40 not out

This entry's been a long time coming, but last Tuesday I was 40. Since then, it seems to have been a very pleasant but somewhat unending whirl of activity, hence lack of blogging... I'm not about to get all Yarnstorm on you - she does it so much better - but here are some slightly imperfect fairy cakes, the ones which wouldn't fit in the tin to take to EJ's husband Paul's birthday barbecue this afternoon, complete with M&S additive-free dolly mixtures.

On Tuesday, I met Jan in East Putney; after a cuppa (and presents!), instead of heading for Stash, as usual, we went to the De Morgan Centre, which is a lovely place and essential if you like artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The pots, in particular, were a revelation because they're displayed back-to-back in glass cases so you can also see that the backs are highly decorated too, usually in the same colours but in completely different patterns. No photos allowed, but they had a very nice guidebook to the collection... Then we went for lunch which lasted a strangely short but actually long time (we suddenly looked at our watches and realised it was 4:40pm...) and I got back on a train to catch the last hour of the evening KTog.

Among rather a lot of beautiful things, Jan gave me some yarny items...

Brown Sheep Handpaint Originals in a colour called Stormy Skies. (Additional white fur by Amelia, who objects to photos being taken of anything when it's dinner-time and insists on monitoring and expediting the process).

And a skein of Socks That Rock Mediumweight in Chapman Springs. (I tried to find out about Chapman Springs as a place, because that sort of thing's always interesting - but it seems there's a road in Atlanta, and a Chapman's Springs near Salem, Mass. which is now called Eggleston... The funniest thing was that the first 6 pages of Google results are people raving about sock yarn...). This has already been wound into a ball for the River Rapids socks - my current travelling project is a scarf which is now nearly my height, so it's stopped fitting into a bag...

There are a couple of other knitty things from Jan I'd like to show, but the photos came out really badly with flash - I'll try again on Tuesday.

On Thursday I picked up a parcel from Gill - who is, as anyone who's visited her shop knows, a serious yarn fanatic with access to The Good Stuff. I spent a day in anticipation (I had time to collect, but not actually open, the parcel before work and birthday drinks, so it was 11pm by the time I tore into it!) and this was not disappointed...

Two skeins of Abby's Yarns handspun in a colour called Blue Blazes. The beads are some I already have, and go perfectly. I'm thinking a very beautiful pair of handwarmers for next winter, possibly with some lace...

And a skein of Jitterbug (and Bug's feet again; she really was Very Cross about dinner). I've raved about this yarn before, and now I get to play with a new colourway - Florentina.

Obviously, I don't have a purple thing going on. Nooo... not at all...

Just for a change

Some knitting! in progress!




I've finished one of the Secret Projects and nearly finished another... Meanwhile, those Mason-Dixon ladies really weren't kidding when they said the baby kimono was a quick knit. Just over an hour's worth of knitting after casting on, I was making the back neckline... (The flower is meant to be a distraction from the mess on the table. I know, it doesn't work; but I try, and it's pretty...)


I actually took my camera to the KTog yesterday, too. Photos are on the Knit Cambridge blog here. After KTog EJ and I went out for a drink, and then Sue and I saw Fracture, which was unexpectedly excellent; highly recommended as a classy, classic psychological/legal thriller if that's what you like, and we do... Rounded off the evening with an early birthday dinner at CB2 (thanks, Sue!).


Tonight, friends coming over for dinner. Better go and try to remember where I put the kitchen, then...

Fluffiness

Anyone remember these?

My parents are clearing their loft - I'd resisted looking at the boxes of soft toys when I went up last month, and then Dad sent me this photo (or, in fact, actual, you know, portrait: pesky photographers)... Thankfully Little Albert is only about 3" tall and will sit on the top of a bookcase (or join Tiny Clanger in tutu-clad bliss on the Christmas tree). I will, otherwise, Resist...

Particularly as one of my actual furry companions has relieved herself all over a pile of clean washing for no apparent reason today! I'm not entirely sure which one...

It's a fluffy time of year though - the blossom is particularly fine on the trees around the office building

and the first of this year's bumper crop of babies is due next week, all being well; a Mason Dixon baby kimono in this stuff is likely...

