49: THE DOGGY ONE : Knitting Podcast : The Crimson Stitchery : Knit & Crochet Vlog

hello and welcome to the crimson stitchery a video channel about making all things beautiful and useful my name is anushka and today i have company i'm gonna have to just turn the camera so this is what's going on at my feet at the moment um a lot of enthusiasm and um and love no come on man not the slipper not the slipper these are some finished objects that i was going to tell you about but i'm not 100 sure if it's going to be possible um let's see how it goes [Music] so hello again and welcome to the crimson stitchery a video channel about making all things beautiful and useful my name is anushka today i have company of a beast and you can find me elsewhere online as v crimson stitchery and relevant links and show notes for this video are on the down bar here on youtube as normal so welcome to my august vlog the august edition of my knitting etc podcast i hope that you were well and thank you for joining me this video is coming to you guys courtesy of all of my lovely and wonderful supporters over on patreon who are keeping the crimson stitchery going through monthly membership subscriptions in exchange for a range of exclusive benefits including extra blog posts showing everything that's going on behind the scenes and access to a private discord server as well as regular online knit nights where we get to meet up and have a chat and do and work on our projects together which is really lovely so if you've been enjoying the crimson stitchery and have been considering becoming one of my patreon supporters i would like to thank you very much head over to patreon.com forward slash the crimson stitchery to check out all of the different tiers and choose the right one for you let's just get straight to it um and talk about what's in my knitting basket except that um so as you will have gathered the crimson stitchery is no longer just two people me and mr tech support the crimson stitchery is now three beings as we have a beast we have a beast that is pretending to sleep but if i try and pick up that finished object to show you the beast will spring spring into action um i've got a couple of finished objects and a couple of works in progress this month um i'm not going to lie it's been a little bit up and down there's been times where i've been very enthusiastically working on stuff and other times where i actually have had no energy at all and i think that that is down to a side effect of having my second covert vaccine i've heard lots of people report back to me lots of friends and family and acquaintances and colleagues who have had wildly different reactions to the vaccines from nothing at all to a sore arm to like much heavier kind of symptoms um cold and flu-like symptoms i had my second vaccine um two weeks ago now and i've just been feeling incredibly drained and just had absolutely no energy ever since then and um yeah it kind of it it goes to show i mean it's not normal i guess for me just to like be lying down on the couch and barely moving um and it happened after the vaccine so that seems to be the link well i wanted to show you what i had been working on um one of the main things i've been working on the last month or so is um something that i can't really show you which is quite annoying but i did want to mention it just to you know go through what i've been doing um which is that i was commissioned to design um something for a publication for for a book which is going to be coming out next year so you know it's not like i sound they haven't made me sign an nda or anything like that but um it's not really appropriate to show it at this stage but i just wanted to make sure that i got that sample out of the way and i was really excited about it because it was in a really really nice yarn that i probably wouldn't have chosen myself but i was very very open-minded to it um and it's turned out to be really gorgeous so sometimes it's really nice to have that little element of surprising projects so i'm going to show you a tiny tiny bit of the finished sample hang on i just wanted to show you like that little gradient fade from aqua gray into a mauve kind of pink so i just wanted to show you this tiny little piece of fabric just just to say like what an amazing gradient this is something that i'm working with a commercially available yarn that's mass-produced and it's got this really wonderful effect and it's just so fun and it's been a really really interesting challenge to think about how i would design with these kind of color effects and sometimes it's really nice to have certain decisions taken out of your hands and putting some boundaries in place so that you can just you know focus on problem solving i definitely get decision fatigue pretty easily and if there aren't any boundaries and restrictions i tend to try and find some to put them in otherwise you just you kind of i find myself flat floundering um in many ways so sorry that that was just like a tiny little glimpse um but i just wanted to show it to you guys just to kind of tell you really that i've been commissioned to create something to create a knitting design um for a book which is really really exciting because i really sort of started dipping my toe into doing knitwear design you know hand knitting design with the launch of the podcast really and was just curious to see where it would go because i've always just improvised improvised stuff and made stuff for myself but um you know this kind of design for hamleting it's very different from the previous kind of design work that i used to do which was you know client focused and with different kinds of clients so of a different kind of audience if you like in mind um and i'm just so thrilled that you know although my design