Thursday, December 27, 2012

Christmas Letter 2012 - The Round Robin comes Bob-bob-bobbing along again!

It's that time of year once again - Keeping up with the Rotte-Murray Family - though we are nowhere near as rich or (in)famous as the TV family half the youth of the world are keen on keeping up with, the Kardashians. It's a special day today, being the 12-12-12, a type of date that won't roll around again this century.

I hope you're all well and looking forward to the festive season albeit in a time of austerity and post-budget blues, when we are all counting the cost of the pain, and are unhappy with some of the cuts that are having an impact on young families and older people. Banks and big business seems immune from the worst excesses of austerity and people are getting increasingly angry and aggrieved, all understandably. I am not complaining personally as I am one of the cushioned public servants as a HSE nurse, but I do resent all the assumptions that I'm on a gravy train and get my gold-plated pension for free! I'll be lucky to retire in the next decade with less than 20 years of service - equal to about a quarter salary including the state pension. Meanwhile I'll grit my teeth and smile whenever I'm told I'm lucky to have a job!

What a year it's been in our family - one of flux and massive changes, mostly good, although not without some measure of poignancy, as our children move on and make their path in life. It reminds me of us a generation ago and I guess we gave little thought to the impact our choices made on our families. Now I can see that my mother had great fortitude to let me go off on my travels without guilt tripping me, and also that it can't have been easy for her to see us heading to Africa when she only saw her grandchildren when we came on holidays every year.

The year started with Martin heading off to Australia on a year's work-holiday visa. He went with his friend Bobby and they were based in Brisbane where they had friends. They tried their hand at farming in N. Queensland but it spiralled into a cascade of unfortunate events culminating in their somewhat premature return to the comforts of city living and settled down to working in Brisbane, where Martin is still enjoying working in a graphic design company and he spent some months in a nice upmarket restaurant as well. He'll be back in Ireland in a couple of months, and see where his next adventures will bring him.

Maeve has just turned 17 which is hard to believe and I wonder where all the years have gone since she was a baby - then I realise we are living in Ireland for almost 16 years or most of her life! She has really grown up and is taller than me, peroxide blonde for the past few months after working her way through the spectrum of home hair colours from brown to purple through red. She is in Fifth year in the local Blackwater Community School, and has a far livelier social life than I remember at that age. Learning to drive is top of her to-do list right now so she'll have to knuckle down and get her theory test before she can even take a lesson.

William has just finished his Masters in UCC in e-business (no, I haven't a clue either!) and is now in Dublin looking for work and enjoying a break after all the study. He seemed to enjoy the course and worked in Cork in an outdoor adventure shop for a few months. He would like to travel but will need to get some funds together after being a student for five of the past six years! He doesn't come back to Lismore much although he will be home for Christmas, which will be great, as it'll be a quiet one compared to the last few years.


And the reason for this - as many of you already know - is that Shayne and Jany and Sofia and Livia moved back to Spain in late July, a few weeks after their wedding on July 5th! This was the big family event of the year, which we knew would take place in the summer. We were all looking forward to it, and then at the end of May they announced their plans to move back to Spain where they had lived up to three years ago, before they came to Ireland. So that news took us all a bit by surprise, although we knew they'd ultimately planned to return, mainly as we hadn't realised it would happen so soon after the wedding. They had steady jobs in Ireland and in the midst of so much unemployment it seemed Spain would be the last place to find work. Yet within days of checking online jobs in Spain Jany was offered a job in IT in Barcelona. Then Shayne was offered an interview for a customer services job in Citibank in Barcelona. All this fast forwarded their plans for moving so within weeks of the wedding they had moved.

