Uncategorized

Willi - Oct 2, 2013

Which reminds me. We’ll be in London from December 11th to the 14th. We’ll be seeing Wicked on Wednesday and Matilda on Friday. :D

And dance! Which I did on my walk home on Friday night.

I love going to the theatre. And now that I live in London? I actually get to go!

My friend Krisi and I went to see Top Hat to celebrate her birthday. She’d found a deal through LastMinute.com (I think that’s what she said) where we could get a 2 course meal and a ticket to Top Hat for just £24.

Sure, our seats were up in the nosebleed section because come on, at that price, we weren’t going to get great seats. But that didn’t stop us from thoroughly enjoying the show. The dancing, the songs, the actual story… all of it was fabulous.

I highly recommend seeing it if you ever get the chance. The show is leaving London to go on tour in 2014-2015, so you’ve got until this Saturday to go see it if you want to see at Aldwych Theatre.

I went to the library today. I specifically went to get Let The Right One In since it’s the book club pick for November, but when I saw The Woman in Black, I grabbed that too. I’ve seen the play, but haven’t read it. Nor seen the movie. The play was fabulous, so I’m really hoping that the book’s good too.

The only thing that’s dampening my enjoyment of it so far (yes, I already started it, couldn’t help myself!) is that a previous patron has obviously used it in an assignment of sorts. There are tons of bits underlined in pencil (at least it’s not in pen?) and little notes in the margins. I’m trying not to be distracted by them all, but it’s not easy. I’m nosy and want to see what this person has to say about the story. But I want to read the story without outside influences first. And they’ve folded down the corners of the pages too! Someone clearly doesn’t respect library books.

Since my current projects (socks and a blanket) aren’t inspiring me too much, I decided to cast on another cowl. It’s the stranded version of one of my designs (a double-knit cowl) that hasn’t been released yet. I really should get to work on writing up the pattern and getting it tested, huh? I procrastinate way too much. Anyway, when I picked out the colours for this, I had the recipient in mind. She looks fabulous in orange. But it wasn’t until I actually cast on and started knitting that it occurred to me: the dark grey and orange? Totally Halloween-ish. At least it’s not black! And they do look really nice together, so hopefully she won’t mind.

In an attempt to blog more often, I’m trying a different approach. I’m going to think of my posts as mini-postcards of my life.

So! I went to Belgium last weekend to visit my sister. She took me to the market on Sunday morning where we had breakfast before doing her weekly grocery shop. The mint tea was deliciously sweet; the galettes had smooth goat’s cheese and honey inside. Since they were spread onto the freshly cooked dough, the melted goodness dribbled down our hands as we finished them off. Definitely worth a visit. So jealous she gets to do it every week!

I have the best friends. Look at what was waiting for me in the mail box!

I wandered over to Covent Garden today. I wanted to buy these sunglasses since I don’t have any sunglasses right now and I know Oliver has bought me a 50s style dress as a birthday present. But alas, they didn’t have any in stock in the store. They did suggest buying them online, but shipping is like £5.50. Over half the price of the item. Not worth it. The shop girl was really nice though. She’d bought some for herself online and let me try them on. They were cute. I might get them one day if I ever order something else from them at the same time. So I wandered around some more, found another retro shop and voila, now I have sunglasses. For only £10 too! :D Whatcha think?

During my wanderings, I also came across a massive queue to get into Five Guys, a blue chicken, a cute cottage and kayakers in the Thames. :D

I can’t remember where I read it, but someone suggested that instead of having ice cream, try a frozen banana instead. So today I was like, cool, I’ve got bananas, I’ll try it. So I put one in the freezer. A few hours later, when it was frozen solid, I took it out and realized I’d forgotten one crucial step: peel the darn banana first! I tried defrosting it but the whole thing just turned to mush. Gave up on that one. Attempt #2 is currently in the freezer (and yes, I did remember to peel this one)… To be continued! Maybe. If I remember to update. So probably not.

I went to Woolfest last weekend with three of my friends from Sheffield. I went up to Sheffield by coach on Friday. If you follow me on Twitter, then you already know that the air conditioning wasn’t working and it was just awful where I was sitting. But there was a plug socket and free WiFi so it wasn’t too bad. I spent Friday night at Lucy’s and we went out to eat with Sarah and Janice for my second ever curry. I’ve decided that I like Indian food, as long as it’s very mild on the spice. If I remember correctly, I had a lamb paneer? Whatever it was, I liked it. The portion was huuuuuge, so next time I’d be better off just getting a side portion instead of a main, but that’s an issue I have with a lot of places.

Saturday was Woolfest day! The drive there and back was fine. I really miss driving, even with the morons who hog the middle lane on the M1. Seriously, if you’re not passing other cars, just shift over to the left. I managed to be a bit more restrained in my spending this year, but I still feel like I came back with some really great stuff. I got 100g of fibre from Woolyknits, a skein of Sparkleduck Spirit, two skeins of Eden Cottage Yarns Bowland DK, a skein of EasyKnits Cherish (I think), buttons from three different places and butterfly hair accessories. I also got a lot of photos of sheep and alpacas and goats while there, but I haven’t uploaded those from my camera yet.

