I seem to have lost something

I'm not entirely sure whether turning the house inside out, looking into my pockets, under the sofa, or in the back of the car, will entirely help with rediscovering my lost thing. This thing is, of course, most of the start of November. I mean, what happened? How did this occur? A couple of days ago, it was 22nd October. Now, it's 13th November. This is just patently unjust! I want those days back.

It's particularly important because, coming up this weekend, we have the Knitting and Spinning weekend at Lower Shaw Farm, in Swindon. Preparation has been going on for a while, and I'm now really looking forward to it. Lower Shaw Farm is such a lovely place, a friendly and calm learning environment where people can hang out, learn new crafts, make new friends and meet old ones, and eat wonderful food. We have got games to play, lovely raw materials to use, and beautiful tools to work with. Full report after the weekend, I hope.

Goodbye Molly

Sadly, Molly didn't make it. Her condition really deteriorated during Thursday night and Friday, and our vet put her to sleep on Friday night. She waited until Foz returned from Edinburgh, and was delighted to see him, but after that she really went downhill. She spent most of her last few hours eating little tiny bits of chopped up carrot, then resting from the effort with her head either on Foz's lap, or resting against him as he sat with her. Our vet gave her an overdose of sedative, and she drifted off very peacefully and with dignity. The barn seems very empty without her. I'm surprised at how gutted I am to lose her. It's always part of shepherding, that you will lose sheep. Cotswolds are tough customers, and don't deserve the reputation sheep have of dying easily, but they're still mortal. We lost another well-loved ewe, Tilly, earlier in the year, which was very sad, but losing Molly feels much worse.

Probably due to the stress of the last week, I have gone down with the cold that I could feel prowling round the edges of my immune system, so I am at home right now feeling pretty wretched. Edward, our vet, said that he felt Molly had left behind a real legacy, because she had been one of the original ewes we bought, and had been the friendliest, right from the word go. We now want to make sure that we use that legacy in the best possible way, so we're thinking of how to take the flock forwards from here. It could have been easy to have been discouraged, but we are determined to pick ourselves up and carry on.

A Quick Molly Update

Molly is still hanging on in there, although she had a bad day yesterday. She got stuck on her side at some point during the night, and I found her exhausted and disorientated the next morning. She seemed to recover OK, but her energy levels seemed to crash during the afternoon, and by the evening she was very weak. I phoned the vet, and asked him to come out, with the unspoken understanding that he might have to put her to sleep. Meanwhile, I fed her some sugar beet pulp, which is easily digested and a good energy giving food, and she perked up. The vet has changed her homeopathic remedy, and I really think that she seems to be responding to it. She seems somehow different this morning, and I feel that she may have some more muscle tone in her hind legs. Maybe yesterday's crisis was her hitting rock bottom? Who knows. I'll keep you posted.

What can you make with a single skein?

This has been bugging me of late. What CAN you make with a single skein of my wool? 100g of pure knitting loveliness, especially the hand painted yarn.

See? Very nice. (Oh, you saw that picture last time - duh. Never mind. It's staying there now.) Now I like quite big projects - jumpers, large-ish bags and the like. (I also like making teeny tiny little beaded bags, knitted on the thinnest of knitting needles, but they are not made of our Cotswold wool, and so I shall not mention them right now.) But I want to create some knitting kits, which will contain handsome wooden needles, a pattern, and enough wool to create the item in question. I'm wanting to do some for beginners, and this is causing me a bit of a problem in deciding how tricky the design should be. Can I, for example, include a bit of decreasing? I don't think that's too difficult... especially if I explain how to do it. How about ribbing? I dislike doing it myself, but that's not the point. Clearly some people love it. I tend to feel that things you can create out of rectangles are Good. Also, things you can put into the washing machine and felt, thus maybe disguising slightly weird tension, the odd dropped stitch, or the strange thing that happened when, for a period of 10 rows or so, you had 2 more stitches than you should have had, and then the problem resolved itself without you knowing why. (Actually - and I probably shouldn't say this - all these things have happened to me recently, but I think the gaining and losing stitches could have been due to the beer.) My Cotswold mill-spun wool doesn't felt quite so enthusiastically as the hand-spun stuff does, which does mean you have to grit your teeth and put it on a bit of a hotter wash than you might originally have thought of - but it does go lovely and felty and furry and soft when it comes out.

