yarnstorm

makes a change

I was shopping for more seeds (I'm back to growing tomatoes after a couple of years' abstinence) when I discovered that the garden centre I was in had an enormous cold-room full of cut flowers. The lack of heat actually prevented me from buying more than I did as I have a horror of getting stuck in places like that, and I came out with just three bunches of gloriously orange ranunculus, or Persian Buttercup.

I don't grow these as they aren't fully hardy, but they are so pretty that I couldn't pass them by. The flowers appear to have an infinite number of petals which are all tightly packed in the bud, and which open up to reveal layer upon layer of progressively softer colour. It's as if you could unwind them to make a long, long piece of hand-dyed orange silk - so it's no wonder they are also called the Turban Buttercup.

 

My bunch has many shades of orange from tangerine to peach, orange peel to pumpkin, coral to amber. It's an extravagance at the height of the tulip season, I know, but I see it as a mini masterclass in floral design. 

good year for the tulips

'Douglas Bader'

Elvis Costello made a huge impression on me - the clever lyrics, the great tunes, the excellent dance music - and I've been gathering tulips and singing my version of 'Good Year for the Roses', because it's been a good year for the tulips. I was wrong when I told Gemma that I thought it was a bad year; it's not been great for tulips in pots (too dry and sunny), but it's excellent for those deep in the ground.

Someone else who influenced me enormously was Douglas Bader, the fighter pilot who lost both legs and yet continued to fly. I read his autobiography Reach for the Sky in hospital when I was eleven after having my appendix out. I really don't know how I came to be reading such a huge, adult book while I was convalescing, but I can still remember the story and the impact it made. Amazingly, the tulip named after him is just about the most feminine you could imagine. This is the first time I've grown it and I love it. The flowers are beautiful with their powder-pink colour and slightly bluish stems. They should be on rococo dressing-tables in ladies' boudoirs everywhere.

'Sorbet'

'Sorbet' doesn't carry any such deep and meaningful significance, unless it's that it reminds me of the tubs of raspberry ripple ice-cream we all ate when I was young, in the days before a multitude of ice-cream flavours appeared. Then it was a matter of vanilla, chocolate or strawberry, but if you were very, very good you might just get raspberry ripple.

'Helmar'

'Helmar' is the kind of tulip I would want to design if it didn't already exist. I would get my felt-tips out and colour in a childish tulip shape and make it as bright and cheerful as possible. I wouldn't call it 'Helmar' though; it would have to have a more fitting name such as 'Crayola' or 'Caran d'Ache'.

'Black Parrot'

I had a major parrot-fancying phase before the children were born and tried out lots of different varieties. Some are too floppy and loose for my liking and sometimes so laid-back that they fall over completely, so now I grow just a couple I can trust to stay upright. This year one of them is 'Black Parrot' which has a glossiness which reminds me of Baudelaire's description of a woman's deep black hair in his poem 'La Chevelure'.

'Burgundy'

I also grow a few lily-flowered tulips each year. This year one is 'Burgundy' which is very, very bendy, like a Romanian gymnast. It's a great magenta-purple and the petals arch backwards when they open and makes me feel I really should do a few more stretches now and again.

And this is just a gratuitous photo of 'Helmar' tulips in front of a walnut veneer wardrobe because I like the warmth of the colours and it makes a change from a white background.

Unfortunately, all this tulip frivolity and loveliness won't last for ever and I'll be changing my tune and singing Frank Sinatra's classic: 'It Was A Very Good Year'.

in and out of the kitchen

Phoebe has been busy again. She made mini lemon loaf cakes and iced them so that there could be no doubt as to their nature. While she waited impatiently for them to cool so that she could try out the new, disposable, cellophane icing bags (which resulted in three children having a yellow icing war in the garden) she indulged in her second favourite pastime - trying on and modelling shoes.

When she put on one of her dressing-up, glittery, silver high heels and one of my blue plastic Crocs, I thought she summed up the modern woman's dilemma perfectly.

I know which one I prefer.

scottish dancing crochet

My 'Scottish Dancing' blanket looks like it's on a pedestal. I like the idea of this as I feel it's a trophy I've won for all the hours and hours of ripple crochet that went into its creation. 

I stopped where I stopped because, once again, I ran out of the right shades of yarn. Of course, I could just carry on regardless with leftovers, but I much prefer to keep to an overall theme and scheme. This one is 'Scottish Dancing' and was inspired by a visit to Inverness in early autumn last year when I was spellbound by the wonderful colours of the hills, trees, plants, flowers, lochs and skies. I really wanted to make something with a teal and orange combination because those are the colours in my favourite tartan (I have no idea which clan, but one which must live/have lived near water and hills covered in rowan trees). And then I added more colours for heather, clouds, earth, leaves, wild flowers.