A few fair days

(Anyone remember the book of short stories by this title by Jane Gardam? I found it in one of the boxes of books my parents brought down and was flicking through it at the weekend; the title went well with the weather...)

There's been a lot of knitting here - but all of it's on Unbloggable Projects - with any luck it won't be too long before I can put up pictures of these. I have got nearly halfway with the Hanging Garden Stole, but it still looks like a (slightly larger) pile of denim-blue washing with lifelines, so not exactly fascinating.

On Sunday I did quite a bit of dyeing - it was such a cheerful day that most of it is quite bright; like the standard Euonymus and the flowering currant in the garden. This is all pure wool superwash DK from various sources (mainly the Yarn Mountain at KCG and the bargain bin outside the LYS)...

Here it is reskeined and in a basket - waiting for me to list it on Etsy ...

A grand day out...

After several days' fighting with buses (I will not rant here about the new timetable; everyone I've had the misfortune to run into over the last few days has already had the benefit of my opinion on that one, as have the Appropriate Authorities), I decided I wanted to go Somewhere Nice, Somewhere Cheap to Get To, and Somewhere Which Did Not, Under Any Circumstances, Involve Buses.

As my bike is still out of commission (combination of mechanical failure [the bike]) and procrastination [me]) that left the train; and as one of the reliable harbingers of spring round here is that they start pulling up bits of the track around between here and London, I went North, to King's Lynn. Not quite the seaside, but near enough for a 40 minute train journey! Just over an hour after leaving home I was here.

By that time it was T-shirt weather so I sat by the dock and knitted for a bit (no photo, it's an Unbloggable Project). Ambling back into town, I noticed they have a better class of Tourist Information Centre in King's Lynn...

I've seen this chap's statue before, but never gone over to check the plaque; turns out he's Captain George Vancouver, maritime surveyor par excellence - yes, that Vancouver... There's a festival in his honour this summer - I'll be going back...

The other classy thing in Lynn is the charity shops. I actually went looking for some odd drinking glasses (I've had a clumsy couple of months...) - the sort of thing charity shops are usually full of; not in Lynn where they're all nicely sorted into sets. But I did get some Treasures.
From the front - Plato's Symposium, Folio edition, the main selling point of which was Tom Phillips's illustrations; Barbara Walker's Knitting from the Top and a Threads compilation which has a combination of features providing brilliant information and features which leave me in blank incomprehension of why the editors found them worthy of inclusion... Cost of the three, £7.40.

In the late afternoon I did this. You need to read this for the full story... old skein below, new skein above. Let's hope that does it! (It's on its way, Gill...)

Jitterbugging and gardening

I've found my New Favourite Sock Yarn - Colinette Jitterbug, in this case, the Fruit Coulis colourway (thanks again, Jan!) ... it's spongey, lovely texture, completely unsplitty, gorgeous colours, and a beautiful spiral pooling... And you *can* make a sock with half of it (the slightly smaller half, according to my scale...) which sort of defies belief given the stated yardage... I haven't yet knitted with Koigu; but I've made socks with Celestial Merino and Fleece Artist merino; and this is even nicer... It's 100% wool so might still felt on my feet, but the knitting experience is so nice I almost don't care...




First Jitterbug sock (part according to the pattern on the ball-band, part altered by 3 x 1 rib and short row heel), seriously-out-of-control flowering currant (to be left untamed until it stops making my heart glad with its flowers), and beautiful Good Friday Sky.


Have been cutting down rampant shrubs all morning in one of my random and infrequent moments of garden enthusiasm, combined with some superb Easter weather. The guy next door is a nice, friendly, bin-taking-out-and-bringing-in neighbour, but Not A Gardener (not claiming any form of competence for myself, but I at least like the idea of growing things...), and a previous lot of neighbours, who employed a gardening service once a month or so, planted a variety of rather nice but totally overachieving climbers along the dividing fence, many of the more fragile of which have now died and left their skellingtons for the more voracious and unattractive to scale... Trying to disentangle myself from all the dead whitery as I hauled it up towards the recycling bin reminded me of the 1963 film of Jason and the Argonauts they used to play most Easters, with the sword-wielding undead warriors... That's probably just me, though.


