Holiday work

August Bank Holiday here, and so there's a quiet day to get on with some work.

Remember the angels from before my holiday? They still need sorting out, but rather than face those today, I worked on the gift box samples. Had to scale the pattern, which took forever, and make adjustments to the top, so that they could be fastened more simply, but I was quite pleased with the results.

Have done the instruction sheets, the patterns and the samples. Maybe tomorrow I'll tackle the angels... 

Like proverbial London buses

- no blog entry for a few days and then several all at once.

The fact that three different people offered me plums yesterday led me to go and look at the progress of our own. I knew they were not completely ripe, but thought I'd take a closer look and maybe get enough for a crumble.

I was right, the plums need a few more days of sunshine, but oh my goodness, the apples were dropping off the trees and there are so many of them!

This one had a rather cute "birthmark"

(It's now in a pie by the way!)

The fun came when I walked underneath the greengage tree and bumped my head on a branch - I was showered with a deluge of the small round, golden fruit which was so ripe it was ready to fall. I collected a large bowlful and brought them in for lunch. When I ran cold water into the bowl to wash them, bubbles of air formed around each fruit, giving the impression they were set in glass, each fruit having an individual crystal casing.



As soon as I put my hand in and disturbed them, the effect was gone.

The greengages are gone too. They were yummy!

Yarn close up

Lang Cleo yarn - see the Liquorice Allsorts?

 

Any excuse

As soon as I bought the Magical Knitting book, I knew I just had to have a go, if only to work it all out. I am hopeless at interpreting directions until I get my hands on and do it. I had three balls of Lang Cleo in my stash from a trip to Zürich last Spring and armed with the larger 60" needles I bought in Boston, I cast on 160 stitches in the "mobius way" - actually a total of 320 stitches, but don't ask me to explain! I've knit the three balls up and am now casting off a picot edge - and it is taking forever.

The yarn consists of a fairly thick untwisted wool with a strand of pastel coloured loopy synthetic running through. The pale pink and lemon yellow loops remind me of liquorice allsorts - any excuse to open a packet, eh, Jordi?! 

A place for everything

In last weeks post about Canterbury and the Shakers, I made reference to their method of ensuring nothing got lost. Communal living meant that things would inevitably go astray and they managed this by marking everything with a letter (to denote the building) and up to two numbers (to denote the room and possibly the table/drawer/cupboard) where the item belonged. Every broom, flat iron, box, basket, chair, towel - not to mention clothes - was labelled in this way. At the time, I joked that I thought Mark must have lived in a Shaker community during a former life.

As I try to find homes for all the piles of "stuff" which are still around from our trip, I wonder if it would be any easier if everything here was marked in a similar way? But what pleasure to rediscover things which have remained hidden in the bottom of a suitcase for a couple of weeks, forgotten!