Cast On

Episode 86: Anniversarius Podcastia

Brenda Dayne — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:20:46 +0000

Happy Halloween! Cast On returns for its ninth series, trailing builder’s dust, bits of rubble and three moments of ritual humiliation. Today’s Sweater is a BOGOF, with two epic sweater fails, in one week, even. We spend an hour on the 4th plinth in ten minutes, and magically wind up very close to home.

This week’s Audible recommendation is the Victorian True Crime Murder Mystery, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale.

Don’t miss: Knit Pink’s Calendar of Hope 2009 - Mo Rocca’s Moment of Ritual Humiliation (Scroll down and click Knitter’s Revenge - Mother Bear Project

Plus:
If you missed my hour on the plinth, take heart. It is still available for viewing online.

Get your Stash Busting Bad Ass Giant Knitting Needles here! (You may remember Rachel from the 1000 Strands video.)

Want to make felt but don’t know where to begin? Try Felting Lessons with Terri Pike.

Moment of Ritual Humiliation, the last. The awesome felted jacket that I once stumbled upon, and now cannot find for love nor money, is actually based on a Marci Tilton pattern, not a Sandra Betzina pattern. (I have patterns from both designers, who each rock my wardrobe, in different ways.)

KniTunes were provided by and used with the permission of:

Jonathon Coulton - Ikea
Cotton Jenny – System Failure
3 Blind Mice - Kolysanka
Maria Daines - Turned October

Additional music: Mother’s Mandolin by Upstairs

Download Episode 86

Download audio file (CO86-091031.mp3)

Knitting and beer

Brenda Dayne — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:47:30 +0000

Judging from the amount of nervous energy I am storing in every cell of my body, by Saturday afternoon I shall surely be in dire need of both.

The giant needles arrived last Friday, and I spent the weekend getting acquainted with them. They are very large and somewhat cumbersome to use, but are not impossibly fiddly. Garter stitch is definitely easier to manage than stockinette, and looks nicer too I think, though it does, as always, really eat the yarn.

Not that there’s a yarn shortage here. I managed to score about thirty or so leftover ends of cones from Melyn Teifi, and some full cones from the Wool Museum’s new spinning operation, that didn’t quite make the grade for consistency, but are perfect for my purposes. I also delved deeply into my own stash, and managed to pull together a couple of different colorways to play with, consisting of between 24-30 different yarns each, made up mostly of those always-difficult-to-find-a-use-for oddballs. If nothing else, the needles are terrific stash busters. They have the potential to be more than that, I think, and I’m already wondering what cables would look like at this gauge.

Prior to working up an enormous cabled piece for, say, the wall above my desk, however, there is the plinth project to get through. In case you missed the memo (which I find hard to believe, as I feel very certain I have notified everyone I have ever met in my life)…

Saturday is 4th Plinth day!

I’m on at 1pm London time. (For those of you in the US, that’s 8:00 am Eastern, 7:00am Central, and 5:00 am Pacific.) You can watch the action live here or visit my profile, after the fact, to watch a recording of the live stream.

After the event I will be at the (adorable!) pub, pictured above, called The Ship and Shovell. Located below Charing Cross Station at 1 - 3 Craven Passage, Charing Cross, London WC2N 5PH, the S&S is actually two pubs in one, spanning an alleyway. I haven’t made a reservation, as I didn’t know how many of us there would be, but they do know a group is coming. I plan to arrive between 2:30 or 3:00 pm, and I would love it if you’d join me for a little post-plinth knitting and beer.

Dither dither dither BANG!

Brenda Dayne — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:58:19 +0000

With less than two weeks to go, yesterday I began making preparations for my plinth sitting. The process was ridiculously simple, and utterly erased all the stress I had been carrying about the event. Which was good, because I had been worrying, and procrastinating, and then worrying about the procrastinating for weeks.

Turns out there were a lot of things getting in my way of feeling happy about being hoisted to the top of a tall column of concrete, and sitting there for an hour, knitting. You wouldn’t think there’d be much, but the list was actually pretty long. I’ve had a good stretch of time now to come up with things to be unhappy about.

Despite being over-the-moon excited when I got the news, the bloom about the affair began to fade shortly thereafter, when I realized I had an hour to fill and had to make some plans. First I began to fret about the plans; the expense of them, their hassle, and their do-ability. Eventually the plans, or rather the lack of them, began to loom larger than experience itself. After a few weeks of this I had managed to all but talk myself out of going. If you’ve written lately asking about my plans, and I haven’t written you back, this is why.

