How Did I Miss This?

Looking back through my April photos and the blog  I see that I never recorded on here the re-opening for the summer of Geri's Ice Cream Parlour. 

This annual re-opening has been a date of note for us for many years and  we were very sorry that due to Covid Geris remained firmly closed all last summer. We were rather worried that with some restrictions still in force this spring she might not bother to open this year either, in fact we were rather afraid that she would not open again at all.

We need not have worried. The Ice Cream Parlour re-opened, for takeaways only, on 1st April. Although we like to be there on opening day, that wan't possible this year but we were there on 2nd, and delighted to hear that it was possible to buy her trademark desserts in takeaway form. We'd wondered if we would have to content ourselves with cones. 

We duly did that very thing, choosing our favourites, choc mint chip for him and hot fudge for me. I would have had the raspberry ripple, which is my all time favourite but it seems the Orkney Dairy has stopped making coconut ice cream, so the RR is off the menu.  Boo to then. 

Still, even second favourite was a Lovely Thing.

Happy Mail 3 - All the Austen Things

 I may have mentioned the Literary Gift Company on here before, with a warning to perhaps hide your credit card before you start browsing. They also have a sister company called Present Indicative and the same caveat applies. That said I mostly use them for presents for other people but a couple of weeks ago I decide to let myself go slightly wild, brought up the Browse by Author menu and clicked on Jane Austen. 

And lo and behold, several days later I received a large box which contained this

It isn't actually all the Austen things they sell but it's a pretty collection nonetheless. Mug, candle, 3 themed notebooks, a tote bag and a smaller zipped bag to match. 

And not in the picture, but inevitably this as well

It was harder to do than you might think. 

Meanwhile I am in daily expectation of more happy mail, but the postman is proving a disappointment in this  respect as he hasn't ventured up our drive, not even with the election communications which are destined to go  straight from front doormat to the recycling bin, for three whole days. 

Ah well, perhaps today.  

The Sun Was Shining

at the end of last week and it was so warm on Friday it occurred to me that I could risk asking someone round for a coffee outside without  them being in danger of freezing to death. So I got on the blower and suggested it to a local friend who I have talked to on the phone over the last year but not actually seen in all that time except for five very careful socially distanced minutes when we exchanged Christmas presents. 

She was delighted. I then went and looked at our patio furniture, which has suffered the depredations of several Orkney winters being stored in a more or less roofless byre, and then the equally harsh conditions of several Orkney summers living out on the patio and decided it needed a bit of TLC before it could be used. Or perhaps camouflaging  would be  a better description. 

I threw throws over the two chairs, and put a cloth on the table. The OH was busy taking cuttings from a geranium that was threatening to take over those  small parts of the sunroom not already colonised by the coffee plant which meant he had a lot of loose flowers so I rescued a few of those and put them in a small crystal vase. Eh, voila. 

Then the OH collected my friend and we spent three happy hours chatting away, drinking coffee and being abstemious in the matter of biscuits before he took her home. 

It was an unexpected pleasure (remember the days when we could be spontaneous whenever we liked?).

The geranium flowersare now on the hall windowsill and still gong strong five days later which is nice; they are such a pretty colour so I hope some at least of the multifarious cuttings 'take'. 

More Stripy Socks

 I posted the Felici stripy socks that I  did for son no two earlier in the month and I've now finished the pair for the OH. These were originally going to be for son number one, because the colour was called Goth Kitty and it looked black and purple on the website. Which would have been fine but when it arrived it had a fuchsia and a pink stripe in it, which I knew would be well outside son no one's comfort zone. So they were repurposed for the OH who is well pleased with them. 

And here they are. 

Tomorrow I plan a post that has nothing to do with knitting or wool or anything remotely connected. Because we need to ring the changes before we get stuck in a rut. 

A Postscript to the Rant

Someone has suggested that my dissolving yarn may be due to moth damage. The thought had occurred to me which is why I didn't name the supplier of the yarn concerned, in case it was my own fault.  I didn't think it was, because most my yarn is stored in drawers or plastic boxes, and additionally these have various forms of moth repellent in them. And I certainly didn't want to think that it was. 

However I woke up this morning with a very clear memory of taking that ball of silver grey out of the plastic bag in which the project had been stored and having to shake off it a couple of dead dessicated very small twiggy bit of stuff, and I suspect that they were in fact dead moths. 

So the bad news is that it probably was moth damage. The good news is that as that yarn was stored on a bag away from other yarn the damage is probably limited to that one ball - and possibly the other one that is the contrast colour, although no sign of that yet.  Fingers crossed. 

