Every home should have one...

Not a cat (although I think every home should have one of those too); she's come back from her holidays and sloped off to the bedroom to pretend to sulk. Actually, she's come back smelling of grooming powder and stuffed with biscuits, but she does like to have a moan for form's sake...

After a day's hard tidying up, the dining-room table was finally Ready for the Assemblage of the Big Christmas Present. It arrived in November, but I didn't want to make it up before Christmas...


What can it be? It's certainly in a big enough box! (The people at the post office were worried about how far I'd have to carry it... then they looked at the address and realised that 'about 50 yards' was the answer...)


And it came with a Christmas card...


I opened it when it first arrived just to make sure Customs hadn't done Bad Things to it on the way in, but all the little bits and bobbins were securely contained in a sealed bag, so I took out the card and left the rest alone...


When you get it out of the box, here are all the bits... The envelope in the foreground says "Assembly instructions. *Read first!!!*" (If only everything in life came in a flatpack, with instructions.... no, don't go there...) Look at all that oaky goodness, on my ash dining table...




Making it up was a doddle. I got out my box of 51 screwdrivers (I haven't actually counted them in and out, some of them are socket-set-type-things, but that's what it says on the label) despite only needing one #2 Philips; and it took only a short time to assemble the windmilly bit on the front (seen here sitting on top of the base with its rotation-counter)

wonder very briefly about which way round the main post went into the the base - before, you know, actually looking at it: this guy leaves nothing to chance:

sort out the bits which needed to go onto the main spindle [ditto]

and finally, wind a skein!

I had the idea of a 'can you guess what it is yet' series of photos, but I got carried away with the precision of the thing, and how it all made up so perfectly, and forgot to take photos of most of the assembly. But it's a skein winder from Ball and Skein, and it works brilliantly. Thanks to Mam and Dad for going with my somewhat strange idea of what I'd like for Christmas, and to Judy and Chris for the help with shipping info, different woods, etc.!

Dyeing day tomorrow, I think - better check the vinegar situation...

Home again

I'm back!

You know when you go away on holiday, and you think your house is a bit of a mess, but you get home and think, 'actually, where I live is quite nice'?

This time, not so much.

I had people round the last two nights I was home, was wrapping presents until 3:30am, had 3 hours' sleep and then finished a present and wrapped that, sort-of-did the washing up, packed in the last hour and flew out of the door for the train (sans hairbrush, moisturiser or stitch-markers); and the house looks like it. For my own sanity, I'm going to clear up before I sort out the photos of the Christmas knitting. But couldn't resist posting this; nephew Baby A in his Woolly Wormhead I-cord beanie (a free pattern!)

More later...

Finally festive

Long time, no blog... It's not that no knitting has gone on - some of it I can even show you - but the last couple of weeks have been full of small, hassling events like late trains and failed signals, and lost cameras, and mail containing replacement cameras getting lost en route, and so on... All sorted out now, I hope... The last of the Christmas shopping is done; the last of the Christmas knitting is still to be done - two little hats to go! - but it's under control...



At about 6 last night though, the house still looked as if a bomb had hit it, and was still tinsel-free and without a tree... So I thought whatever... and just put up the decorations in the middle of the mess anyway.



Happy Christmas everyone, from me and Tiny Clanger. She's back on top of the tree, her battery hasn't yet run down so she still shouts in Clanger as required... And this is the first photo with the new camera. At the moment, the memory card hasn't arrived, so won't before I set off North, but Dad has a spare, apparently... Still have wrapping and packing to do, and the Bug has just been borne off for her holiday, swearing all the way; maybe there will be photos of knitting later on; maybe not.

Happy 70th, Mr F.

After my extremely good lunchtime fish-and-chips (the benefit of working in a traditional institution on a Friday! And they home-make their tartare sauce, too...) I went off to read the papers; someone was already reading the Grauniad so I ended up with the Indy instead. Don't know about you, but if I'm knitting as well as reading, I tend to absorb more including the ads, because I'm loath to stop and turn the page - so I read the birthday column today, and found that the Grand Panjandrum of colour, Kaffe Fassett, is 70 today. Which has dragged me out of my long blog-silence.

