28 June: Something entirely different

A clip of Michael Jackson's act shows him doing a sort of jerky backwards walk (this may be the "moondance" thing?) - but Wilson, Keppel and Betty did exactly the same moves many years ago, and were much funnier.

Oh, and this tickled me as well: To err is human, to arr is pirate.

Edit : To arr could also be yokel.

26 June: Woolfest

Exhausted after a trip to Woolfest today; that's me and my cash reserves.

But I have the fibre I need to spin up and finish DH's jersey, which has been on hold for a few weeks: some superwash BFL for a possible project: 3 hanks of Yarn Yard sock yarn: some Landscape dye samples: a couple of crochet hooks: a bag of pot-luck mixed buttons: a copy of Annemor Sundbo's book Invisible Threads in Knitting: and a Kromski rigid heddle loom.

How long have I been resisting weaving? Must. Not. Start. Weaving. As. Well. And there's enough knitting projects lined up to keep me busy for several more years.

Oh well, perhaps I can give up sleep.

Which reminds me - there will be karmic consequences for the driver of the van that pulled out in front of us as we were coming home, forcing DH to brake hard and swerve. It woke me out of a nice little nap.

23 June: Wailing and gnashing of teeth

Remember the knitting I took on holiday?

The pattern is in a book I bought recently - full of interesting designs. The first pattern I tried turned out to be so full of errors that I had to unravel the whole thing.

The zigzag top had already been made by lots of people on Ravelry (if you want to know, google), and there was no mention anywhere that I could find of mistakes in this pattern.

Oh yes there is! A simple arithmetic mistake in the decreasing instructions. Now I have lost all confidence in the whole pattern, but as I now understand the shaping (and my yarn/gauge were different anyway), I shall finish the garment to my own working.

I have usually regarded books of knitting patterns as starting points for my own designs; I liked this particular designer's work enough to use her pattern. Not again, though - back to looking at pictures of items I like, then sorting out my own version.

And the publishers of knitting books have lost a customer.

20 June: Back home

Home again after a lovely week. There was a lot of this -


- walking along well-trodden tracks (and some less-travelled), with views like this -


- over the Manifold and Hamps valleys. Note the steepness of the hills!
Of course we visited here -


- Dovedale; even early in the day, mid-week, it was busy.

We made use of our NT membership (acutely aware of the recently read description of NT visitors looking as if they dress from Radio Times adverts or from the Harold Shipman collection).

Sudbury Hall was particularly interesting, with its Museum of Childhood as well as a fascinating house -


-and the gardens at Biddulph Grange were amazing, and a complete surprise, as neither of us knew about this wonderful place. This was taken in the Stumpery -

Great week! And we've already tackled the laundry mountain and the knee-high lawn. Now back to normal loafing.

11 June: Poised

The cat's at his holiday home, the car's fuelled, the luggage has been pulled out of the top of the wardrobe, it's raining - yes, it's holiday time!

I'm wondering whether to add the fleece-lined wellies to the growing stack of all-weather clothing (shorts and waterproofs, flip-flops and thick wool jerseys).

Maps and guide books are piled up with the details of the cottage we've booked; provisions have been assembled; camera batteries charged and binoculars dusted off.

Much thought has been given to the knitting project to take - and it's been cast on, so that the pattern could be checked out (remembering the time I took a pattern for socks that developed into dainty little items that would never fit my size 9 feet, and I was stuck for a week with no knitting). Wonderful yarn - merino/silk, handspun from some Wingham fibre, and another attempt at a Marianne Isager zigzag design -

And the light holiday reading is chosen - as well as the books of sudoku and of crosswords, DH has Gogol's Dead Souls and Beowulf (in translation), and I'm taking a 500-page tome called The Scourging Angel - the Black Death in the British Isles.

We know how to enjoy ourselves.

