An afternoon out

Yesterday, I decided to go on a little outing to the Morningside Makers' Market. The weather was beautiful in the morning (while I was doing fascinating things like going to the supermarket) but just as I was leaving the house on my bike, it started to rain.

Never mind, I thought, it'll only be a passing shower.



By the time I got to the market, I had revised this view. However, the entrance looked positively festive despite the downpour.

There were lots of lovely stalls inside. I saw silver jewellery, knitted and felted items, quirky patchwork toys and stylish hats (possibly not for wearing in the rain).

I also managed to make a few purchases.

Firstly, I bought some beautiful lampwork glass beads from Min Fidler. They have an amazing amount of detail and change colour according to the light, and I'll have fun thinking what to make with them.





Then I found a little green finch on a stall with lots of toys (including some sock monkeys) and somehow he came home with me.



(This is not the stall - www.madestuff.co.uk - but our telephone table!)

The main reason I'd come, though, was The Yarn Yard's stall.



It was lovely to chat with Natalie and I eventually managed to choose three skeins of yarn - one DK, one sock weight and one laceweight. (I am trying not to buy too much sock yarn as I could keep myself happily knitting socks for about a year without buying any!)



Red, green and blue* - perfect if you should need to calibrate your monitor.

Then before I could spend any more money I headed out into the rain, but only went around the corner to the Rocket café for a cup of coffee and some warm melty chocolate cake, and a little sock-knitting.



There is something soothing about watching the rain pelt down when you don't have to go out in it. Unfortunately I had offered to get J some brake blocks for his bike and some extra dark soy sauce from the Chinese grocery (I always seem to have weird shopping lists at the moment).

So... once more unto the breach. Or the rain. At the bike shop I was served by the member of staff who taught our bike-maintenance class a few weeks ago and then had to fix my bike immediately afterwards (bit of an epic saga) and he rather sweetly asked if it was still working OK (it is).

By the time I got home, I was rather cold and wet about the trousers and feet.



Perhaps I should have worn more waterproof shoes...

Still, it was a lovely mini-holiday from the daily round (and a hot shower and dry socks sorted me out). Tomorrow I shall get back to doing useful things.

*Sorry about the weird shadows; daylight is beginning to be in short supply around here!

Happy November

So the last anybody heard from me, I was in America, having fun at WisCon. Which I did. I don't have many photographs of the actual con - too busy having fun - but Madison looks like this:



While I was there I tried the local delicacy (tastes nicer than it looks), had my hair plaited up like this, met up with Mum and Dad's old friends J and B and their grownup children (who were lovely) and my internet friend Cabell, among others, and had many, many conversations about Doctor Who and Lois McMaster Bujold books. I did a lot of live-tweeting of panels and felt, for once, as if I was at the cutting edge. I also managed to win a book token and come home with all of these.

And then I came home and was reunited with J and my piggies.



In August I went to the Edinburgh Ravelry meetup and rubbed shoulders with lots of famous-to-me knitters, and some genuinely famous ones. I have been knitting lots of shawls, and a few socks.

Then in September, I went with my lovely in-laws on what has become our traditional British holiday. We were based in Bamburgh in the north of England, where we went for walks and I took lots of wannabe-arty photos.

We also went to Lindisfarne:


and to the Alnwick Garden, which I really liked.



A good time was had in general.


When I haven't been on holiday, much of my life has been spent at work. For various complicated reasons, work has been very busy this summer and rather more time-consuming than normal. I have been finding that I haven't had a lot of brain left to blog with, hence the silence. I am thinking about what I can do about this.

In the meantime I have mustered enough braincells to make a boyfriend for our sock monkey:


to knit some ghosts:


and to make a pumpkin lantern for Hallowe'en.


So maybe I'm back. Hello.

Green shoots

If you squint, you could convince yourself it's spring. The sun has been shining (some of the time, anyway); bulbs are poking up in the garden; it hasn't been as cold (except on the days when it has).

The onset of possible spring is making me think about plans for the future: short-term ones like knitting projects, and more life-changing ones like moving house and the Baby Question. Only I need to get the Thesis done before I can really think about any of these. I think I maybe need to take some time off work and grind away at it - I have two days a week to do it in, but somehow I never manage to get as much done as I think I am going to.

Not a lot else is happening here at the moment. We went out to lunch with my parents and Granny for Mothers' Day, which was lovely. We'd really celebrated it the week before (since my sister and brother were both away for the actual day) but can you celebrate mothers too thoroughly? Of course not.



J's big news this week is that he has bought a digital satellite receiver. He speaks German fluently and is fond of watching German free-to-air TV, but has hitherto been doing this through an elderly Sky box without a card, which isn't ideal. This new box is very clever, and among other things will receive signals from two different satellites without getting confused, so he can watch either UK television or German through the same box.

