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.

Favourite tree

My Favourite Tree hasn't made any appearances recently I don't think, so following a trip to Kittochside for the Country Fair today, here it is: 

 Favourite Tree and Nora Louise (one of them - there have been several).

Baa and Moo

Happiness is the smell of wet sheep.

Today was more restful - all the important stuff is done so the kids and I went to the museum and said hello to the young bull:

I've forgotten his name but he was very friendly.

And this afternoon I did a bit of dyeing with some leftover dye liquor (possibly elderberry?) I had in the freezer and a mixture of onion skins, mostly red. It's the first time I've done any dyeing in ages and the smell of wet wool was pleasantly familiar. A comforting smell, I always think. I'm leaving it to soak overnight this time - no idea what colour it'll turn out though it's a rich reddish-brown at the moment.

This evening I have been wrapping presents - imagine my eyes crossing with tiredness. I'm not done with the wrapping yet but at least I've broken the back of it and tomorrow night shouldn't be quite so chaotic. Yeah.

end of term

To start, a ta-da! A present for the Boy's teacher - a large plain mug, and a mug cosy knitted in New Lanark yarn. The pattern is this one, Owl Coffee Cup Cozie, but I knitted it flat so I could make ties as it was for a mug rather than a takeaway coffee cup. It was fun to knit and turned out pretty well I think - hope she liked it. I put a little bag of chocolates in too, just in case! And the Boy drew her a picture of the school as she was only at his school as a sort of long-term supply teacher after his original teacher retired, and is going to a different school next year.


This was the scene walking up to school - it was a non-uniform day (we used to call them mufti days when I lived in NZ but I've never heard them called that here - shame, it's much easier to type!) hence the Boy's jeans.

School finished at lunchtime so we headed off to Kittochside for a picnic, taking my brother with us as he had some leave due and fancied the afternoon off. Aaaah, coffee in the sunshine - the cups were hot, could have done with a coffee-cup cozy actually!

Lunch took some time as much running and jumping and other expenditure of energy had to be fitted in between morsels. Parkour? Pah! An alternative name could be just 'being eight'! After lunch we had tickets for the three o'clock tractor but...

... disaster! Epic flat tyre! Pretty impressive isn't it?

So we walked up to the farm in the sunshine.

The farm is full of babies - an incredibly noisy lamb, calves, piglets...

Awww!

Miss Mouse tried out 'new Clover', the wooden cow. New Clover's udder arrangement seems to work better than that of old Clover who had her udder at an angle and kept leaking, poor old thing.

Aaaah. Bliss. A perfect start to the summer holidays!

awwwww

Today was meant to be a dye post. Yesterday I started dyeing with dandelion root for no other reason than curiosity as I'd never tried dyeing with roots before. But it was only looking like a boring beige so I added dandelion leaves to see what happened - and now it's another boring beige! So I'm just stewing up some onion skins (I've been saving them all winter!) to overdye the beige and see if I can perk it up a bit. But for today I have nothing to show for my efforts so I'll show you some of my favourite pictures from Tuesday when Miss Mouse and I took a quick trip to Kittochside (that is, the National Museum of Rural Life) to see how spring is doing on the farm.

All my pictures of this calf are blurred because he kept stretching towards us - the Ayrshire calves at Kittochside are so friendly. They get used to lots of visitors and love the attention.

And the Pyrenean valerian is on its way up (and up - it gets quite tall eventually). There's loads of it there. From what I've read it was a plant that was introduced, presumably for ornamental reasons, by Scottish landowners and did well, so you'll find it on estates and in the planted woodlands of southern Scotland. Kittochside wasn't farmed much after the 1950s and so never underwent the big changes of modernisation that other farms did. As a result the plant life is particularly rich and you get oddities there that perhaps would have been cleared out elsewhere.


And finally the bluebells (or harebells, if you must) are looking gorgeous. *happy sigh*