Hopes and Aspirations

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Anna Chancellor, crochet, granny squares, juggling, Mapp and Lucia, New Year's resolutions

Christmas Day walk in the Brecon Beacons.

For the first time in 16 years Wellyman and I had a whole 2 weeks off this Christmas and what a joy it was. Apart from my Christmas Eve blog post I didn’t touch the computer for the whole time. There were lots of frosty mountain walks, we met up with some lovely friends and caught up with family, ate more than enough dried fruit in all of its festive guises and snuggled in front of the fire watching films and reading books. But, as I’m realising, the longer the break that harder it is to return to the real world, and the fact that it is January, my nemesis, makes it all the more difficult. Oh to be like Anna Chancellor’s character Lucia in the fabulous TV adaptation of the Mapp and Lucia novels, wafting around in a kaftan, picking flowers from the garden, painting on the beach and practicing Beethoven. *whispers* Between you and me, I’d be fine at the first two but rubbish with the brush and the piano.

Instead I find myself ensconced once again in front of the computer, in my slightly bobbly cardigan clutching a cup of tea as the light fades. New Year’s resolutions might not be everyone’s cup of tea but for me they’re one way of motivating myself and giving me a sense of focus. I’ll be celebrating a significant birthday this year and I’m only too aware of how quickly time seems to pass. I know how easy it is once the routine of daily life takes over to forget to book those tickets for that play, or to sign up to that course that caught my eye. Probably the best bit about having a long break this Christmas meant I had a chance to clear my head. For the first time in months, maybe even a year, my brain didn’t feel like it was constantly whirring with thoughts about work, the house, moving, shopping lists etc.

For me New Year’s resolutions should be an encouragement to do the new and interesting or to pick up something I haven’t done for a while rather than a stick to beat myself with. They should be goals or aspirations but if they aren’t achieved I don’t feel as if I’ve failed. In fact we’re only 7 days into 2015 and I’ve already foundered with one of them. The great thing though is that there are another 358 days left to give that particular resolution a go.

So in 2015 I hope to:

– juggle more. Wellyman taught me to juggle when we first got married but in recent years I’ve let my practice slip so much so I can’t remember the last time I picked up the juggling balls. I was always in that forlorn group of kids left to the end when team sports were being picked. It was fair enough to be honest, I was pretty rubbish when it came to hand-eye coordination. I was always more concerned about self-preservation partly due to a rounders bat in the face on one occasion and being taken out by a basketball to the head on another. So it was a huge surprise when Wellyman showed me I wasn’t a lost cause when it came to throwing and catching. It’s fantastic exercise too, particularly when you’re learning as you spend most of your time picking up the balls that you keep dropping.

– read more. This is one I haven’t had great success with so far this year. I was lucky enough to receive this fabulous stash of books for Christmas. Before Christmas I had developed the naughty habit of working through my lunch break, sandwich in hand showering the keyboard in crumbs, so my plan for 2015 is to spend 30 minutes at lunchtime reading. So far, after only 3 days back at work, the plan hasn’t worked but I’m hopeful that I’ll achieve it at least some of the time.

– make more. Rather than dwell on the number of years I’ll be celebrating this coming birthday I’ve decided to use it as a spur to try my hand at a few new crafts I’ve always wanted to learn. There’s book binding, willow weaving and how to navigate my way around a sewing machine for a start. Hopefully there will also be the completion of my winter project of a crocheted blanket. I’m at about the halfway stage at the moment and starting to think if I ever see another granny square it’ll be too soon.