Yesterday, line item by line item, I changed everything on that list that I could, adjusted some of my own expectations in the process, then made a few calls, and sent a few emails. When I was done I realized I had me some plans, and the only thing left to do now is show up. I hope you will too (Saturday, 19 September, 1-2 pm in Trafalgar Square) because according to Woody Allen, just showing up is eighty percent of success, right there.

After a little research on portable PA systems, and having watched the truly spectacular equipment fail of one poor plinther (no link; she’s suffered enough humiliation) I’ve given up on being heard by the people below. I’ll be wearing a radio mic (you’ll be able to hear me in the live stream) and I’ll be recording a podcast (that I’ll produce after the fact). I’ve ordered a spiffy new lapel mic, which will leave my hands free to knit something big, in recycled wool, on enormous needles. Thus, after weeks of dithering on the plans for this plinth thing, some pretty awesome things came together over the course of a couple of hours. I’m really all set.

I had a little crow about that in the Green Room (the private Skype chat that has become the office water cooler for a handful of creative souls, scattered across the planet). I shared the link to my new giant knitting needles, and the really wonderful phone call I had had with Rachel, the woman who makes the needles, how happy I was to see the plinth plan coming together at last.

And one of my Green Room buddies said, “But you know how it goes. We fret and worry and feel like horrible empty vapid holes and then BANG comes the lightening and everything falls into place. It is our way.”

So it seems.

This little shop is new in Carmarthen; it’s been open just five weeks. Tonia and I stopped in on Saturday to have a look around, and noticed at once how bright the corner of Jackson’s Lane was, now that the black and red facade of the old sex shop has disappeared behind a cheery new exterior. We had a nice chat with the owner, and she laughed when we said, “Knitting is the new sex!” just as if she’d never heard that joke ever before.

The shop currently stocks just a few lines of yarn, but there are plans to add more as time goes on and I am really looking forward to watching them grow. Though I have enough yarn and fiber to last a decade, and can find whatever I want online, there is just is no substitute for a real, honest to goodness LYS. Welcome to the neighborhood, Knit and Natter!

The woman makes my head explode

Brenda Dayne — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:17:22 +0000

Cat Bordi’s new sock book looks amazing.

The worth of a picture

Brenda Dayne — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:09:58 +0000

I wonder how many people clicked to look at this sweater after the Harlot linked to it on Twitter? A lot, I’m betting. I did too, and found this other pattern for free, on the Berroco site. A few years ago a friend sent me a photo of a Donna Karan sweater, clipped from a glossy mag, that looked a lot like this one, so I’ve been thinking about this shape for years, wondering how to create it. And now I need wonder no more. I should really visit Berroco more often. It’s a very nice place to browse, as well as worship at the alter of my most favorite designer.

I know you know how I feel about Norah, so I don’t need to explain why the eleventh hour sweater fail of a Norah Gaughan design hit me rather hard this week. The good news is that the fail was in no way Norah’s fault.

If blame is to be apportioned I suppose I must take the lion’s share of it. I didn’t read the instructions. Or rather, I read them, and then looked at the picture, and second guessed them, and then ignored them and knit the sleeves my own way. This was, however, to my mind a perfectly logical course of action, given the picture that accompanied the pattern. I made a lot of assumptions about this pattern, and I based every one of them on the picture. Let’s look at those sleeves again, shall we?

The assumption I made in looking at this picture is that the sweater was designed with wide, turned-back cuffs. Had I looked at some of the examples of this sweater in Ravelry, like this one, however, I’d have realized that the sleeves as Norah designed them don’t look like the picture. Moreover, the sweater doesn’t fit anything like it does in the picture.

No, there isn’t a problem with the pattern. The problem was with the stylist whose job it was to make the too-big sweater look like it actually fit a very tiny model. A stylist who rolled one cuff up, and folded the other very cleverly, hoping we wouldn’t notice the damned sweater was too damned big. Mission accomplished. I never noticed.

When I realized this, lo, there was much ranting and gnashing of teeth and shaking of fists in the general direction of stylists everywhere, believe you me. Thankfully, I am over the worst of that now, and just glad that I’ve figured out where I went wrong. And next time, instead of knitting blind, I’ll check Ravelry for examples of finished sweaters, photographed on a range of different body shapes and sizes.

Thanks so much for the many fine ideas for fixing the sleeves of my ASJ (which I ought to be able to post a picture of soon, weather permitting) but mostly just thanks feeling my pain.

