Yes! Here's my button
Work on needles
New for 2006
Rachel's lime green cashcotton sweater
Asymmetrical Reds jacket
Socks for Chris in autumnal colours
Unexpected knitting in greens
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SECRET
The lovely person I've done secret things for is interested no more. If anyone else turns up, I'll let you know.
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July 30th
Leaky flue repairs
'Twas a fine summer's day and the boys decided to repair the leaky flue from the woodburner in DH Mike's studio. To do this they rigged up a marvelous Heath Robinson type contraption involving the Defender, some axle thingies, a stepladder, a nuther ladder, some pillowy things to protect the old tiles and a fair amount of ingenuity. Nothing wobbled. I'm still not sure how they got the Defender over the wall onto the lawn...
Here's Mike being balletic
Joined by Chris who had crafted the stainless steel patch just moments previously. They do work together well, these boys!
Knitting
Chris' Autumn socks are coming on apace, and I am now half way down the foot. This is what they looked like yesterday
And here are the baby socks I did for Sue's little one. I may knit some more as babes lose their socks so easily.
JamTart
Here she is, blinking a little, doesn't see too well these days, and lost a fair chunk of short-term memory capacity, but the kits and us human beans look after her well. Her purr volume is, as ever, unrivalled. She was 15 in February and is still TopTart.
July 22nd
Swatching
I've been swatching with the hemp yarn, just fooling around. I'm going to do something with both colour and texture. Not sure what, as usual, so here are the ideas so far. I may allow reverse stocking stitch to curl back for windows of garter stitch colour to show through, and / or knit twirls of garter stitch spirals à la Patricia Roberts of yore. Top right in the pici you may notice Cleo's paw, strategically placed to lend scale and hold back the curling edge. Thank you Cleo, sweetheart.
And before I did that, I had to wind the yarn, with much help from the kits. DH Mike snapped this - he's always found my yarn-winding procedure hilarious - and then Cleo joined in, obviously unwinding rather than winding, but the stance is similar, don't you think? Except that one of us, the four-legged one with the fur coat, is considerably more elegant. We went to and fro, winding and unwinding for many happy moments like that.
Remote Viewing
I went on a remote viewing conference in London last weekend - it was very good fun, if, and also, very badly organised. However, My friend and colleague Lou and I are now avidly remote viewing picis we set up for each other. For those of you who do not know how this works, neither do we :)
No, seriously now, this is how we do it: Lou finds an image (which she can store and email) of an object or a location and gives it a number, or a 'coordinate'. Doesn't have to be the actual coordinate of the place if it is a location. She then sends the number to Anne, who remote views it over 20 minutes or so, scribbles down sketches and verbal impressions, then sends the sketches to Lou. Lou sends Anne the 'target' pici and we both have a good laugh. In the meantime, Anne has sent Lou some other coordinates to remote view and we reverse the process. this is so much fun! And it's amazing how much one can pick up, even if we are totally off in some respects. The main problem is in assigning meaning to the shapes and colours we pick up (called 'analytical overlay'; not that either of us are in the slightest bit analytical ;-/ ). If we just stuck to what we perceive and didn't let our conscious minds try and tell us what it is we are perceiving, we'd do really well.
Of course now Tracey, Evelyn and Rache are all joining in...
These are my sketches for the first target; as usual, I managed to get what I got on its side:
And here is the target - no Victorian sewers, then!
July 8th
Happy endings
Let's not mess around: the yarn arrived yesterday, despite having been sent to the address minus house name - just the road! We have an amazing postie! Now, let's see...
As soon as I spread the haul on the massage table, Phoebe installed herself. Here she is modelling the lime-gold DK weight hemp at her paws (with some lime kid-silk I have left over from something else), the 1000 brown roses under her noble head and raven's wing propping up the 1000 brown roses pillow. Behind the raven's wing is the raspberry DK hemp. On the left you can just see the emerald green recycled banana fibre, which has since been transformed into a curly scarf. Behind her is some lovely fuchsia hemp from a previous stash haul. In front of that is the natural coloured hemp. Below are close-ups of the hand-painted hemp.
  
Here's a little peek at the DK sock yarn i got for chris - had to start, of course, and the recycled banana fibre. The latter feels like rough silk and is wonderfully knobbly. You don't want to knit anything with fiddly gauge with it :) It came out rather long as a scarf but I like the way it twists around itself. Pattern made up as I went along, as usual.
Just one more of Phoebe laying a proprietorial paw on the gold-lime hemp, with the merino lace-weight just beyond.
July 5th
The wild and woolly road to Woolfest
So this was the first time I have been to Woolfest - only its second year. This represented several days off for me, not least for the travelling as I am on the South coast, and Woolfest is in Cumbria, way, way, way up in the north. I took the journey in two stages, wending my enthusiastic way to just north of Lancaster on the first day - to Kirkby Something, a rather grubby but pretty tourist town, and stayed at the rather grubby public house hotel / the Sun Inn. It all could have done with a good wash, but the food was good.
