Igenlode Wordsmith

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I managed to repair an old lace parasol (not 'vintage', I think, as the inside had plastic parts) by cutting down and lashing on a cut-down rawlplug to replace the missing wooden tip, so that the canopy extended under the appropriate tension when unfolded.
Ideally it would have been a wooden rawlplug for a better match, but I couldn't find one in my collection of scraps and wasn't about to go out on a hunt for an entire new packet of rawlplugs :-p

I lashed and whipped the edge of the lace canopy fairly securely through the split in the 'tip' (held together chiefly by the whipping!)

Now I just need to find an appropriate recipient, i.e. a lady who thinks a lace parasol is pretty and doesn't object to the fact that it has been 'rescued'...

I am still plugging away through my very overdue accounts from last year and have now completed nine months -- but for the last two months I have been working on, the recorded cash expenditure has quite definitely exceeded the amount of cash withdrawn from my account (by a few pounds at a time), and at this lapse of time I have absolutely no means of working out where the extra money to fund this spending can have come from -- I have had to simply give up on attempting to balance my accounts for the period in question. ( Read more... )

I have also made the decision to give up on my pot of parsley, which has never been healthy enough to actually use in cooking and which is just dwindling year on year. Even the 'new' parsley has all died, one plant at a time, and the much bigger 'old' parsley proved, when I finally pulled it up, to have virtually no root on it. It clearly just doesn't like the growing conditions.

And I have ripped a pair of pyjama trousers very convincingly across the seat -- there is no point on earth in trying to mend those. As it happens I have rather more (non-matching) pyjama trousers than jackets, since to my perplexity it was the jackets that kept ripping... so at least this evens things up a bit :-)

Doing last-minute repairs to the turn-ups of my black trousers an hour before the concert... the trouble is that I never normally wear black!

I got the last of my winter clothes down and discovered a lot of clothes moth cocoons (and two grubs) but only one item that had actual visible holes in it -- given that the cocoons were all tinted in that colour maybe they had been feasting on that and pupating elsewhere? The cocoons were mainly on the corduroy, which is definitely not wool and probably only a low percentage of cotton, if any -- original label long since illegible. And I have just found another grub on a garment that is definitely 97% polyester (and 3% elastane :-p)

The Great Changeover was much later this year, partly because of a warmer autumn and partly because all my thermal underwear was in the smaller trunk and I had been existing in multiple layers for the previous weeks!

Some of my clothes came out of the wash with mould stains on them :-( I can only assume that it was because I used the 'overnight' setting, which delays the final drain/spin cycle until the user returns and manually triggers it... although the irony is that I did so specifically in order to avoid the washing cycle finishing while I was out and the damp clothes sitting around for hours inside the machine! And I have used it numerous times before with no problems...

I tried soaking the affected items overnight in a gallon of water with half a cup of vinegar in it, as suggested, and then tried using a toothbrush and undiluted vinegar to scrub the stains. Neither expedient had any perceptible effect, so all I can do is put them in for another rinse and spin to get rid of the vinegar and then hang them out to dry, black spots and all. You're supposed to put mould-stained garments through a hot wash to kill the spores, but that's a bit difficult for items that aren't supposed to be washed above 30C and ideally should be hand-washed only :-(

Fortunately we have a little bit of sunshine this afternoon.

( winter plants )

My Roma tomatoes have successfully gone red (and need using up) after being stored in temperatures of around 16C for a month or so... all except one, the smallest. Presumably that was the last to set, and failed to reach whatever point of maturity is needed for the fruit to start ripening?



( cuff repairs )

I went to put on my cashmere jumper (which has basically had to be darned every single time I have worn it) and discovered that it had acquired a whole new crop of much larger holes up the sleeve which it is obviously quite pointless to repair. Probably moth damage, although there are no tell-tale cocoons, because the holes are just so big compared to the ones which were appearing previously. So I shall have to ditch it, as the arm has basically been perforated off at the shoulder.

( Read more... )

A fairly apocalyptic final episode of "Frozen Planet II" last night, in which the BBC film team demonstrated the scale of the climate damage which is happening *right now*, never mind accelerating into the future. Despite David Attenborough's concluding call to arms of 'We need to do something immediately', the unintended message I took away is that it is basically too late already. ( Read more... )

I got within five or six holes of the end of sewing the front apron onto my new Simple Way shoes before I realised that I'd got the holes misaligned somewhere, and that I had one more stitch-hole left in the apron than in the upper. I spent almost an hour in laboriously unpicking the sewing so that the thread could be re-used and the pre-punched holes weren't damaged (far slower than sewing it up in the first place!), and counting and recounting the remaining numbers of holes in each piece to try to find out when I'd got past the mistake, a process which got slower and slower the more stitches I unpicked.

I eventually found the error right back at the start, when I'd skipped a hole in the leather upper (hidden under the apron) with only the fourth stitch I'd made. So I now have to sew the whole thing up again and hope I don't miss any more holes while feeling blindly about inside the shoe... It's the classic mistake, and I've done it at least once per pair of Simple Way shoes I've made :(

An ominous ripping sound across the shoulder of my pyjamas as I rolled over in bed. I can probably patch the tear, but it's a sign that the fabric is worn out -- the bottom buttons need patching on both pyjama jackets, one of them for the second time as it has torn a hole in the patch itself.

It's inevitable, as I haven't had any new pyjamas for years and they get an awful lot of wear -- my winter ones are in worse condition. But it's hard enough to get decent new pairs of pyjamas at the best of times... these ones came from a summer fair that no longer exists, the first pair being such a success that I made a beeline for the stall the following year to snap up a second pair.

My entire wardrobe is just falling apart.

I've discovered that cold potato duff eaten in slices direct from the fridge is very much more appetising than the same dish served hot with custard ;-)
In fact so much more appetising that it might be worth making again for that specific purpose; it becomes much more solid, with the texture and flavour rather reminiscent of Russian cheesecake, with the lemon (which becomes detectable) and peel dominating, and the jam just discernable as an added delicacy. Very more-ish.

I wonder if the original recipe was intended to be chilled before serving. It really doesn't sound as if it was! http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/Potato_Duff.htm

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( cold-weather clothes )

( mesembryanthemums )

(The last of the putative yellow poppies that were growing over the winter have come into flower... and are also red! But I have had a brave display of red ones as a result; they are very ephemeral, and only two still remain this evening of the half-dozen or so that were in bloom this morning.)

I discovered(!) three more shirts on the airer when I took down the washing -- one of them (the shortest in the tails) even having unfrayed cuffs -- thus averting the immediate emergency, and explaining how I could have failed to notice such a sudden crisis in my wardrobe. Though I still need to do some ironing.

After a couple of warm days I now look likely to have an excess of marigold seedlings, as another half-dozen or so have germinated. However, one of my four dill seedlings has suddenly flopped, the stem having gone through completely at the root -- this is what happened to all my dill last year, coming up happily enough and then dying abruptly before it was large enough to be of any use :-(

It's not slugs or frost, since this is the pot on the kitchen windowsill. Presumably damping-off.