Does anyone remember a series in the Times in about 1983-4 about knitting? They had contributions from Richard Rutt, and Elizabeth Zimmermann... And the pattern for the Toothed Stripe sweater which later appeared in Glorious Knitting; which blew my mind with its sheer simplicity - no 'you will not get the expected results if you do not use X-brand yarn', no 'blue with green should not be seen', just sheer, wild, rich colour. I was about 17 at the time and I haven't put down the needles since...

So, happy birthday, Mr F. I know there are many more universally revered figures in the knitting world, including Mrs Zimmermann, but that was my personal Knitting Can Alter the Way the World Spins on its Axis moment... And I don't give a damn which way you weave your ends in; or if you do.

So some colour. A very good excuse to show you the fabulously bright skeins I got at the Secret Santa exchange at the knitting group at Liberty last night... Handspun merino!

Not entirely sure how much there is in each skein, but it looks to be about 4-ply weight, so I think there's enough to do a really decent splash of colour against the background of some of the dourer (and we're talking Gordon Brown just after Prime Minister's Questions dour) colours in the stash... They're from Victoria; but I only know Victoria from a couple of evenings at Lib's so I don't know whether they're her handspun or not!

(Nic and baby Pete were also there, first time I'd met him, and he was lovely and they were both looking extremely well...)

And a bit more monotone, but this is why I've been AWOL for the last two weeks - steeling myself to do some stitch samples for a class tomorrow.

I've not done a lot of stitching over the last few months (and frankly for a while before that), but it's Christmas so something ornamenty for this four-hour workshop... These will become a 6-petalled poinsettia-like object (no, I haven't counted how many petals/leaves a poinsettia has; and no, I don't care...), once the final petal is complete...

My personal favourite is at the front of this photo... shame I managed to get my personal least favourite in focus at the back, but that's trying to do flash-free photography after a long, hard week for you (in the sense of there is so much to learn and I need to turn myself into some sort of sponge and just absorb all of this while coming up with some seriously good ideas every now and then to justify my existence, rather than actually difficult, in the former sense of I am mindblowingly bored and under-rated but I am still a professional so I will attempt to derive some satisfaction from the minutiae of the daily process; I still have the sense that someone wrote a job description for me and it would be crazy not to fill it!)

I'm off to write up the instructions for all those petals now...

Have other things to show - probably on Sunday as I'm off to view (as yet blogless) Sue's new, and hard-won flat tomorrow night after teaching; if I'm still sentient... Otherwise I'll go and see it anyway; I have a housewarming present and bottle of pink fizz to impart, after all...

(And if anyone's bothered reading this far, and has worked this out - is it just me, or is getting paragraph formatting to work in New Blogger a serious pain? Editing the HTML really doesn't seem to work all that well either!)

Nephew!

Updated: now with photo content!

My SIL and brother's baby, born yesterday at lunchtime (with sharp nails, see photo!), is a boy called Alexander Paul, henceforth to be known as Baby A on this blog - after this report saying that most teenagers are providing way too much information, I have no idea how much everyone will know about this year's generation of babies! Everyone OK, and all fingers and toes counted and so on... yay, and phew!

6lbs though, which is good and healthy, although marginally smaller than the mammoth babies (myself included) of past generations... Which gives me an excuse to knit him something else, as if one were needed. (Yes, indeed, it's another Heartbreakingly Cute Baby Kimono from those Mason-Dixon people; this time with buttons because despite having an enormous quantity of haberdashery round here, it doesn't seem to include ribbon of the correct shade...)


(He's also getting the EZ baby jacket with the rainbow collar shown last week, once I sew the buttons on whichever front boys' buttons go on, and also this hat with tentacles, pattern available gratis thanks to Woolly Wormhead who's knitting, and giving away patterns for, fabulous hats in anticipation of her own baby next year)




Not as cute as the baby, but here's the Bug, helping with the button choice. Well, not really. As far as she's concerned,

Sorry. It was only a matter of time before the lolbug made her appearance...

Otherwise it's Monkeys all the way:

Thursday: progress slightly hampered by my first really huffy seat-companion so far. Not only did he feel he needed to take possession of both seats by that sitting-with-his-legs-wide-apart thing, but he was also going to make seriously exasperated pshaw noises all the way home as soon as I pulled out my knitting. As I'd a) already had to fight my way on and off various platforms due to collapse of Victoria Line and b) discovered that if I plug my dead iPod into my government-issue PC to charge it, it does everything bar calling the police and c) lost a beautiful rosewood dpn in the lunch area (I went back on Friday morning but I suspect someone mistook it for a coffee-stirrer or something and had binned it - the cleaning is very good! and thankfully I very rarely use the 5th needle in a set - it was just very sad, as I'd decided this was my most favourite set of dpns, ever...); I just had to be content with the last (half)seat on the train, and try and tune him out by knitting and humming (irritatingly, I hoped) to myself...