It all 'dances' because of the ripple pattern. As I crocheted the ripples I thought of the highlands and lowlands of Scotland, the peaks and valleys, the mountains and the lochs, and all the windy roads around them. I took the pattern from 200 Ripple Stitch Patterns by Jan Eaton (no. 8 'Soft Waves') and used mostly Rowan Pure Wool DK plus a few odd waves of Jaeger Merino, Debbie Bliss Merino and Blue Sky Alpacas alpaca (all DK weight). The blanket swallowed 1110g of yarn and it measures 54"/136cm x 58"/147cm. When it's hung over the banister (second photo) the weight makes it have a 3D ripple effect; the colours not only dance on the horizontal stripes, but also the whole thing meanders in and out like a textile version of corrugated iron (and like the playground game of 'In and Out the Scottish Bluebells'). 

This is how the top section looks. I know it's upside down but I quite like the way the stitches fan out on the crests of the wave and, anyway, this is how I see the blanket when it's over my knees.

And here it is in all its glory, suspended over the stairwell with Tom hidden behind, holding onto the edge to prevent it sliding off.

When I was eight we all had to do Country Dancing at school. It was one of those things which the girls took very seriously and the boys did not. I can remember the complete tangles we got into (mostly because none of us wanted to hold hands with the boys) and it got worse when we had to do Scottish dances. So I am quite happy to restrict my 'Scottish Dancing' to crochet, and reward myself with a trophy blanket.

these boots were made for tulips

At the moment I have to cut tulips first thing while it's still cool, otherwise they start to open in the warm sun. If I pick them later, they exhaust themselves quickly when they are brought indoors. Sometimes I pick them and put them in an unheated, dark place for a while until I have time to sort them out. As I was putting a bunch in the porch which is stuffed with shoes and trainers and flip-flops and Birkenstocks, I saw that the colours of today's flowers matched Phoebe's wellies perfectly.

I'm fast running out of vases for tulips, and the thought occurred to me that the floral boots would make the most lovely containers for these three tulips - the deep, dark, double 'Black Hero', the elegant coral 'Menton', and the flamboyant ivory and purple 'Zurel'.

I think this is the peak weekend for the tulips. I don't use the word 'ravishing' often, but it's what springs to mind when I look at the blocks of flowers all clashing and waving and bending and blooming. I'm trying to make sure the image is engraved on my memory because it won't be long until it's all over for another year, and wellies are once again worn and not used as flower pots.

sewing and reaping

I am baffled by the traditional British imperial units of measurement, but I like the words that go with them, such as gills, bushels, pecks, roods and furlongs. Allotments are still measured in 'poles' (also known as 'rods' or 'perches') but I have no idea what a pole looks like (even knowing it's 5.5 yards does nothing to help). I'm hand-quilting my Allotment Quilt and have a distinct feeling it would measure a few poles. It's the largest quilt I've made so far and even Tom couldn't believe how much ground I have to cover when sewing.

I bunched it up when carrying it upstairs to my high-tech, windowsill photo studio and liked the way it looked when I put it down, with its swirls and bunchings and folds. They reminded me of the tulips I'd photographed earlier - there's a similarity in the layers and gentle structure.

This is 'Uncle Tom', a peony flower tulip which is the double version of the red 'Jan Reus' I showed a few days ago. 'Uncle Tom' is much shorter and its redness is more ruby or cherry, but it's quite wonderfully vivid and flamboyant. 'Double' seems a mean way to describe this bloom; I'd say it's at least quadruple.

'Uncle Tom' is just one of the flowers I am reaping from the garden this spring. And I hope it won't be too long before the quilt stitches are all sewn (sown?) and we can reap the pleasures of the fabric allotment. 

Have a great weekend.

barefoot in the garden

I do like the day I can paint my toe-nails for the the first time in the year and find a tulip to match the colour (the bright satin-pink 'Mariette'). This little piece of garden folly made me think about the film Barefoot in the Park (1967) which I haven't seen for ages but which sticks in my mind for two things; Jane Fonda going barefoot in New York and the jaw-dropping gorgeousness of Robert Redford. And this is from a woman who still maintains that the wrong man (Robert Redford) got the girl in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). It should have been Paul Newman, with his startlingly blue eyes and bicycle tricks. Don't you think?

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Each morning I go to the tulip patch and pick bunches for photography and display. The kitchen windowsill is beginning to resemble a seventeenth-century Dutch still-life, the kind that teems and overflows with feathered, stripy, brilliant tulips. This is what the bulb patch looked like when Simon was planting it last December:

and this is how it looks now. And that's after I've been through with the secateurs.

