Fairtrade yarn & other nice things

I bought some yarn. I'd seen someone else's copy of the March 2011 Yarn Forward mag at knitting group and liked some of the patterns, so the OH went and got me a copy. Then I bought the yarn for one of them on Saturday! It's Manos del Uruguay Maxima and is lovely and squooshy.

See, I spent half of Saturday at Christian Aid HQ in London on a "Making London Diocese a Fairtrade Diocese" morning. Very interesting and most entertaining, particularly the bit where they tried to do Ready Steady Cook and bananas were flying everywhere. Now Christian Aid HQ is on Lower Marsh, just behind Waterloo station, so almost immediately opposite...

Iknit! And as I'd spent the morning doing Fairtrade whatsits it seemed appropriate to buy some Fairtrade yarn. The Maxima is intended to be knitted into a present, so it still fits with my current intentions to only buy yarn when I know what I'm going to do with it.

Back at home the amaryllis is growing a cm a day!

I received an exciting parcel from Nicsknots, all beautifully packaged up.


It was my Phoenix Cards order. I started getting these from Nic last year sometime, the cards are really nice, made to high environmental standards and are also considerably cheaper than cards in the shops! I'd reached the point when I resented buying the extortionate prices for shop cards, had a go at making my own but didn't enjoy it or have time for it, then found out about these ones, which solved all those problems. I considered switching to email cards only, but I think it's more fun getting a "real" card through the post, plus a lot of my relatives aren't on email. I've only pictured a few of mine below, but you get the idea. I think my favourites are the notecards - you get a pack of 10 postcards with envelopes. The best ones are the sheep ones, which I think a few readers will probably recognise as I've sent them this one. The only hiccup I've had so far is remembering where I've put the cards when I want to send one.

Knitting-wise I haven't made much progress, it was a bit of a busy week, with meetings on 3 evenings so I wasn't at home a great deal! I got the body of the baby cardigan finished and started one of the sleeves, switching to DPNs. I'm loving this pattern so far, it just seems to flow along very smoothly and there's going to be so little sewing up to do! :-)

Reading-wise I collected Any human heart from the library but have only read two pages whilst waiting at the hairdressers. It hasn't made me want to read any further. But I have been reading the History of Christianity: the first three thousand years by Diarmuid MacCulloch. It's very readable (apart from being so stonkingly heavy it crushes your chest if you read it in bed). I've just been picking chapters out to read, rather than starting at the beginning as it's over 1000 pages long, so I've been jumping in at the bits of history that I know least about already.