3 June: The garden

Many of the garden plants are doing well after the recent sunshine. This year we have some potatoes in bags on the paving -


and some runner beans that have not been wiped out by slugs and/or snails! This time the beans were planted in pots in the conservatory, and were only put out in the garden when they had 2 pairs of leaves.


The spring flowers have gone over, and the summer ones are showing up, like these dianthus -

and the Buff Beauty rose -


Not all in the garden is lovely though - those roses give me a rash; and the little oak tree has a problem too. In one area some of the leaves have these galls (?). This is the top of one leaf -


and this is the under-side -


Other examples are paler or darker. What, if anything, will emerge from these growths?

28 May: Seasonal knitting

Made in this season, but for the winter - another double cap, this time for me, to go with my peacock scarf.


I began to knit a hat from a pattern in a book I got recently, Classic Knits, Marianne Isager Collection. I have her book Knitting out of Africa, and although I like many of the garments in that, I have never actually tried to make one. (More of an inspirational book)

But Classic Knits has several patterns I would like to make more or less as shown. So I started on a hat, but had to abandon it - in a couple of places the instructions did not tally with what was on the needles, or clearly shown in the photographs, but that was easily corrected. When, however, I had enough work done to start to see how it was coming together, I realised that the instructions as written resulted in one side of the hat having only two-thirds of the stitches that the other side had, just in the parts where the earflaps should go. Lost in translation from the Danish, perhaps?

Ah well, the garments in the pictures still look good, and I can probably copy them from the pictures (schematics are included, which is helpful) - I would have to make adaptations for using my handspun instead of the specified yarn, anyway.

The first one will be a jersey for DH. He liked one photographed in Classic Knits, though my version will be in 100% wool, not linen and cotton, probably not the same thickness either, and the shaping will be a bit different, and the stitch pattern will be another one to compensate for the different fibre - oh, and the edgings will be different. In fact, a jersey with very little in common with the original picture, but that's where we started.

Last week I spun a bag of humbug Shetland fibre, bought on our recent trip to Winghams, with a view to knitting a jersey for me, but it's a suitable colour for DH, so I'll use that. There's about 900 gms - will that be enough?

25 May: Ashes

Something which has been very noticeable this spring is how late the ash trees are with opening their leaves.

These 2 trees almost looked dead at first glance, but there are little leaflets appearing in tufts at the ends of the branches. The sycamores on each side, on the other hand, are in full leaf.

I've been trying to remember the rhyme - If the ash is before the oak, then be ready for a soak; if the oak's before the ash, then be ready for a splash (perhaps). Folk rain forecasting.

Could be a good summer.

23 May: NGS

Today we succeeded in doing something I've wanted to do for ages, but somehow never achieved - we visited a garden open for the NGS, the National Garden Scheme.

It was interesting to see how the planting had been arranged, and how the rather difficult site had been used. Quite steep banks swoop down to a stream, and large trees stand in a group in the middle, shading the flatter part of the garden. On the other side of the house the bank has been made into a rock and gravel slope planted with alpines, and a lawn curves round to the little valley. Lots of unusual trees have been planted, and I was particularly checking out the shade planting for ideas to take home.

This colourful bed was in a walled area-


And these misty blue flowers, with a white birch behind them, were at the top of the bank down to the stream -


Other people's planting style is always different, and the plants chosen are always different from what you might choose, and this makes for fascinating viewing. We'll try to visit some more gardens over the summer.

20 May: RSPB Saltholme

A short visit to the new RSPB place at Saltholme, down near the mouth of the Tees. It is all brand new, the car park, the Visitor Centre, the paths, hides, even the lakes appear newly scraped out of the bare earth.

As we arrived, the wind whipped across the marshes - gulls and swifts were sailing about above us. After a brief introduction in the centre, we explored the site. Near the Centre is a "wildlife garden" - not quite Chelsea, but pleasant.