I've now filled my green wheelie-bin with the remnants - I suspect I could incinerate the Very Dead Stuff of the next plant down using the barbecue, given the clearness of the sky and lack of visible doing-of-laundry by my neighbours... but the next step is really the Buddleia That Came From Elsewhere... (And quite possibly, my filling the guy next door's green bin with his own dead creepers...)

More NE pictures

A few more pictures from last weekend; mostly just nice images.

The roof of the Sage - I'd love to see this as a knitted thing... preferably in hand-dyed indigo. Precious, or what? but lovely colour stuff...

Mr Gormley's Angel. OK, it's a hackneyed image these days, but I love him; and was pleased with this photo, taken through the car window on the way home.

A tunnel at the Alnwick Poison Garden. This was fascinating, and gory, and the guide was brilliant - there wasn't a lot there in mid-March, but completely worth going in for. We made the next-to-last tour of the day, despite them telling me the one before ours was the last tour... and I'm really glad we did...

And a graphic from a long wall-painting outside the Sage. The political subtleties escaped me (actually, I think the political subtleties were largely absent, to be fair), but wow, the fabrics were pretty...

A weekend of two halves...

Last weekend I went up to County Durham to visit my parents; on the Sunday we went to Newcastle, to look at the Sage and the Baltic, neither of which I'd visited...


The Sage is amazing - you can only really get a decent picture of the whole thing from the Newcastle side of the river, but I love the way the curve at one end echoes the Tyne Bridge, and at the other end the Millennium Bridge. Inside it's very clean and minimalist, but in a way that makes the Quayside buildings over the river one of the focal points...

One of the halls was open for viewing while some lighting testing was going on...

The Baltic, a former flour mill, was also really interesting - but they had 'no photography' labels all over the place... Highlights of the current exhibitions for me were the portraits by Vik Muniz, (made in all sorts of materials - magazines clipped with a hole-punch, chocolate, ink, tiny plastic toys, spaghetti - and then photographed. The wide-open spaces of the Baltic meant you could get a good distance from them, which was important to see some of them properly!) and a moving display of tiffin tins from Subodh Gupta (scroll down a couple of pictures) - these were on one of the slow-moving tracks you'd see in a sushi restaurant so the alignment of the towers changed all the time - it was really mesmeric, and the tins themselves were gorgeous...

On the Monday we went to Alnwick (photos to follow), and in the evening my cousin and his wife came over and we went out to see the marvellous Bob Fox playing at the extremely friendly and welcoming Brecon Folk Club. After seeing the splendours of the new Quayside, it seemed a fitting contrast to hear songs about the industrial glories of the old one...

WiP amnesia

At the weekend I decided that rather than cast on yet another sweater in my lovely new Kureyon, I really had to get my jacket-version of Ragna out and finish her - she's been hanging around on the needles all winter, and I only had one front and the neckband and the Dreaded Zip to do. And she's hogging all the 5mm needles...

The front is almost finished - a couple more repeats of the pattern and then the front neck shaping - so I thought I'd assemble the other shoulder and one sleeve; I've been undecided about how to complete the shoulders because they're heavily cabled, and have been wondering about grafting them...

So I got all the bits out, and laid them together... and noticed something.

I seem to have stopped two entire repeats short of completion on the back... two whole repeats... 32 rows of 160 stitches, with cabling in every right-side row, and I'd forgotten all about it! Gah!

So, back to the front, and then back to the back... don't think this is going to be finished for the weekend, as planned! Oh well, puts off attempting to overdye a zip for another few days...

Another couple of WiPs then - another square for the SkipNorth charity afghan, waffle-stitch pattern from Jan's blocks book

and Ilga Leja's Brickwork scarf, in Trekking 108 from Stash, which has demonstrated to me that I am unable to count accurately to 8... but I love this scarf. The stitch pattern is really clever, the yarn is much nicer to knit on larger needles - I found it a bit splitty when making socks - and I did a crochet cast-on which unzipped very obediently, which was heartening! And I love the colourway - it's slightly bizarre that you get colours in the knitting which you can't actually see on the ball!

