Party Time

Today was the day of the CCG Christmas Party! It was a select gathering but all the members of the Guild attended - and as the Country Crafters Guild consists of Me and Nicky, it meant we could have 3 Heston Blumenthal pine-sugar dusted mince pies each :-)

Yum. We also discussed the projects and crafts we'd like to complete/try/attempt. I'd like to have a go at needle felting and Nicky is contemplating knitting an Afghan throw, and of course, there will be the seasonal produce to preserve. We decided to press on with the Sock-a-Month challenge by casting on our January socks!

I am absolutely loving the yarn - it's British blue-faced Leicester wool from the Natural Dye Studio and feels lovely and soft. The colour is gorgeous too; I am really in to my greens at the moment!

Earlier on in the day I wanted to make the most of the mild weather and try and split one of my lupins as I need some space to fit other plants in and also need to do some dividing so I can populate my new border. I took out one of the smaller ones but it was still quite a whopper:

However, I took some tiny plants from the base, a bit like this one:

and potted them up in gritty compost and trimmed the leaves right back. I have no idea if they'll take, but I've put them in the greenhouse and I'll see if they produce some roots.

I love seeing a tray full of cuttings! So full of promise. The greenhouse is also being used for another purpose; I had lost Ida the hen earlier in the day and eventually found her in there having a bathe in the slightly drier earth. Mary also took advantage:

So as you can see they really appreciate my recent purchase of a fancy dustbath and perchery station with oven-baked sand :-/

The bees enjoyed the relative warmth too and I thought I'd give them a feed and use up some old waxy honey cappings that have been sitting in a tupperware on my worktop since the spring. I diluted it with hot water and popped it in a dish with a bit of sponge so they didn't drown, then placed one in the sunshine near the entrance of each hive:

I did also get round to giving the bathroom a thorough clean and Rosie said it looked much better and not so haunted...a reference to the cobwebs!!

So, it's now time for a podcast and a few more rows of the socks :-)

Bees, bikes and yarn

Amber has had a bad cold which has required lots of iPlayer and You Tube to get her through the worst of it and to save a row I let her have my laptop, but I have stolen it back for long enough to do a quick blog post. All my wool from Stash arrived yesterday:

I realised, being rather new to the whole yarn lark, that I had sort of slightly mis-ordered, which resulted in me being rather a sad bunny when I thought I might have to send it back. However, having spoken to Nicky we decided I could probably salvage the situation with a bit of creativity. I want to knit Tristan a woolly hat so having never tackled knitting with circular needles or Fairisle/stranded knitting and with 2 end-of-year exams looming, I thought there was no better time to start such a project. Tristan, of course, is overwhelmed with joy at the thought of one of his mother's hand-knitted creations for his birthday just as any 14 year old boy would be. At least that's why I presume he didn't really say anything when I measured his head.

Here it is thus far though:

I'm on row 4. Or was it 3...

My lupins seem to have burst back into life meaning they have been flowering pretty much non-stop since May:

And the bees are still working the Himalayan balsam by the river. It's tricky getting pictures but they are coming back to the hive with bright gold pollen which according to my chart (yes! really!) could be ivy or balsam so although it is a pernicious weed, it's very good for my girls getting ready for winter. They've kicked all the boys out now as they would use valuable resources and I'm hoping to have a look in the hives once more before the winter to check they've enough stores.

Rosie and I cycled to town today which was nice and surprisingly quick, although perhaps a library trip wasn't very wise as my basket was laden and I had omitted to remember that it's slightly uphill all the way back. Still, R enjoyed it and it was great to use my new bike; it ran really well and I hadn't realised how much I had missed not having one.

Pictures!

La la la! I have a new laptop so I can get pictures and get online and upload them on to the blog! Ridiculous that one should need a pc and a laptop and an iPad but none of them do everything. My pc is about 7 years old and the usb will only synch my iPod Nano, not Pad or camera. The iPad doesn't do uploader or anything as it won't seem to speak to other things like that so I have lots of lovely pictures on the Pod/Pad that I can only show or email. I also can't back up the Pad on anything but it seems to be doing so now, even though Tristan's bloomin' FIFA 11 HD is taking an absolute age to upload or back up or whatever it's doing. Plus (who am I justifying this to??) I have to do lots of dvd interactive stuff and video lectures for correspondence degree and I get a headache sitting at pc on the really uncomfortable chair and Flash doesn't run on Apple things. I'll shut up now as I'm sounding petulant.

I do seem to have developed a bit of 'device dyslexia' as when I first unwrapped laptop I prodded the screen icons and wondered why there wasn't a response, and I realise how sloppy my typing's become since iPad helpfully capitalises i's and substitutes words, although that is a mixed blessing at times as I did try buying a train ticket to Gatwick and getting the error message, until I realised iPad was changing it to Batsman when I wasn't looking. It only likes Pole Gate too.

Anyway I spent this morning having coffee in Nero with John who is doing the same OU courses as me and always gets much better marks (which is really, really not a problem obviously...) and we spent a long time discussing career prospects or whether a PhD would be a better route, neither of which are really feasible but it was nice talking about it! If I do ok I would like to do an MSc but I need to get more than 69% for my assignments methinks.

Here are some pictures:

My lupins have been fantastic this year and the Eremurus have also settled in well. The hollyhocks are about to burst forth and hopefully the rain will give everything some vigour.

Here is the boy and Maud the picked-on chicken-cum-parrot. Tristan has reached the age where having one's face in a photo (especially smiling! I mean, come on!) is the ultimate in uncoolness but I snapped him unawares.

Oh and this is my absolute favourite rose - Jude the Obscure - who has taken over from Gertrude Jekyll (see profile pic) in the loveliest scent and shape stakes.