I treated myself to some lovely stitch markers as a bit of an early birthday present. These came from Knitoramaa on Etsy. As you can see I was having a bit of a Douglas Adams moment, but she has several others.
I love the flexible wire loop on these which goes over the needle. I find them easier to use than the jump ring sort, and am inspired to have a go at making some of my own soon.
Happy birthday to me 🙂
It has been a good day so far. New knitting books, before 8am! A bit of chocolate in the afternoon, and I think a birthday curry from the takeaway down the road this evening.
I am hoping to get back to a bit more frequent and regular blogging. My parents got stuck in the US with all the ash business, but are home now, they stayed with us on Wednesday after flying in to Heathrow. I have been doing a bit of knitting and spinning. Several samples and experiments have been done for my next City and Guilds project, which is going to be a cushion cover. I am currently washing them so I will know their proper tension, then I can plan out the real thing and get started on it. I have even (shockingly!) finished a couple of projects which I must photograph and waffle on about. More soon, I have some serious curry decisions to make right now.
As I mentioned in the previous post I missed the first half-day of Unravel due to being stuck in the US. This was a bit of a last minute trip, booked only the week before we went out there. Paul was sent out for a work trip, and I went along for the first week so I could go and see my sister Annie.
The travelling was also the reason behind the hastily cast-on portable projects. I didn’t take the jumper with me as I didn’t want to risk it being either confiscated or lost by the airline. We were staying in New Jersey, a 1 hour train ride from New York, so that gave me a good bit of knitting time on the journeys into and out of the city on the days I went to see Annie.
While we were there we did a mix of typical touristy visiting, and helping Annie and her husband Andy move into their new appartment and generally hanging out with them.
On the tourist front we went down to Brooklyn and walked back to Manhattan over the Brooklyn bridge, you can see the bridge in the background here behind Paul, Annie and Andy.
And we went to Thomas Edison’s factory and house in Orange, New Jersey (this is his house).
The house was interesting, and the factory definitely worth visiting. Edison was a man with many interests.
On my last day going in to the city Annie and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have been once before about 12 years ago, and was keen to see it again. It is a fascinating museum and I am looking forward to going again next time we go out to visit them.
As well as all the wonderful exhibits (including a whole temple from what is now the site of the Aswan dam) they have fantastic tiled mosaics on the floors in the Greek and Roman art section. There are 8 different mosaics, 4 circular, and 4 square. I love symmetrical patterns like these, particularly tiling patterns. I am hoping to do something on symmetry for my City and Guilds Diploma course (the Diploma is the course after the Certificate course I am currently doing), and so am collecting inspiring images.
As you can spot here one of the mosaics is in twice to make a nice grid.
We had a great time visiting the city and seeing Annie and Andy again, and were really lucky with the weather at the start of the week. It was colder than home, but warmer than New York had been the previous week, and lovely and sunny. Unfortunately after the first three days the rain started, and on the day I was due to come home it snowed all day and then there were high winds in the evening, so finally after attempting to take off once my plane was cancelled and we were all rescheduled to the day after. The next day was much better weather-wise and although we were a bit delayed it all went fairly smoothly, and I even managed about three hours sleep on the plane (this is quite good for me, I am not a very good traveller).
My travel socks are motoring along, although they have been abandoned now I am home in favour of the jumper. Pictures of knitting will come soon!
Hope you are having a good start to 2010, and I hope that it will be a great year!
Hope you are all having a great day!
I think there will be a lot of eating, board games and knitting in the rest of my Christmas day 🙂
Washing machine: fixed
Light in utility room: not fixed but at least we know more about the problem
Central heating: hopefully will be fixed soon, plumber coming this afternoon
New car: ordered
Old car: limping along
Work: backlog
Heather: more sleep needed
Happy birthday to me! Today I am 32. 32 = 2^5 (I’m afraid I haven’t worked out how to do general superscripts yet), and powers of 2 are always nice numbers. I think this will be a good year 🙂
Well, there have been quite a lot of goings-on here lately. The latest of which is having our (rather ancient) boiler replaced. To add to the excitement they don’t make the kind we had before (a back boiler behind the gas fire in the lounge) so the new one (which should be loads more efficient) is going into the utility room, but it does mean having new pipework to connect it to everything else. Hence, due to concrete floors downstairs, and therefore having to put the pipes through the ceiling, the floorboards have had to come up in both our spare bedrooms, although luckily not all the boards, just about half of each room.
Up until last week both of the spare rooms were fairly full of yarn (and other assorted bits and pieces), which has now all gone for a nice holiday to a storage unit a few miles away. It is rather distressing not to be surrounded by all my stash, although I did make up for it by having a load of undyed yarn from Bluefaced arrive on Tuesday, which is now sitting in its box in the middle of the lounge 🙂
Luckily we have 24hr access to the storage unit, so if it all becomes too awful I can run down there and stroke it all. I am going to take the opportunity to have a bit of a sort out when it all comes back again too (it went there in rather a rush so I didn’t get much sorted on the way out). I have managed to give away 8 cones of chenille to people at the Reading knitting group on Saturday, so I am making a start!
We are currently on our third day of no heating, and second day with no hot water. The kettle is getting a good workout! It has been a bit cold over night, but I am wearing my warmest knitted jumper and it is ok. I am missing the hot water a lot more. It took me 20 mins this morning to boil enough kettles and saucepans to have a not-terribly-warm bath about 4 inches deep, and then another couple of kettles to wash my hair in the washbasin. I have learnt from when we had our bathroom replaced that it is more comfortable to wash your hair in the bathroom washbasin than the kitchen sink, since it is a better height, and you don’t run the risk of bashing your head on the kitchen cupboards 🙂 Hopefully all being well it should be finished later today.
While it all goes on I have been doing a bit of City and Guilds sample homework (although with frequent breaks because the latest couple of samples have been hurting my hands) and sorting out some of my photos. So hopefully more blog posts with actual photos soon!
Dear World,
The number of hours in the day appears to be inadequate, please adjust the rotation of the Earth accordingly.
Love Heather
PS. I have tried using the hours usually reserved for sleeping to get things done, but the results weren’t pretty.