Sock yarn muse...

In answer to some comments:

Jae said...
Hey, there is no reason that they have to match! You could have 3 pairs of mismatched socks. I love the colors! What are the colorways? Caesar is a big fan of using my knitting as a blanket as well! He can smell wool from a mile a way.

Hi, Jae! Colours are Koigu KPPPM, P202 (purply one), P623 (pinky one) and P615 (greeny-mixed one). I can't pick a favourite, I'm in love with all three at the moment! I love knitting with handpainted yarn and seeing how the colours come out when it's knitted.

Willow never usually seems to want to sleep on my knitting except when I'm actually knitting it! She jumps up in my lap and stands up with her front paws on my chest, in between me and the needles, with her face about an inch from mine. This is kitty language for 'put it down and fuss me!'

By the way, Jae is doing a fab thing in a couple of days - Knit Michigan. If you haven't done so already, Go sponsor her! She is so close to her target and this is something that affects us all.

Brenda said...
Poor Willow! It is hard being a usually pampered housekitty. She is very cute!Do you like the colinette yarn? I keep hearing about it, but no one seems to have posted about how it wears and washes.

I love the Colinette - It's in beautiful colours, is machine washable, has that gorgeous sort of corded look like koigu which seems to make the colours shine more, somehow, is 100% merino for snuggly softness, and is made in Wales! Go Wales! Why should British knitters keep importing wool from the other side of the globe when there's this gorgeous stuff right here at home? Support your local producers, while there still are any!

(sorry - rant mode off)

Unfortunately I can't help on how well it wears - only just finished these ones, my first pair. I will keep you posted!

In the meantime, can anyone else offer advice on how well Colinette yarn wears? Don't be shy! Leave me a comment! De-lurk! In fact i might run a competition soon to encourage you... yeah. tell your friends and watch this space! I need to come up with something silly!

Some sort of competition.... hmmm....

Threesock update

Knit one sock at a time when I can knit three? Not me!
I was dying to see how all these colours of Koigu came out, so i went a little bit crazy and cast on three different socks at once. I've been kniting on the pinky one this evening, so it's in front, but I'm going to try and keep them all more or less even - I don't want two of them to just become more UFOs hanging around.

I decided that I have to knit up a load of my yarn before buying more, not because I'm doing any kind of 'knit from your stash' challenge, just because yesterday, in one of my favourite yarn shops, I had an epiphany. I didn't want to buy yarn.
No, your eyes are not deceiving you. I didn't want to buy any yarn. The thought of all the yarn sitting in my stash was getting to me. Not so much guilt at the cost of it, the money I've spent on it, but rather that it's sad for the wool to sit getting dusty and never become anything beautiful to get shown off in public. The sight of all that beautiful new yarn made me sad at the idea that I could take it away and hide it in a cupboard.

I did not have PMT. I may have been slightly tired...

Anyway, at the moment I'm enjoying knitting up the beautiful yarn I've got already. Aren't they beautiful? And I don't intend to make the second socks yet. When I've finished these three, I have at least another three gorgeous colours I want to see knitted up. This time it's not about the FO count. It's just about the joy of knitting with gorgeous colours.

We are not amused.

Willow is glad that I finished my assignment, so that she can have some attention again. She was quite annoyed that I stayed up all night, in cat time, and just sat tapping at the computer and ignoring her. Not a happy catty.

'Stop looking at that silly screen, I want some fuss and some kitty treats!'

'Would you credit it? She even ignores me when I roll on the floor and look super-cute!'

'I give up. I just want you to know that I am not amused. I can't even jump up on the desk, It's all covered wilth silly bits of paper and I get shouted at for putting perfectly attractive muddy paw prints on them. Can you believe that?'

'At last! Life round here is back to normal, there's knitting I can sleep on! Nice blue socks, by the way. Lovely and soft. They go very nicely with my fur... I wonder if I could get a kitty basket made in this colour?'

Willow models completed Blue Parrot Colinette socks, along with the beginnings of the next sock in koigu! I'll let you in on a little secret.... I've been wanting to cast on all my lovely colours of koigu for so long now, I've cast on three different coloured socks at once! Don't tell Willow!

Done, done and done.

Yippee! Free as a bird now!
The assignment was completed at 3 minutes to six on Thursay morning, I got 2 hours' sleep and then got up to go and hand it in. Once it was gone the world suddenly seemed full of sunshine....
To top it all, I have also finished my second blue Colinette socktoday, and we have finished shifting all of the gravel on the drive! So three FOs in a very short space of time!
Having shovelled a tonne and three-quarters of gravel and also shifted at least a tonne of earth today, I'm now aching from head to foot, and very very tired. It hasn't stopped me casting on another sock already, though. Koigu this time - It's been smiling at me from my stash for weeks, and I've been very reastrained not to have started it before finishing the second blue sock!
Pictures tomorrow, I promise. Willow says purr.

