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
Garden Variety Crochet
In case you thought my promises of completing that insane project were sounding more hollow with each passing week year, I decided to show you some progress on the garden portion... which happens to be the final section. For those of you who haven't been reading The Yarn since it was hand-copied on parchment by medieval serfs, this project is large, bonkers, furniture-related, mostly crochet, and I'm very excited about showing you what it's eventually going to be. Not long now, my fine fibrous Continue Reading
Mutants! Mutants Everywhere!
I saw the weirdest thing today (whilst knitting, obviously). There I was, flicking through a perfectly normal gardening catalogue, thus proving through one simple action that I've left my youth behind forever, when I came across the most spooky mutant plant thingy that I've ever seen. The TomTato. And I'm not even joking. Look:- How spooksome is that?! You plant this oddball in a pot, and whilst above ground you get a lovely crop of cherry tomatoes, below ground the roots are busy making... Continue Reading