How to wear a shawl

Brenda Dayne — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:13:45 +0000

Loads of nice ideas for draping, folding, and wearing great swathes of lace.

Knitting Blind

Brenda Dayne — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:00:26 +0000

I hate my knitting.

I realize this attitude will not get me anywhere, and is unreasonable, and will eventually pass. Nevertheless. At this moment. I. Hate. My. Knitting.

Reason, the first: The Adult Surprise jacket is done and, true to its name, it’s a huge surprise. It looks like crap on me. Having suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous numbers of garter stitch rows, its finally done and I hate the way it looks. I am, quite rightly I believe, gutted. I think the problem is with the sleeves, and it might be fixable, but I don’t know yet, as I can barely stand the sight of it.

Reason B: The Tilted Jacket (Norah Gaughan, IK Winter 2004) which had been languishing, but into whose armscyes I flew on the rebound from Adult Surprise, has also let me down, in a big way. I still love it, and think it could quite probably look fantastic on me, if it were in anyway close to the size it’s supposed to be, instead of approximately two sizes too small.

So that’s it. Two big reasons why I hate my knitting, in two big projects that have come close to fruition this week, but fallen far short of the mark. Two sweaters. If one of them had been a scarf, I think I could probably deal, but two sweaters? I am not handling it well.

What these two patterns have in common, other than the fact that I somehow screwed the pooch on both of them, is that they feature “non-traditional” shaping. Which is to say that parts of them are knit sideways, backwards, upside down and/or on the diagonal, and yet somehow this process results in a sweater-shaped garment. Those are the fronts of the Tilted Jacket you’re looking at there. Doesn’t look like two fronts, I know, but there we are.

Owing to their non-traditional construction, neither of this week’s sweater patterns are ones that can be easily tried on as you go along. You have to take them on faith, and just cast on and hope that it all works out. Which is great, when that works out for you, but which really bites when it doesn’t.

In the case of the Adult Surprise, I knew I would have to knit blind at the beginning of our relationship, and I accepted that. I looked at lots of these sweaters on Ravelry before I began. The one I liked the best was knit from hand spun (which was also my plan) using the instructions that make the body a little narrower, and the sleeves a little wider than the original. I liked the way it fit the knitter in the picture, and she looked not dissimilar to me in size and shape, so decided to use the same instructions.

At this point I’m not sure how I went wrong, all I know is that the sleeves ended up much, much wider than I intended. Note: I have tried several times to get a decent shot of me wearing the garment, but there’s no one home, and it’s a gray day, so not enough light for the mirror trick, and it’s just not happening. You’ll just have to take my word for it. The body of the jacket fits well, but when I raise my arms the upper part of the sleeve dangles like I’m about to call, “Bingo!” Really not the look I was going for. I knit the fronts wider than the pattern called for, to create a sort of lapel on the jacket, but I really don’t like the reverse side of the fabric when it’s folded back. That is easy enough to fix, I’ll rip back to make those fronts meet in the center, instead of overlap. But the sleeves present a much trickier proposition, as their width is determined by the placement of the mitered decreases that are worked from row one of the pattern. ROW ONE.

There’s just no way I’m ripping this out, and starting over. Even if the hand spun Polworth could take it, ripping seems a step too far. And yet, I know for a fact that I will NEVER WEAR THIS SWEATER in the state in which it now exists. The loss of the Polwarth yarn, which is so wonderful, and so dear to me, raises this knitting fail to epic proportions. This is why I am now pretending that the Polwarth still exists in my stash, untouched, and that I have never heard of an Adult Surprise jacket, much less knit one. Denial is my only way forward.

The Sweater That Shall Not Be Named was the impetus for the flurry of Tilted Jacket sleeve cap knitting over the weekend. I really needed a success, badly, and I was so close to finishing this one. The body of this raglan cardigan was knit sideways, and I’d already finished the back and both fronts, and blocked them to size. The unusual construction of this sweater meant that it was impossible to see how, or if it would fit, until it was finished. I completed the sleeves over the weekend, and blocked them, and began sewing it all up. First the raglan seams, then the back of the neck, and finally, the sleeve and and side seams. Let me state, again, that these pieces were blocked to the size called for in the schematic. Imagine my shock in discovering that the raglan shaping was not really deep enough, and the sleeves were fully 6 inches too short. I knit the size to fit a 40″ bust, because I happen to possess a 40″ bust, and while the bust fits just fine, the sleeves are way too short and tight. It’s like they belong to a different sweater.

