Spring knitting plans

Inspired by the warmer weather I've been looking for some Spring knitting projects. I bought a brown linen dress recently



and have been thinking about a cardigan to go over it. I've ordered two patterns from White Lies Designs - the Krista Tee and Easy Lace Jacket. I think the Easy Lace might go well, but then again, I was wondering about a shrug...

...been researching them on rounder ladies and found this one, the Mia Shrug from Yarn is my Metier, which I really like. Need to think about a yarn next.

I'm supposed to be trying to get my stash down a bit, but I bought this:



It's Handmaiden Sea Silk in Woodland. At £17 for 100g I only bought one skein. It's going to be a scarf.

Proof that I am knitting something at the moment:



Sock in Opal something or other, sunning itself on J's newly refurbished "Dad's bench". (Guess it's more J's than Dad's now, but that's how it will always be in my mind)



And a close-up. This yarn feels a bit scratchy. I'm hoping it will soften and bloom a little on first wash. It's in a 3+1 rib for a little stretch and may be for j, if he likes the look of it when it's finished.



Marsh marigold looks lovely at this time of year and there's some nice lichen making a home on our Buddha at last.

It's not all purple

We've had a productive couple of days - J has been restoring an Edwardian garden seat we got from my Dad in 1989. The legs and uprights are cast iron and the back and seat are timber. The timber had rotted and the paint flaked quite badly, probably due to the fact that it lives in our 'woodland' at the bottom of the garden. It's a lovely spot in the morning becasue the sun gets down there early and it's perfect for sitting with a cup of coffee and listening to the birds (while praying that they don't dump guano on your head from one of the big trees, which can ruin the atmosphere...)

Finished assembling those purple pieces:



Angle of photo makes the mouth look a bit odd, but it's quite sweet, used up lots of odds and ends of purple yarn and has got the whole sock monkey thing out of my system...well, maybe:



and this:



I love those adverts!

More purple - this time in the garden:



A perfect Queen of the Night tulip in bud



and another, starting to open



Tiny grape hyacinths in the rockery.

It's not all purple out there though.

Our way is not soft grass

Eventually (travelling with a small child is like going on manouevres - factor in my brother and his wife and preparation for a trip out takes 3 hours....aarrgghh...) spent the afternoon at Nature's World today. It was relatively people-free when we arrived, which was surprising for a Bank Holiday weekend.

This one-winged swan became very interested in J's bread roll.



This sculpture reminded us of some we saw at the Eden Project.



J unleashed his inner child.



We walked around for 4 hours - much of it on uneven surfaces and some climbing - echoing our walk, yesterday, at Preston Park.
(WARNING: self-pitying fibro-related moaning coming up, skip ahead to avoid) For the last week I've had shooting pains up my left leg and a sort of 'sprained' feeling along the bottom of my left foot. Thought it would be kill or cure with all this walking - of course, I always hope for cure rather than the other - and I'm paying for it now.

Negligible knitting over the last two days, I'm prescribing feet up, tv, knitting and chocolate for tomorrow.

At last, some knitting content!

Well, just a little...can you tell what it is yet?



(Moody pose, basking in the shade.) No? Oh, well. I hope to have it finished soon.

I also got this today:



I'm probably the only person in the knitting world who hasn't made a Charlotte's Web Shawl. I'm not doing it in Koigu, but in some Twinkletoes sock yarn as part of my stash-busting endeavours this year.

End of knitting content for the moment: It's been 21.5 degrees C outside today! I had the aircon on in the car! And I had to endure the heat while cleaning the upstairs of the house. My brother and his family are driving up tomorrow for a short visit so I instantly became ashamed of our accumulating dust (despite purchase of new vacuum cleaner this week...) and then the beds needed changing etc etc.

When J came home he 'pottered' outside with the kind of force and energy only he can put into pottering. Our potted bay tree had blown over earlier in the year, cracking its terracotta pot, so he repotted it into something bigger.
Crippled by my earlier exertions (pathetic, isn't it?) I just took some photos.



Lovely blue scabious - frighteningly early. (Planet's f*cked - J)



Heleborus Niger, with resident spider.



New Senetti.



The sun has brought the anenomes out into full flower.



I love the acid green of these euphorbia. It's a colour I tried to match with yarn last year, with horrible consequences...

To sit in the shade on a fine day,

and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment. (Jane Austen)

Weather today is beautifully sunny, but still devilishly cold. Instead of sitting in the shade, I'm going to sit inside, sew up my reknit Calmer tank and then sort some stash while I explore Listen Again to catch up with some books and plays.