Friday: progress assisted by knitting a bit at lunchtime, and deciding to get a marginally later train in favour of picking up some food for the weekend (meaning 20 minutes or so sitting down at King's Cross in addition to the train).

First step (so to speak) on Monday morning is turning the heel...

Monkeys, and the benefits of evil twin-ness...

Thanks to everyone who commented on the last post - I'm still feeling slightly smug about the shawl...


But on with the next thing, and the amount of time I have to knit on the train is making itself felt in the speed I can knit smaller items. I made a hat on Sunday night and the Monday morning train (can't show you yet); and then started a pair of Monkey socks halfway down to London on Monday. Progress each evening:


Monday:




Tuesday:




Wednesday (about 6 rows to go - will explore grafting on a train this morning, but have some waste yarn with me in case that's an insane idea!):



I'm loving this yarn - and may have best part of a pair of Christmas socks for my aunt by the end of the week, if I continue to get a seat in the evening...

Evil twin-ness - I've been meaning to post this for a couple of weeks. Jan and I have a standing joke about this - it seems that we both discover things at about the same pace, and have the habit of turning up when we meet with a pair of socks at the same stage of completion in the same yarn, or ordering the same needles from the same shop in the same week... When I had my week off at the end of October, I went down to Brighton, and Jan gave me a very beautiful pair of ear-rings as a good-luck-in-the-new-job present. The day before, I'd ordered a pendant/brooch from luckygirltrading. When it arrived....

Scary, eh?

200 not out...

Just realised this is my 200th post. Which is very weird - I didn't think I'd have all that much to talk about when I started this blogging thing...

But I have some actual Finished Objects! You wait for months, and then four - or five, or seven, depending on how you count them - come at once.... If I were sensible, I'd eke these out into several posts, but I'm updating my Ravelry notebook, so may as well upload the photos in both places!


First - TA DAAA!! The Unbloggable Project - aka the "Shetland Tea Shawl" from A Gathering of Lace...

... which turned out very nicely in the end, despite my paranoia at various stages of the process, and was much appreciated by my brother and sister-in-law whose first baby is due next weekend...

I suppose technically it's only 99.995% complete - sitting on the train the day after posting it off, I realised I had no memory of sewing in the last half dozen stray ends, and when I checked with my brother, I hadn't... I'll have to do that when I go up at Christmas, but they're pretty secure...

This shows the additional rows I ended up working in Beech Leaf lace from the first Barbara Walker treasury, once I ran out of chart and it still seemed too small. The beech leaves worked out very well with the leaves on the edging... Here are some close-ups including the obligatory Blocking Shots...

The yarn is laceweight (90% Blue-Faced Leicester, 10% nylon for strength) from bluefaced.com and is more like a cobweb weight; and it took about 90 grammes of the yarn. I actually think it's finer than the Jamiesons of Shetland cobweb I saw at Ally Pally... Anyway. I think I'll probably leave it till after Christmas to start another ambitious piece of lace!!

Next up is the Gryffindor Bag - very nice free pattern from Rosemary Waits. This is for Fiona's 9th birthday, which is today - I'm hoping they're going to swing through the village sometime today and pick it up... As ever, it took me forever to do the finishing on this - I finally lined it and got the handle and fringing on yesterday (because you don't want to do this sort of thing without a sense of impending panic, that would never do...). This picture is fuzzy but atmospheric - the other ones taken with flash make it look very flat and stark, which it isn't... The cushion in the background is a charted needlepoint one from this book by Candace Bahouth - there are some lovely things in the book but I've lost the urge to needlepoint...

Third are the Serpentine Mitts, finally finished... All four of them! And all four from one skein of Jitterbug. I think there's something slightly weird about Jitterbug - the yardage given on the ballband really doesn't seem that much, but it seems to go on for ever...

