lottie | Recent Entries

So! This polyamory webcomic I've been running for a while. We're approaching the 100th comic on Friday, and I'm trying to raise money to get some cool postcards made of some of the comics. Check out this fundraising page I made. Not only can you get leetle rewards from just $6 (£4), but you could even get a custom comic made for you, get promoted on the comic itself AND get it put in a signed custom comic book just for you.

Also, everyone who donates gets entered into a draw to win some handwarmers and a comic book.

In a shameless twist of self-promotion, if you tweet, blog or otherwise promote this campaign, I will be super grateful and nice about it, and possibly tweet about how awesome you and your website are, etc etc...

On 6th March, I planted these:

The things on the left are some potatoes that my mum gave me to plant in my garden. They are properly dark purple all the way through, a bit like beetroot only bluer. And they taste different, but only a little bit. See how purple the stalks are? It's a bit like that. How pleasing! They were just from the supermarket in a bag for the average shopper to eat, which is pretty cool. Biodiversity FTW. They're in the ground, and in the last month they've not done much, but I'm not surprised. I'm expecting some potatoes I lost in the ground last year to come up again, so we'll see if they appear at the same time.

The bulbs on the right are tulips, brought back from Amsterdam as a gift by Serena who lives upstairs, what a sweetie! I do enjoy tulips, so I made a little patch for them in my garden. She tells me they've been treated to flower this year even though they've not been in the ground through the frost. And they've already grown a good 20cm or so! The leaves are different to the tulips I put in last year; last year's are growing faster, and have a fresher, lighter green leaf. The new Amsterdam tulips are so far a little shorter, and the leaves are darker, with an almost reddish brown tinge to the edges. I am looking forward to seeing how they turn out. Photos will be abundant when they flower!

Current Location: Sofa
Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats

I posted this a while ago on my Vox blog, and now Vox is going under so I'm moving the pattern here before it disappears...

This scarf is stretchy, cuddly, warm, and looks the same on both sides. It has a pleasing diagonal twisty pattern. It looks good in all kinds of yarn. Tip: Use needles one or two sizes up from your usual for the chosen yarn. As far as I know, this can only be done "throwing" style (with the yarn in your right hand).
This scarf pattern isn't really a pattern, so much as a stitch instruction.

Ready... steady...
Take some delicious DK yarn, and some size 4.5mm straight needles. Cast on 40 stitches for about 7 inches wide.

Slip the first stitch of each row knitwise.
Insert the needle into the next stitch knitwise. Wrap the yarn around both needles. At this point, it will look a bit like knit-two-together (k2tog) because you will have two "stitches" to knit into one.
Continue as if it's a normal knit stitch - lay the yarn between the needles, pull it through with the right hand needle, slip the old stitch off the left needle.
Do as many rows as you like and cast off with a stretchy technique.

Credits!
I learned this stitch from my ex-boyfriend's grandmother, Celia. She was using it to make dishcloths, for which this stitch is ideal. I'm not sure why it's called cabbage stitch, but I imagine that the rows look like a field full of tidy rows of cabbages. I have since learned that the actual stitch is very similar to twisted drop stitch!

Halloo thar,

I just wanted to drop by to tell you that you should make an Onbag. I know, you don't have a baby who is carried about your person in a sling, but you should make one anyway. They are blimmin' amazing. I would go so far as to say they are BANGIN'.

(Clicking on pics will take you to their Flickr pages, which have little tags on to tell you interesting things. Or, here is the whole set of photos.)

First of all, the bag is huge. I mean, it doesn't look it, but it's an awful lot like the TARDIS. It's got three pockets inside, and two on the outside. The flap stays closed with handy velcro. When I was making it, I was like "ooooo this seems small!" But honestly, it's epic.

Second, check out these straps, they're not even attached:

This is amazing, because if you look at the lower back corners of the bag you can kind of see in this photo above that there are these really strong loops built in. This means you've basically got an infinite number of ways you can wear this bag, whatever is most comfortable. Hannah/Citrusgirrl has had hers for a while, and she says that because the straps are so wide and you can change them about, you can have huge weights on you and it's like you're not carrying anything at all.