Pulling an All-nighter....

Oh, I am too old for this.
Hmmm... let me see. Ok, we now have the required number of words. We have printed out all of the stuff to go in the appendices. We have overdosed on pro-plus.
We have started to talk like the Queen.
We are a little concerned to note that we are still a long way off having this darned thing in a hand-in- worthy state, and it is half. past. three. in the morning.
Hmmmmm......... maybe all you get-it-done-early chaps are on to something, after all......
Nose back to grindstone....

Last-minute-itis

Do you ever find yourself wondering why on earth you have left the large, important, time-consuming piece of work to the last minute? If not, if you are one of nature's planners and freakily perfect, organised people who have always got it finished with a week to spare, then please go away, because I just can't be friends with you today.
The assignment is due in tomorrow at 2pm. And I have classes and meetings to go to in the morning. 4,500 - 6,000 words. I'm currently at 2,598. The first half I am now happy with - 1,739 words wich seem to flow and make sense and are about the right topic and everything. Now we are on to part two, which is more a rationale of a scheme of work I had to write. The scheme of work is 1300 words. Those words don't count as it has to go in an appendix. Neither do the other 6000 words of notes I had to write about the topic I will be teaching. That sucks. A lot. Almost as much as the fact that I had to read another 10 books on educational theory, as well as the text that I am trying to actually teach, in order to write this sucker, of which the only evidence will be a few tiny little snippets in as quotations, which, yes, you guessed it, don't count in the word count. I guess that's fair because I didn't write them. But it doesn't feel fair right now.
If my head hasn't exploded, I will offer an update on progress later on.
i haven't knit a stitch for 4 days now. not one stitch. I've got a twitching muscle under my right eye and I'm getting close to screaming. I just want to knit, and then drift into a peaceful sleep and dream about knitting. In reality, I'm off to take more pro-plus so that I can stay up all night writing an assignment that I never want to set eyes on again, ever.
Wish me luck!

high winds

This was a fence...

On Thursday it was quite windy. I drove home at lunchtime slowly, avoiding lorries, fighting against the wind trying to push my car out into another lane. I got home to find this large hole in the fence. Well, that's not quite true. When I got home, most of the panel was still there, whipping about in the wind and slowly breaking up, sending chunks of wood full of nails whipping across our back garden with amazing force. We made sure the chooks were ok and then hid in the house. The whole panel was gone by nightfall when we went to tuck in the chickens. You can just see through the neighbours' garden that they have lost fence the other side as well - these were seriously high winds! We don't get a lot of extreme weather in the UK, so when it does come, we're completely unprepared for it. The ugly chicken-wire patch is my doing, put up on Friday to allow Ethelred and Atilla out for a run without them escaping - I have no idea how many of the fences in the row came down, but they must all have been put up 9 years ago when the houses were built, so i'd guess they are all in the same state. Darling hubby has a weekend job at a large DIY store and says that they sold £15,000 worth of fence panels yesterday. I'm not surprised!

On the theme of weather, it has been amazingly mild so far this winter - I think I've only had to defrost my car once, and that was a couple of months ago! The garden seems to think it's Spring - several things in bud, like this daffodil. If we get a sharp frost, I think we could lose a lot of plants taht are shooting fast at the moment. We're generally only talking about things above chicken-destruction height here though. they don't seem to go for the bulbs, but everything else low-growing is shredded.

There are compensations, though.... like a warm egg on a cold morning....
Had some fun dyeing the other day: was playing with colours for my Spin to Knit secret pal's skein... ahh, it's like playing with a big chemistry set. But with prettier colours. Did some fun rainbow sock wool (homespun) at the same time. It came out a bit psychedelic, though... might have to overdye a few bits of it to tone it down a tad.
This post is brought to you by Ethelred and Atilla. Well, it might be one day. They keep trying to come into the house every time I open the door! I think they want to see where Willow goes...
I'll leave you with this meme that I pinched from Not an Artist:

Find the nearest book, open to page 123, and copy out 6-8 lines of text.

My text:

"Theory x managers assume that the average worker is lazy, lacks ambition, is resistant to change, self-centred and not very bright.

Theory y managers assume that the average worker is motivated, wants to take responsibility, has potential for development and works for the organisation. Any lack of ambition or resistance to change comes from experience. "

McGregor, 1960, quoted in Capel, Leask and Turner: Learning to teach in the secondary school. Routledge, 2005.

