Staines

The house move has been accomplished.
Between us we had three lorries. The Other Half had 63 boxes of stuff, I didn't have quite as many, but still quite a few. We had boxes stacked everywhere. We had to have a one way system to get round the living room.

Thanks to the Herculean efforts of the Other Half, all the boxes have been unpacked and removed by the removal company. Oh, and Monkey's Herculean efforts too, obviously.

(note to Other Half: did you actually see Monkey unpacking anything? He looks totally knackered in the pic but all I ever saw was him lounging around?)

Once the boxes had disappeared we were free to enjoy the comforts of the new house:

The garden. I washed all my handknitted scarves and hung them out to dry. It is VERY nice having a garden again. Yes, that is a train in the background.

The garage. Which is VERY narrow, and our road is, ahem, popular for car parking, so it can be very tight getting into the garage. So Oxo got scraped. Oops. Sorry Oxo.

Walks along the banks of the Thames.

The posh kitchen.


We have a dishwasher in the kitchen. I am in love with the dishwasher. I think it's great. It's so clever. No more washing up! I am also in love with the washing machine, which didn't come with the house, it belongs to the Other Half. It's a very posh washing machine, and much more intelligent than me. I have reassured the Other Half that I don't love the dishwasher and washing machine as much as I love him. (and anyway, he's very good at loading and unloading the dishwasher and washing machine, as well as doing ALL the housework. So all I have to do is cook! And a little bit of ironing. Cool or what?!)

The commute to work. Which is very cool indeed. It's a short trot to the station, then 13 minutes on the train, then a 10 minute trot to work. In fact, 13 minutes is proving a little too short a commute to get much knitting done. Plus, commuting OUT of London means that there are loads of seats. The trains have air conditioning. Apart from one day, the trains have all been on time or early so far. This is SO much better than driving through Slough to work every day...

Walking in Windsor Great Park:

And I've even got some knitting done. The Rib Fantastic socks are nearing completion! I'm trying to get a few projects finished off before I start anything new.

Moving places and swine flu

Eeek, it's nearly a month since I last posted! How did that happen? Well, once again, exciting things are happening. I will be leaving Slough far far behind on Thursday this week, to move to Staines with The Other Half. I'll be very happy to leave Slough behind (there is currently a pile of dog poo sitting outside the entrance to my block of flats, plus a lovely smell of excrement, and I found a used syringe lying around last week) and I'm extremely excited about moving to Staines.

Several people wanted to know more about my OH, so I thought I'd post a couple of pictures:

This is him washing the floor at our new house (we got the keys last week!):

And this is him cleaning Oxo:

Spoilt? Me?! See, isn't he lovely?! And he has seen the size of my stash and is prepared to move in with it... Although he has a LOT more books than me, but I'm much more interested in his books than he is in my yarn!

We've been out and about as well as househunting. Having fun reading the silly messages in Puccino's in High Wycombe:

Admiring the sheep at Deen City Farm in London, after we'd visited Morden Hall Park and walked along the River Wandle.

Oh, and avoiding having swine flu. There was an outbreak very very close to me so I ended up having to take Tamiflu - not nice, only 3 more doses to take. Horrible stuff. Fortunately neither of us caught it, although I suspect having swine flu is better than taking Tamiflu.

Knitting update soonish (I will be without broadband for a while after the move) as I still haven't blogged about the GetKnitted workshop! I'll leave you with a picture of the Thames at Staines:

Italy

I had a tough 24 hours in Italy with work last week. After the trauma of an 8.05am flight from Gatwick (which meant getting up at 4.30, and catching a train at 5.25. Ouch) to Pisa and then two different trains, I arrived in Lucca a bit too early so was told to go and sit in the square and get a coffee whilst I waited. This, of course, was extremely challenging and tough. I sat in this square, the Piazza Napoleone:

in the sunshine, with my knitting, and drank cappuccinos for an hour and a half. Once the work was finished (which took 40 minutes, although it could have taken a lot longer if something had gone wrong), I wandered off to find my hotel and do some exploring.

I stayed in the luxurious Palazzo Alexander, where my single room was bigger than my flat back at home. Still, I managed to cope with the size of it.

And I did some exploring. Lucca has the most amazing city walls, which still encircle the old city. You can walk round the top of them, where there's a wide tree-lined path for cyclists and pedestrians. I even found a restaurant on top of the walls, where you could buy cappuccinos and knit(anyone spot a theme developing here?).

