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This is 98g/212 yds of squishy goodness. ^_^

Mara - Sep 1, 2009

I love Woolhunter yarns, and am working with a couple at the moment. Her colours are exquisite. Yay for getting red tomatoes, finally…!

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So the Sheffield Wool and Textiles Craft Fair was this weekend. I went on both days and this is what I came back with.

That’s a hank of alpaca (90/10 alpaca/nylon), a hank of Gothic Yarns in Lost Innocence, 100g of Shetland in Humbug and a niddy noddy. Never had a niddy noddy before. Can’t wait to use it! Which is probably why I’ve been on such a spinning kick. Finished off the second singles of the September club shipment from WildCraft today. Will ply it tomorrow.

In gardening news, lookie! I have red tomatoes!

I just keep picking off about two of the reddest a day and eating them right then and there. So yummy.

I’m sick. Feel like crap. So instead of a “proper” blog post, you guys get pics.

Here are the socks I just finished today. They’re the Marlene pattern by Cookie A, found in the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Knit.1.

And here’s the Clapotis I knit for myself. It’s to replace the one I lost. This is what I worked on while I was in Finland for a week.

Just posting to show that I’m still alive. Will blog about my trip to Finland later. For now, I’ll just leave you with a pic of my gorgeous new shoes.

My mystery shawl is done! All of the yarny/knitterly details can be found on my Ravelry page.

I bound it off last night and was kinda worried that it looked a bit small. But once I made it wet and spread it out on the bed? Boy did it grow. :D

The amount of daylight in the attic bedroom isn’t the best, so forgive the not so awesome pictures. I’ll take more outside (with me wearing it) when it’s dry. I ran out of pins while blocking this (had about 1/6 to go), so I had to do some emergency strategic redistribution. Now I’m just waiting for it to dry so I can wear it!

Here’s the whole shawl:

This is clues 1, 2 and 3:

Clue 4:

And the fifth and final clue:

Last night at the pub, I got these as a birthday gift from my friend Jane.

And I just spent over 800 words of my 5000 limit explaining why I titled my dissertation’s set of stories the way I did. I guess I feel very passionately about that.

I should be working on my dissertation commentary. And I will start it today. The story section I got done last Thursday (14,081 words, giving me about 1000 words or so to play with while editing). My goal is to have half of the commentary done this week, the other half next week. So that’ll leave me with about four weeks to edit and revise the whole thing during August.

But while I haven’t been actively working on the dissertation (I think about it constantly), I’ve been doing other stuff. Like participating in two KALs (a blanket and a shawl knit-a-long). And when those two weren’t giving me enough to knit, I started Christmas present knitting. My dad’s present is going swimmingly. :D

This is what I did just now (about ten minutes ago). I started off with two empty tea cans like this:

And about ten minutes later, I had this:

The stripe-y one now holds pens and pencils, the green one matches the paint in the kitchen and is in there holding my wooden utensils.

In yarn-y news, I finally scored some Wollmeise. I just happened to stumble upon an update and I got a skein of Campari Orange (medium) in the Twin 80/20 base. The color saturation is wonderful. And I’m going to knit it before I buy more to see if it really is worth stalking the site for an update.

Earlier this spring I decided I wanted to try to grow some veggies. So I planted seeds for lettuce, tomato and cucumber. It was four of each in their own compost pellet things and they started off fine. Then three of the tomato plants died, three of lettuce plants died but all four cucumbers seemed to be okay. I was telling O’s dad about my gardening attempts and when he saw the state of my puny tomato plant, he bought me two seedlings.

Anyway, eventually I moved all of them outside into a sack of compost.

Apparently, the fates decided that three of the cucumber plants had to die too.

So what I’m left with is two large tomato plants (but no tomatoes!), a lettuce plant and a cucumber plant.

And the cucumber plant that I do have left has two teeny tiny cucumbers growing! See?

This year, the cherry tree has decided to grace us with cherries too.

I did try one that was way darker than any shown in the pics, but they’re still not ready. :/

Oh and my last instalment of the WildCraft fibre club came last week. Isn’t it pretty?

I can’t wait to spin it up, but I’ve got so much on my needles at the moment (two KALs!) and my dissertation (at 13,409 words now) so we’ll see when I get the time to do it.