If you tie the straps together near the bag, you've got a shoulder bag thing.
If you tie them toward the end of the straps, you can carry if across your body, messenger bag style.
If you put each strap through its nearest loop you've got two shoulder straps, backpack style, and you can tie the straps over your stomach for extra weight distribution support, or just behind your back.
If you're carrying some epic quantities of tinned tomatoes or potatoes, you can (OMG genius!) cross the straps over your torso, put the straps through the opposite loops and then tie them together over your stomach!

Here's a photo of the backpack style:

And soon I hope to add a photo of me wearing it with the crossed straps, because you just have to see how awesome it is.

ETA: Here are the crossed straps!

I forgot to tell you, I made this from some old curtains and some old trousers, so it was practically free. Especially because I did it all on my hand-cranked Singer sewing machine that my mum gave me! I have yet to add zips and buttons and all that, but I will. :) Hannah says the pockets are infuriating on the inside especially unless they close somehow.

Current Mood: ecstatic

Here's my first harvest of cucumbers, which aren't as mini as expected, due to the huge leaves obscuring the view of the veggies themselves. The plants also have pea/bean-like tendrils.

I've also been binding a notebook for @RunSqueezyRun (click photo for full Flickr set):

Current Location: Sofa
Current Mood: exhausted

So far this summer, things have been really quite productive for someone with a new garden and CFS. Fran and Dave have recently helped me to add to my garden path to keep things organised, and that makes a huge difference.

They contributed the three slabs next to the mini-greenhouse.

I recently cut the roses right down to the ground, and the peas weren't producing so I cut them off at the soil. I've had to regularly trim leaves off the courgette plant, and there was a huge, HUGE courgette hiding under the leaves that I kept forgetting about. The plant then stopped producing other courgettes, so yesterday I cut it away from the plant to see if that gives it a chance to produce more. At the same time I picked a few tomatoes, and ate them with some of the diddy courgettes on some noodles for dinner. Here's the harvest:

Today I put some of the EPIC courgette in some soup, and there's still two thirds of it left! Don't know what to do about that...

Current Mood: apathetic
Current Music: Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/user/lottiotta/playlist/1QcR1i20J8eToYuVebMIFW

Recently, I decided that my skinny leeks were so skinny that I'd rather leave them to flower in the spirit of curiosity, and so the bees could share them. Last week the flower buds opened, and the most incredible flowers emerged! They're huge, the size of average apples, a lovely shade of purple and very dense. Here's the photo I took:

I also noticed that some of the potato plants were either flowering or getting shriveled, so I dug up the older-looking ones with my mum. Here's a photo of the first lot. The second lot were just four really big ones, I was impressed! And I've been eating them in my communal meals, and yesterday I sliced and fried some in butter, crispy edges, woof.

As usual, click on the links to get to the Flickr pages.

In other news, I have been enjoying Being Erica, Misfits and True Blood.

Current Mood: productive

Voila, I have finished the rebinding of a broken paperback that my aunt gave me back in September, almost ten months ago! Click the photo for more pictures of the finished book. If you can't be bothered, here it is next to its broken cover.

Latest haps, excusez-moi pour mon retard. As always, click on the photos to find bigger versions, some with handy tag/note thingies.

Here is a photo of my first decent amount of food grown in my garden! I've been snacking on chives, the odd tiny leek, etc. But this feels more proper, somehow. Some lettuce, and some mangetout.

About 10 mangetout pods, and about 10 leaves of lettuce, in a plastic bowl.

I've also been knitting a tiny purple sheep for BJ, and I'm almost done binding a broken book for my aunt that she gave me at the start of September, almost 10 months ago. Whoops. :D When it's finished I'll post a photo, anyway!

Today I am very excited, because even though I may be overdrawn for a good few weeks I hope to make some of it back. A guillotine is being delivered today, and it can cut up to 4cm of paper in one go! This probably doesn't sound like a big deal, but if you hand-bind books you'll know how annoying it is that folding the signatures makes for a very uneven block, which it's pointless to try and fix without a decent guillotine. Here's a photo to explain!

And finally, garden wondrousness. The wonderful Fran and Dave have kindly delivered to me six slabs for my garden, all the way from Sheffield. Look how proper my garden looks now! And here is a link to my timelapse garden slideshow, so you can see how my garden grows.

