It's just as well I work in the sticks. I'd never survive the temptation of regular exposure to good shops.

I had 1 day to attend meetings in S. London near Waterloo. Waterloo stn, as every London knitter knows, is dangerously close to I knit London.

And so it came to pass that I entered the shop in search of a single needle, tripped, and fell into their bargain bin, dislodging my wallet in the process.



The thick yarn is blue faced leicester roving, 100g. The pink and purple is silk 4ply (actually counted 7plies, but never mind), 100g each. The Addi needles, nuff said.

The DPNs are the smallest I now own, 2mm and 1.5, for trying fine stockings.

Thanks to zmiya_san's loan of a yarn winder and a ball winder, I've been skeining and winding a lot of yarn lately.

Here's my 4kg of yarn now skeined, washed and wound, towards a major jumper project.

Thanks to my recent guest Gwendolyn, I now know how to wind silk successfully - on a toilet roll. Here's a couple I prepared earlier.



Lady Gwen is the EK visitor at DW last year, who did silk weaving, starting with growing the silkworms from scratch. When I first heard about her through Lia's posts and pictures I thought 'that's right off the scale' for craftiness. But Gwendolyn isn't mad...just really, really thorough. :-)

Today is hot for London, around 29 dec C apparently. Glorious, excellent for drying still more skeined and washed yarn.

Well, finished making - now for the washing and fulling part.

This is the flat cap I started at Raglan, in 2 ply jumper weight, which is quite fine. Hence it took an age.

The next one in the same yarn will be with 2 strands and bigger needles.

In this house, it's hard to photograph anything without a measure of cat butt appearing alongside...

I have knitting on the brain.

I can do it without having to find all my craft supplies in our new place - just go with what is at hand. It's mindless and soothing.

Of course I've now just received both Kaffe Fassett books and a book about traditional sweater patterns, so I have slightly obsessive knitting-brain, and my plans are running miles ahead of my actual capacity and stash.

Ah yes the stash. I'm still trying to stick to my resolve to work from my stash. It doesn't always work, and I've stumbled and bought myself treats here and there, but I try to keep it to enough for a pair of socks at a time...

except last week I ordered 1/2 a kilo of black Shetland yarn for making Tudor flat hats. Whoops. Well, it's a commission.

So is the Kaffe Fassett, as it happens; the books are inspiration to make silly sweaters for a friend. But he'd better give me an idea of what he wants or I may run amok. It's hard to sit still reading a knitting book, my fingers begin to twitch. And Robert's taste does not run to Kaffe Fassett...

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Slowly, the flat is looking more homey. We manage to empty a box or so a day, and have invited friends to come unbox our books with us tomorrow.

They're the biggest bibliophiles I know outside the SCA (we still have friends outside the SCA, it's allowed - I checked) and the best people to ask for help in reshelving.

Til now we've simply reshelved at random - truly at random, as in 'take out books and put on nearest shelf' so right now it's genuinely weird - there are' books on shelves but no discernible order. Even my self-help books are out on display.

It's a symptom of just how wearing the move was that we're not busy fixing it all RIGHT NOW MUST FIX and that we're simply ignoring it. But tomorrow we gird loins and fix it.

Yesterday for a laugh I fired up LibraryThing which I haven't touched in several years. I was keen to record all our books but mostly stopped after 2008, when I had most of them recorded at that point - probably in anticipation of our next move, and influenced by Terafan the raging keen got-a-database-for-everything guy. Har har! They've run away again.

Now is a good time, because the LT interface has improved, a lot, since I last used it. And I can tag stuff better now. I can even delete stuff, because we've parted with a lot of books - otherwise we'd have no room for the new ones.

I know that weeding out books is a rare things for a lot of bibliophiles. But I genuinely want a working library, one that I use, not one that just causes L-space, a la Discworld. I don't want bad books; I want things I read, that I re-read even.

Someday, I'll have to pack and leave again. I only want to take what I absolutely need, for wherever that next trip takes me.