work is quite slow i'm arguably not as prolific as other people that are self-publishing and all of the rest of it personally i try not to compare myself too much because i'm just doing what i can with the resources that i have um and without trying to wear myself too thin but just like so happy that it's led to the point where i have been approached by you know by another company by another publisher um so really you know quite a large part of that is down to the interactions that i've had with many of you guys on youtube on patreon um on instagram at times as well and in our ravelry group and just having that interaction and encouragement and knowing that lots of people enjoy my taste and just like what i'm doing and like to follow sort of the problem solving that my mind um you know goes through so yeah i just wanted to share that with you because because it's sort of through this channel and everything else that i've got to that stage and i'm excited about um having finished that design you know my sketch from sketch to finished sample it's pretty much come out as i envisaged it um without too much wrangling you know just with a little bit of ripping and redoing you know just the normal amount but not too much so i'm pretty happy about that um and yeah so thank you for for being here and your belief in me as as a designer and as i you know have been creating the crimson stitchery which is this kind of studio space as i like to think of it um online space um yeah that's it i'm like you can see you can see how happy i am about this and you know i'm hoping that this will maybe lead to other opportunities and just really totally along for the ride and along for just seeing what will come up being surprised and taking chances which is why in many ways having the patreon account has been just incredible because it's just it's just a way of demonstrating to me that like actually yeah this is something that i might be able to seriously um pursue without being totally at the whim of as i said you know client client working in that ways and i know that i'm pretty sure that anyone who's ever done client work you know work with people um will appreciate that there are a lot of challenges there um there are there are a lot of challenges anyone who's worked in any kind of customer facing facing role or you know you're i'm sure know what i mean um but i don't think of my viewers you know as customers i think of us really as a as a shed as a shared online space where we talk about my creativity and your creativity and we help each other learn so it's getting very very sappy now let's move it along let's move it along um so i finished that sample so obviously i was quite focused on that i just wanted to do one thing at a time i just wanted to start and finish it get to the end and now i've got to put it in the post now that i've shown you that tiny tiny little glimpse and so watch out for 2022. those of you that are still around then um hopefully you'll remember and that will be fun um now the other finished objects are two things that i made for the hound for the hound so they're stash busting things they're stashless items so i've had this one bag of yarn that was like totally cringe and i i don't even know if i went through it when i did my first stashless video like when i went through my stash back at the start of um 2020. i don't know if i even opened it because i felt so embarrassed because basically i i got all of this yarn literally about 15 years ago intending to make something with it to make like this big i just plans this big sweater cardigan thing with like a big shawl collar and a little bell and it was going to be great i just never got made i was going to write my own pattern 15 years ago and i think i got intimidated i think i'd made a few twirls of things and they weren't quite right and i didn't quite know at that point because i was a teenager how to fix them i didn't have the knowledge of the pattern cutting and all of the rest of it that i do now 15 years later 15 years later and several degrees [Laughter] so i got abandoned and i felt really embarrassed because my mum had bought me this sack of yarn um it was like half price but it was still you know it was still not an insignificant amount of money and it sort of followed me around to different flats that i've lived in and i never made anything with it and at one point i was like do you know what i'm just going to knit into a scarf i'm just going to make a garter stitch scarf with this yarn and be done with it so i started doing that um but i got about halfway through and i was like do you know what i'm never going to wear this garter stuff garter stitch scarf because um it's chunky yarn and i was holding it double to try and make it go quicker and also there was this point like maybe about six or seven years ago where like extremely massive garter stitch scarves were really fashionable especially when i think it was when like street style blogs were really really big and you'd have these like gorgeous dramatic images of people in the street with this lovely bokeh blurry background in gaypari or who knows where in new york and they'd have these huge chunky knitwears you know that were very very simple but very sculptural and structured and i thought they looked so cool um but halfway through knitting that piece i just realized that it was actually too too big for me um and it just wasn't gonna work like it didn't really work with the coat that i had at the time and yeah so i started unraveling it um fast forward to now [Laughter] i started putting some things together for the beast to sleep on um and gathering up like old cushions or blankets and stuff like that um because i wasn't you know we weren't about to go out and spend even more money on stuff for a beast