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.