This means, of course, that he will need two dishes, one to point at each satellite. He has one in our back garden at the moment (see above) but I happen to know there's another one squirreled away under the stairs. Maybe our (hypothetical) new house needs a bigger back garden.

The other snag is that the new box needs an update to its software before it will receive German HD channels, and he is a bit anxious about installing this. Fingers crossed. (This all seems like quite a lot of trouble to go to to watch *The Simpsons* dubbed into German...)

I received a request a little while ago for a combined picture of my sock monkey with a guinea pig. Here you go, Loth's Second Born - will this do?



J has decided that the monkey's name is "Mrs Monkey". I will shortly be making a Mr Monkey to keep her company, so I expect more sock monkey photographs will be forthcoming.

In other news, I only have one week left of yoga. According to the yoga teacher, I am the only person who's been every week. Unfortunately I still can't do the Half Vinyasa. Perhaps I need more practice...

February's ice and sleet

You know what? I have had about enough of it being February. March can start any time it likes. It has been very cold all week and we have had snow and rain alternately, with high winds from time to time. I don't normally mind winter, but I would really welcome even one day of unseasonal mildness with a bit of sunshine now and again.

On the other hand, February does have a few consolations.



J and I celebrated Valentine's day in our usual fashion, with home-made cards for each other. And then he made us dinner and produced some pink fizzy wine, as seen above (it really was pink, although the red candle behind it is making it pinker).

Then on the Tuesday it was Pancake Day and we duly ate pancakes. I've never quite bought the official explanation that we are supposed to eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday so that we can use up any ingredients that are forbidden during Lent; apart from the egg, there's only flour and milk in them, which doesn't sound terribly indulgent even by the standards of more austere times. Although I'm pretty sure that lemons, maple syrup and large lumps of vanilla ice cream would count as luxuries. (We did not put all these on the same pancake.)

My spare time lately has been taken up with a bit of knitting for the Ravelympics. This is an event on the knitting/crochet social network, Ravelry, and the idea is that during the course of the Olympics you take on a knitting challenge. I decided I was going to learn entrelac, which is a technique that produces knitting that looks like it's woven over and under itself.

Since I was just starting out with this I chose to knit Quant, a headband.



Entrelac turns out to be much less complicated than it looks. The blocks of knitting are attached to each other at right angles; you start one by picking up stitches along the side of a previous block. Then you join it to the one at the side by knitting two stitches together at the end of each row. (There, that made no sense to anyone who doesn't already know how to knit. Sorry.)

I'm very pleased with the finished headband - it should get plenty of wear, since I have another knitted headband that I use a lot. If I wear my hair up, I can't wear a woolly hat, so this lets me have tidy hair and warm ears.


Or it will if I can persuade Pumpkin to give it back.

Upward dog, inhale

Sorry about the pause! I have had a rather busy and exhausting couple of weeks, but am now recovering.

I have been so exhausted that... shock horror... I have done hardly any knitting. I finished off these socks on Boxing Day, but the ones in the previous post are still languishing. I messed up one of the heels, didn't notice until the sock was nearly done, and am still psyching myself up to rip it back.



Still, you don't care about my socks. You want to know how the yoga is going.

My sister and I have now had four classes and are enjoying it. We are doing Ashtanga yoga, which is fairly energetic, although not so energetic that you seriously break a sweat. Our teacher is very nice; she's Spanish, and as a consequence we are probably learning all the words for the different positions with a Spanish accent.

To begin with, we both found it quite tough going: after the first class, I couldn't raise my arms for a few days, while S had a sore, um, gluteus. We seem to be adapting, though I wouldn't say I'm precisely graceful yet. Most of the others in the class are students, although one girl has started bringing her mum, so I'm no longer the oldest in the class. Probably still the chunkiest. But I'm managing OK.

On Monday evening I tried something new: I made a sock monkey.



Sock monkeys have a whole history in the US, but they're practically unknown over here. I think they're cute, though. And surprisingly easy and quick to make. I also like the fact that you do almost all the sewing before you have to cut into the socks, and that one monkey uses up one pair of socks, with hardly any wastage. (These were cheapo knee socks, cost £1.49).

The instructions I used are here.

Sock monkeys are very good at yoga.



I don't know if anyone noticed (other than Mum), but the comments on my last post contain one from J! A rather scathing one, frankly, but still. He excuses himself by saying that he's never commented on a blog before and doesn't know the etiquette. (Honestly. You'd think it was 2003.)

A red hat

I went back to work and tackled my e-mail backlog, as you do.

