It's that time of year, isn't it?
Thirty five days to go until the Winter Solstice - my personal deadline for secret knitting. Adam, after several years of saying he didn't want to wear hand-knit socks, and refusing to try them on at all, may have succumbed to them at last. He came in from walking the dogs last week and was rather wet and soggy. I handed him a pair of socks...
... the finished version of course.
He put his cold feet in them.
He wriggled his toes.
He sat back on the sofa.
He wriggled a bit more.
And said...
"You know if these were in dark green..."
Gotcha!
Of course, that means I now need to knit fairly solid dark green socks. I will need to experiment with colours and things so expect lots of dark green bloke-ish yarn in the shop this week. There should be time to squeeze in a pair of bloke-socks by Solstice, shouldn't there?
I think I have almost caught up with myself (I really, really shouldn't go on holiday). and the Fibre Club mailing will be in the post any minute now.
In other secret knitting, Sally and I have been beavering away on the Mystery Mitt-A-Long which will be starting soon. She is knitting one version and I am knitting another. This is mostly going to happen on ravelry but I expect it will spill over onto here as well. We have done multiple swatching and doodling and charting. As you might expect, I am using a Moleskine Quadrille and Sally has taught herself to chart in excel. Between us though we are doing rather well. There has been much laughter and tea and coloured pencils.
Our mittens are meant to be fun, they are not like these, which are beautiful and very stylish. Oh no, ours are quite different, much more - shall we say, organic?
And what about these socks (also from the Twist Collective)?
I forsee colourwork and texture being big trends this winter, especially as we all try to squeeze every bit of value from our yarn.
In recognition of this there will be some mini-skeins in the shop this week and also more solids in 50g aliquots. I love that word. Aliquot. It sounds elegant and rather mysterious at the same time. I've been trying to figure out how to work it into the blog for ages.
I digress.
Mini skeins and 50g aliquots in the shop this week, in solid colours.
And Hug for Cranfords.
And Fibre.
Wednesday.
Posting on Thursday.
Because I'm going on a wee trip on Friday... to Harrogate.
The veg bag, BTW, was great.
There was mud.
Potatoes.
Mud.
Carrots - and I can't show you the biggest carrot, it was quite ridiculously HUGE.
Mud.
Onions.
Beetroot.
Bean sprouts (except they aren't beansprouts, they are lentil sprouts, mung bean sprouts and chick pea sprouts and you can feel the vitamins being absorbed and doing you good as you crunch them, straight from the box).
Yellow chard.
Savoy cabbage.
Celery.
Tomatoes.
Parsnips.
And mud.
I like a bit of mud. There is a letter with the veg bag telling of farm goings on, and it has been, well, muddy. So I quite like the fact that there was mud on my potatoes.
So far we have had lentil, carrot and potato soup with ham.
Hummus, tomato and beansprout wraps.
Stir fried chard, onion, corn (frozen), chilli (2 from the fridge door, bought a couple of weeks ago and looking rather sad) and chicken with a lemon and creamed coconut sauce.
Today I will make spicy parsnip soup, and we'll have rosti potatoes with something or other... maybe sausages. And tomorrow I am thinking quiche with carrot, cheese and finely chopped cabbage mixed in for colour interest, served with potato wedges and a beetroot salad.
Can you tell that I am liking this?
n