Feminist interlude
I don't think they must be used to women on their own in pubs up there, or maybe they don't like them drinking pints. Or maybe it was that particular combination that was too much for the one gnarled-into-himself bloke who eyed up my Guinness and demanded to know where the 'old man' was. Ah ha ha ha ha ha! After I had teased him a bit along the lines of 'looking for a new boyfriend, was he?' he countered with the age old stand-by of 'women shouldn't be out on their own'. I said he was not to worry, and that my lover would be turning up in a minute (I wish!) and that when she arrived I wouldn't be on my own any more. Luckily he couldn't stand the prospect of that and left muttering dark things to anyone who would listen, and never found out that I was bluffing about the gf :) I only had two pints, just in case you were wondering, I know how your minds work.
New delights to tempt me?
Woolfest was wonderfully inspiring. Yarns and wools and tops and fleeces and already prepared tops (I hope I'm availing myself of the correct terminology, I mean the stuff immediately before it gets spun), dyed in rainbow hues, and natural coloured ones, more yarns and books (didn't buy any books!!!) and buttons and spinning wheels of enormously splendid proportions, and ones which would have been almost perfectly square had they not been wheels, which folded in and out of themselves and fitted just in between your feet, presumably for spinning on the train. There were beautiful drop spindles and table top drop - or rather 'lie-flat' - spindles, the ones which are mechanised and you turn a little handle with one hand and hold the fleece with the other, and the wheel goes round and the spindle spindles away - fascinating stuff. But I didn't get myself led astray by spinning of any kind. Nor by weaving… there were looms, big ones, little ones, ones with things to do with your feet, and ones with layers and layers of… well, layers of things, and one with a sign saying the owner had now idea how it worked; looked about as complex as all the others to me. And there were little ceramic frames with warps… or wefts… already attached - nearly, nearly tempted, but no, I held fast.
Serious Stash Enhancement
I held fast because Woolfest turned out to be a supreme opportunity for Serious Stash Enhancement on the yarn front. Shall I start the tally? Here goes:
First of all I was tempted by some lovely merino lace-weight yarn. 25 ish grams in hand-painted reds and mauves will make a beautiful cobwebby lace scarf. At the same stand, the Knitting and Crochet Guild, I found some addis to enhance my addis collection in 3.75mm, so that I can have more DK projects on the go at the same time. Then a little further on, 100 grams of creamiest, lightest cashmere in 4ply for a wider, longer, thicker scarf, also in lace, of course. So far so good, and at this stage I felt that I had been really restrained. A brief dally with Opal sock yarns produced some DK sock yarn for thicker mid-winter muckboot wear and some soft autumn browns in 4ply, both for DS1 Chris. And a couple of Opal sock patterns. Oh yes, and three skeins of lush green yarn made from recycled banana fibre. So nothing really wild, then.
Lunchtime loomed and whilst Emily and Sue (I'll get to that bit later) went off for a bite to eat, I inadvertently turned the wrong way down an aisle in an 'I wonder where this leads to' sort of way, and behold, it did indeed lead to… The House Of Hemp!!! This wonderful emporium is worthy of several Exclamation Marks and Capital Letters. They were there in a small stand, but in all their glory, with hand-painted hemp skeins draped quite shamelessly over baskets and chairs, and festooning the walls of this little Aladin's cave, tempting, beckoning, seducing the unwary traveller onto the pointy rocks of rainbow after rainbow of colour and texture. To be honest, this particular traveller was not unwary in the least, and had indeed ventured so far north of home with the express intention of visiting the House of Hemp for just a little stash enhancement. However, prepared as I was to be excited and entertained, I was not ready for their hand-painted range. Having become accustomed to the beauty of the 'plain' expressions range, to the point where self-control was almost on the cards, it seemed suddenly as if the expressions range provided but a beautiful backdrop to the swathes and swathes of amazing luminous colour play in the hand-painted range. The stand was jam-packed all day, not only front to back, but top to bottom as well, with knitters and weavers both kneeling and on tip-toes. Different ones, that is. And different weavers and knitters, not just different knees and toes. Jane managed amazingly, waving her online card machine around in a desperate attempt to get a signal, with sighs of relief when customers offered cheques. OK, so you want to know what I bought?
Well, in DK hemp I bagged an amazing 550gram skein of what Emily later described as 'raven's wing' blacks and greens, mutating magically into purples and reds. Imagine the underside of a raven's wing, with the light glinting off a rainbow of blacks - well, that's it. But that was not all. In the finer 2ply, 4ply equivalent I found the yummiest light reds floating into 1000 brown roses in another 550gram hank which I added to the pile. I actually intended, initially, to buy some lime golden DK but found the best colours in the finer weight, so bought 350 grams of that. And a couple of 50 gram hanks of rose red in DK for the asymmetrical reds jacket. Oh yes, and 550 grams of their undyed, a creamy stone colour, like dark flax. Ha. It only took an hour or so to get the exactly right combination of hemp for the ideal stash enhancement experience, an hour extremely well spent. And I love the way it all piled eventually into the beautiful House of Hemp bag, plain, so unassuming, with string (hemp?) handles, to be clutched lovingly to my side until death or disaster do us part.
