Oh yikes, has it been that long since I posted? Apologies. Let's pretend that my absence was due to Very Worthy And Important Stuff, rather than the truth, which is that I was struggling with post-cancer-treatment side-effects that made my right arm medium-useless for a while. Fortunately, I was still able to walk and run in pretty places around here. This is Thrupp Lake on a crisp November morning:- Since I wasn't able to knit very much, I didn't feel as though I had a great deal to share Continue Reading
The Half-Filled Kettle Dilemma
One of the odder consequences of having breast cancer is finding yourself standing in the middle the street wondering how much horse poo would half-fill a kettle. When you're diagnosed, they send you a chunky booklet about what to expect, and absolutely nowhere does it mention either kettles or horse poo - a disappointing oversight. But I'll come back to all this silly cancer stuff later in this post. For now, let's discuss the vastly more serious matter of yarnery, specifically knitting. Continue Reading
Would You Like A Hefty Discount On Some Hand-Dyed Yarn?
Sitting down to write this post with knitting and wine beside me is the most normal thing that I've done for a while. I hate the word 'normal', along with the word 'should' - as my patients rapidly discover when I ban both abominations from their vocabularies. But whatever on earth normal is, these past few weeks have not been it. (This whole year hasn't been normal, of course, but you've doubtless noticed that. And if you haven't, then I really don't want to be the one to burst your Continue Reading
2020 Vision
Well, that was a very 2020-ish sort of week. Oh, for those heady days of innocence, way back when nobody would have understood what the above sentence meant. Right now, you probably wouldn't even be surprised if I told you that the neighbourhood had been invaded by hordes of opera-singing purple mega-ants, or that a sinkhole had opened up under Twisted Towers and had swallowed all of my yarn. Fortunately neither of these things has happened... although given that it's 2020 I should probably Continue Reading
Another Week, Another Skirt
It's difficult to blog when the knitting is trundling along without any major catastrophes. There's only so much anecdotal mileage to be had from, "I'm knitting another colour combination of a skirt for the book and yeah, it seems to be going OK so far." Here it is, in case you're curious. It looks a lot less terrifyingly yellow in reality:- Please don't get me wrong. I don't sit here hoping that my knitting will spontaneously combust just so that I can write about the experience. But if my Continue Reading
An Unexpected Yarn-Bombing
We've all had to work out new strategies for coping this year whilst the world has been spinning off its rocker. But don't worry my friend, no matter how outlandish your survival techniques have been, you'll find no judgement here... and I'm sure that both of your pet cats genuinely enjoy wearing the replicas of 12th century French armor that you painstakingly crafted for them out of old baked-bean tins during the early weeks of lockdown. Look, they're hardly hissing at you at all these Continue Reading
Babies!
Ah-ha, I realize now why Robyn-the-robin and I have a special bond. She figured it out way before I did. It seems that we have something in common. You see, we're both twin-mums. That would explain our shared under-eye baggage, at least. (Yes I know, other sources of chronic exhaustion are available. Parents - even twin parents - don't have a monopoly on tired, etc etc, etc.) But sometimes it feels good to hang out with a fellow mum-of-multiples. Look! Here are her babies! Twice this Continue Reading
Comfort Knitting
There's nothing like being halfway through a simple project to make me want to knit something complicated, and there's nothing like swearing my way through designing a complicated skirt to make me want to create something really simple. Here's the skirt in two different colourways. It's for the book, so I can't show you any more detail just now. I've been picking at the details of this stranded skirt design for so many weeks that I'm starting to see the world around me in terms of how best Continue Reading
Colours Behaving Badly
Colours are like children. You learn, for example, never to leave young Cedric alone with little Jessica, because they won't play nicely unless maybe you've also got sweet Timmy there to provide a soothing influence on both of them. But things can turn unpredictable in a heartbeat. Dear Hieronymus and Maud are usually a delightful combination, but add Bob into the mix and - WHAM! - all three start swinging from the chandeliers and behaving monstrously. As it is with children, so it is Continue Reading
Locked Down But Not Out
The trouble with being home so much is that I'm a sitting target for anyone who wants food. And suddenly, it seems as though everyone wants food, all the time. Indoors, the twinnage want a snack. The answer is mostly 'no' because we're being cautious with our supplies. Also they had a stonking big lunch about three seconds ago. So I offer them a lecture about how snacks weren't even invented when I was a lass, and they roll their eyes and ask whether dinosaurs were around in my youth. By Continue Reading