The wedding itself was a wonderful day, the ceremony in Cork Registry Office followed by a reception in the Montenotte Hotel. I made the wedding cake which was a new and fun challenge for me! We had a small group of about 45 sitting down to dinner and then another 30 or so for the afters, that peculiarly Irish institution of extending the party to everyone who doesn't come for the whole day. Anne came over from New Jersey for her Godson's wedding, which was great, and we enjoyed meeting all of Jany's family who came from Holland and who we met for the first time. Sofia and Livia looked sweet in their little flower girl frocks and loved the excitement of the day, and Jany made a beautiful bride, with her lacy dress and homemade crochet bouquet which was so creative, and a lovely touch. I had the heebie-jeebies about being mother of the groom as I am so not into fancy frocks and any I tried on seemed to add about 20 years to me - at least that's how it seemed to me! Finally I saw a lovely lavender ensemble in Shaw’s that felt right and I made a little crochet handbag and was sorted for the day. Maeve wore a beautiful blue dress from TKMaxx and she and her three friends looked great.

As the move to Spain was so soon after the wedding there was plenty to plan - Jan and William drove down to Malgrat, where Shayne and Jany had lived before, with all their worldly goods in the back of the Trajet, which held a lot once the seats were removed. Shayne flew over earlier, and found an apartment before the stuff arrived, and I flew over with Jany and the girls once everything was in place. I stayed for a week's holidays and enjoyed spending that time with the girls as Jany started work a few days after we arrived. Shayne got the job in Citibank and they are well settled in by now, with the girls in the local crèche and a childminder to help out. I went over for a long weekend in October and look forward to going over again in the New Year. We miss them a lot but Skype is terrific and with almost daily chat on Facebook it is easy to keep in touch thanks to social media. Cork is definitely not the same without them and I'll always have great memories of the Hen Night in June when we took over Cork by stretch limo and had a great night out clubbing and in the Old Oak.

Jan had a busy year with Immrama going from strength to strength and this year's festival had a great lineup of speakers yet again. Despite the Arts funding cuts the festival was a big success, and hopefully this will continue to the second decade. They published a book of essays from previous speakers - The Blue Sky Bends Over All (The words of Thackeray on Lismore) - to mark the first decade of the festival. He was busy with the town council and got elected to be a delegate to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, where he went for a conference in October. There are a lot of changes afoot in the whole local government area and it looks like the town councils will be abolished and replaced with district municipal councils, covering a wider area. Time will tell how it'll all work out, as there's a lot of scepticism around the future of local democracy if there's no representation at town level. So it looks like Jan will go down in history as the last Mayor of Lismore, a somewhat dubious honour if it’s the swan song for the town council as we know it.

As for me, I've been enjoying getting embedded in Lismore as the local public health nurse, and as I drive around the area I sometimes have to remind myself that this is actually work, so much do I enjoy it! I'll take some photos of the mountains or the sky or the views if it takes my fancy and share them on Facebook or Twitter, so that others can enjoy the beauties of Lismore and its environs. I went to the INMO conference in Killarney, and I go to Dublin for meetings of Labour Women. It's the centenary year of the Party and there have been some nice celebrations, although not on the ostentatious lines of the infamous Galway tent of Celtic Tiger days! I'm still enjoying knitting and crochet and made some great jumpers, socks and scarves, and the knitting circle and Bookclub are my downtime activities and I get a lot of pleasure from my hobbies! This year the knitting circle got involved in Yarn Bombing or Guerilla Knitting, blitzing public space with knitted art. We did a bicycle for the Immrama 10th anniversary which you can see below, and both Jan and I did the Sean Kelly cycle again this year, me the 50km and Jan the 100km. So we really are as fit as fiddles! We even took part in the second Aengus Finucane Memorial Walk in The Burren in May, which was a great weekend of old friends reunited from our Bangladesh days with Concern onwards through Tanzania and Laos. We are delighted that the Waterford contingent will be hosting the walk in 2013 and have a delightful route planned in West Waterford – and all in a good cause for a charity after Aengus’s heart. This year it went to Jack Praeger’s Foundation in Calcutta.

