Thank you, my Fine Fibrous Friends, for your kind words in response to my last post about how Twin One* has cancer and potentially also another alarming condition. We're continuing to wait for more news about Twin One's more precise diagnosis, plus his prognosis and treatment plan. I assumed that we'd know more by now but they're still testing the portion of him that was surgically removed. It's taking so long that I'm beginning to suspect that they're culturing a whole new twin (ergo Continue Reading
Chopped
Hello, my Fine Fibrous Friends. As so often happens on this page, the story told by the words will likely weave in and out of the story told by the pictures, because different bits of life are best told via different media. At long last, it's done. After several postponements I've had the surgery to even things up bosom-wise post-cancer. (I've always been left-leaning politically, but wasn't keen to match that anatomically.) The surgeon who rocked up super-enthusiastically with his marker Continue Reading
Summery Summary
Summer evenings imagined: lounging on the garden bench in the sunshine, wine chilled to perfection, an olive or thirty within reach. There is knitting - perhaps a skirt-in-progress, with neither dropped stitches nor tangled yarn. On the lawn in front of me, children and wildlife gambol endearingly. (No, I didn't say gamble - that would be a bit less charming.) The Stoic Spouse is nearby, being stoic of course. Summer evenings lived: Oh, is it raining again? Never mind, I'll just relax in the Continue Reading
Hiatus
A confession: I've been neglecting my knitting. This is problematic when you're a knitting blogger. The yarny hiatus is temporary, and it's partly because we've reached peak season in the veg-growing calendar. My coping strategies for covid, cancer, Brexit, and perimenopause are all pretty similar: grow as much fruit and veg as possible, drink wine, go running a lot, and laugh in the face of adversity. Oh, and - usually - knit or crochet too, just not these past couple of weeks. It's the Continue Reading
Keep On Yarning
Hello. :-) Thank you, my fine fibrous friends, for your heartwarming comments in response to the self-care post, including the many from people who are new around here. (Welcome, do come in and please excuse the mess.) I started replying to each comment, but they number in the hundreds, and I'm not sure I can write a sensible response to every single one without being prosecuted for child neglect. Special thanks for your birthday wishes for Mother Twisted, but more on that in a Continue Reading
You Can Do This. Yes, You.
Morning all. Right, before we go any further, a quick announcement. I've just made all of my patterns free (using the code ANTIVIRAL at the checkout) because it doesn't feel right to take money whilst people are losing their livelihoods. You can find the patterns here. Most of my designs were free anyway, but for now, they all are. Anyway, to the subject of today's post. I don't usually discuss psychology stuff on here, because I like to keep this blog very separate from the day job, but I Continue Reading
Clothes For Vegetables
Meet the leek-cosy. It's knitted in a 2x2 rib using Stylecraft's 'Life Changes' yarn. Oi, stop laughing about this terribly serious matter! There really is a good reason for this. Allow me to explain... Being someone who wastes far too much time nosing into oddball corners of the internet - peering into its cupboards, opening the occasional drawer - I come across all sorts of things. On nights when I can't sleep, it sometimes gets to the point where I feel as though I've Read The Continue Reading
Springy
As seasons go - and man, do they go fast for those of us on the less popular side of 40 - spring has a lot to recommend it. The very best thing is that nature stops hiding its colourful light under a damp, grey, bushel, and comes out to frolic. Look at these beautiful snakeshead fritillaries! It's trickier than usual to be miserable when there's so much new life around, such as the bottle-fed lambs in the twinnage's friend's garden. Meet Alfie. Alfie is trouble. But Alfie gets Continue Reading
Millionaire
That title is misleading. I'm not really a millionaire, although I did just find a bar of chocolate that I'd forgotten about so I am feeling pretty fortunate. (I sometimes hide chocolate away from the Twinnage, and the advantage/disadvantage of having a rubbish memory is that I then promptly forget it ever existed.) But the title of this post is because recently, my blog visit stats passed the million mark. Those visits can't all have been by my mum, surely? A million! That's quite a big number. Continue Reading
Making Stuff
Yes, yes, the crochet version of the Hiking Reindeer Cowl is well on its way. I've done lots more since taking this photo yesterday:- Meanwhile, there's a standoff going on between me and the Stoic Spouse, concerning the garden. With an enthusiasm-to-wisdom ratio of approximately 500:1, I've been planning the redevelopment of our small plot. It's very, very, slowly on its way to being full of bulbs, and fruit trees, and sneaky interspersed vegetables, and ferns, and - I dearly hope - a pond. Continue Reading