This is a view of the Centre building from the garden, with some of Teesside's more usual architecture in the background -


The water feature/pond in the garden (inside the low wall) has a fountain in the middle -


And this is the seat where the last photo was taken from, showing the up-ended trees which line one side of the path -


They are real trees, though dead, uprooted, turned upside down, and replanted.

The rest of the area was less photogenic, being very bare and windswept (though DH took photos of the Transporter Bridge, and some ducks, with his superior camera and lens). We visited 2 of the hides and watched some of the birds (though I was more interested in the cows which appeared to be walking on the water at the other end of the lake), had coffee and cake in the nice cafe, which has excellent views of one lake, browsed round the shop, and plan to go again.

18 May: Short Wait

Here is that stranded hat -

It's called the Sand Ripple hat, because that's what the pattern is supposed to represent. It's all the usual fine handspun yarn, black Wensleydale and oatmeal BFL, of which there is a good supply in my stash.

Perhaps the next project should be something more colourful. Or perhaps I should knit a lizard..?

16 May: Latest knitting

A very plain, jolly useful waistcoat -


-with pockets. It's made with 2 strands of yarn, one a soft and silky natural dark BFL, and the other a slightly rougher pale grey Suffolk (both handspun, of course); together they give a tweedy effect.

It's knitted in one piece, from the bottom edge upwards, then the pockets, neck edge, front bands, and armhole edgings knitted on afterwards. It seemed to take a long time to make, but it's only a few days over a month. It's probably all the thinking, measuring and calculating that seem to have taken a long time.

The button box had the perfect buttons for it - but only 3. Fortunately, it was fairly easy to find some very similar buttons in the market at Durham.

For a change, I haven't already got the next big project lined up, though there's a couple of small items on the needles - a stranded hat in a design of my own, and a scarf in an interesting double-sided stitch pattern. You can't wait to see them, can you?

11 May: Even more wildlife

It's a lizard shot, I'm afraid.

This little character, about 4 inches long including the tail, startled us by skittering across the track in front of us this afternoon, while we were walking in Hamsterley Forest. For some reptilian reason, it took cover in a big puddle on the track, with only its head above the surface. But at least it stayed still long enough to have its photo taken.

10 May: More birds

This morning the street at the front of the house is a-swoop with house martins. It's wonderful to have a nest under the eaves, and to hear the burbling of the inhabitants. The only downside is the tremendous mess they drop underneath the nest, on the porch roof. And we've only just got the remainder of last year's mess cleaned off.

9 May: Fledged!

The local pair of robins have successfully raised at least one youngster - it was foraging in our back garden yesterday evening, on its own, all round and bright and spotty - totally delightful!

7 May: Tweedy Yarn

The recent trip to Wingham Wool Work boosted my stash of fibre - on Tuesday I started to spin some of it.

This was a batt of 90% wool and 10% other natural fibres, which has spun up into 410 gms of lovely chunky tweedy yarn.

No, I have no idea what (if anything) it might become.

1 May: LOL

No, really, I laughed out loud.

One of the pleasures of a live bookshop, as opposed to an online one, is the small treasures that fall serendipitously into your hand while you're trying to find a worthy tome on, say, Red Tape Concerning Buying a House Abroad.

Thus it was that I chanced upon Mike Parker's "Map Addict", and, being one myself, had to have it. Very readable, informative, and highly amusing; I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in maps.

I was slightly surprised to find that a man so hooked on maps seems never to have become obsessed by orienteering (then he'd know why people turn the map round to point in the same direction as they're going) - is it too late for him to discover the delights of not only the competition but also the hours spent afterwards tracing the exact route taken on the map, and comparing it with the route that should have been taken?

In fact, now my mind is focused on maps, I have only to pick up the map of the 1993 British Orienteering Championships at Brown Clee to remember the echo features, the awful moorland, the boggy bits where the next control was, naturally, over that nasty hill up there; and read my notes on the back, and see that I came 65th out of a class of 70 (rather unfit after a year on the sick).