On that upbeat note I’ll wind up the newsletter for this year. We loved meeting friends old and new, from near and far, and while we’ll miss having the family all together over Christmas we’ll be Skypeing across the airmiles and looking forward to our next reunion. As ever we wish you and yours a wonderful Christmas and every good wish for a great 2013, in the hopes that the recession will recede as it should, and as the cliché goes - things can only get better.

Love and good wishes from Jan and Catherine and all the family near and far – Shayne, Jany, Sofia and Livia, Martin, William, Maeve and of course our old faithful Ben!

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Knitmas time again - happy days for Twitter Knitters!

My Knitmas gifts!
Yes, it's Knitmas again and for those of you wondering if I've lost my festive seasonal marbles, rest assured, it's just that it's the time of the year for a dedicated group of Irish-based knitters to do an online Secret Santa via Twitter! It's my second year and it's been fun both times. Last week my "victim" Jenny (@jenbear) posted on her blog about the goodies I sent her; now I'm doing likewise with the lovely parcel I got on Friday from Isobel (@teaandcakes).


Driving to Dublin on Dec. 8th
I was thrilled with the lovely gifts I got last year from Caroline, (@scattyhats) who sent me a lovely alpaca silk cowl and two skeins of yarn, which gave me a lot of pleasure as I knitted a shawl and a scarf with those during the year. I drew Cathy (@cathyqtpi)This year I was paired with Jenny and as it's a three-way swop you don't get something back from the person you draw. Via the website Elfster I could post anonymous questions to Jenny to see what colours she liked and what her shoe size was! All a bit smoke and daggers, as Bertie "Malaprop" Ahern might say! But she had indicated on her wish list on Elfster that she'd love a pair of handknit socks - so that was a challenge I loved! I made her a nice pair of purple self-striping socks and even though she wasn't too keen on variegated yarns she was delighted with those. I made mitts to match, and a phone cosy as well as sending a few balls of nice yarn - some Cushendale bouclé and merino with a tea cosy pattern.

Lovely Lace Merino - perfect for a shawl.
So I was chuffed with the parcel on Friday which had this delightful pair of fingerless mitts in a terrific navy, cerise and teal intarsia design - a bit like stained glass - and some fab sock yarn, as well as a 1400m skein of lace merino in a gorgeous lavender colour! I can't even begin to think how I'm gonna wind it into a ball - I'm sure I need a ball wonder thingy but haven't investigated it yet, they always wind the skeins in This is Knit in Dublin which is the only shop where I've bought unwound wool! I wore the mitts going to Dublin yesterday for the Labour Women executive meeting and they are perfect driving gloves, keeping me cosy when it was 1°C outside and ice on the roads!

Isobel also sent me some funky stitch markers, beads and slices of cake (!) as well as a notebook and soap and some cookies and chocolate to keep me happy! Altogether a very thoughtful and generous pressie and I am always touched by the kindness of strangers who've become virtual friends via Twitter - there's a lot of good things about social media despite all the bad press it gets!
Enjoy the photos!


This is what I sent to Jenny!









Sock yarn - can't wait to get going!

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Speculating on Speculaas Koekjes - a real Dutch Treat for Christmas

Dutch Speculaas Cookies
Today is a filthy wet Sunday and I am happily stuck indoors with my knitting and the Sunday paper which I did venture out for earlier on, and browsing Facebook and the Twitter machine. I saw an enthusiastic post about Lidl's Spekulatius cookies from Susan (who blogs at Queen of Pots), and she had bought up the shop's stock from what I could gather. So in the interest of cookies, international cultural and culinary relations, and the much-vaunted Electric Ireland Random Acts of Kindness that Sean Moncrieff was banging on about on Newstalk last week as a fundraiser for Concern, (of course I'm too late for that but I hope they won the competition, especially as he was doing the final show of the week in a onesie as a random act of humiliation).