The thing about the sleeves is that I had a sneaking hunch while I was knitting them that the pattern could possibly be not quite right, but I never did check for errata. (I have since; there are no corrections for this pattern.) The total length of the sleeve underarm seam, before the raglan decreases, was supposed to be 17 inches, including the cuff. However, the cuff itself is supposed to be 6.5 inches which, when turned back, would result in an underarm seam length of… 11.5 inches. Can that be right?

Let’s look again at the picture. The left sleeve of this sweater is clearly rolled back, and the sweater is hanging off her left shoulder. If those sleeves are 11.5 inches long, then the model is under three feet tall, and she is sitting on doll house furniture. Do those sleeves seem 11.5 inches long to you? No, they didn’t to me either. And yet, I knit blindly on.

The thing about knitting blindly is that eventually you have to open your eyes. There will come a day when I will have to deal. I will have to unpick these sweaters, in more ways than one, and try to figure out how to right what went wrong. And I will. Eventually.

After several days of back-to-back sweater fail, all I can say is thank goodness for babies. Thank goodness they are small and easy to knit for, and thank goodness that Zach and Laura’s friends, Eve and Jimmy, have just had one. When you don’t have your own grandchildren to knit for, knitting for the babies of your children’s friends is the next best thing. And thank goodness there’s a new baby to knit for, because I needed a sweater success like nobody’s business.

Ribbed Baby Jacket by Debbie Bliss, in Briar Rose “Wistful”.

No sheep were harmed in the making of this wedding dress.

Brenda Dayne — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:51:02 +0000

Louise Fairburn, an award-winning breeder of rare Lincoln Longwool sheep, used the fleece from her very own flock to create her gorgeous and unique wedding dress. The accompanying article states the dress was created by a spinner and a dressmaker, and took 67 hours to make.

Under Siege

Brenda Dayne — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:53:09 +0000

Ulrica wrote last week with details of a lovely little food game; a variation on the Make Do and Eat strategy for using up the food you have on hand. “Siege” was the name of the game played by her husband’s family. The rules are essentially the same as for Make Do and Eat: Use the food in your own pantry; buy only a little fresh food - fruit, veg, milk and eggs; see how long you can keep this up. The new name, however, lends a sense of urgency to the game. Indeed, it elevates the practice of eating one’s way through the ice-encrusted Containers of Mystery lodged in one’s freezer, from mere parlor game to survival strategy.

This week we decided to really give Siege eating a go, and we think it’s been working, mostly. Other than a wee pint of ice cream, lobbed over the castle walls by our dear friends, Ben and Jerry, we have stuck to the rules. Admittedly, I am carrying the lion’s share of the thinking about food and planning what we eat, but then I’m the one with time on my hands just now. I began at a ridiculous hour on Sunday morning by cleaning a couple of the bookshelves in the kitchen, making a place for all those not-yet-filled canning jars, reorganizing my cookbooks in the process. Way at the back of the top shelf I found a stack of embarrassingly dusty food magazines, that I had “saved” for one recipe or another. A quick flip-through was all it took to identify the recipes, rip them out, and recycle the mags. I also found a stack of recipes already torn from magazines, for bean and sausage casseroles, pasta bakes, lots of vegetarian fare and, I kid you not, no less than nine different recipes for chocolate brownies. I guess we all have our priorities.

Interestingly, but not perhaps surprisingly, my pantry contained a lot of the staple ingredients for most of these recipes. (Except, possibly, I don’t actually have enough chocolate on hand to make nine different batches of brownies.) Which probably explains why I clipped, stashed and otherwise saved the various recipes. They were all variations on my standard pantry staples theme. I suppose we all tend to buy the things we know we like over an over again, but I realized this week that I also buy things that I think I should like, because I know they are good for me. Like, for instance, beans.

Turns out I have as many varieties of beans in my pantry as I do recipes for brownies. I’m grateful for the beans, as we began this Siege game with very little meat in the freezer, and I tend to get cranky without protein. Esthetically beans are the living end; very pleasing to look at in their little glass jars, but my goodness, what a pain in the ass they are to use. All that soaking and cooking. Beans require a little forethought, and a bit of planning ahead which, I suppose, is not necessarily a bad thing. There is a certain comfort in knowing what you’ll be eating over the next few days, and maybe part of the comfort lies in knowing that you will, indeed, be eating.

The weather in west Wales has been almost autumnal, with gray skies and heavy showers adding to the feeling of being under siege. Of course I grumble about the weather, but it’s a delicious excuse to curl up and knit, or spin, with Radio 4 on in the background. I’ve been very productive.

