Fluffy stuff and nonsense

It's the night of my biannual pondering - how many of our clocks will change themselves automatically? As is traditional, I'll be wandering around tomorrow morning comparing various clocks, watches and electronic devices and getting thoroughly confused as to what the time actually is.

So farewell British Summer Time, hello GMT - it was a good summer but it's long gone now. It's been very dark in the mornings this past week and it's been tricky convincing Miss Mouse, who's not a morning person, that yes, really it IS time to get up for school. Yes, I know it's dark. No, it isn't still night-time...  The week before was the October break and we were quite lazy, given the opportunity, so the gloominess of this past week has been a shock to the system. I'm not a morning person either and I like my bed.

Here, have a splash of colourful fluffy stuff:

It's a very fuzzy picture, unfortunately, from the Glasgow School of Yarn event - this was one of the stalls in the marketplace and was gorgeously colourful. I should have taken loads of pictures but I was having too much fun catching up with people - including my friend schoolfriend H. We hadn't seen each other for, we think, about 17 years, but it was as if no time had passed. She has also ended up living near Glasgow, though the other side of the river, and we've meant to try to get together but never quite managed it. I'm glad we did this time! I also caught up with a few other people I've not seen for a while, so even before all the knitting fun, retail therapy opportunities, cake and stew I had a wonderful day out.

That's my loot. I'd like to say I was restrained, but I wasn't. I was making up for last year! I really went for warm golden colours this year. I do try to break out of my usual colour tastes now and then and these golds were just calling to me.  I went to Liz Lovick's Shetland Lace workshop and although I wouldn't necessarily say I learned anything I didn't know, I came out with more confidence with lace knitting, a clearer idea of how the stitches work together and I'm happier with lace charts too, which I've always found faintly headache-inducing until now, so it was worth it! When I came out of the workshop I headed back into the marketplace which was winding down a bit by then and bought some laceweight, the orange in the middle of the picture, from Natalie Fergie (The Yarn Yard).  I haven't dared try laceweight before because I feel so clumsy and giant-fingered using fine yarn and comparatively big needles, but I think I'm okay with the idea now.  I've got things to finish first though.

Also in the October break was Miss M's 7th birthday. I'm quite taken aback at being the mother of a 7-year-old - it shouldn't be that surprising given that I'm also the mother of a ten-year-old but it's the baby who's seven now. I always think seven is the age at which they stop seeming little. Six is still little, barely more than a toddler in many ways, but seven sounds, well, quite grown-up all of a sudden.

The cake was a bit of a mess, as you can see. She'd already had supermarket cakes for her birthday party and on her actual birthday which was while we were up north visiting my parents, but I always do a homemade cake too. The icing kind of slid off this one, as you can see, but it tasted nice. I prefer butter icing on a chocolate cake but the kids like water icing so that's what they get. I messed up the consistency for the batch that went on the sides of the cake and it was too thin.  It would never do on the Great British Bake Off but thankfully my kids are less picky than Paul and Mary when it comes to decoration. I'd love to see a Bake Off contestant decorating with chocolate buttons one day! I wonder if they've ever done a child's birthday cake on it? I didn't see the first two series. Could be a good challenge! I can just imagine Paul saying 'I wasn't sure about the decoration but the smarties and chocolate buttons really work here. But the cake is just too sweet.'  Little does he know that a kid's birthday cake can never be too sweet...

I bought some flowers the other day to brighten things up in the kitchen. More gold. I think the season has been affecting me!

This tree has been looking glorious - heart-liftingly bright and cheerful even on the dreich days.  The other day was quite breezy and the autumn leaves were just raining down, well, like rain. It's amazing how many leaves there are on a tree. At the rate they were falling off it felt as if the tree should be completely bare in 5 minutes. I'm glad that autumn still surprises me.

Going wild on our birthday

 No, I'm not using the Royal 'we' - as well as my 42nd birthday it was the Boy's tenth birthday, ooh double figures!  And it was a glorious day too - we were in the Highlands again visiting my parents for the long weekend, so we all went to the Highland Wildlife Park for the day. There was still snow on the mountains but it was hot (that's Scottish hot, probably just tepid to Californians and similar, but the kind of day on which peely-wally Scots get just a bit pink-and-singed-looking). The camels looked quite relaxed and sleepy. I think that's a yak in the background. A yakground. Or possibly it's a spy-sheep in a mac. Incognito.

Another camel catching some rays:

This is a rare sight, the saltire against an actually properly blue sky:

Well, it's rare in the soggy bit of Scotland which I inhabit anyway. My family mock me for my habit of taking photos of blue skies but it's good to relish them and even better to look back at the pictures when it's grey, wet and generally dreich. Look! It's so bluuuuuue!

That's the view across the snow monkey enclosure. I'm relaxing just looking at it.

