In memory of Ellie

We had to say good-bye to our darling Ellie this morning. After a charmed life, where she always seemed to land on her feet and pull through in spite of the odds, her kidneys failed her on Saturday and her poor little body finally couldn't cope. She was sweet and loving. She was quietly courageous. She made our house a home and we miss her.

 

Staycation

It's the last week of my holidays. I was going to spend the week doing some jobs around the house but after a disastrous Monday when I cut my hand doing a minor DIY job, I decided to spend the week being a tourist in my home city. 

So I visited the Ikon Gallery and Cafe Opus on Tuesday, and did the RBSA sculpture trail and the 6/8 Kafe on Thursday with Ruth. We also saw an EdinBrum Preview at the mac

The rest of the time I've been lounging with Ellie in the garden, enjoying the sunshine.

But it's back to the office next week. 

Seascape

 












 

It's not surprising that the Penwith peninsula has been a haven for artists  - it's difficult not to be inspired by the sea and the sunlight in this part of Cornwall. This is the view from the cliffside as we walked from Lamorna to Mousehole and the beach at Pedn Vounder. I always come away from our Cornish holidays wanting to create something.
 

So I've been wondering what to do with this cone of yarn that Caroline gave me for Christmas and am thinking about trying to make a Cornish sea-inspired jumper from it. There's not really enough yarn to make a sweater so I will need to combine it with something else. I really like the combination of the soft hazy sky against the sparkling sea in the photo above and I'm wondering if I could re-create the effect in yarn - perhaps by pairing this with something silky. Or perhaps try to capture the wavy stripes of the surf against the sand on the beach at Pedn Vounder.

dancing in Tate St Ives

This picture, taken in Tate St Ives in June 2012, has started a very silly tradition... 

 In June 2013...

... and in July 2014!

Hula Girl

I love my job! Today at the office, exhausted after two weeks of spending every waking moment marking end-of-year projects, I won a bottle of wine for being the best at the hula-hoop. One of the teaching rooms had been turned into a fund-raising fete with skittles, sports circuit, the Human Fruit Machine, competitive bubble-wrap popping - and the hula-hoop. And I was the best!  

A Meeting of the Learned Society

There is a tiny handful of people who I know who will get this post (you know who you are ladies!) so I feel justified in blogging about my new dress

I've bought it to wear when I give a paper at a conference in July - it's the first paper I've given for ages and consequently I'm feeling rather nervous about it.

But wearing a yellow floral dress (which I intend to team with my favourite yellow cardigan and trendy chunky white sandals) can't fail to keep me smiling, whether the paper goes well or not.

I'm reminded of Mildred's purchase of a new brown velvet hat to cheer up her winter coat in preparation for a meeting of the Learned Society in Barbara Pym's Excellent Women. I just hope I won't feel like Mildred did once she got to the meeting and thought, 'It was a pity I had not thought of reading up the subject a little, that would have been far more to the point than buying a new hat'...

bon vacances

Just back from a great mini-holiday in Paris where we did touristy things like visit Sacre Coeur and go to the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Pompidou Centre; saw the craziest exhibition of outsider art at the Musee d'art naif; and spent a relaxing afternoon at a park in St Ouen visiting an exhibition of art made by local school-children - here's Mark modelling one of the exhibits.

Just keep on dancing

It's International Dance Festival Birmingham at the moment and we've already seen two brilliant shows.

Last Wednesday we saw Alias perform 'Sideways Rain' - which was so simple and yet so brilliant. The company enter the stage from the left, traverse it in a variety of repetitive movements, and then exit on the right - over and over again. It was mesmerising.


Then on Saturday we saw Kidd Pivot perform 'Tempest Replica' based on Shakespeare's The Tempest - Caliban was fantastic. The show blended film, lighting, shadow-work and dance and was really beautiful.

We see a lot of dance in Birmingham but these two shows were, in many ways, better than anything I've ever seen.

As usual, I've been inspired to dance myself. I've been going to a streetdance class at the gym, which is great fun and I'm wondering now about doing something more serious... 

... but perhaps I could start by knitting some legwarmers. 

New Life

As I'm not really a religious person, Easter means chocolate eggs, bunnies, and fluffy yellow chicks to me - it's a celebration of springtime and new life. So it seems fitting that I've spent this Easter weekend planting a new tree in my garden.

It's a Eucalyptus Nicholii from Grafton Nursery. It's just over a metre tall at the moment but promises to grow another metre or so this summer. Digging over the ground to plant it was a surprisingly tiring job so I'm now going to eat chocolate while watching my new tree flutter in the breeze.

