We celebrated our wedding anniversary the other weekend. Can’t believe it’s been a year already!

I’ve absolutely adored our first year of marriage and we really spoilt ourselves.

The Lions match in a sports bar on Saturday afternoon, followed by a stunning performance of Madam Butterfly at the ENO - which was beautifully done, very simple but striking set and costumes. We recognised some of the traditional Japanese Kabuki moves from a production of the Mikado we were both in a couple of years ago.. So something for each of us I guess!

I’m determined we’re going to stick to the traditional themes for anniversary gifts so year one was paper, so Duncan bought me a subscription to Sew magazine. A fantastic new magazine published in the UK .. which I appear to be the exact target market for! You might recognise a little someone in issue two.. which dropped onto my doormat today! There’s a feature on sewing bloggers with mini interviews with 5 of us - it’s quite exciting! I was really hoping to include some photos, but as neither of our cameras has battery, I’ll link to Lisa’s review of issue one for now instead! - I couldn’t resist posting straight away, Duncan’s out and I had to tell somebody!

Image from Joggles.com

I made a last minute decision to sign up for Sharon Boggon’s Studio Journals: A Designer’s Workhorse course through Joggles. It’s a course I’ve been meaning to take for a couple of years. It’s about using a journal to ‘catch your design ideas’ with a view to designing fiber projects - so embroidery and quilting. I have the list of the materials needed so will head out to the art shop on Saturday morning - first item on the list a journal

I’ve done a couple of other courses with Sharon before and have really enjoyed them. I have found it difficult to keep up though - I think the first one I had to stop the sewing part way through after hurting my wrist and I followed it up with a second course not long after recovering..

I’m going to have to make time this time to get the most out of it! Which will be a challenge for me! Especially with my new addiction to Springwatch and hopefully a house move this summer.. (still sitting with fingers crossed waiting for our buyer to have her mortgage approved).

I was at our local pub last night, The Earl Ferrers, it’s a fab local with a real community spirit. Last night we had a lavender bag workshop for us instead of our usual stitch and bitch session.

One of my neighbours is a costume designer and had a host of different materials and trimmings for us to play with. Please excuse the sewing on this - the lighting in the pub, the beer and the lateness of the hour did me no favours!! (the embroidery in the centre is cut from a lovely piece of embroidered silk - not my own work!)

I’ve had to hold off on this post until my Father-in-law’s birthday present was delivered!

Richard is both a big Schubert fan and difficult to buy for so this year we decided that an embroidery of Schubert was a good option.

I took this image:

Traced the outline and simplified the detail a little. I used split stitch for most of the design and fly stitch to shape the curly stitches on the hair. I’ve run the picture by a few of my musical friends and they assure me that it is a recognisable likeness! What do you think??

When Duncan visited Seattle recently, he stayed with a Search Marketing associate of his, CEO of SEOmoz - Rand Fishkin and his wife Geraldine.

While he was there they visited Archie McPhee a store who’s tag line is ’slightly less disappointing than other companies!’ The store sells Yodelling Pickles - I can’t wait to go visit myself at some point! Geraldine bought a jar of fake eyeballs.. which I wish Duncan had photographed! Not least because we decided that it would make the perfect thank you card!

The photo’s not great, but the iris is done using buttonhole stitch, the pupil a french knot and the red blood-shotness is fly stitch.

Since making my own eyeballs I found some kits over at Creative Kismet who would have thought there’d be so much call for embroidered eyeballs!

One of my favourite stories as a child was the Princess and the Pea, so I’ve been really excited by some of the projects I’ve seen around recently.

This embroidery is just so lovely, it looks so simple, which I find are often the hardest projects to do!

Over at Soulemama this amazing project really captured my imagination and I’ll be saving this one up for the future

Chickens

The flowers obviously did the trick

We accepted an offer on our flat on Thursday and there’s now a lovely Sold sign outside. Not counting chickens, touching wood and looking out for pairs of magpies! We’re also booking appointments to go and view places out in Surrey.

Knitting

After more than a couple of false starts, a bit of a strop and a lovely afternoon with a good knitting friend (that’s both good friend and a friend who’s good at knitting!), I am proud to present the half finished back of my gilet-to-be…

My initial problems stemmed from not understanding the pattern properly and having to count 82 stitches.. yep - I have a PhD and struggled counting to 82(!)

But now I’m underway so far so good! The tricky bit is not dropping the cable needle - any advice on that would be very welcome!

We’re trying to sell our flat, I don’t think I’ve mentioned that here, but where I used to spend my Saturday mornings sewing or writing blog posts, we now clear out for viewings..