I haven't told you about meeting Emily and her mum Sue, have I? Emily is on one of the online knit-groups I am on, and this was to be the first time we had met. We decided that the rendez-vous was to be the Viking Sails exhibit at 11am. Fantastic. We had exchanged photos and mobile phone numbers, which was a Very Good Thing, given the fact that there was no Viking Sail exhibit (Did we miss it? Both of us? All three of us?). We found each other easily, however, Emily wearing a fab new top she had *just* finished, that very morning. We three shared not only curly hair but an ability to fondle yarns endlessly without getting bored. Much fun was had throughout the day, large parts of which were spent at the House of Hemp (many return visits) whilst Emily procured several more skeins for 'Joe' and I withstood temptation purely because when I was just about to give in, I was looking after the bags (many!) and couldn't get anywhere near the yarn for punters. Sue and I actually thought we had lost Emily at one stage, but she eventually emerged from a basket right at the back of the stand, dishevelled but victorious, clutching a handful of hemps.
We rounded off a wonderful day sitting on a grassy slope in the sunshine with a 'show and tell' of all our goodies. Emily and Sue wended their happy way back down south, and I made my way to Cockermouth, to The Trout, an hotel which looked really good on t't interweb… well…
The Tragedy of Loved Yarns Lost
I'll cut a longish and boring story extremely short, to say purely that all round, my Saturday night's accommodation was adequate at best, and I left feeling as if I had just spent a night at a motel rather than an hotel where they are supposed to pride themselves on service. Snort. So eager was I to get away… that… let's cut to the quick… I LEFT THE BAG OF STASH AT THE HOTEL!!!!! Yes, I shouted. And I am not going to apologize. In fact, I was so eager to get away that I left it in the car park next to my car. I had had zilch luck finding someone to take my luggage to the car, that when I heaved in the heavy overnight bag myself - note the bitterness? I heaved all by myself - I must have left the yarn stash standing there. They found it. They phoned home. Mike phoned me. I was on the motorway. When I got to Leeds 3 hours later, I nearly cried. Nearly. I also nearly turned straight around and drove back to Cockermouth. But no. I calmed, I didn't shout, I booked in to the most delightful hotel 'Quebec's', took some deep breaths, and phoned the Trout Hotel. Yes, they had the yarn, of course. Yes they would send it. Yes they would wrap it in bubblewrap first and package it carefully. B****cks they would. 'Of course, madam'. For a fee of £5. Fair enough. And they would try to get it off on Monday. Try? What? But given that they were supposed to have produced a Guardian for me this morning and didn't, and didn't give a flying **** about guests with luggage, or about eye contact, or about being even reasonably courteous when guests arrive, and about the impression it gives when they can't be bothered to tear themselves away from a computer screen, and about there being staff around perhaps when one wanders into the dining room for breakfast, or indeed about wiping the table after the guest before… well, given all that, I was not convinced I would ever see my stash again, so I phoned back and asked them to send it first class and registered. They promised.
I had left honest but not damning feedback on their 'comments' form and hope that this may galvanize them into action. Or I may lose my hemp, cashmere, merino, addis, sock yarn and banana fibres for ever. I'll keep you posted.
Postscript
I've been in Cambridge for the last two days, and so yesterday evening I phoned the Trout Hotel, to see if they had indeed sent off the yarn. what a cooincidence, the lady on reception said, she was *just* about to phone me. Yes, they had ascertained that it would be possible to send the stuff first class and registered and could she use my card number to do so. I was charming. The yarn should arrive tomorrow, Thursday morning before 1pm. that's if they sent it off this morning. Hmmm.
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Knitting books now:
AlterKNITS - Leigh Radford
Good inspiration. You have to be able to knit, not that easy for beginners - but hey! we worked our way through Patricia Roberts' impossibly complex designs in 4-ply in the eighties without knowing that it was 'too difficult'. Surely women's brains haven't gone that soft in the meantime. Go for it.
US shoppers click here:
AlterKNITS
Never The Bride - gigs
Menacing Knitting or "Craft in any media - weaving, metallurgy, crochet, soul-painting, cooking, or other any medium you can bend to your will"
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Read this month:
Messages From Water - Masaru Emoto. The first pictures of frozen water crystals. About the effect on water of the subtle energy related to consciousness - Chi. US shoppers click here:
The Hidden Messages in Water
Since May I've been reading wonderful science fiction by Melissa Scott. Check out Dreamships, Dreaming Metal, and the one I've just finished, Burning Bright. These are suberbly crafted tales, well-written, intelligent (you have to concentrate - bliss!) and surprising at most turns. I love her mind.
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