Spinning Fishwife

Innerwick 2011.

2011-11-25T10:02:00.000Z

Today I am packing to go on a local spinning/knitting/dyeing weekend retreat in the evening. It’s the same one as I went on last year when the Big Snows started, at Innerwick along by Dunbar. Ten of us from the Haddington Spinners are going as residential girls for two nights and more are coming along tomorrow to join in for the day. We are going to be dyeing sock blanks and sock yarn…this is us being the guinea pigs for a class on acid dyeing running at the Guild next year, actually, but we don’t mind at all. We’ll have the chance to dye our own yarns and fibres too.

We’re also doing some Nuno felting and if the weather holds we’re going for an expedition to a local beach to gather “interesting things” to learn to make mood boards. A brave OH is coming along with drills and woodworking expertise to help us make interesting things out the interesting things…I’m not quite sure what this will entail, but it should be interesting, no? Last year we made hedgerow spindles and spun wool fibre we’d collected from sheep fences which was dyed using local plants. It was fun too and showed you don’t have to have money to make fibre.

Margie from Moondance is coming up to join us for a bit and bringing things to sell, plus we’re having a bring and buy table on Saturday. And there’s the usual cake, wine, knitting, spinning and chatting.

55 Christmas Balls.....

2011-11-23T14:54:00.001Z

Absolutely compulsive book. You have been warned!

Singer Lotus 66k

2011-11-21T11:48:00.000Z

I went out on Saturday with the intention of having a good look round the charity shops (it's a hobby!) and if I saw any sewing machines, so much the better. Lad volunteers at a local very large charity shop on Saturday mornings and has strict instructions to text me if they've got any sewing machines in. No texts, no sewing machines, so I decided to go out to the local junk yard. I've bought two spinning wheels there in the past and it's always interesting there.Lots of interesting things but no sewing machines, unless you count an utterly wrecked Singer cabinet that's not even worth salvaging for spares, it's so rusty.

Then I spotted IT under a table. A Lotus!! There are so many old Singers availible round here in central Scotland that really, you've got to be selective but I've always had a hankering for a Lotus.

Anyway, no sliding bobbin cover plate, no top of case, bit worn on the base, electrics looked a bit ropey. I prepared myself to haggle a bit. I don't like haggling but I do like a bargain! However I didn't have to, the junkyard owner asked for £10 straight off. What's that...about $17? Oh yes, I'll have it, thanks.

Then he asked me if I was interested in a treadle machine that was on the lorry atm. The thought of my Hubby's face if I turned up with two sewing machines? Anyway, the car was full. I'll go back and look at it on Monday.......

So. I now have my old Lotus. it's a 66k, there is a manual with it and I did check the archive pictures to make sure. The serial no is F7629593 which gives me a date of 1917 and I'm assuming it comes from Kilbowie given we're only 30-40 miles away from it. It's 94 years old, which means it was made seven years before my late mum was born. My gran probably used a machine like this and she was born in 1890! I'm absolutely amazed that you can go out and buy a piece of living history like this for £10, honestly. You'd think it should be in a museum. But given that it came from a batch of 75,000 66ks made in 1917, it's not exactly rare. There were more 66ks made than any other sewing machine ever, though the lotus details were discontinued in the late 20's, apparently.

The big decal on the bed is very worn and scratched which is a pity and there's some rubbing on the front edge but the rest of the decals are good. The metal end plate (no idea of name) has a matching Lotus engraving. I never knew this existed before this weekend. It's absolutely lovely.

The sliding plate to cover the bobbin race is missing but I know a UK spares shop where I can buy one from. It came with the darning plate, a old pack of Singer needles, a tube of Singer motor grease and a pile of evil plastic bobbins. No other accessories.It has a back clamp foot and I've been reading that this means it was one of the first versions of the 66k made.

It's been electrified..the motor is a BUK one,, the same as my 99k, so I'm wildly guessing at late 50's for that? I'm assuming that it was originally a hand crank because there's no slots in the wooden base for a treadle belt. The base, btw, is very, very scruffy. No top.

Oh yes. Does she work? Well, of course. Even before I excavated the half pound of lint from the base and oiled her, she worked. I plugged her at arm's length (Crocs and thick insulated gloves) and she just whirred into action like the old pro she undoubtably is, judging from all that wear. Now she's been cleand and oiled, she's smooth as silk.

Anyway, I am thrilled. I know 66ks are extremely common and you're probably all laughing at my enthusiasm for a machine you've probably all seen hundreds of times but still, it's one I wanted and I'm happy to have it. Don't much care for peeling old electrics though so I was thinking of turning it back to hand crank or treadle. I do like treadles given that my first ever sewing machine was a treadle.

Catching up.

2011-11-18T08:23:00.004Z

It's been a while, hasn't it? I think I just got tired of blogging. Nothing wrong Chez Fishwife, I just didn't feel like doing it and then I started to feel guilty about not doing it. Which is silly when you think about it. Who needs self imposed pressure like that? So I gave myself permission to worrying about it and let things drift. Lately though I've found myself thinking about blogging again and considered starting a new blog. New slate? Then I decided that this was also silly because I've a perfectly good blog already and anyway, I like the name.

So a quick run through the last ten months.

Family.
We're all in good health apart from me. My degenerating lumbar disc has been causing problems with my balance and gait so my GP sent me in for an MRI to see what was going on. Didn't much like the MRI, I must admit, but it was useful. The DD has brought on early osteoarthritis of the spine ie excessive wear and tear. This is not good and can't continue at this rate so my GP has sent me away with strict instructions to start losing some weight pronto. We can't do much about the disc (it's not so bad atm that it needs surgery) but I can help reduce some of the mechanical impact on the spine by lightening the general load. I've been overweight to a greater or lesser degree most of my life and yes, I've read the usual warnings about how this can cause excessive wear and tear on joints but somehow, the two ends haven't connected in my brain. Oh well, they have now. I still want to be able to walk in ten years so I'm motivated to lose the weight, put it that way!Five pounds down alread, one heck of a lot more to go.

Apart from that Princess is now 10 and almost as tall as me, Lad is towering over me, turning into a fantastic rugby prop and is currently sitting his SQA Standard Grade prelims. Biology today! Hubby had a brief scare with two positive FOBt (this is the bowel cancer screening program), went in for a colonoscopy and had a polyp taken out which showed signs of pre-cancerous cells. Hubby is now fine now it's out, don't worry, but he has joined the happy band of folk who have been spared from the onset of bowel cancer, just by doing the very simple screening tests. (Note from us both...DO IT WHEN YOU GET SENT ONE, okay?)

Allotment.
It was a good year this year, not because of the weird weather but because we didn't go away for a long holiday. The kids had too many other things on so we settled for a very nice couple of weeks camping in Yorkshire. At the moment I am putting the allotment to bed for the winter. More about that another day.

Crafting.
Literally hundreds of things to report, far too many in fact. Highlights were a crafting trip to York, spinning in a Back to Back at the Royal Highland Show, buying a second hand Joy spinning wheel (lightweight, folding, portable, totally necessary for people with back problems) and also spinning in a Sheep to Shawl at the Scottish National Sheepdog Trials. This last not only had great scones, it also got me back into weaving. The shawl was a woven one and I was so taken with it I bought a 24" rigid heddle loom. I've not done a lot yet but I'm learning.

What else? Oh, I also went to the Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers Summer School. Given that I can see the venue from my attic window it would have been rude not to! I was a little disappointed not to have got onto my first choice, Spinning Exotic Fibres with Sue Macniven, but I took a great class in Knitting with Handspun run by Di Gilpin. Great event, highly recommended.

General.
So, atm we're settling in for the winter. I'm off to a spinning/knitting/dyeing retreat the weekend after next. This is the same event I was atending when the big snows started last year. I'm hoping for better weather this time round. We've got the usual over-commercial run up to Christmas to endure and then come January I'm off to York again. Apart from that, no plans as such. Except I will try to blog a little more, I promise.

Allotment: January.

2011-01-10T12:05:00.004Z

I went to the allotment for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon. First time this year. First time since just before the snows started, actually, so that makes it seven or eight weeks since I last went. That's okay though. It's down time for allotmenting just now. The soil is too cold and wet to work without damaging it, especially if you use raised beds like me. I know that traditional allotmenteers dig over their patches in early winter and allow the wind and rain to break down the clods but that can also be viewed as damaging the soil structure (unnecessary digging and weathering) and the rain leaches out soil nutrients.

I prefer to prepare the beds as they come clear at the autumn harvest. I let then stand empty for a couple of weeks for the birds to pick out any bugs they may want, then I weed the bed, especially for perennial weeds, add a layer of mulch or compost plus fertilizer and lime as required then cover with black plastic or tough weed membrane with a layer of newspaper underneath. or even old carpet if that's all I've got. This keeps the soil structure of the bed protected and the covering means that rain won't leach out the nutrients. The soil under the beds keeps warmer too and the worms and micro-organisms work away at the mulch and drag everything down into the soil. In spring all I have to do is remove the cover and plant into the bed. No hard digging work required! The warming effect of the cover means the beds are ready to go earlier than bare soil too. All in all it's a system that works very well for me.

Anyway, the allotment looked okay for the start of January, all things considered. A bit of wind and snow weight damage to the nets and supports but most of it is tucked tight and snug under the layers of plastic and mulch. The paths and pond were frozen solid but the earth under the coverings was still soft enough to poke a finger into.
The cloches over the winter spinach etc were covered in snow so not much growth in there due to low light levels. But everything is still alive, despite the -15'C temperatures we had last December. The garlic has survived, all the Savoy cabbages and kale and sprouting broccoli plants and swedes and parsnips are fine under their nets. Any brassica that wasn't netted had been pecked to death by the pigeons of course. The only crops that survive winter without the protection of at least a net are the leeks, garlic and the Jerusalem artichokes. The Jerusalem artichokes would survive the next Ice Age though, I suspect. Tough little buggers.

The other tough bugger on the allotment is the willow. Despite me trying to kill my willow stand a couple of seasons ago three stumps have survived and thrown up a really quite promising crop of basket weight willow shoots. I may take an afternoon and try to revive my rusty basket weaving skills. I love the few baskets I've woven myself. They are special, and much cherished. I've also found a couple of old battered picnic hampers in charity shops last year that need some repairs done. So the unexpected willow is not unwelcome.

There's wildlife too. The fabric gardening gloves I left in the shed have been daintily nibbled round the cuffs so I expect there's a family of babies somewhere in the shed with a cosy nest made of gardening fleece and red floral glove fabric. There are fox tracks everywhere, up and down the paths and over the beds. We used to have a vixen that lived on the allotment and every year she had a family of cubs in a den under the old railway guard van that served as the communal shed back then. It was a treat to see the baby foxes and as they kept the vermin down most effectively it was worth suffering the odd squashed lettuce. The vixen vanished a couple of years ago..dead or moved on, not sure...so it would be nice to see another fox family this year. It's a good safe place for cubs. There are certainly enough tracks at the moment.

The pond is frozen solid, despite the old ball in it to keep a hole free. And the tanks. I must take some water up for the birds on my next trip. There were lots of bird tracks in the snow but I don't know enough about them to identify tracks. Pigeons for definite, given the condition of some of the neighbours' brassicas! And I saw a robin fly into a space between the wooden pallets that surround the compost heap. Nesting? There are always lots of robins on the allotment.

Did I do any work? Yes of course. There's always something to do on the allotment, in any season. I pruned the gooseberry and other soft fruit bushes. It's a good time to do it as you can easily see the branches and what to take out. My gooseberries are feral and get out of control very easily so need a good hard prune every year. I still get more goosegogs and berries than I know what to do with. The other thing I did was to put an old dustbin over one of the rhubarb crowns. I was shocked to see forced rhubarb in the shops at £5 per kilo at the moment. £5!!! For rhubarb!

So a pleasant start to the gardening year. I hope it's the sign of a good season for us all. :)

New Year.

2011-01-07T12:44:00.003Z

Wow, one week into the New Year already? How time flies. I really must apologise for having fallen off the blogging wagon so precipitously in November. It's not that I had nothing to blog about, quite the contrary. Far too much happening, including battling The Snows. We really did have some astonishingly bad weather here in the east of Scotland from the end of November, right up till Christmas and beyond. The Fishwife family live in a decent sized town with almost everything within walking distance so we were fine for food and general supplies but I did nearly get stuck at the spinning retreat I was attending, an hours drive away up in a tiny village in the hills, when the snow first started. And the schools were closed quite a lot and Hubby was working from home mostly and really, the entire routine of life went to hell in a handcart.

It was quite fun in some ways though and certainly made for a less stressful Christmas, given that shopping was not regarded as a good enough reason to dig the car out yet again! Presents and visiting and general obligations to run around attending things got cut back quite a lot but we didn't find this made Christmas less enjoyable. Quite the opposite, actually. We did the important things and they were quite enough.

I also got an amazing amount of crafting done. I've been concentrating on smaller projects recently which means actually getting some FOs for a change. And once I'd actually got the bobbins cleared on the wheels I felt much more inspired to tackle some more unusual projects. I've done a bit of test spinning for a indie dyer called Dyeing for Yarn, who is about to start selling hand painted fibres in her Etsy shop. At the spinning retreat we did a big natural dyeing project, which deserves an entire post to itself soon, and I've started a Spinning Challenge 2011 thread on The Yarn Yard forum on Ravelry, where the idea is to challenge yourself to spin regularly every month for the next twelve months. I don't need much encouragement to be honest, but it's nice to be able to encourage other folk to do the same.

My spinning groups start back next week, actually, on Tuesday and Saturday, then I've got The Sheddite Gathering at the end of the month in York (three days of knitting, spinning and socialising in a convent in York, yeah!) and two spinning workshops in Feburary. A busy couple of months and I'm really looking forwards to them. :)

Finally, a couple of Cat Pictures. I made two felted Kitty Pi-s as Christmas presents for The Boyz. First one was for Ollie...

Then, after due reflection on sizing.......

A somewhat larger Pi for Paws...

Which was still a bit snug, but he likes it anyway.

Happy belated New Year to you all!

Paws for Thought.

2010-11-12T20:06:00.003Z

A cute cat shaped blog post tonight because I'm too tired to think of anything to say.

Ever wondered why Paws is called Paws?

And by way of comparison, Ollie's dainty little ballerina mitts...

Normal spinning services will resume here tomorrow, because it's Guild day.

Dinosaur Skull.

2010-11-11T20:01:00.003Z

In response to Paraknit's question... it's a dinosaur skull.

One of two, actually, that sit on the lower shelf facing each other. They came from a part work magazine that came out a few months ago, called Build a Dinosaur or some such. With each issue you got one part of your eventual dinosaur, the first part being the upper section of the skull. Like all these magazines the first one cost a paltry 99p or something, has the most exciting looking part and it's only after your kids have pestered you into buying the first three or four parts that you realise there's another ninety-six issues to go and they now cost £4.95 per issue. No, I have never succumbed to buying any of these rip-off items. But Hubby thought this section of the skull would make a great bit of war games scenery so he bought two. And there they sit. To the best of my knowledge they've never seen a game yet and I have no idea why they live on my spinning equipment shelves but they do look good and they're funny, so they can stay.

Yes I am a bit odd at times. And your point is.....?

Running on Empty.

2010-11-10T09:53:00.004Z

A picture to make any spinner's heart beat faster.....

Twenty-nine empty bobbins! Yup, count them, twenty-nine. Isn't that a beautiful sight? And I've got another three Louet ones carrying WIPs, two Ashford ones ditto and five more empty bobbins sitting on various other wheels that I didn't want to bother taking off just for a picture. Oh, and three on the Hatbox which is up in the attic. Forty-two bobbins in total, eek. I've never actually bothered counting them all before. I've always, like any other spinner, thought I never had enough bobbins. Now I realise I've never had enough bobbins because they've always been full of something that I've not finished making.

I've cleared this lot though, and the two Ashford ones will be plied today. I have been doing a lot of plying lately. I estimate it as at least one if not two kilometres worth, actually, which is a lot of treadling. It's a sunny day so there will even be pictures to come of the finished yarns over the next few days. But in the meantime today's picture is for the spinners among you. Lovely sight, isn't it?

Oops.

2010-11-09T14:16:00.004Z

Oops, I missed a day. Never mind, it's not like I get chucked out from NaBloPoMo after all.

I got this today, for my new-to-me Ashford Traditional.

Fourteen inches of hardened steel tapering to a point. It would make a fine weapon in a tight corner. This, if you don't realise, is a quill spindle, the part of a spinning wheel that Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on. Modern flyer wheels don't usually have them but Ashford make one to fit the Traditional. Normally these are only found on spindle wheels like a Great Wheel. I would dearly like a Great Wheel but space and finances dictate otherwise, sadly! In the meanwhile, this will do just fine and will be a talking point(!) at demos.

Off to play....

Winter is coming.

2010-11-07T20:59:00.004Z

This morning I went to watch Lad play rugby. Beautiful day with blazing sunshine but goodness knows what the temperature was. I was wearing camisole, long sleeved thick t-shirt, fleece body warmer, winter weight fleece and big winter cagoule jacket on. I was just comfortable and that was in the sunshine. Goodness knows how cold it was in the shade. Winter is definately here.

The cats knew this weeks ago. They have been seeking out the warmest places in the house and bracing themselves for the freezing weather.

Saturday.

2010-11-06T22:22:00.002Z

It's still monsoon season here. I haven't seen rain like this since....ohh, our 2008 camping holiday where about 100 slugs came to live in our tent every night. Think I'm not serious? We were overrun with slugs.

Today was an interesting day. I bought some yarn from The Yarn Yard, who had a stall at the Morningside Makers Market, I had a most productive trawl round the posh charity shops in Morningside but most unusual of all, Hubby and I went out to a party. Without kids. And...? I hear you all say? Well, this time we did not get a babysitter. We left the kids home alone. We decided that if Lad was old enough and sensible enough to take Princess on bus rides, to swimming pools, shopping and just generally gad about all over the place then he was old enough to look after her in the house for a couple of hours. So we took our phones, put a neighbouring mum on stand bye just in case he needed speedy assistance or advice and toddled off, leaving them with a mountain of snack food and Addams Family Values on DVD. And they were just fine.

I feel like I've turned a corner childcare wise. Freedom beckons! I knew technically that there had to be some sort of progression between them being born and them leaving home but it's always surprising when something like this happens and you realise that yes, they're becoming more competent at looking after themselves. It's great, really it is.

I can recommend the Morningside Makers Market btw. I've been to quite a few craft fairs in my time but the standard of the items for sale at this one was really quite superior. And if The Yarn Yard gets a permenant stall there we can all go and buy world class yarn there every month. What's not to like?

Bonfire Night.

2010-11-05T19:21:00.004Z

It's the Fifth of November, Bonfire Night. We don't say Guy Fawkes Night so much here in Scotland, we say Bonfire Night. I wonder if it's because of some old forgotten pagan fire festival at this time of year, one that I don't know about? I must Google for this one day.

