elegant ladies

I've been getting such pleasure from these beautiful amaryllis. They grow so fast and bloom so dramatically. I bought these in Ikea of all places in early December. My normal preference for colour is a definite shade like the red, but I'm so glad I got the pale one as well - that pinky blush is so delicate and lovely.

holiday pursuits

Since returning home from a very jolly and convivial Christmas in Leyland we have had a very lazy and lovely week - the best rest and recuperation I have had in years. I realised about ten days before Christmas that I hadn't had a great deal of "proper" holiday during the year. Working part-time from home means always being able to catch a few hours work here and there, which sometimes leads people to imagine I'm on holiday all the time, but frequently means that when I am supposed to be having a break I'm still regularly checking emails and looking at the bank balance online. So I decided to take the rest of my year's holiday allowance in one shot - two full weeks from 22 December. The few days before Christmas were a bit of a scramble as we had to sort the house out for visitors staying while we were away. All the stuff from the studio was still in the dining room in the aftermath of the December Exhibition so it was quite a big deal and we were exhausted, but it did us a favour really because it meant we returned after Christmas to an immaculate house and could just flop.


This was exactly what we did and I've spent quite a bit of time on the sofa under a quilt watching rubbish telly or reading.

I've done some knitting. Mostly working on a scarf in the alpaca wool I bought back in the summer. It's quite a slow knit because it's k1, p1 rib and needs close attention to the chart for the placing of the double cable twists, but I'm enjoying the results.

Trying to make up my mind whether to leave the natural colour, or to dye it - it may end up in an indigo vat during the summer.

Also did a very rapid knit project to make myself some wrist warmers. Quite a few of my cardigans have three-quarter length sleeves or open bell-ended sleeves and I've found a chilly gap between glove and sleeve-end even under a winter coat. So, in preparation for our new year's day walk, I made these. I had 72g of yarn, so had to keep weighing as I went along so that I didn't use too much up on the first wrist. Worked well and did the job.

My other creative activity was also in the interest of keeping warm - a draught excluder for the front door made out of an old jeans' leg and stuffed with old socks and tights. It still needs a bit more stuffing before I close off the end, but is already in service. This had the added benefit of forcing me to sort out my socks and tights drawer.

Also had the opportunity to sort out all my knitting needles into the pockets on the gorgeous bag Ruth has made for me.

There are flapped pockets both sides and a ring binder inside to store all my patterns - bliss!

Then there was the Christmas jigsaw - a fiendish optical illusion from my sister. I mostly did the straight edges and Steve filled in the middle! I was a bit bothered by the fact that the illustration of the puzzle is circular and the puzzle itself is square - an illusion indeed!

It wasn't all lolling around, though. We included a healthy sprinkling of social activity as well - time spent with family on a couple of days, new year's eve with friends, a new year's day walk and meal with other friends and a walk on an icy beach yesterday.

whose grand-daughter would line up her satsuma like this?

Little Miss Low had two satsumas for lunch today. The first one she lined up with the sections all facing the same way. The second one was lined up like this, with the sections arranged around a central point of symmetry. Given that Mr B recently blogged about his obsessive list-making, I think that something genetic could be going on.
She also insisted that all the "ends" be pulled off because "I don't like to eat them".

lace knitting - gah!

When I first started looking at knitting sites and knitting blogs I noticed that a lot of knitters favour lace knitting and produce lovely shawls and scarves. At the time I thought – no, this is not for me, anything finer than double knitting is just too fiddly for me, especially as I generally have to reduce my needles by two sizes to get the correct gauge. Then I realised that lace knitting may be a fine yarn, but it is knitted on larger than expected needles (and gauge for a shawl isn’t crucial) and I also discovered the wonderful world of beautiful hand-dyed and hand-painted yarns. At the Knitting and Stitching Show this year I was seduced by a gorgeous skein of Fyberspates Scrumptious Lace in a pretty lettuce-y green. I chose Swallowtail as my pattern and even had a friend in mind as the eventual recipient of my work.

However, it turns out I was right – it IS too fiddly for me. I have had five attempts at getting started, keep ending up with the wrong number of stitches and it’s all too fine and fiddly to identify my mistakes. I think I will come back to it next summer when there are longer hours of daylight to knit in, but for now all that frogging is beginning to damage the yarn, so it will be put on hold.
Meanwhile I have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous and am knitting an eco string bag on big fat needles.

sad

I’m feeling sad. It has been a sad year: several deaths; major surgery and long stays in hospital; bad news about unborn babies; extreme weather conditions; work and financial worries; and relentless grey, wet weather. All of the above (apart from the wet weather) have been at second or even third hand, not my personal tragedies, but I’ve spent a lot of this year sympathising/empathising with or worrying about people I love and now I feel sad.
I can be a bit of a pollyanna – searching for the silver lining, looking on the bright side, urging people not to be gloomy, but sometimes I think it is appropriate to recognise that life has been tough of late and to acknowledge all that sadness in other people’s lives and mine too. I won’t dwell on it for long – we’re going to a wedding at the weekend, good stuff is happening as well – but just for today I’m not going to push the bad feelings away.
Note: this is not a bid for sympathy from the cyber world – just a statement of how it is.

manx loaghtan

Knitting yarn from the Sheldon flock of rare Manx Loaghtan sheep. I bought this natural, undyed yarn when I was on retreat at Sheldon in May. It’s a slightly uneven, rather rustic yarn and it took a while deciding what to knit as I realised that my 500g pack was not going to be enough for a big sweater. In the end I went for a cardigan/jacket, knitting the sleeves from the top down so that I knew how long I could risk making them without running out of wool.

The ball-band says "knit as double knitting" though it looked and felt rather more like aran to me. My knitting tension never matches pattern requirements anyway so I decided to play around with needle sizes and see how it knitted up and then work from there (ended up using 5mm). I decided this was going to be my first venture into creating my own garment without a pattern and that I was going to make something to fit ME rather than some idealised size. After the gauge experiments the next step was taking my own measurements, which was a bit sobering as I realised that shaping to go in at the waist was not going to be one of my requirements. I went for a shape that would give plenty of ease around hip and belly while fitting more closely around bust and shoulders. This meant some dart shaping at the lower end of the jacket. Also went for a slightly scooped round neckline, which I find more comfortable than something that comes up close round my neck.

I am modestly pleased with the results. It fits better than most knitted-from-patterns garments I have made – so good not to have a cardigan that strains to fasten at the bottom edge – and I think it will probably work quite well with my winter wardrobe. If I’m honest it’s probably not a yarn I would have bought if I hadn’t been staying at Sheldon where the wool was produced. It’s an unusual colour – french mustard maybe, or cinnamon if we’re talking colour charts, but probably cowpat brown is more accurate - and the yarn still has that redolent sheepy, lanolin aroma, which was quite nice for knitting as my hands felt moisturised, but not particularly what I want my clothes to smell of. (When completed I washed it and used fabric conditioner and I don’t like the smell of that much better than the sheep smell.) I’m still happy to have bought and used it though – another piece of work that carries memories and associations and a good way of supporting the work of a valuable organisation.
(The sheep photo at the head of the post was taken by Cathy Wainwright and was posted on the Manx Loaghtan Sheep Breeders Group)

what if the hokey cokey is what it's all about?

Spotted on a tee shirt at Greenbelt.

Greenbelt is, of course, awash with slogans on tee shirts (and some unusual fashion choices - see Mark Loudon’s photos), but this was my favourite. I noticed it on a scholarly looking bloke in the book tent in an understated navy blue.

Very post modern.

Seems like a good motto for living with uncertainty.