spots on socks + other fancy stuff

Hello dear friends and welcome to today's episode of the Friday Foxs Lane.

I hope you've had a lovely week and that you're gearing up for a wonderful weekend.

My week has passed by in a haze of hot days, sleepless nights, garden and girls. Actually I can't work out whether the word I want to use is haze or daze, but you know that blurry feeling you get when your body gets out of the habit of sleeping at night for no apparent reason, your nights are never ending and your days are filled with fog? Yep, that.

So in honour of my loosening grasp of the English language and the hazey-daze, I have decided to take a blogging short cut today and make a list of ten things I am doing right now. Or more precisely doing or done, past tense, so I can include the spotty socks above.

Are you ready? Here we go...

one - sewing in the ends

Everything about sock knitting fascinates me but especially the way it makes me into someone I'm not. On the top shelf of our studio there is a basket that is filled with clothes that need mending. Shirts that buttons have fallen off, skirts with hems that have come down, socks with holes in the heels...the list goes on. This basket has in fact recently overflowed onto the back of my desk chair and on top of my sewing machine. Optimistically, I imagine that one of these days I'll pull that basket down and methodically work my way through it, buttoning and hemming and darning. But the truth is, I probably never will. But for some reason every single time I cast off a pair of socks I finish them off all the way to the end. I find a needle and I thread each of the loose bits of yarn on in turn and I darn them in until they're all done. It's like the little shoe-maker's elves have visited. And only then can I consider them finished.

two - admiring the insides
There's something so unexpected and surprising about the wrong side of a fair isle knitting project that I only really discovered a few months ago when I started knitting colour-work. Since then I've started a little ritual where I save the inside-looking until I've cast them off. Once I'm done I turn them inside out and sit with the wrong side for a while, looking at all the strands and the negative colour pattern. Each time it's so interesting to see how things have knit up on the back, sometimes I even prefer the wrong side.

three - finishing up
Once the knitting, the darning and the admiring are done, the next step is to hunt down a daughter for the photographing part. Sometimes it's as easy as stand, snap, done! But other times the foot looks funny, the part of the sock that I'm not thrilled with is too obvious, the light's not right, the foot model is in a hurry and won't stand still...you get the picture.

Luckily last night all the sock moons and planets aligned and we got the shot and the sock model was back to singing scales within ten minutes.

The details are on Ravelry if you're interested in such things.

four - casting on

I'm going to call the next project to hit my needles - when you love someone who loves the Bulldogs. Not exactly my usual type of colours or colour combination, but I do love her and she does love them. 

I guess it's not really cheating on the Bulldogs socks if I'm sitting here daydreaming about a beautiful skein of CircusTonicHandmade sock yarn that fell into my shopping cart this morning. Australian merino wool...indi dyer...soft variegated yarn...ochre, greys, charcoal and the slightest hint of lemon...mmmmmmm.....

five - preserving the sunshine
Over the past few weeks I've mentioned a few times that this season's harvest isn't looking to be quite as bountiful as we'd hoped and expected. There are definitely some things that have positively surprised us, like the cucumbers, the berries and the beetroots. There are some things that have flat out disappointed us like the apples and the plums. And then there are some that could still go either way.

Over the past five or eight years we've grown most of and made all of our own tomato passata. Enough to last the whole year through. Over January our tomatoes get going slowly allowing us to finally break our tomato fast and to eat them on everything and in everything we can. By March we're not keeping up with the harvest and we start with the cooking and bottling.

This year has been the strangest tomato season ever. The vines are heavily laden with fruit but it's just not ripening. Or rather it's just starting to now, but only enough to eat, definitely not enough to preserve for later.

