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Last one of 2012! The Christmas feeling started to melt a little too soon for me this year, brought on by the pelting rain and everyone being ill. So here's a last blast, courtesy of the ever-delightful Little Grey Rabbit. Motto to take us into the next year: 'Never go hedging with a sledghog'. Have a happy one!

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This year I had a first real go at patchwork, which I've been meaning to try out since the lovely quilting exhibition at the V&A in 2010. When this is eventually finished (still working on the hand quilting at the moment) I'll post a making journal, but for now here it is partway through. The reason it looks like a stained glass window is that it is taped up to the light. Quilting turns out to be really hard work, although it's quite satisfying -- a mix of accurate cutting and machining, and then relaxing hand quilting. However, I turn out also to be very wibbly about the accurate cutting bit, so my triangles and squares are frankly all over the shop. To be continued.

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To mark the 'five gold rings' of the fifth day of Christmas, these remember my sister's wedding early this year, for which I painted these cake toppers to look like her, her husband and the tiny one. They sat on the top of a very indulgent and gorgeous pile of fruit cake and cheeses. Lush.

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Felled by noro virus, so missed another day... Very miserable, and still feel weak. The rain has been pretty relentless, I'm afraid, making for a strange Christmas, as you can see. I've never seen a rainbow on Christmas day before. 2 years ago, this lake was deeply frozen, but this year it was warm and even muggy.

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Catching up with projects from this Autumn, this is a short-sleeved jumper I made for my sister's birthday, using this paper dolls design by Kate Davies. This was the first of her designs I had made, although I am now working on a further two, including one from her beautiful and inspirational new book, Colours of Shetland. Her patterns are quite complicated, but that is because they are very precise and excellently considered.

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Yesterday, we opened.... a new Christmas jumper for doglet. Made to match her rugby-watching Welsh family. I'm sorry to say that it wasn't one of my best efforts as the fit needed adjusting. But it does have nice i-cord edged cuffs and it received compliments when walking around the lake (bothering ducks) on Christmas morning.

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A harebells challenge. I'm going to try to post for each of the 12 days of Christmas. I've done well so far by missing day 1... So 2 posts to begin.  

M e r r y     C h r i s t m a s !

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Laura's crafty thrifting for Christmas presents explains much about the inside of my brain.

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All I can see out of the window is damp grass through fuzzy windowpanes. The sky is dark grey (when there is any light at all) and the air seeps cold and deep into the bones. Not a nice version of winter, and disasterous for the doglet whose legs are too short to keep her tummy out of the mud. All of which makes reading John Clare's crispy little poem all the more sparkling and delightful. Our garden is actually the 'black quagmire', but as we have restocked the bird feeders, and bought an extra one, I like thinking about the frozen plains, the leaves mingled with crimple and frosty twigs all decked out with tiny birds of all types. A 'bumbarrel' is a long-tailed tit, but so far we just have the little guys -- bluetits and coaltits.

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It is a winter Sunday... we wear our heavy coats. This song is going around my head! The last few days have been very cold, very crisp and now today very frosty. The oily colours on the water here remind me of the Wind in the Willows (old favourite). The last photo is the view from our new bird feeder. It's delightful watching the little blighters fill their little bellies with seeds.

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Christmas twinkling begins.

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We went to a screening last night of Luke Fowler's film, The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper, and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott (2012): see a clip here. Luke Fowler was nominated for the Turner Prize this year, but lost out to Elizabeth Price. This was a shame, but good for us because it meant that he could make it back to Glasgow in time for the screening, so there was a great conversation session afterwards, and after that drinks in the pub. The title is a quotation from E. P. Thompson's passionate book, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), in which Thompson said:

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. 

workers at a WEA class (image from here)

This fine, moving and timely assertion of the power and resonance of protest (and the pernicious effects of academic/goal-orientated history) propels the film, which is a grainy, sometimes fuzzy, poignant and thoughtful recognition of Thompson's warm commitment to education as socially situated and socially engaged. The film focuses on Thompson's work with the Workers Education Association in the West Riding between 1948 and 1964. Having spent the afternoon beforehand vexing over our first-year courses, this was acutely touching.

