befogged

It’s a long time since I spent almost the whole day reading, but today I got absorbed:

There are, it has to be said, much worse ways to spend a morning. It’s wonderfully sunny, too, so the birds are out in force and singing springy songs as the last of the snow melts away from our garden.

Latest handspun:

Natural chocolate coloured alpaca, about 476 yards of light fingering weight. I have to confess to feeling fairly pleased with myself! It was such a pleasure to spin, too - practically threw itself onto the bobbin. I think I’m even more of an alpaca fan than when I was just knitting with the stuff!

It took a while at that weight, though, so I spun some aran weight Falkland this week as a quick n chunky project. Here it is:

There’s about 170 yards there, and it’s my first attempt at a 3-ply so I can see room for improvement but am overall pleased.

So, the wheel and I have been getting to know one another since my last update, erm, last year! So far I’ve thrown some corriedale (not my favourite fibre so far - it’s ok, and it’s easy to draft, but it’s not nearly as *nice* as other sorts) and merino at it and produced decent results. There’s some alpaca on there at the moment that is looking like it will turn out to be laceweight or not much heavier by the time I’ve plied it (just started the second bobbin… getting there, but it takes a while at such a fine weight!), but so far what I’m most happy with is this:

It’s about 300m of roughly sock weight 2ply Wensleydale from Babylonglegs in the ‘Blue Banana’ colourway. I tried to split the fibre in such a way that I would get a degree of colour-matching between the two plies. It seems to have worked to some degree, although not 100% perfectly, which means I should have some nice gradations of colour once it’s knitted up. I really enjoyed spinning the Wensleydale - it’s got a lovely sheen to it, rather than being a floofy fibre, so it’s a totally different look and feel from BFL. We like variety!

And just to prove that point about the colour gradations:

That’s the beginnings of a Tudor Grace  - it’s probably a more accurate shot of the true colours, too.

And just before I started that, I finished this:

It’s a Logan River Wrap in New Lanark Donegal Silk Tweed Aran. Great pattern for a simple but warm and effective wrap, and the yarn is a real bargain - produced on a small scale in Scotland, excellent service and a good price for natural fibres. It feels rather tweedy at first, but it softened a lot with knitting and still more so with blocking - it’s got a lovely softness and drape now.

The days of festivities went pretty well in this neck of the woods. Those who were in hospital were out of it in time to not have to spend the season in the ward, we are now properly installed and comfy downstairs (well, we could do with some more and more suitably coloured throws for the furniture but those are easy to pick up), and Al’s parents’ Christmas gift to us was to cover the cost of a cleaner to keep it shiny for as long as possible. Now that is an excellent present!

And thanks to some impressive subterfuge and perfect gift-arranging abilities on the part of Al, I am now the proud and very, very happy owner of a spinning wheel.

Here’s my spinning spot, in our newly-*done* downstairs (not that you can see too much of the latter!):

Squee!

And yes, it’s near a radiator, by a window, and with a good view of the tv. *Grin*. I have already discovered that there’s something satisfyingly contradictory about making yarn whilst watching Voyager

I’m finding the wheel easier to work with than spindles, now that I’ve got a little more used to it (helped enormously by guidance from Linzi, the very lovely Alpaca Spinner, whom we went to see on Monday - and with whose help Al smuggled a wheel into the car boot while I was playing with some of her wonderful alpaca on her Traddy and Traveller to see which I was more comfortable with!), though the lighter spindle I got recently helped a lot. I seem to lean towards quite fine singles, so it makes sense that I got on a little better with a lighter spindle and more so with a wheel.

I guess it needs a sprig of holly ideally (Greenery will really counterbalance the 450g of chocolate, the 285ml of double cream and the five eggs. I think I’ve put on weight just by looking at this thing - I have never made anything quite so frivolously calorific before but my goodness it looks tasty!), but it’s not quite Yule yet and I can get some of that tomorrow:

Yuletide greetings, all

I have spent the day so far cleaning and cooking, which is all terribly domesticated. However, every trace of dust, painting equipment, and random screws (because no matter what you’re having done in the house it always seems to generate more screws than there seems to have been things from which the screws could have emanated) has been evicted from downstairs and the furniture is back where it belongs.

All that’s left are the finishing touches - moving the tv and unit back down there, moving the birds back down there, hanging pictures, and investing in lots more throws for the furniture.

Just in time for us to collapse onto it for the festive season. Wooyay!

A book one, this time. It’s doing the rounds again - I think it first came round after The Big Read - but I thought why not? I don’t know about italicising ones I love, though. ‘Love’ is sort of the wrong word.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read.
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - bits of it, I spose
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - why yes, I was a Literature student, why did you ask?
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald Dreadful book. Highly amusing memories.
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - well, I might get round to it one day…
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - Tried. Failed. Tedious as a tedious thing.
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Not after 100 Years, thank you!
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding Um, I know. It was just as good as I expected.
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare well, if I’ve read the complete works of Shakespeare…
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

7.48am.

I should think it’ll have melted by the time I get home again, though.

Pattern: Revontuli/Northern Lights Shawl, pdf pattern here

Yarn: Colourdrift BFL from the lovely Maylin at Tri’Coterie

A simple but very effective pattern for a rainbow scarflet of a shawl. The yarn is lovely and soft, though it’s actually a little more muted in real life. It still makes for a nice wearable rainbow for brightening up greyer days, though.

I think a close-up of the rainbow may be in order:

Well, we’re getting there! The kitchen is all but completed, thankfully (just a cupboard door or two to be affixed), and downstairs is well on the way to looking much more like a habitable space. It’s now been painted (after some nipping about trying to find the most sensible paint deal on Alan’s part while I was at home nursing a migraine whose origins may have been either stress or paint fumes from the primer coat, damned if I know which) and has had the old floor taken up and the underlay put down so hopefully we should have new laminate shortly. The stairs and landing (continuous decor from the rest of downstairs, so as we’re doing down there we have to do those too) still need tackling, and then once we’ve got all that sorted we’ll be able to move downstairs again. And then re-do the bathroom, but I think I’ll just not think about that for the time being…

It will be quite confusing to walk into the house and, y’know, be able to *use* the downstairs. Instead of immediately trundling upstairs. Hopefully the furniture has survived its stay in the garage!

I will be quite confused by actual telly, too. We have rubbish reception upstairs so haven’t bothered to plug ours in while we’re living up here - consequently any tv viewing we’ve done has been courtesy of laptops and BBC iPlayer, ITV CatchUp (by far the most irritatingly buggy of the options proffered by the terrestrial channels! But they do have the new Marples…) or occasionally 4OD. Will have to start recording things in which we’re interested so that we can just watch them when we feel like it as we’re doing now!