Time off

With a most fortuitous conjunction of Easter, a certain royal wedding and a little bit of annual leave I will be working for only two days until 5^th May – hoorah!  I don’t have many plans, but it certainly gives me loads of time to spend knitting in the garden maybe I’ll even take my knitting to the beach.  Tomorrow I’m planning on having a barbecue for all my siblings, both actual and siblings in-law to be, which I’m really looking forward to.  With the wedding so close it seemed like a really great idea to get them all together, particularly as I think it will be really good fun too.  I must remember not to sit and knit my wedding shrug while to barbecue is going though, I don’t need to be going down the aisle smelling of sausages!

Other than that I am going to make the most of being away from here....

 And enjoy a bit of sunshine.

Lucky old me

Stu and I both took yesterday off work and had a lovely long weekend, spent mostly outside and it had been glorious.  Apart from a brief shower of rain yesterday the weather has been unseasonably sunny and warm and we very much took advantage of it.  On Friday Stu picked me up from work and we went fishing.  Well Stu went fishing and I sat and knitted next to a lake.

On Saturday we behaved like good British people and went to some garden centres.  We got lots of flowers and six different types of strawberry plants and I got myself a lovely pink knitting lounger so I don’t have to sit on the steps next to the tumble dryer any more!

Sunday saw us risk causing a break in the good weather by buying a barbecue, but we didn’t actually use it so the sunshine continued unabated.  I took advantage of this by knitting while Stu worked...better than television.

Yesterday, while everyone else worked we went and hand delivered a load of wedding invitations before taking a little trip to Ikea and then coming home and doing some knitting.  I decided to take a break from the wedding shrug and finished off the first of my hand dyed socks.

Once that was done and ends sewn in I immediately cast on for the second one (if I don’t it will never get done) before putting it aside and casting on again for the second of my first ever toe up socks.  As I have documented recently all was going swimmingly with this sock the first time I started it until I noticed that I had been knitting the lace pattern all the way round, including on the bottom of the foot.  I’ve now knitted the toe again – great practice for short rows – and now all I need to do is find my fifth DPN and I’ll be off and running again.....about time too.

Phones, smarter than me.

After enjoying a nice night knitting away on my wedding shrug on Tuesday, I sat down last night to do the same again.  Assembling all my bits and bobs I quickly spotted a flaw in my plan.  I don’t need much, just the project, both needles, my notebook which has a simple breakdown of the bit of pattern I’m on plus a tally of how many pattern repeats I’ve done and my phone which has the row count on it.  Except I managed to leave my phone on my desk at work last night.  Marvellous.  Smart phones are a super idea, so many things you can do with them .....and so many things you have to do without if you leave it somewhere.  Mine also has my bus ticket on it.  Extra marvellous.  Luckily it is lovely and sunny here at the moment so a 50 minute walk to work this afternoon wasn’t actually all that bad.

Compare this to a picture of the same view in November.  Slightly different eh?  Because the weather is so nice I headed out into the garden with my sock this morning.  I found myself a nice sunny perch next to the old tumble dryer and knit away whilst dreaming of sunloungers and thinking that maybe it’s time we took that old tumble dryer to the dump!