So yesterday we made the call and went and picked up a 10kg box off our mate Florian at Mount Franklin Organics down the road. Tomorrow we'll squish them, cook them into a sauce with some onion, garlic and basil, and then we'll pop them into jars for later. Hopefully our green tomatoes saw the boxful of red beauties make its way in and will hurry on up. And if not, we've arranged to pick up another box next week, just to be on the safe side.

six - listening

During the week Jo, another knitting mum of three, contacted me about her daughters Mabel and Ivy and their folk duo Charm of Finches. She was hoping we could work together to put on a house concert and as we've been talking a lot lately about doing something like this, we loved the idea and were hoping the same. Unfortunately, at this stage the dates didn't work, but in the meantime Jo sent me the girls' CD and I fell in love.

We've spent the past few days with Staring at the Starry Ceiling as the soundtrack to our drives to school and back, our dinner prep and our lying on the couch with closed eyes, feeling completely transported by their angelic voices, their beautiful harmonies, their original lyrics and all of the instruments in-between. 

With Mabel and Ivy being only one year older than our Indi and Jazzy, I can't help but dream of the places their shared love of music and song and flowy dresses might one day take them.

In the meantime I highly recommend you to click on over to the Charm of Finches site and support the girls and their dreams and melodies by buying their CD. 

Hopefully we'll get another chance to work with them in the future.

seven - listening to the scrape of Bren's knife against his spoon 
One of the best things to come out of this year so far is the dedicated Friday craft day. Just last night my Mum sent me a text asking if we needed help with stacking some wood today. The fact that I didn't have to think twice, or justify myself, or agonise over the decision was awesome. Friday is craft day. A whole guilt-free day for carving, knitting, sewing, drawing, playing guitar and writing my blog. If we decide to do a bit of farm work in amongst all of that then cool, but otherwise even cooler I say.

seven point five - listening to podcasts
Yesterday I listened to Richard Fidler interviewing Kate Summerscale about the life of Robert Coombes who in 1895 when he was 13 killed his mother and went on a spree with his little brother across London. I always love Richard's interviews but this particular story gripped me so tight that I hardly noticed the physical work I was doing in the garden until the whole hour was up.

It is a tragic story of Victorian-era matricide that also includes a boy's own adventure, a court case, an examination of family life with a father at sea and travels all the way over to Australia for the ending.

Kate has written a book about Robert's life called The Wicked Boy which I'm sure is a fantastic read, but I don't feel the need to read it now I've followed the whole story so closely in the author's words. Perhaps I'll look up some of her other books.

eight - splitting

The wood splitter is back for another week and the splinters in my hands and the ache in my muscles are there to prove it. Gosh I love watching that blade slice through those enormous rounds of wood as if they were butter. Not to mention that growing pile of firewood that will be stacked along the driveway and look pretty for a while and then keep us warm when the weather turns horrid.

nine - fermenting

If you were to ask me what I grow well on this farm, after little girls I think my next answer would be cucumbers. I seriously love growing cucumbers. I love how big their first leaves are when they poke their green tips out of the soil, I love how quickly they grow, I love their prolific yellow flowers and I love those green, crunchy, water filled fruit (?) and how much joy they add to my kitchen.

We mostly eat them as they come, in sandwiches and on salads, but when the season really gets going and we're bringing them in by the bagful, we ferment them by the jarful.

The recipe we use is from this book. We pretty much follow it, but often add and subtract ingredients. Lately we've been adding lemon slices (thanks Meg), and bay leaves, and as much garlic as we can be bothered peeling. 

Have I told you that my girls have started calling me Pickle? Tis true.

ten - reading
I just finished reading The Seven Good Years. Bren read it in a few days but I think I took a whole week. Even though I often struggle with short stories, and these are extremely short, I really enjoyed it. I laughed and cried at times but mostly I just admired Etgar's ability to take a simple thing that happened to him and make it into a great story.

I'm not sure what I'm going to read next. I heard Wendy James interviewed on the radio a few days ago, maybe I'll start her new book The Golden Child. It sounds very interesting and topical.


And with that my lovely friends, I'll bid you farewell. Pepper is sleeping over at her friend's house, the big girls will be home in an hour, which gives me just enough time to pop some washing on the line and get started on those tomatoes.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
I'm going away for three days with my Mum and one of my sisters and I can't wait!

