Becalmed.

Scruffy chair, yet to be fixed but already much loved by Magnus

Victoria Sponge from the Arch Cafe, Fettercairn

Home made bread, pears and Dukkah.

Things are a bit flat around here, I've taken to my bed like a Victorian heroine, which is rather appropriate because the book by my bedside is this one, all about 19th Century women writers. I bought it on a whim after it was mentioned in a ( now forgotten ) newspaper article and am enjoying it very much indeed. There's only one snag.  It is huge, seven hundred and sixty two pages of huge. Which means that while there is a lot to learn about women writing in the 19th Century, none of that learning will take place in the bath.  A great pity as I find that a little steam helps the knowledge to sink in.

The new spinning wheel is settling in well. Having assembled it single handed I'm sensing that Archie is feeling just a bit proprietorial towards his creation. He's been checking that my maidens are aligned and looking critically at the drive band. In return I knitted him a pair of snazzy house socks made from the first two spinnings. No pictures as yet because there has been no light other than grey for many days now.   I've been snatching the odd snap when I see a rare sunbeam. Not that there are too many of those about, leaden is the sky colour of choice for this month.

Tomorrow brings big changes -  I'm dragging myself from under the duvet and heading for London to catch up with some family and check out the Richmond Literature Festival. The festival has a snazzy Literary Salon and my plan is to take up as Knitter in Residence. I have a book and about ten balls of sock yarn. If all else fails I can knit myself a blanket and snooze .

Wovember.

Exciting things are happening in the Scottish Wooly world. Wovember is here. Have a look at Kate Davie's blog to find out more. Actually, I'd recommend you have a look at her blog any month of the year. It is stuffed with inspiring design, damn good writing and beautiful photographs.

One of the aims of Wovember is to raise awareness of the difference between wool and yarn.  I sometimes feel a bit of a pedant about this myself having grown up in a place where wool was used to describe anything you could knit with. It still happens, go into any traditional Scottish 'Wool Shop' and I can promise you that at least two thirds of the stock will never have seen the back of a sheep.  There are some honourable exceptions, like the wonderful Twist Fibre Crafts in Fife but it is quite normal for a knitter to enter a Scottish shop looking for wool only to be shown the acrylics.

One thing that taught me the value of wool, real true wool, was learning to spin. It was magical watching the fibres grab onto each other to create a thread, albeit a lumpy one. I have early handspun fit only for felting. This week my spinning took a turn for the better with the arrival of my new wheel, an Ashford Traditional. My old wheel is a Louet 10 which is great for thicker spinning and I hope the new one will lead me down the path of finer things.  Many thanks to ever patient Archie who put it together with the minimum of swearing, and to Kay, my spinning guru who cast her experienced eye over his work and pronounced it good.

When I first started knitting I choose my yarns according to colour not fibre and I still have heaps of acrylic blends that I'm trying to use up/fob off onto others. Likewise with the spinning. To begin with I bought up lots and lots of dyed merino tops without a thought to how much fibre was needed to make a decent amount of yarn and even now many bags of multi-coloured fluff haunt Knitting Headquarters. My plan is to use as much of this up as I can while I get to know the wheel and what it can do. My first finished yarn is made from appropriately autumnal colours and I'm hoping to make it into thank-you socks for Archie.  I don't have quite enough of it yet. That's a perfect excuse to spin some more.

Someday My Quince Will Come

In the news today  - sixty-odd thousand geese have flown many miles this month to spend the winter in Angus.  Lucky for us we also had a flying visit from the marvelous Mary Jane Mucklestone.  We met up in the not quite so marvelous Travelodge at Aberdeen Airport as MJ swept in en route from from her star appearance at Shetland Wool Week before heading home to the States.

In her luggage was a copy of her brand new, not yet released book ( you can see just how excited I was to get my hands on it ) and many many beautiful swatches and samples of Fair Isle. Complete and utter knitterly Heaven. We managed to squeeze in a meal and a whole lot of talking and it was great to catch up with her. Next time I hope we'll be in more salubrious surroundings with a lot more time to talk and knit. Archie came with me and took these pictures. He had fun and said that we didn't talk about knitting too much.

So many samples and swatches

I used to have a face like this on Christmas morning!

