Some 'last time' things

 So there were a few things we wanted to do 'for the last time' before we moved.

One was a final trip to Geri's Ice Cream parlour where, in honour of the occasion I had an ice cream  dessert and not just a cone,

Mine's the top one, a raspberry ripple and the OH had a Salted Caramel. In the event I might have enjoyed a cone more, but there was nothing wrong with the raspberry ripple really.

Then there was a trip to Celina Rupp's. This was partly a last visit  to her Barrier View Cafe 

and partly to buy a piece of jewellery. Celina is the last major Orkney jeweller who didn't feature in my jewellery box so we felt that needed to be remedied, sort of a farewell present to myself really. After much deliberation this is what I chose

It's from her Harvest Moon collection and I love it. 

Another one was catching the primula scotica. This was going to be a More Walks (2) post but time has gotten the better of me. We saw a post on Facebook a couple of weeks ago which said the primula scotica was out. It seemed a bit early but we decided to give it a go as it would be nice to see it once more before we leave. It only grows in Orkney and Caithness, and as it's very tiny and very low growing it's hard to spot. Once you've found your first one and got your eye in you see loads and we were lucky.

they may be small but they are lovely

thumbnail for size reference!

After we'd had our fill of the flowers we had a wander along the cliff tops at Yesnaby ( which are very close to where the P S grows). I love this stretch of Orkney's coast and have many photos to prove it. here are a couple more from that recent visit

We are still packing but fast approaching the stage where we will only have the last minute things to do which can obviously only be done at the last minute. That doesn't necessarily mean I will have the time, the energy or the means to blog again until after we are in the new house. We'll see. But I'll be back when I can. 

Farewell to Some Old friends

 

Not people; but chairs. 

These belonged to my grandmother; in fact they belonged to my great aunt before that and I assume they came from a set of six but two were all my grandmother had. My parents kept them and at some stage they came to me.They were what Peter Kay calls 'spurr churrs'  but it's a long time since they have ben called into service. We did have them recovered a few years ago but basically they have just been sat in the spare room for years. There is no room for them in the new house, not nohow so, with a heavy heart I took them to the Orkney Reuse and Recycle centre this morning  where the man in charge was very enthusiastic about how nice they were. In fact he waxed  so enthusiastic that he almost made me want to bring them back home with me. 

But sadly there's no point in taking them all the way to the Central Belt where they would sit, in the way and unused again for decades more. I was very sorry to say goodbye to then but the time had come. 

More Happy Mail

So the thing about getting a monthly club instalment very late is that the gap between instalments becomes quite short.  Not very long after the ( late ) March Van Gogh from Yarn Unique, here comes April's William Morris. 

I ordered DK for this as I thought I knew what the yarn would look like and I wanted to use it for  a specific mitten pattern I have. Sadly my impression of what the yarn would be like - I expected it to be based on the colours of Strawberry Thief -  and what it actually did look like were very different and it won't be suitable for the pattern I had in mind at all, as the textures won't show up in anything so dark. 

I'm not devastated! I'll just have to look for a plainer mitten pattern. 

Here's the yarn - and the extras, a bookmark as always and another coaster

Those colours in the yarn really do not say William Morris to me, but I'd be the first to admit I don't know a lot about his work.

This isn't a club where you have to buy it every month and I'm skipping the next two as they're Monet, and I have a lot of Monet themed yarn from someone else, and Turner, because I'm not a fan. If I remember I will be back in July for Kandinski. 

We are still packing but at least some of the filled boxes were taken away by the removal firm yesterday which was a relief. 

A Book Post

 Obviously with an imminent move we are rather busy, with packing, admin ( don't talk to me about BT for at least a month) farewell visits to/from people and oh! did I mention packing. So the blog is a tad neglected. Also I see it is a long time since I updated my reading posts, so here is one about some of the books I have been reading or listening to. Can't do them all, I'm up to 38 and I suspect I've forgotten to write  a few down tbh, so I would be here all day and readers might give up. 

There is a new Mick Herron Slough House book out in autumn and with that in mind I have been re- listening to some of the earlier ones to keep me company while filling in boxes. So far I have done Slow Horses, Real Tigers, and Spook Street, plus the three linked novellas The List, The Drop and The Catch. I've just started on the most recent which was Bad Actors and which is a personal favourite. There are gaps because some of them I don't want to listen to again, or at least not just now. Herron seems to go from strength to strength and I'm eager to get my hot little hands on the new one, Clown Town, once it's out.

Back in the autumn when I went to Bloody Scotland in Stirling Elly Griffiths did a talk and she was publicising her new series of books which features time travelling detectives solving historical cold cases. I wasn't particularly sold on the idea so didn't buy the book when it was published, but recently it was available on Kindle for 99p, so I splashed out and I enjoyed it much more than I anticipated. It's called The Frozen People if anyone wants to check it out. 

Talking of Elly Griffiths a while ago she recorded some Podcasts called The Plot Thickens. I forget how I stumbled across this - possibly Audible brought it to my attention and I enjoyed listening to them. there weren't very many but she had some interesting guests who talked all things crime fiction with her. One of them was her friend and fellow writer Lesley Thomson and as a result I checked out the first of Thomson's series about a mismatched couple called Stella and Jack. It was called The Detective's Daughter. I borrowed this from the library and I have to admit to finding it hard going. Jack is distinctly off-beam, and Stella has a lot of her own hangups and neither of these are as fully articulated as they might be; also there were jumps in the sequence of events, and timelines which were difficult to understand. It was well plotted and with some interesting characters and some surprises along the way and I may well persevere with the series and put the oddities in Book 1 down to sloppy editing if subsequent ones are better. 