that's gonna you know chew it up possibly sick and piss on it like who knows what's gonna happen to it roll around in mud and then roll around in the bed i'm just not really the kind of designer dog kind of person um so i don't really want to spend any money so i was like hunting an old at the backs of cupboards and stuff for old bits and bobs and then i saw this piece of knitting and i still had a little bit of garter stitch that i hadn't unraveled this was my partner suggestion he said what if you make it into a long cushion almost like a draft excluder like a long and thin sausage so that it can be you know used to line the edges of whatever the beast wants to sleep on the edges of the beast's crate slash cage um you know that i think at one point we thought maybe the beast would like to sit in a cardboard box so we we like made it all look really nice and we thought all having that um like a long thin bolster kind of thing might be nice to snuggle up against or whatever whatever um so then i made this piece then basically i never got round to stuffing it before the beast came home the beast has joined us from a shelter and everything happened very quickly and i just didn't get time to find some some stuffing i was going to stuff it with like old clothes like some shredded up old t-shirts and underpants you know stuff that was really on its last legs i had a bit of wadding i was going to shove in a bit of old quilt batting that wasn't the right size for a quilt or anything it's just some random bits um but i've never got around to it never woven the ends so um the way that it's made is it's that piece of garter stitch and that was you know half unraveled so i put the live stitches back on the needle but then i decided to join it in the round and then i knit in the round and stocking stitch so it's just the knit stitch and then decrease down my partner suggested that the beast might like the different textures of the fabric but i never got around to stuffing it never woven the ends and i just kind of dumped it in the corner with the beasts blankets um yeah and then it turned out that it's an amazing toy and who needs the ends woven in because ends are really fun to snap at and yeah it's like a kind of tug of war go round and round and round kind of toy but he absolutely loves playing with it it's not his favorite toy i've got other favorites but he really really enjoys it and i don't have to actually bother to stuff and make it into a cushion so the other thing that i made was that i had lots more yarn left over in the bag because i really bought quite a lot you know it was on sale and i decided just to make a very simple crochet blanket that was like a granny square so i just used it all up i made it into a big square and at first i used it to cover the crate um the cage you know just put it on top to block some of the light out so that it could feel a bit more cozy um but then you know i realized that i needed to put a much bigger blanket and have a much bigger covering on it so that it was i'm stifling more noise to have a bit more sound proofing for it because um being a rescue dog he's very triggered by noises essentially quite certain noises and the noises of certain people like my upstairs neighbor so just anything to try and block a bit of noise while he's sleeping so that at least he can get a bit more rest before feeling like he needs to alert us and go on the attack because there are foreign invaders trying to break into the house you know just a little bit to kind of like lower the the potential triggers so you can get a bit more sleep so that we can be a bit happier a bit less grumpy a bit less um you know on the defense you know he's a very excellent guard dog you really couldn't fault that at all um so anyway so then i put a bigger blanket on and by the way sorry just to say like i'm sorry for people that really couldn't care less about about dogs um but this is really just to explain the process of the the knitting project i was crochet actually i'd always intended to use up the last ball of yarn in tassels i was going to make some tassels and sew them on the four corners of the blanket and i thought that that would be really sweet but i made the mistake of making one tassel and showing it to the beast and the beast loved it and it was his tassel and then suddenly it was no tassel and um this is this is the last remains of the one tassel that i made it's gone don't worry he didn't eat it i threw most of it in the bin because it was mauled and i just found this on the floor before i started recording so i thought ah this is the last remain of the tassel okay so the cushion turned into a fun toy the snake cushion into a fun toy called fluffy the tassel um was mauled and then the blanket so it got taken off the crate um i think i just put it on the floor and then suddenly i looked at the beast and he was licking it and he was cuddling it and he was jumping on it and whacking his tail and he was like moving it into his um into his little rug he's on the sheepskin rug down here down the side and i've never seen him so excited about a piece of cloth in my life you know he wasn't that excited about any other blanket in the place but something about the crochet and it's quite spongy yarn and the little holes and who knows maybe it feels a bit like his own fur but he absolutely loves it so it's just a very very big granny square like just the three lots of trebles or double crochet i'm not sure what i mean just like the basic one that you do like again and again um round and round and round with a seven millimeter hooks a pretty big hook um and like he loves it it's like it's his friend do you want to come up here do you want to come up here it's going to annoy him too much um he's looking very very distressed so we'll