Well, I haven’t disappeared off the face of the planet but it has been a busy couple of weeks.

Since my last post, I have been to The Beadwork Fair at Lingfield Park, which was great fun. Oddly enough despite being a bead fair I managed to buy some knitting needles 🙂 I bought another set of 2.5mm rosewood dpns to replace the ones I have had a few years and which are all rather bent and one has snapped. I did buy a few beads too, I found a lovely selection of pretty coloured delica beads, which I am going to make into bracelets when I finally get round to it. I am not very fast at this beading lark, as can be witnessed by the fact that I am still only 2 inches into the bracelet I started just after the 2003 Beadwork Fair.

I also went to the International Arts and Crafts Exhibition at the V&A which was fantastic. A really interesting collection of exhibits, in a well thought out exhibition. I would encourage you all to go but unfortunately I see from their website that the Exhibition closed yesterday 🙁 The V&A generally is always worth an outing though, and I am definitely resolved to try and get there more often and have a closer look at all the amazing things they have.

Keeping on the theme of the V&A I also went back there for the Knitting and Crochet Guild AGM, when we had a talk on knitting at the V&A and conservation, all interesting stuff. The previous day a few of us also had a very interesting and illuminating tour of the textile conservation department also organised by the Knitting and Crochet Guild. A lovely chance to meet up with lots of knitters too, and wonderful to see all the things they were making or had brought along to show. I am definitely inspired by Mary Graham’s knitting with wire to have another go myself. The shapes she had knitted were quite different from what you can achieve in a more floppy material like most yarns, they rather reminded me of surfaces of constant negative curvature which you get in non-Euclidean geometry (worth clicking the link for the pretty pictures even if you aren’t a mathematician!).

As well as the outings my parents have been to stay twice in the last week! Both on their way to, and on their way back from a holiday in France, and it has been both my parents-in-law’s birthdays. Just to add to the general hecticness, the TV broke on Saturday and the car needs a service, it doesn’t rain but it pours!

In among all this domestic chaos I have managed to knit a bit more on the multicoloured cotton jumper, and here is the first sleeve, nearly finished.

Since photographing this I have now joined it to the body, unfortunately no photo since the camera batteries died and are currently recharging. Hopefully I’ll take a piccie tomorrow.

So, I am off to catch up on all the blog reading I have missed, cast on for the second sleeve and possibly read a bit of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (I am hopelessly slow and only on chapter 4 so far).