sugar.
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
400g plain flour (this recipe works very well with gluten free flour)
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp mixed spice
pinch of allspice

For the icing:
250g icing sugar, sieved
Juice of 1 lemon
Food colouring and sprinkles as wished

Cream sugar and butter til pale. Beat in eggs and vanilla. In another bowl mix flour, salt and baking powder, and then add them to the butter and eggs, mix gently. Halve the dough, form into discs or balls and wrap in clingfilm to rest in fridge for 1 hr. Roll the dough on a floured surface to half a cm thick, then cut shapes, and place on baking sheets – I flour my sheets as these do have a tendency to stick. Bake for 8-12 mins at 180C, until golden brown.

For the icing, mix the lemon juice with the sugar until you have a thick paste. Add a bit of water if you need to. Colour as desired and then go mad.

This year, we’ve had an Advent Candle instead of a calendar, and it’s alarming how quickly it’s shortened. It’s a very visual reminder that tempus does indeed fugit.

The children love it and we have daily arguments over whose turn it is to blow it out. (The Little Boy has odd numbers, the Little Girl, even). The Little Boy does a big puff and blows it straight out, while the Little Girl faffs around with tiny breaths making the flame flicker and gutter, before the chorusing of ‘Get on with it!’ makes her blow it properly!

Sorry folks!

I am going to tag….

Emily

to choose the next word.

Yes, I’ve cracked open the festive music. Mr S&S has stopped complaining since I told him that he was squashing my attempts to be happy and festive and accused him of being a Grinch. Sometimes guilt has its uses. Anyway, no, this is not, despite what it claims, the Best Christmas Album in the World Ever, but it’s pretty good. It has most of the must-have classics (White Christmas, The Christmas Song, an Ella Fitzgerald number), the obligatory Wizzard and Mud and Slade, and some more unusual choices (Mad World and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power of Love, not to mention a bit of Steeleye Span (Gaudete, one of my favourites). It has Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews doing Baby, It’s Cold Outside, which is a marvellous version. I do prefer Eartha Kitt’s Santa Baby, but I can live with Kylie’s. There are some fillers – I could live without The Waitresses – and I am fairly sure that the true best album ever would have East 17′s Stay Another Day, which despite being objectively awful, is one of my favourite Christmas songs ever.

But no. The thing that comprehensively ruins this compilations claim to greatness is that while it does contain the marvellous Fairytale of New York, it is not the Pogues version with Kirsty MacColl. No. It is the version with Ronan bloody Keating. Ronan Keating. Yes, him out of the squeaky-clean boyband. And a woman who has a nice voice but who lacks the venom necessary. (‘I could have been someone…’ ‘Well, so could anyone’ , spits Kirsty. Marvellous.)

Whose idea was this travesty? Find them. And … well, what I want to say next may lead to comparisons with Jeremy Clarkson. Let’s just say I skip past that track. In a week or so I’ll be breaking out the Carols from Kings CD, which is my music of choice for baking and decorating and present wrapping. That’s when things get serious.

But there they were, in the supermarket, looking all red and green and festive. And cheap. So I succumbed, and bought one. And very cheery it looks too.