Anyway, we're not actually doing anything special tonight. It is tipping it down with rain, absolute stair rods bouncing off the pavement. I know this because Hubby left the car lights on and I had to trail up the road to where it was parked and turn them off, after a neighbour phoned to tell me. Hubby is down at the pub, the cats are asleep in the warmest parts of the house and Princess and I are watching the fireworks out the window. One advantage of Chez Fishwife is that it's built on top of a hill and on three floors, so we can see lots of fireworks. From the attic we can see clear to Edinburgh and the big city centre displays, from the front we can see our own local Council display (not at all bad, really, and on a clear night we can hear the sound track too) and then up in the hills we can see the higher rockets from the smaller village displays. Given the monsoon weather it's the best seat in town, nearly, and we have home made pizza and soup to boot.

Oh, where's Lad? Out with his mates down at the fireworks? Well I'm sure he'd like to be but the poor soul has rugby training tonight. They have one of the most important matches of the season coming up on Sunday and they have to show commitment, you know. Ye Gawds. Rugby training on Bonfire Night? That's cruel!

Spinning backlog Pt1.

2010-11-04T16:57:00.004Z

I started working on clearing the spinning backlog today. I have several bobbins of long forgotten orphan singles, a few skeins of yarn needing some remedial attention (I used to badly under ply my yarns)and some singles that were just patiently waiting their turn in the plying queue. And a few bobbins of almost finished singles, just needing the last 20 or 30g of fibre spun.

This is some of it. Note the dust on the bobbins....

So today I got out the skein winder, ball winder, lazy kate and my best plying wheel, my old S10. If I've got a lot of winding to do I like to be able to half watch the telly while I'm doing it, so I set up a sort of winding station in front of the sofa. The various clamps don't fit our coffee table so I use this.

Sharp eyed people will detect that this is one of these wooden stepping stools you can buy for £10 or so from Ikea. Very useful item around the house but I doubt even the Ikea designers thought of doing this with it. Ideal though, perfect height for the sofa, you can re spin straight off the skein into the wheel and you can move the whole assembly round to wherever you want it. The little Lazy Kate is a Haldane one btw. It's untensioned but it can take any of my huge assortment of bobbins and it's very compact and stable.

I decided to start with the under spun skeins, as these don't take long to make good if you can unwind the skein straight to the orifice of the wheel and onto the bobbin, adding that crucial extra bit of twist as you go. ???? Well, here's a really bad photo but it shows what I mean.

On the right is the under plied yarn. You can see the plying is loose but more importantly the fibres of the singles are not in alignment along the length of the yarn. This yarn has been washed btw, so it's not going to get any better than this on its own. On the left is the same yarn after a tiny bit more twist has been added. You can see the fibres now run straight along the length of the yarn. This is what you want. I had four under plied skeins I wanted to add a little more twist to so I did this, but they're still on the bobbins awaiting skeining so not worth photographing just yet.

Then I made a tactical error and started plying some camel/silk singles I had been carefully ignoring for a year or so. You can see them on the ball winder above. They are skinny so there is a lot of yardage in that one centre pull ball and I decided to ply both ends of the ball together. Yes, of course this works....it's a neat trick to know and as long as you put your thumb into the centre of the ball as it comes off the ball winder the ball doesn't collapse and tangle. But of course, you can't take your thumb out while you're plying, nope. You're stuck. You can't go to the loo or answer the door or anything. You've just got to keep plying til you finish. All 1200 yards of it. It takes a loooong time to ply 1200 yards of yarn, did you know?

More tomorrow.

UFO Sightings.

2010-11-03T11:04:00.006Z

I might as well use NaBloPoMo to do something useful, so as I've been sorting out the spinning and knitting supplies I also decided to round up all my UFOs and put up the (bi)annual Knitting List of Shame. Some of these articles have been in the UFO pile for a year or two so I expect you'll have seen some of them before, sigh. I'm sure you understand how it can happen though.

I dredged my most recent past list up from November 6th 2008.

1)Plain vanilla socks in Regia Kaffe Fassett . 95% finished, will complete this week. Finished long ago.

2) Viveka in Rowan Soft Lux Amythyst. 25% done but really like this one so WIP. No change here.

3) Brigitta in Rowan Soft Tweed Twig. 35% complete. Not sure about this one. It may be working out small but I can't tell untill I get to the armholes. Horrible. Frogged it. Yarn now being used in entirely different UFO.

4) Cold Weather Corset in Noro Iro. 80% done and intend to finish it. Eventually.

5) Tahoe in purple DB Cathay. Hate this and it's heading for the frog pond. The Cathay is meant to be knitted at a looser than usual gauge then blocked to size. To me it just looks cheap and skanky, as if my gauge was off or I used the wrong yarn. Frogged.

6) Kismet from Rowan mag No (???) , in khaki Linen Drape. I've finished 60% of this, as in the back and front but have laid it aside as it's a summer sweater. I'll definately finish this one. Linen Drape is gorgeous. I have to finish it anyway...it's not listed on Ravelry yet, so this is my chance to be the lead link picture, lol. Finished, sewn up, just needs the ends darned in and blocked. It's been like that for a few months now.

7) Forest Canopy in a heavy blue silk 2ply I bought at Woolfest from Knitwitches .

I like this and it was my holiday knitting (until I got the wheel) but I was having real trouble with it in the poor light of an evening campsite and rather put myself off it. It's looking lovely though and I'll get going again with it. No change. Can't bear to frog it though.

8) Silk Tweed Sweater in dark raspberry Summer Tweed. 60% done, as in the body is done up to the front neckline. I hate the neckline though and have reknitted it three times and it's still not right. I want a Summer Tweed sweater though and most of the rest of this is okay so I feel it's worth at least one more shot. Finished the knitting, just needs sewn up.

9) A single sock in something I really can't remember, except it was by The Natural Dye Studio. This is nice and I'll make a point of putting the other one in the car to knit on in these five minute slots when I'm waiting around for kids. When I've found the other ball of the yarn, of course..... Long gone. I think I lost the first sock eventually, then found the yarn. I p/hopped the yarn just to put an end to the misery.

What else has appeared since then? Well, I've actually knitted and finished quite a lot of items but not gained many UFOs, which is a relief. I've got a pair of socks on the needles at the moment but they're my car knitting so don't really count as a UFO. Similarly I'm knitting a blanket but as it's progressing at a slow but steady rate of a 12" square per week that's not really a UFO either, is it? So really, I've only got one new item in the UFO pile.

10)Mr Greenjeans from Knitty, Fall 2007.

I've almost finished the first sleeve of this and as it's knitted top down aand all in one, that means only one sleeve and the front bands to knit, really. And no painful sewing up to do. It's cardigan weather now too so I am motivated. I have pulled it's basket out and placed it firmly on the sofa. I'm intending to finish it before I cast on anything else. Honestly!

The rest of the UFOs have been gathered together in another basket so at least I don't have the excuse of not being able to find them any more. Really though given that two of them only need some sewing up and blocking it is pretty shameful. But I can't find it in myself to think further than Mr Greenjeans and something new to cast on.

Tomorrow (or soon) I'll give you the Spinning List of Shame, or what's on the bobbins and has been for months. And I have a lot of bobbins, oops.

Spinning Group.

2010-11-02T20:46:00.003Z

Tuesday is Spinning Group Day. I've been a member of the Haddington Spinners for some years now, ever since I went along to one of their Open Days a few years ago out of curiosity, just to have a wee look. Really, that day was a watershed day in my life. I had never seen a spinning wheel close up, I'd never seen anyone spin, I had no clue at all about how it worked or how yarn was made or fibre types or anything. I went for an hour, just for something to do that would get me out the house and away from the kids on a rainy Saturday. They practically had to sweep me out with the rubbish five hours later. Actually, I've never really left.

That day I bought a spindle, fibre and a book. Two weeks later, after a Google powered crash course in spinning wheels, I bought my first wheel off Ebay, an elderly Louet S10 with dodgy painted artwork and a skeinwinder. Truly the Spinning Gods smiled on me that day because it was a fabulous old wheel, ideal for a beginner and in perfect working order. I told my Hubby that it made sense to buy a second hand wheel as if I didn't take to spinning then I could resell it for not much of a loss. He agreed, but told me much later he'd privately known the wheel would never leave because spinning was so obviously "one of my things". He was right. I've still got the Louet and it's been joined by several other wheels. I think the highest number of wheels I've had in this house at any one time was eleven, but to be fair only seven of them actually belonged to me!

So yes, that Open Day had quite a profound effect on me. If people ask what hobbies I have I don't say "I spin." I say "I am a spinner." I don't just spin, I'm interested in the science both of the wheels and the way spinning works, the history of it all, the fibres, the techniques, the ways you can work with colours when spinning. There is an awful lot more to it that just doing the spinning bit and I'm interested in it all. And the more I learn, the more I realise what a vast topic it really is. I've been doing this for years now and really, I hardly know anything compared to how much more there is out there. And I used to think I was a "not bad" spinner but over the last year or so I've begun to realise I've barely begun. That isn't to say I'm bad, just that there's so much more.

Oh well, it's not like it's something I'll get too old to do, unless my hands cease to function. I just wish I'd started earlier, you know? But...and this is what prompted this blog post....someone asked me today how long I'd been spinning and I had to confess I can't remember now when that Open Day actually was. Six years ago? Seven? Eight? There is nothing else I can match the date up to in my memory. I only know there was a half forgotten and distant time without spinning, then the Open Day and after that I was A Spinner. Just like that.

Blogging for November.

2010-11-01T17:03:00.004Z

I've been awol for a while now, haven't I? Sorry. Been busy. As in really busy. Since I started on these new drugs I've been getting at least halfway back into my old groove again and getting so much more done than say this last year. More things done means more to blog about but also means less time to do the blogging, no? Oh well.

However it's November and that means it's NaBloPoMo.I've done this before so it seems like a perfect opportunity for me to do some catch up blogging, as I'm sure you'll be delighted to hear. What have I been up to? Well, a lot of spinning and knitting, astonishingly, lots of work down the allotment, three birthdays and even some home improvements, though I must admit my back isn't up to shinning up and down ladders any more so not quite as much DIY as I would have liked. Oh yes, and there is the saga of the apples too.

First off though, I bought a new spinning wheel. Yes, another one. I can hear you all laughing from here, ho ho. Get Away. It was a deliberate planned purchase, not like some of the others. I decided that I really needed to own an Ashford Traditional, both for doing some basic teaching and also for when I'm taking a class myself. Despite all the wheels I own I don't really have one good simple workhorse that can do a good range of types of spinning. You can't go far wrong with a Traditional so I decided to keep my eyes open for a good bargain second hand one. At the same time I was due to spin at a local Scottish Day event and was dithering about which wheel I owned that would look most Scottish, which most of them don't. So when I saw this wheel on Ebay, I thought it looked ideal for a Scottish Day, despite coming from New Zealand.

(Pictures from the Ebay auction, but it's MY wheel now. I don't think the seller will mind.)

I fell in love with it instantly. I bid (quite a bit more than I would for a basic Traddy, must admit) and I won, at a remarkably fair price and a lot lower than I was prepared to pay. It arrived, I put it together, I spun on it. And loved it. Old Ashfords go on forever but this one is a particularly sweet spinner. And I just loved the painting on it, with the clever Celtic twirls that fit the wheel perfectly and the affectionately drawn fibre animals. (There is a camel, a goat, an alpaca and a cotton boll on one side, two sleepy sheep and two crazed rabbits on the other.) My favourites are the rabbits, hurtling at top speed round the rear of the drive wheel. Lovely, and full of character. I've bought it a four speed sliding hook flyer for taking classes and really, it's become my favourite wheel.

But it gets better.Today I got a PM from a spinner on Ravelry. She'd read a description of my 70's painted Tradtional and it sounded familiar. Could it be the same wheel that she had owned some years previously, and which she'd painted? I linked her to a picture and waited with bated breath. I love wheels with character and history and I must admit I'd wondered about the spinner who'd owned this wheel before me. She must have loved it very much to lavish so much attention on it after all. It is an old wheel, dating from the mid 70's, thus 35 years or so old. It was entirely possible that the owner had died, even, given the Ebay seller appeared to be some sort of curio dealer.

But no. Step forwards the previous owner but one, Skyskeiner, who had indeed painted her/my wheel. She had bought it second hand about 14 years ago, then later sold it to a spinner in Cornwall. Skyskeiner is "into gardening, fruit growing, spinning and spinning wheels", lol. It say so on her blog. I've read her blog in the past! She's read mine! And she told me all about how she'd painted the wheel, and what had inspired the lovely paintings of animals.

I'm really pleased she found me and told me more about our lovely old Traddy. She's pleased to see it again, and to know it's found a good home where it's loved and cherished. Isn't the world a small place? Really, it's made my day.

Ikea Cats.

2010-09-13T08:00:00.005Z

This advert went live on UK TV this past weekend....(it's better if you click twice on these to go to YouTube and get the full screen effect.)

And there is a companion "Making of..." video.

The makers reckon it's going to make the Top Ten YouTube hits of whenever and also sweep through Blogland. They could well be right!

"What I Did on my Holidays."

2010-08-19T14:30:00.004Z

First day of term and the kids have gone back to school. Yeah!!!!

Traditionally in UK schools the teachers always set a "What I Did on my Holidays" essay when the kids go back to school. I'm not going to write this, but I'd like to show you all a video of one of the things we have to do regularly on our camping holidays which is to set up our big Conway Camargue trailer tent. This video surfaced on a tape we thought we'd lost so it's about four years old. The kids you can see (occasionally) helping are Lad and Princess. The reason that there are cars crossing in front of the camcorder is because we had to set it up on the opposite side of one of the campsite roads. Sorry.

The whole process usually takes a good hour or so, normally. But at least it wasn't raining!

Knit Camp Marketplace.

2010-08-16T12:00:00.013Z

I went to the Marketplace at Stirling Knit Camp on Friday. There had been a lot of talk on Ravelry and elsewhere about the shambolic disorganisation that was the hall mark of this event but I decided that I was going to go to support the vendors of the Marketplace anyway.

I have to say at this point I did encounter several small examples of the general disorganisation myself. I had pre ordered my Marketplace two day ticket back in April but had never been sent a confirmation...got that one sorted out online in the end though. There was practically no signage to the event on Stirling Campus..if it hadn't been for the fact my OH works in the Pathfoot Building I'd have had no idea where to go on campus. There were no Goody Bags when I arrived...I did go back and get one later but really, it was barely worth the effort given that it contained mostly advertising literature and Stirling University pens, plus two small and not very interesting balls of yarn. The two areas of the Marketplace were several corridors and a steep flight of steps apart with no direction signs between them.....though I belive some of the vendors made their own signs and pinned then up. No Hall of Fame either.

Worst bit though was just after I arrived I was talking to one of the vendors I know and Jo herself came up with some piece of paperwork. I'm a friendly soul and she looked a bit grey round the edges so I smiled and said hello. She looked me up and down then turned on her heel and walked away without so much as a nod or a word. Was I annoyed? Yes. Was it my Ravelry badge that pissed her off? Who knows. I will say however it was bloody rude of her and totaly unprofessional behaviour by an event organiser. You just don't blow off the paying punters like that. At the very least you fix a plastic smile on your face and say "Nice to see you...hope you enjoy yourself!" two or three hundred times over the course of a day until your teeth ache. No?

Anyway, that's my moan. Nuff said. Lets get on with the rest of the day. The Marketplace was GREAT. There were lots of stalls with some totally fabulous things to buy, belive me. Yes, I did buy one or two things!

70% Baby Alpaca 30% Silk laceweight, from Abstract Cat. This was her first big show and I think she's a seller to watch in the future. Lovely stuff.

Superwash Blue Faced Leicester, from Artist's Palette Yarns.

Hand dyed Kid Mohair tops, from Freyalyn's Fibres. I've not spun mohair from tops before so am looking forwards to this.

I don't normally go to wool shows with "honey stirrer, pastry brush & wooden spoon" at the top of my shopping list but you know...when you see such things complete with pictures of cute sheep, you've just got to have them. From Fire & Fibre.

A giant ball of orange fibre, from Woolfish. She very kindly donated this to me to use when I'm teaching and demonstrating. I go through a lot of fibre doing this so it's a very welcome gift. The next Woolfish/St Abbs Festival is on Monday 30th August at St Abbs btw. Small but perfectly formed. I must try to get down there for a couple of hours.

Dido shawl pattern by Asa Tricosa, from the p/hop stand.

Miscellaneous items. Clockwise from top left...

Long cords for my Denise Interchangables from Jamie Possum. They're the new UK dealers for Denise needles and you can get all sorts of spares from them.

Stitch markers from Wibbo's Works, given to me by my friend Liz.

Sheep stitch marker from Atomic Knitting.

Washable ceramic buttons by Incomparable Buttons.

Silver ball earrings from Northern Lace Too.

Shawl pin and wooden buttons from Textile Garden. This last was an absolutely fabulous stand, with a vast selection of treasures on sale. Some people were getting really carried away with the credit cards here!

A copy of Issue One of the new UK spinning magazine Yarn Maker. This was literally hot off the press...it had only been printed in the last couple of days and the first copies were either sent out to advance subscribers or to the Northern Lace Too stand at the Marketplace. If you're a spinner in the UK I do urge you to buy and support this magazine. It's well written and beautifully laid out, full of interesting articles.

Finally, I didn't buy this but would like to mention it. This is a flyer from a very old Haldane Orkney that belongs to my spinning group, the Haddington Spinners. The flyer was completely knackered and the bobbin in bits and we really thought that the old wheel was only good for spares...then we decided as a last resort to show the flyer to the woodworking geniuses at Woodland Turnery. I handed it in at Woolfest and picked it up from them on Friday. Result....the mended flyer is as good as new and can you tell which is the new bobbin which was made by them? No, thought not. So the old Haldane is back in business and all for the very modest sum of £15.95. I was so pleased by this I promptly gave them the drive wheel of another damaged wheel to mend lol. I can set up and adjust wheels and even do some basic repairs but for expert help, go to Joan & Clive.

Finally I'll say again, I really enjoyed my day at the Marketplace. The shopping was excellent (far too excellent!) and I had the chance too meet up and chat with a lot of old friends including The Yarn Yard, Woolly Wormhead and Knitting on the Green. The chat and gossip is the best part of these events, really!

Da Boyz spent their day at home, in a sunbeam. Priorities...

Because I can....

2010-08-11T15:37:00.001Z

Found this on Ravelry. I think I'm going to have to try it....

General news and gossip.

2010-08-09T09:22:00.003Z

Update?

The house is a swamp....eight loads of washing, canvas and camping equipment everywhere. All waiting to be cleaned or hung up or folded or put away. After a month of absence every surface is dusty or covered in cat hair or both. The kitchen and bathroom both need cleaned as a matter of some urgency. And we are close to running out of toilet rolls and bin bags, not to mention that I've not quite got into a shopping routine again yet so there are erratic gaps in domestic supplies. And I haven't even opened up the trailer tent to unpack it.

Of course I have been back for three days so I should have been able to deal with all the above. Nope. I've been gardening. Much more interesting. Princess and I went up on Saturday for three hours of picking (her) and weeding (me) and I was up again on Sunday for another three hours. My sister joined me yesterday so that I could "put her to work" but I knew she wasn't serious when she turned up in white trousers and strappy sandles, hoho. As revenge, I put her to picking blackcurrants. Do blackcurrant stains come out of white chino fabric?