Lucca Cathedral, like every British cathedral I've ever been anywhere near, had lots of scaffolding and noisy building work taking place. Bizarrely they also had electric candles you could light at one point (instead of the real candles I've encountered at every other cathedral I've visited). Screwing a fake candle into a stand just doesn't feel the same as lighting a real candle.

But I think what I liked best were the winding streets. Within the walls it's an almost car-free area so the streets bustle with pedestrians and cyclists. I only spotted two chain stores in my whole time in Italy (a McDonalds at Pisa Centrale railway station, and an Accessorize in Lucca), everything else was small, individual shops just begging to be explored. There were wonderful food shops with all sorts of bread and vegetables (and some had meat but I avoided those!). No sign of any yarn shops, but I did discover a wonderful fabric shop with vast quantities of fabric inside. I was very very tempted to buy some, but it wasn't really very practical due to lack of storage at home at the moment.

Possibly the most amusing thing (apart from the electric candles) was the advertising at Pisa airport. Which was really doing its best to promote Yorkshire as the best tourist destination:


So, a pretty good trip. I think next time I'd make it a bit longer though...

Oh, and I didn't manage to get my knitting needles onto the plane. :-(

A post about my weekend in Bristol, including the Get Knitted workshop will appear soon(ish).

Flying visit

I'm off to Get Knitted at the end of this week to do a course with Farli and Penny.

On the day I'll get 10% off anything I buy in the shop, so it seems a bit silly for the yarn diet to be in operation that day, doesn't it?

I need to decide what I'm looking for. I've wanted to make Maude - from the Inside Loop for ages, so I think I'll go with yarn for that (her?). So I need either 1890 yards of laceweight or 945 yards of fingering weight. There are some really gorgeous ones already made on the Ravelry project page. I've seen the original at Diane's flat, and it's really really nice.

But I also want to make these sometime:
Hey Teach - from Knitty.
February Lady Sweater - from Ravelry.
Amelia - from Knitty.
Henley Perfected - from Interweave Knits.

Decisions, decisions...

But before I do the course I'm off to Tuscany on a work trip. Yes, I did say a work trip to Tuscany. It will be a bit of a flying visit, and unfortunately it looks like my attempt to arrange to meet up with some other knitters in Pisa isn't going to happen (typically, a work meeting got in the way, and much as I would prefer to prioritise knitting, sometimes that really can't happen). I'm still pondering whether British Airways are likely to let me anywhere near a plane whilst armed with my knitting needles.

But there are a few things I'm hoping to see whilst I'm out there. If I'm awake. My flight from Gatwick is horribly early and I'm having some doubts about even being awake during the work part of the trip...

I'll be off email and blogging most of this week. But hopefully I'll be back soon, armed with lots of pictures!

Folksy and Misi

I've been admiring things on Etsy for a while, but the dollar pricing put me off, especially once the exchange rate began to move in the wrong direction (for me).


Then I read on Nic's blog about Folksy, which is like a UK version of Etsy. And I got hooked stalking things on that. A couple of weeks ago I bought a couple of things from Nic's shop, NicsKnots, pictures below:


A needle roll for DPNs with SEEPS on it!! BAAAAAA

And this really cool cat drawstring bag:

I'd also followed Nic onto Misi (which is similar to Folksy) to have a look. And ended up stumbling upon the perfect present for a friend, from a seller called Mad about bags

Haven't sent her it yet, I hope she'll like it!

Thank you for all the comments about my last post - we enjoyed reading them (he does read my blog, and yes, he has seen the size of my stash. Although he's only seen the boxes and chest etc that it's stored in, rather than the whole lot strewn all over the place, which would look far scarier...)

I'm missing my garden. I've been reading people's updates about gardens and planting things, including Yarnstorm's gorgeous pictures, and I'm missing doing things in my garden. Waah. I'd only just discovered that I liked gardening, so I only really had 18 months of doing it, but I enjoyed it in that time (we'll ignore all the Sunday afternoons I spent moaning about having to go outside to do stuff instead of curling up with a book).

So I planted some herb seeds for my windowsill:

It's not really the same, is it?! Now the weather is better I'm also missing having the garden for hanging washing outside. The airer is a bit of a permanent feature in my living room. I want my garden back!! I hope my tenant is taking good care of it...

The recent lack of knitting

The eagle-eyed may have noticed a massive decrease in the amount of knitting I've done over the last two months. There is a reason. Exciting things have been going on in part of my life that appeared to be in terminal decline. And I'm very happy about it. ;-)

Yes, Monkey and the nephews are no longer the only men in my life. Actually, are they men at all? One is a knitted monkey and the other two are small, noisy, energetic sprogs who like making Play-Doh hair with garlic crushers and making their Auntie get up horribly early to read books about Big Diggers when she's on holiday with them.

