My own splash of colour

The 'official' splash of colour is over but despite the sunshine yesterday I'm in need of more winter-brightening.

Little foil-covered chocolate eggs - what could be better?

I tidied my sock-drawer today - the one that jams open and that the smaller cat wriggles into - and found my only completed pair of adult-sized handknitted socks. Ooooh, they're so comfortable... It's made me think that I really ought to finish the pair that are lurking on the needles somewhere. And do the second sock of the Boy's pair. I completed Miss Mouse's pair ages ago (exactly to her specification of pink and more pink) but she won't wear them. *sigh*

A belated Splash of Colour

That was a long blogging pause wasn't it? We all caught colds at the end of January and have been a bit wiped out so I've just not been in a blogging frame of mind. I haven't even done much knitting which is unusual. But I did continue to take photos so there are a few splashes of colour. First Lego Luke Skywalker goes to soft-play:



Miss Mouse has a bead-set that we got ages ago but decided she was a bit young for yet, but I finally allowed her (after much begging) to have a go with it. She made a necklace and a bracelet and then we decided that the beads looked like a ball-pool so we got one of the Boy's Lego minifigures to play in it.

We had a long weekend last week and went up to my parents in the Highlands for a few days - mostly it was cold and wet :

but the sun came out on our last morning and lit everything up:

Granted it was lighting the ice up, but sunshine's better than no-sunshine, eh? We had a lovely weekend - very relaxed and the kids loved seeing their grandparents. Wish we could do it more often really. I notice from the school calendar that March will be the only month of the school year without any holidays or in-service days - it's going to be a long haul to Easter!

The official Splash of Colour is over now but as we're far from the end of winter in this neck of the woods yet (it's been snowing again today, we usually get snow in March and the daffs are nowhere near blooming yet) I'll do the first week of March as well.

Splash of insomnia

I've had a bout of insomnia and have felt like a zombie - ironic really when Rogerborg shopped for a zombie apocalypse and failed to notice his own wife shambling around, blank-eyed (though admittedly not slurring 'braaainsss'). So I've not been capable of sensible blogging and missed the rest of January's Splash of Colour. Never mind, I'll add to it now - the day we took our Christmas decorations down and packed them away:


I'm always quite glad to take the decorations down again, though I love having them up for a bit. Before having the kids we used to put our decorations up quite late, but as the kids have got older we've done it earlier each year, so really by the time New Year has come I've had enough of it all! Bah, humbug, eh?

The big excitement of the week has been the arrival of my new camera - there she is:

I was quite ridiculously excited about this - I've really missed having a compact camera for everyday use and this is very much pocket-sized. I took loads of completely pointless photos that day, but here's one from a few days later when it had snowed again. I'm really pleased with the results from such a tiny camera.


This is about as creative as I've got during my zombie-stage - I just couldn't concentrate on knitting or anything else really. Thankfully I'm sleeping better now and feeling much more human, and even managed to do a bit more on my log-cabin blanket last night. Yay for sleep!

January splash of colour : fire

I have no pictures actually from today because I was out most of the day - I went into Glasgow to investigate the sales. Specifically I went to look at what wool was in the sale at John Lewis, and the answer is quite a lot and quite nice but nothing that I needed. Never mind - I do have plenty in my stash and several projects on the go already! So today's picture is from the other night.

It's cloudy here. Again (though the snow melted again over night so not all bad). One of the Boy's Christmas presents was a telescope - he is space mad - and due to a combination of that and Stargazing Live on the Beeb we're quite desparate to get out and look at the night sky. Except there is no night sky, just cloud. It's probably a little known fact to the majority of my friends that at university I was in the Astronomy Society (or Astrosoc). In fact I was VP one year, or was it for two years? - sounds impressive, but it mostly involved taking the minutes of committee meetings! I didn't understood a vast amount of the technical stuff at the talks, being an anthropology student, and some of the talks were very technical, but I suppose the interest in astronomy relates to the interest in anthropology - the night sky being such a rich source of myth-making for cultures everywhere.

