festive

Yikes, a whole month since I last posted!

Oh dear. Well, December happened at its usual insane velocity. And then on Christmas Eve I came down with the worst cold I ever recall having.  I had a fever for four days, so I was quite spaced out to say the least and it's all a bit hazy now. I think I had fun some of the time though. We watched the Slow TV sleigh ride thing on Christmas Eve and I do remember enjoying that, because it made no demands of me whatsoever and there was no music.

I'm still not completely right but I'm drinking a hot toddy and that's helping a bit. My Beloved came down with something similar, though not as extreme, on Saturday night, followed by Miss M on Monday, so we've been a right bunch of wrecks apart from The Boy. Touch wood. Luckily there was nothing that we were going to do that couldn't be cancelled so there has been a lot of vegging out and much watching of Star Trek and Eureka.

I hope everybody else has had fun!

Last post of November!

Greetings from the cat.

Ten minutes until December. Oh dear, I appear to have mislaid a month or six..

I do have a proper sensible what-we-did-on-Saturday post to do but it requires a daylight photo, so tomorrow maybe, and I just wanted to do another post in November so that I don't feel too much like an intermittent blogger. Which I am of course, but you know, good intentions and all that!

Also St.Andrews Day - I feel I should post on St. Andrews Day, having enjoyed the Google doodle and everything, even if I'm only posting a picture of my Scottish cat.

forward planning

The PTA Christmas Fair (or Fayre, I dunno) and the Christmas disco are coming up and I'm baking for both. So being quite incredibly organised, I've actually planned what I'm baking and I've done a trial run of one of them. Seems implausible doesn't it?

Pinterest has been very useful in getting fairy cake/cupcake decoration ideas. I'm a fan of the chocolate orange anyway, so when I saw pictures of chocolate orange cupcakes, well... Drool. I had a rummage through my various recipe books and found a recipe for chocolate fairy cakes - though as always it was a weird quantity, enough for 16. I've only ever seen tins for 12 ever, in my whole life. Mind you, it's better than the recipe I used for the Hallowe'en cupcakes which said something random like 'makes 27'. 

Miss M and I threw together a batch at the weekend, iced them with *blush* ready-made 'frosting' (butter icing in this case as far as I can tell) and topped with Chocolate Orange Minis. Well, most of them - Miss M doesn't like chocolate oranges, weird kid, so she had them without the segment. The Boy has had a cake in his packed lunch every day so far this week, but there are, ahem, only a couple left now. The ready-made frosting feels like a total cheat but it goes on so easily and is much tastier than I thought it would be, so I'm happy with it. Thumbs up from all!

I'd like to try them with orange essence in the cake mix but I fear Miss M would disapprove. Oh well, two batches, eh?

My other plan is to make rainbow cupcakes, so we'll need to give those a trial run too. Miss M likes playing with food colouring so I'm sure it'll all go swimmingly. Maybe.

lurching into winter

It snowed on Friday night. The snow didn't last beyond Saturday evening but it proved that autumn has definitely gone. It had lingered longer than usual really, being quite a dry and mild autumn, but we had gales last week and suddenly the trees are bare. So these pictures are my final fling of autumn, all taken in mid-October when we were visiting my parents.

 Looking at them now I'm realising how much warmth is in them!

I'm having a bit of trouble blogging because my knitting mojo is AWOL and I'm feeling essentially boring - how sad is that? I want to knit but I want it to be something soothing and easy. I have wool, I have needles, but can't make up my mind about a pattern!  As for being boring, well, I've been studying. Bit behind at the moment but life happens sometimes! I did my first assignment for this course a couple of weeks ago and got 84% for it which was a relief as this course is quite a step up from the one I did last year and it was all feeling a bit alarming. The first assignment is always an emotional hurdle I think.

I'd better stop now - Cat 1 is knocking things over, a sure sign that it's time the cats were fed and that I go to bed! I'll try to be (even) more fascinating in the next post.

there's a light (over at Peeriemoot's place)

Particularly tough neeps this year!

Worth the effort though. I hung the jagged eyed neepie lantern outside the house while I took the kids out guising, carrying the other one with me and pausing to relight it every few minutes of course - there was hardly a breath of wind, but just enough combined with moving around I suppose! Every year I tell myself I'll get some of those little electric tealights, and every year I forget. However when we got back to the house the outside lantern was still burning, so that was pretty good going. Astonishing actually!

may contain traces of sugar

There has been a certain amount of Hallowe'en-inspired culinary creativity going on in the last couple of days.