Just enjoying a latte in one of J's 'builder's mugs'... (He saw them somewhere and bought a handful, as they would be 'useful for work' or for giving guys large cups of tea. As they are Cornish Blue they never actually made it to work with him, but they hold a lot of latte and enough tea for your average tradesman to find acceptable :) )... when the postman arrived, bringing this:



As I hadn't ordered a Toblerone I was keen to have a look inside:



From Purlescence, but I think I ordered the wrong sox stix size. I'll try again for a bigger size.

Went to the cinema last night - for the first time in nearly a year, can you believe? Saw Becoming Jane, with a friend, and really enjoyed it. It centres around the short period of time in Jane Austen's life when she, supposedly, fell in love with Thomas Lefroy.
I've been a fan of Austen since I was given Emma by my Mum as a girl. Mum said she could see lots of parallels between Emma and me, which I'm not sure is entirely flattering.
Anyway...it's likely that the movie is a work of total fiction, although this article suggests that there may be more to it than was previously thought believable.

Spring is definitely on its way:



Our camellia has never looked happier.




Every year we buy lots of hyacinth bulbs - have them in pots in the house and then plant them outside for the next year. I love these peering out from behind an ivy-covered cordyline trunk.




These anenomes are just beginning to flower. Their velvety purple petals are so beautiful.




We took a chance and planted an unlabelled, mixed bag of small bulbs around the garden last Autumn. These miniature, spikey daffoldils were a nice surprise!



Magnolia in full flower.

Milk or teabag?

I heart Johnny Vegas



I said, the other day, that I'd like to knit a sock monkey. Today I've spent some time looking at sock monkey tutorials and searching for a pattern. Eventually, I found this. Result!

Deskbound

Spent a lovely quiet afternoon catching up with marking from the last few days at school while listening to old Knitcasts.
It made me realise that I should explore a few more knitting podcasts. These are the ones I have found so far:
Cast On
Secret Knitting
Fibre Cast

The whole podcasting business really appeals. I've thought about producing KS2 revision podcasts for our Year 6 students.

Some of my marking has been handwriting (see above). I've never been enormously concerned with adherence to a formally cursive programme - we use the Berol scheme - but as we increasingly use IT to present work I'm beginning to value handwriting as an art and as something to enjoy.

Have you seen these in supermarkets?



j has one on top of his computer and J has one in the back of his work car (alongside his disapproving frog. Most people have nodding animals, but J's frog - brought from Calgary as a gift- shakes its head...possibly expressing feelings about his driving...)

I like sock monkeys and am thinking about having a go at one myself - maybe in purple. I'll have to look for a pattern.



Spring flowers are everywhere, but are taking a bit of a beating by the recent cold snap.

Book meme

Found when I was reading another blog. I copied it into Word and then lost the link - apologies.

In the list of books below, bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a barge pole, put a plus (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

1. +The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)

2.+ Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. +The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
6. + The Two Towers (Tolkein)
7. + The Return of the King (Tolkein)

8. Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery)

9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)

10. *A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)

11. +Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)

12. + Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)

13.+ Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)

14. *A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)

15. +Memoirs of a Geisha

16. +Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Rowling)

17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)

18. +The Stand (Stephen King)

19. +Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)

20.+ Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. +The Hobbit (Tolkein)
22.+ The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)

23. +Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)

24. +The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)

25. +Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

26.+ The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

27.+ Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)

28.+ The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)

29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)

30.* Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)

31. Dune (Frank Herbert)

32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)

33. *Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

34. +1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)

36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)

37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)

38. *I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)

39.+ The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)

40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)

42.* The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)

43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)

44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)

45. +Bible

46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)

47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)

48. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)

WHAT HAPPEN TO 49???? Missing in action, I guess

50. *She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)

51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

52.+A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)

53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)

54.+ Great Expectations (Dickens)

55. +The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)

56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)

57. +Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)

58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)

59. +The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)

60.+ The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)

61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

62.* The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)

63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)

64. Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice)

65. *Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)

66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)

68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

69. +Les Miserables (Hugo)

70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

71. +Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)

72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)

74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)

75. +The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)

76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)

77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)

78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)

79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)

80. +Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)

81. Not Wanted On the Voyage (Timothy Findley)

82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. +Rebecca (Daphe DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)

85. +Emma (Jane Austen)

87. Watership Down (Richard Adams)

87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

88.The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)

89. *Blindness (Jose Saramago)

90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)

91. *In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)

92. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)

93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)

95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)

96. The Outsiders (S. E. Hinton)

97. *White Oleander (Janet Fitch)

98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)

99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)

100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

What a shocking lot I've never heard of...