It's also a good lesson in making sure that my yarn is properly put away - stares hard at recent acquisitions piled up on top of box, - although piled up with a sachet of moth repellent on top, and in any case, now about to put safely away! 

Duck Now - Because I am going to Rant!

But only about yarn. In fact  about one specific yarn. 

In a recent fit of guilt, or adventure, or just being sick of seeing/tripping over bags with part done knitting projects in them I picked out my longest outstanding Ravelry project determined to finish it. I say Ravelry project advisedly because some of my unfinished works pre-date my joining the site and some of my other unfinished or started stuff never got on there in the first place. 

Anyway this particular thing was a wrap with a very simple lace pattern which dated back to 2017 (!!), and the reason it had been abandoned (because there always IS a reason) was that I had gone wrong and I wasn't sure I could find where I had made the error or, if I found it, whether I could put it right. But you know, I've been knitting for several more years since then, and I have done some other lace, although I don't know why because I do not have a gift for it, and I thought it would probably be a matter of taking it back a couple of rows,  and then racing to the finish. Because it's not a sizeable thing. 

Ha, ha! 

I had to take out about ten rows and as they were all over 200 stitches long that took me quite  a long time. However I did eventually get back to  a place where I recognised that the pattern and the number of stitches I had on my needles actually coincided, and instead of pulling stuff out I could now start knitting stuff on. Which was good. 

I got past the point at which  I had started to pull out and that was progress so I was a happy kitting bunny. Until this happened 

In several places the yarn started to fray and then break. It wasn't under any particularly tight tension, it hadn't weakened due to my pulling it out because we were well past that part of the ball. It was just wrong. And though I seem to be temporarily past the problem who knows that it won't happen again further into the ball?  I now feel I have to be constantly on the alert for places where 2 ply becomes one and make sure I place no tension on the stitches in those places. They aren't long enough, and they are too frequent, to justify cutting and rejoining, they're one or two stitches only. But it's very frustrating. 

Since there is very little pleasure left in knitting this I have reduced my time on it to  two rows a day which means it's an awfully long  way from being finished yet. The yarn has a beautiful sheen and it's very soft and warm ( as it should be since it's 80%  kid mohair) but however lovely it is  I wouldn't use it again, ever. You can say what you like about Rowan's kidsilk haze, but at least it doesn't self destruct when it sees a knitting needle. 

Yes Only Twelve - and now it's Only Eleven.

So the first bedside book is finished. I haven't been doing nothing but reading since yesterday's post, the book concerned was almost finished when I wrote it. It was the latest from Saturday Slaughters and - ta-da! - I really rather enjoyed it.

This is it

Beloved Poison by E S Thomson. It's set in a C19 London hospital which is on the brink of being demolished to make way for the railway, and a macabre discovery sets in train a series of very violent events. 

It's well plotted, well researched, well written and full of likeable and/or credible characters - honestly, whats not to like? My only criticism is that in places it's a bit Grand Guignol, and I did wonder if perhaps she had originally envisioned it as a graphic novel.  There's a verve and enjoyment to her description of a dissection which I found quite disturbing. 

But overall a hit and, as far as Saturday Slaughters goes, not before time. 

Bedside Books, and a Trip down Memory Lane

Spurred on by a cryptic comment in a Facebook memory about some horror or other that I was undergoing and of which I now retain no memory at all (and is that not a sign that perhaps sometimes we, or certainly I, get worked up about things which really have no long term effect and can therefore be met with slightly more equanimity than I can sometimes summon) I naturally turned to the blog to find out what it had been all about. 

And actually the blog was no help whatsoever. This mean one of two things. Either it really wasn't that awful or, slightly more likely, I had been deeply upset by The Dark Lord of University Gardens aka my doctoral subject supervisor, but didn't wish to commit details to a public document on the slim chance that a mutual acquaintance might see it and report back. This latter happened all too often. Not the reporting back, the self censorship of the upset. 

Anyway while I was reading through the ups and downs of 2017 I came across accounts of my efforts to read down the pile of books on the chest of drawers beside my bed. Funny that, I thought, because although that pile eventually got down to nil (although I am not going to claim that they all got read, I suspect some of them just got put away) I'm fairly sure I have a bit of a stack there now. 

So I went to check. And I do. To wit - 

There are twelve. And so we all know what happens now ...

Happy Mail 2

This one took so long to arrive I was beginning to think it had got lost, as things I had ordered afterwards had arrived before it did. It was supposed to be tracked, but it was sent using that totally useless tracking  system where you put the number into the Roya Mail website and they say 'We have received your parcel and no further information will be available until we have attempted to deliver it'. What on earth is the point of that? I know this came all the way from Sussex, so the length of England and Scotland, but equally well, most of the journey will have been by plane. So why did it take ten days???

