Lady Adventure

 

I was at home waiting for news from my sister, Eithne Gingerbread, who was supposed to deliver unto the world a new baby today. The child has Eithne's sense of punctuality and thus took a good fortnight to appear on the scene, but finally did so in a whirl of drama this afternoon. Mother and child are doing well, hurray.

While baby Hannah was adjusting to the world, I was trying to get some odds and ends finished. So I'm going to do a series of little blog postettes about my craft fair endeavours. Most of what I'll show you in these posts will end up being donated to a Christmas bazaar in aid of the local children's clinic - as a result, they're quick and economical to make and rely heavily on a certain cuteness factor as a sales technique. Brace yourselves, crafters. Here we go!

Soap Socks
The idea behind these is that, as the soap shrinks with use, the wool felts through rubbing and the use of hot and cold water. I had loads of these finished, but everyone who has seen them so far has bought one or two off me - which is a good sign, but honestly I have to stockpile a little before Advent starts. They look cute. They smell nice. They're cheap to make (I buy the soap at Aldi - no one sees it because it's sewn into the soap). And even a novice knitter like me can make them.

You need:
felting wool (I can make 4 or 5 socks from one 50g skein)
and a set of DPNs/straight knitting needles.
(I used a size 5 mm.)






Cast on 20 stitches. Divide over four needles, or knit flat.
Row 1: plain
Row 2: purl (If you're knitting flat)
Repeat in stockinette stitch till you have a little tube the length of a bar of soap. Sew up the bottom opening. (If knitted flat, sew up the bottom and side.)

Alternatively,
Cast on 10/11 stitches on your trusty DPNs.
Row 1: Plain
Row 2:  Kfb (knit front and back so you have double the amount of stitches that you started the row with)
Knit until the sock is *nearly* long enough to fit the soap, then
K2tog (knit two together) for one round, so you have 10 or 11 stitches again.
Cast off. Sew up the bottom opening.

 Squeeze the soap into its little sock. Weave the tail of the yarn around the top opening and pull to close the hole. Weave in your tail. Thread a piece of cotton yarn in and out around the top hole and pull tight (as a drawstring), tie it in a bow.
(Wowzers. Knitting patterns are so simple to write, eh?)


Add a label.
Be fancy.
Voilà - or as we say in cyberspace: Waalah!

Here's a copy of a sample label as a Microsoft Word document here.

But does it work, Gingerbread Lady?
 Well, here's the tricky part. Whether the soap sock actually works depends on a number of things. I've found that some soaps are too soft, they turn to mush straight away. Others are too hard to get up a good lather. In order to felt, the yarn needs friction, so the user has to be prepared to scrub hard to felt it! When I give these as gifts, I always say that they're best kept in a drawer among your underthings or linen: they make excellent scent sachets. The wool holds the scent for a long time and the soap normally has a very delicate scent.
 

At this time of year, I often while away the time spent in the serpentine queues before cash desks thinking about a story that appears in a Christmas reader for our students. Blithely ignoring the woman behind me, who's decided to remove the skin on my shins with her child's pushchair (no, really, misssus, shoving the vehicle in the back of my legs will not make the fifteen people before me magically disappear or even make them move faster), I think of the story of a teacher at an African school who explained the meaning of Christmas and how Christians celebrate - and how they give each other gifts in the Christmas season. Some time after, one of the children turned up at the school with a sea shell, which he presented to the teacher as a Christmas present. The teacher realised that the shell could have only come from the coast, several hours' walk away.
"You didn't have to go so far to get me a gift," the teacher said.
"Long walk part of gift!" the child replied.

This is my zen-mantra during the worst periods of Christmas shopping. While waiting in line for a free counter while the post office workers chat to each other beside the parcel depot, I grin brightly and think, "Long queue part of gift!" When poked in the legs by errant rolls of wrapping paper, I think "Weird bruises part of gift!" When I suppress the urge to smack the bottom of the wally that thought it would be a good idea to bring their red setter puppy on a last-minute Christmas shopping expedition at our city's crowded mall at 4 p.m. on the 21st December, I breathe deeply and think, "Great patience part of gift!" By the same token, when I hold the door open for someone and that person looks me in the face, smiles and says, "Danke schön!" I also think, "Small kindness part of gift!" 
I hope the recipients of my clumsily-wrapped Christmas presents appreciate all the extra intangible bits and pieces that have been wrapped up inside them, along with the gifts themselves.

In any case, I am simultaneously disorganised (72 hours and counting down!) and breathtakingly organised at the same time. First of all - the organisation:

I decided to knit a couple of soap socks for the colleagues that I work most closely with, the ones I see every day. Five or six, I guesstimated. (Pause for laughter.) Twenty socks later, my apartment smells of Yardley's Rose and Lavender soaps, and I can only thank the heavens that my husband has been struck by the near-death experience of a mancold (= do watch this. It will be familiar to many of you), rendering him incapable of smelling anything.

I've also made some yarn-covered pens. This idea is from my sister Emily, who has been doing Trojan work on her blog, coming up with quick and easy gift ideas for every day of Advent. Really: if you're reading this post with cold sweat running down your back, your pulse racing at the thought of all the uncrafted and unbought gifts on your list, have a look at her blog here. The yarn pens are super cute and quick to make (mine are a lot less neat and a lot more woolly than hers).


The disorganisation? No decorations up. No tree bought. No presents wrapped. No washing done, no floors vacuumed, empty fridge. Oopsie.


And how did the soap socks go down at my school? Well, after the astonishment that I'd actually made them myself had died down, and after I'd explained what they were and that, no, you didn't have to actually use them, you could also stick them in your among your bed-linen or use them to scent your drawers, one of my colleagues did a quick tally of the soaps knitted and said, "How many did you make? Have you been knitting non-stop for the last week?"
More or less, I thought. Long knit part of gift!