Like Eliza Stickleback, I was also taking pictures of the 'wrong' things - such as lapwings and oystercatchers in the bit of the park you drive through. Well, the bison and suchlike were further away from the road. And I like birds, especially oystercatchers but my oystercatcher picture is a bit blurred.

I indulged myself with a pink drink with my picnic - rose lemonade! I'd never seen or, obviously, drunk it before but it was too pretty not to have as a birthday drink, don't you think? 'Weird but nice' is my summary. The Boy tried a bit and agreed.

A very nice day indeed. I was quite happy to be 42 (in recent years I've not been keen on the new number but 42 is different) and the Boy seemed quite pleased to be ten. Even if I kept muttering 'you can't be ten, you were just a baby a minute ago' and other similarly parental things.

Forty-two

That being a number I'm imminently to become acquainted with.  So what else can I do but treat myself to some nice yarn (Sparkleduck Pulsar -55% Bluefaced Leicester, 45% silk) with an appropriate colour name (Looking for the Whales) and knit a Hitchhiker:

Twelve points down, thirty to go!

I've been very lax about blogging this month - partly because it's a very busy month with three birthdays as well as all the other stuff May brings but mostly because I've had the worst cold I've had in years and have just been lurching through each day before going to bed early. Sometimes soldiering on just doesn't achieve anything. I've been doing a fair bit of (easy) knitting though, such as finishing Snowy the polar bear's blanket. No pic because I'm doing this on the netbook and it's a bit of a faff finding and resizing pictures - you wouldn't believe how long it took me to sort that Hitchhiker picture! 

I have so many squillion things to blog about but now I'm here can I think what any of them were? 'Course not!  Here's to regular blogging. Shortly  :-).

Star Wars Day

I'm a bit rubbish at this blogging malarkey at the moment. You know why? Constant interruptions. For example, I wrote the first line of this post seven hours ago. They're not deliberate interruptions by any means, but it does mean I lose my train of thought. Hmm, I'm starting to feel jinxed.

Anyway, happy Star Wars Day! Which by very happy geeky coincidence is My Beloved's birthday - couldn't be more apt really, though actually none of his geeky presents were Star Wars ones. My secret knitting of the last few weeks was this:

A Jayne hat

Oh, so much fun to knit! I've been doing quite a bit of 4-ply knitting this year so the gorgeous squishy aran-weight Drops Nepal and 4mm needles were a real pleasure to work with. And making a pompom is always fun :-D.

I've also knitted a blanket for Miss Mouse's teddy:

That was using Drops Nepal again, bought the same day I got the Jayne colours.  I took Miss Mouse with me on a trip to the Yarn Cake woolshop/cafe last week and let her choose some more from the wall of woolly goodness, for another blanket for Snowy this time, her polar bear teddy: 

She always chooses interesting colour combinations ( you should see her when she's given free rein to dress herself) and I really wasn't sure about these colours together

but she was insistent that 'this is what Snowy likes', and actually now that I'm knitting them up into squares they're looking quite good together.  While were up in the wilds of the west end of Glasgow (necessitating a trip on the underground, the first time for Miss M*) we took a detour through the botanic gardens and had a quick mooch around the Kibble Palace:

Miss M was getting tired and fed-up by this point but I love the swooshy shapes in the greenhouse. Greenhouse is too domestic a word for it really, it's more like how I'd imagine a Victorian spaceship. Lovely place.

* Wide-eyed the night before: 'Will we see icky worms and things?'

Happy times

Cake:

more cake:

 a trip to the frozen north:

 loot from the 'Glasgow School of Yarn' event:

 and finally, a picture and story by Miss Mouse:

'I wish I had a coin ov choclit.'

 I like the snails she's done at the bottom of the trees - click to embiggen, they're a cheery bunch and worth a look.

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It's been the October break here - the kids went back to school yesterday. The holiday started with Miss Mouse's birthday party, then the next day on her actual birthday we headed up north to see my parents for a few days (hence cake picture no.1). It was cold but glorious there, and it was snowing lightly just as we left. The last chilly picture was taken mid-morning the day we left.

When we got home we had a couple of days lazing around and I made Miss M a birthday cake, cake pic. no.2. I always make the kids a chocolate sandwich cake with chocolate buttons on top on their birthdays - it's not an intentional tradition, it just evolved really. Of course we were travelling on her birthday, but although she had cake at my parents' she couldn't miss out on her own special cake could she? I think the chance to blow out candles may have something to do with it of course!

Then on Saturday I had some glorious time to myself and went into Glasgow for day two of the Yarn Cake's second birthday bash, the 'Glasgow School of Yarn'. I caught up with old friends, met some Ravelers (Ravellers?) in real life for the first time, bought some very nice yarn and generally had a brilliant time.  I'd been saving since last year's GSoY but actually I was fairly restrained. Possibly if I'd been there on Day One I'd have spent more as I imagine quite a lot had already sold by the time I arrived on Saturday lunchtime!

