Lots of stuff

Yes, once again I haven't blogged for a while. Life kind of got in the way. We've had an incredibly busy couple of months, mainly getting the new house sorted and moving into it!

The house is looking lovely. We went from this to this in the bathroom:




This is what the bathroom looked like when it was mostly in piles in the study.

We disappeared behind a very large pile of boxes during the packing:

I wound my unknown 4ply wool from the Skep, purchased on Skip North 2007, into balls ready to knit Thermal.

Monkey sat watching monkeys on TV (he claims he did all the packing, but I'm really not convinced).


We found a heart shaped potato when I was cooking tea one night.



Farli sent me a belated birthday present - a ball of Opal Cotton in some rather lovely colours. Oh, and she agreed to preach at our wedding! :-)

I stuck to one knitting project - Thermal - reasoning that I needed something with an easy to remember pattern, in 4ply (so no risk of finishing it any time soon) to concentrate on amidst the chaos of building work, moving house, unpacking, organising wedding and trying to do the boring but vital parts of everyday life, such as going to work.

The old oven at the new house passed its gas safety test, but proved to be leaking heat at a great rate and threatening to damage the appliances on either side. Plus it was coated in about 20 years of grease. So we bought a shiny new cooker. Which has made cooking meals for the two of us SO much easier.

We've done an enormous amount of cleaning (don't worry, I did some too), both of the new house and the old. And are now arguing with our letting agent from the old house who is trying to hang on to some of the deposit on the grounds that we didn't leave it clean. When we actually left it in a better state than we found it. Grrr.



I went for my wedding hair trial. The OH was very rude about it. Apparently I look like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards. I thought I looked like someone from Pride and Prejudice...

My colleague had her baby, who is incredibly cute. And he seems to like his new bootees.

There were boxes everywhere. We've unpacked 97!

This is what happens when you get two book lovers together - vast piles of book boxes everywhere.











Spring suddenly arrived and we realised the garden (which had been handily hiding under a lot of snow for much of January) was looking overgrown and Needed Something Doing With It. I also discovered a lot of ground elder in residence. I'm taking heart from all of the work Liz did last year on her garden. If you follow the link to her blog there's a link to a Flickr album of the same spot in her garden as she worked on it through the year - which I'm finding extremely encouraging at the moment!

I ordered our first meat box from Riverford. I've been ordering their veg boxes for a couple of years now, but this was the first meat box - and I'm impressed! It all came in a sealed box, along with our normal veg box delivery.

And inside the box was insulated with wool! Cool or what?! The packaging is then returned the following week when the next veg box arrives so it all gets re-used.
 I'm still struggling with recipes a bit - they all seem to be aimed at feeding 4, whereas we are a veggie and a meat-eater-who-eats-veggie-a-few-times-a-week. There is more freezer space at the new house, which does help. The meat box was various items chosen from a list, they do various sizes of pre-chosen meat boxes too, but those all seem to involve lumps of meat intended for roasting etc, which I can't imagine we'd get through!

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Way back in February we celebrated the anniversary of our first date by going back to Putney and wandering around in the cold (just like we had done the year before!). Unfortunately we couldn't totally relive it, as the café where we had lunch then has now shut, as has the wonderful Stash. :-( Funnily enough I didn't mention our first date when I blogged about that Saturday in Putney a year ago!  ;-)




And we fitted in a trip to Claremont Landscape Garden to escape from the housemoving adventure/wedding planning for a while.

Think that's all! Hopefully life will begin to calm down a bit soon...

Long time no blog

I haven't really gone missing, I'm just not quite sure where the time is going. We've been going to marriage preparation classes at church, which are hysterically funny. And also planning the wedding in odd moments of time inbetween doing things to the house. We spent ages getting quotes from builders for the work on the  house, and all the snow delayed things too. Weddings and building work seem to have been the only topics of conversation for quite some time now - maybe people are starting to avoid me?!
This is the current state of the living room:

The end of the bathroom, which did look like this:

has had the wall between the bathroom and separate loo knocked down:

And a new wall built to extend the corner of the bathroom, so we can put a shower cubicle there.

Downstairs we've also discovered where a door used to be, connecting the kitchen with the dining area. Which must have made the kitchen incredibly tiny.

I also got the Stashbuster Spiral socks finished. A really fun knit and a good way of using up some leftovers.


And I've been knitting a Clapotis Scarf for a friend's birthday. It's not completely the drop scarf pattern I've linked too as I've made it wider and longer, just not as wide and long as a proper Clapotis! The yarn is Mirasol Hacho, which I love love love.

Also read some good books, more details in the LibraryThing link in my sidebar, but I particularly enjoyed "Notes from an exhibition" by Patrick Gale and "Engleby" by Sebastian Faulks. And kind of enjoyed "Fault lines" by Nancy Huston, although I found it hard to keep up with each narrator as my brain was whirling around paint colours, bridesmaids dresses, yarn, bathroom fittings and other such things.

No idea when I'll next be blogging. I'm trying to take pics of all the work in progress (whether it's knitting, building work or wedding bits) as it happens, but there never seems to be much time for downloading pictures or writing about it! We're planning to be moved into the house a couple of months before the wedding, so the clock is ticking now.
I have been trying to read people's blogs, but may not be commenting as much as normal, so please don't be offended!

Projects

The WIPs on my Ravelry project page are gradually reducing in number. I seem to be so slow at the moment at finishing things off, but I suppose there's quite a lot going on, so it isn't really surprising.

