Boo's Attic Yarn

A friend and I paid a visit to the Made-It Market (Facebook link) yesterday. It was a fairly small affair in the Guildhall, with tables sporting cute cards, cool anime accessories, handmade chocolate, and a stall of those meaningful words ('love', 'friend', 'feelings') in a typewriter-y font glued onto stones. There was also some rather exciting yarn, from a local dyer who doesn't seem to have a website yet, but who can be contacted at boosattichomeATgmailDOTcom. I couldn't resist this one-off skein of laceweight - it's not the softest yarn I've ever stroked, but the colour is mesmerising: a dark, sensuous, velvety claret (the colourway is 'Cherry Valance'). I think was is the first time I've met a dyer in person, and it was most interesting to hear how she achieved this intense shade by dyeing over an oatmeal coloured yarn. 

Also, how adorable is this little key charm included with the skein?!

Spring Sprung

The trees are bearing boughs of blossom, chicks are chirruping outside my window, and I have been experiencing a flowering or rebirth of interest in things stitchy. I went through something of a creative dry spell, and it was difficult to keep up a craft blog while I wasn't making anything to post about. There's nothing like a real, pressing need to do some work on my PhD to  make me engage in a variety of displacement activities, from knitting, to running, to putting together outlandish outfits, to emptying my penny jar (it contained £1.58). 

The weather was truly glorious today, so I dug out some crumpled summer clothes and took myself off on a promenade to soak up the Cambridge. I found my sandal-ed feet inexorably drawn to this fine fabric shop, where I managed to resist the temptation to buy, but did daydreams about handmade sun-dresses. I'd dearly love finally to befriend my sewing machine... perhaps this will be the summer of sewing.

Cambridge. Autumn. Pretty.

By the end of this term I shall have acted in three plays. Last night Play #1 ended, and we celebrated until the morning birds began to sing. Today, all my poor, pickled little brain can manage is to bring you is some soothing shots of Cambridge prettiness.

Because this place is only ever so slightly bigger than a postage stamp, many of its glories are piled on top of each other in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, and can be espied peeping over walls, through cloisters, or between rooftops.

On the subject of walls, I have enjoyed watching this one transmogrify from this...

... into this.

Sometimes I do feel a little hemmed in by Cambridge, physically and figuratively. There have been several periods during my six years here when I thought I couldn't wait to flee escape to metropolitan excitement (which in my mind was an ever-changing carousel replete with glamorous bars, yarn shops, boutiques, coffee houses, theatre book shops, haberdashers with every shade of velvet ribbon etc.). Undergraduate terms are so short here that it was hard to form an attachment to the place as a home rather than some sort of academic holiday camp.

For various reasons, though, I decided to prolong my stay, and I have more or less come to terms with my decision. I think I might occasionally blog about nice things to see and do here, to ward of fits of anti-Cambridge grumps. After all, there are far worse places to live, really.

Coco Belle Cupcakes

Remember a little while ago I was bemoaning the dearth of nice places to have coffee in Cambridge? Yesterday I discovered the Coco Belle Cake Company, a little cafe which is an oasis of cupcake calm next to the Grafton Centre. Cambridge already has its fair share of traditional bakeries and tea shops, such as Fitzbillies, and Auntie's, both popular with tourist keen to tuck into a sticky slice of England.

Coco Belle satisfies a slightly different confectionary need. Though the cupcake is a less indigenous species than the Chelsea bun, the owners of this bakery have not attempted to transform this nook of Burleigh Street into a shrine to fifties Americana. The warm pine furniture (including a dresser!) encourage you to linger and enjoy your cake with cup of tea or coffee. I did wonder whether perhaps the colour of the walls was a sly nod to the well-spring of cupcake frenzy, the Magnolia Bakery in New York, but perhaps that's reading a little bit too much into things.

The cupcakes must be among the most photogenic of baked goods, and these ones lived up to their appearance in deliciousness. They were also very reasonably priced, at only £1.85 a cake. I do have two titchy quibbles, firstly that I wish their selection were more seasonally inspired. They had a very subtle take on Hallowe'en, with chocolate spiders on their chocolate cupcakes; while I can respect the choice to spurn the violent oranges and blacks that adorn most cakes at this time of year, surely a compromise might have been achieved by a sophisticated pumpkin, or autumnal spice cupcake?

The second gripe is not so much aimed at the proprietor of Coco Belle, but at whoever it is on the local council who made the decision that what the tiny centre of Cambridge really needed was five branches of Starbucks and several more of Neros and Costa. I would love to see a more proactive policy whereby interesting, independent businesses like this are encouraged into the centre rather than forced into the periphery. It is places like Coco Belle which make Cambridge different and special, and I wish they were supported as such. A monster branch of Primark is soon to open a few doors up from the cafe, so I hope it might benefit from the increased passing trade. If you live in or are passing through Cambridge, I would heartily recommend a visit to this cute little place.

A Net!

After several arduous hours knitting my gift yarn in cafes in Spain...

... and a couple more in rainy Cambridge Annette is done! To underline the celebratory atmosphere of this occasion, I got my friend to take some photos of me in it outside Party Mania, the one-stop shop for all your plastic shark, anchor and mermaid needs.

This is an excellent pattern, and I'm still so excited to have snaffled this lovely yarn for free!

The only mods I made were to lengthen the sleeves, and shape the neck-line with short-rows and finish it with an i-cord bind-off. I am pleased with the smooth finish this gave, although it did lead to a little bit of pattern uncertainty where I picked up the wraps, as you may be able to see in this photo.

It's nothing I can't live with, however, and over all I am heartily pleased. Hooray!

Stitches in time (and bouncy castles)

I have been listening to Anne of Green Gables on audio book as I knit my Hey, Teach! cardigan. This was one of my very favourite books as a child, and I have been amazed at how much detail I have remembered. Equally, however, I am definitely appreciating new things about it... I doubt I picked up on the knitting content first time around, for example! The book starts with a woman knitting, and I have just come to the part where Anne goes back to school, and is welcomed back thus:

'Sophia Sloane offered to teach her a perfectly elegant new pattern of knit lace: so nice for trimming aprons'

It feels appropriate to be engaging in an activity that would have been so familiar to women and girls at the time whilst listening to a story about them. I'm not sure whether Anne herself, or non-fictional versions of her, would always have enjoyed knitting: I have read about children being made to sit and knit a certain number of rounds on a sock before they were allowed to go out and play. Nevertheless, it was a common currency of knowledge which, as 'Sophia Sloane' shows, could be shared and passed on, and it is nice to think that I too can participate in it. I suppose I do not have the same need to knit that Victorian women did  (my legs may still be warm even if I do not knit myself stockings), nor quite the same uses for it (I have yet to experience the urge to trim an apron...), but I bet they paused every now and again to stretch and admire their work in exactly the same way that I do.

I wonder if, conversely, they glowered at things that did not turn out quite the way they had envisaged? I have been doing so at Forecast. I did what I was talking about, and ripped out and re-knit the button-hole band (on the left in the picture below), picking up fewer stitches, which I think now looks just about ok. The button band, on the other hand, which I had previously thought was perfectly passable, now appears flared by comparison. I decided to block it, and see which side looked better. I'll keep you posted...

In the meantime, here are some things I love about Cambridge:

The de-stressing bouncy castle that the college erects every exam term.

I've passed this poster in the pigeonhole room a few times, and finally got round to photographing it. In case you can't make it out, someone has taken the time to modify its message to 'Do you think you are an academic?'.