Anyway, quite a lot of the allotment is looking a whole lot better. "Coarse" weeding, when you rip out practically everything, is fast and dirty but effective. I have cleared the top end totally and there's only three more beds that urgently need attention in order that the actual crop plants in them have a chance to grow. I've harvested quite a lot too (fortunately several of my neighbours actually like courgettes). There is still a lot of work to do but I'm confident that three or four more sessions will get it up to speed again. It just shows though the difference it makes when you can go up two or three times a week and keep on top of things, and when you have to leave long gaps between sessions. My friend Jean always bemoans the fact that her vegetable gardening is not as succesful as mine but I'm absolutely certain that's only due to her not being able to visit her plot as much as I do. If she was visiting her garden three times a week, every week, it would be a showcase dripping with produce, I'm sure of it.

Knitting? Nope, none to report. It's still all packed in the trailer tent. I am however going to the Ravelry Weekend at Stirling on Friday, to meet up with a few friends and (ahem) maybe have a look round the stalls. I did intend to book classes at KnitCamp too and even got so far as to fill in the booking form but didn't in the end because our own family holiday was so close. Now I'm glad I didn't. The classes I wanted to book and the tutors I wanted to meet vanished off the list long ago, and there seems to be some worrying last minute glitches developing in the program, but no-one seems to know what's happening and the organiser has gone to ground. Hopefully her silence means she's working on the glitches but no-one seems to really know. It's worrying. I have several friends that have taken holiday time and invested a lot of money in classes and accomodation for this week and I hope things work out for them. The worst that can happen to me is that I'll loose £10 on a two day weekend ticket, but I'm pretty sure the Ravelry Market won't be affected.

I won't be going on Saturday as originally planned though. I realised that the Broughton Gathering is on the following Saturday and it's a bit much to take two full Saturdays off in a row. I've also found out that Jess and Casey from Ravelry are having a meet-up in Edinburgh that afternoon so guess where I'm going? Even Hubby approves of this....he's got no interest in knitting but he highly approves of Ravelry as a site and uses it frequently as an example of excellent use of site design in his lectures in Media Studies. So I have a mission to convey this opinion to Casey, lol.

Jungle?

2010-08-07T07:52:00.009Z

Allotment in early July, just before I went on holiday.

Yesterday....

I think I need to do a bit of serious weeding, don't you? However, there are some florishing (and less weedy) bits.

Sweetcorn bed.

Courgettes and squash, with broad beans behind.

Tomatoes. This last was a bit of a gamble, actually, as the plants were a bit small to go out just then I thought. Hence the enviromesh cage. Looking pretty good though.

I was only up for an hour to pick and see how things were so had to struggle with an overwhelming desire to start tidying the place up. (I do not get this urge with housework, ever.) There was a lot of produce ready to harvest though, far too much. I was feeling a bit frenzied about it actually! I thought my sister would have picked x5 as much, but instead there was all this plenty going to waste, argh. I concentrated on taking what I needed immediately however and promised myself I'd go and start the weeding today and Sunday. And take Princess...there are about 10lbs of blackcurrants on one bush alone, and she's got nimble little fingers.

Peas, broad beans, purple french beans, raspberries, lettuce, chives, white and black currants, potatoes and (ahem) some of the many courgettes.

Home.

2010-08-06T09:13:00.003Z

Got back home yesterday, after the usual loooooong, tedious drive up from Portsmouth. Made worse and longer by roadworks, two delays caused by accidents up ahead and of course the speed restrictions on towing a trailer. Still, it was otherwise uneventful.

Good holiday. I'll blog about it all when I get the pictures uploaded. There's even some knitting content but as usual, I woefully overestimated the amount of knitting and spinning time I'd have and took far too much with me. Still, better than running out of yarn.

I wasn't entirely looking forwards to this very long camping trip actually because of the increasing pain and mobility problems I've been having with the degenerating disc in my back, but two weeks before I went I saw a new GP and she didn't hesitate, just signed me up for a new painkiller regime that made the previous GP's efforts look like "take two asprin...". Five days later I was skipping around like an elderly lambkin mostly pain free....... well worth the side effects of almost permenant nausea and occasional foul headache. Seven weeks later the headaches have mostly gone as the drugs bed in, but the nausea hasn't. Think 24/7 morning sickness. It quite put me off the nice holiday food, which was a pain , (and also NO alcohol)but as a bonus I've lost 20lbs in 7 weeks, which can't but help with the mobility problems all by itself. To every cloud and all that...? I'm off to see the doc again next week and I'm hoping I can continue with the same regime. I wouldn't recommend it as a diet of choice however!

Anyway, today is an unpacking day. I have eight loads of washing to do which is not bad at all given that it includes the towels and bedding from a month of camping plus a weeks worth of clothes. Plus a shopping trip to Tesco/Lidl and a "shopping" trip to the allotment, just to stock up on fresh veg and fruit and see what's what. My sister and brother in law have been up twice a week to harvest things and my non-cooking sister has even made some jam (!!!!) but neither of them are gardeners of any sort so no work or weeding will have been done and the allotment will be looking a bit shaggy, I expect.

Melting.

2010-07-09T16:10:00.002Z

It's 36'C and sunny here in Arnhem. I'm Scottish. I don't do 36'C, not for three days on the trot so far and set to last till next Tuesday when it goes down to a more civillised (but still too hot) mid twenties. It's too hot to knit, to spin, to sightsee, to cycle, to sit outside or inside the tent, to eat. I am melting. And people actually go on holiday in search of weather like this???????

Farewell and enjoy the view.

2010-07-04T08:19:00.006Z

Time has run out...I'm off on holiday tomorrow. We're going to Europe...the Netherlands, Belgium and France...for a month of camping in the old trailer tent.

I did intend to take some photos of What I Did at Woolfest but really, I've been too busy packing and at the allotment. So instead (and especially for Jean) here's some pictures of the allotment instead.

Overview for July.

Different crops...sweetcorn (Yes, in Scotland!) and the courgette/squash bed behind. I grow these through black membrane to suppress the weeds and to keep the soil as warm as possible. The hose arrangement is "leaky" semi-permeable hose...you couple the main hose up to it and the bed gets watered at base level. Otherwise with courgettes and sweetcorn a lot of sprayed on water would get trapped on the foliage and wasted.

Yellow onions, with strawberries and potatoes behind.

Broad beans.

Gooseberries and apples. This is a family apple tree, with three varieties grafted onto one trunk. It cost me 50p at Woolworths a few years ago!

Crops...this is the first of the early garlic. It's been a good year for garlic. It likes a bit of sun.

New potatoes International Kidney, otherwise known as Jersey Royals if you grow them in Jersey. Plus two varieties of strawberry.

Red hairless gooseberries. They still have spines on the plant though.

I do sometimes get asked if I grow anything other than fruit and veg on the allotment. Well yes, I do have some flowers but they're more tucked into corners than grown as a focus. Still they do provide some colour.

Roses. This was a nameless one out of the garden centre reduced to clear box.

Clematis...a Montana species. This covers the trellis between the end of my allotment and the communal barbecue area.

Volunteer poppies. I pull up the common red ones but I like these ones so much I spare them. They're very prolific however so I may have to start culling them soon!

Californian Poppies. These also self seed everywhere but the hover flies and bees love them, so they're useful.

Not exactly a flower but a self seeded onion. I let these stay if they're not in an inconvenient place because they're fun to look at. This is a Welsh Bunching Onion.

The Shed, just to show you that I do tidy it up sometimes. Yes, these are slug pellets on the shelf at the back. I'm mostly an organic gardener but I'm also a pragmatic one.

And finally, everyone needs to end a long blog post with a picture of a Cute Animal. This is a Ouessant lamb that was the most popular sheep at Woolfest...it's about the size of a small cat. It's being hand reared and will live with a small flock on a childrens zoo down south somewhere. Ouessants are true miniature sheep, not dwarves.

Allotment update.

2010-06-25T18:44:00.003Z

May....

June....

Have been knitting, have been spinning but there's too little time and too much to do to feel like blogging. Summer is for gardening, really. I'me off to Woolfest tomorrow though. Head Prefect on the Guild bus as usual so I'll see some of you there, I hope? Might even manage to blog and tell you about it.

But next week even the allotment will have to take second place. I'll be packing for the big summer camping trip because we're off to the Netherlands, Belgium, Paris and Normandy for four weeks in the trailer tent. The poor allotment will get weedy and neglected and my sister will get to pick all the strawberries, bah. No, my sister does not do the weeding thing. She does cat sitting and hoovering but gardening is not one of her stronger points.

Oh, the cats? They are enjoying the summer too.

Allotment year.

2010-04-16T11:35:00.004Z

January....

Feburary...

March...

Yesterday...

Yes, I have been busy. It's looking good though, don't you think? Now all I have to do is wait for it all to grow a bit.

Too Many Wheels.

2010-03-24T09:21:00.003Z

That's it. I now officially have Too Many Wheels. Also, I want to buy a set of wool combs and they're far too expensive for my current equipment budget so I've decided to sell a couple of wheels to raise the money for combs.

First wheel up for sale is my Frank Herring Saxony wheel. Complete wih six bobbins, original orifice hook, on-board Lazy Kate and instructions for both use and assembly. Can be used wit either Scotch Tension or double drive.

And the completely refurbished Ashford Mk1 Traveller that I spoke about recently. (This is the "before" picture, I hasten to add. It's a lot cleaner now.) Three bobbins and an on-board Lazy Kate. Scotch Tension.

I'm currently in the process of taking pictures and writing up a description of each before I put them on Ebay next week. Might put them on Ravelry too. I just wanted to give you, my faithful readers, the chance to express any interest in either wheel first.

Natural Gas Commercial

2010-03-15T18:38:00.004Z

Shamelessly swiped from glittyknittykitty's blog...

I want that shower.

Scrap Swap.

2010-03-07T17:26:00.006Z

I took part in a fun little swap over on the UK Spinners Forum on Ravelry.

Basically 20 or so of us sent in 100g or 200g of painted wool tops to a central coordinator, she stripped them down into 10g or so sections and then you were sent the same weight of fibre back of mixed short sections.

There were some fantastic colour combinations in the scraps.

Half the fun of this sort of swap is to see what other people do with their scraps. Some folk have opted to separate out colour families or divide the scraps into cool and hot colours, then spin the resultant piles. Some folk have drum carded their scraps into amazing multicoloured batts. And the spinning techniques have varied too. Singles, thick or thin or both, two ply, three ply, Navaho, coiled yarns...endless combinations.

I opted to spin what someone else called a "pudding yarn". I tore the scraps down even further into finger length sections, drafted them out a bit then spun them in a totally random sequence.

This was spun on my old Louet S10. Every time I get out my Old Man Louet I think that if I was made to have only one wheel he would be it. First wheel and still favourite, lol.

When plied this should end up about aran weight so I was thinking of making another Liesl with it to wear to spinning demos. But of course there's only a couple of hundred grams here and I'll need 700 yards or so, or 400g+ of fibre. So, yup. I'll have to do the next Scrap Swap (or two) as well.

Fun to spin. I'm not going to Navaho ply it though. I'll spin a second bobbin with the scraps from the next swap and ply the two bobbins together into one crazed barber pole yarn of many colours.

Madonna of the Yarnwinder.

2010-03-01T17:41:00.006Z

I was sort of half listening to the news on the radio today when the phrase "Madonna of the Yarn Winder" caught my ear. Eh? So I went and Googled for it and found it's a painting. Really!

The news article, btw, was about the prosecution of the gang that had stolen the above from Drumlanrig Castle a few years ago. Story here, for anyone interested.

But. Really. I knew there was a Knitting Madonna..

(Detail from 'Visit of the Angel', from the right wing of the Buxtehude Altar. 1400 - 1410. Meister Bertram von Minden (1340 - 1414))

.. fact there's more than one..

(The Holy Family ca. 1345 Ambrogio Lorenzetti of Sienna (1290 - 1348))

...but this was the first I'd heard of a possibly spinning Madonna. Because, bah to the "yarnwinder" bit, that's a niddy-noddy the Baby Jesus has in his little mitts.

So I went looking..

(Madonna with the Child 1570s. Oil on wood, 72 x 52 cm The Hermitage, St. Petersburg)

I don't know why I find the thought of a spinning Madonna faintly amusing, but I do. The expressions on the first and last Madonnas' faces are priceless, actually. As are their hands, poised for a fast removal of spinning equipment from possibly sticky hands and drool, lol.

Olympic Liesl #2.

2010-02-27T22:42:00.002Z

Liesl. Finished and blocking. Used almost exactly seven balls of Noro Kureyon 157 for a size 46". Yarn obtained from the York p/hop Yarn Swap.

Modifications.....left out purl ridges in main body and sleeves, added four rows of reverse stocking stitch to neckline, used a purl cast off at sleeves and lower body to give a rolled edge finish. No buttons. I'll never wear it buttoned up so I'm not going to rush off to look for buttons. If some come along one day, that's fine.

I enjoyed knitting this. I've never knitted an entire adult sized garment in two weeks before and I've always struggled a bit with lacy stitch pattens. This was such a nicely written pattern though that I got past my mental block about actually having to count while knitting. I'm very happy with it.

Olympic Liesl.

2010-02-26T14:07:00.005Z

I only have a few rows to go on the second sleeve, plus sewing in the ends, so I'm pretty confident about finishing my Olympic Liesl in time.

Here's a picture of where I was last night...rubbish picture with colour photo shopped to death because it's just about impossible to get a straightforward picture of anything in the grey gloom that passes for daylight here at the moment.

I do like the way that the colour sequence looks very different between the yoke with purl rows, the body and the smaller circumference sleeves. It's not been at all difficult keeping the colour sequence running correctly btw. Kureyon is very easy to spit-splice and as long as you don't mind shuffling the order of the balls around a bit and starting in the middle of a ball occasionally it works out fine. Incidentally it does match up across the front...it's just that I didn't lap the fronts over very neatly for the photo.

Some thoughts on this cardigan. Firstly I don't like the neckline. I opted for the lower neckline and it's just too loose and gappy, plus the weight of the yarn is stretching it. I will finish it all up, including blocking and the buttons then have a think about tightening the neck up. This will probably involve a crochet hook, bah. Don't much like crochet.

Secondly, the sleeves are pretty snug. This is of course because the sleeve is designed to preserve the 12 stitch repeat of the feather and fan pattern and so the sleeve size is not necessarily proportional to the exact size of body you are knitting. But it's worth keeping in mind. I think going up a needle size might work here, or adding a few plain stitches under the arm. In my case the sleeve is on the edge of okay and I'm hoping blocking will give me an inch more.

Fun knit though. Easy, well written pattern, very economical on yarn, minimal finishing. I may make another if I can find something suitable in plain black aran yarn with a bit of drape.

One for the Wheel Geeks.

2010-02-24T09:29:00.014Z

Okay, my beloved fellow wheel geeks, something interesting for you today.

Mystery wheel...

Is it a Haldane Orkney, like this one I had a couple of years ago?

Is it an Ashford Traveller? (First picture swiped from the web, second picture from the Guild wheel down in the utility room.)

I tell you, I looked and puzzled. Table of a Traveller, uprights of an Orkney, mother of all and maidens similar to an Orkney, flyer and bobbins clearly Ashford. But it all fitted together with good clearances. So what is it??? Hybrid, made from parts of two wheels? Something different altogether?

Well, after much hunting round the net it turns out to be a Mark 1 Ashford Traveller, made between 1977 and 1979. I did not even know there was such a thing. I thought the standard Traveller had been around in the same form forever. But no, right there on the truly impressive New Zealand Spinning Wheel Index there is a picture, about half way down the page.

Bingo....possibly the only picture of a Mk 1 out there on the web. Till today.

Thoughts though. I still think it looks part Haldane Orkney, especially the upright/MofA and especially one of the maiden adjustments. Lookie....

Haldane Orkney....

Mk 1 Ashford Traveller.

The top of the maiden turns and there is a screw adjustment system inside that tensions the drive band as it stretches with age. Utterly unlike the modern Ashford system of tilting the whole mother of all to tension the drive band.

So... when was the Orkney first produced? Around or after 1979-ish? Anyone know? And did Mr Haldane borrow a few design features from the Mk1, or was it the other way round? The Mk1 almost seems like a common parent, doesn't it? I wish Haldane hadn't gone all quiet about the history of their spinning wheels since they stopped making them.

I do like spinning wheels. All of them, though some I like better than others. I have preferences as to design, material, looks...I don't necessarily prefer old over new or any one material over another, but some spinning wheels just grab my interest and some are terribly ho-hum. I have to admit the two most common Ashfords, the Traditional and the Traveller, both leave me cold as to looks. I hate the flyer and mother of all position on both. Ugly. But they are both amazingly good wheels as to function, utterly reliable, easy to use, sturdy and have lots of accessories available. Good wheels and ones I recommend all the time. But I've never wanted one, oh no.

But a Mark 1 Traveller is a wee bit special. Different. And it hasn't got that offset mother of all either. I quite like this wheel. Also, I feel sad for it. It has a lot of rust, paint dribbled on it, it needs a good dust and oil and the footman connector is broken but you know what? I bodged up a footman connector last night, put some oil on the crucial points, put a string drive band on it and it spins like a dream. Judging by the dirt layers, the squeaks and the filthy, mouldering yarn I pulled off the bobbins no-one has spun on that wheel for the last twenty years or so but ...that wheel is a real old trouper, a class act. I tell you, it's possibly the only Ashford I've ever really wanted to own.

Got to give it back though. (It belongs to a friend who I'm trying to lure along to The Spinners.) Eventually. Once I've cleaned it up. And spun a bobbin or two on it. And taken it round to meet my other wheels. Might even take it to spinning group next week....

Liesl and The Herbs.

2010-02-17T09:55:00.005Z

More allotment.

This is Bed M1(a) when I'm writing up my allotment notes. Yes I'm anal enough to have kept a yearly Plotter's Diary for the thirteen years I've run this allotment. The science training must have stuck somehow. And as I have twenty-six raised beds of various sizes on the allotment it's easiest to number them. M1(a) means Main Plot Bed One, and as a few years ago I split this into two shorter beds I now have M1(a) and M1(b). These two beds are both 4' wide by 8' long so are still decent sized beds but easier to fit into the crop rotation. I've got eleven this size, plus a couple of smaller ones and thirteen 4'x 16' ones if anyone is interested.

M1(a) used to be the main herb bed but it got taken over by two very thuggish lemon verbena bushes, a couple of dozen feverfew seedlings and a generous sprinkle of couch grass so really, it was due for a good clear out.

The three tiny survivors up the top end are a couple of oregano plants and a small patch of chives. I used to have a chive border right round this bed but the recent hard frosts have killed most of it off.

It's a nice sheltered bed (it's next to the hut) so I decided to put my collection of ancient cold frames on it this year. Scruffy? These all came out of various neighbours' skips, must admit. I don't bother using the lids as they just blow off in the windy allotment. The environmesh is just as effective and I don't have to vent or water the frames in summer. I'll let the soil settle here for a couple of weeks, skim off any new weeds and plant up some early carrots and salads in these.