hold it up so it's just a little well a big piece of crochet really so that's one of my finished objects now he's glaring at me i'm gonna have to put it back trying to see if i could um if i could tempt him back up but um oh no he's not pleased the beast is displeased very very displeased works in progress so i've got a few works in progress to share with you guys today um and now that i've sat back down he's just made a big effort to move his blanket away like away from me and now he's got his two hands on it and he's licking it um he's a bit camera shy whenever i you know if i ever turn the camera on him or whatever he he just finds it a bit odd so um yeah he's not going to be a model but that's fine he's no pedigree and nor am i so um i've got a few works in progress to share with you guys um the first is my bobble sweater so my bubble sweater is currently in pieces so this is something that i've been designing for myself almost as a sort of part while but just just for fun really i'm just designing it for fun i'm not trying to meet a deadline i'm not trying to meet any brief apart from my own which is to make a textured yolk using yarn that i bought in someone else's g-stash um oh um so i mentioned in the last episode that i was playing around and experimenting with adding more shaping to a yolk sweater and some stuff worked really well and other things that i experimented with just didn't work out um and they probably didn't work out in a way that other people wouldn't have noticed but i knew that it was wrong and it's fine you know this is just part of their process sometimes you try stuff out and it doesn't work out and you don't realize why it doesn't work out until you've just gone through it done it tried it on five times in different lighting and seen for yourself that no it doesn't work out and and this is why and i think partly one of the things that happened was that i was experimenting with adding more shaping to the garment that reflected the body but i think yolk sweaters shouldn't be fitted items basically i just don't think that they lend themselves very well to actually tailoring the the item around the body because you need seams basically i think a certain sleeve is is the ideal um the idle garment if you actually want a good fit but with a yolk i think you've just got to go for that looser fit and don't expect it to be 100 perfect and you know just call a spade a spade um and what's the other one square peg round hole yeah don't do that so i had got quite far i'd done the yoke the body and the sleeve and then i cut it all apart again i'm gonna have to unravel some of the stuff and then graft it back together which is probably going to take ages um especially as the yarn is quite fragile so i'll just show you what i've got so um oh dear i mustn't i mustn't drop this too close to the beast or he might think that it's a present for him um so this is the actual yolk piece that i showed you last time it's looking really really good then we've got the body piece um which is here so i'm not going to be able to hold it up very nicely but the body piece which has got nice little details on the hem um so you can see there's like a proper sweater body there put it there that's a good idea um and then the sleeve which is the most exciting thing about it the sleeve um so it's like a bracelet length sleeve with a frilled cuff with lots of texture so i i do need to get around to putting it back together um but i've had i've had other things to finish like i've had stuff that actually has deadlines that needed to be finished off so um because i've got the horrible job of the on you know putting it on the knee back on needles cutting it apart doing a bit of unraveling it never quite works out as easily as you hope and then grafting it back together it's going to take a while but i definitely want to do it because i i think it's going to be really really nice um fun and dramatic in the most me way possible which is it's good it's good to be taking the time to calculate patterns with like the shapes and silhouettes and little details that i like for myself but also i'm trying more and more this year um as i you may recall that i've mentioned before to set up systems so to try and find systematic ways of designing knitting rather than just improvising one-offs which is what i'm more accustomed to doing but actually plan ahead for multi-sizing for you know dividing things into multiple so that that works out and yeah just all of the rest of it and just to have much more in mind right from the beginning how it's going to look on the body and you know where and how it will be adapted to different bodies so um i am building up my test knitter pool so i'll put a link for that down below again i had intended to contact people already like even if by you know the beginning of the summer but life happens um it just hasn't worked out but meanwhile i would really like to keep building up that pool so that when i'm finally ready you know i mean i'm hopefully there'll be enough people so that i can get some people test knitting quite early on um because it will be so interesting i think that that opportunity to see how um you know people are interpreting my written words and the way that i'm trying to write patterns where i've kind of doing a little bit of not really doing any hand-holding but just more kind of encouraging you to explore certain things yourself so kind of giving in one area and i think supporting in in the pattern writing and with lots of clarity but at the same time not completely you know assuming that you don't know how to do anything at all um i guess i'm trying to get a balance between the sort of vintage english knitting patterns where you know the whole sweater will fit in one small paragraph like that you know