More SkipNorth: Haworth

While everyone was at Wingham on the Sunday, Rosie and I decided to bunk off and see a bit of Haworth. We walked down the hill from the hostel past the Brontë Balti (sadly, it was too early in the morning to see Bramwell propping up the counter waiting for his takeaway),

and back up the hill past the Brontë Weaving Shed

(it was Sunday morning so presumably the family were in church, or beavering away in the back room putting together all those presentation tins of Scottish shortbread). We did like the name of the antique shop...

Last year, we came from Keighley to Haworth on the KWVR, but this year it wasn't half-term, so the steam trains weren't running on the Friday; we remedied this by going on the Sunday instead...

Here's Oakworth station, made famous by The Railway Children, viewed through a gin-and-tonic from the buffet. Very civilised.

In a spin

Thanks to advice from Isabella, Sue and Ruth at SkipNorth last weekend, I've got my Louët wheel out of the corner this week. I've gone in to work later and spent a few minutes each morning while vaguely awake messing around with the tension and trying to spin. And at the end of the week, I have a lumpy chunky alternately over-and-underspun 93g of yarn; which beats last year's production, anyway! And I think I spun (span? someone help me?) one bobbin clockwise and one anticlockwise, which really didn't help with the plying...

The yarn is pictured on top of my new 'Ningbo Future' electronic scale for yarn-weighing. 'Ningbo' allegedly means 'Serene Waves'. Let's hope...

The colours are pretty. And I shall persevere.

The Haul

So; here are the fruits of the weekend. I've sorted them out into type... First, the dyeables. Top left, 1100g of pure wool Aran from Coldspring; top right, 505g of pure wool DK from Coldspring; bottom, 5 cones of Sunbeam Elysée from the Skep...

Next; the Noro.

Top left, 400g Kureyon; top right, 705g of a different colour of Kureyon; bottom, 275g of Blossom, all from Coldspring... There's enough of this one

to make Rosedale for myself; this one

will probably make scarves, etc... And the Blossom may make this...

Next; this is 4-ply

One 360g skein of purple (Coldspring); and 500g of red/blue/purple variegated (The Skep)...

Next, the balled yarns; clockwise from top left, 3 balls of variegated Aran; two balls of James Brett Marble in reds to go with the rest in the stash; and at the bottom, 6 balls of Twilley's Freedom Spirit, probably for two more Helter-Skelter scarves; all from the Skep apart from the Marble, from Coldspring).

And then from the Yarn Mountain at KCG: five balls of black 4ply King Cole Anti-Tickle Merino; one of pink and three of cream in DK; three balls of Phildar Rubane (dyeable); and a stray ball of Frizzante.

And my Find of the Weekend. The camera can't cope with the sheer beauty of this...

It says 4-ply - but actually it's nearer 3ply. And one cone had this little swatch in it. There's 700g of 70% lambswool/20% angora/10% nylon yarn here... And I got it for £6... No idea how much yardage there is here, but it's A Lot... I'm going to have a happy afternoon sometime working out what to make with this lot, and what colour it'll be when I do it!

SkippedSouth

Home again - neither of the cats left home while I was away... It was a lovely weekend - lots of enthusiastic, knowledgeable knitters; learned a bit of crochet; got some advice on Louët wheel management; taught some people to dye; and generally had a very good time. Photos to come although as ever I was a Shy Blogger and don't have many of people! I'm hoping some of my fellow SkipNorthers were better - I'll be watching the blogs.

Have unpacked enough to remove damp towels and run the washer, but I'm leaving the Real Unpacking until tomorrow... In the meantime here's a sneak preview.

SkippingNorth

The clothes (note, this is not a large suitcase)...

Tilda's opinion on what I should be packing...

And the suitcase more or less packed. Just a couple more skeins of yarn to wind and I think I'm done... Amazing how compactly one can pack dyeing supplies and samples for 30 people when pushed... Nic and Lixie have got the salt and soda up there already...

Rare sighting - a Finished Object!

The Puréed Clown scarf is done... subtle, isn't it? (No, don't answer that).



The nice thing about having the odd day working from home is that I can not only finish something during the lunch-break, but photograph and blog it too! Now, back to my specification. Don't usually mix work with this blog, but it does still occasionally amaze me that I can sit here with the catalogues of three major libraries, two online style guides and work e-mail, all on my desktop...