And on that trip I don't need still more cat books or schlock paperbacks. The cats know I am a cat person, and I know, and that doesn't need a book collection to illustrate it. And paperbacks I vet carefully for 'will I really read this again?' And a lot of them don't pass.

Books are for the things I can't keep in my Sherlockian mind-palace, and that keep stuff together (stories, ideas, instructions) so I can find them again...YMMV.

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Robert is on a mission to cross the city today to visit w/ Vitus, so I'm free to putter. So I think it's more exploring the neighbourhood - find the nearest Lidl, for one. Part of moving is finding the new 'local' stuff.

We've determined the local Aldi is crap; the local Sainsbury is ok, but not 'friendly' as a trip on the bike.

We don't visit Iceland, typically, b/c most of what they sell is not food as I know it. The Morrison's is ok but is on the other side of a tricky bike ride, or a tedious Tube+walking trip.

The truly local shops are excellent for food, so we're good there, but thin on some of our staples, that we used to get from Lidl in Hackney.

So today it's Lidl's turn, as it's listed as just over 1 mile away. And it's beautiful out.

Got a sweet card back from the former neighbours, who got the baby blanket and say they're delighted, totally different from the usual girly pink crap (no 2 is likely a girl).

And settling into Reading, for them, is working out, though their cats are enjoying a Dorset village holiday til they're permanently settled into a mortgaged house.

I miss them, and their cats both - they have a charming Laurel and Hardy pair of tuxedo cats with character.

For general springy cheer, see some lambs enjoying their trip up a mountain in Lombardy:

What's not to love?

Finished a scarf with the yarn left over from making Lady Anne's Bigger on the Inside shawl.

It includes Daleks! and the last of my Zauberball yarn from my longitudinal socks.

Details on Ravelry, for those keen on it.

I didn't expect my slippers to work - they were so huge and blobby and they weren't shrinking as quickly as I expected...but third wash and rinse was a charm.


Flat knitted pieces, before sewing up and felting.



Finished - sewn into footbags, and then felted. The lopi yarn is shedding a lot of longish hairs and fuzz, but I'm hoping that passes.

I can see the advantage of 'shearing' a felted fabric now (the way medieval cloth was felted, sheared, felted sheared again) in a way I hadn't before.

I posted them on Ravelry, if you're a Rav-ist (membership has its privileges).

I staggered back to the office yesterday and am doing a passable impression of a human being, albeit one stuck with a bad case of January, which is accurate.

Tomorrow there's a forecast of snow in London, which would be charming. If there's more than 2 cm there's a good chance of all public transportation grinding to a halt, and school cancellations. I alternate between being amused and appalled by the English in winter, and wonder how they will cope with an increasingly extreme climate. More moaning, I suspect...

While laid-up on the sofa, I did get a chunk of knitting done - a cardigan for me is now well underway. It's a clever design for knitting from the neck down on circular needles, with an absolute minimum of sewing-up required (something I look for in a pattern).

I'm using some of the huge mass of yarn donated to me by Master Paul when he gave up on his warp-weighted loom project, plus a lilac varigated colour yarn carried alongside. 

Another kitty-pang: I had no 'help' in knitting this project, as I've sometimes enjoyed in the past. Sigh.

However, I should be back to the slope this evening with a couple of projects to start for Coronet.

Today I discovered that the whole of Jane Grey's prayerbook was online. It's not pristine, but it's clear enough to see the combination of very Renaissance capital letters (cutting-edge artwork), used alongside the more traditional secretary hand, that I associate with 15th c (think of Christine de Pisan's city of ladies, or other French 15th c MS). AND it's in English.

Glorious. 

...England is a awash with flooding. I'll have to watch the Peanuts Christmas special on YouTube, and the Grinch too, for any white Christmas fill.

Hoping to stop pretending to work and slip out of the office soon, and go shopping in person rather than online. 