for everything um and the kind of more contemporary ones that are published by independent design houses like brooklyn tweed and whatnot um that are really long they're just so long and they just describe everything in excruciating detail i think there needs to be a middle ground and i think it's important to encourage people to to take you know take charge of their learning and find stuff out for yourselves and hopefully you know i i will be um continuing to support that through tutorials on the channel um but yeah that's sort of my thinking and that's why i would like to get feedback from people it's almost like a focus group um yeah just to kind of engage engage with you guys um a bit more and hear hear from people when it comes to the garment patterns not so much the accessories because i think that's very much you know there's a bit less variation there but with the garment you know the size and shape of people's bodies that varies so much and that theme we've been exploring on the channel over the last few months especially that i've been making videos about how i do knitting alterations so at the time of speaking i've got two published i have one more filmed i've got one more scripted and they're pretty labour intensive to produce but if you are intrigued by the kind of things i've been talking about about body shaping and altering up knitting patterns and and you'd like a bit of you know guidance and you know a few examples and so on do follow my knitting master class playlist um because that's where i'll be uploading it too and yeah just keep an eye out on the channel over the next couple of months i'm unlikely to upload them every week but you know they are in the making and generally i upload two to three videos per month just depending on how things go because again life happens um so that's this project i would really like to finish it but you can't do everything um the other work in progress i had was basically i got the unusual itching to do a bit of color work stranded color work and i really like to do this i don't particularly enjoy the process although i do enjoy the visual aspect of it but i just don't really enjoy it that much i've tried it and it's okay but the thing that really you know gets me going is texture um so lace especially geometric lace and stuff that's fairly symmetrical i just enjoy it so much even just the basic horseshoe shetland lace pattern that was probably one of the first ones i ever learned and i still love it even though in certain projects it can look a little bit dowdy but i just love doing the actual stitch pattern it's so satisfying um so yeah fair isle stranded color work yeah it looks you know norwegian scandinavian color work it looks amazing but i just don't actually enjoy doing it it's too fiddly and fussy which i'm not into it's just not my priority when it comes to the craft um but anyway so i had my like once every one to two years i have a hankering to do some stranded collar work and um cast something on so i decided to um make a pair of gloves because i'm anticipating having to get up very early to take the beast out for exercise um but you know this is something that i cast on before we um acquired the beast um but in actual fact being a rescue um the outside world has the potential to have a lot of triggers um and it very much depends on whether one is having a good day or a bad day or if one is at the higher point of the roller coaster mood swing or the low point of the roller coaster mood swing so i'm not actually going to be needing these anytime soon because i'm not actually going to be doing those early morning dog strolls anytime soon but in any case i wanted to do a stranded color work glove and i wanted to use some hairy rusticy wools i had in my stash so that i could get rid of some and after a little bit of flicking around on my bookshelves i decided to choose a pattern from warm hands which is by edited by jeanette sloane and kate davis it's an edited collection and jeanette very kindly sent me this copy for review when it was published last year so thank you so much jeanette and there is a pair of gloves in here so it's called blue interference by claudia fiorketti and it's this yeah triangle business triangle in squares and this very happy girl is really happy that her gloves match her raincoat i'm not going to be doing it with different coloured fingers i'm going to simplify it a little bit so obviously i had to use yarn that i had in my stash and i decided to make a main color a ball of tuku wool sock which is a non-machine washable rusticy wool with a little bit of nylon in it so it's an interesting yarn but not one that i had worked with successfully i did knit a pair of socks in to google right at the beginning of the podcast actually in 2019 and they felt it up after just a couple of wears and then they shrank in the wash so yeah took you all doesn't work well for socks but i thought that the nylon content would be quite good for the glove um because you know obviously it's going to have a lot of wear on the hands right so that needs to be quite strong and firm as well so i'm doing it inside out now i've been experimenting with my different ways of doing stranded collar work um yeah i'm doing it inside out so if i turn it that way round you can see that my tension well maybe i don't know if you can see but my tension's not amazing and also it keeps changing so i think it's got a bit wider at the top when i started turning it inside out so i did the cuff in um using my normal 2.5 millimeter higher higher sharps which is what i use for socks and it just felt horrible it was such a horrible experience also it's a half twisted rib so the knit is twisted but the pearl is not in collar work and they just had you like doing one twist one pearl one twist