I love to cable...

I had a ball of wool left over from my cowl and my sister had mentioned wanting a headband. To be fair she mentioned this during the freezing cold start to April we were having, but I could see her point about needing something that would give a bit of warmth on her commute but not be too hot on the tube.

Of course Ravelry came up trumps with hundreds of options and I went for this one because it sounded so easy. And it was!

New things I had to learn in this pattern included changing from knit to the dreaded purl halfway through a row. I couldn't understand why I was getting an extra stitch every time I changed to purl, and eventually worked out that I had to bring the wool to the front when switching from knit to purl. I'm sure anyone with an ounce of knowledge about knitting is laughing as they read this, but for me every day is a school day when it comes to knitting at the moment.


I love cabling, I love to see the pattern taking shape, and it's so easy to see where you're going wrong.

So now the sun is shining and the headband is finished. Is it wrong to wish for a bit of a chill so that it can be worn?

Cake International

If you're going to call your show Cake International, surely there should be quite a lot of cake? Putting this aside, I had a great day at the show at Excel yesterday with my friend Mel.

I hadn't been before so didn't know what to expect but from looking at the Cake International Facebook page the night before, I knew there would be lots of amazing cakes in the competition section and possibly the chance to bump into Bake Off gurus Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry.

After a surprisingly smooth journey on train and underground we arrived at the Excel just before 11am and did a quick circuit of all the trade stands to think about what to buy later, before moving on to the competition section. Some of the cakes were truly amazing, but equally I was quite reassured to see some that weren't outside the realms of my ability. Maybe next year!

Very few entries actually contained cake, especially the wedding cakes and decorative pieces which didn't have to. I found this a bit odd but I guess it's to give the decorators the best opportunity to show off their skills without having to worry about correcting a slightly wonky cake or worrying about how to support the weight of the cake.



By lunchtime we needed to get out of the crowd, so took a little stroll outside the Excel to the Fox pub where we had a lovely quiet lunch to refuel for the afternoon. We returned to the show to make purchases!

I have never really done any sugarcraft work - as I've said before it's all about brilliant tasting cake for me and I've only really done fondant modelling and some piped ganache or buttercream. Pretty sure I really would codge it up if I tried to anything that required delicacy or patience! My eyes were truly opened to the wide array of things that were on offer though!

The Arista Soft modelling paste team were demonstrating how to make flowers on their stand and these looked quite simple. When the paste dries it is still a bit soft and flexible, which, I think,  makes it a lot nicer to feel and look at than the hard, brittle sugar ones I have seen before. Only problem is you can't eat it! Well, you could because it's non toxic and made from potato flour, but it wouldn't be very nice. I bought a big block (surprisingly light - it feels like a pack of baby wipes) for £5 and will have a little experiment.

I knew I wanted to try some transfer sheets, the ones that put a pattern onto chocolate. I shopped around for the cheapest ones and found a stall selling five sheets for £10, even one with some Rock Choir stars on which will come in handy in future. Some paper butterflies (£2 per pack) and an offer bag from Renshaw (nice big blocks of white and brown modelling chocolate, white fondant and a teatowel for £5) completed my haul. I hadn't planned to buy much because I have nowhere to tidy it all away to at home so I was quite happy! Mel topped up her stack of things with some wires for flowers, a silicone rose mould, a selection of powder colours and some fondant blocks that Renshaw were selling for £1 each. We could already see that the stands were planning reductions for the last day so I think we'll come on the Sunday next year and pick up bargains!

Paul Hollywoood and Mary Berry were on in the theatre area at 4pm so at 3pm we headed over there, hoping to get a place and a much needed sit down. Alas it was already full and nobody was budging when the previous demo finished, so we joined the queue to be let into the VIP seating area if that didn't get filled. We were lucky to eventually get seated and Paul and Mary were fab. I picked up a top tip from Mary about putting your pastry onto the bottom of your flan tin (fold the edges in) before putting it into the ring and then arranging the pastry, rather than trying to lift the pastry into the ring with the base in place, and Paul's tip for dough is 'the wetter the better'. Filth. ;-)

It was lovely to see Paul do some baking after a day filled with decoration. I felt back in my comfort zone!

