Big red wolf

Well, Monday turned out to be more interesting than planned; despite my forgetting my travel pass and having to go back for it, when I got to the station, the 0804 was still there in the platform. And stayed there, for the next hour... At 0930, when I realised there was no way if we even set off at that second I'd be able to make it in for the 11am meeting, I phoned my boss and arranged to work from home for the day. And it was all extremely productive.

I'm not the best worker-from-home, to be honest; I get distracted; the PC's in the middle of the living room, and there's just way too much yarny stuff about and things I'd rather be doing. So today, to focus my mind, I decided to work for an hour and then do something else for half an hour. Mostly, that was spinning - the work stuff was absorbing enough that after an hour, taking half an hour off for the sort of mechanical activity which leaves big bits of your brain free to think creatively, was perfect, and I got loads done (and still finished an hour earlier than I'd have got home on a normal day, due to only having spent 1 hour travelling rather than nearly 4). Wish I could have a wheel in the office!


I'm spinning Jacob, still; this is likely to go on for quite a while as I have at least another couple of carrier bags of it. It's proving surprisingly good fun, despite the amount of vegetation there still is in it - I'd say that I'd be pickier with my picking another time, but these sheep were pets from the next village, rather than animals raised for yarn, and the amount of straw and moss in the fleece was pretty extreme - this is not going to be a yarn for garments. Having said that, a fleece for £5 including delivery is not something you sniff at (previous years' shearings had been burnt or used for mulch). This is the second bobbin; I wound the first one off yesterday:

I think I'll wind the spun bobbins into cakes for the moment (unless anyone who actually knows what they're doing has a better suggestion, of course! please post in the comments), and then skein, wash, dye and ply them all at once, at which point I'll work out how much there is, and what it wants to be. I ordered a WPI tool along with an impulse sock-club purchase (the club is getting to the end of its life so they were allowing you to buy one month at a time); the package won't arrive until sometime next month, but that's OK - I spin glacially slowly.

To whit - this is the rest of this year's production. Not Jacob. Merino, and Blue-Faced Leicester, and much, much prettier.

The roving for the skein in the middle was a very kind gift from Franklin when he was here in the autumn. The colourway is Rufus lupus (which translates as Red Wolf, hence the title of this post); the dyer is Sakina Needles, who doesn't seem to be in business at the moment. Oddly enough, when I was trying to track down the name of the dyer (I couldn't find the card attached to the skein but could remember the colour name), I found this Etsy listing - the spinner is SO much more competent than I am, but her skein seems more pastel. Mine reminds me of the colours of Venice and the mosaics in San Marco, so the Latin name is even nicer.

I'd spun this by Textiles in Focus in February, and took it with me, hoping for something to match it. And needed to go no further than the lovely Alison at Yarnscape (she has links to her shops at Folksy and Etsy, but I think most of her production is going into shows at the moment; and Ely Yarn Shop has some of her batts and dyed yarns) for a couple of plaits of BFL which would absolutely do the job. On the left, Rosewood, and on the right, Denim. It was definitely one of those squee moments - the pinkybrown-ness was just perfect, and the blue was exactly the right colour, too. It was also one of those weird and serendipitous things where yarn given by a friend from Chicago, and yarn dyed by a friend from Cambridgeshire, worked together so perfectly.

So, I have 450m/200g of DK-ish weight yarn; pondering what to make... I might do something geometric-y to reflect the San Marco mosaics...

Ah well... and competition reminder.

NaBloPoMo isn't really working for this month. Partly it's the freezing temperatures; mostly it's spending 6+ hours each day just ploughing back and forth to work.... I shall keep trying. It's not as if knitting isn't being done...

And if everyone can Think Good Thoughts to prevent trains hitting people in my local area, that would be good too. I've no idea whether this was suicide or an accident (although I understand you would have to try very hard to end up on the line accidentally at that particular point); but please, let's just hope people stop doing that.