And finally, finished last night after 2 days' bus knitting and a KTog (huge group of us again at the Grads Café!) , a February baby jacket from EZ's Knitters Almanac. These are so much fun to do - that's the second one and I may well cast on for a third...

Not sure who this one's for, yet... The buttons were a great find at our very large and slightly scary new John Lewis (who decided that making people walk across a translucent glass bridge with views down two floors to get to Haberdashery was a good idea? It certainly deters me from going in there, anyway, which is probably a Good Thing!!) and I've made buttonholes on both sides so once the recipient's decided, I'll be able to stitch them on in gender-appropriate positions. If I can remember which way round these things go, anyway! I always have to go off and look at pictures of men's and women's shirts on the web to remind myself...

So I'm feeling pretty productive and trying to ignore the vast quantity of items on my 'to knit for Christmas' list... Think I'll adopt Tahoe as my train knitting this week - it's coming on, but not as quickly as winter... I need to finish this front and stitch it together (minus one sleeve) to see if it's going to fit. I'm not convinced it isn't a little snug... I reckon a couple of days' train knitting will get me to the end of the second front and on into the final sleeve...

Week 1

Well, I did the first week, I survived and I enjoyed it. Even the commute, mostly. The fifteen minutes on the Victoria Line in the morning, not so much, but I got a seat on the train every day, and the people I sat next to were either nice and smiley, or just asleep... Here's a picture of a thing I found at the end of the road by work on the way to the Tube...*



Saw Yvonne and Sue at Libertys on Thursday night - Yvonne knitting the most gorgeous scarf of many colours, Sue ploughing round an endless frill... I took the Unbloggable Project which is, thanks to the increased train-knitting time, Off the Needles.

Otherwise the knitting's not been quite as successful! Took the second Serpentine Mitt off the needle, to discover




Not so much a ta-da!! moment as a ta-doh!! moment... Actually, this photo also makes one look much longer than the other, which isn't the case - but I have, indeed, knitted two left mitts by the simple expedient of following the instructions re: the gusset but also working the pattern over the opposite two needles, which has the result of creating two identical mitts (apart from the centre cable which I thoughfully twisted in the opposite direction for the second mitt)... Thankfully a) the yarn will make 4 mitts b) I already had a taker for a second pair... So all was not lost...


Still plugging away on the Tahoe cardigan - halfway up the second front, at which point I'll do all the finishing and give it a try-on with one sleeve...


I also forgot to blog my personal trifecta in charity-shop books, found in the British Heart Foundation in King's Lynn last Saturday - total cost £6.

From the left, a book of stories I nearly bought at full price the week before, as I'm currently enjoying Mr Gaiman's Fragile Things collection (I'm not normally a fan of short stories but these are great; more a series of little atmospheres...); a knitting book with actual content as well as the 1980s interpretations of the sweaters); and a cookbook which is both retro and practical. It's relatively unfaffy Delia (she does, for instance, assume her readers know how to make pastry), and very 70s in its nutritional values (I can't imagine today's Delia suggesting a recipe comprising six eggs and 12oz cheese to feed three people); it is, however, a great combination of the basic, the quick and the traditional, and I suspect it'll be used and re-used in the same way as my extremely battered copy of Fay Maschler's Eating In, also a collection of Evening Standard cookery columns but from the 1980s.

*Generally things found on the way home from work in the old job were interesting leaves, or completely bizarre pieces of litter...

Bodging

The last couple of days, I've been fixing little minor niggling things around the house that would irritate me even more when I've even less time... And other things which have gone awry during the week. And am thankful that my not-particularly-frilly girlhood included instruction in the right use of screwdrivers, Superglue and which sort of fuse a lamp-plug needs*. Thanks, Dad.

The pretty thing on the right? a pen. Certainly mightier than the sword; as long as you aren't sitting in the dark with your muse, waiting for some chap to sort out the light-bulbs for you...

*and, since I posted this, the art of cassette-tape splicing has also come in handy...

Holiday at Home: part 2

I can't believe how quickly this week has gone. Although I have done things. Which I'll catalogue tomorrow, I think.

