Hello!

Taking Five

We are all busy people and this time of year is, I think we can agree, busier than most.

At times like this when I just seem to have five minutes here and there I thought it would be fun to have some interesting places to visit for ideas and inspiration. I'm also starting to firm up plans for the new blog and I thought I would  use you as guinea pigs try out some new things to see if you like them.

Blog-rolls and blog-lists can be quite contentious. I have heard of serious spats because Blogger One features Blogger Two, but doesn't get featured in return. Or where Blogger Three is on Blogger Four's blog-roll for a few months and then suddenly finds they have been removed, resulting in feeling rather hurt and wondering what they did to deserve being dropped without so much as a by-your-leave.

With this in mind I have started a Take Five list in the sidebar.

The Take Five list is not a blog-roll. It's a collection of websites, blogs, and photos from flickr (taken by other people) which I have discovered on my journey around the web. 

There may be food, knitting, art, youtube, quilting, or books - pretty much anything and everything.

The most important thing is that it's not going be a permanent list. Instead it will be dynamic and will change often - at least weekly. So if you see something you like, bookmark it quickly before it vanishes! 

If you are reading this in a feed reader or in an email, you'll need to visit the blog to see these delights, I'm afraid. 

n

  

Home!

Just got home after a whirlwind business trip to London of which more another time.

127 emails to answer so If you have sent me a message I will get back to you on Friday when I've had a chance to go through them all. I have answered some using my iPhone from London, but anything that needs to be cross referenced with the website can't be done on the phone without me looking like Clarence the cross-eyed lion from Daktari.

n

The Voyages of the USS Avensis...

... going boldly where no knitter has gone before.

Fegrig has a job which means he covers a lot of miles. 

Planes, Trains and Automobiles. And the occasional Bus and Ferry.

This means that he is given a work-car (with the usual not-a-perk tax penalties). Today was changeover day. The Vectra he has had for the last two years was replaced by a British built car (in support of British industry), and he took delivery of a Toyota Avensis... known hereafter as the USS Avensis.

It's a nice car.

Given the choice he would have opted for a Citroen Berlingo, no frills, totally practical, no fuss. Instead he was given a star ship. He was in Belfast last week and a colleague told him he would need a day with the manual and a Teenager to decipher it before he would be able to drive it, let alone listen to The Archers.

We laughed, oh how we laughed.

This morning the USS Avensis was delivered a little after ten o'clock. 

TWO FULL HOURS later, he emerged from the car with Radio 4 still posing an unmet challenge and the satnav trying to cook a three course dinner in the airbag. 

n

  

Pinwheel

Coming to a screen near you this evening.

 

From the Saffron yarn, clockwise.

Saffron, Mischief, Pine Needle, Wine, Pillar Box, Chocolate Mousse, Knitting Vicar, Emerald, French Navy, and Lawn.

These are all Clan, but some are available in toddy and macushla too.

Really saturated colours rather than multi-toned semisolids. Ideal for mittens or gloves as well as socks.

I am uploading now so it will be at least 20.30 and more likely 21.00.

n

  

Not Pantone 2685c

The new dyes I ordered arrived yesterday afternoon, and I couldn't resist diving in and doing what I love to do right away. I never use a straight-from-the-manufacturer colour, there's always a little alchemy involved otherwise I might as well work on a production line. And after a couple of hours, this was the result, dyed from an experimental blend of three different manufacturer's dyes.

 

And after I had dried it - and panicked a bit because it does funny things as it dries with the still-wet sections looking completely different from the almost dry parts - I realised that I had just dyed something rather similar to the now infamous Pantone 2685c. Infamous because a certain chocolate manufacturer has trademarked the colour!!!

This isn't exactly the same. And I certainly didn't intend it to be so similar. I just wanted a good strong purple and blended the dyes (which I do all the time) to try and get one.

 

In fact, it's even more saturated than this...

It will be in the shop tomorrow along with some other equally gorgeous colours. I'll post on twitter and ravelry when they are on the shelves.

n
 
  

 
 

Holiday shopping

Usually, when we are on holiday, I subject Fegrig to visiting knitting shops. Why are you not surprised? I have an eclectic selection of dpns from North America, Japan and various European cities. This craft-souvenir shopping is not a new addiction habit, I used to collect fabric which was equally small and portable and relatively inexpensive - and of course, useful.

Tucked away in the pages of the unlikely AA Brussels guidebook we borrowed from my in-laws, was the suggestion that it might be worth visiting an art shop which produced its own pigments.

I was expecting a small arty type shop but instead we found what can only be described as an emporium of colour. 

