Five on Friday - (k)not work

Right, better make this quick - this has seemed like a long, dark week - and I need a glass of something restorative and a sit on the sofa! 

(I'm undecided - I will welcome the lie-in on Sunday because all week our 6.45am reveille has felt like getting up in the middle of the night. On the other hand, I hate hate hate the dark afternoons. Bring on Solstice and the lengthening days!)

1. Still no progress on the seascapes and knots. No surprise there then, as I have no definite brief at the moment. Not like me to work without a deadline!

2. I have, however, gathered lots and lots of source material. Our local charity bookshop was the source for all this lot and more, for the princely sum of £7.

3. I have also spent a week creating texture and colour swatches for my seascape project, and while this has been a wonderful procrastination, I am now thoroughly bored of it and not sure I like the result! It was also a bit worrying to realise just how much of this stuff I have in the house already to be able to do this:

4. On the subject of all the stuff I have in the house, as you know, I don't have my own room. YET. There have been mutterings - the same person who swore that he could never "work down the end of the garden" has been thinking that he might like to, what with his desk being surrounded by a sea of fabric, laundry, paper and other people's sewing machine trolleys and what-not. I have always dismissed the idea of taking over having the office as my studio, as the ceiling is split level and lower towards the window, which I think makes it hard to consider working in there standing up - and I spend a lot of time on my feet. 

But himself then had the utterly BRILLIANT idea of moving the GIRL into the office, and the Girl's room becoming a studio. (I have no idea why this hadn't occurred to us before - maybe because the Girl absolutely detests change of any sort??!) Anyway, he immediately regretted saying anything at all, as of course I have now spent the last week perusing the online catalogue of a certain Scandinavian furniture outlet and drawing little plans on graph paper. Such fun! We have to demolish and replace the summer house with a bigger one, which we can't afford to do yet, but still - you have to plan these things!

5. Finally, but by no means least of all - I did finish some work. This started out as a teaching sample, then went drastically wrong and I considered chopping off the offending lower portion. I have been dreading tackling it, as I wasn't sure how to rescue it. But I'm now VERY pleased with how it has turned out. Hooray.

Have a great weekend everyone, and thank you for reading!

Cold pricklies

It's what comes of having warm fuzzies last week.

Ofsted.

Just 48 hours of madness in which to tame all the paper in the lever arch folder, make sure my objectives were all s.m.a.r.t. some quick rejjigging of a lesson plan to make it marginally more exciting than "students finish work started in previous session" and I was finally deemed to be "Good" (I think I forgot to take my hoops of fire to jump through whilst balancing a ball on the end of my nose)

...just as well the students are Outstanding!

All are Fiona's outstanding pieces of stitch, exploring texture . 

I love the merino wool in the third one down...



Colour, texture, line - everywhere

We hadn't seen each other all week.  We're all so busy, what with schooling and violining and cycling and teaching and cityandguildsing and cleaning and dogwalking and allypallying.

So to put things right, we went on a pilgrimage to Wakey.

We took cake (butternut, cinnamon frosting), flask of coffee, milk, forks, stickywipes, forgot the mugs and had to beg some cardboard ones, and we took a camera.

We found a labyrinth:

600 metres long and 12,000 bricks!

And we found a favourite view:

some lines

some texture 

and some colour

I'm really enjoying how teaching this course is making me go back to the beginning. 

But why do we talk of going "back" to basics?  Maybe basics is a good place to stay.

(Uhoh, unexpected rant coming up....you have been warned)

In the Knitting & Stitching Show catalogue, there was an ad for a certain magazine, purporting to be about the "simple things" in life, the things that matter most - like interiors, lifestyle etc.  AGGHHHHH!!!!!  Stupid people.  Those are the things that matter LEAST!!!! 

Sorry about that.

To make up for the rant, here is some knitted village from the K&S show:

Colour and texture - sorted

After the muddy foot debacle of July 14, I discovered that the lovely people in Cornwall are making my favourite boots again - so I took a deep breath and ordered a new pair.  Gosh, they are lovely.  Like walking around with your feet wrapped in a duvet all day.  Expensive, yes, but my last pair lasted four years and are now on light dog-walking duty in the mornings when I don't wear wellies.

But...every time you order something, you get another catalogue - as well as the ones that are sent out anyway.  So yesterday, when we received yet another catalogue from my favourite purveyor of warm boots, it was definitely surplus to requirements.

I'd already used a previous one to stitch over with various LINES

 (it's in there somewhere - I think it's the woolly jumper along the right-hand edge)

So as we had another one, I thought I'd chop it up and sort out COLOUR 

and TEXTURE as well!

Job done.

(Well, apart from the yellow/orange section...)

Talking of yellow and orange, did I show you my squash?

From my favourite purveyor of seasonal veg.

(no, I'm not on commission!  Just a happy customer:)