Soft Greens...

After the knitted chair marathon, I finally got around to knitting the second wristwarmer in the soft and delicate green Fiberspates yarn.  These wristwarmers are my own design, using the lace border from the green scarf as a flared ruff around the base of the glove, the main part of the glove being plain stocking stitch with a little vintage mother-of-pearl button at the wrist.

I felt the yarn is so beautiful with it's subtle changes in hue that it would be a shame to detract from it with too much lace. It also has a slight angora type fluffiness to it.  These wristwarmers are lovely and soft to wear as well as being nice and warm.  They are going into my Etsy shop very shortly!

With the day job back in full swing and all sorts of everyday tasks to get done, I haven't had much time for painting over the past couple of weeks, which is incredibly frustrating. I did have the odd half hour here and there to paint a little still life of various pieces of fruit that I gathered from my garden - the last pear, a sprig from the only bunch of grapes that hasn't been made into jelly, one of the very last blueberries and one of the many, many apples on our tree.  I used a piece of Khadi paper that was free in an art magazine months ago - interesting stuff, very absorbent and sucked up pigment like a sponge, leaving the colours quite muted.  Hopefully this coming week I will be able to make more time to pick up a paintbrush before the withdrawal symptoms get too intense!

Knitting-wise, I'm having to design my own goldfish as any patterns I have turn out far too large.  After a few false starts, I think I have a working pattern now so we are good to go for the knitted aquarium. 

I also want to make a little felt doll that will actually pee to use as a visual aid for my new little boy at work....I've had a fortnight of changing nappies and think it's time we moved on!  Of course, a peeing doll may not work, but I'll give it a try.......

Thank You Ikea!

Let's start with another flamingo - I wanted to paint one in watercolour, very simply and cleanly, and this is the result. Sometimes I prefer a non-fussy painting. I think this may be the last flamingo for a while.....or maybe not, I still have a few ideas in my head for those lovely reference photos.

Now prepare yourselves for a pretty awful sight - it's not something I'm proud of and I know I am not the tidiest person but this really is dreadful!


This is how the dining half of my kitchen has looked for a while now....we haven't been able to sit down to a meal at the table for....oh, I don't know how long - at Christmas I had to move all my craft boxes into the hall and bedroom in order for us to have a semblance of a civilised meal together. I knew what I wanted to do with it but never had the time what with the day job and those darned potato paintings. However, after a day of building my set of Billy bookcases, another day of moving everything out including that (very heavy) dresser and putting everything back again into the new shelves, and a couple of hours this morning for the final touches, it now looks like this -


It's not totally finished yet - there are still a few things to the left that need to have homes found for them, and under the table are a couple of boxes of photos and paperwork that need sorting out, but I think you'll agree it is 100% better. There is even a whole shelf and a half that need to be utilised properly - either that or it's an excuse to get some more books!

While sorting through the dresser drawers I came across a couple of little treasures I had lost - nothing valuable but they mean a lot to me.


My maternal grandfather was a sea-captain in World War I and I was always told the tale by my mother that he had travelled to the South Sea Islands and brought back this bag of cowrie shells that were the currency of the island he had visited. I don't know any more than that, but I used to run my fingers through this bag of shells when I was a child imagining where they had come from, who had touched them and how far they had travelled. I still do!


In 2000 I took my children to St. Lucia for a week's holiday - we were even poorer then than we are now, and I used some small savings to take them somewhere special as my son had just left school and it would probably be the last family holiday we would take. I found an amazing deal on Teletext (never to be repeated!) and off we went and had an amazing time on very little money indeed - we ate at KFC or made sandwiches from stuff we bought at the supermarket, and used what spare money we had to take a trip to the rainforest and see as much of the island as we could on a budget. When we boarded the return flight, the above is the exact amount of money we had left....64 Caribbean cents, which I think is about half that amount in US$. If there had been the Icelandic volcano back then, we would have starved to death!

Don't forget the giveaway - it will run until the end of August.

A Little Piece of History.....

Yesterday I got my hands on a big box of photographs that had belonged to my mother, who passed away about 15 years ago. It was fascinating to see her as a child, my parents as they were when they got married, and all sorts of relatives who I barely remember, some of whom I never even met as I was born when my mother was in her forties and they had already died. Above are my maternal grandparents. My grandfather was a sea captain.....


Here they are on their wedding day - look at those wonderful clothes!


I have no idea who is getting married here (sadly very few labels on the photos) but my mother is the little blonde bridesmaid in the centre - she was three years old!


This is me, the little blonde girl in the red velvet dress that my mother made for me with a lace collar, at a Christmas party on the first cruise we ever went on. I was just four years old! Next to me is one of my brothers. It was 1963.............

There are many, many more photographs to be pored over and sorted through for copies to be made. One of the most interesting sets is of my father's time in the Middle East during World War II - he never spoke much about these years for obvious reasons, but also because he caught yellow fever while out there and spent most of the time very, very ill. He met my mother in a most romantic way - she was one of the WRAFs that moved the little model planes and ships about on big maps to show their whereabouts and he was in the RAF and phoned in the reports to her. They spoke on the phone, wrote each other copious letters, and had only met a couple of times before he proposed.....now there's a movie right there!