Have you been following this year’s Stylecraft Blog Tour? Yesterday, designer/author Sue Pinner showed us her marvellous Spinning Top crochet blanket pattern. Six new shades have been added to the aran and the chunky Stylecraft Special acrylic ranges, and the fine fibrous folk at Stylecraft have mixed these up with some of the existing shades to make a couple of different ten-ball colour packs that they'll be selling for a while. Over the summer, they kindly gave a few of us yarniacs a pack to Continue Reading
Archives for October 2016
Over To You
On Sunday, this blog quietly turned three, which gives me an OK-ish excuse to wheel out pictures of the cake that the Stoic Spouse secretly had commissioned ahead of this site's first blogiversary, in 2014. (Way back in the mists of time, he also proposed via a cake. Are you spotting a theme in this man's primary means of communication? If he ever decides to ditch me, it'll probably be via an 'I want a divorce' cake.) The blogiversary cake was large, and rather delicious. I wish I could have Continue Reading
It’s Not A Popularity Contest! Oh, Wait, Actually It Is…
Hello blog. Just a short one today. Thank you for all the kind comments that you've left lately, you lovely yarny lot. On Sunday, this blog will be three years old. Three! I can scarcely believe it. In my experience, three-year-olds are obstreperous and independent little spirits, prone to embarking on unhinged adventures and removing all of their clothes on a whim. So read here at your peril. Talking of the blog, I discovered by chance the other day that I've been shortlisted for the British Continue Reading
Thank You
This post is mostly a 'thank you' to all of you who sponsored, encouraged, or at the very least grudgingly tolerated me as I prepared to run the Oxford Half Marathon in aid of the Nasio Trust. The big race was yesterday. Nine thousand of us lined up in the centre of Oxford under a beautiful blue sky, to await the starting klaxon. Guess what: I didn't win. (But my friend Chris did come 15th out of the 9000, which just boggles the brain: he's fast.) Still, I ran all 13.1 miles (21km), for which I Continue Reading
The Mindfulness In Knitting, A Book Review
It's fairly rare for my day job (clinical psychologist) to collide with the knitting thing, but today a new book is published that spans both of these worlds, and I've been given the chance to review a copy. "Well if you absolutely insist," I said. Actually, that last bit is a lie: I jumped at the chance. Allow me to introduce you to The Mindfulness In Knitting by Rachael Matthews, published TODAY by Leaping Hare Press. It's rather a beauty, don't you think? Not that I'm superficial enough to Continue Reading
Back In The Crochet Garden
Dear blog, I've neglected your regular silliness business, what with all those giveaways and other stuff. So I thought it was high time to drop in on a project that's been slowly (very slowly) progressing in the background whilst I've been on here chattering about other things. Yes, if you've been reading here a'while: you'll know the one. The over-ambitious furniture-related one that began with a house, and which is now slowly (oh-so-slowly) acquiring a garden. It's so close to the Continue Reading
Getting Cosy
Our letterbox is a mean and fearsome beast. Unusually narrow but psychopathic of nature, I swear that I’ve heard it growl on occasion. Postal staff approach with dread, and if you saw the state of the few letters that make it as far as the doormat, you’d be forgiven for assuming that we owned a very large and ill-tempered dog. So when I was contacted about a company that claims to deliver vacuum-packed, letterbox-friendly yarn, I said, “Yeah, right. Charming idea, but you haven’t met our Continue Reading