 Miss M came home from school today with 'Dracula's dentures' today - two digestive biscuits, mini-marshmallows, icing sugar and food colouring. Pretty effective, don't you think?

And the Boy came had Home Ec. today so he came home with a chocolate apple - I'm quite relieved they didn't try toffee apples!

So they were happy eating their creation.

Miss M's school had their Hallowe'en disco last night so I was providing a bit of home baking. I made two batches of chocolate chip cookies because they're quick and easy, but they looked a bit boring so I did a quick batch of fairy cakes as well, and then looked on Pinterest for decorating inspiration, and rather regretted it. It turns out that some people really throw themselves into producing incredibly disgusting-looking Hallowe'en party food. I stuck with spiders' webs and eyeballs as being just gross enough to satisfy children, but not actually stomach churning to look at.

I'm not really cut out for fiddly cake decorating but these were reasonably easy using squeezy tubes of icing. Reasonably. That's me all baked out for a while though!

Mother's Ruin

Just not this mother.

Having investigated making scrambled egg, my next culinary adventure inspired by my fondness for crime fiction set in the first half of the 20th century was gin.
Specifically Gin and It, i.e. gin and Italian vermouth.

Despite my name I've never tried or even wanted to try gin, so this was genuinely new territory for me, or rather us, as My Beloved joined in.

So, gin. Gin, gin, gin. It's absolutely mingin' isn't it?

We tried Gin and It with varying proportions until the vermouth just about drowned out the gin. Then we tried gin and lemonade. At that point I gave up and had vermouth and lemonade which I *do* like. My Beloved persevered and tried gin and coke, gin and Irn Bru, and goodness knows what else. This evening we tried gin and tonic, it being the classic.

Not so.

Oh Em and indeed Gee.  Nasty medicinal topped with even nastier medicinal (I leave it to you which is which). It was like doing a Bushtucker Trial. I think we'll have to face it, we're just not cut out to be grownups...

Can I manage another post before the end of September?

I think I can! Just. If nobody interrupts me.. *glares at family*

----

Time passes. Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.

Much later..

*grinds teeth*

So, to summarise..

1) 'The weeks are fairly flying in!' To be said every Wednesday, Thursday and twice on Friday.
2)  Pic above is borage flowering at last. I'd always heard that it's a bit of a thug in the garden so was surprised that none had come up this year, but it just appeared really suddenly and unexpectedly. Love that picture because of all the teeny tiny dewdrops on it. Took it this morning I think (it's all a blur..) which started out very foggy and damp but quickly turned glorious!
3) Totally immersed myself in Shakespeare last week (for my OU course, not just for a laugh) and found myself saying things like 'Why are you thus out of measure sad?' to the cat. Now reading the introduction to the required edition of As You Like It and getting bogged down in literary theory. Head hurts.
Also immersed myself in the swimming-pool last night, swam for 45 minutes and contemplated Polonius.
4) Aaaargh, everythung needs to Slow Down!

A post without a picture

I made scrambled egg for my dinner today. I hadn't made scrambled egg for years, and in any case it had never turned out well when I did. So why today? Well, mainly because I have this addiction to 1920s/30s-set crime novels, whether written then or set then, and it seems that your 1920s/30s murderers, victims, jewel thieves and amateur detectives all like to tuck into scrambled egg for breakfast (never cooked by themselves naturally).

It has to be admitted that I am very suggestible when it comes to food in books - I discovered my favourite recipe (lemon and oregano chicken traybake - can't remember how to link from my tablet) when I was reading an Ann Cleeves book in which a character was cooking a mediterranean lemon chicken dish, the very thought of which made me peckish, which led me to Google recipes.

So tonight, scrambled egg. Partly I wanted to make it because it had never been a success before, and I don't know what I did right tonight but it was perfect.  Don't listen to people who say it needs to be made with full-fat milk or (bleurgh) cream - I used skimmed milk because that's the milk we use, and it worked perfectly well. I think the trick is to stir the egg constantly. Damn, now I'm hungry again!

Ruins and Being Organised

The ruins pictures are just because I want there to be a nice picture at the top of the post in case I don't get post for weeks (again). And also because the pictures were taken last Sunday on a particularly nice day, so why not? The ruins in question are Bothwell Castle, some bits 13th century, some 14th, so it's doing all right really!