one pearl one twist one pearl in the colors through the row and that was horrible to work so i went round and i you know knitted in one color slipping the other one and then i did the other thing if that makes sense um so that i was only knitting in one color per row and then slipping the the alternate one and then i kind of caught up with myself afterwards i don't know if that's a normal thing to do it probably is somewhere um but it felt horrible so then i switched then i remembered that i had um the same needle size 2.5 millimeter which i think is a u.s one and a half not sure um yeah i remember that i had that in a circular needle so then i tried doing it with magic loop and it was a little bit better but then i snapped the needle it's a shame so then i remembered that i also had bamboo um double pointed needles which is what i used to knit all of my socks on when i first started i've knit so many socks on these needles and i've cracked one i think they're just like um like a prim or you know just one of those brands that you get in like department stores or just kind of you know not it's like not it's not a trendy or enticing brand it's not like chow goo or um i don't know anything else like that it's just one of those basic kind of granny brands that have been around for ages um but actually these bamboo noodles are much much better the ones that i snapped i bought from um the closest local young shop to me it's not it's not that close to be honest but all the closer ones have long gone they've long shut down like they used to be a lot very nearby um kind of granny granny haberdasheries that were really good but they've all gone so the closest one in east london and so it was like it was like a nice posh japanese brand of needle was quite pricey um but snapped like a twig um whereas these you know i mean i'm not gonna i'm not gonna do it but i didn't do anything more than than that kind of action i basically tried to pull them out of the bag but it was caught in something and you know i didn't do more than that and they just snapped the expensive brand whereas these these are great so i think i knit loads of pairs of socks on them before just one of them had a crack but it didn't even break in two so you don't always get what you pay for i don't know sometimes you get lucky or maybe like more old-fashioned things are made to last i've got no idea because like japanese products are generally renowned for their workmanship and quality control but that knitting needle snapped in half anyway um so then i remembered that i had these double pointed needles so now i'm doing that and then it was still really tight and not very nice so then i remembered that you could knit it inside out so that's my latest thing so i'm knitting it inside out so that i'm carrying the strands the floats over a larger part of the circle so that the bigger part of the circumference is outside not inside and also when i'm knitting i'm making much more of an effort to spread all the stitches out i mean the thing is that i do color work literally once every 18 months 18 to 24 months so anything that i feel like by the time i get better about the technique i'm so sick of doing it that i just abandon it and then by the time i do another one i just the technique is gone again so we'll see how it works out um in terms of the yarns i'm using odds and sods so here's my chicken wool sock in this granite color it's a very dark gray of lots of hairy whites and browns i've got a bit of my whole super soft which feels quite weird because um the tuku wool is sport weight it's very heavy and plump and you can see that in the in the finished piece because the stitches are much bigger and the whole supersoft needs to be washed for the fibers to fluff up and it's it's much lighter there's not as much to it and then the third one is a little bit of it's like one of those shetland like supreme one of the posh versions with more lambswool not the jumper weight one but the the other one of the like many jamisons that live in shetland i just can't keep up but it's really soft and it's really thin and it opens right out so i've got red dark gray and pale gray yeah so somehow i need to get through this and i've been trying to do i've been trying to work on it but i've not managed to do more than a couple of rows um per evening if i show you that up again [Music] yeah i think it's it's quite me isn't it it's not it's quite graphic it's quite bold the colors are fun but not too overpowering it's going to be nice so it'll have gray fingers oh my god oh my god oh my god the beast the beast i work the beast by approaching the camera um so yeah so to whip i managed to finish off the design project for the book that has to be sent off and then i was just yeah as i mentioned i had my vaccine and i've just been absolutely knackered ever since um and you know i work on this other pattern that i can't show you or talk anything about publicly um but it is something that i'm blogging about on patreon and giving like a really in-depth um glimpse about the whole process of how that project has been developed and so if you're intrigued by the design process or if you just want to you know nosey around and get to know a bit more of what's going on and get to know much more about the projects rather than what i'm just showing you glimpses of once a month on the vlog then you can have the patreon blog but yeah i've just been so um tired what is it just had to go and do some patrolling this is one of the techniques that i'm using when the beast who's the guard dog alerts me alerts me about the presence of foreign invaders you know i have to go and check it out i have to determine that it's safe and that there will be no battle today um what was i saying yeah just having a lot to work on but