So. I-pod sock? (Will have to swipe someone's I-pod for that in order to make it fit - I don't own one myself.) Egg cosy? Tea cosy? Very retro-ironically-chic. Scarf? Nice, but a bit of a long haul if you are only knitting 4 rows a night. Hat? Good project, but to make them nice, they have to have shaping... maybe not a complete beginner's project. Purse? Bag?? Mat for one's cat to sit on??!

In livestock news, our misfortunes continue. Molly, one of our senior ewes, has been stricken with a strange hind leg paralysis, the sort where sensation is still there, but muscle tone and the ability to actually move those hind legs has completely gone. Our vet is stumped. Fortunately, Molly is absolutely fine in herself (apart from the small matter of being paralysed of course), and is still eating and drinking, plus fulfilling all those other bodily functions necessary for good health. She is also content to lie there and be waited on, and I do get the feeling that she thinks this is her due from the simians with the buckets. Our vet, as well as being a most excellent vet, is a qualified homeopath, and it's this form of medicine we are pinning our hopes on now. Molly did have a bit of a go at getting up this evening, which she hasn't tried for some days, which is definitely a change. She is very well loved by all who know her, and Foz and I have been very up and down about the whole episode. Our vet, though, is absolutely determined to get her well again, and so the only thing we can do is to trust him. At least Molly is not suffering in the slightest - she is in no pain, she's pretty happy sitting in the barn and watching Sheep TV (the cows and pigs, which she seems to hold in magnificent disdain, but is secretly interested in them - a bit like someone professing not to like Big Brother but secretly being an avid viewer), she has her daughter Lily with her, who is not best pleased but that's just tough, and she is getting any amount of attention from all her human friends. I'll let you know what happens.

Just to cheer myself up, and make myself feel a bit better about the sheep situation, here's a coupla photos of Alfie, taken by our friend the lovely Annabelle last week.



What a handsome boy. And with a lot more fleece than he had last time you saw him. Thank goodness that all grew back.

Enhanced By Cats

I've had a very busy couple of days. Yesterday, I went to see my friends at Lower Shaw Farm, who are hosting the knitting and spinning course I am teaching on next month. (14th-16th November, and there is apparently one place left, so get in there fast if you wanna go! Great food, wonderful atmosphere, and wool as far as the eye can see. What more do you want?) We have talked over The Plan, and have found it good - and also very open to change, which is great because that's what we want to have happen. It's wonderful to be able to sort out exactly what everyone wants to cover, and then have a goodly go at getting all that in. It worked well last year, with everyone telling the group what they wanted to do, and us all agreeing the programme there and then. Today, I made a visit which may well take my business in a different direction - more details to come once finalised, but I'm very excited.

But the weather is fine and lovely, and so photographs of WOOL must be taken! I need to get some things posted up on Etsy, so have to take pictures for the posting. It being beautiful outside, I took my camera, and went out to take these pics:

Lovely wool, good colours - probably needs a bit of cropping on Photoshop, but that's fine, I can do that. I love that bench in my garden, as does my cat Tico.

Clearly, everything on this bench belongs to Tico, and here she is, having appeared from nowhere, to inspect what is going on. I am expecting her to rub extravagantly against the wool and knock it down. So I'm poised with camera, waiting for her to do something amusing so I can capture it for posterity.

Do we ever do what is expected of us? Nope.

This definitely reminded me of something you see on Etsy shops, where sellers state whether their work spaces are smoking/non smoking, or whether they have pets. Quite often, you see someone's house described as 'enhanced by cats'. Well, that's my life for you - definitely enhanced by cats.

In Which I Discover My Maths Teacher Did Not Lie

I wasn't very good at maths at school. I was a rather scared and dutiful child, though, so I did my best to understand it - but to no avail. Of course, now that I am designing knitting patterns, I find myself using maths all the time, and I am just about mastering the easy stuff. Working out what tension (or GAUGE, as Elizabeth Zimmerman would have it) I am using by calculating the amount of stitches per centimetre on a tension swatch, then multiplying that by the measurement of the garment I want to knit - yep, I can do that. And the things I make now fit, most of the time. I know about how to custom shape things so they will fit better. So, on the whole, this kinda stuff wasn't a problem for me.