The kids have been back at school for two weeks now. The Boy Child is settling into high school - it's a big change from primary school but he seems to be adjusting quite quickly, and Miss M is adjusting to not having him at the same school as her. Not that they saw much of each other, but she knew he was there! So new routines all round. I'm due to start my next (and last) Open University course at the start of October so I'm looking at ways to be more organised. For the moment I'm trying to get all the course reading done before the course starts - some things are easier than others. I'm 40% through Gulliver's Travels at the moment and it's slow going, whereas As You Like It only took a couple of days.

I'm a great one for list-making. I am a pen and paper person when it comes to getting organised, although I use my phone and tablet for appointment reminders and so on. A while back I came across a mention of bullet journalling, which is a bit like making to do lists but with different symbols for different things. It can get very complicated and I'm wary of that - it could be a big timesuck, which is hardly the point - but I've taken elements of it so that I can keep track of things done, things started, things no longer necessary, and things moved to another day.

I did a search for bullet journalling on the wonderful world of Pinterest and discovered all sorts of amazing complicated systems involving multiple colours of felt-tip pens, loads of symbols and quite unfeasibly neat handwriting! Hmm. So the picture above is the reality of my own version, complete with post-it notes for other things to keep track of (shopping list, theme list for a picture-a-day group I'm a member of, that kind of thing). It's simple and not very pretty, but is working for me, especially on days when I have lots of not-very-big things I want to get done but might easily forget because they're essentially boring, or when there are things I need to get the kids to. I always start with 'Kids to school' so that I can tick something off at the start of the day!

So there we are, the start of a new academic year and all the resolutions that entails!

addicted to rain

It failed to rain today. The weather forecast promised heavy, no torrential, rain, and all day the sky looked heavy and soggy and rain seemed imminent, but not a drop fell. I'm slightly disappointed.

I've probably mentioned before that I find the sound of rainfall very soothing. One of the great pleasures of our stay in St. Andrews was the moderately heavy rain that fell on several evenings. We were staying in a 'lodge' at a caravan park. To all intents and purposes it was a static caravan though it was a bit wider and it felt more like a small house than a big caravan, but the roof was also the ceiling if you follow me, so when the rain was drumming on the roof it was immediately above us. As well as that we could have the window fairly wide open at night which we can't at home for fear the cats will try to jump out. All this meant that when the rain was falling I could lie in bed and really listen to it - all very relaxing if you're a weirdo like me.

It occurred to me a few weeks ago to wonder why I like the rain so much - yes, it's a soothing sound and there's that amazing fresh smell in the air during and after rainfall, but could it be I've lived in the wet west of Scotland too long and I've developed a weird form of Stockholm syndrome? Well there's an unnerving thought!  Eventually I came to the more reassuring  conclusion that growing up on the windswept coast I rarely knew vertical rain, or for that matter rain when it wasn't also cold and miserable, so summer downpours are probably still incredibly exotic to me. The most vivid memory I have of a horribly jet-lagged stopover in Singapore is a half-day trip over the bridge to Johore Bahru in Malaysia and a visit to a mosque on top of a hill and a batik workshop in the middle of a thunderstorm and properly equatorial heavy showers - that's properly exotic. Summer rain in mainland Scotland can come a good second though.

So where was my torrential rain today then? Oh well, it meant the Boy got to commune with the trampoline.

Edited to add: I had just posted this when my meteorologically-minded cousin posted an amusing and very appropriate Daily Mash link on Facebook.

Those socks

Although I haven't done very much knitting over the summer I did finish Miss M's Elgin socks last month.  The colour scheme was her choice and it's worked pretty well I think - it's very 'her' at any rate! Twisting the yarns at each colour change meant they were coming out a little tighter than I'd anticipated so Sock 1 had to be taken back to the heel and reknitted a little more loosely, and now they're the perfect fit. The other thing I didn't take into account (and it was a total 'doh!' moment) was that in using purple for the toes, heel and cuffs I'd be using more purple - slightly more than I had as it turned out. Very fortunately Miss M suggested using the blue for the cuff of the second sock - I'd already considered that but I was very pleased that she came up with a solution herself rather than having to be talked into it! So oddish socks they are, for an oddish girl.

