Now listen up, good people: this is serious. All your comments on The Icing On The Cake were lovely, thank you, but they're starting to go to the Stoic Spouse's head. He's even been overheard muttering the phrase 'fan club'. Ahem, we need to put the brakes on this before it gets out of hand. Anyway, while the Stoic Spouse keeps the home fires burning (literally: he's apparently shifted one tonne of newly-delivered logs from front to back garden whilst we've been away), the Toddler Twinnage Continue Reading
Archives for October 2014
The Morning After The Cake Before
Well, friends and fair crafters of the blogosphere, may I confess to a certain feeling of fullness? The blogiversary cake was eventually cut and… well you can probably guess the rest. Let's just say that I won't be hauling myself out of this chair for another week or so. Those buttons on my waistband won't re-attach themselves, y'know, if I accidentally pop them. No I hadn't forgotten that this is a knitting/crochet blog, so here's a tiny bit of my semi-secret project, now finished and Continue Reading
The Icing On The Cake
A year ago today I moved into this blog, opened the blinds, looked around at its bare walls and set about putting up some pictures. Then I unpacked a couple of boxes and began to write my first post. Fast forward to today. Well, the place is a little more cluttered, and some of the original boxes I moved in with still haven't been unpacked. Oops. But TheTwistedYarn has become a colourful, happy, lived-in place where I get to talk about knitting, and crochet, and colour, and nature, and Continue Reading
To Oxford, For Extravagant Yarn And A Haircut
Though I live in rural Oxfordshire, I rarely go into the city of Oxford these days, except for my twice-yearly haircut. But a chunk of my shrivelled old heart is forever in that city where I lived, partied, loved, worked, and studied for my first degree and doctorate. I bought my first home there too, in which I spent seven happy years living alone but socialising manically, before I met the Stoic Spouse and morphed into a Semi-Sensible Grown-Up. Ah, those were the days. Anyway, today was Continue Reading
Inspiration: Dan Bennett
It'd be tricky to be creative in a vacuum, don't you think? Inspiration is essential. T'would be an awfully large leap from the blank page to a work of beauty if you'd not laid your eyes on beauty elsewhere. So I'm always happy to discuss inspiration with friends such as your marvellously good selves. Where - if you don't mind me asking - do you find your inspiration? For me, nature is an unsurpassable source of ideas for colour, form, and texture. And artists/crafters who capture the Continue Reading
Channelling Autumn
Autumn has definitely sneaked into our quiet little corner of Oxfordshire. And in its sneaky sneaking, it's brought a very familiar damp chill to our old house, as well as rich new colours to our surroundings, and some birthdays to be celebrated (not mine - I'm plenty old enough already and don't feel the slightest need to advance any further). Birthdays bring visiting relatives and peaceful times around the log fire. This time it brought a happy new novelty, too: companionably knitting with Continue Reading
Today We’re Mostly Pink And Orange
First, thank you all for your kind words about my risky felting, but to misquote a phrase, reports of the death of my washing machine are greatly exaggerated. After some enthusiastic but inexpert effort, I managed to unblock the beastly machine, and whilst it's still spitting out occasional gobs of pink felted fluff, it is at least functioning sufficiently to deal with the laundry generated by two potty-training toddlers. (We're talking a lot of laundry, here. Like, really, a lot.) Here's the Continue Reading
The Near-Disaster Of Felting The Knitted Bag
This blog post is jinxed, jinxed, I tell you. In the course of its making, I've broken the washing machine, over-shrunk a knitting project, mislaid an important piece of technology without which I couldn't finish illustrating the post, and almost flooded part of the house. I drafted the first, pre-disaster, part of the post earlier. It went like this:- Well, the Toddler Twinnage are abed, the Stoic Spouse is quietly playing 'Live Forever' on his guitar in the dark in another room, and I am Continue Reading
Review: Rico glow-in-the-dark yarn
Glow-in-the-dark yarn sounds like a rather wonderful concept, no? When I heard this thing existed, I had a, 'Gah, WHY didn't I think of that?' moment. This happens a lot - the universe is clearly some way ahead of me. Anyway, I know TheTwistedYarn is primarily a stuff-for-the-home blog, but when I heard about this brand new yarn, I had to take a minor swerve into garment-knitting, because what toddler-about-town doesn't need a glow-in-the-dark knitted hat? Pedantically, I should point out Continue Reading