And the album of photographs from the walking holiday in the Auvergne, with all the maps of the area tucked inside the cover, unfold the sheets, and remember the heat that had us moving from one patch of shade to the next, the spots where we stopped to eat our lunch on different days, the little chapel in the woods, the wonderful place we stayed in Orcival, the politeness of strangers on the train, exactly where I tripped and fell, lacerating both knees and blacking my eye...

Even the family history research is peppered with maps, both old ones of the places where forebears lived, and current ones, to see how it's all changed. Like the family tree charts themselves, it's all so much easier to follow on a map. One of my own earliest memories is of poring over a map of the Festival of Britain site.

Beside the computer here is a small pile of new maps, preparation for the next holiday. The position of the cottage has been pinpointed, the terrain examined, routes for walks and bike rides discussed. What memories, joys and disasters will attach themselves to these sheets?

29 April: The bluebell wood

Though both DH and I have slight sore throats and muzzy headaches (it's either a bit of pollen fever or the fashionable swine flu), this morning we decided to follow coffee at the Botanic Garden cafe with a stroll round the woods.

It was reported that the woods were crowded with photographers at the weekend - they must have got the same e-mail as us, with the news that the bluebells were out earlier than usual. (Being retired, we are no longer limited to weekend trips to view the flowers.) Today there were only two other couples with cameras; one woman told us she had come all the way from Darlington to see the sight.

The sun was behind a cloud -


Then it came out -



Bluebells are notoriously difficult to capture with a camera, and none of these pictures really conveys the light, the air, and the glory.

Beside the path was this interesting dead tree - with holes possibly made by the woodpeckers that are often heard in the wood?

28 April: Just blink

It must be old age, but I have no idea where last week went.

There was a lot of sitting in the garden, knitting, and a pleasant walk (the first house martins are back at the local farm), some gardening and some bead-ear-ring-making; and a shopping expedition.

In the garden, the apple trees are covered in fat pink buds, the snakeshead fritillaries are mostly over, the bluebells (only ours are pink) are nearly out; there are violets, auriculas, comfrey, cowslips and hybrid primulas, bergenias, daffodils, lungwort, hellebores, two tulips and two hyacinths, one rhododendron/azalea, honesty, and about a thousand forget-me-nots - a bit of colour.

There are 3 sorts of potato in bags on the paving, all looking good, and some seedling lettuces on the windowsill in the conservatory.

And we have some birds coming to the feeders; the regulars include a pair of robins (their nest is probably in our neighbour's garden), a pair of house sparrows, a pair of collared doves, several blackbirds, the dunnocks, and recently a small band of starlings - entertaining when they try to hover, but also very untidy feeders. The sparrowhawk has visited, but not fed.

19 April: Venturing southwards

Yet another har this morning, so we decided to travel south, in the hopes of finding better weather.

To Yorkshire, in fact. Pausing only at Woolley Edge services for a M&S sandwich (how civilized), we zoomed down the motorway to Wentworth, near Rotherham, for our first visit to Wingham Wool Work.

It's amazing how much fibre you can get into a car - I might even have enough to keep me spinning till Woolfest. And there is very little chance I'll knit it all in the foreseeable future. No doubt some of it will be making individual appearances here in the weeks to come.

Then we drove to Nostell Priory, a NT property we've been wanting to visit for ages. And the sun came out.


In the grounds, the magnolias are looking wonderful, and the scent of the flowers was held in their sheltered corner.


There was a charming arch over the path.


This bridge had collapsed into the lake, and has been restored with much effort and expense. Of course, it can't actually be used; since it's narrow and has no guard rail, it doesn't comply with health and safety.


A cream tea in a loose box in the old stables, followed by a tour of the house (too much Chippendale for my liking, but an interesting building), and it was back northwards again. The sun through the car window was so warm that I dozed off. Fortunately, I wasn't driving.