Oak galls

yesterday  i was running around like a headless chicken embarrassing my children because I found hundreds and hundreds of oak galls! I normally only find a handful each year and I boil them up and dry them out and keep them for another year but this time I have got hundreds.  Going to do a fairIsle in graduated murky colours. Lush.

Little autumn top

Joining in with ginny on yarn along.. A funny little tank top that actually won't fit anybody I know so I think I'm going to felt it and even make a soft toys to go with it or find one that it fits

Eek steek

Joining ginny on yarn along.  

eek steek.. I've cut the steeks which was and is rather unnerving.  I have converted the pattern orkney by marie walling to being knit in the round and there are all sorts of odd steeks going on. I'm hoping they are not going to add too much bulk. As for reading.. well i'm not. I'm listening to loads of TED talks. Brilliant

Coming along and got poorly lurgy

I actually feel properly ill today which means I can officially stay in bed.. quite like that... however I'm not actually acle to knit that much either. Don't like that.
Anyway here is the latest orkney situation and Tabby's collection of tat displayed to make me happy. Happy tabby.

Summer holidays

Having a soopa time.

Yarn along

Ive started orkney by rowan and it is really flying off the needles.  Very surprisingly.  Colors are a bit off but I'm using up my stash.  I'm reading a very dated machine knitting book. Following the chart for the fairisle leaves very little concentration capacity.
Lots of very's

Yarn along

Joining ginny on yarn along.  I needed a bit of a break from the monotonous stocking stitch and started on a pair of socks.  It's only tsken a day so far to do the colour work and that is just when waiting to pick up kids etc. Welk maybe staying up late too.  Im also reading taproot again. Its such a great magazine with no adverts....

Knitting when some people might suggest should be cleaning

I have an hour to spare. Well I don't really as the house is a pigsty. However,  it is a good day to be outside and lying on the ground and soaking up the sun. So, I fed the pony and lay down and listened to the birds singing and the dog snuffling. Life can be too short and these moments are not greatly forthcoming around here.

Although I've got a lot to do on the saddle shoulder boxy thingy I need a diversion. So a pair of socks out of the wool I dyed last week.  72 stitches and i'm going to do three inches of twisted rib and then see what takes my fancy.  I need stress relief as oldest boy birthday was this weekend and it involved ten boys sleeping, camping, climbing wall and lots and lots of food and egos.....

Ill clean when its raining. And husband is away.

A little knitting but a lot of dyeing

Yarn Along

Joining in with Ginny.. who's having another Baby... I'm so pleased.. and i'll never even meet him or her.!! nuts world of the blog family!

 

 

A day late again... (for yarn along...i'm not having another one!)

Well I have had a wonerful day today. I am organising my eldest boys' eleventh birthday and I had just one thing left to do. It was weighing heavily on my mind and it was only a small logistical thing, but I knew that I was in great danger of not doing it at all, because i'm like that. Anyway...  I did  it and it only took five minutes!! Hooray!. 

 

Therefore I had time to do lots and lots of dyeing.. therefore my yarn along is the dyeing book Wild colours by Jenny Dean and I'm still knitting my boxy saddle shoulder thingy .  I keep falling asleep when putting kids to sleep so it is progressing very slowly.

 

 

 

I had mordanted (with alum , iron, and rhubarb root) various sock yarns and I had gathered a large handful of broom flowers and i got going.  I'd remembered that a few years ago I had dyed some wool with gorse before (another word for broom) and it was a fantastic bright yellow.  I've been a little bit obsessed with finding a yellow and grey combination for the last year, but I rarely find it. I have come close with my boxy saddle shoulder thingy but this is taking an age and I need something to divert me.  Anyway, to cut what could take a long time, short, I didn't really get it.  The yellow is really pastel and wishy washy and not me at all. I had eight skeins ready and waiting and I had plans to make a sweater worth of one colour. However, the disappointment in the yellow meant that I had to do more more more!

So here below are today's excitements.  I found some old cochineal hidden in a draw. Hardly any really - about a tablespoonful.  I boiled it up and added it to my alum and left over gorse flower pot. I also picked some amazing rhododendrums and put that in another pot.  I then put the gorse and alum skein in both - dangling one end in one and and the other in the other.  The rhodoendrums were very strange... instead of a pale pink... green.. go figure.

 

 the pear blossom with cocchineal/rhododendrum wool

 so.. left to right. iron and thrice extracted oak galls, left over gorse flower and alum, soaked and forgotten about eucalyptus bark and simmered overnight, gorse flower and alum mordant all in one (no different to the exhaust bath) then...... delicious oak gall an iron and alum mordanting with the exhaust eucalyptus.

 necklaces waiting fo the perfect yellow sweater to go with them.....  ooh just noticed small girl on stairs!

 

I went on the most amazing walk yesterday.. the mist had well and truly come in and I waited for three hours for the sun to burn through... did it? NO.

 

 

 

Boxy saddle sock thingy

Here is a picture of my wonderful to knit but eternity to knit self designed, er actually not designed but evolving boxy thingy.

This is a rather disheartening knit in that I'm still really excited about it but it is going to an age to knit up the body. And I have no idea whether it will come out as any kind of wearable garment..

Yarn along

I finally finished my endless noro tunic..... I cant bear doing sleeves so I put off finishing for six weeks... and cast on my stashbusting boxy thingy.yet to have a name.  However im showing my hutt valley hat which has been requested by oldest boy. Think did the link wrong.. here is the proper one. And I'm reading the local cornish proprty pages drooling over all the lovely farms that we cant afford!

