Sorting out the stash

Being a good librarian I decided to re-classify my stash. It was originally stored according to cotton, wool, acrylic and oddments but had long since outgrown this, combined with my Ravelry tags for it which date from when I was living in two different places so I still have yarn labelled "Slough" and "Lincoln" on Ravelry! This was very frustrating to my librarian brain, plus I could never remember where anything was and had forgotten I'd got some stuff. So I got the whole lot out and, with some assistance from Monkey, spread it out on the spare bed. This is the 4ply pile, verging into laceweight at one side:

I've divided it into laceweight, 4ply, DK, aran and chunky, plus an oddments box and it now looks a lot better! And it all fits into one wardrobe...

And it made me feel all inspired to start even more projects. I haven't indulged myself. Yet.

The two projects I have got on the go are coming along nicely. I've nearly finished the first Owen sock. I was going to keep going until I'd used up half the yarn but, after weighing it on the kitchen scales (cue very funny look from the OH) I'm nowhere near that point and don't really want them going much further up my legs! More piccies on Ravelry.

I have also been flaunting the Owen socks on the train as I totally freaked out a couple of men having a very dull conversation about sales targets on the train to work last week. They kept getting distracted by my knitting. In fact, they couldn't take their eyes off it.

And I've finished the front and back of a nephew's Christmas jumper and used the three-needle-bind-off to join the shoulder seams. I've also finished both sleeves so just the hood and a whole other jumper for the other nephew to go now. Heck, it's still August anyway. Oodles of time.

The goodies I ordered at Knit Nation arrived - a matching set of Babylonglegs sock yarn and Vampire on the bus knitting bag from Nicsknots! Aren't they cool?

Yet another colleague had a birthday so I made a chocolate beetroot cake this time. Then forgot to take a picture of it at home so had to take one with my mobile at work! Chocolate beetroot cake is highly recommended, not only is it very tasty, but it's also obviously incredibly healthy as it has vegetables in. We'll ignore the sugar, butter, chocolate etc. Ignore the array of biscuits behind the cake. Another colleague had just returned from holiday and it's obligatory to bring biscuits back from holiday in our department.

And the rose project is continuing apace. All six seeds germinated and have now been potted on into individual pots with seed compost in!

That's it for now. I was going to write up a couple of book reviews too but this is already going to be lengthy. I'll save them for another post.

The rose project

One of our wedding presents was some named rose seeds so with some trepidation we followed the instructions and planted them, and crossed our fingers some would come up. We had six seeds and the instructions were to plant them in a tray of vermiculite and keep moist and between 20 and 23°C (how do you manage to keep the temperature that exact during a British summer?!).

Vermiculite looks worryingly like cat litter! Nothing much happened indoors so we decided to give up on the temperature thing and moved it outside, keeping our fingers crossed again that no local cats would decide to investigate the new toilet facilities. Lo and behold, a seedling emerged within a few days!

Closely followed by four more!

I will post more pictures soon once the seedlings are a bit bigger. We also constructed this over the weekend. A cold frame for my cuttings to go in and to help things acclimatize to outside temperatures - bought in the Lakeland sale.

And some of the free bulbs I got have been flowering. This gladioli is one of my favourites:

 Oh, and I came home from work and discovered the OH had bought me some SHEEP socks. Isn't he sweet?!