Current Mood: satisfied

I am so pleased with how fast my garden is changing, and becoming full of more things! It's also getting some structure. Here is a link to the timelapse set on Flickr, and below is a photo I took on Saturday (click on it to see the tags):

I just got this email from Stephen Williams MP, as I'd emailed him not long after the hung parliament situation during the general election as part of a 38 Degrees campaign. He's just sent me back an awesome reply, presumably the same to everyone who's emailed him recently, saying (among other things):

I am glad to say that under the coalition agreement with the Conservatives significant gains have been made in this vital policy area. The parties will bring forward a Referendum Bill on electoral reform, which includes provision for the introduction of the Alternative Vote in the event of a positive result in the referendum, as well as for the creation of fewer and more equal sized constituencies. Both parties will whip their Parliamentary Parties in both Houses to support a simple majority referendum on the Alternative Vote, without prejudice to the positions parties will take during such a referendum. In addition, the parties will bring forward the proposals of the Wright Committee for reform to the House of Commons in full – starting with the proposed committee for management of programmed business and including government business within its scope by the third year of the Parliament. The parties will also tackle lobbying through introducing a statutory register of lobbyists and we have agreed to pursue a detailed agreement on limiting donations and reforming party funding in order to remove big money from politics. Finally, a fully elected House of Lords, with members elected by a proportional voting system, is also a highly significant part of the agreement.

This sounds pretty awesome. What do you think?

Latest garden stuff! I've not been able to do much this week, though I can't remember why. But! Here's the timelapse set on Flickr with today's photos added. And here's some photos of what I've been up to, starting with what the garden looks like right now. As usual, click on the photos to go to the Flickr pages, adorned with helpful tags to identify the plants.

Duplicating the Forsythia

I did a bit of research about this forsythia that was in my garden when I moved in, and I thought I'd have a go at duplicating it. The website I found said that you can make new ones by bending a branch over and burying the end, where it will take root. Then you can cut it away from the mother plant and put it somewhere else. How cool! Here is a photo of the ends I "planted" yesterday, with the leafy bits already pointing upwards.

Wine Bottle Wall

I heard somewhere that to be kind to bees and bugs and stuff, you can let a bit of your garden grow unchecked. I like this idea, because then I don't have to do as much and I can find out what this mystery plant is. (It's the green leafy stuff along the ground in the above photo, very mysterious.) It's also going to have the pile of wood in it, which I hear is good for bugs. But I felt it needed boundaries, because then I have a clear line to work with - weeds on this side, no weeds on that side. I considered bricks, but they're not very pretty. And then I remembered a garden path I met once, which was bits of slate broken up and kept in place by upside down beer bottles! Genius! So, now I'm collecting wine bottles to make this mini wall, which I hope will be pretty and sparkly. Here is my wall so far, which is only not-a-post because there's more than one bottle.

Current Mood: drained

My grandmother gave me some money for Easter, so I'll be adding the photos of what I did with it in a mo. Did I spend it on booze and strippers and blackjack? Strangely, no! :)

Here's a few, click on them to get notes that show you what all the plants are. Today I bought "Dollar Princess" fuchsia (can't put it in 'til May though), compact marjoram, orange thyme, Hidcote lavender, "Suttons Apricot" foxglove, "The Governor" lupin, and bergamot.

The two top ones are going to be in a timelapse experiment on Flickr! I'm going to take photos from these two angles once a week and put them all in order in a set on Flickr so we can see how it changes through the year. :)

Spot the kitty! ---->

This border is looking a bit lusher than last week, which is great!

Current Mood: accomplished

Lots of seedlings! Many are probably weeds. I used soil from the garden because I don't have transport - I could get to a gardening place, but I couldn't carry the compost home. Luckily, the seedlings don't seem to mind, but there are still little weeds coming up that must have landed as seeds in my garden at some stage. Oh well. :)

So far, the courgettes (that's zucchinis to the US people) are doing really well, and the little beetroots are coming through nicely. A couple of lavenders have sprouted in amongst plenty of straggly weeds, and there's some things in a pot that I hope are lettuce.

I've also got nothing growing in the two pots with space tomato seeds and Earth tomato seeds - that's where one set of seeds have been in space, and for some reason the people that packaged them thought they might grow differently? Er. And today I just put some mangetout seeds into two pots, because I love mangetout.

