A walk in the sunshine

It was beautiful today - a frosty start, followed by a perfect cool autumn day. I had to go and get my flu jab this morning, among other things, but I had some free time this afternoon and thought I'd better take advantage of it and get outside. It's that time of year when I find myself grabbing every opportunity to enjoy a sunny day because there's not likely to be many more of them this year!

And out in the garden my sweet peas are still giving it a go! Come to think of it, it might be because they're in a hanging pot up on the fence so they're getting more sunlight than things on the ground. I'm still impressed though, I thought they were done for the year a few weeks ago and then they suddenly started flowering again.

Miss M comes home tomorrow afternoon and I'm hoping she's had fun. The school have been great, putting pictures on their Twitter feed so we at least have an idea of what activities they've been doing, though not necessarily who's doing them - twenty kids in borrowed waterproofs turn out to be difficult to tell apart especially if they're wearing hard hats and climbing gear as well!

Currently it's so quiet in here that I can hear the cats breathing. Well, snoring maybe. Ssh, don't wake them..

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.

Ooooooowoooooooooo

Yay, go me - cramming another blogpost into October! It's not an exciting one, just a bit of Hallowe'en fun (I think I may be the last person left using that apostrophe) and some autumn colour. I made neepie lanterns again this year. No injuries at all, not even bruised knuckles. No injuries to me that is. I did get a bit enthusiastic with the bigger neep's eyes though and sliced right through to the top. I left the smaller lantern on our doorstep and took the larger lantern out with me when I took the kids out guising.

 In progress 

The weather was a bit wild today - at ten to four there was heavy rain followed by thunder, lightning and hail (briefly). I can't say I was actually looking forward to taking the kids out, but fortunately by the time we went out the rain had stopped and the sky had cleared - we even saw some stars. It was chilly and quite breezy so my lantern's candle kept blowing out, but at least we weren't wet.  We met up with my friend from over the road and her kids. The kids had some terrible jokes to tell, as tradition dictates of course. For example:
-Knock Knock
-Who's there?
-Europe.
-Europe who?
-No, you're a poo!

and

-What does a witch want in a hotel?
-I don't know, what does a witch want in a hotel?
-Broom service!

The first one had my friend doubled up laughing every time (it was her son telling it - with great relish!).


But enough of Hallowe'en and silly jokes.  I went out for a walk the other day  - on an intermittently wet day.

It was sunny for these pictures but chucked it down again five minutes later. Refreshing though.

I like this footpath:

It looks leafy and mysterious though it actually just leads to a children's play area and more houses. The white dot in the middle is a cat who was trotting purposefully away, on some cattish mission no doubt. Secret one. Ssh. Don't tell a soul.

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.

Pondering

I think if I made these mitts again I'd move the cable/lace panel over a bit, or perhaps move the thumb further round - they have to be adjusted into the right place rather than sitting there naturally. Perhaps I just have oddly shaped hands.  The interesting thing about the wool is that it looks quite different colours in different light. In daylight it looks red - not scarlet, but more to the orange side of the range (tomato red perhaps). By the light of my bedside lamp it looks rusty which is why I didn't like knitting them in bed.  When I was out for a walk today they looked quite autumnal, as if they could almost, almost, have done for the orange project too.

I don't knit with a lot of red or orange, or warm colours much at all come to think of it - until I started Project Rainbow this year had been all about the blues and before that there were more greens (and I'm just remembering a Far Side cartoon of a frog in sunglasses singing 'I got the Greeeeeens, I got the Greens real bad..'). I'm not sure warm colours suit my peely-wally colouring - would my fingers look less blue with blue mitts?

haha! havedunnit! the bee photo

I've spent all summer trying to get a photo of a bee. The hoverflies have co-operated beautifully, but the bees have just been too quick for me. You think they're slow moving but before you can get the camera to focus they're away. But yesterday morning I finally managed it - several pictures in fact. The bees were contentedly buzzing around the last remaining lupins and with the weather being bright but cool (it's been perfect autumn weather for the last few days) perhaps they were a bit dozy. They were certainly less camera-shy.

Achievement unlocked!

Autumnal

Not much to say today, but I'm trying to get back into the habit of blogging more often again, so here's a few pictures I took yesterday. Some of the trees are absolutely glorious just now, and some have hardly changed at all. And one that we pass most days has one branch that thinks it's autumn and is suitably colourfully attired, and the rest think it's still late summer and are a tired green.  Weird.  The leaf picture is of an (ex-)inhabitant of that one branch.

I liked the sky in the last picture - it was almost like three skies stuck together a bit randomly.