So I posted to Susan that I had a recipe so she asked if I'd blog it. Of course I will, and better still I'll make the darn things. So the dough was chillaxing in the fridge and I've just baked the first batch. The Dutch recipe is from a book called "Dutch Cooking Today" and is very simple. I'll post it and also a pic from the page which you can read. I'll also post a page of a German book called "German Baking Today" from Dr. Oetker who's well known for baking products (somebody's very busy today writing cooking and baking books!) which is much more complicated and way too much hassle for a quiet Sunday so I'll wait till another time to try that one, but for anyone ambitious out there in the blogosphere you can click on the photo and see the recipe.

So here goes.
The Recipe I used

Ingredients for Speculaas Koekjes (Spiced Biscuits)
200g/7oz Self-raising flour
125g/4oz soft brown sugar
2 Tablespoons Mixed Spice
Pinch Salt
150g/5oz chilled butter
1 Tablespoon milk

Method
Mix flour, spices, sugar in a bowl.
Add butter, using knife chop up and rub in lightly with fingertips to breadcrumb texture. (Like short crust pastry)
Add milk and quickly knead to firm dough.
Wrap in cling film and put in fridge for 2 hrs minimum, ideally overnight to let flavours develop.
Preheat oven 175°C/375°F.
Cut dough into thin disc if it's been rolled into a sausage shape, or roll out flat and cut with cookie cutters.
Place on lined baking tray and bake for 15-20 mins until nicely browned.
Result - a nice light-as-air spicy biccy perfect for dunking - briefly! - in tea or coffee!



Sausage of cookie dough and Stars 








My Dutch Cooking Bible!


German Spekulatius recipe - on my to-do list!




Sugar and Spice and all things nice…and flour!
chopping butter in the spicy floury mix
And I thought Dr. Oetker just made baking ingredients and pizza!
yum yum!






Sunday, November 11, 2012

The Knitting and Stitching Show Dublin - Craft Heaven for Knitters and Quilters

Mary & Me at the Big Knit Innocent Stand 
Back after a long hiatus for  no particular reason other than Bloggers' Block - I just couldn't seem to find time between life and work to do anything other than knit and read and think "I must write a blogpost soon"! Of course it just kept getting deferred and now I'm almost totally embarrassed that it's been two months without a post which is a first since I started blogging from the Déise in 2008. So I have to really make more effort - must try harder, in school reportese.

So I decided this post would be about a recent event - the Knitting and Stitching Show in the RDS (Royal Dublin Society) in Dublin last weekend. I won two tickets in an online competition on the Innocent Ireland Big Knit page which didn't even seem like a competition as all I had to do was post a comment who I'd bring to the Knitting and Stitching Show. I wrote that in a wishlist I'd bring my mother who taught me to knit, and Jany my D-i-L who I taught to crochet and who has been blitzing everything with her craft ever since, and as she's in Spain I would then love to  bring my Knitting Circle knitters. So I was delighted to get the email telling me I'd won - then I had a reason to go! The Knitting and Stitching Show (Facebook too) is a UK venture that puts on 3 shows every autumn - a London one in Ally Pally (Alexandra Palace) in October, this one in Dublin in November, and the final one in Harrogate also in November. They bring over a lot of exhibitors from the UK but there is a huge Irish craft element to this show, which gives the best of both worlds.
Patchwork quilt on show

Zoe Williams Needle Felting - Saola and Rhino
I found out a bus was going from Tallow with their knitters, and Helen kindly let me join them. I brought a friend from work, another friend wasn't able to go as she had another gig on, and I was delighted that Mary could come at short notice. We joined the Tallow knitters early on Saturday morning for the bus, and there was a sharp frost which made everywhere very Christmassy for about an hour! The trip to Dublin took about 3 hours plus a half hours pitstop in the Midway in Portlaoise for tea and scones, and then we were brought to the door of the RDS.