On Tuesday night, I knitted at the Lamb with E-J (whose blog needs to be seen, and particularly today, for the pastel which makes even our route to our former office look romantic and burgeoning with possibilities) and Rosie (whose blog always needs to be seen...). We had a very strange start to the evening, with an incredibly inebriated, extraordinarily scatological, racist, South African (not a guess, she told us about 32 times) woman who decided that standing at the counter and screaming at an assortment of staff about their nationality for 10 minutes was the best way to go. The staff all behaved with extraordinary grace in the circumstances... The new menu was slightly hilarious in the description (the word "napped" has reached Ely in the sense of 'covered in sauce', rather than in the sense of 'fell asleep for a bit in the middle of the day', which I suspect has happened for centuries) but really extremely good in the execution...


On Wednesday I went to Brighton to visit Jan. And although I took my camera, the only shots I took were some very grey ones of the Thames as we went over Blackfriars Bridge.



.. and adding to my geographical bemusement this week, went back over the river near Borough Market... Oh, I don't know, doubtless I'll pick it up... I chose the only dull, grey day this week to go to the seaside, but it's always good to get together, and we went to see the Indigo exhibition at Brighton Museum which was excellent. I love textiles exhibitions with historical/anthropological background, and this was good; and it was well-labelled, which is my usual complaint... And although it's boring shopping, I did find a Good Coat for work, and it was extremely nice to have a second opinion in the choosing! After that, we went to one of Jan's local knitting groups, at Borders in Brighton, and I met Up Knit Creek and several other really friendly knitters... (as if "friendly knitters" wasn't tautological...)

There has been some knitting. I'll show you the shot which shows some actual created Thing...
Tahoe - one sleeve, one back, nearly one front. Quite a quick knit - or it will be up to the neckband which will take a little while. Doing it in a week wouldn't have been unrealistic if I hadn't been trying to finish the Unbloggable Thing too. As it is, I think I'll have one sleeve and the neckband left to do...



The rest of the knitting has been on the Unbloggable Thing - which is now halfway round the edging after 16 hours' knitting - only another 2 working days to go on that!

And I picked up the Hemlock Ring blanket to watch the second Pirates of the Caribbean film with a friend, and realised that I'd managed to do something really, really weird about three repeats back on one (but only one) of the 8 segments... So that's actually made negative progress this week!

Holiday at home: Norwich

I've been here this week, generally getting things sorted out for work and so on...


Funny sort of day on Monday. I decided to try Marks and Spencer for work-clothes. Checked their website, verified which stores had a Plus department, decided on Norwich (I'd been to Peterborough earlier in the summer)... Got there after an hour and a half on the train and half an hour's walk up the hill - no Plus department. None anywhere, apparently, now! I'm not going to have a rant here - I've channelled my energies into a stinking complaint letter with attached rail ticket for refund, which should have got to them today. We'll see whether it brings any results. But evidently the M&S website is pretty out of date, so don't trust it for any other details either!

Given that I'd drawn a blank there, I made the best of the rest of the day which was sunny and warm. Country and Eastern, one of my favourite Norwich shops, had moved; but they'd left directions to their new store on the shopfront of the old one and it was spectacular, a renovated Victorian skating rink.

This photo was sneaked from the top balcony, where the small textile items are, looking down at the furnishings, architectural features etc. below... There's a picture of how it all looked as a skating rink here. I only bought one small item and it's a present...

I also had a thoroughly lovely holiday French lunch at a basement place in the market-place I've been to before. I think it's called the Wine Cellar now - I'm pretty sure it was called 'La Vigne' or something last time. Anyway. They do something called a 'meze' which was actually a plateful of warm duck confit and merguez, caperberries, tapenade, grilled baguette and salad... there are fish and veggie versions available too. And a very nice glass of Picpoul de Pinet. Perfect. I could almost hear the cicadas.

With my usual unerring sense of direction, once I had really, really tired feet I headed out of town back over the river... forgetting entirely that Norwich is in a loop of the river. I should know this - I did, after all, go to school in Durham, which is a more extreme version of the same phenomenon. So I saw a bridge, crossed it - and, it turns out, headed dead north for the station, which is actually at the south-east of the town... After a while, I found the bypass - and had a not-so-happy 45 minutes following it round the town to the station... By the time I was getting back to the river, though, the sun was setting, and it did all look very pretty...

End of an era

This should really have been posted earlier - as it happened last Friday - but I'm on holiday this week between jobs and it's making me even more inclined to procrastination than usual...


