It’s Christmas time so I thought I would make something special for my friends who were coming for Christmas dinner. What better way to celebrate than with a yule log from Nigella? It’s my first attempt at such a cake, and I have to say I was very pleased with the result.

(excuse the horrible photo, but it was taken with my iPhone – rubbish!)

I decided to add some sparkle by scattering a few gold glittery leaves around the rather realistic-looking log. And damn it tasted good. That Nigella knows how to bake a thing or two. Everything I have ever made from her How To Be a Domestic Goddess book has come out amazing.

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I think my yarn addiction has reached an all-time low. Or an all-time high, depending on your perspective. I am beginning to think that I have more yarn in my closet than clothing. And I’m almost certain I have more balls of yarn than shoes… and I have a LOT of shoes.

This hasn’t been helped by the fact that I brought home almost half a huge suitcase full of yarn when I went to Japan in October/November. At first I thought I could limit things to stocking up on gorgeous Noro yarns, but no, I couldn’t help myself. In fact, I even borrowed my cousin’s bike just to make an expedition to the local craft shop in Maebashi to stock up on all sorts of crafty goodies. Not only did I come back with 2 bags full of yarn, but I also bought some cute craft kits for making slippers, handbags and money purses.

I also spent far more time than should be allowed trying to hunt down the best Tokyu Hands store in Tokyo, rather than going out sightseeing. Prioritisation problems? Moi? Never!

The best thing I brought back from my trip has to be the craft books and magazines, though. The Japanese attention to detail and the fairly-recent zakka trend means that bookshops in every town are laden with beautiful volumes covering everything from felting to making your own moisturiser. I picked up a couple of real gems, including a whole book dedicated to making corsages, and another one called Happy Small Goods of Crochet, in which I want to make pretty much every single thing. I hope I can find time between getting my web consulting business off to a flying start to make a few gifts for Christmas.

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So I’ve been inspired to get back in to crochet recently, perhaps because my life has been so hectic and crochet can be done so much more quickly than knitting. I picked up a copy of Stitch & Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker a while back, and ever since then, I’ve been doing bits of crochet here and there.

The real clincher for me switching to the hook has been the fact that you can no longer knit on airplanes anymore, due to the ludicrous security rules (oh come on, you can do more damage with a ballpoint pen than most knitting needles!). Anyway, I decided to take a few skeins of yarn and some crochet hooks with me on my recent trip to Japan, to try and whip out a project or two during my travels.

Here’s a crochet scarf I made one night when my insomnia struck again. I think this took me an hour or two, crochet by the light of a headtorch while my hubby snoozed away. I made it using some super chunky chartreuse yarn in a wool blend. In fact it’s so chunky, it only took 3 rows of double crochet to make it! It’s a really long skinny scarf that looks rather fetching in shocking chartreuse, especially when paired with my favourite peacock blue overcoat. I have another skein of this yarn left, so I am thinking of making a beret or perhaps some wrist-warmers to go with the scarf. Yet another in my long list of future projects!

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Scarves are among the easiest things to knit, so they tend to be ubiquitous amongst knitters, especially as gifts. But this scarf is very different, very special, and one I will never forget knitting.

A few weeks ago my hubby and I got back from an an extended trip to Japan to celebrate our 10 year wedding anniversary, and to meet up with my Japanese family. It has been nearly 15 years since I was last in Japan, and my family there have never met my hubby, so that in itself was a momentous occasion. To me, the other big deal about this trip was that it may be the last time I get to see my 93 year old grandmother (obachan in Japanese). She is an amazing woman, and I can see where my mother gets her amazing-ness. I hope that even just a little bit of this wow-factor has trickled down into me.

I started knitting this scarf for my obachan before I left England, hoping to finish it during my travels around Japan before we headed to Beppu, where she lives. I ended up frantically knitting on the train to Beppu, getting motion sickness as a result, and only finishing moments before we disembarked. It was worth it, though.

You see, my obachan was a keen crafter when she was younger, and my mother has some fantastically detailed amigurumi (little crocheted animals) that she made. I hope these will be passed down to me, just like the skill of crochet, which went from my obachan, to my mother, to me. My obachan also made all of her children’s clothes, when the family were forced out of Manchuria during the occupation in WWII. They had nothing but rags, yet my obachan made do, and managed to instill in all of the children an incredibly positive outlook on life that pervades the family to this day. The ability to make something from nothing was also passed down to my mother, and I like to think a little bit has rubbed off on me, too.