As always please feel free to leave me any suggestions you might have for podcasts, books, music, shows and patterns you're enjoying.

LoveLove,

Kate xx

spots on socks

Hello honey bunches,

I hope you've had a gorgeous week.

Me? Not so much. Well actually it started off quite promisingly. We had a lovely weekend last weekend. Saturday was busy and we spent Sunday celebrating Bren's wonderful parents and their 50 years of love and marriage with dinner and a show.

But then it nose dived pretty quickly from there. On Sunday night I went to bed and didn't get up again until Thursday. My bones ached, my muscles cramped, I was HOT and then FREEZING, my chest hurt and I don't know how to describe the pain in my head except to say that I've never experienced a head ache quite like it. It was scary.

It's so dumb, but sometimes when I'm running around in my normal, healthy life, the thought of being sick and stuck in bed sounds dreamy. I imagine myself propped up on big poofy pillows, with my hair in a messy bun and my lap top perched on my knees, watching movies, knitting and taking sips of fizzy mineral water guilt-free. In my dreams, being sick was almost luxury.

Of course the reality didn't even vaguely resemble the fantasy: grubby, sweaty hair, eyes that were too sore to watch or read anything, head that hurt too much to listen to anything, scary pain and nausea and as for knitting, forget it. What a waste of time.

But I'm pleased to report that today, on day five of the awful sickness, I am just about well again. I'm still not at that stage where the whole world looks brand new and fresh and exciting and I feel like skipping through the daisies singing, but I'm close. Unfortunately Bren, Jazzy and Indi are still a few days behind me.

In other news, during the week my niece Sascha turned 20. Twenty years ago my farmer boy, who back then was probably more of a dread-locked gypsy boy, took a break from trekking the world and returned home to Melbourne to meet his newborn niece.

Not long after he'd returned, we met at a wedding, we fell in love and have been more or less inseparable ever since. Thanks to Sascha being born. I can't believe that was 20 years ago. I can't believe that that beautiful, tiny red-headed baby who wouldn't ever go to sleep is now practically grown. Sometimes I can't even believe that we have kids and cars and land and apple trees....

Twenty years hey!

What I can believe in though is socks knitting. I still love it. It still fills me up creatively and at the same time feels useful.

I knitted this pair for my farmer boy for his birthday, but due to some issues with the tension of the fair isle pattern around the top, he couldn't get them on. Miss Indi could get them on and modelled them for me, in exchange for a new Facebook profile pic. Remember the days when the going rate for bribery was a cookie? How things have changed. Anyway, as you can see from the photos, the socks are actually too big for Indi so will probably end up on Miss Jazzy's feet. Even though she was the last in the family to receive a pair from me. Better keep knitting.

The next thing that happened in my knitting land is that Indi requested a pair of socks with spots. Cool, I thought and proceeded to search the internet for patterns. Not so cool, I thought, when weirdly I didn't come up with any.

So I tried to convince her that what she really needed was a beautiful, snuggly shawl instead.

She disagreed.

So I got out some textas and paper and tried to work out what spots on socks might look like. Then I tried to work out how many stitches across and up and down they should be, how many stitches between them they should have, and how on earth I could evenly fit them across a 66 stitch sock. Is your brain hurting yet?

Once I had more or less worked out the stitches I tested them out by knitting a square. A square of spots.

That worked quite well but Miss Indi thought the spots were too big.

So I knitted a smaller swatch on 2mm needles with sock yarn.

Perfect!

Which leads us to now. For although I'm not 100% better I am better enough to take my spotty sock knitting into the other room to watch one of the Little Women movies. I have just finished reading the book and am dying to see the characters brought to life.

Gosh I adored that book. It broke my heart and brought me to tears of sadness and joy more times than I could count. I love those March girls, I love their relationships and adventures and of course I loved every single mention of knitting socks for the soldiers. What I wouldn't give for a chance to sit at that table for a night counting stitches with the sisters, turning heels, making lace and giggling at each other.