Anyway there are three things to say about this particular piece of happy mail, the first being what it is. 5 x20g mini-skeins from Suzie at Elderflower Stitches in her Spring Sorbet Collection. I wanted a skein of this soooo badly but couldn't decide which colour to choose so opted for mini skeins of all five instead. They are  beautiful.

The second thing to say is that I thought I had the prefect pattern for them - hooray! but when I double checked it's not in fact suitable at all which has me rather stymied as, beautiful though the wool is, I didn't buy it so it could languish in a box or be a decoration on my shelves. I'm a bit busy with my Celtic Art assessment  just now, but once that's out of the way I must put my mind to looking for something else. I'm expecting to pair them with a plain cream skein and do some sort of wrap but we'll see. 

And the third thing to say is that I have to stop looking at Virtual Yarn Festivals  because all it does is introduce me to more and more indie dyers who are producing beautiful yarn which I then want to buy. Most of it I don't buy, but if I don't watch the festivals then I won't be tempted. (For those who might want to be put in temptation's way, the Virtual Yorkshire Yarn Festival for April - its every second month - is on this weekend and most vendors will put up their 15 minute presentations on You Tube. They are all on Instagram which is where the festival is hosted but I'm not on Instagram, which in my case  is probably a very good thing.)

Coffee and Cake

 

So all of a sudden there's lots to blog about, but I'll start here, with our wee jaunt at the weekend. The  OH needed some anti-fugal stuff for his citrus trees and some potting compost and a shallow dish for some  Pleiades (?)  - I know they aren't Pleiades because they're stars and a group of ancient Greek godlets of the feminine persuasion, and what the OH has is bulbs of a plant that looks a bit like an orchid and sounds something like pleiades. Whatever, they need special potting compost and they have to be planted in something a lot shallower than a normal plant pot, so we needed to get supplies. Also he had lost the trowel and since he's teeing up to do some gardening we needed a new one of those too. The garden centre has a very nice cafe, which I'm sure must have featured here before so as well as doing the garden shopping we had some coffee and cake. The first time  we have been able to indulge in that simple pleasure for eight long months.

It was lovely. Cake I hadn't baked myself, lattes  we hadn't made ourselves. Such a treat. I'd go more often if I hadn't boggled at the bill.

The cream egg cheesecake was not mine.  I cannot stress this enough. I did have a little taste, but these days I cannot cope with the thought of a creme egg, which is a Good Thing, and progress, and I  look back in wonder at the days when I could eat two, one after the other. 

Anyway we bought the anti fungus stuff, and the dish, and the compost, also two birthday cards, two half price notebooks and some gardening gloves for me. 

We forgot the trowel. 

Well that was a nasty shock,

Perhaps I should put a fashionable 'trigger warning' on this because it's about someone dying, in what I find distressing circumstances. It's not gory, or painful, it's just very very sad. 

So, I knew the woman who died only virtually in the main, since we were both on Ravelry and we were both in a few of the same groups, notably the  one for Archers Listeners although there were others too. We did meet once, at the first Yarndale Festival in Skipton, but as she lived in Cambridge and worked in London, once we had moved to Orkney the chances of us ever meeting again in person were remote. But she was still someone I knew and occasionally swapped messages with on Ravelry.

I heard on Thursday that she had died. It was unexpected since she seemed in good health. She was divorced and childless and lived far away from her nearest family, her father and brother, so it was her employer who raised the alarm on Wednesday after she didn't log in to work on Tuesday. They got in touch with a local friend, who got no answer at her home, called the police to gain entry and there she was. 

She was such a lovely kind and  helpful  person with many many friends so it has hit me hard to realise that in the end she died alone, and that it was her employer who realised something might be wrong.  . It's a sad and unfitting end for the person she was. 

It would have been her birthday this coming week. And she would have been 54 years old. 

Seize the day. And hold your loved ones close. 

Happy Mail

I am indebted to Helen, the dyer behind Giddy Yarns for the concept of Happy Mail, a term she use on her vlogcasts for the receipt of nice things that she has ordered on-line.

I have been waiting for some happy mail myself and yesterday the first of three anticipated parcels arrived. 

A matching project bag and notions pouch from For the Love of Yarn. Since I seem to be knitting so many socks just now and since I am usually working more than one pair at once it seemed a good idea to get a new sock project bag. I love the fabric this one is made from, it's so cheerful,. The notions pouch clips onto the handle to keep together stitch markers, sewing up needles, large safety pins  and a tape measure, which will save rootling about in the bottom of the bag, which  is just too common an irritating occurrence. 