Overall we had a brilliant day - there was so much to see and ideas to obtain. There were just a few things that could be improved:

• More baking stands and baking ideas...or just rename it Cake Decorating International so it's more clear what will be there. This is only slightly tongue in cheek!
• Not sure how this could be improved but I found people quite rude, pushy and impatient, especially when the stands were busy and we were patiently waiting to have a look at something or take a photo of a competition cake. I always thought baking people were nice people. My illusions have not been completely shattered but bruised!
• The show needs a bigger theatre to avoid the seating problems.
• Less aggressive 'Do Not Touch' signs on the trade stands. I even saw one stand telling people they would die a slow death if they touched the cut out shapes on display! I can understand this with the competition entries, but if you want people to buy your products you need to accept they will want to pick things up and examine them to see how they work, and factor potential damage into your business costs.  

 




Thank you Cake International, we will be back. Maybe next time we will bring competition entries!

This is either going to be brilliant or the biggest codge ever...

I don't love charity shops. I know everyone goes on about how they find all sorts of bargains and vintage things in there, but there seems to be a void in Basingstoke for this. We've got loads of charity shops but they're all full of the same polyester clothing, jigsaws and chunky dinner sets. There is one shining star though - the St Michael's Hospice furniture store. This place seems to be going from strength to strength recently and when I spotted a kitchen dresser on their Facebook page last week I popped up on Saturday to have a look. The one I had seen had gone, but there was a smaller, oak dresser there.

Now, I would love a cream kitchen dresser, but the ones I like are hundreds of pounds and sometimes a little bit too far towards the twee side of things. I long for a country style kitchen but what I have is a bad, nineties-style affair with ornate units that are so high I can't reach the top and nasty grey plasticky worktops. And that's before you start on the bad lay out and the oven that's hotter on the outside than the inside at times. I think the previous owners thought they were good at DIY. One day I will transform it... one day.

So little by little I'm trying to put my stamp on the place and I could see potential in the dresser although furniture restoration/decoration is something I don't know anything about. I bought it, prised off the ornate trim on the drawers before it even went in the car and the googling began.

Armed with the knowledge that I'd need fine sandpaper and an oil based primer for oak before I could do anything pretty, I headed to B&Q and found Stuart, proudly wearing an 'I've worked here for 30 years' badge. He did know his stuff, and I came away with a water based primer specially formulated to stop colour coming through and knots showing. Apparently this is better because it dries more quickly and doesn't smell as strong.



So on Sunday afternoon I sanded the top of the dresser, revealing that it's not all oak but most of it is, and that my plan to leave the top natural and paint the rest wasn't going to work because the wood is so dark. I am going to have to paint it all. I used a mini roller for most of the painting and a smaller brush to get into the gaps. I got bored and started rushing pieces so instead of ruining it I decided to stop at one coat and continue another day. The horrible knobs will be going too!

After one coat of primer it's clear this is going to be a long project, and that humping furniture around less than three months after major abdominal surgery, in the same week I conquered the ironing pile, isn't the cleverest thing I ever did. I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm not the most patient patient and have returned to knitting for the time being!

Total spent so far on dresser
Dresser £50
Primer £14
Sandpaper £3
Mini roller set £3

Sewing wizardry

I watch Professor Brian Cox, completely transfixed by science that I will never understand. And that's how I felt about the Great British Sewing Bee which started last night on BBC2.

In the hour long first of four episodes, eight shortlisted competitors had to make an A-line skirt, alter the neckline of a top in the technical challenge and create a showstopper day dress. It's the same format as Bake Off except lovely Mary and the silver Hollywood fox are sadly absent and their replacements don't quite cut it yet. Happy to report that Claudia Winkleman managed to keep her sideways glances and jarring intonation under control and wasn't as annoying as she usually is.

I thought it was a bit unfair on the men that all three of the challenges were feminine - the women had spent years making their own clothes whereas the men had never really had a reason to make a dress. It was great to see the male steampunk fan that the judges seemed to have written off come through at the end with a lovely polkadot trimmed dress. Next week appears to have a male bias as they will be making jackets, blouses and a pair of trousers. Where on earth would you start? My mum's answer to that question is "with doll's clothes" - clearly I need to find some small children willing to give up their toys for experimentation!

I haven't really got to know all the contestants yet but my stand out ones were Ann (elderly lady who has been making her own clothes for almost twice as long as I've been alive), steampunk man and a lovely hospital cleaner from the West Midlands.

