Heather Knits

Hope you are all having a great day!

I think there will be a lot of eating, board games and knitting in the rest of my Christmas day

Washing machine: fixed

Light in utility room: not fixed but at least we know more about the problem

Central heating: hopefully will be fixed soon, plumber coming this afternoon

New car: ordered

Old car: limping along

Work: backlog

Heather: more sleep needed

Happy birthday to me! Today I am 32. 32 = 2^5 (I’m afraid I haven’t worked out how to do general superscripts yet), and powers of 2 are always nice numbers. I think this will be a good year

Well, there have been quite a lot of goings-on here lately. The latest of which is having our (rather ancient) boiler replaced. To add to the excitement they don’t make the kind we had before (a back boiler behind the gas fire in the lounge) so the new one (which should be loads more efficient) is going into the utility room, but it does mean having new pipework to connect it to everything else. Hence, due to concrete floors downstairs, and therefore having to put the pipes through the ceiling, the floorboards have had to come up in both our spare bedrooms, although luckily not all the boards, just about half of each room.

Up until last week both of the spare rooms were fairly full of yarn (and other assorted bits and pieces), which has now all gone for a nice holiday to a storage unit a few miles away. It is rather distressing not to be surrounded by all my stash, although I did make up for it by having a load of undyed yarn from Bluefaced arrive on Tuesday, which is now sitting in its box in the middle of the lounge

Luckily we have 24hr access to the storage unit, so if it all becomes too awful I can run down there and stroke it all. I am going to take the opportunity to have a bit of a sort out when it all comes back again too (it went there in rather a rush so I didn’t get much sorted on the way out). I have managed to give away 8 cones of chenille to people at the Reading knitting group on Saturday, so I am making a start!

We are currently on our third day of no heating, and second day with no hot water. The kettle is getting a good workout! It has been a bit cold over night, but I am wearing my warmest knitted jumper and it is ok. I am missing the hot water a lot more. It took me 20 mins this morning to boil enough kettles and saucepans to have a not-terribly-warm bath about 4 inches deep, and then another couple of kettles to wash my hair in the washbasin. I have learnt from when we had our bathroom replaced that it is more comfortable to wash your hair in the bathroom washbasin than the kitchen sink, since it is a better height, and you don’t run the risk of bashing your head on the kitchen cupboards Hopefully all being well it should be finished later today.

While it all goes on I have been doing a bit of City and Guilds sample homework (although with frequent breaks because the latest couple of samples have been hurting my hands) and sorting out some of my photos. So hopefully more blog posts with actual photos soon!

Dear World,

The number of hours in the day appears to be inadequate, please adjust the rotation of the Earth accordingly.

Love Heather

PS. I have tried using the hours usually reserved for sleeping to get things done, but the results weren’t pretty.

Like the rest of the UK we have had unaccustomed snowiness over the last few days. It started on Sunday night:

and by Monday looked like this:

This is definitely the most snow we have seen here since we moved in. Paul’s work had emailed and told everyone to work from home unless it was critical that they made it into the office so we put on our warm clothes and stayed indoors. At lunch time we went for a walk around the village to assess the situation.

The station was closed:

But there was some surprisingly industrious snow enginnering going on. Unfortunately I failed to photograph the large igloo in progress on the village green, but did photograph the snowman on the common (for reference Paul is about 6 feet tall – that is one tall snowman! Click the picture for the full effect).

It was very beautiful but a bit cold, so after a circuit of part of the common we came home and dried off and had hot chocolate

The snow is definitely on its way out now although I am surprised by how well it has lasted.

And now to justify the knitting blog part – well not actually knitting, but ingredients for knitting at least. I mentioned that I had been doing some more dyeing while my parents were visiting. Here are my latest efforts. They are for some more experimenting for my next City and Guilds project, which is coming along, although slowly.

I am very pleased with the oranges, they have come out pretty much as I planned. The green was a bit of an experiment. This is the first time I have had a go with Kemtex acid dyes, and this is their green. It is quite a bit bluer than I was expecting, and too blue for this project, though it is a lovely colour. I have also been playing with the acidity again (me, obsessive, heaven forbid!), and I made the solution for the green a little more acid than my last experiments. One of the reasons for this was the discovery that if you make up dye solutions and then leave them for 3 months, the less acidic ones go a bit mouldy (although they do still dye the yarn fine). However since the acid fixes the dye to the yarn, and the stronger the acid the faster the fixing (this means that the colours don’t run as far), in this case the colour has hardly had a chance to get onto the yarn before it is being fixed to it, resulting in the inside of the yarn if you unply it being considerably paler than the outside. It is an interesting effect, and makes the yarn look slightly heathered which is pretty, but I think I will reduce the acid next time and aim for a more solid colour.

My parents have been visiting for a week and we have had a very nice and rather busy time. Amongst other things we celebrated Christmas again, complete with roast chicken, stuffing, etc, crackers and party hats We have done this several times now, spending Christmas itself with Paul’s parents, and then having mine to stay at the end of January. More Christmases can only be a good thing, any excuse for lots of eating and some board games Also everything seems so frantic in December. It is rather nice to have something to look forward to at the end of January and by then you can face the idea of turkey again (although admittedly this time Tesco’s turkeys looked a little tired so we opted for chicken). As always with having people to stay there is a great temptation to cram in as many exciting things as possible. We had a lovely time but are now rather exhausted! I have just about got caught up with the washing and cleaning, and am making inroads into my email inbox. My parents have gone home equipped with possible holiday travel options to work on, information on restoring some of their furniture, and in my Mum’s case some newly dyed wool for a capelet – we managed to wedge a lot into a week!

In completely unrelated news I have reached the dizzying heights of You Tube, though not in a knitting related fashion. The dance class I go to is run by the University of Surrey, and each December they put on a show where each of the classes does a piece. I am on the far right, luckily the camera angle means that you can’t see me most of the time

We are having a nice quiet New Year, with some knitting and the latest experimental chili from the book Paul got for Christmas (today’s was good but we have even higher hopes for tomorrow’s!).

I don’t really go in for new year resolutions, my plan for 2009 is to become a bit more organised, and a bit tidier. I will be able to better enjoy all the lovely yarn that I have if I can actually get to it, and know what is where.

Happy New Year! I hope that you will all have a wonderful 2009, full of interesting things you want to do, and great friends to share it with.

I hope that you are all enjoying a very happy and knitting-filled day.

I plan to do quite a lot of eating, a fair bit of board game playing and possibly even fit in a little bit of knitting too.