Blog statistics...

If you've got a Blogger blog like me, have you tried looking at the stats for it (on the control panel)? Mine are most amusing. I can see which sites have referred people to me (usually Ravelry), what people have searched for on Google and then found me ("lopsided cake"!) and which countries the people who read my blog are in. Which seems to be a fair few scattered right across the world. The only continent not represented is Antarctica!

A bit more knitting time this week, and I managed to get the baby cardigan finished off and blocked. I would highly recommend this pattern - it's fun to knit, only the top of the hood needs sewing up and it's very clearly written.

I got some digital kitchen scales last year, which are now proving useful for weighing odds and ends of yarn as well as cooking ingredients. I have 54g of the variegated purple cotton left, i.e. just over half a ball, which should be enough for a very small tank top or I might do a bigger one with stripes?
 

Some more yarn arrived, this time some acrylic for a tea cosy requested by a friend at church. She had requested cream and terracotta to match her kitchen and I struggled to find some terracotta at the cheaper end of the spectrum. Eventually, this came from Knitwell, who also seem to have quite reasonable postage - I investigated a few other places for cheap acrylic but the postage was much higher. It's Hayfield Bonus DK, which does feel rather acrylicky, but I doubt a teapot is fussy about what it feels like. I'm using the Terrific Tea Cosy pattern by Martin Storey.

The amaryllis put on a spurt this week, I took the first picture yesterday for the blog, and ended up taking the second picture today as it had managed to grow a couple of cm overnight! And the sun came out today so it's easier to see.

We went off on an outing to a garden centre yesterday, and went to the Longacres one which is a bit further away than the usual one. I was pleasantly surprised - it had considerably more plants than the one closer to home and they also seemed to be cheaper. We had lunch there too but the café wasn't as nice as the other one though. Amusingly we drove past two other garden centres on the way there, which makes about 5 garden centres in the space of 10 miles - do they really have enough business?!

Anyway, I'm pleased with our plant purchases. Not only were the rhubarb plants cheaper than elsewhere (the reason for the trip in the first place), we found a lovely Dogwood to go in the back garden, as well as a holly and I unearthed a Euonymus reduced to 99p in the sale section!

We also got some compost and propagating trays for use in the next few months when I want to grow some more plants from seed. And the OH found this in the pet section:

A squirrel proof bird feeder, which we're also hoping will be pigeon proof. We've been attempting to feed the birds here for months now, but the old bird feeder kept being inundated with pigeons, some even tried clinging to it and doing a humming bird impression to get seed out, and this scared away the smaller birds. As we live in a conservation area with a lot of woodland we've also been having trouble with squirrels and it was getting annoying having all the bird seed gobbled up by vermin! Hopefully this will do the trick.

Any human heart arrived at the library and I've been reading it this week. It's OK, not that interesting though and not really grabbing me. I don't really care what happens to the character and, as it's written in diary format and he's only just gone to university, there's a loooonnnnggg way to go yet. I have a feeling I'm not going to get it read in time for reading group in February...

And I've been doing a bit of clearing out. I've put some knitting magazines on Ebay to see if they sell, so if you're interested, look here.

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.

In the middle of January

Despite a very long day at work one day this week when I went into London, and a migraine on another day, I got quite a lot of knitting done this week. I finished off the second baby tank top - pattern made up as I went along. This used another 1.5 balls of Rico baby cotton soft DK, using up what was left in my stash.

Then I cast on the Easy baby cardigan, from Knitting Pure & Simple, which has been fun and easy so far and promises to have little sewing up involved. The yarn is Wendy Supreme Luxury cotton DK in variegated purple, on 4mm needles.

I liked this post by the Yarn Harlot: The Steph School of Slightly Less Crappy Knitting. I end up not even trying new things because I get frustrated with not being able to do them Really Well straight away. (Perfectionist, me?!).

I've finished Sarah Dunant's Sacred hearts. Really enjoyed this one, unlike some reading group books I've had to wade through! ;-) It's set in Ferrara in 1570, when girl's dowries had become so expensive that most families could only afford to marry one daughter off, and any other daughters would end up in a convent (where the expected dowry was much less). The book is about one girl in this position, who had fallen in love before being forced into the convent after her sister's marriage. The action almost entirely takes places inside the convent, but it's brilliantly described - I love the way it means different things to different sisters - some find it a prison, some an inspiring place to live. Indeed, one of the various themes in the novel, is women's leadership. In the convent some can become far more powerful than they could have done in the outside world as a wife, and also receive much more of an education and have a much longer, healthier and more fulfilled life. The action also takes place with the changes made at the Council of Trent going on in the background, with the potential implications for convent life so there is a lot happening for the convent as a whole and the individual women. I will definitely be getting other books by this author from the library! Of course, I managed to have the migraine the night of reading group so I didn't actually get to go and talk about the book itself...

Next month's book is William Boyd's Any human heart which I haven't started yet. I hated the Channel 4 adaptation of it on before Christmas so not sure what I'll make of the book.

And the amaryllis has shot up during the week. It's now almost 10cm tall!

First sign of Spring?

Something is beginning to come up in the garden - it still seems far too cold and early for anything though. I'm also perplexed about what they might be. I definitely don't remember planting any bulbs just there and am wondering if it's grass seed gone AWOL from an attempt to re-seed the lawn?!

 Meanwhile, I've enjoyed watching the first parts of Alys Fowler's The edible garden  and Carol Klein's Life in a cottage garden. Both are on BBC HD and the Klein one is on BBC 2 at the moment as well as being available to watch on the website. I think I like the edible garden  best, mainly because she's gardening in a relatively small space, more like my garden - although her garden is quite large for in a city! And I already enjoy reading her weekly column in the Guardian Weekend magazine.

The amaryllis progressing slowly. It has grown a microscopic amount and turned green. Maybe I should stop staring at it and it'll do things a bit quicker?

Tina, whose blog I've been reading for several years, posted about how she was going to take a picture of her garden from the back door on the first of the month every month this year to show how the garden develops. I really like this idea so have decided to have a go too, although obviously a bit late for this month. And until it gets lighter in the evenings the pictures are going to have to be taken at the nearest weekend as I don't see the garden in daylight on week days at this time of year! It also might spur me into action as last year I mainly concentrated on the front garden (i.e. people see it!) due to all the other stuff going on, and the back garden was a bit abandoned. Hmm. It does look rather bleak though! Especially with the washing line across the front of the picture - maybe I should have hung some washing on it to hide the garden?!

 So, after my spectacular failure at Iron Knitter, I have, of course, signed up for something else. But this is just a mystery blanket (I refuse to call them afghans, they're blankets or throws to me) knit-along with one square a month. Surely I can fit that in?! There's a group on Ravelry for it here. Of course, all I've done so far is join the Ravelry group, not thought about yarn, knitted a swatch or actually done something productive about it.


Someone has asked me to knit a tea cosy for them. I'm going to use the terrific tea cosy pattern by Martin Storey, which needs 2 x 100g balls of DK but I'm struggling to find some suitable DK in a terracotta colourway (she wants cream & terracotta) so if anyone has any ideas for cheapish DK yarn please let me know!).

 And I received my final Christmas present. The Amazon delivery chaos caused by the snow in December meant my present from my brother's family hadn't arrived with them before they set off to see us before Christmas, so it arrived in the post this week. It was actually quite nice getting a present this week when everything was dank, damp, miserable, grey and we went back to work (surely getting up when it's still dark should be illegal?). It's Gwen Bortner's Entrée to entrelac, which I had read a few reviews of and been wanting to read it for a while. It looks really good, with plenty of detail and diagrams about how to do entrelac, as well as some lovely patterns.