About a month ago, when I first gave notice, I made the mistake of telling another cake-maker at work, Leah, that I'd thought of making a fairy-cake for each month I'd been working for the company, but then realised that would be 165 fairy-cakes which might defeat even our workplace's phenomenal appetite for cake... At which point Leah said it was her birthday the day I was leaving so she'd share the work... and a Plan was Hatched.



This slightly strange photo (taken without flash, so blurred - it looked as if the cakes were in a cave with the flash on!) is a first and last one of my former office with five of the eight plates of cake in situ... Maddy, on the left, is taking photos of the other three plates... From the front - poppyseed and apple-pie spice with lemon glace icing and choc sprinkles; coconut with coconut icing; cherry with rose icing and Barbie sprinkles; unadorned choc chip; vanilla with vanilla icing (Leah used a recipe from here, which was absolutely delicious...) By 4pm when my leaving presentation took place, there were a couple of dozen cakes left, and people were swooping in with sandwich-boxes to take some home to their families...


The speechifying and so on went better than I'd feared - nobody dredged up anything too horrendously embarrassing, I didn't burst into tears (just as well I left reading the very sweet comments in the card till the next day) or say something inappropriate. The colleague who did the gift-choosing was pretty inspired too... raiding my Amazon wishlist for this and this; when it gets to me, one of these; and then finding this lovely mini chest of drawers...





I'm still not sure whether he's seen me vanishing into The Pier every week and looking at their pretty things, but this is great. And I realised when I put it up there that it really reminds me of The Luggage, which I've always thought was more like a merchants' chest than the pirates' treasure chest in the Wikipedia illustration... I'm choosing to believe it has the rest of its legs retracted. Cadet is enjoying lounging around on the top of it for the moment, anyway...



Even the Bug got presents - Whittard now do a Catnip tea. Theoretically, you make the tea and give it to the cat to drink once it's cooled. But I couldn't resist just giving her one of the bags and seeing how long it lasted as a cat toy. Quite a long time, as it turns out. Here's a picture no dignified cat could be proud of...

... she is indeed pushing the bag as far up to her nose as possible using both front paws, and giving herself Mickey Mouse whiskers into the bargain... She still hasn't managed to destroy the first one though!

After work went to the pub, where lots of present and a couple of past colleagues came along... I know a few people from work read this, so thanks, guys, for everything...

We have a winner...

The name out of the brown paper lunch sack this morning is...

Sue, let me know if you'd like something already in the shop, or what colours you'd like in a custom dye job!

Thanks to everyone who commented - it was really interesting following links to blogs, too, some of them familiar and some not!

To answer some questions:

I'm very unlikely to make it to Stitch 'n Bitch Day - I'll have done my first week's long-distance commuting just before then, so I imagine I'll be asleep!

Likewise, I don't think I'll get to Harrogate this year... I'm hoping that by Christmas I'll be more used to the new rhythm of life and will feel like doing things; but I'm anticipating being pretty wiped out for the first couple of months!

And also - the bus company finally reunited me with my purse!!! the driver who'd been handed it was then on holiday for a week, so I only got it back on Tuesday... but I'm very glad to see it!

Right. Need to buy something smartish to wear to meet my new boss on Tuesday, and then there's a KTog this afternoon... I'll try and remember to take the camera!

Compare and contrast...

Two lace projects. On the left, the Unbloggable Project making its only appearance before it's rehomed; on the right the Hemlock Ring Blanket. The only similarity between the two, other than both being knitting-with-holes, is the wonderful Entrelac stitch markers. I was going to do this Hemlock Ring on larger needles, but the stitch markers didn't slip over the needles nicely; and I'm so sadly addicted to these things that I took it down a needle size... No affiliation, just a fan. Unfortunately the most recent consignment is still in the postal backlog... I didn't get the HRB started on Thursday night as planned; Emily Ocker's cast-on was just too complicated even with this great tutorial, given that I kept forgetting how to do garter-stitch for the baby jacket edging!

Clarification... and some AP extras

Was listening to the podcast by Lixie earlier - not just because she said she was going to mention the blog and the shop, you understand, but that did get me listening to it when it came out this afternoon, rather than sometime in the following week as I usually do! I liked her comments on the Garnstudio/DROPS people particularly (they were absolutely besieged when I got there, and although I could see they had lovely stuff and the prices looked good, I just registered that and moved on, so a review was great... Have bookmarked their website not just for the free patterns...) but it was interesting to hear someone else's impressions of the same show on the same day, particularly when it's someone you've bought yarn with....

