Mooooo!!!

On a whim on Wednesday I ordered some Moo mini cards. You get 100 for £9.99 + P+P. You can have any text you like on the back and you can get quite a lot on them. I have my name, address, phone, blog address and email address on mine. I painstakingly went through and chose 100 different designs from the thousands available but you can also upload your own pictures or designs. You can have minicards, postcards, greeting cards & stickers.
(click pic for close up)


These are some of my favourite ones from the ones I chose



Cute eh? They said that they would take 7-14 days to dispatch but they arrived in 3, great service!

Tasty cakes

First off, a pic of my socks in progress. The Show Off Stranded Socks. An easy 4 row repeat to remember. I'm using the Socks That Rock mediumweight and they are coming out quite big but they will make good slouchy socks I think.


While we were at Woolfest, Colin bought me a swift (shhh, I don't know about it 'til my birthday) so that he doesn't have to sit with his hands held out wrapped in skeins of yarn while I wind them into balls. He also got me a ball winder stick (technically known as a Nostepinne) which you wind the yarn onto by hand (link = YouTube video) to make a centre pull ball. I decided last week to have a go on a 20mm knitting needle. It takes ages to wind a ball onto it. It'll be fine for left over bits of yarn in shortish lengths but I decided to have a look for a wool winder.

I found this one second hand on ebay and it arrived yesterday.


I couldn't wait to give it a go but as I don't have a swift (nudge, nudge, wink, wink.) I used a couple of balls I'd already wound by hand. And look at them now........

I think the technical name for these is cakes, and the most tasty looking non-edible cakes they are. It was so quick!! My skeins are going to wind so fast. Wheeee.

Last Tuesday evening was Borders Knitters night. We had a total of 21 people there this time, which seems to be about the number we have each month. Another 3 new members turned up. I don't know what we would do if all the people who have ever come all turned up at once, there would be over 30 of us and I think Borders would have a fit! As it is, we are going to be going fortnightly probably as of August.

In my last post I mentioned some yarn that I couldn't show. That was because I got this for Becca and she hadn't seen it yet.



I wasn't happy that the yarns I picked for her at Woolfest were sufficiently turquoise, which was what she had asked me to get, so I got these from Scandinavian Knitting Design. 2 balls of Alpaca and 1 150g ball of Kauni Effect. She did take one of the sock yarns I got and the bluey skein of Manos Silk Blend from Woolfest too.

Poor Becca is a bit poorly at the mo and is off work and very bored, so I popped over to see her on Monday. We have decided to have a knitalong for a Booga Bag, using the Kauni Effect. This is my colour

This is one of those patterns that EVERYONE on ravelry has made, so I succumbed in the end. We knitted some swatches to see how they would felt and bunged them into Becca's washing machine at 40 degrees. Not a lot happened so she put hers back in at 60. After doing this 3 more times she eventually got a decent felted fabric. I went home and put mine in again at 60 and it felted straight away. So we have concluded that her newer machine is far too gentle and we need mine because it has a much more vigorous agitation action. When the bags are done we will chuck them in my machine at 60.

Colin is getting a new car, a Mazda 3. I quite like the Mazda 2 for myself but I'll wait a few more months I think. He is picking it up tomorrow and then later on we are going to the National Exhibition of Wildlife Art preview evening. We got invited because we bought some pictures last year. We will have to restrain ourselves I think!

Hooked on Art

As much as I enjoy getting emails, there is nothing like the anticipation of waiting for the postman, especially when you know there are things on their way. My postman comes around about the time I leave for work. Sometimes he gets to the house and posts the stuff through the door, sometimes I catch him in the street and he hands me the post through the car window, and sometimes I don't see him at all and I have to wait all day until I get home. And sometimes he just doesn't come at all.

This morning he managed to beat me to it and two packages landed on the mat. The first contained a set of pretty crochet hooks that I ordered from eBay a couple of days ago. Aren't they nice? I think they will encourage me to have another go at the crochet. The sizes range from 2mm to 8mm so something for every thickness of yarn there.

I was nosing through etsy the other day for pictures of ATCs (artist trading cards) because I thought I might have a go at making some. However, the standard is very high, and I'm not very artistic. Anyway during my search I found this seller who had listings for ACEOs ('Art Cards, Editions and Originals') which are the same size as ATCs - 3.5in x 2.5in, but are miniature prints of larger art works. I thought that her work was beautiful and decided to order one of her pictures. I chose this one:

It is called Night Ride. It is #15 of a limited edition of 50. The colours are more vibrant in real life. Anyway, enclosed with it was this one as a free gift!! It is a new design of hers called Dream by the River and it is #1! How lucky am I? I'm just trying to work out how to leave feedback on etsy as I want to say how pleased I am with them.

