It smells like Christmas

Last night I realised I had everything in the house to make one of these:

It is an orange and clove pomander.  Pomanders originated in the middle ages; I first became enchanted with them when I was very young and read about them in the books by Cynthia Harnett.  Pomanders are balls containing scented herbs and perfumes, which were carried around to ward off bad smells and diseases.  They were originally made from filigree silver or gold, and hinged to allow you to open them up and put the perfumes inside.  These seasonal versions using oranges and cloves have been around for years too.  For me their smell is quintessentially Christmas.

To make them you need:

• a nice, fat orange
• a box of cloves
• some ribbon
• a cocktail stick (optional)

Tie the ribbon around the orange as if it were an old fashioned parcel: over the top, down to the bottom, cross over and back to the top to finish with a bow.  Your orange will now have four sections, divided by ribbon.

Push the cloves into the orange as far as they will go, alongside the bits of ribbon.  Let the wonderful smell wash over you.  You can make life a little easier by piercing the orange's peel lightly with a cocktail stick before pushing the cloves into the holes.  Once each section of the orange is outlined with cloves you can add some more to make designs on each section.  I made our family's initials: G, N, C and O.  Stripes look really good too.

If you put plenty of cloves in (you can of course stud the entire fruit with cloves and not bother making patterns at all) then your pomander should dry out slowly and keep for anything up to a few years.

Ours lives in the sitting room and is picked up and inhaled often.  Pomanders look mighty fine hung from a Christmas tree too, although the options for sniffing them when they're hung on a tree are not so good.

The Victoriana shawl

Another small shawl is on the knitting needles. 

This time it's one which I have named the Victoriana shawl, from this Ravelry pattern.  These shawls are the perfect sized knitting project for me; small and quick enough for me not to get bored, and practical and pretty enough to spur me on to finish them.

I can lose hours of my life at a time searching Ravelry for other small shawl (sometimes charmingly called shawlette) patterns.  I also like these ones very much:

• Mini-mochi Shawlette
• Skinny Ruffles Shawlette
• Deirdre
• Little House Shawl
• 28's Cousin 53

Someone else I know has a shawl obsession going on at the moment, although hers are crocheted and the patterns look much more fiendish than the ones I have chosen.  It is the season for shawls, clearly.

Festive thoughts

Festive cheer, overheard in the very long queue at the Hackney Post Office today:

• "I just hope she was dead before they decided to cut her in half."
• "The Government just want us to suffer.  They robbed our money so they can buy Christmas presents for their own families."
• "Life's tough."
• "I wanna do something sooner or later, but you know, on my medication I am a bit unpredictable."
• I've sent everybody Christmas cards telling them I'm not buying anyone any Christmas presents this year."
• "I was on everything, man - smoking this and smoking that - I was just so stressed."
• "There's not a lot of us left."
• "I like making friends in queues.  Better than real friends, y'know."
• "This country's gone to the dogs.  Everything's so hard, man."
• "I'm not saying everything's bleak - don't get me wrong - but the world is just full of so much evil."
• "See, this is what I like about Hackney, innit.  Chatting to people in the Post Office queue always cheers me up."

Photo of Hackney Empire, just along the road from the Post Office, by Fin Fahey on Flickr.  Used under the Creative Commons license.

Winter blankets

I want to share a really good project for December's Making Winter post.  For the past few days I've been making two sorts of winter blanket - the blankets sit piled up on the arm of the sofa, waiting for someone to curl up under them for some TV watching, or colouring, or knitting, or drumming.  In the summer they will come camping with us.  We all have quilts, but the quilts tend to just live on our beds - these blankets are more portable.

In an ideal world I would live in a place which is home to a choice selection of charity shops which sell old 100% wool blankets for just a few pounds.  The reality is that I live in a big city where the charity shops specialise in nasty poly-cotton duvet cases from 1988.  No vintage or thrifted wool blankets round here sadly.

So I raided my airing cupboard for old baby blankets instead.  I had two cotton aircell blankets bought for C over twelve years ago, and hardly used (I was a dedicated fan of Grobags when my children were babies).  To turn these baby blankets into something suitable for winter warming I simply added bias trim to them.  One in a selection of leftover pastel prints and the other in deep purpley pinks and dark blues. 

It is extraordinary how the trim changes the whole appearance of the blankets.  They are proving very popular.