A still from Luke Fowler's short film, Anna (2010). Image from here

There was so much in this, and in the conversations we had afterwards with Luke and with those, such as Tom Steele, who have taught us so much about this movement -- together with those who had also taught for the WEA or, like me and my grandparents before me, have benefitted from adult education evening classes. It can only be painful to talk about this in our current climate that sees such classes and provision as ripe for vicious financial cuts. But perhaps more distressing was its illustration-by-implication of the desperate impoverishing of the ideological and philosophical purposes of education that now dominate in the University sector and beyond. The film grows on you as its significance dawns gently, carefully, and subtly that in Thompson's attack on 'University Standards' is the kernel of an attack on the neo-liberal lie of ideological neutrality that dominates the technocratic University I now find myself working for. The insistence that there are 'neutral' spaces and policies, that commitment is tiresome and immature, that protest is shrill, that to be academic is to be 'tolerant' [of injustice] and that catholicity means 'a little bit of everything and nothing much about anything' turns out to be the thin and bloodless tissue that Thompson excoriates so elegantly and engagingly when he asserts the profound value of lived experience. It was an evening where melancholy and nostalgia were moral forces of opposition, and heartening for it.

Van Gogh, sketch of Scheveningen Woman Knitting, 1881

But the parts that lit up most for me in all this is the determination to recognise and remember 'lost' causes, and to see in them the refusal to participate in consolidating the power of property owners of all kinds. The hand-loom weavers, the stockingers, the Chartists -- all those records (always written records) and all those stitches and woven fabrics that add up to the traces of labour in production, of experience and debate in history, and ultimately the principle of resistance -- not as retrograde backwardness, but as a stay against casual cruelties, indifference, and rampant empire building.

And it helps that it all comes back to knitters...

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Very frosty morning. Stayed very frosty and cold all day. Everywhere is looking so beautiful and glistening. The shops just down the road all opened up their frontages and were serving mulled wine and cakes under their awnings and it's all feeling very warm, cosy and just right for Advent.

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To have a proper weekend, with no pressure in it, is really comforting. At last we had one of those. There was work to do, but not so much that you get all resentful and cross. And there was time for catching up in the flat, which had got into a muddle. We used up all the Thanksgiving turkey (at last -- sandwiches, sandwiches, pie, sandwiches, pie, more sandwiches...), had parsnip soup, and actually got round to slicing the oranges for pudding. We got the hannukah gifts together in time to post to Arizona. I de-pilled, washed and pressed my cashmere jumpers (very pleasing), darned holes in other jumpers and in socks (only irritation -- these had only been worn twice. Bad American Apparel. That's my punishment for buying things from a pornographer), and managed to read more Dickens (doing more of that today). Then on Saturday evening we went to see The Master in the good cinema down the road where the seats and comfy and they let you drink wine. A pretty strange film, but so beautiful to look at. The lighting, camera work, settings and everything were in a very appealing colour palette that felt very 1950s and was a real treat to gaze at. So many millions of times better than the BBC's The Hour. What's going on with that programme? It should be so good -- the actors are pretty good in other things, the costumes are lovely and the idea is sharp. But the script is desperate, and the directing has to be the worst ever -- who can get people like Anna Chancellor and Romola Garai to say things with all the charm and subtlety of a brick? Watching this feels like you're stuck in a small pub on a hot afternoon in the Edinburgh fringe watching an ex-publisher who's decided in her mid-50s that it was the stage she was made for after all, but that she delivers lines in a way that no human has ever spoken before (yes, that was my afternoon this summer) -- to achieve such sow's ears from silk purses is really special (...).

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We had a turkey dinner last night for Thanksgiving. I felt sorry for Americans in the UK -- all their loved ones at home were having a day off, watching the football, eating nice food, having presents etc. while they were just facing yet another regular November day in Blighty. Cold, wet, dark, having to go to work. Sobs. But we staged a little bit of a holiday feel, which was very nice indeed and an indulgence on a Thursday. It was also actually not a bad idea at all to be encouraged to be thankful for things (although not necessarily for the arrival of the Puritans); this has been a tough and challenging year in so many ways that it threatens to overshadow the fact that it has also been entirely lovely.

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A very dank and misty morning out throwing balls for the doglet. This was at about 7.45am -- still little sign of daylight. It all looked very beautiful and calm -- save for the insane dashing about of a French bulldog. Anticipating the final series of The Killing that starts on Saturday.