But I digress: back to the scarf. Because she has such an appreciation of handicrafts, my obachan was thrilled to receive the scarf. It didn’t matter that she speaks no English and my Japanese is pretty awful: we could both tell that the gift was something much more than just a little bit of fabric to wrap around your neck. It was something that transcends generations, cultures and time, and brought two people closer together.

She also loved it for other, more simple reasons: the colour is her favourite (which I had no idea), it was done in a stitch that she hadn’t learned herself (seed / moss stitch), and she was really intrigued by the keyhole, which she had never seen before. Overall, a resounding success, that made me want to knit even more. I only hope I get the chance to give her another gift made from my hands someday.

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My fantabulous friend Digger brought me some knitting magazines from her trip to Australia, and this is the second project I’ve finished using patterns from those mags. As usual, I couldn’t resist changing things up a bit so instead of using super-fine mohair for this shawl, I used a beautiful Noro Blossom yarn, which made it more durable and warm.

I love Noro yarn, and had purchased a load of this particular colourway, even without knowing what I would make with it. I think the self-striping effect looks pretty cool on this shawl, and the variegated colours mean it goes with most outfits.

The coolest part about this project is how quickly it knits up, because you use ginormous knitting needles and the holes are made by purposely dropping stitches. The result is like a really stretchy net, so I can imagine using this technique for something like a toy ‘hammock’… I used to have one hanging over my bed when I was a kid, filled with soft plush toys. I guess you could also make a handy string bag using the same approach. Or – God forbid – a string vest (aka fishnet tank top, for you American readers!)

Although it’s supposed to be a summer wrap, I think you can wear this pretty much year-round, either as a wrap or around your neck as a scarf. Here it is worn as a scarf, which I must say is very warm indeed.

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Although I think I do a pretty good job of documenting my work-related projects, I have made a lot of things in my crafting life that I foolishly neglected to document. My mother sent me some photos of the gazebo and closed porch she is building, which has reminded me to always take pictures of my projects from now on. I will never again get to see the lovely alpaca scarf I knitted for my hubby, because he lost it shortly after I gave it to him last winter . And then there are all those scarves, hats, soaps, body creams, bowls and assorted other things I have made as presents for friends over the years. I really regret not having the foresight to take pictures of them.

So I decided to go back in time and take a photo of my very first knitting project, which I still have. It’s now well-worn, with little fluffy bits all over, and it looks quite amateur-ish when I look at it. But here it is: a duck-egg blue & chocolate brown stripy scarf. It’s a basic garter stitch pattern from Stitch & Bitch, adapted with stripes. In the photo it’s sitting on my lovely wool coat that is an amazing peacock blue colour… shame the colours didn’t come out too well because it looks navy rather than teal.

Aside: My mother is an incredible woman. She has always been my inspiration. We have crafted together a lot over the years, from oil paintings to ceramics, to silk-flower making and all sorts of other projects. I really wish I had photos of some of the things we made together when I was growing up. My mother’s latest love is woodworking, and at 67 years old, she’s pretty hard core to be building giant covered porches all on her own. She ROCKS!

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My hubby asked me to make a tea cosy, but we both wanted something modern rather than something frilly or granny-ish. We have a minimal white teapot with a kind of Japanese-inspired shape, so I thought I would find some masculine yarn in neutral colours to make a thick warm cosy to fit it.

I chose a dark chocolate brown superchunky cotton yarn that has strands of white and grey satiny ribbon running through it, and here’s the result. I didn’t follow a pattern, I just made it up as I went along, and I am pleased with the results. I have a whole ball of the yarn left, so I’d like to make a matching tray liner (dare I say modern ‘doily’?) or some coasters for the teacups.

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In clearing out my computer hard drive, I found some photos of the garden that Mark & I cleared out and made into something useable. Mark did a lot of the hard work, and I did the design and most of the planting. It was from our first flat together, on Wimbart Road in Brixton. The photos are from 1999, and I am not sure that I had a digital camera back then… which is a shame because the only photos I could find on the hard drive were low resolution, so unfortunately you can’t see a lot of the detail.

We worked really hard on the garden, which was an overgrown wasteland when we moved into the flat. It was a rental flat, and it looked like it hadn’t been used in years. There were thistles that had grown to 7feet high, discarded toys & furniture, and weeds everywhere. It took us AGES to clear it all out, prepare the soil, and plant it up. But what took the longest was the mosaic.