The other blankets have been made from fleece.  Ikea sells plain fleece throws in a few different colours for just £1.59 each.  These throws are perfect for all kinds of sewing projects.  I've used them several times as both wadding and backing for quilts, I've used them as backing fabric for babies' bibs, and I've made cushions from them.  The simplest thing to do though, is to applique onto them.  For C's and O's Christmas stockings I've made them each a quick and easy blanket, using the Ikea fleeces as a base.

For C, who loves dogs, I cut out the pictures from a piece of dog fabric I had been hoarding, and simply stitched around the dogs onto the fabric with my machine.  For O, whose preferred colour of the moment is purple, I cut out long oval shapes from all my scraps of purple fabric and attached them as flower petals.

If you are lucky enough to have vintage 100% wool blankets in your airing cupboard or your local charity shop, then either of these methods would work very well with those.  Neither type of blanket takes very long to make - the whole point of these is that they can be whipped up in a couple of hours, unlike a quilt which can take weeks, months, or even years to complete. 

You don't want to hang around when people need to get cosy on the sofa as a matter of urgency.

It's all in the name

I really enjoyed this article on The Guardian website last week, about namesakes in literature.  I really love my name, Nancy, because it is a name everybody has heard of, but in Britain it is still quite unusual.  I've never met another Nancy.

I have very clear ideas about what sort of person a Nancy is.  A Nancy is feisty, strong, independent, feminist and slightly old fashioned.  She doesn't take anybody else's nonsense, and she gets things done.  I'm not sure that all these attributes apply to me, but they're certainly traits I aspire to.

Good Nancys:

• Nancy Mitford - writer.
• Nancy Astor - politician; first woman MP to take her seat in Parliament.
• Nancy Blackett - Pirate, Terror of the Seas, and true heroine of the Swallows and Amazons books.
• Nancy Sinatra - singer of excellent, strong songs.  This one is my favourite - definitely a feisty, sassy, Nancy song.
• Nancy Drew - multi-talented girl detective.

Rubbish Nancys:

• Nancy Reagan - although clearly a powerful woman, ultimately too flaky to be a proper Nancy.
• Nancy Dell'Olio - no; just no.
• Nancy in Oliver Twist - an ambivalent Nancy: nurturing, but sappy as well. Gets herself murdered by Sikes. Could have been feisty, but wasn't really.

Last summer I visited the French city of Nancy, in the region of Lorraine near the German border.  I stopped off for a day with the children on our way back from Switzerland, and I was delighted to discover that Nancy is an absolutely glorious city - elegant and chic; very worthy of the name.  I would have been so disappointed if it had been a dreary, grotty sort of place.

Nancy in Nancy - beautiful roses and peonies in our hotel

How about you?  Do you like your name?   Do you approve of other people or places who share your name?

Inflation

We live in times of high inflation.