These are iPhone photos taken fairly discreetly because I wasn't sure they would be happy about photos.

The shop was like Awkrights. 

  

Except that it was about five times as full of stuff.

Each of the side windows you can see was full to a depth of about a metre. And there was a corridor about a metre wide up the centre, with not enough width for two people to pass. And to the left of that was a counter which ran the full length of the shop, also about a metre wide... and every centimetre was piled high with colour. 
 

  

Paints, pencils, dyes, you name it, they had it.

  

 

You want raw pigment? They had that too. This is just the sample chest.

They don't just sell it, they make it.

  

 

The front window was stuffed with huge jars of powder, as if it was a sweetie shop - which of course to me, it was.

  

 

Not a lid in sight.

Health and Safety? Clearly they LAUGH in the face of Health and Safety!

Behind the counter was a small walk-space, flanked by a wall which was covered in wooden drawers from floor to ceiling with a ladder to reach the higher ones, a bit like an old apothecary shop. The sort of shop which is in another world (they have no website and do not do mail order). 

I was entranced, it was a truly magical place where nothing short of alchemy was happening.

And yes, I did buy some dye, but I had a difficult task because there were forty-eight hand made colours from which to choose.
 
It might have been a bit of a busman's holiday, but it was a wonderful place.

n

Before I was a knitter...

... I was a quilter.

At first there might seem to be little in the way of similarity. One is created by chopping up the textiles into small pieces and then sewing them together again - an activity which Laura Ingalls found to be particularly stupid. 

The other is concerned with trying NOT to chop the textiles up unless you are extremely cross (as I was with the Brainless socks a few months ago when scissors and temper got the better of me).

But there are similarities; pattern, colour, design and even an empathy with those who have gone before, a drawing on skills passed down and on patterns remembered and recreated or given a new twist.

  

 

This is one of my quilts. It was made from Fat Quarters collected from various quilt stores in Seattle, Vancouver and Toronto, and was sewn on my 1897 treadle sewing machine with a needled cotton batting giving a low-loft look which has the benefit of being able to be chucked in the washing machine, and it has a pattern of continuous line pentagram stars. This quilt has covered broken ankles, knackity knees, ill children (even though they thought they were teenagers and far too cool to be wrapped up in a patchwork quilt on the sofa). It's a double and it lives on our bed.

  

 

We discovered this beauty on the bed of a B&B we stayed at in Chicago.

  

 

And on the wall of the flat we borrowed at the weekend in London, I found this. I think all the fabric is silk and it's been hand quilted, which just goes to show how a simple pattern is sometimes the best, a bit like stocking stitch I suppose. Or 3x1 rib. 

I bet EZ would approve.

n

PS  There will be more quilty pictures soon... we found the quilt stash in the attic!

Inky fingers

Well, we are half way through the attic clearout.

We have found the clothes in which I brought the boys home from the hospital, when they were just days old. Were they ever so small, my lads with their newly beardy chins and their deep voices?

We have found knitting (of which more another time).

We have found children's books. Mrs Lollipop, The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark, The Jolly Postman.

We have found school reports and jotters and Mother's Day cards and paintings.

We have found wall-quilts of the patchwork variety. 

We have found Roxy Music vinyl singles.

And I am most excited that we have found my Parker 51 which I thought was lost. I have no Quink so I couldn't resist scissoring the ends off a couple of non-Quink blue cartridges and refilling it. Using it is like coming home... even if I have never filled it with blue ink in my puff. I'm strictly a Permanent Black girl.

n

  

Upgrading

As part of the preparation for moving the blog and installing it on the Yarn Yard domain, I have had to back up the photos. This is because typepad will let you move text to another platform but not the photographs, so they need to be moved manually.

So I have upgraded to flickr pro and begun the process of uploading it all.

If you add me as a contact, I think you get a message when I add photos, and of course you can add comments in a similar way to adding blog comments. I take many more photos than actually end up on the blog so please visit and have a browse. I'll be doing some every day for a wee while I think... I didn't realise I was quite so prolific in my snapping!

The Yarn Yard flickr account is here.

n

A delivery from Deutschland!

The notebooks have arrived!

They were delivered late this afternoon so I will post them out on Monday... assuming I don't decide to keep them all for myself of course.

This weekend we are clearing the attic in readiness for thicker, fatter insulation which is being installed next week. I have lived here for 18 years and I'm one of those people who keeps the boxes things come in. You know, computers (plural), sewing machines (plural), that sort of thing. So there may be a skips-worth (or two) heading to the dump on Monday.

Wish me luck.

What are you doing? I bet it's more interesting than clearing the attic.

n