Something I found really helpful was to get all my packets of seeds out and make a big spreadsheet of them all, with names in a list down the left and boxes labeled January to December left to right along the top. On, for example, the mangetout row, I checked the packet and found that they're good to plant from March to June. So I coloured in these squares on the mangetout row. I did this for all my seeds, and now it's really easy to see which seeds are good to plant for any given month. Awesome! This is particularly good because it seems a lot harder to riffle through the seed box, so I'm much more likely to plant seeds if I have a handy chart to find out at-a-glance, and then I can go to my seed box and take out the exact packet I'm looking for without any fuss. Organised, I haz it! Also, some photos, let me show you it. (Click on the photos to get to the Flickr pages, which have notes on for more info.)

Courgette seedlings:

Beetroot seedlings:

Lavender seedlings:

This is a lucky discovering, because I am impatient.

The mystery shrub that has straight, smooth branches and yellow flowers very early in spring appears to be a forsythia, which someone on Ravelry suggested. This is great news, because according to this page it should be cut back straight after it flowers. I had been wondering whether it was bad that I hadn't cut it back in winter, and I was surprised to see the cut branches still flowering in a zombie-like, undying way. Hurrah!

My version of the mystery shrub can be seen here.

Today the weather is beautiful, and the forecast says we have beautiful weather every day for the next six days. I am outrageously pleased! My energy is set to dip in a pretty serious way, but I hope to get as much gardening done as I can. This post is to show you a few photos of my garden as it is today, so that when it's looking amazing we can see how far it's come and how much hard work I've put in.

Below is my garden, zoomed out. (Clicking each photo takes you to the flickr page, where there are helpful notes/tags to identify stuff.)

The bare area is the part I've dug over, removing all the brittle roots of some invasive weed that was strimmed before I moved in, and is just starting to sprout up. You can see some of it in the far corner.

To the right are my pots of leeks, which I brought over from my old house.

Below are some of the things I've planted myself, all bought or given at a plantable size:

Top left: Aquilegia
Middle left: Rosemary
Bottom left: Chives
Top right: Purple sage
Bottom right: Amazing winter-defying parsley

And last but not least, here is my garden path:

That epic pot is all the invasive weed roots I've dug up so far, not sure what to do with it. The green pot to its left is some chocolate mint, which needs splitting. (Sorry, mint, I meant to do that ages ago!) The pot towards the bottom of the picture is purple sage. You can see those black pots with the leeks i again - I topped up the soil in there, wondering if that means I'll get longer white bits on the leeks. I'm not sure if you're supposed to do that, I'll let you know what happens!

ETA: This evening, I also split the chocolate mint into four separate plants and thoroughly watered them. One is going to my mum, one is going to Steve, one I'm saving for Becka, and the last I am keeping. I am so tempted to put it in the ground but it would take over the world!

Then I sowed some seeds in little pots in my sunny window sill. One pot has seeds from tomato plants grown in space, and one has seeds from Earth-grown tomatoes. My mum gave me the seeds, and I am going to keep a close eye on them! (She said she didn't notice any difference...) I have a portable greenhouse that my brother gave me last year, so I may even get actual tomatoes this year. (Last year I grew the plants but the soil was poor and there was no sun, so it was a fail.)

So, those bulbs I planted a month ago are starting to come up! No sign at all of the potatoes, which I put in before them, so I guess they're not coming up. But at least the worms get some dinner. :)

In other news, on Saturday I went to Swansea Indoor Market and met a lovely man who grows things and sells them. I had an awesome print-out of bee-friendly plants from Bumblebee Conservation; this list is great, because it divides the plants up into flowering season. It tells you which ones flower March-April in one section, May-June in the next, etc. So if you make sure you have one or two plants from each section, your garden will be helping bees for the maximum possible time. Me and Becka, who was coming to visit, chose rosemary from the March-April section, and then aquilegia and chives from the May-June section. (I like to pick useful plants, and rosemary and chives are both yummily edible, but aquilegia is just really pretty!)

Today it was really wet, and I know it's better to plant things out when the soil is wet, so I put them all in near the edge of the plot. I did have to do a bit of digging the weeds first, but it was worth it.