I think people will love this as much as we love Bake Off, but you can't just make a dress in the same way that anyone can make a cake. It takes days, expensive fabric, patterns and a sewing machine. You can make magic on a wet Sunday afternoon with eggs, flour, butter and sugar. I do like the parts where they alter existing garments though - something I think I could do, and more realistic for me than trying to find a plus size pattern that isn't for a tent shaped item!

I once tried to make a waistcoat as part of a Guide badge (it was the nineties, tartan waistcoats were the thing to have) and it ended with me crying, hurling it across the room and my mum finishing it off for me. I also made a pig shaped hot water bottle cover at school, but that is the sum total of my experience with a sewing machine. And as I don't have one, my neighbours and my mum will no doubt be relieved to hear that I don't have a burning desire to start making my own dresses at the moment.

But wouldn't it be amazing if I could...?

Evil crochet helps me find my knitting mojo again

My friend Cath sent me a text to see if I wanted to go to a beginners' crochet workshop at Make Me It Said last week. Never one to turn an opportunity down, of course I wanted to go, and Hannah managed to squeeze us in.

There were seven people in this workshop, so there was less time for the tutor to spend with each of us to make sure we were getting things right. I found it really difficult to grasp the concept of crochet - it doesn't grow in the same way as knitting and it's hard to visualise what it's going to be. By the time I had worked out what I was doing, the rest of the group had moved on to the next bit, so I was a bit lost. Hannah was in the background doing some admin and encouraging me not to give up but I don't think my heart was in it really - I'm not used to being rubbish at things!



Here are my creations. The one that looks most like the middle of a granny square is the one the tutor did for me in an attempt to help me catch up! It must have just been me, because Cath did succeed in making a nice granny square which became a pirate hat for her cat!

The workshop included a crochet hook, wool and a list of instructions to make a granny square. I expect at some point I will pick it up and have a proper go, because I don't like to be defeated, but for the moment I am definitely of the opinion that crochet is evil!

I realised it had been three months since I had knitted anything, and, suspecting that it was the sort of thing you had to do regularly so that you don't forget how to do it, I knew it was time to pick up those needles again. I also wanted to reassure myself that I wasn't a complete dunce when it came to needles and wool!

I have a lovely cowl that I got from Seasalt, which has a cable twist pattern running through it. It's wool but quite thin and not very snuggly and it's been freezing this Easter! So back to my friend Ravelry I went, searching for something that was worked flat (because I don't know how to knit in the round yet) and rated as easy. Up came this Burberry inspired cowl  I thought I could probably do, and I already had the size 10 needles. A quick visit to Pack Lane Wool and I was equipped with four balls of lovely thick grey/brown acrylic/alpaca mix wool and a cable hook, which the woman said would be easier than a cable needle because the stitches don't slide off. As I had no idea how to do cable at this point, I just smiled and nodded!

So off I went to Cornwall for the Easter weekend, and was glad to have the knitting to do on the chilly evenings, to keep my hands busy and not dipping into all the lovely snacks that my parents had available. I had to face my nemesis in this project - the purl - but my mum was on hand to supervise and I soon got the hang of it. It's a simple knit row, purl row pattern, with a row with a cable twist in every so often. I have Youtube to thank for showing me how to use my cable hook! I associate cable with the twists you find in the Aran jumpers my mum used to knit, so it took a while to realise that this was a very loose twist rather than the rows that look like plaits. It took two balls of wool and two repeats of the pattern before I realised I was actually doing it right! I did a third repeat and a third ball of wool, so it's bigger than the one on the pattern but I'm really pleased with it. There is just one error on the back where I knitted a row instead of purling it and inadvertently put a stripe in!

Here it is on the needles before I cast it off....

The finished cowl...
















And me wearing it. Snuggly!

 I think I'm getting the hang of this knitting thing, but I was glad to have my mum on hand to spot where I had gone wrong and couldn't work out how! It took three nights to complete and is lovely and cosy!












Pondering what to make next. I have a friend who is having a baby in June but I'm not sure my skill level is high enough to give things to other people yet! I may be inspired by the Great British Sewing Bee tonight (if I can turn the sound off on Winkelman)!