For this holiday crafty wish list:
- get more gilding tools to improve gilding results, hopefully today
- finish lining a hood
- start a new cardigan on the needles
- make more smellies as gifts
- optional: start laying out new bodice for German undergown

I have to rein in my instinct to start a half-dozen new projects - I get so wound up at the prospect of a few days uninterrupted crafting that I tie myself in anxious knots over what I could do, and end up frozen, unable to decide what to do first, and only manage to do the boring routine stuff like housework.

If I can settle to just a handful of projects, I have more chance of actually finishing them, and thus avoiding further rebukes from UFOs round the house.

I've actually had some FO results - finished a smock, finished some knit garters - but somehow they're anticlimactic compared to starting new.

Lovely Indian-summerish weekend in Thamesreach.
Started with shopping in Shepherd's Bush, meeting Dragana, a recent arrival to Thamesreach from the fair lands of Avacal, An Tir. Despite Tube 'planned engineering works', the biggest hassle was the football fans congregating at the station - fortunately less of an issue on the return trip.
As often happens, I didn't come home with what I planned to buy, but still managed to spend money on fabric - a beautiful light herringbone linen in a madder-orange-red, and an astonishing silver-and-blue diamond woven silk, which I think will make stunning trim on anything cool-coloured - white, blue, black. I bought the rest of the bolt. Dragana found a gorgeous burgundy wool which, if I didn't already have in spades, I'd consider buying myself. 
Happily, one of the favoured run of fabric shops now stocks haberdashery, which is a first - usually fabric and notions are separate in this corner of London.
We also stopped at the firetrap, to buy me some towels.
At my favourite shop, we found out that the properties along Goldhawk Road are being 'redeveloped' - the shop management is not keen on it. I found the relevant planning document on the Hammersmith and Fulham council website, which says (emphasis mine):

Talk about being damned with faint praise - 'poor visual quality'?? Why not just say, 'ugly'?
But frankly, if you think Classic Textiles is ugly, you haven't looked at the rest of the market frontages. This is not Knightsbridge, for pete's sake.
Seems their resistance may be overruled - most recent chance to comment closed on 11th Oct.

Back home Robert was being clever with metal bits (photos to follow eventually), and we found a weekend-long Star Trek moviethon to pass the afternoon, puttering on our respective projects. HIGNFY has started a new season, but was slow to warm up

I've finally finished a couple of knitting projects enough to block them (one is still drying); stitching up is next.

Sunday was a lovely day, and I took a risk and headed to London Archers' range at Kensington Palace. Unfortunately, the club seems a bit shaky on communications - they're not very good at letting people know when outdoor shooting is on through the autumn and winter. It's usually on, unless it's off, sort of thing. It was so beautiful out, though, I felt safe taking the trip to find out.

Sure enough - sunshine, not a breath of wind, intermittent cloud. Spectacular for long-distance shooting, and I spent a very happy hour or so trying out Dad's bow. It's longer than mine, and is marked 38 on the handle, which is probably 38lbs at 28" (archery equipment uses a mix of Imperial and metric measurements, depending on what it's for). I very carefully strung it (don't know when it was last strung!) and took it for a spin.

Wow. I don't have a huge dataset for longbows, but this one is beautifully smooth to draw; the extra length means the sharp increase in draw weight towards the end of the draw doesn't happen to me. It's probaly lighter than my own (couldn't carry both to the range) but it was a joy to shoot.



While I didn't shoot for long (don't want to strain me or the bow)...it was one of those days when I feel centred and All There while shooting - fully in my body, in the experience of shooting, and have just a glimpse of what Buddist monks hanker after by taking up archery - moments of perfect stillness untroubled by anything outside the moment. 

I beamed all the way home, wrestling with the very long carrying tube on the Central line, and then on the bus - it's too long to stand upright on the Tube. It blocks traffic one way or another.

Afternoon and evening were quiet - laundering assorted fabrics and projects, more knitting, dinner with Robert, still more knitting while watching the new ITV 'Upstairs, downstairs' drama thingy, Downton Abbey. Beautifully made, and Maggie Smith is excellent. I love Edwardian fashions. I see ITV now has an online catchup player as well.