just being so drained by these side effects that um you know one day it took me all day just to like do a tiny tiny little bit of number crunching on excel like i was just so physically slow at doing it and then the same thing with the knitting like just being very slow at going through it so i've just had to accept my my limitations i think it took me a little while to tweak but that was the problem but there it is lot of life um i've got a few things to show you for larder life which is my home and garden section just looking to see where they are um firstly i oiled my wooden spoons and chopping boards now i'm just telling you this because i found out about this on a knitting podcast a couple of years ago um where someone like just showed them oiling spoons and it was a bit of a revelation to me because i didn't know that you were meant to do this this is not something that i ever did when i was growing up and never saw anyone doing it in our home kitchens but yeah when when wood gets really really really dry it could crack but really just feels horrible to touch um so you need to be oiling it at least once a year if not a couple of times a year every few months um so yeah did my chopping boards did my wooden spoons um and it's much much nicer and i knew that they needed to be ordered because every time i touched it i you know kind of shrunk back because it felt so nasty i guess my fingertips are very sensitive so yeah just oiled it um you can oil wooden um utensils wooden utensils with with a variety of different oils and some people online say that you should use olive or coconut oil you know those kind of vegetable oils but then other people say that it will go rancid if you do that and i and i was you know mindful of that i didn't want a stinky rancid yeah utensils so i just used a bottle of mineral oil um which is not ideal because obviously it's petroleum derived but to be honest with you um there's there's lots of oils furnishes paints and all kinds of things that all contain mineral oil a lot of cosmetic products and and stuff like that you know nail polishes and whatnot are probably um you know not like a natural varnish and all of that kind of thing so i think so certain times you just have to make a compromise and and also like when i oil my sewing machine with machine oil that's definitely not going to be like you know linseed or flax oil is it it's going to be mineral oil because it's light and excellent lubricant and you know the reason why plastics were developed really um first is because of their use in the military and as a lubricant um like in a in a nutshell of like the nutshell of like this huge huge global industry that has caused so many problems as well as you know a lot of innovation and the development of the modern world that you know we are in our society today really due to the you know just you know the use of oil and plastics but i'm really starting to ramble so i used mineral oil um and i rubbed it and i did buy one that said it was it was food safe but i don't know who knows so i did that um fermentation i've given up on sourdough the same thing exactly the same thing happened that it did 12 months ago where i like got really into it loved it then just kind of i think i've ran out of flour or had a week where i didn't do it and then suddenly it went mouldy and it's gone so i've got a little bit of starter that isn't dead um or black with mold i've got a little bit left and i might do another one meanwhile i've got some lacto-fermented salsa which is absolutely delicious the recipe is from the zero waste chef blog and when you eat it it zings and tingles in your mouth i didn't put that much chili in this it's raw tomatoes um sweet peppers like the long pointed sweet ones and like the normal bell peppers some herbs i think fresh coriander would be good i didn't have any so i just used fresh thyme and oregano loads of garlic loads of raw onion and a bit of chili and then you just leave it to ferment and bubble you like stir it all the time so that doesn't get surface molds and it is so so so good um i love it i could you know i dip like tortilla chips in it and i just like drizzle it on pasta use it as salad dressing and it's really good for you because of the the special gut friendly bacteria that's in it so yeah i don't know maybe i'm just really drained because i'm fighting off you know symptoms that could be worse but my immune system is good because of the fermented foods who knows that's pure speculation but just something you know just a thought um i have definitely noticed that i have much less much fewer colds since i've been getting into more home remedies fermentation fermented foods and just kind of trying to actively take a handle on my health and on my my immune system i you know i think i talked about this when i first started experimenting a couple of years ago on the podcast and looking back on it i've had a lot fewer colds i've still had colds obviously it's been locked down as well so i haven't been going out as much and i have been out to be honest with you you know i have seen people and i think it's working to boost the immune system so it's good to definitely take an active stance about you know health basically just every day good health and kind of i trying to be i'm trying to be more appreciative of when i feel good sort of noticing in myself how i am i'm physically mentally um but you know not just when i feel bad but actually like when i feel really good and just trying to just enjoy that in those little moments of awareness and presence so yeah that's really nice um and then the last couple of things i want to show you for larda live um on the theme of cooking i did a little bit of jam a friend came round she had foraged too many blackberries and we had some leftover