Sat in my lounge knitting furiously on a test knit I was heard to mutter the immortal words, ” I never have enough time to knit these days, and with the beach/ windsurfing season on the horizon my time will be even more limited”
Yeah
That will teach me! Torn ankle ligaments, 5 weeks in plaster. No swimming or Windsurfing for me 
Humph!
This morning, in the early hours I was awoken by a cat trampolining off my stomach. She has a habit of hopping up onto the headboard and then launching herself as far down the bed as she can manage. Once awake I became aware of the fact that I was not as usually happens being strangled by my necklace as I turned over. In fact the chain was not there at all!
I scrambled around in the bed to no avail and spent the rest of the night trying to figure out when I had last noticed I was wearing it. When, at a far more reasonable hour my Hubby awoke. He was able to confirm that I was not in fact wearing it when I went to bed and it was therefore lost. I am gutted. I have found the chain on the floor by the bed, but there is no sign of the pendant, which is a lump of polished Guernsey granite in the shape of a heart, enclosed a heavy gold mount that looks like a cross. Not only was it expensive ( 18ct gold) it had great sentimental value as it was a birthday pressy from Hubby. I have hunted high and low and can only conclude that it slipped down my bra and then fell out sometime during my busy day – there is a chance that the cleaners at work may find it, but I don’t hold out much hope.
I also seem to have caught a rotten spring cold just in time for the long weekend.
Then to put the tin hat on the day, no 1 son phone an hour ago to say that his car has been broken into. Nothing has been taken, but the damage they did getting into the car will probably result in the car being written off by the insurance. Who does this sort of thing!
I leave you with a couple of photos. The first is to get my own back on the cat. If she can use me as a trampoline, I can show her sunning he inelegant self on the window sill.
And for those like me who are striving to find a little calm in this tops turvy life. Here is a shot I took on my phone of Bluebell Wood , up on the south coast cliffs last week – all together now- ohmmmm….
We have had a few changes around here in the last few months. Back in October we lost our beloved dog of 16 years. At the end of the following month I lost my Mother to cancer. Christmas was horrible. The only bright spot was that soon after we lost the dog we decided to adopt a kitty. We felt that as we were both working full time is wasn’t fair on a dog, but kitties are far more independent , but will still be company for us. The day after Mum died, we got a call from the GSPCA to say that we had been accepted as potential adopters and would we like to go look at the cats that were currently in need of good homes. We went with the best of intentions of adopting a cat , but as with the best laid plans of all mice and men we came home with two 
They are sisters.
Holly
And Izzy ( short for Isadora)
When they first arrived Holly was the skitty kitty spending all her time under the bed but as you can see from her photo she soon mellowed out and will now drape herself over the nearest available human with gay abandon
Izzy on the other hand with pure Tortitude will sit WITH you but not ON you and is very fond of yarn ( which is proving a bit of a problem)
Holly is turning out to be a Daddies girl who likes to chase shoelaces
Izzy is , well, a tortie which says it all, though she does love to chase laser pointers and anything that shines
More on the cats as time goes by I am sure, but I will try to avoid turning this into a cat blog
Mean while in the Knitting front I am slogging through the test knit of the next mystery KAL before sending it to the test knitters – I was hoping to knit some summer tops for myself, but where the weather has been so cold I haven’t even looked at my Ravelry queue to narrow down the selections
I leave you with a photo taken by my hubby one one of our walks last weekend – spring is here, it is just bloody cold!
This blog has been seriously neglected of late, but I am hoping that. Now that I have figured out how to get things up and running on the IPad I will have more impetus to post.
I still haven’t got the WordPress app up and running, so that is the next task . We are now into the Summer term at school and I am still designing like mad. In a couple of weeks I will be guest lecturing on a cruise ship,mored in the Russell outside St Peter Port.
meanwhile I will leave you with a photo of my latest design
please excuse the formatting problems I seem to be having with the Ipad – I will get there . This is the Flanders Scarf from Knitscene Spring 2013
I say allegedly with good reason – We bought a new BBQ two weeks ago and it is still in it’s box due the amount of rain and wind we have been having.
It seems to be good for the garden however, The grass in knee high – come on Mr gardener where are you? and something odd has happened to the palm like thing at the bottom of my garden – it has thrown a flower spike
It is currently about 35 ft……
The flowers are pretty though
I actually have knitting content – gasp!