One clarification: a couple of people (including Lixie but she wasn't the first) have said there was a lot more stitching than knitting... And I realise that every time I go to Ally Pally, I'm comparing it with the first few times I went (I think the first time was 1996 or 1997, the year before I started City and Guilds Embroidery). As a new stitcher and inveterate knitter, I had genuinely thought that something called a Knitting and Stitching Show would have some, you know, knitting in it. I believe there were about FIVE, or possibly SEVEN suppliers that year - Colinette, the Wensleydale people (from whom I scored my first pair of Brittany needles and felt very guilty about spending £5.50 on a pair of needles), 21st Century Yarns (when they were still 20th Century Yarns; oh dear... I bought yarn, and also 125g of embroidery silk from them which I'm still using...), Black Sheep, and Uppingham Yarns. Shilasdair may also have been there, I'm not entirely sure. Elizabeth Gash was selling her beautiful knitwear and there were one or two places doing quite exciting machine-knitted garments. Texere were there, but catering exclusively to embroiderers. And there was the Handweavers' Studio (notably MIA this year), but as a strictly knit-from-the-pattern-and-shut-up sort of girl at that point, I was a bit intimidated by their off-piste-ness... At the time I was actually grateful for the lack of knitting, as well as fazed by it - the list of supplies needed for the C&G was so extensive and consisted mainly of non-fibre-related articles like sketchpads, paints, brushes and so on, that Art Van Go got most of my cash that year, with a sideline for Oliver Twists (sadly and incomprehensibly still without a website) and Stef Francis (someone in their wisdom put those two stands opposite each other this year! Your two major independent, long-established, family-run, British hand-dyers for embroiderers and you put them head to head? what on earth? Surely you need to give people time for creative justification and amnesia between stands?). OK, that's the folksingerish bit where I go on about the old times; but it's a kind of Show of Hands folksingerish thing where I can also acknowledge that the olden days had their entirely crap elements, and certainly the total absence of acknowledgement of knitting through most of the 1990s was one of those...

So I was just completely stunned by what was available this year. There was qiviut (once fondled, never forgotten! and you have to love a yarn which doesn't put a u after a q); there was yak (from a supplier who'd run out of cards...); there was a lovely bamboo/wool/cotton blend from Teo's handspun... I did miss Pavi Yarns, but I don't know whether I'm thinking about the Harrogate show, having been to that the last several years as well; they may never have done Ally Pally... The two suppliers which were completely new to me were Knit n Caboodle, who were very good fun to talk to (as described in previous post); and Socktopus. Both the people on the stand were talking on their mobiles while I was there, so I can't comment on their general friendliness otherwise, but they had several of the sock yarns you see regularly on Knitty or Ravelry. None of them felt quite as nice to me as the sock yarns I already had in my bag, so I passed, but took a card anyway for future reference...

The photo at the top of the post is completely gratuitous (except that it's the colour Lixie mentions on the podcast, see link above). Not only can I not blog what I'm knitting at the moment, but I've spent four hours on it today and have knitted up 8g of yarn. That's EIGHT GRAMMES, or a smidgeon under a quarter of an ounce... I'm a reasonably speedy knitter, and I've sat down, at a table, with a decent light and a good audiobook, and I've knitted up about half of the grammes in yarn that I've consumed in sugar in my tea while knitting, which, given the name of the pattern, is ironic. Anyone on Ravelry, you'll be able to guess easily which of the WIPs this is (I'm greensideknits over there, the blog name doesn't fit into their name criteria)...

I suppose the overwhelming thing about all these shows is that great reassurance that You Are Not Alone. For the first several years I went to them, I was a member of RCTN (rec.crafts.textiles.needlework, for the young) but most of the members there were from the US; it was so immensely reassuring to realise that there are All These People Here Who Do Stuff. And in the wake of the recent Yarnstorming, it still is...

I came, I saw, I spent; I offer a prize...

Ally Pally again! Most of the summer was spent in job-limbo, so it's amazing to realise that it's autumn again... This was forcibly brought home to me as I left the village before it was properly light this morning...