Updating the knitting

I'm so crappy at putting stuff up on ravely so I'm just uploading a "ton of stuff" (note .. been watching US knitting podcasts).. the knit girllls and knitting in circles.

shellseeker

littlest boy fairisle

littlest girl neighborly

to homeschool or not to homeschool.. that is the question

so... i love love when I homeschooled my four kids and I loathed loathed not having one second to myself EVER.  So I'm afraid I found I needed time to myself and then found a part time school.  They are all there full time now and guess what... I need time on my own. however, now when they are home there is  not enough time for them to get all the attention they need.. What do I do.

If you think part time is the best of both worlds... it isn't. It's the worst.. They miss something important in the week and confuses them and then on the home days you (I) have a vague sense of guilt that I should be covering what they are doing in school. But then the school know how to teach their subjects and I would just confuse the issue.. AAARRGH. To be stuck in what I like to think is best (home) and what the rest of the world think is best (school) is not a great place to be.

Update.. I've just come across this post that I didn't publish from a few weeks ago. I can tell I was in a state because through our educational life we have pockets of time where it everything (for one of the children) goes wrong and I feel hopeless in the face of it.  We are on our easter holidays now and so the problem is not so acute and so I subsequently feel quite chilled about it all.  I'm pretty sure that if I had the courage of my convictions I'd have two of them at home and two would be at school, but I just can't seem to muster up the wherewithal to submit myself to both.

so... here we are on a lovely lovely cornish spring day enjoying the dry ground for once..  Thats the littlest boy painting outside and then the littlelest girl lying in the den that I MADE.. Oldest boy suggested den making and then proceeded to pay the slightest attention to the den that I MADE... Middle boy was actually very  helpful for ten minutes and then insisted on a break.. which took three hours. What he is going to feel when he gets into the workplace and realises that it is the other way round,, I don't know!.
 

yarn along.. a bit late but it was sunny yesterday !!! and I was out all day long

Ive been having a great time in blogland at the moment so can I just say that I'm reading blogs.  Also I had never really got to grips the various blogreaders out there. Now that googlereader is going I have spent a while getting to know how to use these things and organise my cluttered mind.  I have, after trying bloglovin, gone over to feedly and it is so easy and now I've got all the blogs in one place. Bliss.  My daily intake has always been Small things and Soulemama and they really are still my mainstay.

I've been knitting various things... none of which i can easily get  photos of because everytime I try.... a battery is low, the internet is down,  there are half eaten bits of apple and marmite sticking onto everything..etc etc.. Anyway finally managed to pin down one project.  It is the ultimate stash buster.  I am a great one for dyeing wool and spinning etc but for the the life of me I cannot bear note taking or doing the same thing over and over again. The exitement is the dyeing and the colour changes. Therefore, there are  never more than one skein of anything. Although i have done a few socks, there is no way I will ever knit endless pairs of socks.. or even sock of pairs (mr topsy-turvy).  So... I am doing a v neck pullover that changes colour every single round/row. Great idea except see the ends I have to weave in. Weaving in normally stops me in my tracks but this is such a slow knit I don't mind. At least there is no sewing up ! All the yarns are mosty DK although some of the handspun is thicker and has therefore puckered up a little. I'm hoping blocking will help that. Although really that will be a heart in the mouth moment as so many of these yarns are dyed by myself and probably not completely set .. so there may be lots of colour change at that time.  I have made a concious decision not to plan any of the colour changes and it is interesting that when i have felt blue.... I didn't choose any blue colours!

Update... just manged to recharge phone and take a picture of the jumper i'm most enjoying working on. Again it is using  up a skein each of the natural dyeing I did last summer. The colours are so lovely.  I'm not sure if that is because I gathered the dyestuff around the same time last year.  There are blackberries, eucalyptus bark, goldenrod, dock seeds and I can't remember... I initially thought I'd do a sock so i cast on 72 stitches and did two inches of rib (knitting through the back loop on the knit stiches) and then I changed colour every inch or so. It was so gorgeous I couldn't bear that they would be hidden away as socks and realised that this "sock" was the right size to be a sleeve. I then started increasing two stitches every inch and then I got bored of that! Next thing... OOOH  why don't I do a drop shoulder/saddle shoulder boxy thingy.  Anyway to cut a long story short.. That's what I did, making it up as I went and repeated the sleeve all the way down the other end. Now I'm at the very very monotonous stage where I'm just knitting each skein down to the end endlessly, not forgetting it is in sock yarn on 3.25 needles. (8 stitches per inch).

Joining Ginny on Small Things blog

 ~ Two of my favorite things are knitting and reading, and the evidence of this often shows up in my photographs. I love seeing what other people are knitting and reading as well. So, what are you knitting or crocheting right now? What are you reading? Take a photo and share it either on your blog or on Flickr. Leave a link below to share your photo with the rest of us! ~

 

I'm knitting the Shell Seeker by Heidi Kirrimar and this is the link to my previous shell seeker

. However i'm not doing this as per the previous one as i'm not doing the pocket but I am doing the underlying pocket shaping and i'm doing it mid thigh length and I might put pockets on the bottom then. However, I have been very careful about splicing ends to ensure it can be reversible. Pockets on the inside then would not be such a good idea.  This isn't quite turning out as I thought as the length of the round is just a bit too long for the stripe repeats and so you don't get that lovely Noro gently colour changing stripe all the time.. Here's a link to this shell seeker

I'm reading - actually i seem to have temporarily given up reading.. opting instead for using Audible which means i can do the sock drawer (never really) whilst being brainy.  I'm listening to Andrew Marr's history of the world and Danny Bakers "going to see in a seive" autobiography.  It was a blast to listen to him as he is just soooo jolly. I needed jollyness.