I can't believe I have never read it til now. Have you?

And with that I bid you farewell for another week.

May we all be healthy, may our tomatoes finally ripen, may our pickles have just enough pucker, and may the movie not disappoint the book.

Bye!


zig zag toe socks details here
lotsa spots socks details here

Sweet dream. x

Last night I dreamt of a long table in a large warehouse type cafe.

I was sitting down one end of the table deep in conversation with my Indi. We were discussing life and feelings and age and opportunity. We were completely focused inwards on our little world not at all aware of the hustle and clutter of the rest of the cafe.

At some stage and for some reason I took a breath and looked up and noticed a couple opposite us with a tiny baby, maybe three days old. The father was holding the baby, his arms like a cocoon, and the mother was hunched over weeping into her coffee.

It was weird but I recognised those sobbing, shaking shoulders. I knew those big, fat, swollen tears falling onto her lap and I felt that overwhelmed, out of control, helpless feeling I knew she was feeling. Well.

It was like I was her again. The brand new first time Mum on the way home from hospital with our new baby who we were besotted with. I was deeply, madly in love with our new family but also overwhelmed with the enormity of it all. Everything was new. I was exhausted. I could almost feel my shoulders bobbing in time with her sobs.

And at the same time I was also still me. Me sitting there on the other side of the table with my almost twelve year old. My child who made me into a mother all those years ago and now sat with me on the verge of woman hood. My big girl who taught me almost everything I know about parenting and now hung out with me as friends. My angel who by chance and accident and luck and a whole lot of love is becoming someone I am so incredibly proud of.

And then all of a sudden the woman opposite stood up and fled the room. And he, so obviously torn between his adoration of the tiny package in his arms and the love of his life who he knew needed him now more than ever, stood up and froze for a second.

And then he handed the baby to me, looked at me with pleading desperate eyes, gushed that he'd be back in a sec and ran out after her.

And then it was me and Indi and the tiniest, most sweet smelling bundle of sleeping baby.

We sat there for a second, frozen. And then my Indi asked me what words I could tell them to comfort them? How could I make them see through the haze of hormones and breast milk and nappies and exhaustion? And we sat there for a while gazing at and breathing in that perfect bundle. I wondered what she was thinking while I was contemplating my words that would come across as comforting rather than advising.

After a few minutes they returned. They took their baby, apologised for their tears and drama and thanked us. They couldn't keep their eyes off their baby and really didn't look like they needed any help from me at all.

So I took a deep breath and thanked them for letting us cuddle their most gorgeous baby. And I told them that I had been where they were almost twelve years ago to the day. That I remembered all those feeling so well. And that it would get easier and then harder and then easier again as time went on and then one day they too would be sitting with a twelve year old. A girl they could barely believe was that tiny baby not so many years ago. And a girl they would be so super proud of, and so in awe of and so honoured to share in her journey.

And in my dream we all hugged like old friends. And then they walked out to start their new life as a family and we walked out a bit sad to leave that little baby bubble but excited about all the new opportunities waiting for us.


It's been ages since I've remembered so much of a dream and so much detail. This one has haunted me all morning. When I retold it to Indi on the way to school this morning she said she felt like crying. I'm still trying to work it all out. I'm pretty sure it's about letting go and accepting and looking forward. I think it was a bit of a gift.

Are you a dreamer?
A remember-er?
An interpreter?

Oh and that photo at the top? A few weeks ago I went to the wonderful Beci Orpin's book launch and was lucky enough to get a show bag full of goodies to take home. In amongst the candle and notebook and hand cream and stuff were three gorgeous gorman place mats.

And while I am a lover of beautiful home wares, place mats which collect dropped food and then just have to be washed seem a bit silly to me.

So I turned the spotty one into a skirt.

I think the other two will become bits of clothing before too long too.

Such fun and perfectly springly teamed with a pair of OK OK tights don't you think.

Sweet dreams.
Bye! xx