Found some real treasure when I was digging this bed. Yes, two minuscule potatoes. Normally when I find rogue potatoes I roll my eyes at not digging out the potato crop properly last year, as rogue leftovers harbour disease. But these are not any old potatoes. These are Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy potatoes...you can tell by the two-colour mottling on the skins.

I haven't grown this variety in what...eight years? Not since the whole lot got harvested and eaten by mistake by one of my summer plot-sitters. They are special spuds though. The variety is a really old one, dating from 1899 and it is (or was) the only tri-coloured (red and blue-black mottling on a white skin) potato variety in existence. It was thought lost for many decades until a few years back when a a handful of tubers were found in Yetholm in the Scottish Borders, growing in a compost heap. The tubers were taken off to the local agricultural labs and propagated using micro propagation techniques in order clean them up of all the viruses they were carrying. For a while they were only available to the home grower as micro propagated plants and I remember buying three of the plants for some silly price at the Borders Potato Day. I coddled them on in pots for a year, then grew them as an allotment crop for a couple of year, then they all got scoffed by accident and I didn't have the heart to start over again with them. So coming across these two tiny survivors are like finding buried treasure imho and I'm pleased at the thought of growing from my long lost original line again. Only a fellow vegetable grower would understand why this is so thrilling though!!!

Liesl is coming on well. I have got to six inches below the armpits. I decided to omit the garter ridges after the armpit divide and you can see below how this changes the look of the knitted fabric a lot. I do like Noro + Feather & Fan.

(Excuse the vile effect of Princess's dressing gown under the knitting. I needed a tailor's form to show the shape of the knitting properly and she was the first thing handy!)

Colours.

2010-02-16T12:15:00.004Z

I recently took part in a Scraps Swap over on the UK Spinners forum on Ravelry. Basically twenty or so of you send in 100g or 200g of painted tops each, and then you get the same weight of fibre back but made up of small pieces of each fibre sent in.

Quite dazzling, isn't it? I'm now in the process of deciding what I want to do with it all. Usually when I'm deciding what to do with a new yarn or fibre I let it sit on my desk for a couple of weeks so I can look at it and mull things over but in this case, 200g of loose fibre + 2 cats is a recipe for disaster. Hence I'm putting the photos here to look at instead. I am inclined to think though I may make a "pudding" yarn, where you pull all the scraps down into even smaller bite sized chunks, mix them up together in a handy basket or bucket then basically spin the colours at random by shutting your eyes and pulling out the next section of fibre from the basket.

I'm trying to get away from always spinning in the same way ie fine and smooth and to get out my comfort zone when it comes to being consistent and planned, yawn. This year I've already tried spinning thick-n-thin yarn (what a mess...!) and even knitted something out of this, urgh. I'm also attempting to re-teach myself long draw using my right hand rather than my left, given that the Harris is a right-handers Saxony wheel. This last is not going too well either, got to admit. Pictures of the "yarn" produced may be forthcoming if I feel like putting up a humorous blog post one day!

Soup Plot.

2010-02-15T20:31:00.004Z

Plot...

Sink...

Pot...

There should also have been a picture of the final result, but unfortunately soup made with both curly kale and red lentils in it goes an unfortunate shade of greeny-gray so I have not bothered to take a picture. Tastes good though!

The allotment looks pretty grim at the moment, doesn't it? Actually it's not too bad for mid Feburary, apart from the seasonal aura of weedy and decaying dankness that hangs over it. The ground was soft enough on Sunday for me to plant up one bed with three varieties of garlic and some Grisette shallots, and half of another bed with Aquadulce Claudia broad beans, which are a variety that can withstand a lot of frost. I also picked up my seed potatoes and will put them in trays to chit sometime this week. I have International Kidney, Charlotte, Pink Fir Apple and Desiree for this year. It's still early days in the allotment just now but in another six weeks or so the planting season will be in full swing and the weeds will be growing like crazy. Must finish getting the beds prepped up before then!

Liesl (Ravelry link)is going well, apart from one mistake I had to frog back four rows for and another mistake so far back I've decided to ignore it. You'd really have to be looking to see it anyway. I'm enjoying knitting it, but I'm now wishing it had a couple of rows of garter stitch at the start of the neckline to make it look more finished. I may do the sugggested crochet edge instead, despite being a bit phobic about crochet.(Can do it but....) I'm definately enjoying the colour runs of the Noro Kureyon though. I can report with hand on heart that in the three balls I have used so far I have not found a single knot, piece of vegetation or lumpy/thready section. Plus I have been able to spit-splice straight onto the start of the next (carefully chosen) ball and keep the colour continuity going. I know some folk hate Noro but I don't seem to get many problems with it, really.

Nutty Knitters.

2010-02-14T11:53:00.003Z

Or rather, Knutty ones. And Knutty crafters. This a group that meets in a local church hall once per month for a day of any sort of portable crafting, lunch and gossip. Very informal and great fun. I enjoy it particularly because I usually go to fibre craft groups....knitting, spining, crochet, felting etc. This lot do quilting, embroidery, sewing and other exotic things too. Very interesting to get involved with discussing and looking at crafts other than your own, I think.

Yesterday we also had a guest speaker/visitor, The Yarn Yard, who brought lots of her latest yarns to coo over. I see Natalie's gorgeous yarns and fibres in the flesh regularly enough to feel that I don't need to stock up for the next year every time I see her, so it's always fun to sit back and watch the (fairly polite) scrum round the table all cooing and squishing and sniffing and lusting over the new colours, lol. But I've got enough YY fibre to keep me spinning for a year tbh. Did I show you this I bought from her in York?

Superwash BFL, a one off braid dyed with excess dyes from a Clan dyeing session (Clan is her latest lovely 8-ply sock yarn) so a sort of colour chart of gorgeousness. Don't know what I'm going to do with it but there's some things you just have to own, you know?

I took a wheel to the KK but only spent half the time spinning. (YY club fibre from a few months back, merino/silk, orange/grey/black colourway.) I put in a couple of hours on my Olympic Liesl too. What with yesterday and last nights knitting I've almost finished the yoke and will divide for the sleeves in anothe couple of rows. It is a fast knit. I've only had to frog it back once as well!

Knitting Olympics.

2010-02-11T17:49:00.002Z

Yarn Harlot is organising the Knitting Olympics again. I did this last time, back in 2006 and it was really quite exciting given that I'd only just learned how to knit socks. In fact I think I blogged daily about my progress, lol.

This time round I've decided to make Liesl (Ravelry link)by Edinburgh based designer Ysolda Teague. I've met her briefly at a couple of local events and really, it's about time I knitted something designed by her! Also I've been feeling the need for something a bit more crafty-looking than my usual black to wear at spinning demos and Liesl looks like it would be nice and airy to wear over a (black??) t-shirt, no?

I suppose if I'm intending to wear this to spinning events I should have spun the yarn for it? Aye right. Actually I would have done but the idea only occurred to me yesterday and the Olympic opening ceremony starts 2am GMT on Saturday so not much chance of that, oops. Maybe for the 2014 Olympics. Instead I've decided to use this...

...which is the Noro Kureyon I got in the p/hop swap at York two weeks ago. Ah, I've not blooged about that yet, have I? Sorry. There's an article here, and some good pictures on The Yarn Yard's blog, here and here.

Anyhow. I know at least one depressingly fast knitter has managed to make Liesl in four days. I can't knit that fast. I'm a very slow knitter and what's worse, for ten of the seventeen Olympic days my kids are on half-term break. So it will be a challenge to knit this in the time allowed. But that's what it's all about, yes? Challenges?

York.

2010-01-29T07:46:00.002Z

I'm off to York for a weekend of knitting, spinning, crochet, tatting (!) and general eating of cake and socialising. This started off as an informal gathering of a few friends from The Yarn Yard group on Ravelry and has mushroomed into us taking over every room in the convent. Yup, convent. We are staying at a B&B in the heart of York called the Bar Convent. I'm not sure exactly how many of us are going as some rooms are singles and some multiples, plus we have some people coming just on Saturday, but at least twenty. And there is a suggestions that perhaps one or two of the nuns from the convent are going to drop into see exactly what all these mad knitters are up to....

Should be fun. I've packed the camera as well as the spinning wheel so I'll let you know next week.

My wheels.

2010-01-21T11:50:00.005Z

Someone over on Ravelry asked if I had a group shot of all my wheels. No...sadly, but it's an idea and I will have to do one someday, yes. In the meanwhile, here's a roundup of what I currently own.

The first wheel I bought was a 1978 Louet S10,complete with bad paint job and matching skeinwinder. I bought it from Ebay. Given that I had never actually sat in front of a spinning wheel up to this point, had only two weeks of self taught experience with a spindle to guide me and no real clue as to what I wanted, I was extremely lucky to land up with Old Man Louet, really! I learned to spin on him, I still have him though mostly I use him for plying and teaching these days.

I didn't expect to buy another wheel for a while, if at all, but some months later I saw a first generation Kromski Mazurka on Ebay for £40, complete with a set of hand carders. What could I do? I regretted buying it for quite a while though as it's a very finikey double drive wheel and after the Irish Tension Louet I really could not get to grips with the delicate balance of the Mazurka. Fortunately, before I flung it out the window in a fit of rage, I discovered a spinning friend of mine owned the same wheel and she got me going on it. Now it's one of my favourite wheels for fine spinning and also for demos, because it's so pretty.

Next up was the Hatbox Louet, the S40. I was beginning to get into my stride with buying wheels...they were interesting, I like to know how things work and there is a wealth of info and opinion out thee on the web to peruse. I had read about the Hatbox in passing so when I saw one on Ebay for a dirt cheap price I bought it instantly. Quirky, elegant, not a bad spinner and it packs up into a dinky little case. Ideal camping wheel, in fact!

(Sorry, but I don't seem to have a decent picture of the S40. Here it is in a group shot from the days when I only owned four wheels.)

There's another wheel in the above picture which I no longer own, the big Ashford Country Spinner at the back. I found it in a local charity shop. It was a bit of a one hit wonder though and I preferred the Louet for chunky spinning so I sold the Country Spinner after a year or so.

What next? Ah, the Herring. I didn't actually intend to buy this one. I saw it on Ebay (I do love Ebay!!) and admired its petite elegance, even showed it to my Hubby. A couple of days later Hubby skidded my car into a lamp post en route to the garage. When I came in the conversation sort of went...

Him: "I crashed your car...."
Me: "WHAT!!!!!!!!"
Him:"Oh, and I bought you that spinning wheel you liked."

Got to love it (and him) just for that, eh? It's cute and a neat little spinner too, though a bit limited when it comes to ratios.

Next one is a Louet S20. The picture below is pinched from the web somewhere as I don't seem to have a photo of my own one. Suffice to say mine is a bit scruffy, stained black and the paint job on it makes the one on my S10 look like Fine Art. It was being sold by a friend of mine at the Guild and came with six bobbins. Really, I bought the bobbins at about half the price of new ones and the wheel came free.

Interesting wheel next. I was in Brittany a couple of years back, walking round a flea market in Dol-de-Bretagne with the kids when I spotted this one. It's always been a bit of a fantasy for me that one day I would find a beautiful wheel in a French flea market for a song, and here it was! The kids were chanting "Buy it! Buy it!" so after a bit of haggling I got it for €25. I was on a camping holiday with no free luggage space whatsoever to haul a wheel back but still! Here it is on that same hoilday, outside the tent, with a guyline as a drive band.

Just as an aside for this wheel, here's a picture of the same wheel being used as a prop in a Passion Play about Joan of Arc. This postcard is around 100 years old, so the design has been around for a while. Got to say though I don't spin on it much because its a crotchety old dear. Beautiful to look at though.

Final wheel. (At the moment.) This is a Haldane Harris Norwegian style flat table wheel. From Ebay, of course. It was a Christmas present from my long-suffering Hubby. It was part of a limited production run made back in the early eighties by Haldane of Fife.I've always wanted a Norwgian style wheel and also always wanted a Haldane, so this is really two wheels in one for me. It's unusual in that the drive wheel doesn't have a straight through axle. The hub is suspended on a pin and cup system which, when oiled, results in very low friction. As a result it spins like the wind, lol. I'm still getting used to it!

(Picture is from the Ebay listing.)

So the above are the seven wheels I (currently) own. I also have a foster wheel, an Australian Wind Wheel. It's on long term loan to my local spinning group but I'm the only person really interested in using it so it lives with me. The treadling/spinning method required for this wheel is a little different from the norm...it's not difficult to use at all, not once someone shows you, but it's not a beginners wheel. I love it to bits though and am trying to buy it from its owner so hopefully, one day, I'll have eight wheels.

Surfacing for air.

2010-01-11T11:52:00.006Z

Well, the Christmas holidays are finally over. Including the extra couple of days the schools were closed due to snow. Snow in Musselburgh? It's practically unheard of for us to get more than an inch or so, then it's gone by the next day. This year though it started snowing a few days before Christmas and kept going on and off till the end of last week. There's still patches of it lying now, and more is forecast by the end of this week. Of course we're not used to this sort of thing in a lot of parts of the UK, we're not geared up for it at all in low lying areas and there have been a lot of problems. Us? We dug out the cars, made sure we were stocked up with a few basics then stayed in the house as much as possible. So it was a very quiet Christmas, thank you for asking! But the kids enjoyed getting out to play in the snow a lot, and going sledging in the park opposite our house.

Here's a picture of the allotment. No, I have not been working up there over the holidays! I can't even get the produce out the ground. I just went up to get a better snow shovel from the hut.

This is the pond. No, I didn't try walking on it to see if the ice was solid!

On the knitting front, I have been knitting hats. The family is now kitted out in a trio of earflap hats...Lad's you've seen, Princess has one in a very bright turquoise and even OH is sporting one (complete with dangling braids and pom-pom) in the local rugby club colours. He's taken it to wear today though, so no picture.

And, in keeping with the weather, I have started to knit a blanket.

I bought a lot of RYC Soft Tweed in various colours at a dirt cheap price a couple of years back but then couldn't find the right pattern for it. I did try a cardigan and then a hat, but the resultant fabric always looked like wool blankets to me. Finally though the penny dropped...why not make it into a blanket then? So then I tiddled around a bit with the thought of cable patterns etc, until I realised that really, with this stuff the simpler the better. So I've sized it so that one ball = one square, alternate squares of Thistle and Slate Blue, put a garter stitch/reversed stocking stitch border round the edge of each square and am knitting it in strips, five squares to a strip and four strips across to give minimal sewing up. As I'm using 7.5mm needles it's knitting up really quickly and it's going to be cosy, cosy, cosy. The squares are 13"x13", so twenty balls/squares will give me a good sized blanket.

The cats don't like the cold weather. I am mean so I turn the central heating off during the morning and early afternoon, normally, and this means they don't have too many cosy corners to cloose from then. During the night time they usually come and sleep with Hubby and I, or lad, but during the day the warmest spot in the house is the platform bed in the study. The heat from the PCs rises up there and makes the temperature just about tolerable for pampered cats.

Christmas Knitting.

2009-12-17T09:03:00.002Z

I thought I was doing pretty well with the Christmas Knitting.

Planned Projects-0
Finished Projects-0
Success Rate-100%

Yes, I've got a couple of hats on the needles for Princess and Hubby and intend to finish them asap but as I don't intend to wrap them up as presents, they're not official Christmas Knitting. So I'm home and dry.

Except...I just remembered I have to make a Secret Santa gift for the Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers Christmas lunch. This Saturday. That's make, not buy. Oh well, so much for a good pressure free run up to Christmas. I shall just have to do a rerun of what I made two years ago, this. I see it also was a panic knit in exactly the same circumstances! I have some sparkly Louisa Harding Coquette so I'll use that.

(Her website link to the pattern is dead now, so here's the Ravelry link. It's free.)

On the home front I have the tree up, but not decorated, nothing is wrapped, only essential cards have been written and the food shopping barely started. Oh well. I have presents and there are several activities planned over the holidays, plus it's just us four here for Christmas Day so no particular need to go into a cleaning or tablecloth ironing frenzy. Suits me, so it does.

Oh, and I have the workmen back. I have fallen foul of a detail on a Building Control warrant that expires in January, so my lovely joiner and his sidekick are doing some speedy remedial work in the attic so I can get the necessary stamp on the outstanding piece of paper. Time, trouble, money and mess I could well do without, especially at this time of year, but at least I get on well with my joiner!

Yarn with my name on it.

2009-12-09T22:26:00.003Z

I had to laugh...look at this stuff.

Why is it funny? Well, what's my name? And, back in the dawn of pre-history I did a degree in Marine Biology, lol. So, basically, it's sock yarn with my name all over it, innit? How funny! Yes, I will get some but I'm on a yarn diet over Christmas so it will have to wait.

Here are the rest of the new Opal Rainforest V series. Actually I never realised it part of the sales proceeds went to saving rainforests, did you?

Haldane Harris.

2009-11-30T12:41:00.003Z

This "little" beauty is my Christmas present this year.

Given that it has a 24" drive wheel and almost certainly spins at warp factor nine it's not so little, actually! I've always wanted a Norwegian style wheel and was seriously considering a Timbertops Leicester...except it would cost more than I could justify if I bought a new one and the only one that's come up recently on Ebay went for a silly amount too. The Kromski Polonaise was also on the short list for a while.

But under a completely seperate subsection of the "Spinning Wheels I Would Like To Own One day" list there was this scribbled note saying "Haldane?" This was because I really liked the Haldane Orkney that I once had briefly in my possesion and I sort of though it would be nice to own one, if I ever saw one at a good price. I did know that Haldane had once made a limited run of Norwegian wheels, but I thought they were so hard to find that I didn't really include it in the list of contenders for Next Wheel.

Fate really, And it was on at a really good BIN of £175. What else could I do? And Hubby had been wondering what to get me for Christmas this year, lol.

Today.

2009-11-21T21:31:00.002Z

Today was cold, wet and filled with rugby, or so it seems. I think I may be going down with a bug of some sort too. All I want to do is sleep. It's been a loooong week.

Addi Sock Needles.

2009-11-20T20:51:00.002Z

Brief blog post tonight, just to report back on the Addi Sock Needles I bought last week. A couple of you have asked how I'm finding them?

Well, different. Little. I've got little hands but I knit with a classic hands-off english throw and usually my needles move around quite a lot. The small circumferance restricts this so I'm having to push the needle point clear with a finger tip, which can get sore after a while. I've tried flicking,changing to continental, combined knitting and a couple of other ways of holding the yarn, just to see what feels best. I think if you knit continental then you would get used to these needles very easily. For me, it's taking a little longer.

But I'm persisting. Why? Well, they're fast. Very fast. You don't have to stop, muck around changing needles, grip, stitches on the cords and tip. You just keep knitting round and round and round. Actually, that's possibly one reason my fingers are getting tired. There's no break in the flow so your fingers don't get a chance to stretch their muscles. Try knitting four hundred or so little stitches in a restricted way with no pauses whatsoever. Your hands would hurt too! But these 400 stitches are really, really quick.

