(Many) shades of (nondescript) colour.........

In rummaging through the brain for a title for a blog post, I did for a brief moment think about calling it something a little more precise than that above. Fortunately, I did see sense, otherwise I think that there might have been some Comments with a capital K.

So, ok, I shall just whinge on a bit bout the weather. Grey, grey, grey &etc. With added rain. Actually, I think that the Met Office lot have reclassified the nomenclature so that what was "rain" is now called "showers"; if they say "rain" they really mean "cloudburst"; and that is now more likely to be catastrophic, torrential and leading to flooding.

I am not entirely joking.

So, where was I? Well, the weekend before last was the annual AH gathering. And actually, it did not rain all the time. Indeed, we managed to sit outside for tea/coffee breaks on I think three occasions. Certainly helped to make everyone feel more light-hearted than they had been doing.

I thoroughly enjoyed teaching my class - nearly everyone who had said that they were going to do it did, and really worked hard. We had a lovely time. Such a pity then to get home to no telephone and hence no broadband - a tree had come down, we subsequently discovered, some way away from the house, but in falling on to a line had put sufficient stress on it to yank our line off the wall. There were a few trials and tribulations before it was fixed, not the least being totally unable to talk to an actual human being. Interestingly, when the repair man came, he said more or less the same thing. We were not on his job list, and apparently in the good old days he would have phoned the office and had us added in, but now he coudn't talk to a human being either. However he was a lovely gent and fixed it anyway. Phew.

This Sunday, the sun shone again after a week's further rain. I sat outside and read the Sunday paper, and later knitted. But now it is back to the same old, same old.

So, motivation has been hard to come by. I am, however, keeping going! The Ashton shawlette - very nice to knit. I have risked putting in an extra "body" repeat, and am not quite convinced that I have sufficient yarn. But I was sensible enough to put in a lifeline before doing it, so I can rip back easily enough. I found the first pattern row of the border a nightmare to get right, so I ended up putting in a stitch marker for each repeat. I felt a bit of a wuss, but it is making things so much easier that I shall do the same again with another pattern.

In something of a fit of boredom, I cast on a simple lace shawl with some oh so pretty mohair yarn that I bought last year somewhere on or near Cape Cod. Urk. So fine that I can barely see it, and all too easy to knit a stitch and a yarn over together as the threads stick like glue. Ah, well, good for the soul.

I finally finished plying the Wensleydale and silk. Totally yummy.




I'm sure that it is terribly disrespectful to HMQ to put a coin upside down like that, so sorry Ma'am.

I had to ply this before that, though. V nice, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is!



I am having to really sit on my hands - or, I suppose, more accurately, keep on knitting other things - to stop myself from casting on the W/S, I so badly want to see what it knits up like. The other yarn is rather nice, but I have yet to think what I might do with it. So no rush there.

Now, if you remember these:



They have become these:



Haven't they grown? We can go and collect them in a couple of weeks - scarily exciting. They have names, too, although until we meet them again, we don't know which is which. Sam(wise) and Ferdi(brand). Yes, back to hobbit names.

That'll put the kibosh on much knitting and spinning - particularly spindle spinning - for a while!