Back in the saddle

The longer you don't post the harder it seems to get back into the habit. I've thought about it a lot recently, but part of me has been waiting for something significant to write about or some good pictures to post... and I could wait forever for them so this is a crappy post designed to get me back in the saddle.

Just been plodding on for the last couple of months. Work, sleep and TV. Hardly any knitting strangely - I've been mostly too tired to concentrate on anything much in the evenings. I've decided, finally, that I'm not much of a winter person - would be better hibernating.

I've been fighting a low grade flarefor a while now, which has taken much of my energy. Fibromyalgia is not supposed to be progressive, but I seem to have been a lot worse this past year than I have been before. Let's just hope it's a bit of a trough and I'll bounce back up again.

On the knitting front:
I frogged my Calmer tank back to below the armpits, as it shrank in a rather enthusiastic J-powered wash last year, becoming rather short. I know I should have probably taken it all out, but it seems to be coping with being reknit from the armpits upwards.

I'm at the start of my Easter break now, so I bought this today:



Should make lovely socks.

I have a week more or less to myself as J is working and j is still at school for another week - so, other than the school run, the week is my own. I'm having my hair cut tomorrow. Fancy something different, but I bet I come back with a variation on the theme of a bob :)

Why can't i hibernate?

Back to work today. Actually didn't want to go, which is really unusual for me. I wanted to lie in bed and read a paperback. I'm reading Terry Pratchett again at the moment. I go through phases with different authors and after getting bogged down with a long run of crime novels (Harlan Coben, Val McDiarmid, Sue Grafton, Karen Slaughter, Mo Hayder) I felt I needed a few laughs.

So, I'm nearly finished this:



Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are an interesting combination, and it works.

Finally: some knitting news. I had to frog Boobalicious as it blocked out to a size that would have been more Booba-Oh-My-God! so I've started again a couple of sizes up.

Otherwise, I'm trying to finish a pair of socks by Friday. No chance! I've mistimed a birthday gift. Looks like being and IOU.

No place like home

Can you believe I was too tired to take a holiday this week? It's the last evening of the half-term break and we were just reflecting on the fact that we normally take a week away at this time to recover from Christmas and winter in general. Last year we were here:



Krakow - a lovely city but the temperatures plunged my into a fibrohuddle for the rest of the month.

The year before we were here:



Lanzarote - Much nicer temperatures, but we've been there a lot and I think it will be a while before we want to go back.

This year I was just too tired to even plan a trip. Maybe at Easter.

We finally finished the kitchen. J laid an oak floor and it was complete.
Two views - it's an odd shape, so difficult to photograph.



The cooking end.



The eating end.

A twig on my family tree

My Uncle Eric, my Dad's brother, has been working on our family tree for years now. He has been very successful and has traced the line back to the 16th century, although there are some missing parts and some unclear parts. I'm very proud of his achievements.

Some interesting coincidences have been unearthed in his research. Dad's family centre around Liverpool and we ended up on the North East Coast after Dad had travelled around the world, met Mum and settled (by an accident of his posting)near her family's home. I work in Hartlepool, 15 miles away from home, and lived there for a number of years. Anyway, it turns out that Dad's family - my great, great grandfather - had a bell hangers and whitesmiths business in Hartlepool, with some of his children being born in Hartlepool - on a peninsula area called The Headland. Now I know there are still Stewarts on the Headland as I used to work with some and I know that a 6 year old boy from the Stewart family was killed in the 1914 bombardment of Hartlepool by the German navy. (Hartlepool was the first place on mainland Britain to be bombed by the Germans in WW1)I need to do some research of my own to chase up these leads.

In the meantime, Eric has dug out some photos of VE Day in Liverpool.



Seeing my family hanging an effigy that is supposed to be Adolf Hitler was quite disturbing on first sight, but I guess you have to filter it through the experience and context of the time.



J's Dad is 80 this year, which makes me think we should probably get some of J's family tree down on paper too.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

Been gone a while - apologies to anyone who might drop by here.
Without being boring about it, I've been a bit overwehelmed by life for a few weeks and have had to simply focus on family, home, work and sleep. I've had no energy for anything else much.

But I think I'm back now.

