Just a spoonfull of sugar

Fear not! I haven't been baking again. Opinion was divided as to whether the rainbow cake was actually edible or whether it would turn your insides the colours shown in the biology diagrams but Chez Moi it is disappearing fast. The chocolate cakes are long gone!

The sugar is to help me with this:


Clearly I need to find a one-armed teddy bear and announce that I have a custom made sweater for him and for his other arm, languishing at the bottom of the toy box because the other sleeve is done, I just couldn't face all of those ends. I am rapidly discovering that (a) I like fairisle an awful lot more when I'm knitting in the round and/or when the pattern hasn't been written so that I needed to use a new length of teal yarn for every dotty row. Seriously, it's a five row gap on straight knitting. I know I could have changed it but it actually looks best that way and more than anything I want this to look as attractive as possible; (b) I am not sufficiently awake in the morning to knit a detailed fairisle pattern. It was two days before I realised that the sleeve was 5cm shorter than the pattern said, by which point I'd sewn it in and trimmed the ends. I haven't lengthened it because I think it looks proportional like this and I'm not keen on super-long sleeves for babies but that's beside the point and (c) for once in my life my gauge is tighter than the pattern. It means that the jacket is a smidgen smaller than the pattern but it's the same size as a BSJ and I know that they fit babies so all will be well.

The sugar itself is another BSJ for a work baby which has so far evaded the camera. It's the same orange as the very first one I ever knit which is here, and it's very soothing.

Birmingham likes to consider itself an up and coming city and is very keen on art and sculpture type projects to show how cultured we all are. The current street exhibition is wicker work and you'll know where the title for today's post really came from when you see this:


An undeniably British figure, some way north of the big smoke.


I don't know how much of the sign you can read (click it for bigger) but the interesting bits are that the desert spiky plants in the sculpture are supposed to represent smoke and the chimney-pots include the Birmingham Bishop type pot. The only problem is deciding which one is a Birmingham Bishop.

Whilst I like this one:



I put my money on this one - because it looks like a chess piece


Google doesn't turn up anything special about Birmingham Bishop chimney pots so if anyone knows anything more, let me know.

The other unanswered question is which way round is Mary - the view above, or this one:



Whichever way she is facing, Mary is a more soothing sculpture than this next one, the one nearest to my office:


The subtext reads: "Your lunch hour is over, please return to your office now. Your lunch hour is over, please return to your office now. Your lunch hour is over, please return to your office now. " on a continuous loop.



Given how my professional life is governed by time - chargeable hours and minutes and targets for hours and minutes, and deadlines, deadlines and more deadlines, I find it a little uncomfortable to watch; it's a bit like a Sophie Kinsella novel, The Undomesticated Goddess which kicks off with a London solicitor who misses a registration deadline for a charge with costly consequences. Without spoiling the story too much I will say that all is not what it seems, and all's well that ends well, but whereas friends in other professions have read it as light train fiction, there isn't a lawyer I know who hasn't felt that kick in the base of their stomach when they read those first few chapters, and run through their current deadlines in their head - it's just a little too close for comfort.