The safety pins incidentally are to save me from the horrors of Kitchener stitch. I had  got  to grips  with it some time ago and then for about three socks in a row recently it went messily wrong. So I now put my final 24 stitches onto safety pins, turn the sock inside out, replace the stitches on dpns and use a three needle cast off. It looks just as neat, it's easier to do and it's a lot harder to drop stitches that way. Result! 

Back to the Beach

So for most of last week the view from our front windows was pretty much this

except for when you couldn't see the view due to the thickness of the snow showers. Not walking weather as most of my friends would agree. Except for the one on Facebook who urged me to 'get my boots on and get out in it'. There was rather too much of a  'pull on your big girls pants'  subtext to that for me, especially coming from someone who lives near Marseilles and therefore enjoys a  much milder climate than Orkney has.

But the snow has all gone (for now) and yesterday we got back to what we hope will be our daily walk. We just went as far as the local beach (Cara) which is totally transformed from how it was last year. They seem to have done a lot of sand extraction from it at the back, and the tide was a long long way out so there was masse of sand to walk on. I also took lots of pictures and here are some of them.

The Viking! 

Nesting fulmar

sandy ripples

I'm always fascinated by shells which have these worm casts on them, they make such amazing patterns and have an interesting texture. 

After a morning at the Conference (Panels on Women's Work in Iceland and Northern Women's Voices and a more scattergun one which I suspect was 'anything interesting we can find to say about Shetland' which encompassed an archaeology dig, an obscure, and miserable, medieval poem by a medieval Shetlander  and Rhona Laing, the Procurator Fiscal in Ann Cleeves' Shetland Detective Novels. I felt this latter one would have benefitted from  being written by a woman, but hey-ho!) and a bit of domestic drudgery of the laundry persuasion I am definitely ready for today's walk now.  

At Last - I'm doing Something!

 Not everyone's cup of tea, but I'm looking forward to three half day sessions at this;

5th International St Magnus Conference

Island Histories and Herstories, 14-16 April 2021 content

Island Histories and Herstories, 14-16 April 2021

Because it's on-line, I just picked the sessions that looked most interesting for me; sadly this means two morning sessions, but I daresay I'll manage. And today's is the afternoon one. Papers on Women in Gaelic Literature and Women's Work on Prince Edward Island.  

In rather more sobering mood, I find on looking it up that my second assessment for the Celtic Art course is due in on 5th May so I'd better start thinking about that a bit more seriously than I have to date!

Socks for the Boys

 A week! I haven't posted for a week, which would be because we haven't done anything. It snowed so we couldn't get out, it was bitterly cold so we wouldn't have wanted to, so all we did was stay in and do stuff that is fun to do but not very exciting to write about. 

However I have done some socks for both my boys. These ones are for son no 2 and I'm havering between posting them down or keeping the to deliver in person on the grounds that we should be able to do that before very much longer. Although there's an up in the air aspect to that which I may post about tomorrow. 

Anyway these are a plain sock knitted in Knitpicks Felici sock yarn which I hadn't tried before. Sharon at Great British Yarns recommended it, and I have to say it's fabulous. There's a pair half done for the OH in a different colourway and  wouldn't be at all surprised if I didn't buy some more in due course. 

And these ones are the April socks for the one in Canada. Clue for the month is Thompson.The pattern is a modified version of Vanilla Latte which is available through Ravelry and is an excellent basic pattern as it gives a choice of heel and toe. I did my usual toe because I can by now recite it in my sleep. The yarn is from The Knitting Goddess and is called, for obvious reasons, choquoise. I'm hoping it isn't too bright for him, but come on! most of it is brown. He has recently confessed to a liking for 'dark red' and I found a ball of dark red kicking about in a project bag recently so I guess next month's will be dark read ones. But who knows, I may run mad and do them in neon green*

* except of course I won't because then he wouldn't wear them and it would be a waste of my time and effort. 

From The People Who Brought You

 the World of the Impressionist Painters (see here ) I give you  - The World of Jane Austen

I treated myself to this as a reward for getting my first Celtic Art assessment done and I did it last week. I made myself finish the picture before I looked at the accompanying leaflet thing to see how many of the places and people I could match up with the novels. As Austen herself said, sometimes we guess right and sometimes we guess wrong (I paraphrase slightly!) and so it proved here. I did better with the buildings than the people, other than the obvious ones, but who cares? It's a pretty and colourful picture and it was fun to do. And that's probably all you have a right to expect when it comes to jigsaw puzzles.