Still, I'm getting used to it. By the time I finish these socks the motion will have bedded into my hands and it will be automatic. I just love the speed of it all, you see. I'm on the heel of this sock already and I only cast it on two days ago. For me that's amazingly quick. I expect a fast sock knitter could do even better especially if they knitted continental. So definately, these needles are worth a try.

Spinning?

2009-11-19T13:13:00.004Z

Peeing down with rain here at Chez Fishwife. The kind of day that makes you want to go back to bed, or at least sit on the sofa watching slushy DVDs and knitting. Chance would be a fine thing, eh? Much of my knitting is done in the car these days, as I wait for the kids to either go into or emerge from various sports and activities. Yesterday the Mum Taxi was on first thing, then back on duty at 4.30pm. I did get to go home for a couple of hours here and there, but I didn't finally get home till 11pm. (With a very tired Princess who had been at The Gang Show.) Given that I get up at 7am to get the kids to school, I make that 16 hours of domestic and childcare tedium yesterday. Really, I should find myself a job....

Actually, I don't know if I mentioned but I was offered a tutoring job out at the Poldrate. Teaching spinning, of course, which was quite funny to think of given that I've only been spinning myself for five or six years. I've no formal qualifications to teach, you understand, but I am one of these people who likes to teach and explain and so far, I seem to be reasonably good at it. So I did give the job offer serious consideration. It wouldn't have paid much but it would have been fun I think.
However they wanted me to do it at least one evening per week, which is impossible. Hubby used to get home around six-thirty pm least a couple of days a week but work has expanded for him to take up all availible time space and the kids still need someone here with them in the house, let alone their taxi driver! So no evening job for me at the minute, and they don't want only a day class because we already have the self-help spinning group. Where I will teach you to spin anyway, come to think of it. Only difference is I don't get paid for it!

One day.....

Socks etc.

2009-11-18T11:31:00.005Z

Finished socks...Araucania Ranco, colourway unknown, Violet-Green Sock pattern Generator.

Finished hat. Except for the dangling braids. I will need to discuss these with Lad. Rowan Plaid in Soft Kelp, Ear Flap Hat Generator.

It's very cosy. There is a box on the pattern generator where you can adjust for closeness of fit and Lad opted for a loose helmet type effect rather than tight. So it sits down well over his head and ears and what with that and that double layer of alpaca and merino this is a really warm hat. The earflaps are actually just like knitting toe-up socks using short rows, with the "toes" sticking out of the headband section in a very entertaining way until the facing is folded under. Well worth a shot.

Finally, my Addi sock needles arrived today. You can quite clearly see the little kink as the tip joins the cord. That's what makes them fit into my hands so well.

So naturally I had to cast on another pair of socks immediately. The choice was of the pink Yarn Yard yarn above, or the rather lurid greeen and blue. I dyed this second one myself a couple of SkipNorths ago, using Kool-Aid on a (I think) Trekking sock yarn base. After a bit of a mental struggle I decided on the green/blue, basically because it was already wound so I didn't need to go and find my ball winder. Lazy? Me?

(The ginger bit is Oliver's tail, btw, if you hadn't realised.)

Have to say, casting straight onto such small unfamiliar needles was a bit tricksy. So I resorted to my tried and trusted method of casting on to straights, one size larger than my main needle, then working two rows straight before transferring to the working needle(s). Much better. I've done a few rows of the ribbing and the little needle just flows now.

FOs.

2009-11-17T18:01:00.003Z

I finished the socks today.

I finished the earflap hat today too. Well, apart from doing the braids, but the knitting is finished and the ends sewn in.

And I went to spinning group today.

This sort of productivity is a bit alien to me, actually. I possibly need to go and lie down somewhere soothing and dark.

The sock needle has not arrived though. So life is not all good.

Short blog post today, actually, because now I'd like you to all nip over and read my friend Natalie's blog post of the day. Many if not most of you will know her as The Yarn Yard. (Fabby fibres and yarns, really. Have a look while you're there.) But she's also the founder of p/hop, which is her fund-raising site linked into Médecins Sans Frontières.

By the time you finish reading your way through all of this you'll probably be thinking that perhaps that third skein of sock yarn isn't quite the priority you thought earlier? Well, as Natalie says, donations of money would be very acceptable but also it would be very welcome if you could spare a day of your blog to mention p/hop and Médecins Sans Frontières to your own readers. Details on how to do this are on the p/hop linkie above. Spread the word!

Catch up.

2009-11-16T09:20:00.004Z

Monday is always catch-up day. Laundry, cleaning the bathroom, hoover etc. Work out what leftovers are in the fridge and knock up some sort of meal plan till at least Thursday. Write a shopping list so I can go shopping while the kids are in swimming club tonight. That sort of thing.

I'm determined to sit down for an hour somewhere though and finish these socks. Why the rush? Well, while I was at spinning Guild on Saturday a friend showed me her 30cm Addi circs, for sock knitting. Previously I'd dismissed 30cm needles for this because the ones I'd tried had longish tips and joined straight onto the cords. I thought they were awkward and was staining to knit a standard 60 stitch sock on them. But the Addis have much shorter tips and a smooth bend onto the cords. I tried ten stitches of my friend's sock and was instantly hooked to the point of wondering if she'd notice if I just slipped the needle out her half-knitted sock and stole it. (Probably...yeah, she would, bah.) So I came home and ordered one from Pavi Yarns instead. So now I have to get the current sock finished asap so I'm ready to cast on a new pair when my new needle arrives, hopefully tomorrow.

Really, it's ridiculous to get this excited about a new sock needle.....

The Earflap Hat is coming on apace too. I've finished the double-layer headband plus earflap section and am getting close to the crown shaping. For these who have asked no, I'm not going to line it with fleece fabric. There is a three inch deep double hem of Rowan Plaid round head and ears and that's going to be quite warm enough. Plus Lad has his own thick layer of curly locks which will provide the equivalent of thrums inside.

Yeah, hair like that is totally, TOTALLY wasted on a boy.

Lazy Sunday.

2009-11-15T20:03:00.003Z

After a fairly frantic few days, I finally managed to have a lazy Sunday. Up late (ie not 7am), no rush to get showered, only real fixture in the day was to take Princess to gymnastics. I even had time to chat to my neighbour in the supermarket. Then lunch and my sister came round and I sat and nattered to her most of the afternoon, while Princess vanished off to see a friend and Lad and Hubby did manly things like rugby and xBox and painting toy soldiers. Curry dinner courtesy of M&S, kids off to bed sharp, nothing left to do except sit on the sofa, knit and see if there's a good trash film on the telly.

Might not be everyone's idea of what to do on a Sunday but it suited me just fine.

Guild Day.

2009-11-14T18:00:00.002Z

Not the third Saturday of the month as usual, because the church hall we use has their Christmas Fair on the third Saturday of November. The Guild calendar had been printed with the wrong date though and the website is wrong also, so apologies to anyone who intended to turn up for spinning on the 21st! Not my fault, I do assure you. I only found out because of a chance comment another Guild member made on Tuesday. Shoot the Guild proof-reader instead, unless I get there first.

Anyhow, we are going to make Christmas decorations. I have no idea exactly what, but it's sure to be interesting. And I won't need to teach, because no-one new will turn up, I don't think. Not with the date mix-up. bah.

However I have managed to shed Princess for the day so that's good. I was reasonably confident she could cope with half a day of pom-pom making or similar activity but she wouldn't last a full one. I was scheduled to be looking after her because I didn't think I had a Guild day and Hubby and Lad were off to a wargames show, and the car was going to be full. But someone has dropped out and Princess has opted for wargames instead. As she says, she can make pom-poms any time.

Speaking of pom-poms, yesterday I found this amazing set at Hobbycraft. Where has this been all my life? I've made dozens of pom-poms using the classic old two cardboard doughnut method and this is 100% easier. Princess has really taken to it and is churning out pencil roving pom-poms like a pro. Worth every penny. I foresee a very pom-pom Christmas!

Crikey...actual knitting.

2009-11-13T10:55:00.004Z

Well, with some actual knitting content today....

I've not been knitting much over the last weeks. Life is busy and come 10pm all I can do is slump in front of America's Next Top Model (compulsive viewing in this house) and pick my way round a plain sock for twenty minutes. Then go to bed. I have three sweaters all at the stage of front and back completed, but do you think I can make the effort to start knitting the arms? ZZZZzzzzzzzzz......

However when we were up buying Lad his winter jacket at Mountain Warehouse (great place for genuinely warm, waterproof jackets) he spotted this.

Now I'm absolutely b****red if I'm going to stump up £19.99 for a nasty acrylic knitted hat, even if they are on Buy-One-Get-One-Free. But he did look remarkably good in it, in a sort of crazed muppet way. Isn't it amazing what teenage boys want to wear? I rejected a pair of Lee Cooper lace up black sneaker type gym shoes the other week as being dorky, only to discover they were the latest fashion craze around these country parts and had to go back to the shop to get them. (They were dirt cheap so I did not mind.)

Anyway, I said I'd knit him a hat. He came home from school the next day looking expectant so I had to get up to the attic asap and find something suitable. I came up with two balls of Rowan Plaid in an alpaca/merimo/acrylic blend, in Soft Kelp.

It's nice stuff to knit on and I'm using 7mm needles so it should be a quick knit. (Well, for anyone but me...) I'm using the Earflap Hat Pattern Generator.(Ravelry link.)

Here's the socks...

I only have 15 rows plus toe shaping to go on the second sock, so might finish by Christmas, eh? The yarn was a gift from Thereyougothen on her summer visit back from Chile. The lucky so and so apparently lives round the corner from an Araucania outlet shop. This yarn is (I think) Araucania Ranco...lovely bouncy yarn, anyway, and a great colour. I "enabled" Thereyougothen to start knitting socks when she was ill, come to think of it, so these ones have good associations for me.

Parents Night.

2009-11-12T19:55:00.002Z

Parents Night at school this evening, for Princess.

You know, at the risk of bragging, there's hardly any point in me going to Parents Night. Princess is extremely bright, likes school, gets on well with her classmates, is polite and enthusiastic and works hard. There's some bits of work she likes less, of course, but they're few and far between and she just gets on with them or, in the case of disliked classmates, ignores them as much as possible. Really can't ask for more. Except the furiously enthusiastic and somewhat novel spelling to improve, but that will come. So apart from reading off her marks and saying how well Princess is doing in all respects, Teacher had nothing much else to discuss. And I'm perfectly happy with how Princess is doing at school and I have great confidence in the school too, so I didn't really have any worries to discuss either. Is that good or bad?

So her teacher and I ran out of things to talk about very quickly. Her teacher is young and enthusiastic and very nice and Princess likes her but she's not as much fun as the very quirky and opinionated older teacher Princess had last year, who really had a soft spot for my strong willed and also very opinionated girl and treated me to a stream of funny anecdotes of what Princess was getting up to at school. I do miss Mrs P. She's taught all my kids at one point or other and we've always got on very well. Must try not to hold this against the new teacher!

Times Twelve.

2009-11-11T21:33:00.002Z

Do you know, I have driven down the same small street in Musselburgh twelve times today, what with one trip or another. At no point have I driven further than two miles from my own front door, but I have been round and round and up and down and across this blessed town carrying tubas and trombones and a variable number of kids and bags of sports equipment and all the rest all bloomin' day. Or so it seems!

How do mums without cars manage? Do they manage all this by taxi and bus? Or do they just take the sensible option and restrict the number of activities and interests their kids are allowed to do? I was on taxi service duty from 4.15pm to 9.00 pm today, not to mention the am run to school with the trombone.

And to top it all, I had to miss the allotment AGM. First time in thirteen years, bah. And me on the committee too. Bah bah bah. I'm not happy!

Tuesday.

2009-11-10T21:15:00.004Z

Tuesday.

Get up, get kids up, feed kids, assemble lunches/backpacks/kids, make sure kids are clean and dressed, send kids to school. have shower and breakfast, deal with emails. Put on load of laundry. Go to spinnning group at Haddington. Very pleasant lunch with Pollianicus. Quick trip round the Haddington charity shops. (Didn't buy anything.) Back home for kids coming home from school, make dinner, do laundry, supervise homework, feed kids, take Princess to Cubs, take Lad to buy new school jacket, fetch Princess from Cubs, come home. Message on answerphone from neighbour to say that Oliver's mum Lily has had five kittens and could they borrow the kitten cage again? Take cage round (no I didn't see the kittens), come home, get kids to bed. Husband comes home from work. Feed husband. Feed self.

Think I'm going to sit on the sofa, knit a couple of rounds of plain sock then go to bed. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day, not quiet like this one.

First Frosts.

2009-11-09T14:10:00.002Z

It was the first hard frost of winter last night. We live on a hill looking down into one of the local parks and all the grass and trees were diamond white. I live near the sea and as such we miss most of the snow but we can still get some killer frosts. The allotment will be a heap of shattered vegetation today and the pond will have stared to freeze. Start of winter.

I didn't go to the allotment today though as I was so tired from the weekend. You'd think that sitting on your rear end spinning and chatting for six hours, plus an hour's drive at each end would be a reasonable but not excessive day out, no? Apparently not. I was shattered yesterday and this was not helped by having to go to Princess's Cub Scout Remembrance Day parade and service,which took up the best part of four hours of hanging around and walking, with only a brief sit down in church.

So this morning I got up at the usual 7am, got the kids off to school and went back to bed. I didn't get up till lunchtime and I'm still creeping around dead tired and with no energy. Off to the doc's again, methinks. Got an appointment booked for Friday.

Oh, as to Princess being a Cub these days? She was in the local Brownies up till the end of last year till we discovered one of the local Cub packs took girls. (They don't always, it depends on the pack leaders and of course they have to have at least one woman leader in the pack as well.) Our Brownies are pretty tame...they don't camp in tents, just bunkhouses, because it's "too rough for the little girls" in tents. They don't do sporty things or outdoor activities much. On the other hand Princess has been eyeing up Lad's local Scout and Cub activities for years...they camp, often in wet and muddy fields, they get to have camp fires and chop up wood with axes and whittle things with knives and go for midnight walks in the woods. Etc. Much more to Princess's tastes, especially since she's been camping since she was a few months old. So she has dumped the Brownies without a backwards glance and become a Cub, lol. She's even learning to play football (which she doesn't much like, but hey-ho) so she can keep even with the boys. Actually she's very fit and sporty with a mean killer instinct, so the boy Cubs aren't getting away with much, has to be said!

St Abbs Wool Festival #2.

2009-11-08T20:36:00.005Z

St Abbs....a view of the harbour from up the hill a bit. A very typical looking East Coast harbour of around these parts.

This is a rear view of the memorial to the Eyemouth fishing disaster of 14th October 1881, where 189 men from the small fishing communities of Eyemouth and neighbouring St Abbs and Burnmouth were lost at sea. I couldn't get a clear shot of the front without falling off the cliff, but basically you see the women and chidren standing on the harbour sea wall, hands to their mouths and looking out to sea with horror on their faces. Most moving.

The Wool Festival was great fun. It's not a big hall but it was stuffed to the gunnels with wool, fibre and other wooly things. I went there feeling I had more than enough wool in the stash at present but of course this doesn't mean fibre, does it?

From left to right..

Two 100g braids of superwash Blue Face Leicester colourway "Shepherds Warning", from Spinning a Yarn. Not my usual sort of colour choice but they spoke to me, so I had to buy them really! I'm looking forwards to spinning these up to see what happens with the colours.

Two 100g braids of Peregrine 75% merino, 25% nylon in pinks and what my daughter would call "girl blues". From The Yarn Yard. Basically it had my little Princess's name written all over it, lol.

Two 100g braids of 70% alpaca, 30% BFL, also from The Yarn Yard. Scrumptious and sooooft. It's a while since I spun alpaca even in a blend, so yum.

One 100g braid of a brown/orage/pumpkin sort of colourway. Peregrine from The Yarn Yard again.

And that's all I bought, actually, apart from several cups of tea and a home-made scone. Quite restrained of me but really, 700g of fibre is a lot of spinning!

I did take a wheel of course. Actually I took three, the Louet S10 to loan around, my Mazurka to spin on and the Wind Wheel to show off. But I didn't take the Wind Wheel in after all. Too crowded. I'm not precious about my wheels normally but the Wind Wheel isn't mine and we were in quite a busy corner. Still it was an ideal corner for visibility, given it was by the doorway to the tearoom so I tucked my elbows in and got talking. Anyone who knows me also knows I do love talking about spinning so I was in my element.

I was spinning on my recently mended Kromski Mazurka. Notice the drive whorl is a tad paler? I did a muppet thing one night when I was tired and tried to unscrew it the wrong way and wrecked it. Fortunately Joan and Clive at The Woodland Turnery can deal with this sort of thing in their sleep, so the Mazurka is as good as new.

There were a LOT of people at the festival, old friends, new ones, virtual and never-met-you-before ones. It was great to see you all but if I start looking you all up and doing links I would be here for paragraphs. So I'll just content myself with saying that yes, it's lovely to go and fondle the yarns and buy new fibres, but what I really go to these events for is to see you all and have a good blether, really.

Final picture..The Yarn Yard stall, later in the day. There was a lot more than this when the doors opened, I think!

St Abbs.

2009-11-07T21:19:00.002Z

I went to the St Abbs Wool Festival today. Lovely event....small but beautifully formed and an absolute treat to see so much interesting yarn and fibre at a local event.

I have fibre (of course) and I have photographs. I also have the sleepies, so I'll save the first two for tomorrow's blog post.

Not what they used to be.

2009-11-06T20:19:00.002Z

I was in the big city today and unusually, child free and with an hour or so to spare, so I decided to go and have a trawl round the charity shops near Surgeons Hall. This used to be one of my favourite ways to spend a Friday afternoon when I had my first baby and no car...I would get the train into town then walk with the buggy up to Hubby's office, take his car (so he could go out for a few pints after work) and go to the supermarket on the way home. Between the station and the office there were seventeen charity shops and as a newly skint single income family with a horrid mortgage and a new baby, charity shops were great places to get all sorts of things. I really enjoyed the Friday runs. The shops were always full of treasures and in these days, 14 years or so ago, charity shops were really cheap too.

Anyway I do go to a lot of charity shops even now, though the financial pressures have eased off a bit as the interests rates dropped. (15% back then, argh...) I get garden and camping clothes for the kids, odd bit of Lego, interesting bric a brac, books etc. Yarn and needles too and even a spinning wheel once! Our local shops are still well worth going to.

But the town ones? What happened? They are all half empty and what stock they do have is often 50% bought-in goods. I've got no problems with buying Fairtrade, you understand, but I do expect the majority of items to be donated ones in the Oxfam shop for example. And the prices! Some of the prices are getting close to what you would pay for similar new items. I know that a lot of the bigger chains of charity shops invest money in refurbishing up shops and presenting goods in a way similar to normal shops but really, it's getting too much. And, you know, a lot of the donated stock was looking pretty tired too. Lots of bobbly old t-shirts and acrylic jumpers.

