My piano has a lovely voice - round and full (it’s a KNIGHT) and DD learned her jazz chord repertoire and all the rest onnit. Did I tell you about my old Eavestaff? I think I did - you’ll get over it, Fishers. I have, and it’s only 40 years after the event.
Time for bed, for yer bee.
Sweet dreams, Cellarites.
Soo xx
Gin, Darling
Extry Gin
Carinthia.xx
Wanting to open a Home for Distressed, Slighted and Superseded Pianos here. Which is a bit of a lost cause before it starts, this being a two up and down Edwardian terraced hovel, with room for two -ok, three, but I am not getting the bugger up those stairs - at most.
Fishy, ooof and huggage.
The piano I want to go back to is the upright one in my grandparents’ - well, I suppose one might call it a ‘back parlour’ if one wanted to do that kind of thing. A long, cool room. The big window with the seat in it gave on to the milking path and so if one sat in it the coos would lick the window at one. Which was pleasing.
My grandmother played ‘by ear’ and was ****ing marvellous. And could sing really rather well. She had had some music teaching as a child but not to any special degree.
I want to go back to that dark-wood piano with the terracotta jug with the cream-glazed lip with Grandad’s sweetpeas in, and the cows coming past for the evening milking.
You and me both!
The trouble is the damn’ thing ought to be worth some money, so it can’t just be given away to a good home. The other trouble is that it was built for a woman who stood five feet nothing in her high-heeled shoes, so only love for it would make a man over six foot play it. (Which is all the men who ever have, thinking about it. At arms’ length!)
We did once have three pianos in the front room of a (rather larger!) Victorian hovel; this boudoir grand, the baby grand from my MiL, and an upright which I had bought in an auction for a fiver in 1977 and managed to get carried up five floors into the garret we were living in at the time, and then hide for ten days in the spare room (and get tuned three times!) so that it could be a birthday surprise. I got it so cheaply because when you tried to play it no sound came out, and I was the only person there who thought to have a look and discover that the entire case was full of tight-packed dust; once it had been hoovered out and the tuner had got his hands on it, it was a lovely instrument with a fine action and a good tone. We gave it away in the end to someone who longed for a piano and had no money; we really didn’t need it any more. Pity the other two were impossible to keep in tune with each other for more than about a week at a time, even after they had both been carefully brought to concert pitch over many weeks by the piano tuner who was also our dealer… He had to be caused to tune the pianos before anything else, because otherwise he would sample to demonstrate quality and then he had to come back again another day to put the tuning back to normality.
In the same house, we also had several large doors which were rescued from skips in the hope they might fit our sitting-room, which had had a panel kicked out of it one Christmas morning. Other people collect sensible things, like china thimbles or ordnance survey maps; only my family would collect pianos and unusable doors. Well, I did know someone once whose father collected Rolls Royces, which is even less practical, but he did at least have a stable block to keep them in, and we kept tripping up over the blasted doors because they had to live in the house.
All I can say about attempting to fly-tip a solid wood door which might fit a Georgian terraced house in Bath is, unless you have a van don’t even try. People notice you carrying it through the streets on your heads looking for a skip.
My father collected old cars and cameras
At one point he had 3 Jowett Javelins in pieces in the garage he built to house them
Then he got the series 0ne Landrover
And collected enough bits to build at least one more
And bought a lathe so he could make parts for it
And the boat
And the myriad cameras he had
My mother was a demon for throwing out anything she considered to be without merit
So anything you treasured had to be hidden from her as she would bin it with great pleasure pronouncing it to be a dust catching piece of junk
And now Gus is looking , too. Sparrer, what did you do to it? Cats is animals, obvs, but Dunnocks should know better
Taking it to a place of safety, obviously. You have to get them a long way away or they just come back to the house, probably muttering about the state of the bus service.
Fishy, you are being surreal without a licence in a built-up area. Before 10 am, which aggravates the original act.
Well, they certainly come back from anything less than half a mile away. About the buses, would you blame them?
I am an old softy to creatures wot have not bin Disrespectful, and as the young people might say, mouse gonna mouse. So: humane trap and disposal away from habitation.
I wish I knew some of those…
Important Announcement:
I am going back to bed until further notice.
Rubbish morning here, so far
I think that I will follow your example, Gus
Carinthia.xx
May I ask the knitters here if I have enuff wool?
I can find 9 balls of a beautiful mohair each 273 yards long
It wants to be done on 4.5 mm needles with double strands of wool
The pattern does not give yardage required
Do we think I have enough for a simple slash neck jumper?
It’s my quarantine project…
Proffers soothing anti itch balm to a chatelaine…
In need of a calculator and not having one to hand, I turned to google for an online calculator. The first three results were for online bogroll calculators to ‘let you know how long your stash will last’.
Seriously?!
Gosh, I don’t think I can answer that, Twellsy - too out of practice at such things and I’d hate to take responsibility anyway. The best I can suggest is that you look for another pattern for a slash neck jumper using similar yarn that does give yardage, to give you a rough idea, and then add a bit to what it says to make sure. IYSWIM.
You can fine-tune with milk of magnesia and loperamide…
Twellsy, I don’t think you would have enough yarn, judging by this pattern.
https://petiteknit.myshopify.com/collections/adult/products/cumulus-blouse?variant=8288375570487
Thanks Gus
I will knit it single then - that should see me right
It will be my covid project