name that sheep (warning contains a big creepy-crawly pic)

This is wool I bought at the Highland Folk Museum when we were up visiting mum and dad - I love that it's wool with provenance :-D. It was spun on site by my dad's ex-colleague Marion, so though I don't actually know the sheep's name (or, more likely, number), it's damn close!

I'll probably make mittens, fingerless or otherwise (actually, aren't all mittens technically fingerless?), with it. But not now - it's too warm and I have too many other things to finish. I've nearly, so nearly, finished my bright stripey thing. It took me ages to find the final colour, that being the very small amount left from my orange circle socks. Foolish me for wanting needing to make the stripes symmetrical, but I can't help it, it needed to be symmetrical. Really. I should probably point out that Flowermouse's various stripey things, from which I got the idea of doing a stripey thing, aren't symmetrical and I think they look great, but mine needed to be symmetrical this time. I'd like to do another now that's more random though, maybe with a self-striping yarn or just using up random bits of stash.

I've not been blogging much and part of that is that Miss M has been doing Adventure Ted* for the past few weeks and that's made me a bit diarised out. She writes pretty well once she gets going, but needs some nudging to get going! 

It's been great fun and has probably got us out doing more fun things, such as our trip to Edinburgh Zoo on Sunday. I just can't quite believe that it's three years since we did this with the Boy.

At the zoo:

  - the definitive long-leggety beastie crawling up my arm. I think the zoo bloke said this was a spiny devil/thorny devil/something like that. It's a kind of stick insect anyway.  Miss M also held it and wasn't too keen but I quite liked it. We also saw cute cuddly things too.

School finishes for the summer next Wednesday so we're into the final frenzy. Apparently the Boy is getting an attendance prize at assembly on Friday - yes, a prize just for turning up :-D. My Beloved and my brother both said 'Does that mean he doesn't need to bother going in next week?' Can you tell they work in IT?


* To summarise - school sends child home with a teddy bear, child takes teddy on 'adventures' which needn't be very exciting (one of ours was a trip to the dentist, dentist was very sporting about this), and writes about what they've been doing. Photos may be added or pictures drawn. Teddy goes back to school at the end, child may or may not be distraught.

toastie weather

 My husband has just walked in with this:

This is what happens when you work just along the road from a Lidl - random purchases occur. Actually as we have no toastie-maker currently and Miss M is quite partial to them, it is a good thing (quite apart from it having a 'Singe-o-tron image burner'!).

But it's not really toastie weather.  It is warm. Really warm. I mean, for here. I look back on when I lived in New Zealand in my teens and wonder how we coped with temperatures of 20+ degrees all summer. A couple of days of 19.5 degrees and Scotland melts, men who should not expose their pasty beer bellies rip off their shirts in joyous anticipation of 'getting a good colour', red shoulders reveal white bra strap marks, and schoolchildren don't bother changing back from their PE kit after PE. And people mutter 'if that was summer we've had it'.

 Meanwhile in my garden the first poppy is unfurling,

 and the sun is showing up snail trails on the patio. Snails do meander a bit don't they? When the sun was at the right angle I could see metres of trail, drifting around apparently aimlessly but presumably with some sort of snail method in its madness.

 I know as a gardener of sorts I'm supposed to hate snails, but I just don't. I find them entertaining and endearing. The only thing I hate in the garden is dandelions, and that's only because the garden is so small and could easily get swamped in dandelions.

 There were several snails in the garden a few weeks ago and I painted spots on their shells to identify them, but either the paint has come off or this (or perhaps these - I'm not sure it's the same snail in these pictures) is not one of 'my' snails. I'm trying not to give it a name.

Whee!

There's a distinct lack of knitting or making of any kind in this blog at the moment. Partly it's summer term busy-ness and partly warm-weather laziness. But it's also that I had a weirdly swollen thumb over the weekend and at one point was wondering whether I'd somehow broken it without noticing - yeah, I know, how? But really it was hugely swollen, wouldn't bend and was extremely painful. And then suddenly it deflated, started bending and the pain eased though it's still a bit tender on the joint. So I've been giving it a rest and haven't been knitting this week at all, which has seemed a bit weird.

Miss M is home from her dance class so we're off to make toasties!