198yds of Heaven ( well more than that actually ) I added a couple of repeats
the yarn is heavenly Great Nothern Yarns 70% mink, 30% cashmere – Yum! and the mink is humanely gathered – they shave them!
Knitted on 5mm needles – they felt like tree trunks to me
and at the other end of the scale
Lace Leaf Scarf from Lace knitting in Estonia I made it a scarf by removing a repepat or two across it in order to get a decent length of scarf. The Shawl calls for 500yds I only had 438yds
I got there, the beauty of these Estonian patterns is that you knit both ends and then the middle so you get to use all of the yarn up.
Manos de Uraguay Lace in colourway 9111 ( pinks and mossy greens) on 3.25mm needles
This one is packed away for a retirement present for a favourite lady at work – who was retitring in a month or so, but due to difficulties with staffing may be staying on an extra year – it will keep 
We have had some beautiful weather recently, bright, sunny, but still rather cold. March went out like a lamb and here we are in April, Easter,holidays and Spring!
Hubby took a couple of days off before the easter weekend and we have taken the opportunity to get out in fresh air and do some Geocaching. For those who have never met Geocaching it is a sort of global wide treasure hunt fueled by GPS coordinates. At every set of coordinates you will find a cache which can be as small as a thimble or as big as a large lunchbox. in it you will find a log book you sign and in the larger ones there can be “treasures” usually foreign stamps, beads, plastic toys and occasionally a travel bug which is an item that you take out of the cache and move to another one somewhere else so that it can continue it’s travels around the world. You can go on the Website, plug in the code on the travelbug and see where it has been
The best thing about today was getting up onto the south cliffs on the island and walking up and down all the beautiful cliff paths with all spring flowers starting to appear.
Bluebells in the hedge
a beautiful green lane with a secret ( yes there is a cache in this lane)
Primroses, Celandines and Violets
and to top it off a babbling stream ( that also hides a secret)
In between geocaching expeditions there has been knitting, but it is a magazine commission so I can’t talk about it.
Happy Easter to all who celebrate it and to those who don’t enjoy the holiday!
Morning all!
Where to start
First off nothing terrible happened, Life just got in the way and as with many bloggers I just lost the habit of posting. I’m still reading everyone else though
The design front has been really busy and a steady stream of designs have been published including several shawls, a cardi and I am currently working on a men’s waistcoat for a British magazine.
On the home front I have been trying to do something about my weight. At 13 stone ( and only 5 feet tall) my knees are definitely telling me I need to lose at least a stone but t be honest the minute I think I am “dieting” I am constantly hungry.
I am taking steps though I have been to see a friend who is a hypnotherapist and she has been working with me to change my attitude. I was very surprised when as part of the process my subconscious was told to find my “word” that my unconscious mind replied with the word NO!
Not no I won’t give you a word, but your word is no. No you are not hungry between meals, no you don’t need that snack, no you can’t skip your exercise session and even more interesting, it has spilled over into my working life and I find that I am saying no to colleagues who are asking for near impossible things where before I would break my neck trying to save their necks.
I’m also getting more exercise in general as we have taken up a new hobby. Geocaching. Basically it is a treasure hunt using GPS coordinates and we try to walk to all of the caches – within reason – there are approx 160 caches on the island so it will take us a while to find them all.
On the Family front, both kids are hard at work at their respective Uni courses, Daughter is slogging through her dissertation for her Masters and I am delighted to announce that she has accepted a place to study at the Portsmouth Institute of cosmology and Gravitation for a PHD later this year. Son is slogging through his end of year project and has a conditional offer to do the extra year to convert his foundation degree to a full degree. I am so proud of them both.
On the knitting front there hasn’t been a lot of personal knitting – too busy knitting samples for photo shoots
Though I have manages a couple of cardis Adrift in Madeline Tosh lace weight in fig ( brown) and Dahlia in Madeline Tosh light merino ( fingering) in Scarlett
No photos at the moment, I will try to get some soon.
Mean while I am sitting here listening to the fog horns as the Spring sunshine tries to burn off the fog that has settled around the coast. Yesterday we had 20 degrees but unless the sun wins today I think it is going to be a bit cooler. Either way we will probably spend the afternoon yomping round looking for geocaches ( either that or I shall curl up in my chair with the waistcoat and try and get the back done
I leave you with a photo or two - lets face it a post without one is a bit boring
Crocus in the lawn
Daffodils in the border – I think Spring has finally arrived!