What book do you have lying around?

Projects on the go!

I cast on for this sock on Saturday night and did three rows before giving up and going to bed. I did quite a lot on Sunday morning in a semi-vegetative state, and turned the heel on Sunday night. I was knitting it yesterday and today at Uni in my break and lunchtime (kind of scary to realise how many people have no idea how to knit, let alone in cirles and turning corners. Socks are magic to most people - little pixies grow them on bushes and send them to shops to be sold. Or something like that). I decreased the toe and grafted it this evening, and it's so nice it's only come off my foot for 5 seconds to be photographed, then went straight back on. I cast on for sock 2 straightaway, only modification was to cast on over 2 needles (first time I've tried this), as sock 1's only flaw is the cast-on edge is a teeny bit tight. Not stupidly, foot has not gone purple or dropped off, but harder to get on than it needs to be. Hopefully fixed for sock 2.

Wool: Colinette Jitterbug merino easycare in No. 16, Blue Parrot. A joy to knit with - may spark further temptation and credit card debt! (don't tell darling hubby!)

The colours don't show up fabulously here, but hey, it's nighttime and I'm using a flash. Several tones of blue with green and burgundy highlights. Much nicer in person than in this photo.
I have several skeins of koigu in different colours lurking in the stash at the moment, threatening to make me stop working on my next assignment for Uni and just knit socks 24 hours a day! I have an incentive to work hard, though... If I pass this assignment, darling hubby has promised to buy me 2 skeins of Socks that Rock! Yes, unbelieveable as it may be to Cara, I am an STR virgin! And since I didn't win any in her contest, I have to get my hands on it somehow! Isn't he just the most lovely hubby in the world? He's willing to add to my stash!

Project 2: at a standstill. there is 1 3/4 tonnes remaining of the 3 tonnes of gravel that were delivered onto our drive. Everyone seems to have lost interest in moving it and we're just taking it in turns parking in the street. I blame the weather. It's been ok actually, but I have to blame something and I'm not honest enough to admit to just being a lazy beggar.
Project 3: Forest Canopy Shoulder Shawl. Supposed to be ideal beginner's lace. Of course, being me, I started it in a completely different size wool and needle size, which isn't really a problem, as it's a triangular shawl with a repeating pattern, so you can just keep going till it's the right size, but it was takingages to grow and the point of this beginner's pattern is to knit it fairly chunky and get a huge sense of achievement from it being finished so fast. So what did I do? Why, I bought more yarn and needles and started a second one, of course!

Willow is not in the least impressed by all this knitting - it cuts down the time I can stroke her and feed her treats.

" You think I won't find them in the bookcase, eh? Wrong!"

In other news (boy projects) the Landy is not at all well. It had a short list of some 20 or so reasons for failing its MOT before Christmas, and it's been sitting on the drive in pieces ever since. Poor thing. All it wants to do is go and wallow in some mud.....

Lastly, I just have to share the picture that hubby set up as my desktop for my snazzy new computer. It makes me smile every time I see it. Willow, Ethelred and Atilla playing in the garden. They all seem to get on fine now. It's all peaceful down on the farm... or in the very small back garden, anyway.

Eggs!!!!!!!!

We have eggs!

Is it me, or are chickens just amazing? A couple of weeks ago I came home from work to find darling hubby giggling with excitement: we had four eggs! Four! We'd decided that they probably wouldn't start laying until Spring, so we hadn't checked them for a couple of days. Four eggs! We didn't even have to fight over who got to eat the first egg! (and no, we can't share. I have my yolks runny (as fresh, free-range eggs should be served)

mmmmmmmm....... eggs on toast......

but Hubby is a child of the Edwina Currie generation and has his hard boiled for 12 minutes until they're like rubber bullets. Philistine!
Attila is not amused.

(Mental note: take pictures of chickens in daylight rather than at night with flash, to stop them looking like devil hens).

New chicken residence, constructed by ourselves: the eglu has been moved to a permanent site on a 6-inch bed of bark chippings, owing to the ability of 2 small hens to turn our back garden into something resembling the Somme...

The path we laid yesterday in a sudden unexpected bout of energy, having had 3 tonnes of stone chippings delivered onto the front drive. My car now lives across the street until we use up the other tonne and a half!

Willow and the chickens have now reached a mutual understanding. She doesn't chase, and they don't peck.
What you can't tell here is that darling hubby is going 'Ow! Ow! Attila! Will you stop that? That's my hand!......' They don't really do gentle pecking. They do love corn.