Anyway, a picture I took with a certain someone, as we wandered along the South Bank and watched sunset over the Houses of Parliament.



And I may have got slightly diverted into Stash on the same day and came away with some Koigu PPPM (you would have thought a trip to a yarn shop was enough to frighten any man off, especially on a first date, but not this one). And some people, like Nickerjac, Grit and Michaela saw him (briefly) that day!

Other places we have wandered over the weeks:

Cookham, where we had some lunch, then had a look in the church (bits of which date back to the Saxons), saw Stanley Spencer's grave and then

wandered by the Thames in the (sort of) sunshine.

Another time we wandered along the Thames a bit further down and stopped at Boulter's Lock,

which was evidently a bit busier in Victorian times.

We've also wandered around Wandsworth Common. This is the station, which featured in the film "The Waiting Room", which I borrowed from him a few weeks ago. I loved the film, it appealed to my soppy nature.

And there's a great bookshop (LibraryThing link) nearby too. Very small, but one of those independent ones that somehow manages to pack an enormous amount into a tiny space.

I've had a similarly detrimental effect on the number of books he's getting read...

Have you read...

... "Lullabies for little criminals" by Heather O'Neill? I'm meant to be reading it for Reading Group next week, but I'm not getting very far. It doesn't sound cheerful from the plot summary in the link above, but I'm not even that far yet - only on page 25! I just can't be bothered to pick it up and read any more of it.

I finished reading "The believers" by Zoe Heller last week, and I'm wondering if that had something to do with it? I picked this one up at the library as I'd enjoyed (probably the wrong word? More like "found compelling and got sucked into it"?) "Notes on a scandal" and thought I'd try something else by Heller. I wasn't too impressed with this one either, once I'd realised I couldn't care less about any of the characters and the fact that nothing really happened until page 82?!?! Apparently one of the things Zeller does is produce unlikeable characters but I'm not sure where the incentive is to keep reading if you don't give a damn what happens to anyone in the book? According to the reviews quoted in the Wikipedia article: "It has been called a "cruelly clever new novel", "an observant and unsentimental family drama that pits rationalism against faith", "at heart an American novel: a larger, more considered, layered and utterly assured study of a family driven by political passion whose personal lives refuse to comply with prescribed ideology", and simply "a brilliant, brilliant book".

Maybe I missed something? Still haven't decided whether to carry on with "Lullabies..." but if I procrastinate much longer it'll be the Reading Group meeting and I won't have read it so the problem will be solved.

In other backward steps I frogged (again) the Herringbone/No purl monkey socks and began pattern attempt no. 3 with the sock yarn. Has my concentration suddenly become really bad or something? I can't ever remember having this many book and knitting failures all at the same time?!

This time I'm attempting the Rib Fantastic pattern from the "Knitting socks with handpainted yarn" book. I'm loving the book (see, I can still read and enjoy something! Maybe it's weird novels that are the problem?) and found the introductory chapters really helpful in terms of different styles of handpainting/dyeing and what to look out for when you're deciding which pattern to use.


I've also knitted half of a tea cosy for a friend's birthday (which was on 3rd April, but I only gave her last year's birthday present at the beginning of March so I'm not doing too badly really...). The pattern is from the RYC Home book and the yarn is some space-dyed DK I bought from Wingham Wools.

I have also been playing hunt the button. I've nearly finished my Suri cardigan and needed five small buttons. Via Twitter Blueadt suggested trying Duttons for Buttons in Harrogate and Anne suggested Dragon Yarns, both of which I liked the look of. But then I got an email from Kangaroo, whom I'd forgotten sold buttons and they had some I really liked. Except of course there's a minimum order, so I ended up ordering more buttons...

These are cheap and cheerful black plastic buttons, along with some sweet little Rowan ones:

and I couldn't resist some of the Debbie Abrahams hand-made buttons, even though they're too big for the cardigan.


I've been playing around with my veg box delivery order too. I use Riverford Norton, which delivers from Hampshire, and I had been getting the mini fruit & veg box every week, but that never includes potatoes or onions, so I've switched to alternating between a mini fruit & veg box, and a mini veg box with extra fruit bag. Except I then invariably find I prefer the look of the other box contents that week so end up switching around again.

Still, this was last week's mini veg box - looks rather good, doesn't it? I consumed the last of it tonight with an omelette!