The Jitterbug gloves that I have so far failed to picture on here are finished. Just in time for the snow on the journey to work. I was very glad I had them then as they're lovely, warm and squooshy.

Narvik is also finished (the last few knitting group meetings I've just been sat sewing in ends and sewing things together). But I've only just got round to blocking it. I cheated and blocked it after sewing it together, as recommended by Debbie Stoller in Stitch N' Bitch.

I can't decide what to do about the wrapover cardigan in Freedom Spirit that I was knitting. I started it when I was living in lodgings nearly two years ago and was feeling very miserable so it has some bad associations. Plus I've put on weight since then so I'm not convinced it will fit. But how life has moved on in the space of 18 months!

On Friday we completed the purchase of our new home. It needs a lot of work doing to it, so we won't be moving in for a couple of months yet. But it was still very exciting to get the keys and have a wander round planning things (and panicking when we couldn't initially get the boiler to do anything!). It needs a new boiler.
It has an absolutely enormous L-shaped living room/dining room, with a lovely parquet floor.

The amount of space is amazing! Just think how much yarn I could fit in here! (did the OH read that bit?).

It needs totally re-wiring and the bathroom is a real 70s avocado delight.

If you think those tiles are interesting you should see the downstairs loo...

There's a small garden too, although we're a bit hampered at the moment by the sudden snow. The flat roof has a leak and needs replacing but is currently hidden underneath all the snow! But there should be room to grow some vegetables and have a compost bin.

I'm won't be online over Christmas and, as usual, I'm massively behind with blog reading. I hope everyone has a great Christmas!

Missing In Action

Oh God, I haven't blogged for a month! Absolutely typical. You get a lovely new camera for your birthday, for the first time ever you can take proper piccies to put on your blog, and you promptly start running around like a headless chicken with no time to blog and play with the lovely new camera.

A lot has been going on. Not only the small little things like trying to plan a wedding for next year and getting settled into a new town and starting a knitting group (We have 20 members already on the Ravelry part of the group, even if that many haven't actually shown up at a meeting yet), and minor inconveniences like going to work and cooking meals.

There has been a bit of knitting. I test knitted the Arwen Cloche Hat (as modelled by Monkey) for Tabitha.

I have also knitted a glove. Its friend is still in progress. The yarn is Colinette Jitterbug, bought from Get Knitted last year and the pattern is a free adult basic glove pattern. The yarn is lovely and squooshy knitted up on 2.5mm needles. And I think I've forgotten to download the pic of it from the camera.


Then I've been doing a driving course. After last year's infamous panic attack on the A1, and then taking various circuitous routes to get to places (such as Slough to Chelmsford via Amersham, Watford, Hatfield, Hertford and Harlow or Staines to Lincoln via just about every small village in the country), as I was still feeling very panicky and it seemed to be getting worse, I decided the time had come to Do Something About It. So I found a company called Ride Drive who do courses for people who are nervous/panicky/phobic drivers. And it's really cool. They teach you advanced driving techniques (the instructor is an advanced police driver) as well as gradually confronting your fears. I've still got a long way to go, but I'm loving learning all the theory bits and I'm feeling more confident now. Most of the time. When I'm not actually thinking about the next session...

We went up to Edinburgh for a week, but before we did that we suddenly found a house we want to buy. So things started hurtling very fast as we managed to get through two viewings, three offers (the last accepted), instruct a solicitor and arrange a survey all in the six days before we went on holiday. It's the house stuff that has been taking up so much of my time, as it needs a lot of work doing to it so we've been doing a lot of research into things like re-wiring costs and having a new bathroom as well as having an incredibly lengthy and dull meeting at the bank getting the mortgage sorted out.

So no house pictures yet, but we're hoping the sale will complete before Christmas, although we won't be moving until next year once the work is done on it.

Edinburgh was fab. We did a lot of the things that I've wanted to do for years and never had a chance to, including:
Climbing Calton Hill:

Visiting the K1 yarns shop, 

 

where I bought a skein of K1 yarns sock yarn in Teal (made by Fyberspates), and the book "Sock Innovation".

 

The yarn shop is really close to Edinburgh Castle, which we also went round. Unfortunately the lovely HK Handknit shop which I visited last time I went to Edinburgh seems to have shut now.

 

Visited the Scottish Parliament, as well as the Palace of Holyrood.

And climbed Arthur's Seat to look at the fantastic views out over Edinburgh.

We also went round the National Museum of Scotland, which didn't impress us too much (it did lots of jumping around in history whilst attempting to be thematic), took refuge from the rain in John Lewis for a while, went round the Museum of Edinburgh (much better and we actually learnt some stuff). Oh and John Knox's house, where they'd got all the same books on display as I'd just chosen for an exhibition about Calvin back at work, and where there's a nice cafe in the Scottish Storytelling Centre. Plus a trip to Peebles on the bus when we got totally drenched and very fed up. But I did get a pair of boots and some shoes from the narrow shoe shop, so all was not lost.

On the way back down to London on the train we stopped off with Mum to spend a night at her new house and to see how she and Sweep were getting settled in. Sweep seemed to be completely at home.

I am also massively behind with reading blogs (so what's new?!?), Bloglines is saying something like 200 posts still to be read so apologies that I haven't been leaving comments on blogs much recently. Life has been hectic and is showing no signs of slowing down...