Who stole May?

In fact, who stole the first half of this year? It's all going so quickly, I can see the school holidays looming on the horizon,  and I need it to slow down! (Can you guess who's not good on rollercoasters?)

So, June. And the sun is shining! The daffodils and tulips are still out because it was a late spring, but the summery things, like calendula, are starting to appear too.  It's all looking rather pretty.

 Calendula

 Hot cat

 Moomin mug - birthday present from my brother :-).

 Tulip 

Those pictures are mostly from last Thursday but it's been intermittently good weather since then (overcast some days) and today was pretty much like the pictures.

And what did I do in May apart from coughing* and not blogging much? Well one thing I did was go to my friend Chrissie's hen do. As hen dos go it was all very tasteful. Mostly anyway. We met up in the afternoon for a beading class at The Bead Company in Glasgow, spent a ridiculous amount of time cooing over choosing pretty beads, then made a necklace and a bracelet each. Here's mine:

Very simple really, but I love them and have worn them a lot especially the necklace. There was of course a disaster during the making of the bracelet, which led to me scrabbling about on the floor collecting my beads back up, but I expected that.

We all went out for a (delicious) Thai meal later and most of us were wearing the jewellery we made that afternoon. It was a lovely way to spend a day and we're hoping to go beading in a group again sometime after Chrissie's back from her honeymoon. We'll be a bead gang. Lean, mean, and distracted by pretty things.

Anyway, I suppose I'd better go and feed my kids. Or let them scavenge or something..

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* I got fed up with feeling rough and went to the doctor last week and I have a shiny new techno-inhaler now. I was always rubbish at timing the pushing of the inhaler with breathing in, but this one is triggered by breathing in so I don't have to do anything at all. Well, breathe in obviously.  On that subject I was at the dentist today for my check-up (all good!) and the hygienist says that you should always have a drink of water or wash your mouth out after using an inhaler because there's quite a lot of residue from the puff that sticks in your mouth and can cause plaque build-up, so there you go - I'm spreading the word :-).

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?'

things wot we 'ave been doin'

The trouble with having a little unintentional blogging break is that I find I have loads I want to talk about but I'm too overwhelmed by it to be bothered - besides which it is the school Easter break so I'm either rather busy staving off bickerfests or trying to prevent the kids from spending all day playing Minecraft or watching back-to-back episodes of Lazytown. I appreciate musclebound Icelandic men as much as the next woman but there are limits.

The first week of the holiday was great because we tootled up to the Highlands to see my mum and dad for a few days. The weather was lovely and Cairngorms National Park is pretty wonderful at any time of the year:

We were all impressed by this caterpillar.

Since we got back I've done a bit of dyeing, with daffodil heads this time, resulting
in this:

 Ah, yet another yellow! Nice one this time



And I've ripped back the green shawl I'd just started knitting because something had gone not-quite-right and it was bugging me:

So I've started again and now it's going better. She says cautiously.

And I thought I'd show you my little knitted bee.

He brightens up my spotty bag beautifully. I knitted him because Miss Mouse's class recently did a bee topic at school and we-the-parents were all invited in at the end of term to see some of the stuff they'd been doing. I'd offered the bee to Miss M to take in if she wanted but she declined - however she was delighted when I arrived with the bee on my handbag. I think it'll stay there, it makes me smile :-).

Following the crafty theme, I've also become hooked on the Great British Sewing Bee, despite (or perhaps because of?) being completely inept at sewing myself.  I do like watching competent people being competent.

And now, for Mrs Micawber, some of my egg-hunt clues. Apologies for terrible poetry!

'Finding eggs is hard, you'll agree/The next egg is with things that help Mama see' - the egg was hidden on my bedside table behind my contact lens solutions.

'The next egg is hidden from sight/ In a place that might be home to a knight' - in the Boy's old toy castle.

'Magical transport that comes when it's bidden/Is the place to find an egg hat is hidden'  - behind Miss M's Lego Knight Bus. This one had them stumped and I had to give them some fairly unsubtle hints in the end.

'The next egg is the cutest by far/ Find it where the small people are' - in Miss M's doll's house. I'd put gem stickers  and googly eyes on the foil for that egg to make it the 'cutest by far'.

And so on!