I tried to drown my troubles but I couldn't persuade Pooch to go swimming

A woman at work sent a forward round the office yesterday of Peter Kaye one-liners. This was fairly revolutionary - forwards, like spontaneous buying of doughnuts, don't normally happen at our place.

Many thanks for all your good wishes but the but the wheezing has now gone...and been replaced by a kind of gurgling which I can assure you is even sexier. Apart from that and the occasional coughing fit though I'm more or less better. Which meant that I was able to keep a social engagement I had made with myself yesterday evening.

Daddyo was kind enough to get me membership of the V&A for my birthday last year and so off I went to the China Design Now exhibition member's preview last night. That exhibition is one impressive piece of work. I have been to quite a few design exhibitions in my time but this one was really something.

It is split into three rooms representing three cities which have played key roles in the development of design since it was liberated from being just state controlled propoganda type stuff in the 70s. Th first room was mainly graphic design but also featured some clothing and these little fellas.

They are actually about a metre tall and cute and yet menacing at the same time to see for real.

Some of the posters were amazing but the ones that particularly caught my eye were those that played with the chinese charactors, fonts, alphabets and meanings. Posters representing the 60th anniversary of hiroshima had the character for hiroshima with key parts missing while still keeping it readable to represent what was lost that day. So moving even without reading mandarin. This on I particularly liked. It is a collaboration between a famous ceramicist and a graphic designer and the character represents 'China'.

There was also a case of these little maquettes decorated by different designers. Couldn't help buying one and planning how to decorate it myself.

The other two rooms were Shangai and Beijing. The Shanghai room was more 'arty' with videos playing and installations. The Beiking room though was truly amazing. I guess it caught me because I'm now surrounded by landscape architects but it was concentrating on the design of the olympic buildings. Wow. You might not like the way the chinese government acts but visually it is going to be an amazing olympics.

So apart from being amazed by chinese design what else have I been doing? Well I had my appraisal at work. "So how am I doing?" I said. She paused...."I thank god every day I see you walk through that door." So that was ok then. Somewhat different from my last appraisal at the IOP which largely centred around two points. 1 - It's all your fault cause you're rubbish, 2 - when are you leaving?

Then there has also been some knitting...

The cardi from the front cover of Lace Style. Using SkipNorth yarn naturally!

And then there is this to report...

This is a bucket of four leaf clover type plants Lou gave me and they all seem to be sprouting! I am terribly excited. But i don't want to get my hopes up as I generally kill off plants.

So today bodes well with my sister over and we're off to get pampered in a minute.

Quit your jibber jabber fool

If Pooch was to be believed Mr T would be popping out of a tank and throwing a snickers bar at me any minute now while telling me to 'quit my jibber jabber' because, as he solemnly proclaimed to me last night, three days is rather a long time to be ill. He seemed to think that there was some malingering going on and I should go into work regardless of whether I was better or not. At 1am I was coughing so badly and for so long that even he, who had taken refuge in the spare room complete with ear plugs, came in to ask me whether I was ok. "I'm fine" I croaked between whoops, "I think you're right - I'm definitely not really that ill. I'll go in tomorrow." I woke up this morning weak as a kipper and with this really sexy new element to my life - I audibly wheeze when breathing - both in and out. Yeah baby, I'm pretty irresistable right now what with the bed hair, sneezing, coughing and definitive fat pants ensemble - designed not only for comfort but also for those speedy sofa to bed transitions. So far today I haven't even done any knitting - that's how kipper like I am.

Anyway, one thing that is keeping body and soul together is the wonderful parcel I got from the Ravelry Discworld Swap. My pal was Judy and she sent me this lovely lot. (There was some chocolate too but in true swap style this didn't make it to the photography stage).

First up is this gorgeous bchunky cotton.

Judy is a bit of a whiz with natural dyeing and assures me the colours came from mushrooms collected locally from near her house in france. Wow.

She made me these lovely stitch markers:

And there were more beady things. A bag of red beads and these rather amazing things.

Knowing my love of buttons, would you take a look at these and guess how happy I was with them?

Aren't they amazing? Definitely another one for the buttony cardigan.

Now before I get to the piece de resistance this was a Discworld swap and wouldn't be complete without a Nanny Ogg recipe for...chocolate and garlic cake!

Hmmmm, maybe, but I can definitely see some of the other chocolate recipes featuring in my near future. Just look at this for a new take on crispy cakes.

