Coffee To Go

caffè latte shawlette by yours truly
ice yarns angora design in 'brown shades'
ice yarns angora premium in 'ivory'

A caffè latte is more than just a milky coffee, even if it is exactly that when translated from the Italian!  But if you're a coffee drinker, well, it's much more that that; it's coffee heaven!

To the Italians, a caffè latte is a brew made at home for breakfast, which would be accompanied by one of their many delicious sweet pastries, but to those of us brought up more on coffee-shop coffee than home-made coffee from a mokapot, then, mmm-mmm, lattes are a staple for day-long caffeination!

I find watching a barista steam milk and gently pour it into an espresso, then add some latte art on the top in the form of a latte-are rosetta (or fern motif) just the right balance of relaxing viewing to counteract the caffeine shot about to hit!  Plus you have the added bonus of the extra yummy tasty coffee treats you can get; just by adding flavoured syrup you can be in caramel latte heaven!  Or pumpkin spice heaven! Or gingerbread latte heaven (my personal coffee cloud 9)!  

So, taking my favourite hot beverage as inspiration, the Caffè Latte shawlette has a latte rosetta edge, with lacy, frothy steamed milk:

a cabled hit of coffee bean:

with a short-row body of caffeine heaven, finishing with a simple eyelet edge - that bit of creamy froth that's always left in the bottom of your cup:

But really it's worked from the short edge of the latte strip using 3 balls of yarn at a time, and when I say simple intarsia, I mean simple!  So simple that this was my first attempt at working the technique!

The rosetta, froth, coffee bean cable, and more froth were all worked together in a long strip:

then bound-off to one stitch, turned 90 degrees and then picked-up lengthwise (please excuse the unfocussed photo):

and the body of the shawlette was worked in good old stockinette stitch, with the unsupped eyelet froth to finish!

You have a choice with the transfer of the contrast colour (I used the ivory as my contrast, the brown mix as the main colour) for the body of the shawl - you can do as I did and have a highlight ivory purl edge between both sections, which is worked in staggered lines (you can see it clearly in the first photo), or there are instructions for a pure stockinette changeover.  Both are pleasing to the eye in their own lovely way!

But where, I hear you ask, can we find such a tasty, tasty pattern?  Never fear, Ravelry and Loveknitting are here!  The main pattern page on Ravelry is open to ALL whether you are a member or not, and you can either click the buy-it-now link on the page, or you can click on the handy button below!  

Now, if you've read my last blog post, you'll know that payment will be a bit different for the next few months, so depending on where you are, you'll either find yourself going straight to the PayPal page as of old, or you'll find yourself at a Loveknitting page, and through that you'll be directed to PayPal. In the end, it's all still PayPal, just different ways of getting there.  There may be a slight delay for the link to work through loveknitting.com for EU buyers, but please check back.

But Red, I hear you ask again, how much are you charging for such deliciousness? Well...  this is where it gets complicated.  Give or take a few pennies/cents either way, I will be charging €4 for this lovely shawlette pattern... 

Normally with my new patterns, I like to offer you all a deal, money off the pattern with a special code, for example, but because of the new system of selling, it's not something I can do just now.  SO INSTEAD I'm taking 25% off the price for the next 2 weeks!  Yes indeed, until the 8th of March you'll find this delight available for the introductory price of €3 (or the monetary equivalent of your country!)

Grab it while it's hot!

Uncommon Cold

"Nic is cold. All. The. Time.

One of the many not-so-wonderful side-effects they don't tell you about when you lose a ton of weight... The silver lining is that several cardis are now so big that they go round twice!"

I can see the tendons on my hands and feet now. I've never been able to see them before. I catch myself looking at my hands, stretched out in front of me and see concave sections at the side where my thumb joins my wrist. Wrist bones that stick out instead of being an unnoticeable hard lump between a padded hand and forearm, discernible only when pressed. I make fists and see the shape of my knuckle joints. I see my veins, although I think that's been exacerbated a little by working out with hand-weights. Any rings over a size small slip off my fingers. Okay, each finger is slightly different in size, but for the fingers I like to adorn with silver pretties, small sizes are the only wearable options if I want to still be wearing them at the end of the day. (For those of you that remember I celebrated being able to wear my all-time favourite ring back in September 2013, you might be interested to know that I haven't worn it for a while because it was sliding off all the time.) I already had small hands span-wise, but now I need to buy children's gloves just to make sure I don't look like I've broken the top joint of every finger wearing gloves that are too big.