Was very disappointing. I was hoping for some of the old treasure-hunting excitement and I got nothing. Bah. I had to settle for the excitement of Sainsburys instead. Is it because there are less people donating in town areas, do you think? Or more people using the charity shops in these credit-crunch times?

A small rant and a Festival.

2009-11-05T15:06:00.002Z

Very small rant. Remember the building works we had done three years back? Well, the final inspection was done today for a very small but necessary piece of paperwork, and because of the lack of four bits of wood, we have failed to get this paper stamped. Now it's one of these things that would have been dead simple to do as part of the works but because the works have been completed, it's going to be more complicated to retro-fit the required pieces. I think I would rather throw myself off the roof than have to deal with the original builders again though so basically, we're going to get our 100% trustworthy joiner in to do it and suck up the bill.

But, you know, bummer.

On a happier note, I'm off to a wool and fibre shindig on Saturday, the St Abbs Wool Festival. . The Yarn Yard will be there, as will Fyberspates, alpacas, spinning, weaving and all sorts of wooly things for sale. Should be a good day.

The cats cried.

2009-11-04T07:30:00.006Z

I'm not sleeping well these days. I've got problems with my back (long term thing), my joints ache in general and it's worse in cold weather and the perimenopause is adding in the usual sprinkling of annoyances. I wake up several times a night if I need to turn over from an awkward position, if someone gets up to go to the loo, if someone leaves a light on outside in the hall or slams a door or if I get a flush. Or if a cat comes in to sit on my head and remind me it's only two hours till breakfast and I'd better not forget, mmm? So in addition to all the above, I'm often very tired as well.

I've been working on some of the above. I don't like to have to take painkillers every night just to sleep but there are gels and exotic ungents to rub on various achey parts of oneself that do help. Bachs Rescue Remedy and the Sleep one help. Routine helps, plus going to bed a bit earlier! And I have bought some new fabric for heavyweight thermal blackout curtain linings. Intend to make that up today.

Last night though I decided to target one of the random annoyances, the cats. Da Boyz have plenty of favoured places to sleep in this house and they like to rotate round regularly, often several times a night. The tops of the two wardrobes in our bedroom are favoured spots but to get there they have to leap up on various cluttered pieces of furniture, or the telly, or climb the side of a hamper that lives on top of my wardrobe. Crash. Squeak. Thud. Clatter. And after that they like to climb over me, or under the duvet. And purr, or just generally strike up a conversation with each other or me. They are very chatty cats and like to share all the details of their doings with me.

So last night I shut the bedroom door. I can't remember when I last did this. There have always been children to listen out for or, back in the dawn of pre-history (ie before children) we lived in a flat so small that our tandem had to live half in the hall, half in our bedroom. Or to allow cats to come in and out. No longer. Consternation! They were locked out.

They cried. They howled. They pulled up half the carpet tiles in the hall in an effort to burrow under the door. They howled some more, head butted the door in an effort to force it open, scratched and cried. Then, after an hour or so, they went away. They came back at dawn when Hubby went off to work, but I surface around then anyway. However, inbetween I got more sleep than normal, so I think the closed door will be permenant.

I am a cruel cat mummy, yup. There is worst. Da Boyz are on a Cat Healthy Eating Plan at the moment too, poor wee souls. I took them both to the vet last week for their annual shots and check up and while Oliver was pronounced a perfect size, the vet thought Paws is getting a bit "roly-poly". Yes, this is the cat who arrived last year as a scraggy mass of matted dirty fur and bones. He has been making up for all these missed meals, apparently. So no treats, no extras, carefully weighed out portions and no feeding ad lib. Not entirely fair on Oliver who is a bit indifferent to food in general but even he has noticed the shorter rations and has started making sure he gets his share the minute the bowls go down, lol.

And it's cold up the attic, so it's not even worth going up there to sunbathe under the Veluxes any more, and the spiders have gone into hibernation. I tell you, it's a tough life being a cat round here at the moment!

On the topic of spinning wheels...

2009-11-03T14:45:00.005Z

On the topic of spinning wheels, I'm sort of vaguely thinking about buying another one.

Now to get this thought into perspectve you have to realise that at this exact moment I have nine spinning wheels in this house. I own a Louet S10, S20 and S40, a first generation Kromski Mazurka, a Frank Herring Saxony and a 100 year old Breton parlour wheel. I've also got the long term loan of an Australian Wind Wheel and I am looking after the local Guild Ashford Traditional and Traveller until the next meeting.

Nine.

I think. (I always have this nagging feeling I might have forgotten one....)

So with nine wheels in the house you'd think that I didn't really need anything new, mmmm? Well...thing is, I recently inherited a very small legacy from a late cousin of my father's, who I did not even know existed. He died intestate and after all the legal kerfuffle got sorted the lawyers had come up with 22 relatives who were all entitled to inherit a portion of his estate. Twenty-two people is a lot, and it was a small estate, but nevertheless it was nice to get this wee cheque in the post last week. And one of the first things Hubby asked me was "So are you going to get a new wheel?"

TBH it wasn't my first thought but once it got lodged in my head it stayed there. I've never had a new new wheel, always second-hand, so it's a nice thought. And I've always liked these big Norwegian style wheels with the double table.

Like this one, the Kromski Polonaise. (Though not in that ghastly colour.)

Or the really classy Timbertops Leicester.

No hurry, just thinking. But if I want the Leicester by Christmas I have to order one now, to have it made.

Name that wheel?

2009-11-02T18:21:00.004Z

Have a lookie at this.....(more pix on Flickr here.)

No, not mine, sadly. It was brought into the Haddington Spinners by an older local lady who was hoping we could help her with finding some information on the wheel. She'd inherited it from her granny and remembered hearing family stories about Granny spinning on it during WW1. Granny was a Yorkshire lass who had moved to Edinburgh when she got married and the wheel apperared around then.

Well, fairly generic wheel of the era, you might think? Look again. That drive wheel has 18 spokes and that's really quite unusual. Most wheelmakers go for 6, 8, 16...easy divisions of a circle. I mooched around the internet looking for information. Eighteen spoke wheels were common in the Hebrides and apparently were connected with the fact that a compass has 360 degrees ie 2 x 18.

So off I went looking for pictures and info on Hebridean wheels, assisted by the Antique Spinning Wheels group on Ravelry. One of them came up with this picture....

Not a bad match, is it? The turnings are different yes, but lots of the important bits match, like the way the pegs stick out undeneath, the unusual height of the treadle bar and the circular mount for the mother of all. Not twins but perhaps sisters? Or from the same maker at different times. The picture is from the front cover of this book, "Whorl and Wheel: A History of Handspinning in Scotland", by Su Grierson. The picture credits says it is a Dutch type wheel popular in the Isles of the Outer Hebrides and was photographed courtesy of the Highland Folk Museum Kingussie.

I have emailed my photographs of "my" wheel to the curator at the Highland Folk Museum, asking if they could please provide any more information on either wheel. I also emailed the book cover scan to the owner, K, and she came up with this nugget of family history.

“My granny from Yorkshire was a doctor who spent all her married life in Edinburgh. During World War I she was employed by the armed services to go round Scotland to inspect the living accommodation for the women in the army and navy. ( Mainly to make sure it was a fair distance from the mens quarters I think!) Meanwhile she employed a girl from the Hebrides to look after the children at home and the girl may have brought her wheel with her. I will check with my sister to see if she knows anything more about this Hebridean connection.”

So there is a Hebridean connection after all, however tenuous.

Anyway, I'm finding all this sleuthing rather exciting. She'ss a lovely wheel, not small, not big, but she weighs a ton for her size and that indicates oak or similar, yes? The 18 spokes make the drive wheel massively heavy and it's not easy to get going, especially since the treadle is set unusually high. But once you get her rolling she spins like a caffeine-frenzied dervish, at what feels like 100mph. Yes, I'm pleased with myself that I got her spinning again after decades of being a mere ornament. Actually, everything important is there, she just needed a bit of oil and a tweak. A few knocks, yes, deep grooves in the flyer and looking at the underneath she’s been taken apart and reassembled several times, not particularly carefully either. Everything pins together with wooden pegs, but they look like they’ve been levered out and the wood has splintered. And the flyer has broken at least twice, or at least been mended twice.But given a good slather of oil and a bit of tweaking, she was still up and spinning within minutes. Old, yes, but still game!

Anyway,watch this space for more news, or feel free to add any suggestions in the comments, please! In the meanwhile, I'm teaching K to spin so she can use her Granny's old wheel. Isn't that lovely? But...no, I'm not teaching her to spin on her 100mph wheel. What a comedown, eh? The woman owns a fine historic wheel with (hopefully) lots of history and she's learning on my battered old plywood Louet S20, lol!

NaBloPoMo.

2009-11-01T17:18:00.004Z

It's that time of year again, isn't it? Time for NaBloPoMo. So given that I seem to have really lost the habit when it comes to blogging regularly, I intend to join in for November again. I've managed to complete the month for the last two Novembers,though you probably were wilting with boredom by the end.

Anyway, to start you off with some totally non-knitting related blog fodder, here's a recent photo of Da Boyz. I was thinking of entering it on Lolcats but on reflection, I dread to think what some of the caption submissions might have been like. Yes, Paws does have a paw round Oliver's neck. They love each other very much, you know. Still doesn't stop Paws hogging most of the cat bed however.

Paws's paw.

2009-09-02T11:33:00.005Z

I have just spent fifteen minutes chasing Paws round the house trying to get a good look at his paw. He is one hairy cat and has very hairy paws but there was a something growing out one of his toes, he was limping and every two minutes he was stopping to pick at it. I thought he might have torn a claw out or something. Still, he wasn't keen for me to look at it and kept on running for cover. When I did finally get hold of him (using a large towel for body armour) he still put up quite a fight and gave me a couple of good nips.

It was a sugar puff stuck in his fur.

So while I am very glad he's okay and that I'm not going to have to tale him to the vet, that's fifteen minutes of my life I'll never see again and I have two cat bites in my thumb. My knitting thumb at that. Pets, eh? Worse than the bloomin' kids!

Actual spinning content. Etc.

2009-08-31T07:53:00.004Z

I bety you all sometimes wonder where the "spinning" part in Spinningfishwife is, some days? Well, I am spinning. And knitting. I promise. I'm just not very good at blogging about it. I'm not a fast knitter and I forget to take photos and I usually blog at odd hours of the day when it's awkward to just leap up and get a quick snap of a WIP. Anyway, it;s still summer and the focus is on camping, gardening and summer holidays. Which I also forget to blog about, but that's just me being lazy!

Anyway, when I came back from Amsterdam I decided to clear off my bobbins to make a fresh start in the new spinning year. I have been working on this and do have a pile of new skeins but I hit a problem when I stripped the whorl of my old Kromski in such a way that I couldn't get it off the flyer. So the whole kaboodle has had to be sent to the highly respected Woodland Turnery, where they are going to make me a new whorl. I hope. I also went to the Broughton Gathering the weekend before last. This is the event where all the spinning Guilds and other spinning groups in the south of Scotland gather once per year to basically spin, natter and eat cake, plus buying opportunities. The Yarn Yard was there, also Scottish Fibres and some of our independant fleece producers selling their prize winning fleeces. And there was a bring-and-buy stall as well. I bought a dozen eggs from someones pet chickens, a pound of home grown tomatoes and some tablet but the only fibre related buy was a spare part for my Louet S40.

Last Saturday I went to an interesting event at the Dunbar Arts Hub. It is a sort of gallery and the focus is very much on showcasing the work of local artists but we spinners were invited to provide a bit of extra interest. Now I don't normally get drawn on the debate about craftwork v. the work of artists, but suffice to say that the artwork was in the front gallery space, which was bright and open and had a beautiful space facing right out onto the High Street We were squashed into a tiny back room with bad lighting and where no-one could find us unless they had actually come in to look at the front room exhibits. I thought this was rather a waste of us spinners...there's no denying the public pulling power of four spinning wheels going full tilt, and if the owner had put us in the front space she'd have had half of Dunbar in there. I did comment on this to her and got a brief lecture about how artists didn't like their work being diluted by being displayed next to craft work.

Oh well. She was a nice lady, if biased, and we spinners achieved our own ends by publicising the local spinning groups, raising awareness of the craft and getting to sit and spin and natter for three hours with free tea and cake provided. And the best laugh was though actual sales in the gallery area were nil that afternoon, as far as I could tell, one person who came in tried to buy one of my sample skeins which I carry around in a basket for demos. It was a small 5m skein of sparkly stuff that I'd had around for ages and she was a lovely lady who made embellished felted bags, so I did what the vast majority of us craftswomen usually do when talking to other craftswomen and just gave it to her. It's nice to have your spinning appreciated! Then I got a bit of cold shoulder from the owner, presumably because I'd just devalued the work of her artists a bit more, hmm.

Too much of everything. Or too little?

2009-08-26T09:07:00.004Z

It's autumn. You can just feel it in the air. I was up the allotment about ten days ago and though it was warm and sunny you could just feel that edge in the air that meant it was no longer high summer. I was right too. The weather has really turned in the last week, despite it still being August. Cold days ahead.

One job that always has to get done as soon as the kids have gone back to school is turning out the wardrobes. Summer clothes have to be sorted out, judged on size, condition and possibility of wear next year and dealt with accordingly. Keep, pass on, charity shop, textile recycling bin at the dump? The Keep pile is always the smallest. Then I have to look through the storage boxes in the attic for each child, the ones where I keep the stock of larger clothes that I've bought ahead in the sales, kept from an older sibling or had passed on to them to wear. Only then will I go out and buy anything for the new season. Mean, moi? Of course....

Anyway once I'd done this I thought I'd better do my clothes next. I'm not supposed to outgrow clothes of course but I like to put the summer stuff away and pull the warmer garments out of their summer storage. This year though there is a problem...

A couple of summers ago I was the lightest I'd been for many years. I'd got my act together and lost about two and a half stone...thats 35 pounds for the US viewers. I was still fat of course but I was less fat, I'd gone down a couple of sizes and had to buy lots of new clothes. For the record I'm pretty boring in the way I dress, with jeans and tops the normal sort of everyday wear. but it was nice to buy new stuff. One summer later I'd put 7 lbs of it back on again, then I got a new Mirena fitted and put on another 10 pounds in the two weeks immediately after. The new clothes most emphatically did not fit any more! Since then I've put on another couple of pounds and though I've managed to stop this upwards trend and even reverse it a tad, I'm still 20 pounds above what I was two years ago at this point. Which is still 15 pounds less than my top weight, but it's annoying.

As I said I seem to have got a grip on it and I may even have managed to get going downwards again. In the meantime, there is the clothes problem. Practically nothing fits. I have quite a lot of nice stuff in one or two sizes too small. I have clothes that fit me now, a combination of leftover items not thrown out when I was still losing weight, which are a bit shabby, and a few items I've reluctantly bought as the weight crept back on again. So I decided today to have a bit of a wardrobe cull, to put away all the too small stuff and get rid of all the too shabby items at the same time as I changed over the seasonal clothes. I don't have huge amounts of accessable wardrobe space and I thought this would be a good way to free up some of this.

Well.....

Yes, I now have wardrobe and drawer space. It would be fair to say I have Too Much wardrobe and drawer space. Thing is, I hardly have anything to actually wear at the moment, not for the coming winter anyway. I have boxes of nice clothes for both summer and winter, and a huge "out" pile but not very much at all that fits me! And I don't really feel like buying new clothes for the size I am.

Advice?

Yeah, I know, go out and buy myself a few good basics that fit properly and that I feel comfortable in, to see me through till I lose the weight again. (Hopefully.) No point in feeling fat AND my clothes not fitting. But it's annoying, you know????

Freecycle? Got to love it.....

2009-08-23T18:46:00.004Z

I've put my old #2 trailer tent on Freecycle. #2? Yeah, even I didn't know I owned two trailer tents. Seven years ago I gave my 1978 Walker Viva trailer tent to a friend. Turns out it's sat unused in their garage for the entire time. (Bloomin' waste....) Now, they've decided to clear out the garage and wow, guess what? It's apparently been my trailer tent all along.

(In the meantime we bought another trailer tent, paid a lot of money to have the back gate widened enough to get the new one in there and I didn't give the Walker to thereyougothen last year when she was looking for a trailer tent. Because I didn't think I owned it any more, bah....)

Anyway, it's still in passible nick with a few years left in it and we all wanted rid of it so...I've put it on Freecycle. And not surprisingly I've had a lot of responses. You have no idea how many single mums with seven kids (some of whom have disabilities) are out there! And they all want to try camping because they can't afford a "proper holiday". You don't use this expresssion to a die-hard camper, really...

There are a few more genuine responses, of course, and I am drawing up a short list because really, trailer tents don't suit everyone. Much as I would like to give it to the potter lady who wants to take it to festivals I know for a fact it takes two people to put it up. Best response so far though? This letter...

Hi there,

I am writing with regards to your trailer tent. Good luck picking as you will get an awful lot of requests- I reckon!

I recently advertised my caravan on Freecycle and received over 50 requests for it-
some polite some rather quite rude! It was going to be a very difficult decision until
I received a message from some lambers in the hills. Their caravan had been vandalised
and they were getting desperate as the lambing season was quickly approaching.

So really in the end it was a fairly easy decision. The caravan would withstand one more
tow and since the lambers would just use it year after year in the same location-they were the perfect choice.

I had bought the caravan from Gumtree for £100.00. It was a bargain, it was a 1984 Robin.
The cooker, fridge freezer and even the little radio all worked perfectly. The upholstery was
great, orange and brown flowers and looked almost new.

So, I cleaned the caravan inside and out and booked a space in a campsite in the west of Scotland to try it out.
This was for the school holidays in April. I then put a tow bar on my car-all ready to go!

The day before we were leaving my neighbour reversed into the caravan putting a gaping hole in one of the corners
rendering the chasis very unstable. He reversed into the caravan (in a pickup) while in MY garden stealing MY
wood! While he was doing this his dog killed my chicken. He apologised for neither incident! He did advise me though, he had really done me a favour
as the caravan was rotten inside. I didn't really see it that way, as you can imagine.

We go to a lot of festivals with the kids as my partner is in a band. The caravan we bought was for this purpose but it never even got one outing :-(
We would certainly put a trailer tent to good use as we are usually off to a festival every couple of weeks during the Summer. There still a few more this year.

We use 2 tents just now and we do cope- however a trailer tent would make festival life just that little bit better!

On the upside my dog did break into aforementioned neighbour's house while his dog was in season. This cost him £100.00 at the vets.

SO, this is my comprehensive reason to why I would like your trailer tent!

Many thanks for reading
Kindest regards
A.

Is it a true story? One has a few doubts. But come on.... it has style, it has humor, it has plot and she's put a lot of effort into writing it. I think she at least deserves to make the short list, don't you?

Oh, yes, what's a Walker Viva trailer tent anyway, I hear you ask? This....

Anyone want a trailer tent? I am taking applications.....!

Back in the groove again.

2009-08-20T09:25:00.002Z

After seven and a half weeks of holiday, the kids went back to school yesterday.

Yeah!