I have no idea what I did to make it look as if there's ectoplasm in this picture, but it's quite creepy, anyway. I had to leave this early because the rail maintenance people are Fiddling with the Track every weekend till the end of the year, and Ally Pally became a train, a bus, a train, another train and another bus each way...


Undeterred, I got there just after 9:30 and found to my delight that they were letting people in to the box office and the Palm Court; don't think I've ever been there before the doors opened before! Talked to a nice lady from Toronto in the queue - she was here on business but had decided to come all four days... Did my usual with the catalogue and ringed the suppliers I wanted to see. There were an amazing number of yarn places again - I thought this was the best selection yet although I know opinions have differed...


I bumped into several people on the way round, including Debbie, who used to teach pottery at Chesterton, and who I seem to bump into every year without fail despite us both varying our days, and despite our living only a few miles apart the rest of the time and never meeting... Also Emily, from the KTog group, at the very first stand... And more expectedly, Gill, who had Cheryl Potter with her on the Cherry Tree Hill stand; and an extremely elegant haircut...

At the Relax and Knit area, Yvonne had just been given a birthday present by Sue - the most gorgeous velvet bag with a hinge closure...




I meant to go back and say hi-and-goodbye, but ran out of energy after about four hours and made my way home! Having been the other side of the counter, exhibiting with Fibrefusion or volunteering on Relax and Knit, for the last few years, I'd forgotten how tiring shopping (which I generally avoid like the plague these days, unless there's yarn involved) and chatting, and things, actually are when there are so few places to sit down and take stock!

So - the damage...

As ever, the first stall I saw was Colinette, next to the doors to the corridor; this skein of Jitterbug whined to come home with me, so I let it. The colour is Slate, and it's actually quite a lot greyer and less lilac than this - while being a lot more attractive than the colour on the Colinette site... I think I'm probably going to turn it into these which appeared on Mim's blog last night...

There were some other delightfully squooshy yarns around, too; this, for instance, from the extremely nice lady at Touch Yarns - I was looking for yarn for Anne at the time and this hopped into the bag with it... It's 100% merino 4-ply, and I think it's probably not robust enough for socks; I'm thinking about a scarf or small shawl in a simple lace pattern (there's 455 yards)...

I went by RKM Wools - I see Rosie has some Lang Mille Colori on her blog so they must have had some somewhere, but I didn't spot it (although I only saw two of their stalls and they had three last year); I did, however, pick up this for the princely sum of £2.50 a ball. Silver Thaw, this is (colour 13)...

Surprisingly, this is the only really purple thing I got this year. I did fondle quite a lot of purply things, though.. And had a lovely conversation with the ladies at Knit n Caboodle about knitters and their involvement with the colour purple. They tried to entice me to buy purple needles, but I have a very similar set from Jan... They were great, though. And have purple carrier bags...

I picked up this DK sock yarn for the next Baby Surprise Jacket (they were also doing the pattern); and these, which may be useful once I start commuting with my sock projects! I saw something similar on the Yarn Harlot's blog last year but I think that one was metal... as I may have to put my bag through an X-Ray on the way into work in the morning, these reinforced cardboard ones look like a better idea... Once I've got something on DPNs I'll try them out and take photos...

There were also needles. Pretty, pretty needles. Lantern Moon needles... Rosewood Lantern Moon needles... Ickle baby 2mm, 5" Lantern Moon needles... This isn't the first time I've bought needles from LM, just the first time I've bought them for me... It'a a ridiculous sum for five cocktail sticks, but they're delightful... And will live in the little bag when not in use - I learned my lesson with the tiny Brittany ones...

And roving! I see all this pretty spinning on people's blogs done with pre-dyed roving... Fyberspates had some lovely stuff...

And so did these people from Finland - yes; it really is that bright... If it's too eye-watering, I have large quantities of plain Jacob fleece and some dark brown fleece to tone it down; but I have a feeling I'll be using it as is. Any hints and tips from the spinners are welcome...

And now to the prize.

My first post was about Ally Pally two years ago, and the blog's birthday is on Friday. I know there are people who read this and don't comment, and I'd love to know who you are; so as encouragement, leave me a comment about anything at all between now and the end of Friday (midnight BST), and I'll pull a name out of the hat - the winner gets a 100g skein of hand-dyed sock yarn (base yarn is undyed Trekking) in a colour of her/his choosing, either custom-dyed or a colourway from the shop.