Every now and then I get all enthusiastic again, often when there's a meteor shower, and I go and lie on a blanket in the back garden, wearing eighteen layers of clothes, trying to block out light pollution and find a gap in the clouds. What I should do is time my visits to my parents in the Highlands to coincide with meteor showers, taking twenty-eight layers of clothes and a flask of coffee out to the golf course or up the glen. I have never seen stars as clearly as I have in Badenoch - it's really phenomenal. Orion looks as if he's actually striding about the sky, whereas here his belt looks fairly clear and the rest are a bit difficult to make out. Even when I still lived in Shetland which you might think of as more remote there were problems with light pollution, such as the flare-stack at the oil-terminal! I did see auroras though - as a kid they freaked me out a bit, they are quite spooky.

January splash of colour: riotous

I remembered to take a photo of my log-cabin blanket/cushion-cover in daylight(ish)! And appropriately enough for silverpebble's Splash of Colour it's quite a colourful bit of knitting for me - using King Cole Riot. Loving it. There's not been much colour to work with today - daylight was deeply overcast and short-lived, and then it started to snow again. So it's been a staying inside being cosy kind of day:

The mug was a Christmas present from my brother and in normal light is quite colourful. I spent quite a while (after the white stuff started falling again *mutter grumble*) going back through my 365 blog and through my files of pictures from the summer and found this one:

Aaah. Just a bunch of sweet-peas in a vase but so pretty. This was taken at my parents' house. My mum has a talent for just chucking a few flowers in a vase and it looks just right. She had sweetpeas dotted all over the house on window-sills. I am going to grow sweet peas this year. I did last year but planted them very late, so this year, this year..

Splash of Colour: Paper chains

For the first time in years I made paper-chains. My Beloved was working from home and the school was shut so I was trying to keep the kids occupied without disturbing him. So I found a whole lot of coloured paper and we got to work. See how organised my mind is? No random pile of paper strips for me, oh no!


Some of the paper was patterned and the kids decorated some of the plain strips too to liven them up a bit.

We've already put one chain up in the Boy's room, Miss Mouse wants hers hung up in the living-room and I've made another chain for the living-room so the place will start to look quite festive.

I'm loving the results! I always liked making paper chains in primary school but we used gummed paper strips in weirdly un-festive colours (mustard, dark red, brown - yeah, it was the 70s but come on!) so these look brilliantly cheerful. Schools and nurseries are all closed again tomorrow according to the council's Twitter account* so by tomorrow night I may be surrounded by paper chains!

For the truly un-colourful outside pics see my picture-a-day blog.

* Genius idea! They have all the details on their website too but that crashed briefly yesterday under the strain of people refreshing when it looked like the schools were closing imminently, but the council's tweets kept me informed!

The dinkiest little Splash of Colour

The last ten days have been distinctly monochrome, and then today another load of snow dumped itself on us - so the only colour I saw was this:

The men of our street digging the road out, salting it, pushing cars up. That's my Beloved in the bright orange! And let's not be sexist, the women were out there too - just not when I took the picture.

So, more muted splashes of colour today! Lovely to be cosy and indoors after a somewhat trying day.

Splash of Colour: December

It's the first week of the month so it's Silverpebble's Splash of Colour time (link to the Flickr group as Silverpebble's blog doesn't seem to be working - hope everything's ok!) and here's my little splash of colour! And a tricky one it is too because it's all a bit monochrome at the moment as the outside world is like this:



There was no school or nursery today (and believe me, they don't close them lightly round here) so the kids and I were trying to find some colour. Any colour.


I had a rummage through my yarn stash and my patterns to see what I had in BRIGHT because it's the nursery's Christmas Fair next week and I want to knit a few tree decorations for it. Jean Greenhowe and Alan Dart to the rescue!

Hurray, knitted Santas and penguins here I come! Meanwhile the kids had dug out the Aquadraw and were immersed in their work for, ooh, quite a while actually.


I've just realised that what they're doing is a fairly literal Splash of Colour!

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Ah, finally got in to Silver Pebble's blog and we're doing Splash of Colour from Monday the 6th! I'm ahead of myself! Never mind...

last splash

A last bit of colour for Splash of Colour:November before normal neutral service is resumed! And it's all from my garden - it was a beautiful if chilly morning, but it's turned wet and windy again tonight so I suspect that by morning the last of my beautiful hollyhocks will have been blasted from the stem. But I've they've made me so happy this past summer I can't complain.

Sweetpea is still flowering.


And autumn colour hits my strawberry plant.