It's not that I don't love them and like having them around, you understand. It's just that having them with me what seems like 24/7 for nearly two months can get a little tiring. They're energetic and intelligent kids and don't take well to having nothing to do, so this must be provided. Yes they get many opportunities to just get on with things and make their own entertainment but you still have to provide some family activities, yup? Parental involvement and all that?

So we have had trips to the zoo and local country park and cinema. We have had three weeks of camping. We have had meals out and days out and friends round. We have spend quite a bit of time turning the garden into a play space for Princess and the assortment of small girls that live locally. We have had wargames and laser quest games and sports clubs and swimming. Sleepovers. Trips. Activities.

I am exhausted. Holidays? I need a rest!

Lost.

2009-08-14T07:46:00.004Z

I lost my knitting bag. Not my real knitting bag which is about one cubic metre in size and can hold small children, but my travelling one. I'd taken it with me to Amsterdam and had last seen it while packing up to come home.

It took me a few days to realise it was missing. We'd emptied the car first day back of course then on the next fine day after that the kids and I had opened up the trailer tent, stripped everything out of it including the canvas and cushions (they get stored in the dry attic over winter) and carried it all up from the garden to the house. There are still odd heaps of camping equipment all over the house. But the knitting bag? Nowhere to be seen.

Now I didn't care about the actual bag. It was a freebie with some toiletries I got from Boots and I've got two more identical ones. What I did care about was the contents.

Two sets of Boye needles.
The last five balls of Linen Drape for the sweater I am currently knitting. (Actual pieces were in the teeny bag I use in the car.)
One half finished Forest Canopy in KnitWitch silk.
One ball of sock yarn, hand dyed by me.
One braid of Yarn Yard fibre. (Yes I did take a spinning wheel to Amsterdam!)
The latest Spin Off.
And my sock knitting kit. Two sets of dirt cheap charity shop circs in two sizes but they are MY sock needles and fit MY hands and I can't knit socks without them, okay?

Anyway. Over the course of the week I searched and searched an searched for that bag. I knew I couldn't have left it in Amsterdam, that was one good thing. When you drive off a camping pitch you leave an area of flattened grass, nothing more. I'd have noticed a red spotted knitting bag sitting there, honestly. But could I find it in the house? The kids and I had stripped the trailer tent to the bare wood, almost, so it couldn't be still in there. It had to be up here and somehow got muddled in with something else I had put away.

One week later, no knitting bag. I had run out of yarn for my sweater. I was desperate to cast on a sock. I cast on a sock using my Addi lace needles and Magic Loop. I changed to dpns. Not satisfactory. I had to find my charity shop sock needles! (Not to mention the other £200 worth of other things in that bag...)

Finally, when I'd looked in all the corners of the house I admitted I'd better check the trailer tent again. But how could it be in there? I'd stripped it bare. Plus Lad and I had battened it down for the winter, pushed it with some effort into an inaccessable corner of the garden and arranged two wheelie bins, a bench, a parasol and four pots of geraniums across the front of it. I didn't want to unravel that lot again.

I did though. And yes, there was my knitting bag, inside a locker which I had definately, 110% thought bare and empty. I was so bloomin' relieved I could have kissed it. Then I reclosed the trailer tent, pushed it back into the corner and re-arranged all the garden stuff in front of it. Took me an hour in total.

Then I went upstairs and ripped back the sock I was knitting and started it again on the right needles. And I was happy, lol!

Home.

2009-08-01T08:01:00.003Z

Got home from Amsterdam yesterday at lunchtime, and have been running around catching up with myself ever since. Hubby had a 3pm meeting so I had the kids, a grocery run and 8(!!) loads of laundry to do plus we had to go and pick up the cats from the cattery. They have both come home with sniffles, which is a classic risk of being in a cattery after living in a protected home environment I suppose. None of our outdoor cats ever got sniffles. Must be something to do with eating a fresh raw rodent once a day or something.

Anyway, Amsterdam was lovely and we all had a great time. I will blog about it later but only have one thing to say now...I am roller-coasted out for the year.

Other news? My needle biopsy came back 100% clear. The lump was an old small fibroadenoma, otherwise known as a "breast mouse" because it wriggles away when you go in search of it. Benign, and they are happy for me to go away and forget about it.

Good!

Today Lad and Hubby are off to some sort of wargames show. (Was vital we got home in time for this.) Tomorrow is the Allotment Open Day, so Princess and I are off up to the allotment after her karate lesson to see how bad the allotment looks after three weeks of total neglect. The courgettes/marrows will be the size of small houses, I expect. Never mind, lots of produce for the vegetable stall and I can run a little display of Emergency Weeding Technique tomorrow for the edification of the visitors.

Quick farewell.

2009-07-12T22:52:00.003Z

Off to Amsterdam tomorrow. No time to blog. So here are three of my best pix from June, just to give you something to look at while I'm away.

Summer strawberries up the allotment. Plus girl. (She likes strawberries...)

Woolfest. Dazzling as usual!

And the Boys. Are they not adorable? Look at that cuddle! I'm thinking of putting this one on Lolcats. Any suggestions for a caption?

Good times and bad times - Pt1.

2009-07-08T11:56:00.003Z

I've been a bad blogger recently. I have been doing endless amounts if blogworthy things, but do I post about them? Nope...basically I've been too busy doing to have much time or energy left to blog. Oh well...

However, there have been a few things lately which are compulsory blog fodder. Woolfest, the allotment, recent meetups, recent acquisitions and yup, some bad times. So let's do that one first.

I turned 50 last year so am now old enough to be called in for routine screening mammograms under the national breast screening programm. Everyone seems to have a horror story about these so I was not looking forwards AT ALL to this when I got an appointment for three weeks ago, because I've got big boobs and couldn't quite imagine how the squashing bit was going to take place without much pain. Well, it was fine. FINE. It did not hurt. Bit weird, but no pain.

The pain arrived two weeks later when I got a recall letter. They don't tell you why in a letter, obviously, apart from that you have something that needs double checked and that 7 out of 8 women don't need anything more than a second check. Which leaves the other 1 out of 8, obviously. My appointment was six days from the receipt of the letter and yes, I was worried.

Anyway I was there at 9am on Monday and yes, the mammogram showed I had a lump in my right boob. Tiny lump the size of a pea that even the doctor couldn't find manually but it was there. More mammograms, and an ultrasound. Then yet more mammograms because Pea was sneaky and kept wriggling off screen. A lot of waiting around....

Finally the verdict. The doctors are 99% sure it's a benign calcification. Nice word that, benign! However they decided to do a needle punch biopsy to confirm the diagnosis 100%, which was fine by me too. In half an hour or in two days? I went for the half-hour option.

I'm not saying this hurt either. Lets just say that being clamped into the mammogram scanner and told to stay Absolutely Still for nearly thirty minutes is the kind of experience that I don't want to repeat in a hurry. At the time, it was fine, if boring. But two days on I still feel stiff and achy and I have a really sore neck, ouch. I want to say again though for the benefit of anyone going for this procedure...it DID NOT hurt. The bit that did hurt was when they rotated part of the machine and my thumb got caught in it, but that was my own stupid fault, lol.

Anyway, the doctors are happy to let me go off to Amsterdam next Monday for three wweks. They're happy to give me the biopsy results over the phone. They used the expression "confirm the benign diagnosis". They said "99% sure". I know the way oncologists tell you things and the words they use to qualify themselves every second sentence. I'm happy..well, 99% happy!

Normal service will resume tomorrow, or even perhaps tonight if I get the photos crunched down to blogging size. I never did show you the things I got from Woolfest, did I?

Oh, and go for your mammograms when it's your turn, ladies. It's less bother than a smear by a long way, and given that breast cancer is a lot more common than cervical cancer well, it would be daft not to go, surely?

Automatic watering and a felted cat.

2009-07-02T16:24:00.003Z

It's hot here. To have temperatures of over 25'C in Scotland is pretty rare, I can tell you. Usually we're still wearing cardies in July. So it's a bit of a shock all round, especially to the veg patch. For the last few years we've practically been cutting drainage trenches round the veg beds in an effort to keep them from flooding.

This year however it's been very dry the last couple of months and the allotment is turning into a dustbowl. I've never seen it so dry, not at the start of July anyway. I don't normally water crops...I prefer to keep them sturdy and self sufficient. But this year it's different.

Anyway, after yet another hour with the hose last week I took a thought and went hunting in the shed. Eight years back one of our local DIY warehouses shut down and sold off a lot of their gardening stock f0r really silly prices, like the water butt I have for £1. I bought a lot of stuff, including eight rolls of "leaky" ie drip irrigation hosepipe, reduced from £18 per 15m roll to 10p, mostly because each roll had a load of useful hose fittings which are expensive. Me being me though I'd shoved it all in the shed and forgotten about it.

So now I have 120m of leaky hosepipe set up over my favoured beds on the allotment, linked together by short runs of scrap piping. It sounds a lot but really this only covers five beds so I've only put it on beds with thirsty plants. When I visit the allotment I connect up the hose end to the tap and hey presto, the beds water themselves. Cool, eh? I just wish I could put it on an automatic timer but that's not allowed. But it's a fun system. I have plans to extend it further next year and maybe link it to the water butts, but then again, it will probably rain solidly for the next five summers....

On a lighter note, Paws is really suffering in this heat under his huge bear coat. He lies in front of the fans and looks pained. Ollie, with his lightweight coat, is fine, but Paws has started to felt. He has really fine fur round his britches, it's obviously an area that gets a bit of friction and he's sweaty. Thus, he's felting. I do comb him most days but he's never been keen on getting his nethers combed (would you???) and now he's matting up. I'm keeping the felted bits at bay by a combination of clipping them out and combing the bits he'll let me comb, but still. A felted cat, lol. How appropriate!

Going Batty.

2009-06-27T21:19:00.004Z

You have just got to watch this, especially the bit at the end with the nursery-inna-box.

Baby bats are given dummies/pacifiers? And they swaddle them! Who knew?

(Thanks to Fuzzarelly for the link.)

Woolfest 2009.

2009-06-26T07:31:00.004Z

Yup, off to Woolfest tomorrow. I'm getting to be Head Prefect on the Scottish Fibres bus again. I enjoyed doing it last year because everyone turned up on time and there were no problems, but there's no denying it's a worry. What if someone doesn't turn up, they don't contact me and I have to leave them behind? Bad enough on the outwards leg but what if someone gets locked in a portaloo in Cockermouth???? Do I abandon them to their fate?

Fingers crossed.....

Anyway, I'll report back soon. I've packed my camera, knitting, sarnies and *ahem* a modest amount of cash. What am I going to buy? Well, the only thing on my list is a pair of sock blockers, but I'm sure I'll come back with more!

Ma boyz iz famush....

2009-06-04T06:40:00.002Z

Forget bragging about the kids, my fur boyz just made the front page of I Can Has Cheezburger!

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I submitted the picture a wee while back with my own caption but what I didn't know is that other members can recaption pictures and resubmit them. My picture got resubmitted thirty-six times to date, lol.

Have to admit, the front page caption is a lot snappier. Thanks, Lummox. My boys are now in the Lolcats Hall of Fame forever, lol!

The best laid plans....

2009-05-19T07:59:00.004Z

Oh well, so much for my allotment plans yesterday. Around 11am I got a phone call from the school saying that Lad was throwing up and could I come and get him please? So that was me stuck at home for the rest of the day, ho-hum. All that get-it-over-with housework time wasted!I could have gone out in the morning and done chores in the afternoon. Oh well...at leasst Lad is none too ill. There's some sort of bug going around but as long as he doesn't eat he isn't puking. he's a bit tired and grumpy, that's all. So he's home today.

I wasn't planning to go out today because Washing Machine Repair Man is coming back again with the final part for the tumble drier. I had to cancel a spinning group day because of this, which was acceptable, but last night guess what? I discover that Hubby is working from home today, which he neglected to tell me about in time for me to ressucitate the spinning plans. Bah. So now I'm at home with a grumpy kid and a Hubby who expected a quiet child and wife free day alone in his office. (Because I was supposed to be at spinning.) If I go out and leave him with WMRM and Grumpy Child he will get narked. If I stay in I will probably disturb him even more. AND because I thought I had a day stuck at home I have volunteered to look after Princess's Best Pal after school which means even more noise on his supposedly quiet day.

Domestic comunication? We haz itz.....notz...

Anyway, yesterday was not a complete wash out on the gardening front. I got some more pots planted up, and finished getting the late sown seeds into the propagator. Plus potted on the courgettes etc. I have a very small greenhouse but at this time of year it's worth its weight in gold.

It really is just a slice of a greenhouse set against a wall. Neat design though. I did think it would be more than big enough when I ordered it but with hindsight, I wish I'd got a double width one and put up with it sticking out into the garden more.

Not even enough room to sit or stand inside if the potting tray is in place.

Variety of courgette and squash plants. (As usual, too many, but they'll all get homes.)

Different tomatoes...

Sweetcorn. This needs potting on too. It's too early for it to be planted out.

Salad trays.

Potting tray/bench.

Potatoes left over from the allotment planting, in pots. These will not yield a lot but they'll be earlier than the allotment ones because of the shelter.

And the last of my 50p per tray Pelargoniums and other plants for colour. I'll get them potted up today.

Oh well, on with the day...

Today.

2009-05-18T07:54:00.006Z

It's an allotment day...or will be, if the weather clears a bit more. I don't like going to the allotment when its (a) raining (b) extremely windy or (c) bone chillingly cold. Which rules out a lot of days in Scotland even in "summer", believe me. Add in to the mix childcare, chores and the days I feel unwell then you end up with a very narrow window of opportunity for days up the allotment sometimes. However, today looks promising.

Gardening. Thanks for all the suggestions of things to plant. For these of you who suggested rhubarb, however, I give you a picture of my allotment rhubarb patch last month.

I think we can all agree now that more rhubarb is not required, okay?

Sweet Cicily I do not know. I will look for it in the big garden centre when I next visit. I do have Welsh Bunching Onions on the allotment, I suddenly remembered, so that's a good idea for a transplant. I also went to the small local garden centre and bought snapdragons and a curry plant.

Then I went to B&Q for some slabs, which were a bit of a shock. Last time I bought slabs they were 39p each. Now they are £1.59!!! Admittedly last time was ten years ago but still...anyway on a plus note I walked in just as they were loading up their "Reduced to Clear" plant shelves. I never thought of bedding plants having a sell-by date but apparently so. I walked out with twelve trays of plants, reduced to 50p a tray from between £3 and £6 a tray. Pelargoniums, Dianthus, Violas, Verbeneas and wallflowers. Not very food-y, but quite cottage-y. Princess and I planted up a few pots yesterday so we should have some nice colourful spots this year.

Princess also suggested a pink rambling rose near her play hut...this is an excellent idea, actually, as that section of wall is where the local neds/vandals climb over to wreck the garden and steal things out the greenhouse. I must see which variety of pink rambler has the longest thorns.

The weather is turning grey again which leads me to think I might have to go for Plan B today, which is housework, bah humbug. I have recovered from the awful trauma of the unexpected joiner but now that leaves me with no excuses between me and the decorating. Except the clutter...so I have decided to go back to the Get One Bag Per Day Out the House system. I have made a good start with a box of videos to go to the Scout Car Boot appeal and an old cupboard to go to the dump, but I feel I might get more today.

Edit. I just cleared out the freezer and started to defrost the small back up one. And cleaned the microwave. Is that enough destashing/housework for one day???

Knitting? When? I haven't even managed to get to spinning recently. I had to cancel a much anticipated silk spinning workshop last Saturday because Dad and Lad were away and I couldn't find a babysitter for Princess. I have however found a pile of long neglected cross stitch threads and kits in the attic. Watch this space...

My boyz....

2009-05-16T22:29:00.000Z

moar funny pictures

Never say...

2009-05-15T17:09:00.001Z

Never say I'm not good to you. Here be lolcats, noms and balls of yarn. How much time can you waste in one day?

Gardening.

2009-05-13T14:34:00.002Z

I have been gardening. No, not down the allotment! Gardening in the garden. Yes I have a garden...well, I have a space downstairs with the trailer tent parked on slabs and a playhut and the recycling. And green stuff. Grass, weeds, trees, that sort of thing. I used to like the idea of having a garden. Somewhere to sit out and read and burn sausages and such. Trouble is they're so terribly hard work. You have to do things like cut the grass and plant pretty things. Vegetables are easy...you plant them, feed them, weed them a bit then eat them. They don't have to look pretty or the colours match or keep them a certain length.

Anyhow, the grass/jungle was knee high so I got the strimmer out and started hacking my way to the greenhouse. The greenhouse is pretty tidy actually because I cleaned it out at Easter in time for the baby vegetable plants to go out there. Currently I have sweetcorn, six varieties of tomatoes, basil, courgettes and pumpkins growing in there. Nice and organised. It's only a little greenhouse but it was worth every penny my OH spent on it ten years ago. (It was my 40th birthday present.)

I only got half the lawn cut. It's not huge but it undulates around lots of things which have to be moved. The grass is so high I had to strim first, then mow to chop it up. If I can get my act together to cut it again in a few days it will come under control very easily but the problem is cutting grass (a) bores me to tears and (b) hurts my back. Hubby do it? Err, no. Hubby missed out on getting any traditional man genes such as the ones for gardening, DIY or doing the BBQ. In the eleven years we've had this house I do not recall him ever cutting the grass.

Anyway after I did half the lawn I started stripping out weeds from the beds. Most of these are feral geraniums which are trying to take over the entire world so I had to dig them out. I've decided that if my strengths lie in growing vegetables I might as well grow them here as well. I'm going to make a second herb garden, (got herb beds on the allotment) with a few more aromatics and non culinary herbs. There is a bronze fennel there already, survivor of ten years of sporadic weeding. I have potatoes in pots so have planted a mint barrel, chives, borage, oregano and thyme. I've also put in a small strawberry patch and some heartsease.

I've also got four lavender bushes to plant. I've got three apple trees, a pear tree, climbing roses, white lilac and several clematis on the walls. What else? I'm feeling a bit skinflint at present so it's got to be something I can either take cuttings from allotment plants or have in the seed box. Hmm. Two types of lemon balm, garlic chives, coriander, dill and some basic salad leaves? Climbing beans? I know...a blackcurrent bush. I have a self seeded one growing great guns in entirely the wrong place in the allotment. Princess would like that...And a few aggressive flowers. Nasturtiums, Californian Poppies, Poached Egg Plant and Calendulas.

Any other suggestions? Got to be a bit cottagey/food/herbal sort of thing.

Shellshocked.

2009-05-09T07:54:00.004Z

Well that's it over. Joiner and Sidekick have gone.Three days of unexpected "Woott????" and it's all done. Two walls and a ceiling replastered (all in seperate rooms), the kitchen refloored, an alcove shelved and best of all my walk in cupboard has been floored (you could barely walk on the floor before), the pipes boxed in and shelved from top to bottom. It's not a big cupboard, about 6ft x 4ft, but I just got an extra 30+feet of shelf space added in, I calculate. Finally somewhere to put all the big bulky kitchen things, like the jam pans and box of spare lightbulbs. You know, the sort of thing that they never show you how to store in makeover programs? Cake tins, the liquidizer, 40 empty jamjars? Kitty litter?