So yes, my hands and feet are cold because there's just not the insulation around them any more. Doubly annoying for my feet as I am, and have always been, an indoor barefoot kind of girl. My Mum (who would despair of me keeping socks on my feet even when I was tiny) will be the first to confirm this. I was wearing flip-flops on my feet indoors to keep me off the chilly floor when it got really cold, but apart from that small concession to the temperature, I was a happy-go-lucky hippy feet lass. But not now. Holy crap. I hate wearing socks indoors, and I'm not a fan of slippers, but Sheesh! My tootsies could be languishing, frost-bitten somewhere on Everest for all I can feel of them. I got chilblains last September from having to rely on hot water bottles in bed to bring life back to my frozen toes. In SEPTEMBER! Wearing fluff around my feet seems like a small price to pay to be able to walk properly, but I'm going to grumble about it, anyway.  

And don't get me started on my torso. It's all well and good to expect your extremities to be hit by a lack of warmth, given the circumstances, but your intremities, too? (I'm not bowing down to spell-check and its judgemental red line on this one - intremities should totally be a word.) Yes, it's February, but this inner core of cold is a new, new thing. I am currently wearing four layers, including a thermal vest top and a particularly enveloping fluffy jumper but I'm not shivering. I'm just cold. It's like some strange frozen god has reached down my throat and turned my gullet to ice. It's not a pretty picture, but it's the best I can manage. My heart isn't cold, my spine hasn't turned to ice - there's nothing poetic or beautiful about the feeling at all. It's like I'm radiating cold from the inside-out and I'll never be comfortable again.

It is a very strange feeling for this girl who has always been toasty and warm.

The Secret Garden

I've walked past the entrance to Sorghvliet Park several times on the way up to Scheveningen. Scheveningseweg, like your traditional Dutch road, is a multi-decker sandwich of pedestrian paths as bread, a bike path, highway, duo tramlines in the middle, bike path, and another pedestrian path, which separates Sorghvliet Park (in the Zorgvliet district of the city, just to add confusion) from the Scheveningse Bosjes.

Well, I say I've walked past the entrance, but what I really mean is that I've seen the entrance from the other side of the road, but never took my life in my hands to cross the Highway Sandwich From Hell and actually go inside until today. I was inside for all of twenty seconds - the amount of time it took me to read that Sorghvliet park was a walled enclosure, open only during certain hours of each day, and solely accessible if you had a yearly pass, one of which you could buy at the tourist information in the centre of town. But not there at the park itself. Of course.

Well, determined to get my walking hours in, I set off to the public library that houses the tourist information, bought a pass for the year at seven euros, and walked back.  

The park itself isn't huge, and although it was once part of massive landscaped estates (including formal gardens said to have rivalled Versailles) owned by the statesman Jacob Cats, then by King William II, (and now houses the official residence of the prime minister in its own private part of the estate) it is now more wild woods than anything truly park-like. But I love the atmosphere and the light there, and considering you're bang-slap next to the nearly 350-year old original highway between the city and Scheveningen, you lose sense of where you are once the noise of the traffic has quickly faded away.

Legend has it the show of snowdrops later this month, and bluebells in May are not to be missed, but I have to say I fell in love with the starkness of the trees reaching up, en déshabillé, to touch the piercing blue of the sky. It's a lovely, quiet, almost secret wood, and I think I've already had my money's worth just from my first visit this afternoon!

Cheap Frills

"Nic made the difficult decision to buy heavier dumbbells instead of trawling eBay for smaller clothes that fit. Difficult because... clothes that fit versus another means of getting smaller!! Argh!!

Meh, it's not like the clothes would fit for long anyway!"

Tricky, though. Losing weight on a shoestring. I am so thankful for the skills I learned both with a needle and thread, and a sewing machine, because they've saved me a LOT of money. I have enough simple tops and skirts that I've been able to take in down the side seams to stop me feeling like I don't have a stitch to wear!  

It's handy that I made a few of my skirts using an old panelled skirt as the template - it was made up of ten sections that were straight up and down at the top, then swept around to the side, widening out slightly at the bottom, to give a flattering fit-and-flare shape. I have to admit that the ones I made are not, shall we say, as finished as some bought items might have been, but hey, because of their construction I've been able to remove panels to make them a smaller size and sew them back together again, and thus taking them from unwearable back to wearable, so I'm not going to complain about tiny things that no-one except myself will ever notice!   

My infamous shirt collection hasn't fared quite so well, however. Picking apart and resetting sleeves is just a tad over my non-skilled pay grade, and I have had to say goodbye to some favourite shirts after they got just too ridiculously voluminous to wear. Yes, belts are handy in situations like these, and lord knows, I've worn a couple of pin-up style wide elastic belts to death already. Belts are fun, but you know a shirt has to go when you end up looking like an extra from an 80's film: all big shoulder and cinched-in swathes of fabric. Nope. Eighties fashions are best observed on golden-oldie film channels and should never be recreated unless the intention is an ironic one.