*phew*

Computer is fixed - well, for now at least. Hurray for My Beloved and his tech skillz! I finally got to look at my holiday photos and thought I'd mention the day we went to Kellie Castle, which is an NTS property fairly near Pittenweem, should anybody be in the vicinity. The kids were fairly unimpressed with it as a castle and to be fair it's really more of a tower house with bits added - to them a castle is something like Stirling Castle or Bothwell castle, spoilt brats that they are! I'd been there once before, years ago when I was a student and my parents were visiting and took me out for the day. It was the middle of winter and only the garden was open, but even at that time of year the garden was enjoyable to visit. To see it in August was pretty amazing. It's just my kind of garden - masses of plants, new things to see around every corner, and a formal structure with enthusiastically informal plants.

We wandered around for ages and to be honest I could have stayed for a lot longer, but the kids' patience in gardens is limited. So far.

*sigh* Not much to say, I'm just enjoying looking at the flowers again! I should have taken my good camera with me but I was already laden with other stuff (sun hats, sunglasses, umbrella...) so just had my little compact camera in my pocket. It's an excellent little camera but has acquired a mark on the lens that I can't remove and I assume is a scratch, so some of the pictures appear a bit smudgy in the middle.

After we'd mooched round the garden for a while we went and found the adventure playground, small but excellent, and the kids were able to burn off some energy. Then we headed in to look at the house itself. Miss M, thankfully, decided to do one of the picture quizzes which was great because it really slowed her down and let us have a proper look. It's an interesting house and worth taking slowly.

And that's it really! A nice day out, especially as it was sunny and the garden was looking beautiful.

In which Terrible Things have happened (disclaimer: not really)

Oh dear, a whole month off blogging. Well, that was unintentional, but mostly a result of it being the school holidays and me just not getting much time on my real computer as opposed to my tablet, which is not ideal for blogging from. Alas and alack, that's what I'm having to do just now because Real Computer has succumbed to something which Heroic Tech Husband, aka My Beloved, may be able to fix or maybe not.  And as my typing is rubbish on a tablet pkease ignore any weird typos, or enjoy them, as you please!

We spent last week in St. Andrews and I have a squillion photos I uploaded to Real Computer on Saturday night, but which I didn't actually get a chance to look at properly before it shuffled off this mortal coil - so frustrating, and thus is the reason that this post is illustrated with the three bits of seaglass that were in the pocket of my jeans and photographed in my garden using the camera on my tablet. The photos are safe because they're still on my camera card and will (should) have been saved to the computer's backup drive, but I can't see them on a sensible sized screen. Oh well.

The summer has been not great in terms of weather but pretty good fun otherwise I think. There was much pottering around and being lazy, and the kids and I had a few days in the Highlands with mum and dad, as well of course as the St.Andrews trip. Ah, St.Andrews, so many silly memories of that small grey town. The day we arrived coincided with the wedding of an old acquaintance to which loads of people I knew, including my brother, had been invited, so I got to spend an hour on the beach with two old friends I hadn't seen in decades (and my brother who I saw a couple of weeks ago) and caught up with another later on, and I've decided that if at all possible I'll go to the next reunion ball, sans kids, and catch up with people because Facebook's not quite the same. Unless the next reunion ball involves people handing each other postcards with 'why don't you play Candy Crush?' written on them and passing around comically cantankerous cats.

I have no idea if this post is readable, I can only see three lines of it as I type, and I'm usually a great one for re-reading as I go, so apoligies if it's gibberish. Normal service to be resumed, er, eventually.

light levels

I've been playing around with my camera some more thanks to a quick how-my-camera-works masterclass (or idiot's guide) from my brother. The fun thing about photography is that when you accidentally completely mess up the settings you can still get kind of pretty results, such as the over-exposed bee above, and the underexposed flower below (you'll see it better if you click on it, the white background on this page doesn't help).

Don't you think the bottom one looks like a book-cover? Some kind of gloomy literary fiction I think.

While tidying up yesterday I found the book I bought when I first got my camera - an Idiot's Guide or a For Dummy's one, can't remember, for my particular model of camera. So I've been flicking through it, reading bits that seem relevant. I should probably read it properly, cover to cover, though that I don't find that kind of book very easy to read to be honest, so probably dipping in and out and playing with the camera is my best bet.  Miss M is often a fairly willing model when she's in the right mood, as is Cat2, so I can play with different settings on more or less the same pose and see what works.