Allotment cake for the boss

After my disparaging comments about cupcakes, you might be surprised to discover I do quite like decorating cakes. But the foundations have to be good - it needs to be a good cake, or you're just putting lipstick on a pig.

The birthday of my boss was approaching, and she is lovely and has had a lot to put up with so far this year with me arriving last April and then abandoning her for nine weeks when I got ill. I don't know much about her other than she has chickens and an allotment and loves white chocolate, so a cake seemed the obvious choice.

The cake itself is this Ultimate Chocolate Cake from the BBC Good Food website, my go to site when I'm looking for inspiration. I tend to mix up the recipes, so although the cake is from there and I did make the chocolate ganache, I also made a white chocolate buttercream from one of the Bake Off contestant's books. I can't remember if it was Ed Kimber or the one who won last year but it was quite simple, just normal buttercream with melted white chocolate in it, which I then coloured green for grass. Colouring this was my first experience of using powdered colouring because I didn't want the flavour of the liquid one, and it was quite hard to get the right colour. I'll try gel next time. This was also the first time I used the grass nozzle, and in classic codging style, decided to just go for it without practising first. Maybe some time and practise would have been better, but my boss loved it and the cake tasted amazing although incredibly rich.



One of my friends, knowing the time and effort that had gone in, told me it was 'not bad for a first attempt, but quite brown.' He thought the chickens should have been yellow. Have you ever seen a real yellow chicken? I'm currently not speaking to him. ;-)

Make me knit, I said...

Last year I discovered a lovely little shop near me called Make Me It Said. From the outside it looks like a normal gift type shop selling the usual handmade cards, dangly things and personalised gifts that you get in any town. But inside, at the back of the shop, is a large table around which magic happens. Craft workshops and lessons take place here most weeks and they're regularly fully booked. Anything from mixed media to glass, knitting to sugarcraft.

I spotted the beginner's knitting evening and booked myself on back in October, unaware at the time that I would soon find myself in pain and need an operation in December to remove a large alien from my ovary (thankfully large and nasty but benign, and, three months after the op, I am well on the road to recovery thanks to a genius surgeon). So I missed the November workshop because I hadn't got the pain under control. But lovely Hannah who runs the shop, hearing of my impending operation, scheduled a workshop just for me and a couple of other women at the start of December, so that I would know how to knit and have something to do when I began my long recovery of sitting and not lifting anything.

Hannah is exactly the sort of local business we should all be supporting. She goes out of her way to build relationships with her customers, to find out what they think and want and underestimates her own ability as a knitting teacher. She also makes marvellous tea. Life is tough for small businesses at the moment and I hope Make Me It Said is here to stay.

Anyway, the knitting. I have to confess that, as a Brownie, we learned to knit, but Tawny Owl did all the casting on and off for us, so although I can do the knitting part, I didn't know how to do anything else. I do now, and Hannah has the patience of a saint. All three of us left after two hours having cast on and off a few times and learned the knit and purl stitches. The workshop cost (£25) also included wool and a pair of needles and an invitation from Hannah to pop in whenever we were stuck and she would help us out. There is also a regular knitting group at the shop but I haven't been yet. I have also endured endless jibes from my friends about knitting club, old ladies and cats (I don't have a cat but clearly I should)!

So, operation over, I set about my first project - a scarf. I just could not get to grips with purling (this is how basic my skills are) so it was all knit, but it was with much excitement I learned how to put a stripe in thanks to my mum. My mum also introduced me to Pack Lane Wool shop. Less expensive than Hobbycraft, and with really knowledgeable staff. I have since discovered I can print something off Ravelry, take it in there saying "I want to make this" and they will furnish me with the right wool and needles for the job, and advice on how to do it. I think the shop has been there for years but is quite hidden away.

The scarf took about two weeks to complete, between naps, and I don't really like it much but as a first project with no holes in, I'm very proud of it.

My second project involved following a pattern I found on Ravelry for a hat with an enormous pom pom. Again it was all knit because I hadn't yet overcome my fear of purl, but this time involved slipping stitches and knitting more than one stich at a time. More things learned. I also learned that with huge needles (size 10s) and super chunky wool, you can make a hat in a couple of hours. For someone with such a small attention span, to be able to see it growing so quickly is brilliant!

So a hat and a scarf completed in January. And then I packed the needles and wool away and went back to work.