I've just realised there was something stuck to my monitor that kept making me imagine rogue commas - very distracting, I kept trying to delete it!

I type this while wearing a pinnie.

In fact an apron with an annoying label that keeps sticking up. Just at the front. Very distracting when I'm Baking A Birthday Cake! Sneak preview:

I think she'll like the sprinkles!

The recipient is at school so she hasn't seen it yet. It's also the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings you know - or at least the Battle of Hastings was fought on the 14th of October, I think there have been calendar changes in the meantime so I'm not sure it's an actual anniversary.

I finished her scarf, just. With a few rows to go I managed to drop a stitch ( I do this all the time when I'm tired - hopeless) and not notice until it had run down several rows, so last night was late-night salvaging, casting-off and wrapping. Phew! But she likes it and was off to school proudly wearing her new coat (present from her step-granny for want of a better description) and new scarf. I took a couple of pictures this morning but they're a bit blurry and the colours are awful being under electric light, it being a pretty murky morning here. So I shall Ta-da tomorrow!

The topic of knitting gadgets has been on my mind (see the giveaway on the a ¼ to blog) and I've come to the conclusion that my most used knitting gadget is this:


It's called a Knit Kit I think - something like that. My knitting buddy Cristina brought it back from America for me last year and it's perfect for a person like me who can never keep everything in one place. My most used bits of it are the little crochet hook which attaches to the side for picking up dropped stitches, bane of my life, and the teeny tiny fold out scissors. Who can resist the cuteness of teeny-tiny folding scissors? Well, not me anyway.

Also on the subject of a ¼ to - she opened an etsy shop very recently with some beautiful bags in it and the other day I ordered one of the really pretty little bags, meant to be a project bag really but actually also ideal for a Small Person's nightdress case:


Big thumbs up from me! It arrived very quickly, in time for Miss M's birthday - I really didn't expect that! Gorgeous isn't it?

Sufficiently advanced

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke

Wednesday was Towel Day. Coincidentally it was also my birthday and that of the Boy. I love that my Beloved's birthday is Star Wars Day and ours is Towel Day! While the Boy was delighted with a mountain of Lego, my Beloved indulged me with a Kindle. Wednesday and Thursday were so busy one way or another that I hardly got a chance to play with it, but yesterday and today have been Kindle days. And it is completely indistinguishable from magic. I've become quite blasé about technology - well, the rate of technological advance within my lifetime has been so quick that you do take new things for granted after a while. But the Kindle has had me saying 'this rocks!' so often that I sound like a second-rate character in an American sit-com. It's just so cool! And for the following reasons..

Cool Thing no.1. I can read on the Kindle while knitting (it has to be propped up slightly, but that's okay). This is fundamentally exciting for me! I'm like Nanny Plum but the other way round:



Cool Thing no.2 . Now I can buy and read books instantly on a whim - ah, this may not be so good. Fortunately several other presents from family were Amazon vouchers and money!

Cool Thing no.3. I will never be on holiday in the rain without anything to read again! As long as I'm organised - I have the wi-fi version, not the 3G.

Cool Thing no.4. I can look up interesting/unfamiliar words in a dictionary as I'm reading. Granted I occasionally did this before, either with Chambers perched next to me or looking up dictionary.com on the 'puter. But this brings up definitions on the page I'm reading.

Cool Thing no.5. Changing font-size!

So, a good birthday for me, despite the fact that it was one of Those Birthdays that get you depressed! And bear in mind that I got engaged on one birthday and had a baby on another so I've had some pretty euphoric birthdays to compare it with! These more than make up for the I spent doing one of my Finals..

I'll leave you with a picture of the Boy blowing his candles out while preventing his sister from 'helping':

Shed Two

You know what I forgot in my shed post? The best shed of all - Percy the Park-Keeper's shed! Who wouldn't want to live there? Okay, in reality it would be freezing cold due to draughts and no insulation, and there'd be no loo or sink, but other than that perfect! I notice there is a little chimney at the back there so presumably he has a wood-burning stove at least!


Miss Mouse loves the Percy the Park-keeper books - and I approve because I love the illustrations. We got this one for £2 in a charity-shop, how lucky was that?


It's birthday month in our household - my Beloved's was yesterday, Star Wars Day, appropriately enough for a geek of his standing. The kids and I made cake:


Mmm, cake. My Beloved is not actually that bothered by cake though he'll no doubt have a slice or two, but it's the principle of the thing - and the fact that I like baking and the kids love helping. The weather has turned wet and cool here after something like a fortnight with no more than a shower which is very unusual here, and the Boy's school is shut as it's a Polling Place (Scottish Parliament elections today as well as the voting reform referendum) so the kids and I are having a lazy day in the house and the garden is enjoying a drink. The cats keep going in and out the kitchen door, convinced each time that the rain they see through the window must be in some way optional, and every time I open the door I get a whiff of green and fresh garden.