Having completed the body of my Adult Surprise Jacket, I am on the home stretch. This is one of those projects wherein I knit the equivalent of at least four sweaters before settling on this pattern. There are two yarns here; the first, a dark wine-coloured generic wool, that began life as a horrible, horrible eBay mistake - it was the ugliest yarn for which I have ever paid actual cash money. What made it usable was the over-dyeing. It was originally the Cider House Rules vest (IK, Autumn 2000), which Tonia wore for years and years, until she didn’t anymore. I ripped this project out a couple of years ago, and have been saving the 400 grams or so for … apparently this current project. It’s not very nice yarn, but it is the right colour.

The second yarn is my own handspun that began life as Polworth roving, purchased at Woolfest three years ago, originally from Canadian dyer Rovings. (I didn’t see this precise colourway on the Rovings website, but I’m sure if you write and ask, they’ll be able to tell you what it is.) I spun the yarn very fine, and then Navajo plied it, to keep the colours unsullied. The result is DK to light worsted weight yarn with long, Noro-like swathes of near solids that do not repeat. At all. The process worked beautifully, but, I have to admit, it also made this yarn somewhat difficult to use. With long non-repeating colours, knitting sleeves that match, for instance, is a somewhat tricky prospect.

I suspect a less anal-retentive knitter would have had fewer issues with the colour repeats of this yarn than I did. The design process was endless as I tried a variety of stitches and sweater patterns, some of which were even my own, before settling on the Adult Surprise Jacket. I surprised myself, in fact, by choosing a garter stitch jacket (not usually a fan of garter, I gotta say) but the pattern was actually perfect for this yarn. For all that I’m not a fan of garter, I do love the little bumps of colour in the reverse side of garter-striped fabric, and this wrong side of the fabric became the right side of my jacket. The stripes are worked in a Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, and 5) with first the wine coloured yarn as the main colour, then changing to the polwarth as the main colour, then back to the wine.

As I near the end of this project, I am down to just a handful of the handspun yarn, which leaves one big design decision left. For the adult version of this jacket the stitches are picked up at the edge of the elbow length sleeves, and knit downward. I have enough of the Polworth left to work a few stripes, near the cuff, but due to the long colour repeats, the stripes on the cuffs won’t match each other. I’m okay with that one little quirk, but I do worry that the block of wine colour on entire lower half of the sleeves will be too heavy. I’m not sure how to get around that, since I am basically out of the contrasting yarn.

The only other option I’ve come up with is to knit the cuffs so the garter ridges run parallel to the arm, and sew them to the sleeve after the fact. I do have just enough yarn to (maybe, possibly, I think) work three or four stripes in the contrasting colour on each cuff. This would break up the solid colour of the cuffs a bit, but also make any shaping of the lower part of the sleeves tricky, involving both shortrows and… math.

I’ve been staring at the jacket now for two days, listening to the rain and Radio 4, while Chinese Five Spice Adzuki Beans simmer gently, endlessly, on the stove. I’m no closer to a decision, but as the entire project has been, quite literally, several years in the making, I’ve no intention of rushing the ending. Also, of course, I am very busy just now, trying out a variety of different recipes for brownies.

The sweet taste of success

Brenda Dayne — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:48:39 +0000

Is it possible to be too fond of a jar of jelly?

Despite the trepidation with which I approached yesterday’s jam session, I am pleased to report that all went well, and we have the jam to show for it. In the face of exploding Jam Myths, I was forced to release the many preconceived ideas I had about making jam, and whether I would be able to do it here in Britain. I used different tools and a slightly different method, in the process figured some stuff out about making jam. And, despite her initial reluctance, Tonia came right around in the end, and made a batch of hedgerow jam all on her own. The result is many glowing jewel-like little pots of the sweet stuff, that I can’t yet bring myself to store away in a cupboard. They are just too pretty to look at.

We began with road side scavenged plums; tiny (about the size of a cherry tomato) and bright yellow. I have no idea what variety they are, but the flesh is sweet, and the skins are tart. Tonia found the tree growing beside a lay-by on the A40, and stopped to harvest them on her way home Friday night. They were a bit ripe and we probably let them sit a day longer than we should have, as we had trouble with the set, despite adding a half a packet of pectin. We didn’t know that when we potted them up, however.