And this gives an idea of the scale of the planting task:

Simon may not have piercing blue eyes, but he's nifty on a bike, and the best bulb-planter I know.

a dilettante reads

'Dilettante' is a lovely word, like many other light-hearted and unserious words which are borrowed from Italian. Words like gigolo, zabaglione, operetta, spumante, cappuccino all make you feel there are plenty of good, frothy things in this world. So I am quite happy to be a dilettante reader at the moment, a dabbler, one who loves good literature but in a superficial way and without serious purpose. I want to read, I need to read, but nothing too stressful or stretching.

This is my current book pile. The John Lanchester and the Monty & Sarah Don books were read in Paris. The Jewel Garden lasted exactly the length of the train journey there and is an utterly readable story of a garden and the therapeutic benefits of making it. Family Romance lasted longer and demanded more reflection. It's an amazing, riveting memoir about the uncovering of family secrets. It was finished just as we pulled into Waterloo Station.

Claudine's Room is the first Colette I've read. I bought it in the Lake District in a tiny bookshop which had an eclectic selection - hearty walking guides next to delicate classics like this. It's atmospheric, detailed and yet strangely diffuse and obtuse. I loved the worry that Colette had when her young daughter chose to sew rather than read because sewing meant that she was thinking her own thoughts - far more dangerous than reading someone else's.

I started to re-read Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell while I was there, and the peaks and fells which surrounded me made me feel I was right there in the section of the story set in the mountains. The story has since moved to Paris and I feel I really ought to follow this lead...

As soon as this is finished (which won't be long because this is a wonderful narrative - so full of human understanding) I am looking forward to re-visiting Chekhov's short stories after a long, long break. Penny who reads this blog and who also studied Russian at university wrote me such a lovely email about Russian literature that I suddenly felt as homesick for Moscow as one of the characters in a Chekhov play. So a book of short stories has been added to the pile. As has The Architecture of Happiness, because Alain de Botton, one of my literary pin-ups, is one of the cleverest and yet most approachable writers on philosophical subjects.

And that's it. A dilettante's reads. I think it's time for a little vino and vermicelli.

Ciao.

a scorcher

It's been amazing here for the last three days - hot and sunny, and most unlike mid-April. I couldn't believe the sights on the train journey home; I don't think I've been in a time-warp, but it feels like I have. So much has burst into leaf and flower in the short time I've been indoors and glued to a screen. The tracks now have borders of foaming lilac and bright bluebells, star-like clematis is creeping over garden fences and trees are laden with pink and white cherry blossom. I even saw whole walls dripping with purple wisteria.

All this flowering and blossoming had me anxious about my tulips. What if I got home and they'd all finished or drooped or given up in the hot sun? Well, a few have shrivelled, a few have exhausted themselves, a few are biding their time, but a good number have gone into full-on tulip beauty.

This retina-scorcher is the highlight of the bulb patch at the moment. It's so neon and vibrant that I'm quite convinced it glows in the dark. The top photo has not been enhanced in any way - that's really how the flowers look. It makes my eyes swirl and see stars. And  the tulip rainbow below shows you how it looks from the outside.

My work for today is to find out what this is called. As usual, labels were not used and we have forgotten what was planted where. But it wouldn't surprise me if it's called 'Day (and Night) Glo'.

yarn break

Still here, still with red ink stains on my fingers, still drinking tea out of red mugs. Those were the empties I showed in yesterday's photo. I really wanted to get a nice shot of all the mugs lined up, but I couldn't get them all in.

I've taken a yarn break on the advice of everyone who commented and said I needed some balance. I don't need much encouragement, but you made me realise that it really was necessary to find some yarns for a crochet project.

Although it's stunning and clever, I'm not planning on making the bag in the photo, but I was inspired by the wonderful jewel colours in the crocheted granny squares; there's jet, jade, amethyst, ruby, pearl, amber, emerald, sapphire, and many more. Because it seems that I, too, cannot resist the granny square phenomenon much longer. In fact, in one of my tea breaks I crocheted my very first square (practice colours only)

and then spent the next tea break scanning the photos of Alicia's amazing afghan to check whether I had got the pattern correct. Alicia's beautifully crocheted and blocked squares offer a masterclass in crochet construction.

I'm not sure I'm ready to commit to a whole granny square blanket but the colours, the patterns, the yarns are all beckoning. And it's something to think about during my next tea break.

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The bag is in this Japanese book which has a very misleading title (ISBN 4277171532).