 Also this week - our one and only quince was picked. We've had the quince tree for years, bought as a sad looking sapling after I read about making quince cheese in a cookery book. While every year it has given us the most beautiful flowers only now has a fruit appeared. It smells amazing but is rock hard. I'll cook it gently with some apples then eat very very slowly.

Oh, and I finished a pair of socks with some hand dyed yarn from Ripplescrafts. I know there is only one of them here but I really like the light in this shot.  I believe it might be that elusive thing called sunlight. Not a lot of that around these days but I have the memories of Mary Jane's colourful samples to cheer me through the winter.

I know, bad pun.

Stitch pattern comes from Hedgerow Socks on Ravelry.

Plummy Evolution and Parental Revenge.

When I was a teenager I spent many miserable Sunday afternoons traipsing around furniture stores. As my folks admired the shiny new matching suites and nests of tables I lurked in the background perfecting my slouch and wishing I was anywhere else.  There I was a sensitive Bohemian stuck in suburbia when I was meant for higher things.  I'd loudly complain about the ugliness of pretty much everything on sale and secretly plan my escape to a place far far away from the middle class awfulness that was stifling me. A place where I would be appreciated as the genius I so obviously was.  It was torture. What my genius didn't realise, was  that as far as my parents were concerned, the torture was mutual.

A few weeks ago I was back in my teenage purgatory only this time I was one of the grown ups. We needed a new sofa and after extensive research in the same horrid shops we chose a successor to the scruffy collapsing thing we've been sitting on all these years.  I happened to mention this in an email to my father and this was his reply.


Jeni
I think someone must have hacked into your emails. This mention of G Plan just can't be coming from you - the very essence of middle class aspiration, and someone expects me to believe that you have succumbed.


It might have taken him twenty seven years but my dad has had the last word!

In other news. The nights are getting darker, the shelves are looking bare. Time to make plum jam. I wonder what my teenage self would think of that.

High Winds, Low Energies.

Magnus takes umbrage at the news.

Rainy Glasgow.

Sofa time.

The purple is logwood and the yellow one is eucalyptus leaves.

it is a day for staying on  the sofa. A day much like yesterday and the day before that. Lots of snoozing, gentle knitting and stopping to laugh at Magnus taking his anger out on Channel 4 News. It isn't the weather for leaving the house anyway, there are high wind warnings for our area and the sky is grumpy and damp.


My gentle knitting consists of some handspun that I dyed with logwood a while ago and the few balls remaining from a cardigan that I knitted last year and have inexplicably forgotten to photograph. I'm making a witchy coloured purple and green striped scarf, knitted in stocking stitch so that the ends curl inwards in a tubular fashion. It will be as long as the yarn allows. Soothing and hopefully idiot proof. The sort of knitting to be carried out from a supine position on the sofa while wearing badly matched pajamas and socks that have felted so much that the heel is much closer to the toe than the pattern intended.  I'm going to stay here till teatime listening to the weather and dreaming of warmer days.

Moving on.

Time is moving on again,  the swallows are tearing around the fields filling their bellies with as many flies as possible before the long trip south. Even when the sun shines there is a chill in the air and I'm already thinking about mittens in the mornings.

There has been a good bit of spinning and dyeing. I used the eucalyptus branches and bark to dye some fibre. I had been hoping for brown, or even purple but yellow is what I got and yellow is what I'll be knitting.  The kitchen smelt like cough drops for days. Of course I have no pictures of the yarn. I'll do that next time the sun shines.

I nearly took a great picture of this poppy, one of the many gifts that the garden gave us when we neglected to weed at all this year.  However a blade of grass got in the way.  The colours are still pretty though. We have the most incredible collection of flowers and I have no idea where half of them came from. I'm thinking that the birds might be dropping seeds en route to the feeders but who knows. The feeders have been a great success,  I was looking out of the kitchen window far too early one morning and saw two tiny willow warblers and a red squirrel in our big silver birch tree. First squirrel in fourteen years.

In other news, Magnus has learned a new skill. He has taught himself to pee in the drain outside our house. I caught him in the act while I was testing out a new zoom lens. Should save us a fortune in kitty litter.

A little feline interlude.

Cat notices change in bird feeding routine

Crackling from tonight's pork roast

An attempt to storm the feeders

Then a dismount and a wistful glance.