Came back from Sheffield by coach on Sunday. This time the air conditioning was working, but there were no power sockets and no Wifi. Fun times. And it looks like I missed the great weather down south while at Woolfest! It was only +15C and slightly rainy on Saturday up in Cumbria. Sunday it got to +27C and was super sunny down in London. Today? Partly cloudy and only about +20C. How do I always seem to miss the nice weather?

We decided to go out to eat yesterday and settled on Byron Hamburgers at Westfield. I was really pleasantly surprised at how great the service was. All of the staff were super friendly and our waiter in particular was awesome. He took the time to chat with us and made me feel like he actually wanted to know what we had to say (unlike some places that just pretend to like chit-chat). I also noticed how attentive and fun he was with the kids sitting in the booth next to ours. So I’ve now e-mailed the company and let them know. I know how rare it is to hear good things, so I make a point of letting the manager, etc know if I’ve had great service at a restaurant or shop. Plus the food was great so I’m definitely going back there again at some point.

Knitting-wise (since this is supposed to be a mainly knitting blog), I’ve now finished all of the WIPs I’ve had on the needles since forever. My Joanie sweater still needs buttons (I bought some from Iceland but I can’t find them!), the Ethereal shawl is done as are the Glass Slipper socks. So today I’ve cast on TPHPE by Heather Zoppetti. I’ve got an urge to learn double knitting after I saw someone do it at the knit group at the Loop two weeks ago. So I figure this’ll be a good starter project.

So, in my last post I mentioned lots of exciting things are happening around here, but I didn’t say what. Now that it’s all official and nothing’s going to get jinxed (I hope!), I can reveal some of the somethings.

Firstly, and this is a big reason why I’ve been off-grid for awhile, we moved to London (and therefore have had no broadband for almost a month, so I’ve only been keeping up with Twitter and e-mail for the most part)! O got a new job and that required us to leave Sheffield. I love Sheffield, but there really weren’t that many opportunities for us there. Plus, I’ve been kinda itching to move again. Staying put for five years is a long time for someone who’s used to moving almost once a year. Anyway, our new flat is fabulous and we’re sharing it with a friend of ours that we’ve known for a long long time. Plus, sharing is a great way to save money and we get a much nicer place this way. And when I say nice, I mean nice. Right now, as I’m typing this, I get to sit on our balcony and watch boats go by on the Thames. And I can see the top of Westminster Abbey (I think… I’d better double-check that with O actually, just to make sure). So the last few weeks I’ve been dealing with all of the fun stuff that comes with moving. Like transferring utilities over, learning that when this place said furnished they meant it (I’ve never had crockery be included in a furnished place before!), discovering that the previous tenants hadn’t cleaned the oven at all, that there are carpet beetles in this place too. One was right smack in the middle of the wall as we were doing the inventory before we moved our stuff in so I know we didn’t bring it with us. But seriously, I’m so glad that we’re here. I do miss my friends back up north, but we do visit Sheffield quite often, so it’s not too bad.

Secondly, because we moved, I gave up my day job. I’m probably going to look for some part-time work here since I want to get out of the flat and actually talk to people during the day (there is only so much TV that I can watch while I knit), but I’m also going to focus on making the knit designing thing more profitable (ie actually pay me too for some of my time instead of just paying the materials). Now that I have the time and energy during the day again, I’ve been doing quite a bit of sketching and swatching. And I actually have a pattern that’s just been released! I’ll write more about it in a separate post next week, but for now, all I’ll say it’s pretty, it’s lace, it’s a shawl/scarf and it only takes one skein of 4ply/fingering weight/sock yarn. And it’s on sale until July1st! Sinikka will normally be £3.75, but if you use the coupon code “WOOLFEST13”, you can get it for just £2.50.

Thirdly, although this could kind of go with the secondly as it’s to do with knitting, I’ve been published in a book! The book, What (Else) Would Madam Defarge Knit?, came out this April. I haven’t really talked about it on the blog because I wanted to make sure it was a surprise for my parents and grandparents. They’ve received copies of the papercopy in the mail, so now it’s all good. It’s been so hard not talking about this (my designs were accepted back in November 2011), but now that they’ve been surprised, I can talk about it freely. My patterns are based on a fairytale by the Brothers Grimm. The story is about a child and his friend who stick together through the hard times and overcome a witch who’s trying to eat the poor thing (why? I still haven’t figured that out and story doesn’t say!). There are two versions of the fingerless mitts: twisted stitches knit in DK-weight and colourwork using 4ply. You can buy the e-book either through Ravelry or through Co-operative Press and if you want a paper copy, you can get that through Co-Operative Press too. There will be a KAL for my patterns in the WWMDfK Ravelry group later this year, so feel free to join us there too. There’s one more thing in the works relating to this bit, but I’ll wait to announce it here until it’s all official.

So excited! About everything! And now the coffee has kicked in too, so extra exclamation points!!!

There will be a “proper” post shortly!