Winter project – my unfinished granny square blanket

So where does growing fit into my plans for 2015. Well, I have a feeling it’s going to be a year where my plans have to be very flexible. I’m keeping the allotment for the foreseeable future at least, and I’ll be trying to treat spring and the early part of summer as normal, after that, well, who knows. If I need to dig up and move a cut flower patch mid-growing season well so be it. My blog posts may be a bit less welly/garden based this year as a result of possibly moving so I hope you’ll bear with me. It’s been quite hard reading about everyone’s plans for the forthcoming gardening year on twitter and blogs when I feel in such a state of limbo myself. In some ways the resolutions I’ve picked are a way of distracting myself from this state of mind and forcing me to stay positive about the year ahead. I do have plans though for a series of blog posts entitled ‘Inspired by Nature’ so I’m looking forward to writing those, hopefully you’ll enjoy reading them.

Wishing you all a fabulous 2015. x

Hooked

Tags

crochet, green manure, other use for garden twine

crocheted tea cosy

I know there’s always something I could be doing in the garden or on the allotment but the incessant rain since the start of December has meant that they have been no-go zones really. I always find the sight of a ‘bare to the bones’ allotment a bit too demoralising anyway. My own plot hasn’t fared too badly considering. I didn’t think it was possible to rain more than it did in 2012 but this has been the first time I have seen standing water on my plot. I fear for the tulips tucked up in the soil but there’s little I can do about it now. The green manure I sowed back in late summer and early autumn has made a real difference to how the soil has coped with the rain. Neighbouring plots look as if the soil has literally been pummelled, the rain has been so intense. Whereas the beds on my allotment, covered in phacelia, look as if they haven’t been touched. It’s just a pity I couldn’t cover more soil. One of the downsides to using green manures is needing bare soil to sow into at the right time for it to have time to germinate and put on enough growth. With such a mild autumn I still had flowers going into November. By the time I pulled them out it was too late to sow.

Gardening does take up such an enormous amount of my time during the year that it leaves a fairly large void when winter comes round. So what does a gardener do when they can’t garden, when it’s cold and wet outside and nothing is growing? For me the winter break gives me the chance to get crafty. Crochet is the craft of choice at the moment. It’s perfect for whiling away the long dark nights sat in front of the fire.

I have dabbled with a crochet hook in the past. I made a hat for Wellyman one Christmas, although I massively underestimated the time it would take to make it. I got there with hours to spare but developed a touch of repetitive strain injury in the process. Perhaps this is why I took a break and put the wool to one side. But this autumn I returned to it again and I’m completely addicted.

Vintage sewing box

The pile of crochet books are building up by my bedside table and I’ve acquired quite a stash of wool. And I was over the moon last weekend when I was given a beautiful sewing box by my in-laws. I had been on the lookout for one for a while and planned a visit to a flea market in the new year to track one down. Instead I am now the proud owner of the one which belonged to Wellyman’s grandma, and that family connection makes it all the more special. I love the functionality of the design and its simple Shaker-style beauty.

flowery brooch

It turns out though that even when I crochet gardening and plants aren’t that far from my mind. This flower brooch was a Christmas present for my mum. And the colours I used for my tea cosy were inspired by the a drive we did several years ago, in Ireland. We found ourselves passing through a place called Sally Gap not far from Dublin. The scenery was stunning with dark, rich green moorland and pink, purpley tones of heather.

crocheted garden twine coaster

I’ve even found that garden twine makes a very interesting material with which to crochet. It’s much harder to work with than wool because the fibre is tougher but the texture the jute gives to projects is fantastic. It’s more robust than wool too which makes it perfect for table mats and coasters.

Strangely there is little recorded history about crochet. It became popular in the 19th century from Britain to Africa and across to Asia but, prior to this, there is nothing to suggest the origins of using one hook and a thread to create a fabric. Knitting however can be traced back to the early medieval period. Every time I make something I find it incredible that simply by using one hook and a material it is possible to create so many different patterns and designs. I have lots of plans; an old duvet cover is to be cut up and crocheted to make a bath mat, there are cushion covers to make, a blanket to finish. The nights are getting a little lighter and the first of the seed orders has been made. So as the garden starts to make it demands I guess there’ll be less time to crochet in the coming months, but that’s fine, as I’m itching to get my hands into the soil again.

I’d love to hear about what you do during the winter gardening hibernation.