It was a great day, and as Mary is interested in Patchwork Quilting and my interest is in knitting and crochet, we were well served. As well as drooling over the wonderful displays and exhibitions of various crafts and some graduate shows from the art and design colleges, we were able to indulge our wishlist fantasies and get some stuff we mightn't be able to find in our local yarn shops. The Limerick Prison Quilt project was very good, and we were amazed at the multimedia element of some of the work, like the felted cables from a GMIT student. I saw some new crafts I had never heard of like Luceting which seems a bit of a cross between Macrame and French Knitting! Also saw some marvellous silk felting by Limerick-based Kate Ramsey which was a new concept for me but looks amazing!

Limerick Prison Quilt Project
I was very restrained in that I only got one skein of yarn from Winnie's Wool Wagon shop - Drops Lace in Alpaca and Silk blend in Turqouise (6410 if you wanna see it on the website), over 800m. in 100g. which gives an idea of how fine it will knit up and make a fab shawl when I get round to a)winding it into a ball and b)finding a nice pattern and actually making it! I also got a fab circular needle for socks - a pair of 3mm KnitPro wooden needles and a separate 120cm cable! I'd been looking for a long cable to knit up twin socks (two at a time) and the 80mm 2.5mm cable needle I had was just a tad short, though manageable. Also the wooden needles are wonderfully smooth to knit fine yarn with and will do grand for socks and maybe shawls and also I can get interchangeable needles for the cable at any time.

NCAD 2nd Year textile structures
We visited the Innocent Smoothies stand and saw all the knitters busily knitting little hats for the Age Action Big Knit. We introduced ourselves as winners of tickets to the Show and they took our photos and gave us smoothies which was really nice of them, thanks a lot girls! We also introduced ourselves to Rosemary of The Constant Knitter, who's also a Deise girl, and who won an Irish Times Best Craft Shop in a reader-nominated competition recently. We'd had some Twitter talk lately and she'd said to drop by, so we did and took a pic.

With Rosemary The Constant Knitter
We had a cuppa and a sandwich and wandered around for the afternoon, enjoying the craic and meeting others from the group laden down with bags of wool - one intrepid knitter had brought an empty suitcase, redolent of the New York-bound Christmas shoppers from the Celtic Tiger days! We bumped into an old colleague from my Concern Tanzania days and her sister who's an avid knitter and we've linked up on Ravelry since, she's there as FinishMyRow, a familiar knitters' refrain.

We hit the road home at 5pm and stopped for food at the Midway where we had lovely Thai chicken curry, and snoozed in between showing off and admiring our purchases on the bus. Next year the Tuesday Knitters from Lismore Design Workshop will organise our own  bus and look forward to another good day out.

To conclude on the school theme - in the time-honoured words of the annual school essay - we arrived home tired but happy!

Scroll down to see a gallery of photos of the day.

Mary with crafty mags!

Mary gets some fat quarters (quilter's lingo)
some great Innocent Hats
more cute hats


My KnitPro cable sock needles
Matching hats - mine and the smoothie!

Amazing Knitted Village
Granny Square bag idea!
Kate Ramsey Fabulous Felt (Silk)

Schoolkids' quilt

Knitted Village
Knitting Stash Heaven! Bargains galore.





Sunday, August 26, 2012

Not just for Pandas - Knitting up a Lacy Bamboo Cotton Cardigan

The finished cardi 
I have been working on this fab cardi for the past month and am very happy with the end result, so much so that I am writing this quick blogpost to share it with those of you on Blogger who may not be on Ravelry, where I shared some photos and pattern details here. 

The pattern is by Anniken Allis who is a pattern designer for, among other publications, Let's Knit, a lovely UK Knitting  monthly which I have been getting when I see it in the bookshops for the past few months. This pattern is called Serena and is from the May 2012 issue. It is in King Cole Bamboo Cotton, a lovely yarn with a great fall and drape, which means it hangs well on the wearer! It also doesn't seem to crease, as I've had it bunched up in a bag in my car and it was fine, so it's a dream for holiday packing.