It's been said by others, but I'll say it too - when you start looking out for colour like this you become so much more aware of it. I'm also so aware what a nuisance it is that my compact camera is on the blink! I really miss having a camera with me at all times - and no, I don't have a camera on my 'phone. My mobile is the cheapest, most basic thing imaginable but... apparently practically indestructible (touch wood)! Which is a very good thing for me.

A bit of colour, a bit of darkness

A pile of fleeces - 2 jackets and a blanket. Miss Mouse rediscovered the red jacket today. It's actually the Boy's but a bit small for him now, and he got the turquoise one recently. I love how zingy the red and the turquoise look together!

And now for the dark bit..

Ooooh! Aaaah! It's Bonfire Night, when adults suddenly realise they can't remember the details of Guy Fawkes* and wonder why we still care. Truth is, of course, we don't - like so many other celebrations it's an excuse for a laugh! And it's one where you can spot the vintage of the speaker by what they think the night is analogous to: 'It's like Beirut/Baghdad/the Somme out here!'. Well maybe not the last.. Funny how we enjoy explosions though! You wouldn't have thought that was innate.

And sparklers, yay! They terrified me as a kid and actually I still wouldn't want one myself but they're great fun to photograph.

This was my own kids' first go with sparklers and they seemed to enjoy it - and were very sensible with them too.

* And thanks to the utterly brilliant Diana Wynne Jones and Witch Week, I'm even vaguer on it than most.

keep splashing that colour

My cold was a good bit better this morning and I spent much of the day on the settee, knitting and watching Midsomer Murders DVDs. Between that and the weather, not much of the seeking of glorious colour was happening - above, my knitting, coming along nicely. I'm loving the yarn - 100% acrylic but beautifully squishy-soft and not at all squeaky. Wonder how that happens - clearly All Acrylic Is Not The Same, though you'd (or I'd) think it would be.

And below, a picture from Monday, of my freezer - a work of art. Or several works of art. That's the good bit - further down there are Disney Princess stickers *mutter mutter*.

splashing a bit more colour about

A gloomier day today so getting actual colour by electric light was a bit tricky, hence the slightly gloomier tone of today's pics. So I'll start with an old picture:

I have to confess that I like that tea-towel hanging behind the cat so much that I've never used it for fear of ruining it!

And onto a bowl of fruit. Mmm, we're into satsuma season - how I love satsumas! See, winter's not so bad!

Those flowers I bought myself the other day - I don't even know what they are but I'm enjoying them.

And zingy colour in the form of my stash of sock-yarn - how gorgeous is that? But to end, a non-colourful picture just because I love it. It's a detail from a picture my son drew of Mrs Pepperpot up a tree, and I particularly love the cuckoo. How do I know it's a cuckoo? 'Cos he told me!

I have acquired, at stunning speed*, a cold. I've spent the evening curled up on the settee with a hot-water-bottle, knitting a scarf**, drinking hot toddies and watching the new series of Kirsty's Homemade Home and a recording we had of James May's Man Lab from the other day. If James were a girlie he'd be a knitter. In fact I bet he'd enjoy knitting but Clarkson would never let him live it down.

There are worse ways to spend an evening, though I could have done without the sneezing. And so to bed. With another hot toddy.

* since lunchtime.
**with James C Brett Marble Chunky - so soft! Such a huge ball! And so cheap! If I get the scarf finished by Friday it'll be a retirement present for the Boy's teacher.

Splash of Colour: November

Hello November, hello soothing cosy neutrals on the calendar! But it's the first week of silverpebble's Splash of Colour, so enough with the neutrals and on with the colour.

It was beautifully sunny this morning and I had no kids around so I took the opportunity to go for a walk and get some pictures of the autumn colour which has been tremendous this year! And I'm very glad I did take the opportunity because by school pick-up time it was chucking it down and windy and the Boy's school playground is very exposed and quite high so now I'm looking quite wind-swept.

I'm rubbish at tree/plant recognition so I don't know what these pictures are of.

And now for some of Miss Mouse's loot from guising last night. I just grabbed the bucket on the way out of the house but it wasn't nearly big enough - people are generous! My friend made up bags for the kids who came around and I think another year I'd do that too. We just had a big jug of sweeties that we poured into the bags of the guisers who called on us, but it's difficult to be fair that way.

And finally my utensils pot, looking its best in the sunshine!