We were new to London and neither of us was working in a well-paying job, so we had to do the whole thing on the cheap. So I decided that we would build our own ‘mosaic deck’ out of marine plywood and paint. So we cut 2 hemispheres out of marine ply, laid footings to support it, and then got to work on the paint. Little did I know how long it would take to sponge-paint 1inch x 1inch squares onto a circle of around 8 feet in diameter. Well, you can do the math and guess. It was the longest most tedious project I think I have ever done – with Mark’s help, of course. The pair of us must have spent about a week off & on out there in the garden, with our little plates of paint and tiny sponges, dabbing away at this massive white circle. Because the circle was huge & white, it reflected the sun so we both suffered from sunburn. But I think it turned out really well in the end, and we got lots of pleasure sitting out there on our own masterpiece.

During the course of digging and mixing compost in with the topsoil, we ended up with a big pile of builder’s rubble and stony soil that we didn’t know what to do with. We couldn’t really afford a skip, so I had a MacGyver inspiration and decided to make use of our mound, by turning it into a raised bed. Instead of doing something more conventional, I had the crazy idea of using cheap plastic plumbing pipes as the barrier to hold all the soil back, and wanted to make a curved bed that would flow around the mosaic. I cut the pipe into pieces, spray painted it with car paint so it wouldn’t chip, and then set about planting the bed and inside the pipes with rockery plants. The end result looked pretty cool, kind of like a big pipe organ buried in our garden (see picture left). And the ‘mind your own business’ plants absolutely loved the pipes, and were spilling over the edge in no time.

One of the things I remember best was that when we were digging we found a set of false teeth! I wonder how they got into the ground, or what their owner must have thought when they went missing. We also found a tricycle, some wicker shelving, loads of broken pots, as well as several tables and chairs, which I reupholstered and painted. In fact we still have 2 of the chairs and one coffee table to this day.

I often wonder what happened to the garden after we moved out, just a year after the makeover. I remember the estate agents were over the moon when they came round to view the place as we were leaving, because they hadn’t seen it since it was a big wasteland (when we moved in). Of course I had asked them if we could tidy up the garden and make use of it, but they hadn’t yet seen the change until we were moving out. We took a few of the plants, but left most of them in situ, so I wonder how they have grown. I also wonder how well our mosaic and pipe-organ stood up to the weather over the years. Who knows; it may now look just as much a mess as when we first moved in, but I like to think it stayed beautiful.

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I signed up to Flickr last month, and I can see it’s going to be addictive. I love all the groups that are available on the site – I could spend hours (in fact I have!) looking through all the photos on there. There are some real beauties. I particularly like the group that shows you how to do all sorts of things in Photoshop, as well as the groups dedicated solely to images from SecondLife. How they do the things they do in a virtual world with so many constraints, I will never know.

The first batch of pics I’ve uploaded onto my Flickr account is the set of photos from our recent trip to Iceland. What an amazing place! I have never felt so close to the elements of nature. Aside from a slightly scary experience driving through a completely white landscape, with only small yellow markers to tell where the road was, I had a wonderfully relaxing trip. But if you ever go, don’t stay in the Hotel Metropolitan unless you like sleeping on a bed made of coat hangers!

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Public libraries are great. I had forgotten just how great they are until I started working right next to the wonderful and fantabulous Swiss Cottage library, which is a beauty to behold and chock full of literary goodness. The only downside is that many of the knitting and craft books are for use in the library only, and cannot be checked out for leisurely perusal. But they do have a cheap photocopier, so I managed to copy several patterns from Stitch & Bitch Nation that I plan to knit as soon as I can find/afford the yarn.

My first project from S&BN is this cute little bunny hat for babies. The yarn is a lovely soft Rowan merino wool, and I was fortunate enough to be able to find the exact colours and the exact yarn specified in the pattern – which doesn’t seem to happen very often for me. I like to make things my own, and often purposely deviate from the pattern’s specified yarn, but in this case, the yarn shown in the picture on the pattern looked perfect, and when I felt the softness I couldn’t resist.

I seem to be on a bunny theme at the moment – maybe it’s because all of my friends seem to be breeding like rabbits! Whatever the reason, I think this cute hat turned out really well, especially considering it was my first attempt at decreasing and knitting on double-pointed needles. Here’s a picture of the recipient of this gift, the beautiful baby Xanthe Pearl. She has a little growing to do before it will fit her properly, but I am sure it will fit in no time.

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