Glorious

I was doing one of those new "staycation" thingies this week - had a week off, and not many plans, and it's been absolutely delightful.

I finished and blocked two pieces of knitting (see previous post) and got a long way with a third.

I finished some spinning and its recipient likes it. Which gives me an excuse to post a random photo of her cat...

The weather was beautiful except briefly on a day I was staying at home anyway; it's been a perfect British summer week; warm and sunny, rarely too hot, with a nice breeze.

I scored major bargains in charity shops and tkmaxx in King's Lynn - three skirts and two tops for £16...

I knitted on several trains, in a café and garden in Cambridge, on a boat in London, in a pub in King's Lynn with caughtknitting, and in various places in Hove, including at a birthday party in a very swish ice-cream parlour with members of the dog, chicken and aardvark safari knitters (Ravelry link) and on a bench overlooking the incoming tide, with Wibbo. Not bad for a week without one of the usual knitting group meetings... And probably best, given that food was shared with friends on several occasions, that it was a week without a Slimming World meeting, too.

And then there's the cricket, of course. I've had two days listening to that wonderful scary/comforting roar from the Oval (or the Brit Oval as I gather we're meant to call it now; sigh...), and even a dodgy wicket's an actual one at this point... Once I'd got used to the idea of Harry and Draco ambling round the cricket together, Daniel Radcliffe and Tom Felton made very good lunchtime guests today (similarity between Quidditch and cricket - both are "needlessly complex" in a good way; and Dan made a spirited bid for Aggers's job); and Stephen Fry was both delightful and wonderfully knowledgeable at teatime on Thursday...

More photos of the London trip coming soon; I loved being a tourist in the areas I'm usually going to for work...

Two FOs!

A fair amount of knitting has been done, but both of the main pieces have been stealth projects (as is the current one...) I handed both over this week, though, so here are some pictures and details.

This is Mam's birthday stole, the Melon scarf/shawl from the cover of Victorian Lace Today

It's worked in GGH Kid Mélange - the yardage on this stuff is even better than KidSilk Haze (which I really dislike). It was fiddly to do, and I should have known that a 6 row pattern with the instruction "repeat 62 times" might drive me batty a few times, but the result is rather beautiful, and it was much appreciated...

The second project is rather different. I’ve loved the damask flower motif from Kaffe Fassett for ages and knitted the peplum jacket from the cover of Glorious Knitting when it came out. But then I saw sew200’s cushion and thought ‘I want one of those’, and thought Jan probably would, too.

I used the charts from Kaffe Fassett's pattern library - the Small Damask flower repeated twice on the front,

and the Large Damask flower on the back, with a made-up chequerboard pattern as an edging as I wanted it to be a mass of pattern (the symbol at the corner means M1,K1,M1 in the same stitch).
The cast-off is a three-needle-I-cord-bind-off, with the yarn doubled and right sides out. Cast on 4 sts, slip one stitch from the left needle containing the stitches from the back to the left needle containing the stitches from the front, knit 3, k3tog, slip the 4 I-cord stitches back to the right hand needle and repeat the instruction in italics to the end.

I was enjoying this one so much it was frustrating not to be able to post it on Ravelry, or Flickr; thankfully I was able to e-mail in-progress shots to a patient and encouraging knitter friend... And here it is in situ in its new home...

Portmanteau post...

Well, all that NaBloPoMo stuff went out of the window last week, what with the Inauguration brouhaha, and being completely knackered, and all that - and then this weekend Sue and I went to Hove (actually) to see Jan. Sue brought the weather on Saturday

so it was fine and lovely (I had my usual WeatherGoddess effect on Sunday and it hurled it down all day); and after lunch at Hove Museum we went off to the seafront for a walk. The sun descended pretty quickly as we did so, and I got this photo

which has also been stuntblogged at the Hove Daily Photo site today!

In other news - Neil Gaiman has won the Newbery Medal for the wonderful Graveyard Book! This is just about the best award you can win for fiction for young people - and he's in extremely good company. [And any author who tags a blog post GOD I LOVE LIBRARIANS needs a mention on any librarian's blog]... Definitely one of the best books, if not the best book, I read last year - Terry Pratchett's Nation might just have edged it out at the time, but I find myself remembering more snippets from The Graveyard Book. Interesting that they're both YA titles.

I also got my copy of the new Springsteen CD through the post today - haven't listened to it yet because that'll be a treat for tomorrow morning's train journey... I don't know, a new US administration, a new Springsteen production and a new Newbery winner in one week - it's all seriously testing my British sense of moderation... And there's knitting tomorrow night at the Blue; my cup runneth over.

Finally got the prizes out in the post today to those people who won things in the blog contest. That was another reason for not blogging - I really needed to spend the small amount of time I had at home packing parcels etc. - but instead I did Bad Things like sleeping and feeding the cat instead...

A bit of Vienna in Hove...

Blimey, I was so busy catching up on other people's posts that I almost forgot about blogging today!