strawberries we had bought a really big pun of strawberries that we couldn't eat so we turned it into jam very very easy not fermented or natural because it's just with processed sugar obviously um but the wild the wild black breeze and um we used in total only about 450 grams of fruit so less than half a kilo of fruit i think it's about a pound maybe a pound of fruit roughly yeah um which is not that much and actually it was really nice just to make three small jars of jam um look at the color it's like oh it's it's it's the light from where i'm sitting because the light shining on it it's glowing and it's really gorgeous um yeah just nice to make three little bottles i think whenever i do these kind of cooking things i always make these huge batches and then it's kind of a bit much like it becomes really knackering but it's nice to make a small batch with a friend and then the last thing i want to talk about is i made some balms so from my book that i've talked about quite a lot in the past the handmade apothecary i followed a balm recipe so it is made with um beeswax um oh what's it made with i think it's just made with beeswax and herbal infused oils i can't remember if i put a bit of shea butter in it but i don't think that i did you basically just melt them down and mix them together the book tells you what quantities to use and instead of you know i used organic sunflower oil just from the supermarket so it was super cheap and last year i had infused comfrey leaves in sunflower oil and i'd also influ infused calendula so comfrey's got active healing um kind of like binding properties that kind of heals wounds up and calendula is really soothing for irritating irritated skin it's good treatment for like eczema and little rashes and stuff like that so i made a healing comfrey balm just put it in an old jar smells of beeswax you can use some soya wax and stuff like that if you don't want to use beeswax beeswax is quite expensive to be fair um but the smell is really really really good i put quite a lot of essential oils in as well but i think that they might have been a bit old there were just ones that have been hanging around for a while so the real smell is the beeswax but i think the little bit of essential oils distilled the kind of um well not distilled in the technical sense but kind of diffuse slightly the very like vegetarian smell of the comfrey oil with like the sunflower oil and then the comfrey leaves it just smelled like a really healthy salad which is not you know yeah it doesn't smell bad but it wasn't like enticing and lovely to rub on your skin so i think the essential oils kind of balanced out but then there wasn't enough of it then to actually make a really big smell so that was really fun to do really quick highly recommend it and i made quite a bit and it's just really nice to like rub on my hands as a solve and i'm really enjoying just being able to transform very simple ingredients into a range of different things oh i forgot to say the last thing that i did was make candles i'll put some b-roll in made candles also of my friend using soya wax and loads of essential oils this is the second time that we've made candles we tried last in november and they were semi-successful but again we didn't put enough essential oils in um so they didn't smell that well but these ones smell amazing it's lemongrass frankincense and bergamot so some of my favorite scents you know woody citrus bright but with like a little little tiny bit of musk from the frankincense um yeah really really good smell and now we have a beast i have a center candle lit most evenings for many hours it's been so nice dabbling in these projects for my lada life segment and i hope that you've enjoyed hearing about them viewers often tell me that they enjoy this segment and it's generally a mixed bag i'd like to end this episode of the crimson stitchery by saying a massive thank you to everybody who has supported the crimson stitchery on any level from leaving me a comment to buying me a coffee on kofi or indeed becoming one of my regular supporters over on patreon and a shout out to my patreon supporters at the crimson queens level this month who are angie scheidel thank you so much and also a huge thank you to shelley i'd like to say a massive thank you too to all of my other patrons and if that's something that you've been considering do head over to patreon.com forward slash the crimson stitchery to check out all of the different exclusive benefits and choose the right tier for you if you've enjoyed this video please do hit the like button down below it really helps me out and drop me a comment and let me know how you've been i'd love to hear from you guys what have you been working on and how have things been going for you lately also if anyone has ever adopted a rescue dog and wants to drop me any advice i would be really really appreciative meanwhile i sincerely hope that everybody watching is doing okay that you're well and that you're enjoying dabbling in whatever projects at all that you're up to thanks so much for watching and i'll see you again at the crimson stitchery sometime soon bye [Music] you

Channel: The Crimson Stitchery

Views: 2,688

Keywords: knitting, craft, making, mending, podcast, knit, yarn, DIY, UK knitting podcast, knitting podcast, London knitter, London knitters, knitting vlog, knitting vlogger, how to knit, ravelry, sock knitting, sewing, how to sew, visible mending, handmade wardrobe, fat squirrel speaks, the gentle knitter, knitting traditions podcast, fruity knitting, stranded podcast, bakery bears, grocery girls, fiber tales podcast, knitting for dogs, dog knitting, stranded colourwork, colorwork, pet knits

Id: V91GYUPcCw8

Length: 49min 9sec (2949 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021