The M&S bags of chocolate coins now contain £5 and £10 notes as well as coins.

~~~~~~~~~~

(Father Christmas ALWAYS buys his chocolate coins at M&S).

10 things

• The baby has some mittens to go with her kicking bag.  Full details on Ravelry.  I think this is a really lovely baby mitten pattern - very simple, and they end up a sweet tulip shape.

• I took the children to Oxford Street on Saturday to do their Christmas shopping.  We were fast, we were focused, and we were home for lunch with our sanity intact and our list ticked.
• Only two weeks until the end of term for C and O - thank goodness.  The autumn term always feels so long.
• I am knitting myself another shawl.  It is from this pattern, and I am using a discontinued organic 100% wool yarn from Rowan, which is deliciously soft and sumptuous.  I am sad this is discontinued because otherwise it would have been my new favourite yarn.  Full details on Ravelry again.

• A new discovery is New House Textiles - my favourite thing from a whole load of favourite things is this excellent biscuit tea-towel.
• Now he is no longer spending every waking moment training for the Ironman, G is enjoying rediscovering old hobbies.  The snare drum is down from the loft, and he is tapping away on the practise pad too.  I find listening to him drumming remarkably soothing.  I think it's the repetition.

• Off school for the public sector strikes last week, C spent the day making a sock monkey from a pair of O's old socks.  The monkey has been named Advent.

• I start to feel Christmassy once I have bought some Christmas tins of biscuits from M&S.  I prefer the tins to the biscuits inside; but other people in the house seem to like the biscuits more than the tins, so that's all right.

• I am reading Dombey and Son for the first time, and enjoying it very much.  I do like a bit of Dickens.  If I finish Dombey and Son before Christmas I shall re-read Dickens's Christmas stories, which is almost as Christmassy as an M&S biscuit tin.
• The slow cooker continues to enhance our lives.  A game casserole, pimped with chorizo and sweet potatoes, is cooking at the moment.  It smells extraordinarily good.

A baby's cosy red bag

Another reason that I loved the Handball at the weekend, was that it provided me with four uninterrupted hours of knitting.  Despite very strict security procedures I successfully smuggled in my knitting (wooden needles don't get picked up by metal scanners, and dpns look just like pencils on the x-ray machines...), and I managed to finish off all but the last centimetre of this red baby kicking bag, while I was cheering on the Angolan team.

This one is destined for my sister's new baby - a little girl - who is due early in 2012.  She will be a winter baby and will surely appreciate a little sleeping bag to snuggle up in.

I've knitted this pattern twice before.  Here are two of my nephews modelling theirs.

Aren't they snuggly?  This is such a great pattern - simple to knit, and practical to receive.  It is a free pattern - you can download the details and see other people's versions of it here.

I do so love finishing knitting projects.  Mainly because it gives me license to start something new.  I have a second sock to finish for C before Christmas, but I think I should also have something else on the needles too.

Maybe some baby mittens to match this kicking bag?  Maybe a new shawl for me?  Maybe some armwarmers for O?  Maybe all three!

Olympic Preparations

Hugely spectacular lights at the Olympic Park

The buildings on the Olympic Park are all up.  The landscaping of the Park is done.  The grass is planted, the rivers are flowing freely and the paths have been laid.  The 2012 Games are just 8 months away. 

Zany path in the Olympic Park

What happens between now and then, as the finishing touches to the Park are put in place, is that the test events are held.  Every Olympic venue and every sport must have a dress rehearsal to make sure that everything is working as it should.  One of the biggest advantages to living in one of the five Host Boroughs is that we get discounted tickets and priority booking for many of these test events.

This weekend we went to see the finals of the London Handball Cup, which was held at the square, copper-clad Handball Arena in the Olympic Park.  I knew absolutely nothing about Handball before this weekend, but it is a very easy game to learn and a very exciting and dramatic sport to watch.  As we arrived at the arena we were given brochures which explained the sport and listed all the teams and the players. 

We saw two matches: the bronze medal play off between Angola and China, and the Gold/Silver medal match between Austria and Poland.  Even watching the teams warm up for an hour before each match was great - they leaped about, threw handballs to each other with mind-blowing accuracy and speed, sprinted up and down the court and did stretches that any gymnast would be proud of.

Angola and China warming up for their match

The Polish team practise their drills

Handball is very physical and fast, and there are a great many goals scored in each match.  If I had any kind of hand-eye coordination whatsoever I would love to give it a go.  The atmosphere in the arena was excellent - there was a very good commentator who made sure we all knew what was going on, and by the last few minutes of the gold medal match we were hoarse with screaming, and I leaped out of my seat when Austria scored a game-winning penalty with 4 seconds to go.

You can see some properly excellent photos of the earlier games in the tournament, which give an idea of how physical and fast it is, here.  My compact 8 year old camera just isn't up to live sporting action.

In February we are going back to the Olympic Park to see the finals of the Track Cycling and Diving test events.  Tickets for these events are now sold out, but you can find out more about the other test events coming up at the London Prepares Series website.  I want to try and get tickets for the Synchronised Swimming and the Athletics when they are released.  Tickets are currently on sale (and going fast) for the Swimming test event at the Aquatics Centre (details here).

We walked home through the Park at sunset, and the sense of expectation all around us was palpable.  Just eight more months to go.

The Olympic Stadium at sunset

The Anish Kapoor spiral sculpture - one of my favourite structures in the Olympic Park

Magic seeds

I bake a great deal of bread; several loaves a week for roughly the last ten years.  But this week I added sunflower seeds to soda bread for the first time, and made a new and startling discovery. 

The children and I got a massive shock when we broke open the just-baked loaf yesterday after school.  We stared at the bread and then at each other.

"What HAPPENED??" asked O, horrified.

"Cool!" shouted C.

Rather than slather butter and jam on to it as we had planned we went rumamging on the internet.  We learnt that if you add sunflower seeds to soda bread, they turn a deep and vivid shade of green because the acid in them reacts with the alkali in the bicarbonate of soda.  The internet also claimed that they were still perfectly safe to eat, so with varying levels of apprehension we slathered butter and jam on, and tucked in anyway.

The internet was right - they are absolutely fine to eat. I was right too, in that sunflower seeds make soda bread even more delicious.  I do find the shade of green (which has turned almost black in the day since I made the loaf) rather unnerving though.  Today I went back to what I know and made a plain wholemeal tin loaf.