Now....take a deep breath (ignore the wheezing and hacking cough it causes) and look at this.

Oh yeah.

Work it baby.

So pretty! Thanks Judy!

SKIP-a-dee doo dah

I'm back from SkipNorth and do I have stash to share... in fact I think I might have gone a little bit over the top. And that is me saying that. To take a photo of it all I had to stand on a chair and hover over the double bed like the human fly.

SkipNorth hit Coldspring Mill, the Skep, the KCG yarn mountain and KCG trading and Wingham Wools. I also made a personal trip with Julie and Sue to Texere on friday morning. And the photo above shows the spoils.

Going round we start with the big pile of greens which are going to be another starghan, but for my sister Sian this time.

Then there is a selection of lace weight cones and some Rowan Kaffe Fasett light tweed in dark brown - cones were £1 each and rowan was 1p a gram (can you believe the prices?).

A pack of wingham chunky in blue/green - this is what made my so called scarf out of.

Above that is some green and blue airedale aran from Texere. Destined to be a stripey jumper for the Pooch. Also some Wingham roving destined to be another felted bag. I love the ones I've made from the last two trips and am going to make a bigger one.

There's a huge skein of lovely dark purple dk from Coldspring. Then a 400g ball of the james c brett denim. One of these is going to be Prepster from the Happy Hooker.

Then there is the sock yarn. The opal was 2 balls for £4 and I love the bright yellow. Jane has made me reconsider yellow for socks. There's some regia for baby clothes and some gorgeous variegated grey and blue too. The latter is from the Skep whilst the regia/opal is from KCG Trading.

At the very front of the pic is one of WyeSue's ginger cakes - she had made about 6 and I ended up with a whole one to myself! Am going to start on it later on today. WyeSue also gave me a lovely cold to bring back with me but I'm not going to hold a grudge. Just bring it up every time I see her from now until doomsday....Above that is the Zimmermann dvd set which I am so looking forward to! I got that at the KCG too.

I know what you're thinking (especially you Pooch) - how much more? Well we're nearly done. The surprise hit of the weekend was a haberdashery shop that Sian and I found last year by accident. It is so retro but the thing is all the retro stuff is just stock they still have left from when they first bought it. So here we have a small gathering of beautiful ribbons, buttons and nicknacks including a wooden pen and notelets from the KCG.

Just look at some of these buttons!

Aren't the teapots amazing - and the rest are just so kitsch.

So yes, all in all a very good haul indeed. And what about next year? Well, neither of us want to commit just yet but this year's did go especially well so the odds are good. To stay informed either join the Ravelry group or sign up to the Yahoo mailing list. I've also got the most amazing discworld swap parcel to show off that arrived while I was away but I am saving that for tomorrow so it doesn't get swallowed up in all the SkipNorth spoils.

I went to a kniting show and forgot my knitting (and a podcast)

It's true. I went to the stitch and knit show at Excel yesterday to work on the KCG stand and forgot to take my knitting. Rather irritating since could have got through a chunk more rib on Rob's jumper. This is it so far.

Going to look like that for quite a while longer yet!

That meant that I needed to buy some yarn and needles and being patternless I decided on another preemie cardi and hat.

Finished them both barr the sewing up and the buttons while I was there. Not the best show although did get to catch up with Les and Tess from Silkwood which was lovely.

Some of you may remember this little beastie which has become forever known as "Mum's butt ugly jumper" even though its a cardi. I'm just living on the edge type crazy like that. She claims to love it although I find it hard to believe but did ask me to put some buttons on and take off the peplum which was ridiculous from the beginning. So I've done a finishing job that I should have done in the first place but am now stuck on my choice of buttons.

The bottom ones are mother of pearl. The top are boring old plastic fish eyes but somehow they look better. What do you guys think?

So finally there's a new podcast out there. Episode 15. You can either get it on itunes or here. AMAZING competition prizes too, sponsored by Yarnimals. You can also get their stitchmarkers at Woolly Workshop.

Score!

I may be wrong but I think Royal Mail is getting worse. They are making a habit of keeping my parcels from me. I ask for them to be redelivered and they don't come. I go to pick them up and they're not there (apparently it can take 4 days for a parcel to go from being a metre away from my postbox but undeliverable to getting 20 mins walk away to the sorting office, not the 24 hours they always write on the card). That asie, I finally got my amazon order today and here they are, tra la!