Eight down, twelve to go - but it will be more than that by the time I manage another book post I suspect! 

More Happy Mail

 

This arrived yesterday and is the Yarn Unique gallery club yarn for March. No prizes for guessing the March artist. The coasters are wooden and glorious colours, I love them.

March do I hear you say? is it not May now? and indeed it is and I should have had this weeks ago. It was sent but it never arrived, so I had to have a replacement sent out and it came yesterday. On the upside this means it goes into the May count, rather than the April one, which is generally a Good Thing. Another Good Thing is that it gave me some inspiration for decorating our new family room - not that I'm planning to get the paintbrushes out the moment we get through the door, whatever the OH thinks to the contrary! but I've been worrying that I wasn't getting many decorating ideas , and now I have at least one. 

And as I am determined to finish something this month I wound the skein into a ball last evening and cast on this

Socks for the OH. Obviously since he is the bright sock fan of the house. 

ION, we have started packing. Only in a small way. The removal man brought us some boxes yesterday and we made up three and filled them. I suspect that's how days will largely be going for the next couple of weeks. 

Happy Mail, Project Progress and Wool Stats for April

 First the happy mail. 

Top photo is the Little Grey Cells quarter 1 club from Henny Penny Makes. The bottom photo is 2 skeins of fingering weight with bronze stellina in it. These were in her clearance sale and I only ordered one, but for some reason her website  charged me double the postage it should have done so the second skein was sent as compensation for that. Which was very generous. 

I am fairly horrified to have to admit that I completed no projects at all in April. I should have finished at least a pair of socks but I was half way down the foot of sock two when I realised that sock one felt tight in the leg and when I tried to try it on, it wouldn't go. This was totally my fault as I had just cast on my usual number of stitches for a sock for me, without making allowances for the fact that the spiral pattern on the leg  was going to draw the whole thing in. So they had to be pulled out. I cast the yarn on again to make a plainer pair  but didn't get it finished - well, my enthusiasm had, understandable I feel,  been somewhat doused by having to pull the other ones out. 

I also spent a lot of time on a large project which I had hoped to finish in April while realising that it was in fact a Big Ask. I made lots of progress with it, and it will be finished this month, but we're not quite there yet. It is  going to be fabulous though and it will certainly be easier to move in one large piece rather than lots of little component pieces scattered around in five different project bags. 

Given the above the stats could have looked fairly horrifying but in the event were better than I anticipated. In was 869g, and out was 1035g,  which makes a net decrease of 166 and a running total (decrease) for the year to date of 3499g. Slightly better than at the same point last year in fact. 

Progress on the two wips from last month's round up looks like this

the lacy Japanese inspired scarf

I haver  to say this is growing more quickly than anticipated which is a good thing, but I can only work on it when I'm feeling calm, which currently is not very often with the move now quite close. I do try to work on it every day, but it doesn't always happen. It will look much nicer after it's blocked; scrunched up like that on one needle you can;t really see the patterns properly. 

The Earth Dancer cross stitch now looks like this

Much more hair, finished feathers in head dress, a face and neck, and the start of her medicine bags.

Because observable progress is so slow on this, and it's a big stitch, I also picked up a small project which was over half done to work on, as it will be encouraging to get it finished while the other one grows. Foolishly I didn't take  a picture of what it looked like before I started work on it again but this is what it looks like now

There were a few finishing stitches needed on the pot of lavender and the fan ( that rather amorphous blob underneath the perfume bottle ),  and then all the work on the farmhouse, the trees in the background and the start I've made on the lavender field in front is what I've done since I picked it up to finish. 

Really not sure how much crafting time I'm going to get this month but I hope all three of those things will progress, even if only slowly.  Time will tell. 

More Walks (1)

 Well, only two really. 

Here are some photos I took at Happy Valley after we had got over the shock of encountering the stoat killers. 

 

Obviously the draw at this time of the year is the bluebells, but there were plenty of daffodils still out. 

Blue, pink AND white! 

would be arty-crafty photo of moss on tree trunk!

new carved stone. there were a few of these dotted about

a perfect 'Enid Blyton' den! 

the elusive (on Orkney) running water that isn't just field drainage! 

the place seems a lot lighter than usual. maybe it was the weather, maybe it was the late arrival of leaves on the trees.

It's a lovely place for a gentle walk and one I shall miss. 

After we left Happy Valley we continued on to the Ring of Brodgar, not that we particularly wanted to see that again but in case any of the World Heritage Site Ranges were there. A friend of ours, who retired as a Ranger at the end of last summer died very suddenly a couple of weeks ago and we were hoping to find someone who could tell us something about a funeral/memorial service. By the time we got to the Ring the Rangers had packed up and gone for the day and we're still no wiser about any memorial service. We sort of hope there will be one, and before we leave Orkney so that we can attend. Since we had flogged all the way from the Ring car park, which is not as near to the actual site as you might think,  we did have a wander around the Ring itself, not nearly as interesting as it used to be when you could walk wherever you liked and actually touch the stones, not a thing you're allowed to get close enough to do these days. And although I have many many photographs of the Ring of Brodgar I couldn't resist taking a few more. At least the place wasn't full of cruise ship hordes.