While I was away the weather had a feeble attempt at winter:





I wasn't impressed but, to be honest, was quite relieved. I don't cope with temperature extremes very well these days.

The kitchen is finished bar an oak step that J and a friend are fitting this evening. I think the disruption to our home has been part of my problem. There has been no sanctuary. Every room has been upset and crammed with displaced 'stuff'. J decided he had time to do the hallways, staircase and landing at the same time as knocking the dining room into the kitchen and remodelling the kitchen. It's not something I would have planned to do all together, but it seems to have worked. I will try to get some pictures taken when they get done.

I have done hardly any knitting. My hands haven't been great and I've been asleep on the sofa a lot most evenings. I finished the front of Boobalicious, but it seems much smaller than I swatched for. I shall block it today before carrying on, but it may have to be frogged.

Today is very mild, warmish, even. Nature is pretty much convinced that Spring is here. The birds wake us each morning and some nests are starting to be built, despite J telling them to wait and see...

?

1. Write a glossary definition for wellies.

Hmmmm. I was trying to paste something else in here, but this turned up from my Word clipboard instead. It sort of summs up my life at present :)
Well, no, not really, but I'm having great fun filling in with a Year 1/2 class in the absence of a colleague at school. They're great, but much, much more dependent than I can really do justice to, given the other aspects of my job. Something will have to give and it can't be the kids.

Just in case you were wondering... that's an explanation writing activity for one of my Literacy groups linked to our Weather topic.

temporary glitch

Posting has been very infrequent recently due to the fact that any free time has been spent on the kitchen refurbishment. This has actually spread into the hall, stairway and landing too so everything is upside down. I'm already behind with my January socks, but have nearly finished the front of boobalicious.
Normal blogging will be resumed shortly (please....)

Growing up and moving on

Work on the kitchen moves on apace. We now have plaster on the walls and some electrical sockets that work.
When J took off all the old paper he uncovered this:



No, not the awful décor we once had. It’s three years’ worth of height recordings for j from around 9 years ago. The markings come up to my chest. He’s now somewhere about 6 feet 2 inches and still growing.
And who can imagine we ever thought that terracotta (even allowing for the fact that the photo makes it even more yellow and vivid than it ever was) rag rolling was a good idea?!

Sometimes time passes so slowly, sometimes it seems to rush by. How can I be old enough to be the parent of someone who needs a signature to guarantee his compliance with AS level exam protocols next week?

You know that your children are growing up when they are not only 6 feet plus, but when you follow a blog link to a website that they think is unsuitable for you.... "Oh! My! God! I can't believe you're looking at that!" (I was only on the front page...) "It's the Wikipedia of everything that is sick and disgusting on the web!" (I was only on the front page, honest...) "No, it's just too horrible, the idea of you reading that stuff - it's wrong!" (it's obvious that he regularly gets further than the front page and may, indeed, be a contributor...)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was at a funeral this morning. One of our volunteers at school, Jean, died on the 2nd January, aged 72, after a year of failing health, but she kept coming in to man our library and work with the children. She never married and was a very modest, quiet lady and it was standing room only at the church for the service. An avid reader with a penchant for showtunes, she had been an engineer, a librarian, worked with inmates at our local high security prison and was a steward at her church. And she was a knitter and she knew the vagaries of our barcode scanner. She will be very much missed.

Extreme Makeover, Ravelling Edition

Have been suffering the consequences of having moved so much furniture and spent so much time on step ladders on Friday at school. Friday night and all day Saturday devoted to a full blown flare and J telling me how he had told me so-could have predicted this would happen-I should have known better-when will I learn etc etc etc. Well, I suppose it's only fair as he is the one who has to put up with the grimmacing and groaning and helping me lift my leg in and out of the car...

Anyway. I've found the answer to my Resolution quandries over at Geek Foo. A random resolution generator that takes all the hard work out of think up a resolution. This is mine:

In the year 2007 I resolve to: Become a slut. Get your resolution here.

In case this goes the way of all other resolutions, I'm keeping my options open and allowing J to continue on the kitchen remodelling.
Here he is having a busman's holiday:



I wish I had a wide angle lens, but I guess this gives some indication of how horrible the kitchen is at present.





Now that j and I are back to school, J is keeping his work schedule clear for a couple of weeks to work on our house.

I am keeping out of the way and working on this:



I haven't given up the walking, but have got rid of the tracker as it refused to update the way it was supposed to.

4 down, 96 to go.