In other exciting news, I got my Open University course results yesterday and got a Distinction, which I'm really pleased about. I knew my assignments had been Distinction level, but the final big assignment which counted for half the course was not hugely enjoyable and I honestly didn't know how I'd done on it. Turns out I'm a really poor judge of my own abilities when it comes to assignments!

summery

I have things to blog about, I know I do - things flit through my head all day, so why do I go blank when I sit down in front of the keyboard? And it's a beautiful keyboard too! Darn.

Summer is happening - we've had actual warmth. My thermometer said 22.6°C today, which is far lower than further south but plenty warm enough for me, thank you very much, given that it's also horribly muggy. Poor Cat1 is a large boy with thick fur and has spent most of the day lying around. In honour of summer happening I bought myself a summery yellow stripey cotton scarf the other day, because I'm a sucker for yellow stripes and I still had birthday money to spend. I'm not sure yellow suits me but it makes me happy so I can live with that.

I have been knitting - thick cosy socks for Miss M naturally, just what everybody knits in warm weather. They're the ones I started back at the end of April-ish. The first sock was very quick but I just haven't been knitting much recently, too many other things on the go I suppose, so the second sock has been languishing at the toe stage (which, given that it's a toe-up pattern, isn't good). Miss M insists that the first sock is 'fine' but it's tight to pull over her heel so I'm doing the second one looser and fully intend to rip back the first one and reknit the heel when she's not looking. She has no idea how much her feet will have grown by the time it's cosy sock weather again! 

I think I need to sleep now..

Favourite Things

Raindrops on roses poppies (yes, the school holidays have started with torrential rain again)..

Whiskers on kitty..

Dum-di-dee, dum-dee,
Warm woollen mittens, maybe.

Er, can't remember.

Day One of the school holidays and aside from torrential rain, there has been shopping, pottering around, the making of optician's appointments, and, best of all, the receiving of a call from the dentist saying could I come back in so they could refund me because they'd accidentally overcharged me for my root treatment last week. I had no idea how much root treatment cost never having had it before and to be honest I was so spaced out at the time that they could have requested the contents of my bank account, a kidney and my firstborn and I probably wouldn't have noticed. But yay, refund!

So why the singing of Favourite Things? Because this evening I discovered that the freezer door was ajar, had been for some time, and its temperature was 8 deg C. So not so much of the freezing. All of which necessitated clearing everything out, chucking a whole lot of it out, and mopping the floor. And more than a little teeth-grinding, along with quite of lot of stomping around with sotto voce swearing.

Oh well.

Here's a rather brilliant favourite thing though:

My friend L in Vermont has been clearing out her late mother's stuff and has been rehoming all sorts of linens and things, including these beautiful boudoir pillowcases which have come to me. I need to make some small pillows/cushions to fit them, though they're so pretty that part of me would just like to frame them! I may be a total scruff but I do appreciate the pretty stuff too.

day four in the garden

 Pond buttercup

 Sea pink

Still sunny. Well, not now, it's eleven o'clock at night. But it was sunny, all day. It's all been a bit weird. There were loads of things I was going to witter on about but typically, now that I'm actually sitting down at the computer,  I can't think what they were. Ah well, enjoy the pictures!

three days of sunshine

Three consecutive days of sunshine. School sports day went ahead the other day and was a success (thank the weather gods - last year it had to be cancelled due to torrential rain). Miss M won the running and came second in the egg and spoon. The Boy, being uncompetitive, just had fun. I 'helped' on the PTA juice stall*  but owing to having been at the dentist for root treatment that morning and the numbness just wearing off, mostly what I did was entertain our Chair's baby daughter.

Today is glorious. I have been laundering and gardening, Cat 2 has been slinking and prowling, but thick-furred Cat 1 has been sleeping in a cool spot indoors almost all day. Yesterday he wouldn't go out until I hung the washing out and he could sit in the shade of damp sheets.  I don't know what he'd do in a hotter climate.

I have a mystery plant. Don't I always? It's doing very well but I don't have the foggiest what it is. For any experts/Dad, it's in the next two pictures and the 'flower' is about as big as my thumb nail:

* That's the Glaswegian use of the word juice, before you go thinking phrases like 'juice bar' and 'freshly squeezed'. 'Juice' is squash, 'fizzy juice' is a fizzy drink. The kids got squash and an ice-lolly. The parents got coffee or tea. I got a headache.

a non-post

I'm so sick of that Safeway carrier big picture! But I don't really have the time for a proper post so here's a picture from our visit to Greenbank Garden in the rain a couple of weeks ago. Although it was really chucking it down the garden was lovely (if a bit squelchy underfoot).