Anyway, I've had some lavender seeds in a little packet for years and a week or two ago I chucked a few in three pots and put them on my sunny windowsill. Lo and behold, they're coming up lovely and I'm really looking forward to putting a couple in the garden and then giving the rest away. They are from the July-September section, so I have a good selection for the bees. Anything else I get, I consider it a bonus!

I'd also like to put some catnip in the garden, because Rosa recently received some as a gift from @RunSqueezyRun on Twitter (follow her, she's lovely), and loved it! The garden is basically full of cat poop, but I'm hoping that filling it full of stuff will deter the kitties. It's also full of a mysterious brittle-rooted weed that's not Japanese Gitweed. Before I moved in, someone lazy went over the whole garden with a strimmer to make it look empty, leaving all the roots living and waiting to pounce. It was a good idea, because it's more manageable now than it must have been before, so whenever something unwanted starts to sprout up I can get it out before it gets too established. It's slow going, because of the CFS, but I am getting there slowly - about half the patch is clear now, and I am really glad it's not a big patch. It's raining a lot, but I just want to get out there and pull more of it up.

I love my garden already, it's just perfect. :) It needs work, but it's very suited to me. Just crappy enough for me to love improving it, and just small enough that it's conceivable that it won't get out of control as long as I do a little bit as often as I can.

Speaking of Japanese Gitweed, I heard about how they're going to be introducing a natural thingy to kill it off because the Gitweed is so invasive. They're starting it off in Swansea, where I am, in July. I'm pretty much against introducing non-native species, but if the knotweed is so invasive and destructive and expensive to get rid of... :/

I want it to stop raining so I can go clear the garden some more! :)

Current Mood: excited

It's starting to warm up here in South Wales; the bulbs knew it before I did. I was hoping to get them planted over winter, but what with one thing and another it never happened. It's probably a good thing, since I moved house in December. Today, I opened the box and a few of the packets were full of sprouty bulbs instead of sleeping bulbs. So I put them in the new garden, along the brick border. I pulled up a LOT of weeds along the way, and chucked them on the path to dry out. I suspect some of it may be ebil Japanese Gitweed that the landlord cut down, but I don't know. (ETA: climate info! It's 7 degrees C here.)

So, here are the bulbs that were sprouty, and which I then planted.

"Brodiaea", aka cluster-lilies.

"Allium sphaerocephalon", aka round-headed leek/garlic

"Muscari", aka grape hyacinths

Red tulips

And some mystery bulbs. The label says something like "Allium Ostroskianum" (I got mud on it), but I can't find it online. The wikipedia Alliums page, under O, has an uncreated page called "Ostrowskianum" (Flickr search). May come back and edit that once I have flowers.

Here's the Rav link, and here's the photo:

It took me about 6 hours, and it's made from yummy organic undyed wool!

Current Location: Sofa
Current Mood: exhausted

A 40kb Excel file that calculates a whole pattern for seamless stockinette socks knit toe-up, in the round, with short row heels and toes. Fill in your gauge details, and it all fits on to one A4 page.

I recommend that you check out these excellent directions for short row heels and this one for provisional cast on, as the spreadsheet pattern doesn't go into detail. Then, of course, there's JenyC's super stretchy bind-off.

Please note that it's not totally finished yet - the formulae are sorted, and the imperial pattern fits on one A4 page, but the metric page isn't finished.

Hope it helps - please leave some feedback!

Download

I wrote it because I couldn't find anywhere else that had one, and I was fed up of doing it by hand.

12th January 2010: I modified some of the calculations to get a better fit. If you've already downloaded it, it's probably best you download it again. Thanks!

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Lottie

Love, Light and Peas

September 2011

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Page generated Jan. 28th, 2012 11:36 pm

... and then it got stuck in my foot

Chronicling the events that lead to my craft-related injuries

Recent Entries

Poly in Postcards

Spring planting 2011

Cabbage Stitch Scarf

You need to make an Onbag right NOW.

Mini cukes!

Harvest

Gardenoms

Sand in the Wind, rebound

Practically self-sufficient

Garden, May 2010

Alternative Vote

Late April garden musings

Easter plants!

Seedling update

Forsythia

Garden Progress, and leeks

Growing things! Woo!

Planted things today

Finished project: Pot holder

Lottiotta's Sockulator

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September 2011

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