Obsession, naivety and corrugated iron

Tags

crochet, en dash, rights and permissions, writing a book

I try to keep my posts to all things plant related, whether it’s walking in the countryside, reading gardening books, growing plants or, even better, eating them. Now I can add writing about them to the list.

I could never have imagined last autumn when a publisher said they loved my idea for a book what it would have involved. Of course, at the time I thought I did. But isn’t that always the case with something new, because if we did fully understand the process we’d probably never do it in the first place. Instead we fall into things with differing degrees of naivety, discovering along the way whole new worlds that had previously been off our radar. For me writing this book has been a pretty steep learning curve. Previously I hadn’t had anything to do with the world of book publishing. I’d had some experience of research and writing long documents when I was at university but, other than that, nothing. Over the last few months a plethora of new words and phrases have appeared in documents and emails that I have never come across before and gradually the realisation has dawned on me that writing a book is not just simply getting some words on to a screen.

I’m developing a whole new appreciation of the work that goes into producing the books I love to read. It becomes a slightly obsessive process, partly because it’s not the sort of job that you can leave in the office on an evening and go home and forget about it. Ideas crop into your head whenever and wherever. As a result I have pieces of paper with frantically scrawled notes to self dotted about the house which, invariably, I can’t understand by the time I get round to looking at them properly. Because the book is about gardening and I’m growing all the plants for it, my usual, pre-book plant obsession has only multiplied. As the months progress this will be matched only by my increasing preoccupation with the weather.

This time last year I had no idea about the complicated world of rights and permissions. That means trying, and generally failing, to secure the OK to use material, be it a photograph or text from another source in your own book. Just trying to track down who owns the rights to a particular book or photograph is a task in itself and I’ve spent whole mornings in email conversations on the elusive trail of a particular sentence. All of which so often ends in frustration.

I have had to come up with a list of photographs I’ll need. So a rough draft of the text so far is covered in red pen indicating where I think a photo is needed and although I’m writing this with the benefit of spell check, it is, of course, not foolproof. For some reason my fingers insist on typing ‘form’ when I mean ‘from’ but as the former is a correctly spelt word spell check is useless. It’s surprising how many of these little things slip through. It’s crazy now to think that all of my university assignments were hand written and my 10,000 word dissertation was typed up on an electronic typewriter with a tiny screen that only showed four lines of text at any one time. There was more than one occasion when ‘Boris’, as the typewriter was known, was nearly launched from my bedroom window with sheer frustration.

Then there has been the quest for prop materials for the photos. I’ve discovered that spending several hours on cold, wet Sundays wandering around flea markets and reclamation yards is a surprisingly absorbing pastime. And there was the serendipitous introduction to a local builder on one of the aforementioned sorties which resulted in us following him along country roads to his farm. There was much consternation and amusement that I should want something he was going to get rid of as scrap. But when I explained he very kindly gave me just what I was looking for, a sheet of corrugated iron, and we spent a while chatting about his farm and his late wife and her love of gardening.

By the end of this summer I will have discovered what ‘box prominent’ and ‘box recessive’ mean, I’ll have proof read around 45,000 words and I’ll have worked out how to write an index. Apparently, there are some people who write indexes professionally. Another fact I hadn’t come across until recently.

I’m loving the whole process, though. I’ve always wanted to do something that was even just vaguely creative. I did once crochet a hat for Wellyman which he still wears today but I was still frantically finishing it one Christmas Eve and had developed repetitive strain injury in the process and so never really went any further with that. I also have no musical ability whatsoever and have no real skills on the drawing/painting front to speak of. But, for once, I feel like my creative juices have found an outlet and it’s brilliant.

So, if I disappear from the blog occasionally over the next couple of months you know where I am. I’ll be buried in my study, surrounded by illegible notes trying to find the ‘en dash’ symbol. How could I reach my mid-thirties and have never come across an en dash before?  It’s a longer hyphen for all those who are as mystified as I was.