On a more cheerful note, my brother sent me a YouTube clip of Gypsy Girl by Cruella De Ville. At the time, we thought this was a really good video. How times change... In return, I sent him a YouTube clip of possibly the most absurd Christmas recording ever.

And I realised I never gave an end-date for the annual competition. Let's say Sandi-o'clock on Friday (i.e. 6:30pm GMT this Friday, January 15). I'm hoping I'll be enjoying a drink with colleagues at that point, but it's as good a time as any...

BEST achievement of last year...

... was definitely taking the garden in hand. I went out there today, and although it's pretty desolate at the moment (and covered in the thin layer of snow which stopped me getting into work this morning*), at least parts of it will come back in the spring, and it won't make me feel guilty and ashamed, as it would have at this time last year.

Over the last couple of days, mainly clad in many, many knitted layers while waiting for the house to warm up, I've put together a Flickr slide show of all the versions of this shot in date order - some of them turned up on the blog but not all...

So if you don't have any paint you could be watching dry (or just want to have some reassurance that warmer days will come), or you're trapped under something heavy while reading this, do have a look.

While looking for all the versions, I found the photo below, which I made last year but never posted. It also makes a change from the current state of my small resentful house-mate, who is spending 22 hours a day sleeping next to a radiator in the bedroom at the moment, emerging only to eat or dive briefly into the garden to answer the call of nature...

Keep warm, all.

*Bet you were wondering why I was more positive. I'm not the most disciplined worker-from-home, but after yesterday, only wasting 90 minutes of my day dealing with trains, with the knowledge I was only 10 minutes from home at any time, was just fine and I got a fair amount done.

One of the BEST and worst things about living in the UK?

The railways. (I typed failways in originally - I nearly left it there).

The best thing about them - actually, on my line, normally, they really do work. And I'm saying this as someone who's used them a minimum of 10 times a week for 120 weeks now. That's 1200 journeys; and maybe 15 of those have been nightmarish; and those which are merely more than 30 minutes delayed get a small refund (I have 8 refund coupons so far this year, two of them from one day which, in my memory, is extremely happy other than the rail journey. I get a loan from work for the season ticket amount and buy myself a small treat from the amount saved on the coupons). It's not a bad record. It certainly beats planes for punctuality, in my experience.

You also get to see some of the most beautiful British scenery by train. Last night I put up a post on Ravelry about registering for Early Alerts for cheap fares on the East Coast line for the upcoming UK Knit Camp - you can travel from London to Edinburgh for about £20 each way if you book really early. (OK, it will cost you way more than a much more polluting plane journey if you have to go to something totally short notice and obviously inessential like, say, a funeral or job interview, but let's not disturb the bucolic peace of the moment for a second...) If you travel from points south past Berwick, you get the most beautiful view from the train - which you can probably tell from this picture of the train going over the bridge. At the other end of the country entirely, if you travel from Exeter to Plymouth, the view is equally spectacular when the train hugs the coastline .

However (and you knew there was a however coming...)

Tomorrow there is snow forecast for my area in the afternoon. So from 0300 a "snow timetable" will operate... I understand that there is snow forecast in London this evening, but I don't quite understand how that affects the early trains to London from my area, where there is currently no snow; not a flake...

It seems that if I set off from home at 6:15am or so, there is a chance I may be able to reach London by 9 or so. Possibly. By changing trains several times and sitting on endless stopping trains. Maybe. I'm not due in until 10, but then the snow's due at about 3pm, so I may have to leave early...

A colleague who lives not far from London found out at 4pm that most of the trains on her line (not one in the flagged "severe weather warning area") had been cancelled tomorrow. Again, without a flake falling...

I can't work out what's worse - advance scaremongering, or abject failure once the event's happened. But hey, they've tried both in the last month, so I'll let you know which is preferable.

(And yes, it is, additionally, that time of the month, thanks for noticing...)