We bought these beautiful lilies for the viewings this weekend, hear’s hoping that between them and the sunshine we made an impression! I love the shading on these, they’d make a lovely embroidery..

One of the other benefits is the tidiest of flats, I’m not a neat freak by nature, but now I can’t leave for work without tweaking the duvet so it’s just so. When I get a call at work saying can we bring someone to view this afternoon I then flash back to did I put that pile of laundry away? Did I leave a glass on the work top? what mess have we left out!!

There are only two of us, but as we effectively have only Saturday to Sunday evening to wash everything and get it dried it it’s a bit of a focus! Today’s a bank holiday in the UK so no work and no viewings - I’ve got washing strung up all over the flat

It hasn’t all been laundry this weekend, we went out to Surrey to the area we’re hoping to move to. When we first put the flat on the market we went out house hunting, fell in love we a great place, which sold about a month ago.. with no news on our place I just can’t go look at any more until we actually can put an offer in, but we can still go and look round and enjoy the countryside that will hopefully soon be a lot closer!

We walked section 5 of the London loop, through the North Downs. The picture is of Happy Valley - you can’t go wrong with a place name like that!

It’s twenty past four, no work tomorrow, a very busy weekend planned and I can’t sleep.. So I thought a blog post was in order, please excuse my late night ramblings!

We’re traveling up to Yorkshire tomorrow for my sister-in-law’s wedding on Monday, so I’ll have another bash at starting knitting my shrug. I started it a few weeks ago, but haven’t quite got the hang of the ribbing, I’m hoping my Mother-in-law will have chance to help me out this weekend! Though I imagine it will be a pretty hectic weekend!

In fact I’ve just come across a site with quite comprehensive instructional videos on knitting, I think I might have to try ribbing on a practice piece before attempting it in a garment!

A friend sent this video through to me - it’s fabulous, watch through to the end, it just gets funnier!

Mary over at Needle’nThread has a 10% off deal for the month of April with The French Needle, they have some beautiful surface embroidery kits I love this bird but between the exchange rate and the duty payable for shipping into the UK it works out quite expensive!

While I quite like being awake while everyone else is asleep, it’s so quiet outside and there’s no pressure to be doing anything, I know I’m going to be exhausted tomorrow so I should try and grab a bit of sleep.

Goodnight all!

Cast on

How to Knit - Casting On from Penny Dablin - www.TheKnittingSite.com

Very clear instruction, assumes no prior knowledge and is has a good visual everything’s done very slowly, even so I had to replay the video a few times before I got it (and have gone back to it for every new project since!)

• I found on some other videos the hands sometimes masked what what was happening a little or it was done a it quicker maybe?

Apparently there are two methods to casting on and according to this article the thumb method, shown in the video above, gives a less firm edge to your knitting. Maybe it would be worth trying to learn the other method - which uses two needles, but I didn’t find a video I could follow using that method - if you know of one please post a link in the comments!

Knitting

How to Knit for Beginners : How to Make the Basic Knit Stitch, Expert Village.com

Now I had had previous instruction in the knitting part, so just needed to find a reminder but this video is really clear and I’m sure will make it easy for someone who’s never seen it (sorry the permissions for embedding this were disabled, but it’s a really good vid).

Casting off

I like this video - especially the size of the needles used.

Threadheads have a clip, which joins all of these together which is a good refresher if you know the basics but need a reminder:

Next steps

This glossary of knitting terminology might come in useful once we get onto using patterns.

My next project is going to be a shrug - my mum’s tested the patten, her dog (Buddy) ate a chunk of it, the lady in John Lewis helped me find the right wool and needles.

So far I’ve just asked which needles I will need as I buy the wool but this video explains the different types of needles and the different materials they can be made from.

So there you go - using those videos you should be able to wow your friends with your scarves

Having had several conversations with people about how nice it would be to join a book group I decided it was about time that we did.. in a rare proactive move I set one up..

It was so easy.. I just emailed 3 friends and told them to invite a couple of people and that was it

We’re meeting in a bookstore that has a bar and serves cake (covering all bases!) and I thought it might be nice to share..

Our first book is the 19th wife by David Ebershoff and we met on the 24th March. If you’ve read the book or have time to read it let me know what you think in the comments below and I’ll share your thoughts with the group and report back after we meet..

So that’s what I’ve been reading,

I’ve been watching Series 1 through 6.. (this may explain my intermittent blog posting)

playing Ginger Dawn check out the intro

buying wool - I’m trying for a garment rather than a scarf this time.. you may see photos (depends on my success!).

I’m playing catch up on reading blogs as well as writing posts but have just spotted a great post on different scissor types over at Purl Bee. I have a worrying scissor purchasing addiction which this may do quite a bit to feed!