Nickerjac got a copy of the lace one at last year's SkipNorth (2 weeks to go!) and I finally gave in. Some of the circular ones are just divine.

Then opposite the sorting office is a charity shop and they had a load of old knitting books. When I say old I mean 80s. I got these two.

Someone was talking about the Patricia Roberts one on Ravelry the other day. I got them because although the shapes are a bit boxy or baggy there are some quite inspiring designs and patterns. For instance from the Roberts book comes this lot.

1. Polka dot bows sewn on afterwards. OK, I'm not actually going to ever do this but you've got to love it.

2. Again the design is odd but I do like the collar.

3. Lovely jacket. With a bit of shaping it would be lovely.

4. Lovely fairlisle patterns

Then from the Sweater Book.
1. I just love it. I'm not going to apologise.

2. Lovely harlequin effect. Not with long sleeves though.

3. The effect of the pattern and the fibres is lovely.

4. Like the side to side fairisle. They mention DK in the pattern but then it is on 6mm needles and looks a lot chunkier.

5. Love the little flashes and the stripes.

My other major score is curtosy of ebay and is quite an amazing deal. No sign of a catch so far but will keep you informed. 2 pairs of addi needles in any size and any length for £9 odd including postage and mine arrived next day. This seller.

And look - I got an addi sweet too!

In amongst all this capitalist consumerism there has been a bit of knitting. Have picked up my Mermaid again and done a chunk more.

I've decided the 3rd colour, the lilac, isn't that bad afterall and so am slogging through the rows again. Got a chunk done when was watching WWE Raw on thurs night. Honestly - did you see when Jeff Hardy did that back flip off the top rope and totally missed Snitsky but he fell over anyway? Don't see HHH making those kind of errors. Mind you, don't see HHH on the top rope much nowadays. None of us are as young as we used to be.

Finally we have a picture of Darth Mould getting ready to tackle the mould in the kitchen. The landlord has suddenly jumped into action after I mentioned our moving out and a plumber is coming tomorrow to assess the problem. There's obviously a leak further up as the flat below us have a problem too but at least someone is actually doing something about it now.

A litle burst of creativity

I remember being rather irritated at someone who wrote an article saying that people who follow patterns aren't creative and are just copying someone else. My response to this statement is part emotional and therefopre hard to put into words. Or was until I joined the Coconut Grove group on Ravelry and looked at the thread about phrases people are now using in general conversation. The news that one raveler is now regularly ending arguments with "How would you like a face full of cockney urine?" cheered me up no end and I shall be using that riposte frequently from now on when challenged by annoying people such as the hitcher or chief shaman's wife. Or people who say there is no creativity in making something from a pattern.

(Incidentally you know how I was having a hard time deciding between Vince and Howard? Well I came to a conclusion - why decide? They're good friends. The extras to series three confirm they have kissed a zillion times so why separate them. You can never have too much of a good thing they tell me.)

So what got me thinking about this? Well I have had an urge to crochet and the only square I feel comfortable making is the one from the babette blanket that I finished last year. So I've made some. And I was trying to decide whether endlessly making the same square, even in different colours, was creative or not.

Only 7 so far but coming along. Using three left over balls of dk superwash. Going to be another offering to the skipnorth charity project. Which reminds me - someone asked for the preemie patterns so here is the site with all the links.

Apart from those it has been sock central here. I finished my discworld swap socks at the weekend. I sooooooooooooooo want to keep them. Might make myself some although I don't think I've ever made the same pair twice before, apart from standard unpatterned ones that is.

Then I also made another plain sock on magic loop using some of the Fabel I got at Ally Pally. Just like regia really.

Only to keep things interesting I decided to throw in some beads. Despite the fact you can't see them, even if you know they're there to see.

There's a zigzag of them in there somewhere.

So that just about raps it up chez byrne. Podcast in the wings for the weekend with a special new sponsor which is going to be awesome!

The Starghan

Introducing the Starghan, made using this pattern which I can thoroughly recommend for even a beginner crocheter. Here it is on ravelry. This is how it has turned out:

And here on our 2-seater sofa, trying to give you a sense of scale.

As you'll see from this post it certainly started out tiny but has grown and grown. I was going to put all the pics on here of it getting bigger but half the photos are on Pooch's laptop so instead I've got a flickr set for you too look at.