I love storage. Especially the kind with doors you can shut.

Plus I got him to do all sorts of tiddly little other jobs while here, like repairing the window sash and cutting down some bookcase supports. Annoying things that you can't do very sucessfully yourself and keep avoiding.

Anyway it's finished and it was worth it. It's nice not to have holes in the walls any more. Large areas of drying plaster are much cosier!

Busy....

2009-05-07T10:43:00.003Z

Busy....

Allotment.

Selling my Mum's house.

Allotment.

Easter holidays.

Allotment.

Camping.

Unexpected arrival of joiner to do last round of home improvements. (Very unexpected. I phoned to book him for next week. He and his sidekick were here within an hour. It must have been a quiet day.)

Dead tumble drier. (Not good when combined with post-camping laundry.)Repair chap is coming with new piece tomorrow though.

Leaking central heating on return from camping. Fortunately now fixed.

And all the usual domestic dross. Plus next week I get to clear up the chaos the joiners have left behind.

Must try to go to allotment this weekend. Here's a picture though of how it was looking a couple of weeks back. Not so very bad for the time of year...

Normal service will resume as soon as possible.

Herding Cats.

2009-04-03T06:32:00.003Z

I stole this straight from Zippiknits' blog...I thought it deserved a wider UK audience. Thanks, Lella!

You will notice that there's a lot of very similar looking white Persians and black 'n whites in there, but still...hilarious!

Tired...

2009-03-30T06:51:00.004Z

I'm tired at the moment. Very tired. I had a great time at SkipNorth but it was non-stop action, three nights of unfamiliar beds, lots of talking and though the food was fine it wasn't quite what I'd be eating at home and my innards, it seems, are getting fussier with age. At least though I didn't have to drive there and back...thanks, Natalie!

But in short I ended up at the start of last week dead tired, bunged up and with some sort of low grade opportunistic bug that made me feel a bit wabbit. No, scratch that. Very wabbit. Add to that seven loads of laundry (how can three people generate seven loads of laundry in four days???), the general backlog of housework and the sense of anticlimax that always comes after a fun trip away and...well, not a good week at all.

I am still tired. I even went back to bed a couple of times in the morning after I'd seen the kids off to school but then the clocks changed at the weekend, didn't they, and I ended up having to get up at what my body thought was 5.30am on Sunday in order to get the kids organised and off to swimming club. Bah.

And it's been bright and sunny, but with arctic gale winds ie it looks like a nice day for the allotment, but it's bloody cold and downright miserable when you get up there.

Whine....

I am off to B&Q to buy some potting compost. At the very least I can do the non-strenuous task of starting off the tomato seeds, I suppose!

Mr Greenjeans Pt1.

2009-03-29T14:09:00.004Z

I came back from Skipnorth determined to knit more than socks and scarves for myself by next year. Everyone else seemed to be sporting fabulous knitted sweaters, jackets, cardigans and shawls, and what did I take? Socks, socks, socks. Really, I was not worthy..

I had a think about it on the way there actually, and came to the conclusion that while a lace shawl was going to be a given at some point in the near future, I seemed not to be wearing sweaters any more (too many hot flushes!!) so there was no point in knitting them at the moment. I'm too short and fat for most knitted jackets (the awful Bettna experience taught me that!) so basically, it was cardigans or nothing. Then something dawned on me. I do wear cardigans. All The Time. I wear a cardigan over a thin black cashmere sweater when it's cold, and over a black t-shirt when it's warmer. I wear cardigans out, in fact. So why am I not knitting them by the dozen? Why have I never knitted a cardigan for myself, ever??

Tell you why. It's the twinset image. Only old ladies wear cardies. But...perhaps that's because they're practical garments when you're in the Hot Flush stage? Oh.......

Lightbulb moment.

So when I was shopping at SkipNorth I was thinking "Cardigan?" And one of the things I bought was this....

This is Aracunia Nature Multi, 100% wool aran weight in sort of peacock colours. I bought it at Coldspring Mill at a bargain £3.99 a skein. There are 220m per skein so plenty for a cardi.

So I have firmly turned my eyes from the UFO pile and cast on for Mr Greenjeans from Knitty, Fall 2007.

1245 Ravelry Users can't be wrong!

You have to laugh...

2009-03-27T09:44:00.003Z

I was told about spinning wheel cup holders by an American attendee at SkipNorth. I thought she was having me on. Apparently not. Look here....

Well......I can think of a few modifications I would like to make to some of my wheels but it's never occurred to me that I need to have quite such easy access to caffeine or alcohol while spinning. No wonder some folk can spin so fast!

SkipNorth 2009.

2009-03-23T14:43:00.006Z

I got back from SkipNorth yesterday evening. It was, as always, a great weekend. Lots of talking, knitting, spinning, craft talk, shopping, wonderfully knowlegeable people, friends old and new, cake.....what else could you ask for, really? More time??? I did my best but I really didn't manage to get round everyone and there were several new folk I'd loved to have talked to longer and get to know better but really, there was just not enough time to do everything.

As usual I was too busy gabbing and shopping to take many picture but I've unpacked the stash and photographed it instead.

I drove down a day early on Thursday with Natalie. She wanted to go to Wingham Wool Work to do some fibre reconnaissance and I...well, I just wanted to go to Wingham. Plus we've found in the past it's a bit close for time to drive down on Friday mornings, given that I have to wait till the kids are off to school before I can get going. So we fitted in an extra day.

I must say I was extremely restrained at Wingham, given that at SkipNorth One I was the clear and outright winner in the Fibre Buying Contest.

Some purple toned merino and silk Rainbow tops, a small pack of ramie (nettle) fibre to try and some absolutely fabulous yak and silk tops.

We couldn't get booked in at the Haworth Youth Hostel on Thursday night, so headed for the Mankinholes YH ten miles down the road to meet up with Tutley Mutley, Wye Sue, blogless GreenMaggie and SallyJoy.

Yes, the kitchen of the YH does look like a pub!

Nest morning we all headed off to Texere, where I was also very restrained. Very!!

A pattern and a tube of beads for Princess. I was beginning to wonder if I was losing my touch at shopping....

Off to the Haworth YH for the official start of SkipNorth and the Friday pm workshops. I think it's best to draw a discrete veil over my pathetic efforts at double filet crochet but I did as always enjoy Lixie's Kool-Aid dyeing workshop.

This is merino fibre, 100g of each. I'm not totally happy with my choice of colours but I do have Kool-Aid, so might over dye some of the sections.

In the evening we had a yarn swap, where we all brought items from our stash which we did not want, threw them all into a heap on the floor and then had a wonderful free-for-all grab session. Good manners and a desire not to be seen to be too greedy kept this fairly civilised, have to say! We also had a fund raising event for p/hop, where donated items were offered in return for donations of money to p/hop and thus to Medecins Sans Frontieres.

(Psss...have you sent in your event donation yet???)

My haul from these two events...

Skein of Cascade 220 Peruvian Highland Wool. (Swap.)I have never tried any Cascade yarns before so was pleased to get this.

Skein of Manos de Uruguay silk blend, skein of Jitterbug, skein of JK Knits merino silk. (Swap.)

Two hanks of bronze aran weight silk, braid of hand dyed Shetland fibre from The Yarn Yard, "Knit One, Kill Two", a knitting mystery! (p/hop)

This sudden influx of nice bits and bobs must have reactivated my shopping mojo, because I ended up with a really good haul the next day at Coldspring Mill.

This is 700g of Araucania Nature Wool in purple and green aran(enough for a sweater); 100g of pale turquoise merino/silk/alpaca Araucania chunky; 100m of Noro silk/mohair/wool in bright turquoise (these last two are for knitting gifts for my sister, who likes teal/turquoise); 23 balls of Louisa Hardin Coquette in turquoise and coffee; a skein of frog green and daffodil yellow Araucania cotton; 400g of 75% bamboo/25% nylon Freedom Gorgeous in a soft green and finally one kilo of Debbie Bliss pure silk DK in an apricot colour for a cardigan for me. This last cost a mere £29.99, For a kilo of DB Silk!!

Coldspring Mill also sells camping gear, btw. They have some nice display tents up. Look what I found in the sleeping pod of this big 4-man tent...

My sort of tent!

Next stop was a double one, to The Skep and an astonishing mill-end haberdashery outlet called RL & CM Bond.

In The Skep I bought some patchwork fabric offcuts for Princess, and some sock yarn for a mother at the kids' swimming club. She has never knitted socks but as soon as she saw me knitting one she asked me to get her some yarn and teach her. Another convert...

At Bond's I got these, not sure why. It was WyeSue's fault. She made me.

In the afternoon we went to the headquarters of The Knitting and Crochet Guild, home of the 1p per gram Yarn Mountain.

I bought another gruesome doll dress knitting pattern, this one being a copy of that infamous black strapless dress Lady Di wore decades back and which caused such a kerfuffle. Yup, the one where she flashed the not-yet-royal boobs more than was decent.

Also Jan Messant's Knitted Gardens; 600g of Pingouin Highland aran in a nice burgundy colour at 1p per gram; some Jaggerspun Zephyr lace weight in Basil (I already have one ball of the same dye lot so that's the Aeolian Shawl sorted) and seven balls of an interesting merino/silk 4-ply cabled yarn, which was so tangled up I got it for £1 per ball.

AND...yes, yet more...I was given some lovely things by some lovely people.

Tutley Mutley gave me this for Lad...

WyeSue gave me some really rather fabulous things..

That's more Colinette Jitterbug, three skeins of Colinette Parisienne, some Regia Bamboo Color sock yarn, "Knitting without Tears" by the late great Elizabeth Zimmerman and a lovely book on angora rabbits and fibre.

There was also a box of chocolate truffles which was a present from blogless Cybil, but the box is already in the rubbish bin and I'm not getting it out just to take a photo of an empty box, lol.

So that was my haul.

Think it's a lot? See SkipNorth 1, SkipNorth 2 and SkipNorth 3 for comparison....do you know, I thought I'd come home with less this year...but possibly not! However, some of it came from gifts and the swaps, plus p/hop so I certainly didn't spend as much this year.

So that's SkipNorth over for another year. This is a sad thing. SkipNorth is one of the highlights of my year. No it's not just about the swag. The best bit of Skipnorth is definately the people. Thank you all, for making it such a great event again!

SkipNorth 2009.

2009-03-19T08:21:00.000Z

Gone to SkipNorth.

Back late Sunday.

Shoot me...

2009-03-12T07:52:00.002Z

Really, just shoot me now. The new Knitty is up and the white version of the Aeolian Shawl has caught my eye.

I keep looking at it and thinking...1100 yards? That's the same yardage as three pairs of socks. Three months max....

Hahahahaha......

I take the sock knitting with me everywhere and do a few rows here, a few rows there. One pair of socks per month, just out of odds and ends of time and no looking at the pattern. I don't think this shawl would be quite the same. Plus, it's taken me three Forest Canopies just to get the pattern reliably into my head and I still make the odd mistake. I can reliably count no higher than a six stitch repeat, it seems, over a couple of hundred stitches. Maybe. I don't think this shawl woulld be quite as simple as that, would it??????

I just asked Lad if I should try and knit it. He looked and said "Why not? It might take you a few years though...."

Too true.

Ah well.

PS. In response to a comment made in my last post by Cynthia A., no, I couldn't put in another flyer hook, alas. I'd have no hesitation on some wheels but this one does not belong to me. It's on loan to our spinning group and basically I'm the only person there who's into weird wheels, so it's living with me at present. Also the flyer arms are cylindrical and would be difficult to drill, and it's such a beautiful wheel anyway I wouldn't want to disfigure it. I do think though that a second row of offset hooks on the opposite flyer arm would improve the wrap-on considerably and may comment on this to the current maker, if I'm in touch with him for any other reason.

Update.

2009-03-09T17:37:00.003Z

Just a brief post to show that yes, I have indeed managed to master the WindWheel.

This is Blue Jeans, an utterly fabulous 75% merino 25% nylon blend which was the Feburary fibre from The Yarn Yard Fibre Club. It is dyed to look like old ripped and faded jeans, and it's a measure of Natalie's sure eye for colour that what looked a bit "Really???" in the braid is spinning up to give just the promised effect. (I promise to belive you next time, Natalie!)

I get a 200g sub, so this is 100g spun up to give singles that I trust will ply to a heavyish sock weight yarn. You can probably tell I'm going for a lot of twist here, which is easy with the WindWheel and its effortless not-quite-a-treadle pulley drive. It only has one ratio but frankly, you don't need ratios with this wheel. You just move from a slow waltz-beat toe tap to more of a cha-cha-cha. Big bobbins too, which easily hold the 100g in one braid of Natalie's fibre. My only small criticism of this wheel is that it doesn't have quite enough hooks on the flyer to wind the bobbin totally evenly. One more would have made all the difference between this peaks-and-valley effect you see here and a smoothly wound bobbin. Oh well, small complaint given that it's an otherwise superb wheel. I always rewind my bobbins on the trusty Louet S10 before plying anyway.

I will be taking the WindWheel to SkipNorth next week, by the way, so anyone that wants to play on it will be most welcome to do so. Ohhh, only ten more days to SkipNorth! I can hardly belive this will be my fourth year of going to it!

Finally, something interesting.

2009-02-19T16:53:00.008Z

Okay, it's been a crap month or so all round, Nuff said. Lets get back to spinning. Here's something interesting for you to admire.

Front view....

Side view....

Rear view...

Okay, hands up who knows what it is. Thought so...not many of you. Well don't feel bad about it because I had not a clue either before I brought it home from spinning group on Tuesday and got going on Google looking for it.

All I knew about it was that it was called a Wind Wheel, that it belonged to a very elderly and now long retired spinner that lives locally and that she had given it on long term loan to the group. She said she never got on with it. (We got her Ashford Traditional too.) None of us could get on with it either...umpteen years of collective spinning between us and we could not get it to spin. It does not have a drive band per se you see. It has a weighted pulley arrangement at the bottom that flicks over and a drive belt that rotates the massive flyer. It is very, very different from anything I've used before. I regard myself as a bit of a wheel geek-groupie, but this wheel is something else again.

Anyhow, after a bit of Googling I discovered my ...err, our new aquisition was an Ettrick Windwheel, that it was pronounced "wind" as in wind up the bobbin rather than "wind" as in gentle breezes and it comes from Australia.

Actually this last bit I could have discovered much more quickly if I'd looked round the rear of the wheel.

"Tasmanian Blackwood". How cool is that? If you stuck a knitting needle through a globe you'd find Tasmania is the furthest part of the other side of the world from Musselburgh. And the tree from which this wheel is made grew there. (It's a type of acacia.) It's fabulous wood and the whole wheel, from design to wood to style to polish is just so exotic. It sat there at spinning group in amongst our Ashfords and Kromskis and Haldanes looking like a rare tropical bird that had got lost.

Anyhow, there was still the problem of the fact that none of us could get it to spin. So as official Wheel Geek and Person that Hangs Out on the Internet Most I was given the task of sorting this out. I emailed the maker, Norman Walters , asking for scans of the assembly plans and spinning instructions. He very kindly sent these and now...I'm barraging him with techie questions, poor man. And some queries as to the design history.

I'm also talking to two Ravelry members from Australia, Zephyrama and Jenwren, both of whom own Windwheels. Now this is one of the most amazing things about Ravelry IMHO...the fact that I can go into it and hunt down a couple of spinners who knew exactly what I need to know to get this wheel going. Wow....!

Still can't spin on it though. I'm pretty sure I've got it set up right but it's the action of this pulley bit that really gets to me.

You have to sort of tap the treadle with your toe to get it up over the top of the turn, then the brass weights pull it down and round and momentum carries it up to the top of the turn and then you toe-tap again...but inbetween taps, if you push down on any part of the treadle plate the drive band will slip on the pulley. If you don't tap at the right moment the band slips up top here.....

...and the pulley reverses and you lose momentum and really, it all goes to hell in a handcart. It's the complete opposite of normal treadling on a single treadle wheel, where you have to be smooth and think rouuuuuund treadling, with only a little extra over the hump at the top. I feel like a beginner spinner again...you know, when you're kicking the wheel halfway across the room at every treadle stroke and it keeps reversing on you? Well this is it all over again.

I'm going to crack it by Saturday though. Saturday is the monthly meet up day for the Edinburgh Guild of Spinners and I am taking the Windwheel along to be admired. I'm going to look a bloomin' prat if I can't get it to work, am I not?

Off to practice....

Happy Valentine's Day.

2009-02-14T14:32:00.002Z

Back again.

2009-01-21T18:36:00.002Z

Here I am again! It's been a long eleven days or so. Thank you for all the kind messages...they were greatly appreciated.

We had the funeral on Monday and it went very well. I know there's isn't such a thing as a "good" funeral but it was exactly what my mum would have wanted, with the right songs and flowers and the small group of her surviving relatives there. Because it was such a small funeral (18 of us) the minister made a very personal address, with a lot of people mentioned by name. It was the same chapel we used for my father's funeral, thirty five years ago, and she had the same flowers as in her wedding bouquet. And then we all went back to a local hotel and had tea and buns and sarnies and a good gossip with all the cousins we hadn't seen since the last funeral. Which my mum would have enjoyed hugely, alas. So I think we did her well.

However it's been a fairly exhausting period, with the arrangements to be made and her affairs to be brought into order. I do have an older sister and we shared the tasks but there was still a lot to do. Plus, just to add to the gaiety of the week Lad got a real wallop at rugby practice last week (huge bruise on cheekbone, massive keeker and two skinned and badly bruised knees, Princess went down with the lurgy of the moment and then just in time for the funeral she passed it onto her brother. So he was standing there drugged to the eyeballs with ibuprofen and paracetamol, chalk white with two huge greening bruises on his face, trying not to cough too much. He couldn't even face the buns and sarnies afterwards, so he had to be feeling rough!

He's still off school, come to think of it. And he's given the wretched bug to me now. *koff koff* It has not been a good couple of weeks, really.

Must do a craft update sometime though. I haven't done much knitting (half a sock) but I did get to spinning group a couple of times, just to take my mind off things and destress a little.

My Mum.

2009-01-11T20:55:00.002Z

My mother died today. She was 83 and though she had an ongoing heart condition that we knew was going to cause trouble "one day", she was still going out and about and getting on with her life. Until yesterday afternoon when she was out shopping on the High Street, tripped, fell and broke her hip. Even then she was quite positive about the whole thing and the doctors at the New Royal were going to operate to fix the hip this afternoon or tomorrow. Except quite unexpectedly, after morning ward rounds and as her op was being arranged, she went into cardiac arrest and died almost instantly. Boom. I was actually on the phone to the ward asking about the scheduling of the op as the crash team went in. My sister and I went rushing in to the hospital immediately but we were far too late of course. Not unexpected, given the poor condition of her heart valve, but a bit of a shock nevertheless.

Isn't it amazing how just as you think you're going into a quiet and peaceful patch for a couple of months, life can turn round and bite you on the bum? Poor Mum. She would have been 84 on Tuesday.

The Mom Song.

2009-01-09T18:43:00.001Z

The kids didn't really get it, but I thought this was hysterical...