Shirts occupy that weird and dangerous no-man's land of clothing for me; they need to be wide enough at the bottom to fit, you know, my bottom, but fitted enough at the top to stop me losing things down the front, like pencils, fruit, and empty pint glasses. The shirts that I had managed to keep wearing for so long had survived to make it through to the other side because they were neither too baggy, too tight, or too reminiscent of early Meg Ryan films. Goldilocks shirts! But even my favourite favourite black, slightly fitted shirt with pin-tucks and gentle ruffles down the front, somewhat similar to a men's dinner suit shirt (which sounds rather naff and reminiscent of every cheesy prom you've ever been to, but I loved it so I did) has had to be retired from active duty. Pensioned off. Consigned to that big clothes rail in the sky. 

Okay, I lie. It's still sitting in my wardrobe because I couldn't bear to just throw it out, or give it away. I really keep it because it was me, that shirt - I wore it constantly. It saw me through some interesting times, interesting couldn't-fit-into-anything-else times, and it'll stay for a while longer for the dual purposes of being a then-and-now size comparison (because there's no better pick-me-up when feeling overwhelmed by what's still to lose than trying on formerly fitting clothing and finding yourself swaddled in excess fabric), and to remind me that a) not everything black is flattering, b) there's a time and a place for pin-tuck ruffles, and c) that time and place should never, ever return.

Chillin' With The Royal Wildfowl

Oh my, but it's nippy outside! Hovering around freezing when I went out, it's been slowly dropping; I got to the lake at the centre of the Haagse Bos and the ducks, coots and seagulls were all bobbing on the surface, expecting a crust or two from the toddler in the pram and her mother next to me no doubt, but by the time I'd made it round and back again, the seagulls had obviously taken offence at something and were sitting on ice in the centre, and complaining to one another of their lot in life. I'd say in consternation at their nice soft water being slowly turned into a treacherous landing- and taking-off platform, but who knows? I might have been witnessing their tribal song of ice-welcoming.

Fear Of Heights

"Nic is finding it increasingly difficult to tell whether the aches and pains felt the day after a decent workout are caused by good old-fashioned muscle soreness, or the more insidious approach of decrepitude!!"

I can't tell. I'm at that age where I think I could still be invincible, but aren't entirely, one hundred per cent sure any more. For as much as I know I'm not in my girlhood any longer, I'm certainly a long way away from being in my dotage. Or am I?

Is that sore knee a continuing symptom of teenage joint woes, or the first indication that cartilage is wearing away? Are those muscles and tendons that complain and collapse when attempting a lunge just chronically underused and merely needing time and effort to bring them back to strength and stability, or have the supports (for want of a more technical word) just become too weak and will only get more fragile as time progresses? Has losing weight enabled me to feel those bones for the first time, or have I done something strange and suffered a bizarre painless dislocation? Surely I'm too young to contemplate joint-replacement surgery for an increasingly belligerent hip? And has my shoulder always clicked like that? 

Is this Top Of The Hill syndrome. (A syndrome I've just made up, no less.)  That heady mixture of knowledge of what's gone before and awareness of the potential wonders which the fates may still throw at us, mixed in with the unshakeable feeling that our tiny little spark of life will soon be on the decline metaphorically and physically. I'm thinking the symptoms of this fictitious syndrome should somehow be more euphoric, but instead of I HAVE REACHED THE TOP OF THE HILL AND SEE ALL! HEAR MY ROAR OF CONQUEST AND LOVE OF LIFE, it feels more like I HAVE REACHED MIDDLE-AGE WITHOUT DYING FROM MY STUPIDITY! HEAR ME complain about how kids have it easy these days, and surely there should be more fibre options in the cereal aisle.

But right now I still think I could be invincible. Maybe. Although I might just buy another box of All-Bran seeing as they're on special offer.

Home On The Range

It's minus three C outside. I was waiting to see whether the sun was going to make an appearance, and use that as inspiration to spur me on to an attempt at walking off some of yesterday's indulgences, but instead the haar turned into freezing fog. Rather than accepting defeat and settling down in front of the telly with a pile of edible presents, I pulled on my big girl pants (especially useful, even in metaphorical sense) and made another stomp around my old stomping grounds.

And I'm glad I did. The fog wasn't bad enough to render all visibility down to zero, and the temperature was just on the turn when I came across a patch of gorse that had been covered in spider webs. The webs had obviously caught moisture from the fog, had frozen, and I walked past them just as they were beginning to thaw. I've never seen anything like it, and I'm glad I had my trusty Galaxy SII with me to record the melting beauty!