I have only just realised how log it has been since I posted here!
I will haave to get my act together and post more often
Winter has past and early Spring is with us Much has happened oveer the past few months – most of it good
Let me get my thoughts together and I will get you all up to date
Back soon xx
So much for my good intentions – they all go out the window when you press the on button on your laptop and it just sits there loading, loading,loading…. then the blue screen of death – then nothing
Thankfully in my other life I am an IT tech so fixing it wasn’t a problem, just time consuming and in the end a little expensive.
As an IT tech I spend my life exhorting people to make sure everything is backed up – and to my credit I try to lead by example. So, when my machine spectacularly crashed and burned I wasn’t too worried about the data – I would lose a few emails but that was it. Between my external hard drive, Dropbox, my Skydrive & various DVD’s I had plenty of backups – what I couldn’t find was my Windows 7 upgrade disc!
Once I ascertained that Windows restore and various other tools were not going to be able to retrieve my Operating System I reluctantly decided I was going to have to wipe everything and start again.
I search the house, turned things upside down – to no avail and in the end had to bite the bullet and buy a windows 7 upgrade in order to proceed
Thankfully being in an educational enviroment and with 2 Uni students in the household I was able to buy an educational copy so I didn’t have to pay full price.
It is so convenient these days. You can buy and download an OS at the drop of a hat
I downloaded it on my Slate tablet and burnt the ISO to a DVD using an external DVD drive.
AH! Snag no 2. the external drive was not accurate enough and corrupted the files.
So in the end I had to restore my laptop to it’s original Vista OS, re download and burn windows 7 using the DVD in my latop and then reinstall Windows 7 over Vista followed by all my programs
It took the entire weekend
Thankfully all the waiting around for things to load left plenty of knitting time. Everything was backed up on the Slate so I even had the charts from the latest design I was working on.
Moral of the story, you can never have too many backups AND put your software away in a safe place – you never know when you are going to need it!
I leave you with a link to an FO
This was my travel to see Alice Cooper knitting for the trains and the planes
Lazy Katy Asymmetrical shawl in Kauni Effgarten fingering weight in purples, greys & black – very Goth
A nice easy stockinette start to be followed by a lace chaser
Ravelry Guernseygal’s Purple People Eater
Sorry can’t get my camera to upload the photo direct – grrr – technology strikes again!
and for once I can actually show you why
My Principal at school surprised us all earlier in the year by announcing that she was expecting – at 43 that is pretty earth shattering, but then she also found out that she was carrying identical twin boys!
Well I am pleased to say that on Monday last week she was safely delivered of two very healthy young men ( 6lb 13oz and 7 lb 1oz) Lawrence and Teddy
Of course there was no way that I was going to miss such a knitting opportunity and so back in September I ordered a heap of Cascade 220 superwash in non traditional baby colours ( we had talked about this – though she has no idea what I’m up to) and started knitting
First up was these
Brooklyn Tweed’s famous Tweed Baby Blanket
5.5mm and 6.5mm needles & Charcoal, scarlet, royal blue and Lime green Cascade Superwash 220 – which I find knits up more like a DK than worsted which is fine because once these were done I used up the oddments on
These
Based on the Springtime baby cardi with contrasting sleeves and buttons to make it like a college jacket. They also have their initials Swiss darned onto the breast.
knitted on 4.5mm needles
There was still yarn left so next came
These
Based on the Ballerina Cardigan pattern in the Sirdar Hearts and Stripes book I just reversed the closure on the fronts and used buttons instead of ribbons
Knitted on 3.75mm & 4mm needles
This pattern looks lovely , but like most English patterns is knitted in pieces so that meant 2 backs, 4 fronts, 4 sleeves, 4 edging bands….. yawn. Just as well they were so diddy
If I ever made it again I think I will alter the pattern so at least the body is made in one piece.
Finally with the little yarn I had remaining I made these
T-bag hats from the same book knitted on 3.75mm & 4mm needles
I can see me using this book again for anyone else having babies – it is full of basic, but good patterns for cardigans, vest tops, kimonos, and lots of hats
the book is written to showcase their stripy yarn range, but as you can see they look equally good in plain colours
Right I must away now to get on with test knits and designs that have taken a back seat while I have been knitting on these.
I can’t wait to see her face when she sees what I have for her