I got the yarn as a stash-busting treat to myself when I got a gift voucher from my daughter-in-law's mother Irene last month when she was here for the wedding of Shayne and Jany, and they came to visit us for an afternoon during their  holiday after the wedding. As the yarn is a bit pricey (about 7 euro for 100gm) and the cardi pattern called for 4-5 balls, I probably would have balked at buying it with my guilt-inducing stash and my pledge to forego any new purchases till it's diminished. But a gift voucher is different isn't it? Yes, thought so!

Note the matching nail polish!
Blocking on foam playmats!
And in the spirit of supporting local crafts, I was delighted the voucher was from the fabulous Design Workshop where Angela plays host to our Tuesday Knitters Circle. I dithered over the colour to choose, given that she had my fave colour hot pink but I decided to be daring and go for another fave colour of this vivid Peacock Blue Shade 531. I started the cardigan in one piece for the fronts and back, and it worked fine, to the sleeve divide and then I worked as if I was working each piece individually. The only thing I didn't do was eliminate the side seam stitches for a totally seamless pattern of lace. I think my maths and chart reading aren't good enough for that yet, or my confidence.

Blocking the sleeves
WIP Stitch and side seam detail
The sleeves were worked in the round using the Magic Loop method with a circular needle, size 3.5mm used throughout (size 9 UK). I had used that  method on two previous jumpers and it worked fine. They were also Anniken Allis designs from Let's Knit.

Blocking on playmats
The shoulders were joined with the three-needle cast off, and I had some short-row shaping to do for the last few rows. I liked the detail in the lace pattern that meant right and left front were mirror images of each other, not identical. This kind of detail is something I'd never think of which is why I knit, not design! This is the third Anniken Allis jumper I've made in the past 4 or 5 months so I think I can safely say she's a favourite and very easy to follow. The charts are also easy to follow and she explains the technical stuff too, like short row shaping and neat buttonholes.

detail of armholes
I took some photos of the WIP and the Blocking (on kiddies' foam play mats that slot together) as well as the modelling - it got premiered at a colleague's hen party last Friday and got plenty of praise, much to my delight. There's something about hand-knits that's extremely satisfying and I am delighted I rediscovered the Zen of knitting and crochet in recent years - as I said to someone on Facebook yesterday - it's my Yoga!








Sunday, August 12, 2012

Knitting Noro Silk Garden - from Sock Yarn to Zig-Zag Scarf

Noro Silk Garden Sock Yarn Scarf
I wrote about my  Noro sock yarn find in Kinsale in June here so I just wanted to share the finished product with you. I have been very busy and lots going on in my life over the past few months what with the wedding and emigration of our eldest son and his new wife and their two daughters to Spain, where I accompanied them for their first week in the new apartment.  I am back from Spain a week now and feel I'm ready to tackle the blogosphere - though not yet with a holiday post! That'll wait for a bit as I have already posted the photos and they are on my Facebook page.
Blocked Scarf
Before blocking
Meanwhile knitting has been my constant, an anchor in an otherwise turbulent time, and I love the way it helps me Keep Calm and Carry On like on those now fashionable posters. I also like the Father Ted version - Keep Calm and Drink Tea!

Hope you like the scarf - I had blocked it with pins at the side to give some feature peaks but they vanished soon after the scarf dried out, so now it's just wavy ends! I used the pattern from Ravelry for those of you interested, and it was a very simple Chevron design but very effective for showing off the beautiful Noro colours at their best. I like the lacy holes too, and the needles I used were 4mm. If you wanted a lacier scarf, bigger needles would have done the trick, but I felt the 4mm suited the double-knit (worsted in USA) weight just fine. I also used a provisional cast-on using a crocheted chain length and that meant both ends were matching - a  handy tip on the pattern. My first Provisional Cast-On and very simple to do, I'd do it again. Got the info on it from my Stitch'n'Bitch Superstar Knitting book but it's online too

Happy knitting and I'll be back soon with my current WIP when it's done -hopefully in the near future!