Then, I discovered this book. It's an amazingly beautiful and inspiring book by Maie Landra of Koigu Yarns , and all the patterns in it are created with mosaic knitting - little pieces of knitting which are created by means of cunning decreasing, and which form various shapes which, when knitted together, form larger geometric shapes. I had an idea of a hat formed in this way, maybe with a hexagon crown, and squares for the sides. I worried at this idea for a long time, wondering how on earth I could work out how big the hexagon had to be. Then I remembered pi. Of course! In theory, I know how to work out the diameter and radius of a circle, if I have the circumference - remember that? Circumference of circle = pi (3.14) x diameter. Halve the diameter, and you get the radius. The little triangle segments which form the hexagon are each the length of the radius, from point to base. Knitting being fairly flexible, I thought, does it matter if it's a circle or a hexagon? It was worth a go. I knitted a sample hexagon, and blow me down, I found that it worked. To say I was gobsmacked is an understatement. Who knew that this would ACTUALLY WORK? So they weren't lying to me at school after all. Wow.

(Bit blurry, and this is actually a later version than the original, but it does show the segments quite well.)

Inspired, I did the rest of the maths for the hat, and knitted away with trepidation. Was it going to work? Errr...
Well, it turned out exactly the size I had wanted it to, but what I hadn't factored in is that hats fit best on a person's head if they are about an inch smaller than the actual circumference measurement of the wearer's bonce... I seem to have knitted something that looks more like a lampshade.

I'm trying again. Meanwhile, if there's anyone of my acquaintance with an absolutely enormous head, I've got a hat for them.

Picking Up And Starting Again

I haven't been around these parts recently. Things have been happening, though, and at times it's been quite difficult to deal with those things. It's a salutary lesson to me that things ain't always plain sailing, and sometimes all you can do is to pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and carry on.

Here in the South-West of the UK, things haven't been so easy for those of us who have livestock - my vets say that there has been a huge wave of young animals going down with pneumonia due to the wet, humid weather, and we have been no exception. Ruby, the bottle fed lamb, got it first, and fortunately a single antibiotic and anti-inflammatory injection sorted her out. Her brother Yan Lamb, the largest and most magnificent of the triplets, got it next, but after several emergency vet call-outs (never within office hours, how did he do that??) we were no further on. He definitely had had pneumonia, but the usual treatments weren't bringing him back to full health. The 4th vet to see him (who happens to be a homeopathic vet) diagnosed an intestinal blockage, and recommended that, if we wanted to give Yan Lamb a chance to survive, we should send him to the Bristol Vet School straight away, the following morning, where they have large animal surgical facilities. This we did. Poor Yan was really unwell by the morning, obviously in more pain, and I was reluctant to put him through a journey to a strange place, but he had Ruby with him for company, and the lovely vet at Bristol felt it was worth a try. Sadly, though, it wasn't to be - Yan Lamb turned out to have an intussuception, which is where the large intestine telescopes in on itself and necrotises, and he had to be put to sleep. This meant that poor Ruby had a night at Bristol on her own (they shut at 5pm, and I couldn't get back there to pick her up before they closed) which she didn't actually mind too much because she was outrageously spoiled throughout by the staff there. Even the children from the on-site creche came down to see her the next morning. She was pleased to be home, though, and apart from shouting her head off at various points through the journey, is none the worse.

I am proud of the fact that we didn't hesitate when it came to making a decision for Yan Lamb. Gut blockages in sheep can be, apparently, quite curable, depending on where they are. If the rumen is blocked, the prognosis is very good, and without actually examining Yan Lamb fully, nobody could tell whether he had a blocked rumen or not; so I don't doubt that we did the right thing. Even the journey in the trailer can sometimes dislodge a physical blockage, so the vet at Bristol told me (she said that she has often seen severe colic cases in horses where the animal has walked off the lorry perfectly all right). Yan Lamb was very friendly and loved people, so I don't really think that the whole experience would have been as stressful for him as for a more nervous creature. But it was all very horrible, and to have lost him anyway was such a sadness.

But there we go - sometimes you just have to pick yourself up and plod on, and that's what we have been doing. Poor Foz was away for work the whole time Yan was at Bristol, and this was a huge worry for him. He is now away in Chicago (how terrible, huh?) but is anxiously keeping in touch. I think it's probably worse if you are miles away and can't do anything, rather than being there on the spot and able to take action.

But the rest of the flock are fine, and I have to keep hanging on to that fact. The bit of me which is coldly pragmatic says that Yan Lamb was probably the most expendable one of the group, and that if we had to lose a lamb, it was better that the ram lamb should go rather than the ewe lambs, all of whom are definite breeding stock for the future. But even that bit of me acknowledges that it was a very sad thing to have lost an animal at all.