I was going to blog stash from the weekend; but this image caught me. This is Jan with her latest glorious hexagonal throw - and don't you think she looks like Emilie Floge? OK - she's saying 'oh, if you must, for God's sake get on with it... ' but blimey, isn't that gorgeous...

Little pink houses

With apologies to John Mellencamp (the video's up on YouTube and the lyrics, unlike the clothes and dancing, just don't seem to date, and I can't believe it's 25 years since I first heard that one on Paul Gambaccini's show...) ; but small-but-interesting structures have been a feature of this week.

On Thursday I had an all-day training course on Millbank; and finally had a good look at this amazing monument. Look, a shiny thing!

Here it is in context, with the Victoria Tower of the Houses of Parliament in the background. The combination of pastels, geometrics and gilding have always made me think it must be a present from another country.
But apparently not. And even more interesting for that.

And then today, in complete contrast, I went to Hove to visit Jan. We had assumed the weather would be foul - I appear to be the Harbinger of Evil Weather, the Rain Faerie, whatever; usually it's brilliant the day before and the day after, and disgusting on the day I actually visit. In five visits, we had managed to walk along the beach... once.

This time it was forecast to be foul. The weather which rose up to greet me as I approached London was vile - thrashing rain, dark skies, the lot. But lo. A small selection of the beach huts of Hove.

Note blue skies. Also very pretty beach huts... Also delusions of grandeur for little pink houses. Which is as it should be...

Town and country, and a party for a book

Last weekend, I went to Brighton on Friday night, and failed yet again to get any pictures of Jan, her flat or the views therefrom, or the Brighton ICHF Show. I started off well, with a nice photo of sunset over Chelsea Bridge [please correct me; I'm an ignoramus; from the map we thought that was the most likely candidate];

and then left my camera in the bag which was propping up a basket of yarn all day... But it was lovely, and Jan and Yvonne and Annie and Fred were there , and although I wasn't in the main drag of the teaching, I showed a few people a few techniquey-type things, and purchases were made. One has already been gifted, the other will be handed over tomorrow; and then There Was Yarn. Most of it has been dyed for the weekend. But I'll blog the rest as I knit it up...

Since then, I've tried to pack a five-day week into a three-day one, mainly by avoiding unhealthy things like sleep; but as far as I'm concerned, it's Friday night now...

Now going back to the title of this, and not wanting to get all Beatrix Potter on anyone (I'm not sure I was ever that keen, although Jemima Puddleduck and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle spring to mind, mainly because of pretty bonnets and sprigged gowns; the only one I really loved was the Tailor of Gloucester with its illustrations - cats, needles, cherry-coloured yarn, utterly unrealistic Christmas deadlines, nope, no idea why I liked that one...) , until I got this job, I'd have counted myself as a country-mouse; happy to go up to town every now and then but basically content to be provincial. On mornings like today's, travelling from this (village station, 8:03 am)

to this (corner of Westminster Bridge and Parliament Street looking over Westminster Abbey, 9:37 am)

is really very pleasant. (I've no idea whether it cleared up in the village during the day - the fog had re-descended by the time I got home 11 hours later...) I'm doing the village a disservice, but the Fens in February are not, and have never been, my favourite place to be. And there is something slightly unnervingly Ruritanian about those propane cylinders right next to the track, firing off semi-controlled pop-pop-pop-pop noises in little explosions under the tracks to keep the points ice-free...

Another thing about being a daily town-mouse is that you can get to events like this

even if you can't stay very long when you get there! That's Woolly Wormhead, signing my copy of her book. There were hats galore, a full array of the glamorous models from the book (I was leaving as the last arrived fashionably late), presents flying around, and lots of knitters. MLQ was also there, but we just sort of waved at each other in the distance... This blogging business is sometimes really odd - I think I'd met MLQ before at Ally Pally; but I'm not entirely sure...

The photo above is really unflattering; sorry, Woolly - you were looking very fine when not exposed to a horribly harsh flash!! So I'm also going to post this one, which probably qualifies as a Heroically Bad Photo, but actually conveys the essence better - I tried several without flash, but there was some Serious Explaining (and therefore general animation) going on... But once I cropped this, I really liked it...

Epiphany

January 6, Epiphany, Twelfth Night... It always feels much more like the beginning of a New Year to me than the changing over of the calendars. I'll be keeping my decorations up until the last minute, as usual, and doing some New Year tidying up...

Just back from a lovely overnight break with Jan in Hove and Brighton; more on that later! But I'd just missed a train in London, so when I got to Kings Cross I visited the refurbished St Pancras - and loved the way their huge tree was still up, and the blue lights and silver star against the pale-blue girders of the ceiling. There are so many shops and bars in the ground floor, though, that I think you must have to be on the platforms themselves for the real beauty of the old station to come through... While the tattiness of Kings Cross is a bit depressing (I spent half an hour in the pub there last night, and anyone who's been in there...), I do like the cathedral-like feel of being able to see all 8 platforms at once...

Knitting content next post - promise!

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!