I forgot to post a picture of my final set of bookmarks from the swapbot swap, here they are, from SweetJewels. The moon one is lovely and colourful.

I am now waiting for the lovely postie to bring me some Reiki business cards from Vistaprint, some books from Amazon and another book from greenmetropolis.

Last night we went to the pub quiz with Mel & Stu (who are so loved up, ahhh cute) and Phil. These are all people I used to work with in the bookshop about 5 years ago. In the shop we had a mediaeval crypt, so we were going to call ourselves Tales from the Crypt, but then Stu suggested Snails from the Crypt because it used to be REALLY slow in the shop on a Sunday. So that was our team name. We got 35 out of 50 which was joint 4th and we won a box of Jaffa Cakes!!

HP, art, thumb, floods

Last Wednesday we took advantage of Orange Wednesdays and went off to see Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix. Hopefully I am not spoiling anything as I am assuming that most poeople have now read this book (although that is a huge assumption to make!). The film was good, and the 2 hours 10 minutes flew past, but I'm afraid there were some omissions which just brought back "Winkiegate" all over again. By "Winkiegate" I am referring to the fact that although the house-elf Winkie was an integral part of the book HP & the Goblet of Fire, she was completely omitted from the corresponding film! So, some of the omissions from this film included:

Tonks' hair was not pink and didn't change colour; Although only Luna and Harry could see the Thestrals, no one mentioned this fact when they all jumped on them to fly to the Ministry of magic; There was no portrait of Mrs Black in the hallway of Grimauld Place screaming abuse; and although Kreacher was there, his part in the book wasn't covered in the film. There were others which I can't remember now, because I've read the new HP since.

So, go and see the film, but be prepared to come out saying "Where was the bit where.....?"

(I currently have Radio 2 on in work, and they have been trailing a programme about the songs of Noel Coward. I think a much funnier and popular programme would be "the Songs of Noel Fielding" - "crouton, crouton, crunchy friends in a liquid broth", "I am electro boy, I am electro girl"!! Genius!)

Well we had an interesting time on Friday. We had arranged to go and visit a friend near Reading for the weekend. As he was going to be working all day Friday we thought we would take our time going down and take A-roads instead of just hurtling down the motorways. So off we went in the rain. After stopping for some lunch we headed on down towards Redditch and Stratford. Well, you know what the weather was like. The puddles got larger, the roads got wetter, the traffic got slower, and we ended up in a VERY slow moving queue, while watching the water outside the car getting higher. And we were heading downhill. Not good, when there are floods you really want to be going uphill. In the end we turned round, and abandoned the trip. I had visions of the car floating away and us wading through waist deep water with our bags over our heads. All I could think about was that there were no floods north of us so that was the direction to go in. So after a seven and a half hours round trip we ended up back where we started, at home. And what a good job we did, because all the places flooded on the news were exactly the places we were heading towards. I am very sorry for all the people who have been flooded but am also very relieved that we didn't get caught in it. It was a shame we didn't get to see Dave though.

Of course it did mean that we were home on Saturday morning so Colin went off to do the weekly shop as usual at 7am. He went to Tesco where you had to spend £50 to get Harry Potter for a fiver. So he got one. Then on his way back, he popped into Morrisons just to see how much they were selling it for, and it was £4.99 with no minimum spend so he got another copy so we wouldn't have to fight over it. We spent the weekend racing each other until we both finished it yesterday, with me winning by a couple of hours.

There was some time off of HP though. Sunday morning we decided to go out for breakfast because we would have if we'd been away. We went down to the Blue Moon cafe by the river in town, and had two cooked breakfasts. Phew, I didn't half enjoy it, I could have eaten another one straight after. Then we went to B&Q for some boards for the loft, and after went to a garden centre on the Wirral where the National Exhibition of Wildlife Art was on display. We bought these two.

They are very nicely framed too. We can't have them for a couple of weeks as they are still on display, but then they are ours. Ah, I wish I was that good at drawing.

Well yesterday I went off to physio. The physio I saw was very nice and easy to talk to. She didn't yank my thumb back but gently stretched it to its limit. She thinks that the little finger may respond to an injection but the thumb will probably need surgery. I have now been referred on , (although I do have to go back to see her a couple more times in the meantime,) to be assessed for the next stages. So another appointment to wait for.

Well I think that's everything caught up.