The jigsaw got finished eventually, slightly hindered by the larger cat who scampered over it one day and tore a whole chunk up again.  I really enjoyed doing it but it's not that convenient having a board with a half-completed jigsaw lying on the floor for days so I'll investigate alternatives.

I'm in the home stretch with my OU course this year - just doing my EMA. I forget what it stands for, but it's a final assignment that counts for half the course, done instead of an exam. Obviously I want it to be good, and at the moment I just can't see beyond it. Another day or two and it'll be done - I have a good essay plan, half a draft and copious notes - but like an exam you can't really imagine it being of the past. See you on the other side!

Vintage

Dull picture

Today Miss M requested that we do one of my (1000-piece) jigsaws. I haven't done a proper jigsaw for years, for fear of toddlers eating the pieces or some such thing, but it must be admitted that neither of the kids, or indeed the cats, are especially likely to eat jigsaw pieces now, and as Miss M has never done a proper jigsaw it was about time really. So we opened up the box and all the pieces were inside a Safeway carrier bag, which is a bit, ooh, vintage seeing as Morrisons took over most Safeway stores in 2004. That bag is from the days when the Boy was so young that he wouldn't even have attempted to eat a jigsaw piece (he was notoriously reluctant to wean onto solids). Good grief, it even predates Facebook, from the days when people could still distinguish between 'lightening' and 'lightning'. Miaow.

In case you're interested, Miss M's first reaction to the jigsaw was 'Ooh, the pieces are tiny', quickly followed by 'This will take forever' and, after some sorting and the ritual of the Finding of the Corners and the Edge Pieces, by 'I'm going out to jump on the trampoline'.  I've enjoyed it though. I'd forgotten about that calm meditative state of mind I fall into when I'm idly rummaging through the pieces looking for pieces of sky-with-a-bit-of-wall or somebody's-elbow.

Springy

It was a beautiful day today, sunny and relaxed. Sometimes I feel as if I've been cold for months but today was bliss. We're not talking tropical, just nicely warm for once!  My Beloved was off doing the Yorkhill Easter Egg Run, a motorbike event which raises money for Yorkhill hospital, and the kids and I went to the Museum of Rural Life with my mother-in-law and my brother. We saw my Favourite Tree:

And lots of lambs, these two only about an hour old:

You don't get much more springy than that!

Before we went out I'd done an Easter Egg hunt for the kids again. As usual the clues were in rhyme. Very bad rhyme. I'm rather regretting doing that the first time because if I don't do it now I'll feel I'm not trying hard enough. The kids did say it didn't have to rhyme though. It's just me putting pressure on myself - ridiculous! :-D

They were good bad rhymes though!


Also the sock progresses:

Actually since then I've turned the heel - it's really fun knitting, this. So quick - hurray for small feet! I think this may be my quickest ever sock actually. There's nothing like an instant gratification project..

It's been a lovely weekend. Although I've still been getting some studying in, the pace has been much more leisurely for the last couple of days. I do like a bit of leisure.

New month, new socks

I'm celebrating because our internet connection seems, today, to be okay for the first time in over a week. It's been up and down, up and down, and disproportionately frustrating, especially as I had an assignment to submit electronically. We had an engineer out from the broadband provider on Wednesday. He was as helpful as he could be, but it's only today it's seemed okay.  No idea why, but I'm so happy I've even posted in my other blog for the first time since *cough* August 2013! I'm not sure if this'll be a regular thing - it really ought to be as it was a post-a-day blog - but we'll see.

The socks for Miss M - no, not pink, that was just the waste yarn for the provisional cast-on 'cos I'm doing her a pair of Elgin socks, like the squishy socks of wonderfulness that I made for myself a few months ago.  I'm very proud of myself because I remembered to use a smooth waste yarn so the COWYAK thing went really smoothly (unintended pun). It's too dark to take a picture now but I'm well up the foot in her chosen colours of purple and blue stripes, picked last week at the Yarn Cake. I'll admit I wasn't sure about the colours but she seems to have a good colour instinct and yet again the colours she's chosen look great together. She's loving the fact that they're toe-up so she can try them on every five minutes!