I tried to take a picture at the end of each day I worked on it but it didn't quite work out like that towards the end. Partly because I forgot and partly because in the final stages the rows were using 40g of yarn each and so sometimes I didn't do a whole one in the time I spent on it. I did really enjoy it though. The first bit of fun was choosing colours I thought Lou would like. The key one is from Jamieson and is their DK in teal. Then I got some noro in the sales and then there were bits and bobs from stash. One of the rows is what I used for Fu and Michelle's baby blanket, some of the blue is from Lucy's wedding afghan, other bits and pieces remind me of other projects - all happy things so I could crochet all that happiness into it. Ugh. Ignore that last bit. Bit too schmaltzy. The full list of yarns is on ravelry.

The FO made its way to Canterbury yesterday and is now very happily in use according to the recipient. I think that's the best thing about making stuff for people - hearing that it's been useful afterwards!

Finished and started

I started these 2-needle socks at the beginning of december last year and last night finally finished the second one.

The problem is...it's been so long since I started them that I can't find the first one. It's annoying as they've come out really well and are nice and snug so I really want to wear them! Will have to search.

My swap partner for the Ravelry Discworld Swap have come to a gentlewoman's agreement about not looking at each others blogs until we've exchanged parcels so I can reveal these:

The picture doesn't do them justice. I'm using the leftover red from my cherry blossom socks and some plain white and then around the ankle in purple it says "I aten't dead". Discworld fans will know that this is one of Granny's characteristics and as she is my partner's favourite charactor it seemed fitting. I'm also planning a few other bits and pieces which should be fun - I'm even going to have a go at dyeing some sock yarn for her.

In fact 20 skeins of undyed trekking arrived from Get Knitted this morning. I haven't gone mad, it's mostly for the SkipNorth workshops but there are a few extra skeins for your truly to play with. I'm doing the dyeing workshop and made up some samples last weekend.

I've been knitting them up so people can see what different techniques leads to. Am very excited about it already - started compiling a shopping list in my head of all te things I want to get hold of.

So what else is going on...well Pooch and I had a lovely valentines day. Went out for dinner and he got me a copy of the SnB book the Happy Hooker which was a nice surprise. I bought 2 dozen krispy kremes and took them to work and people were amazed. It's weird because at IOP cakes and doughnuts were pretty normal whereas there it seems like they only come out on extremely special occasions at the LI. I managed to consume 2, including one of the special heart shaped ones. It's the chocolate dreamcakes that are my ultimate luxury doughnut though. Oooo, so good!

Mousetrap for the love mouse

Pooch's dislike of me is well documented. However I hadn't realised that he had taken to actively leaving traps around the house in order to hasten my downfall. This manifested itself particularly well when I got home on friday night, alone, and started fixing my own dinner as he had told me to earlier that day. I looked in the fridge and there were chicken kievs. So I cooked a chicken kiev and ate it. Sounds straight forward? Oh no. Because little did I know that Pooch was leaving out of date and potentially rotting food in the fridge in order to trap me with. To hasten understanding I should mention that Pooch is the cook and keeper of the kitchen in our house.





His true genius didn't manifest itself until saturday lunchtime. He'd gone out in the morning on the pretence of doing some computer stuff, which I now realise was to ensure he had an alibi and was safely out of the house when things kicked off. This left me at home alone to commence the being sick and associated goings on that come with eating chicken kievs 4 days out of date. When he came back he had, for the first time in aeons, bought me some nice chocolates. See exhibit A.

Now bear in mind that he knows I can not resist such things so when he offered me one 'to make me feel better' I ate it and 5 mins later was very very sick again. You see what he did there? Cunning. You wouldn't think it to look at him but he is. Here he is off guard sniggering at my suffering. He thinks I don't know.

Anyway, putting aside my own personal misfortune I have managed to make 1.5 premature baby cardis for SkipNorth. I particularly like this one:

Look at those lovely buttons!





This is the second about half done. I am thinking little sunflower or daisy buttons for this one. It's so sad how small they are.

I went to see the Terracotta Warrior exhibition at the British Museum last week and it was pretty amazing. There were only about a dozen of the actuals there but the layout was very impressive and detailed. A shame it was so crowded but that's just one of those things I guess. It put me nicely in the mood for all the chinese new year type things that are going on. The V&A have a website tie in so you can see what animal you are (from your birth year) and then customise an icon of it. This is me:

You can do your own here.