A little shopping

As I mentioned last week, I was away recently. We had a little cottage in Northumerland - and I would love to show you beautiful pictures of the stunning scenery and vast diversity of wildlife, but I can't. It was freezing cold for most of the week, and only warmed up to allow days out to places where you know you're never more than 500 yards from a cup of tea or bowl of soup.

Fortunately, we did make it as far as Alnwick, and our first stop was Barter Books. It's a huge second-hand bookshop, set in the beautiful old station, and I was in heaven. Sadly, my other half was not really feeling it so I made one quick purchase before we cracked on with our day.

It would seem there is quilting in my future!

After our week away, we drove up to Aberdeen and I managed to find the time to go to the Hobbycraft sale. After all, who can say no to £1/ball sock yarn? Especially in the kind of colours that my female family members seem to like.

I saw that some of the stitching kits were reduced too and, though I didn't take to any of the cross-stitch ones, I did see this:

So there is also long-stitch in my future, another skill to learn! Hopefully this will be made easier by the designs being already drawn on the fabric. But although the colours are so pretty, I am not particularly looking forward to separating them all....

And one final thing I have acquired was a lovely present from Hannah, while she was popping home from her amazing adventure in Hong Kong. There were lots of lovely little bits in this super-cute bag, soon to be repurposed as a project bag:

Thanks Hannah! The sweets fuelled another 500 words of thesis this morning :) Keep in touch and see you soon!

And, dear reader, hopefully see you again soon, when I will be telling you about some things that I have finished. Hopefully - a couple are not quite finished yet....

WIP update

After a much-needed week off, we are back to business as usual round here. This week off involved some knitting, but not a lot - mostly we were watching Game of Thrones Season 1 and I didn't want to miss any of it while cursing a dropped stitch! I've got one project that is so nearly an FO I'll show you later in the week, and some purchases from the Hobbycraft sale, but for now, I am going to do a WIP update. [Footnote: this excludes the two jumpers that I'm STILL working on; Lauriel is waiting for me to find the time / energy / patience to reinforce the button band on, Skelf has been ripped back to the armpits and is now waiting for me to work out what to do next].

The first WIP is sadly absent; I was knitting striped gloves for my OH, and left them with him in Aberdeen when I travelled south yesterday. Oh well, if anything there has been backwards progress on them since they were photographed in this post; had to rip back all the fingers and have only redone the little one, but have done the thumbs.

And to add to the general bum note that we are starting on, my good camera is not talking to my laptop (clearly they can't get past whatever happened while they were together in my backpack during my week away), so we are on my less good camera.

Onwards and upwards....

Mince Pie Mayhem has grown from maybe three inches to four and a half. There is a lot of cabling in this, and while it is all two-stitch cables (i.e. one over the other), I do this on trains, buses and in the car. Cable needle required. Progress is a little slow, but I am very much enjoying it; the yarn and pattern are great together, and it's one of those that requires the right amount of brainpower to entertain me on my commute, but not so much that I need to refer to the pattern every three seconds.

Though what has grown is the socks for my Grandma, but they are worryingly long and skinny, like my feet and not like Gramdma's feet. I'm hoping I can finish this one before I see my Mum at the weekend, who has more similar feet to G'ma and can give them a try on.

Also, the Stitching Bug is still going. A little cross stitch kit that I'm battling the backstitch on....

... and another that needs a few more stitches to turn it into a cat next to a flowerpot. If you squint you can see it!

Right, now for a cuppa and to crack on with some craft - I am determined to get something seriously progressed tonight!