Woody Weekend

Just got back from a long weekend at Center Parcs, where we kayaked on the lake alongside the ducks; trekked through the treetops; wandered through a grove of giant redwoods (babies at only 170 years old) and flew owls including this very rare black barn owl. We also spent a lot of time in the heated pool; in the spa; eating pancakes; playing table-tennis; learning how to use a crossbow - I just love Center Parcs!
 

Yarn Shopping

Went to the Sewing for Pleasure show at the NEC on Friday. I've never been to one of these shows before and was a little disappointed. It's basically just a big indoor market. I was expecting there to be a lot of artisan spinners and dyers and so on. But actually, most of the knitting stands were just selling packs of cheap, acrylic yarn. 

The highlight of the show for me was the Toft stand - I bought some of their alpaca double knit yarn and the cutest fluffy pom-pom to make a hat. It all came in a lovely little bag and makes a very nice pre-birthday present for myself.

Don't think I'll bother with the shows in future though...

Reading List

My reading list for 2014 - mostly birthday and Christmas presents from 2013. No match for Jim's 2014 reading challenge - which is to beat the 57 books he read last year. But some challenges here nonetheless - notably, my challenge to read more Dickens. This challenge, recklessly agreed to after a glass of fizz on Christmas Day, was to read a chapter of Dickens a day. That quickly became 5 chapters a week and I'm ashamed to say that I haven't read a single chapter at all this week. The challenge now is just to finish Little Dorrit. Reading Muriel Spark's Symposium at the same time probably isn't helping. Spark's sharp, economical prose is such sweet relief from Dickens that it's difficult to resist.

Others on my list for this year are a mix of pure pleasure (cats and Anne Tyler), semi-serious literariness (biographies of Charlotte Bronte, Patrick Hamilton and Jane Austen), and just great writing (Patrick Hamilton).

Apparently, it's naff to post picture of one's reading matter (as naff as posting pictures of one's breakfast no doubt). Well, naff I am.



Summer in February

I've found myself thinking a lot about yellow cardigans recently. I've got two sunshiney cardigans, which I love and wear year-round. But I've never managed to knit myself a yellow cardigan. I once spent a lot of money on some golden-yellow, very fine alpaca yarn in a cute shop in Edinburgh but half-way through the intended project I realised that that kind of yellow just doesn't suit me. The cardigans that I love are a sharper, lemony yellow and I've realised that this is the shade that I need to knit with.

Having pondered the perfect yellow cardigan for weeks now, I finally took the plunge and spent a fortune today (Rowan - your prices are getting insane!) on this cotton-linen yarn to make my first Spring/Summer project of 2014.

The pattern is going to be this one from Knitting By Design by Emma Robertson. When I first flicked through this book in November, I thought it was a bit boring. But I found that I kept being drawn to it whenever I visited a bookshop. I ended up buying it as a pre-Christmas treat for myself and I've already made a few things from it. It's really grown on me.  

Christmas Jumper

This pattern is from Haiku Knits by Tanya Alpert and is about the only pattern in this book that I really like! It's an unusual construction, knit in one piece starting from the bottom and then knit over the top of the shoulders, casting off/casting on for the neckline before knitting the back from the top down. The sleeves are picked up from the arm openings and knit down. The only sewing involved is the side seams. I altered the pattern slightly to make the neckline roll better and gave it longer sleeves. The yarn is Sublime Chunky Tweed.

I didn't quite finish it for Christmas but it's brightening up January now.

January Blues

Last weekend we went on a couple of day-trips to try to cure my January blues. On Saturday we went down to London to visit the Paul Klee exhibition at Tate Modern. I've always loved Klee's work - I think his use of colour and pattern is very appealing to anyone interested in textiles. I've seen many of his works in reproduction and have collected dozens of postcards of his images but I've never seen them in real-life. I was amazed at how small they are; you have to look at them really closely and it felt like peering into a magical world. There's a sense that Klee is using a very personal vocabulary and I'm not sure that I could make any attempt to try to interpret their meaning but they are beautiful nonetheless. My favourites were his fishy paintings including 'Fishes in the Sea'.

Later that day we went to Liberty and I bought this fabric to make a new spring shell-top. 

Then on Sunday we visited the Sea Life Centre in Birmingham. The star of the show was this friendly filefish - it was really interested in us and kept following us around. It took many, many attempts to photograph him - he swims so fast - so I'm very pleased that I finally managed to get a decent shot.