Then I came home, and tried on the latest product of my needles, which had been drying out after being blocked (soaked in water and re-shaped).



I like red hats. A significant proportion of all the hats I've ever owned have been red. Maybe it's the result of early exposure to the Amazon pirates.

Anyway, this red hat is particularly fine because the cables get bigger from the crown following the Fibonacci sequence. I don't suppose Captain Nancy would have been terribly impressed with that, but I like it.



Brownie's not that impressed, either.

Woolfest!

Yesterday got off to a very good start. We made good time down the A1 (we had borrowed Mum and Dad's car for the day). J does not love driving, but it was one of those bright crisp autumn days and there was no traffic to speak of.

St Abbs is not a big place and even with my less than reliable sense of direction, we had no trouble finding the community hall. However, there were no alpacas (or angora goats) outside this time. C'est la vie. I suppose autumn isn't really baby goat season.

We had slightly more difficulty getting into the hall for some reason - the door should have been perfectly obvious, but we ended up circumnavigating the hall completely before we could get in. Oops. But once we were in, we were greeted with tables covered as far as the eye could see in lovely colours:



It wasn't very long before I encountered Ysolda (Edinburgh's local superstar designer) and Jeni of Fyberspates, who I hadn't met before, but who dyes some of my favourite yarns. I bought my first skein of Fyberspates yarn at the last Woolfest in March, and several more have followed - it's all so pretty and lovely to knit with.

I said I would look at all the yarn before investing in any, but I became entrapped by a lovely skein of chunky green twirly yarn in the Fyberspates bargain tub and had to buy it before anyone else did.



It was only £2! Major bargain. It's very, very soft. After this triumph J and I fortified ourselves with tea and scones before looking at the rest of the stalls.



At most of them, something like the following conversation took place:

Me: Feel this: isn't it soft? It's got cashmere in it. And look what a lovely colour!
J: Very nice. What could you make with that?
Me: Oh, socks. Or a little shawl. Or some fingerless gloves, maybe.
J: Mmmm.
Me: I suppose £12 is a bit expensive for socks. Hmmm, look, this one's pretty too. It might be harder-wearing. Maybe I should get this one.
J: Yes, it's nice too.

And so on. The boy deserves a medal.

In the end, I bought two skeins of sock yarn (a bright springy green from The Yarn Yard, and a green/blue/purple Sheila's Sock Yarn from Fyberspates) and the blue skein in the photo above. I think this was very restrained.

Then J and I went for a little scenic walk around St Abbs.





I don't know if you can read this (click for bigger), but the sign says "Harbourmaster's Office".



"It looks suspiciously like a shed" - J.



Unlike when I was there in March and nearly froze and blew away over the North Sea, the weather was calm and still. There were some people at the harbour preparing to go scuba diving.



By now it was mid-afternoon and already starting to look a little evening-ish. The light goes early in Scotland after the equinox. We headed back up the hill and drove off to a country pub - unfortunately arriving after they had finished serving lunch. Oops again. They did us a very nice lemonade and packet of crisps each, though, and we may go back for their beer festival next week - J undoubtedly deserves an outing of his choosing after his patience with my wool-gathering!

I leave the house

Today I wrapped myself up in a big coat and ventured out into the rain to go and have lunch with my sister. Our offices are just a couple of streets apart, so we try to do this every week, and it's so lovely to see her.

I handed over the mitts - they fit, and L seems pleased with them (though she would never ever let me know if she wasn't, because she's lovely!) I am pleased with them myself - they're the best mitts I've done yet, I think, and the neatest as regards the finishing off. I didn't have any holes to sew up at the thumb joint, which is a first.

After lunch I wandered down to John Lewis and bought a clear acrylic desk-tidy thingy in which to put all the notebooks that live on our telephone shelf. Then I went to the café for a cup of peppermint tea. I know how to live.

Tomorrow J and I are going to the Woolfest in St Abb's, a village in the Borders. I am going to look at all the nice yarn (and maybe, just maybe, buy some). J is going because... well, because he's a good husband, really. And he can drive and I can't. I have told him there will probably be alpacas, which are cute, and tea and scones. I hope it lives up to my build-up!

She feels accomplished

Today I succeeded in reverse-engineering a very simple lace motif.

This may mean nothing to you if you don't knit, but it represents a step forward in my knitting abilities. Previously I have managed to knit lace, sort of, by following the directions blindly without knowing what the different stitches actually do. Now I can - just about - look at a knitted item (provided it's not too complicated) and work out roughly how it was made.

The current project is a pair of fingerless mitts for my sister - they're working out nicely so far. I didn't invent the whole pattern - it's adapted from this one, which I've knitted before and is simple and very comfortable. I am so grateful to all the people who put free patterns up!