name that sheep (warning contains a big creepy-crawly pic)

This is wool I bought at the Highland Folk Museum when we were up visiting mum and dad - I love that it's wool with provenance :-D. It was spun on site by my dad's ex-colleague Marion, so though I don't actually know the sheep's name (or, more likely, number), it's damn close!

I'll probably make mittens, fingerless or otherwise (actually, aren't all mittens technically fingerless?), with it. But not now - it's too warm and I have too many other things to finish. I've nearly, so nearly, finished my bright stripey thing. It took me ages to find the final colour, that being the very small amount left from my orange circle socks. Foolish me for wanting needing to make the stripes symmetrical, but I can't help it, it needed to be symmetrical. Really. I should probably point out that Flowermouse's various stripey things, from which I got the idea of doing a stripey thing, aren't symmetrical and I think they look great, but mine needed to be symmetrical this time. I'd like to do another now that's more random though, maybe with a self-striping yarn or just using up random bits of stash.

I've not been blogging much and part of that is that Miss M has been doing Adventure Ted* for the past few weeks and that's made me a bit diarised out. She writes pretty well once she gets going, but needs some nudging to get going! 

It's been great fun and has probably got us out doing more fun things, such as our trip to Edinburgh Zoo on Sunday. I just can't quite believe that it's three years since we did this with the Boy.

At the zoo:

  - the definitive long-leggety beastie crawling up my arm. I think the zoo bloke said this was a spiny devil/thorny devil/something like that. It's a kind of stick insect anyway.  Miss M also held it and wasn't too keen but I quite liked it. We also saw cute cuddly things too.

School finishes for the summer next Wednesday so we're into the final frenzy. Apparently the Boy is getting an attendance prize at assembly on Friday - yes, a prize just for turning up :-D. My Beloved and my brother both said 'Does that mean he doesn't need to bother going in next week?' Can you tell they work in IT?


* To summarise - school sends child home with a teddy bear, child takes teddy on 'adventures' which needn't be very exciting (one of ours was a trip to the dentist, dentist was very sporting about this), and writes about what they've been doing. Photos may be added or pictures drawn. Teddy goes back to school at the end, child may or may not be distraught.

toastie weather

 My husband has just walked in with this:

This is what happens when you work just along the road from a Lidl - random purchases occur. Actually as we have no toastie-maker currently and Miss M is quite partial to them, it is a good thing (quite apart from it having a 'Singe-o-tron image burner'!).

But it's not really toastie weather.  It is warm. Really warm. I mean, for here. I look back on when I lived in New Zealand in my teens and wonder how we coped with temperatures of 20+ degrees all summer. A couple of days of 19.5 degrees and Scotland melts, men who should not expose their pasty beer bellies rip off their shirts in joyous anticipation of 'getting a good colour', red shoulders reveal white bra strap marks, and schoolchildren don't bother changing back from their PE kit after PE. And people mutter 'if that was summer we've had it'.

 Meanwhile in my garden the first poppy is unfurling,

 and the sun is showing up snail trails on the patio. Snails do meander a bit don't they? When the sun was at the right angle I could see metres of trail, drifting around apparently aimlessly but presumably with some sort of snail method in its madness.

 I know as a gardener of sorts I'm supposed to hate snails, but I just don't. I find them entertaining and endearing. The only thing I hate in the garden is dandelions, and that's only because the garden is so small and could easily get swamped in dandelions.

 There were several snails in the garden a few weeks ago and I painted spots on their shells to identify them, but either the paint has come off or this (or perhaps these - I'm not sure it's the same snail in these pictures) is not one of 'my' snails. I'm trying not to give it a name.

Whee!

There's a distinct lack of knitting or making of any kind in this blog at the moment. Partly it's summer term busy-ness and partly warm-weather laziness. But it's also that I had a weirdly swollen thumb over the weekend and at one point was wondering whether I'd somehow broken it without noticing - yeah, I know, how? But really it was hugely swollen, wouldn't bend and was extremely painful. And then suddenly it deflated, started bending and the pain eased though it's still a bit tender on the joint. So I've been giving it a rest and haven't been knitting this week at all, which has seemed a bit weird.

Miss M is home from her dance class so we're off to make toasties!

Who stole May?

In fact, who stole the first half of this year? It's all going so quickly, I can see the school holidays looming on the horizon,  and I need it to slow down! (Can you guess who's not good on rollercoasters?)

So, June. And the sun is shining! The daffodils and tulips are still out because it was a late spring, but the summery things, like calendula, are starting to appear too.  It's all looking rather pretty.

 Calendula

 Hot cat

 Moomin mug - birthday present from my brother :-).

 Tulip 

Those pictures are mostly from last Thursday but it's been intermittently good weather since then (overcast some days) and today was pretty much like the pictures.

And what did I do in May apart from coughing* and not blogging much? Well one thing I did was go to my friend Chrissie's hen do. As hen dos go it was all very tasteful. Mostly anyway. We met up in the afternoon for a beading class at The Bead Company in Glasgow, spent a ridiculous amount of time cooing over choosing pretty beads, then made a necklace and a bracelet each. Here's mine:

Very simple really, but I love them and have worn them a lot especially the necklace. There was of course a disaster during the making of the bracelet, which led to me scrabbling about on the floor collecting my beads back up, but I expected that.

We all went out for a (delicious) Thai meal later and most of us were wearing the jewellery we made that afternoon. It was a lovely way to spend a day and we're hoping to go beading in a group again sometime after Chrissie's back from her honeymoon. We'll be a bead gang. Lean, mean, and distracted by pretty things.

Anyway, I suppose I'd better go and feed my kids. Or let them scavenge or something..

----------
* I got fed up with feeling rough and went to the doctor last week and I have a shiny new techno-inhaler now. I was always rubbish at timing the pushing of the inhaler with breathing in, but this one is triggered by breathing in so I don't have to do anything at all. Well, breathe in obviously.  On that subject I was at the dentist today for my check-up (all good!) and the hygienist says that you should always have a drink of water or wash your mouth out after using an inhaler because there's quite a lot of residue from the puff that sticks in your mouth and can cause plaque build-up, so there you go - I'm spreading the word :-).