We processed the plums in two batches, in our largest saucepan, and in doing we exploded the first Jam Myth of the day. At some point in my early jam making I was told never to divide a jam recipe; that disaster was sure to follow. Disaster in the form of unset jam, as the proportion of ingredients is key to a successful set. I have carried this as a home truth of jam making ever since, but it’s rubbish. Making the jam in smaller batches works fine. Truly. I suppose it’s a bit more work, cooking two batches instead of one, but if the pan you have is too small, it’s perfectly fine to reduce quantities.

After watching me at the jam pot making the first batch, Tonia took over for the second. This batch was a lot more amber colored than the first and, as we reached the bottom of the pan during the potting up, we discovered why. The bottom of the pot was golden brown with caramelized sugar and bits of stuck-on fruit. Tonia hadn’t stirred the sugar until it was completely dissolved. Thankfully, the sugar hadn’t burned, and the batch was fine. Delicious, in fact, with a hint of caramel flavor to it. And now we know to stir and stir and stir until ALL the sugar has dissolved. The finished jam (which we have dubbed A40 Gold) tastes wonderful, despite the mishap, the tart skins adding just enough of a bite to balance the sweetness.

And therein lies the lesson of Exploding Jam Myth, the second. I’m not sure where I got the idea that jam making had to be consistent, but this is one of my silly jam making notions I’m happy to let go of. Happy accidents are why you make jam at home. If you want jam that always tastes the same, no matter what, you should probably buy it at the supermarket.

With the plums processed we dressed and headed out of the house, buckets in hand, to see what we could score from Millennium Woods. Tonia managed to sleuth out half a kilo of blackberries though it was hard going, as it’s still very early in the season. A few of the crab apple trees yielded fruit that was nearly ripe, and she brought home nearly a kilo of those. My eyes were firmly on the Rowan trees, heavy with berries. They have ripened very early this year, maybe due to all the rain, and I’ve been noticing them over the hedgerow for the last couple of weeks. The birds have already had a lot of the fruit, and those I could get to mostly weren’t very nice. Maddeningly, the best and most perfectly ripe berries were either just out of reach, or hanging on trees way off the path, surrounded by impenetrable carpets of brambles. Still, I managed to gather a half a kilo of just passable berries, enough for a small batch of Crabapple Rowan Jelly.

Back at the house Tonia stemmed the berries, and chopped the fruit, while I scoured the web for alternatives to a store bought jelly bag, and discovered that seasoned jelly makers are fairly scathing about those store bought bags and the tippy three-legged contraptions for catching the liquid from cooked fruit. Apparently an old pillow case is all you need.

I dug around in the linen cupboard, and found a threadbare pillowcase that I haven’t used in a while, and got busy. I sewed up the sides to narrow the bottom of the case and create a funnel shape, then cut off the open end of the case, and folded it over and sewed a casing, through which I threaded household string. It took all of twenty minutes to come up with this gadget, and it worked beautifully. It took the two of us and a bit of finagling to fill the bag, and hang the bag and position the bowl just so, but we figured it out, and then walked away to let the pink-tinged liquid drip.

Tonia turned her attention to the blackberries and crab apples, and quickly turned the fruit into some pretty darned delicious jam, all by herself. This is when we noticed that the plum jam, now nearly cool, hadn’t set. I don’t really mind a soft set jam, in fact, I prefer it to the stuff you can bounce off walls, but this was rather more like syrup. Well, you win some, you lose some. I bemoaned the unset jam on Twitter, and was informed by a kind Jam Fairy that I could dump the jam back into the pot, add more pectin and actually fix it. And there it was. Exploding Jam Myth, the third. Unless it’s burnt, jam mistakes are usually fixable.

Yes, we could have called it “syrup” and used it on pancakes. Yes, it was a bit of a pain in the ass to dump the jam back in the pot, and wash and sterilize the jars and seals all over again. With two of us working together, however, we managed it in short order, as by this point in the afternoon we had become seasoned jam making pros. Another half packet of pectin, a little time on the stove, and our A40 Gold is no longer syrup, but jam.

The final task of the day was the making of the jelly, a whole new thing for me. With the jelly bag no longer dripping, I measured the liquid in the bowl, and added sugar and a half packet of pectin. I probably didn’t need the pectin, as the crab apples are full of the stuff, but after the plum debacle I wasn’t taking any chances. I boiled the syrup down, testing every few minutes for set, and when it was ready I poured it into the waiting jars.

Behold, my first ever jelly. I’m inordinately proud of this jelly.The Rowan berries give it a gorgeous rosy pink hue, and a slightly bitter taste, which is similar in many ways to marmalade. It’s not the kind of jelly you want to spread on toast, but I imagine served with pork or chicken this autumn, it’ll be wonderful.