Having been very virtuous and finishing all my outstanding knitting projects, I’ve started a new one.

This is Soay by Gudrun Johnston a.k.a. The Shetland Trader. I’ve been eyeing this pattern for a good while after being alerted to its delights by Mel, who was wearing a very natty orange version when I saw her last week!

You can have a look at it here. I ordered my pattern and downloaded it through Ravelry.

The yarn is Lana Grossa Merino Superfein, which is really lovely to knit with.

Now I just need to get the quilting UFOs under control. That’s going to be a pretty big task!

Helen

Wouldn’t you know. School goes back on Monday and summer has finally decided to arrive in Switzerland. Today we are somewhere over 30 degrees and by the middle of next week it is supposed to be 33. I know that to those of you living in the deep South this is peanuts, but factor in no air-conditioning and it is pretty warm. Especially for me. I’m a girl from the north. I’m not built for heat.

Today I seem to have been doing everything pretty much in slow motion. Not getting anywhere fast.

I’ve also just realized that today is actually the last proper day of the school holidays if you don’t count the weekend. I think I’m going to enjoy it, find a nice book, some magazines, a cool drink and just do a little bit of this….

….and hope to goodness that it’s raining next week when my gardener friends come to visit, because the jungle certainly isn’t getting tidied up anytime soon….. 😉

manana manana…..

Helen

I’m sure you’ll all be very pleased to know after yesterday morning’s overachievements that I’m not wonderwoman after all. I didn’t get anywhere near all the stuff done that I’d unrealistically planned – surprise! I did take daughter no. 2 for her test results though – and she had make huge improvements and the therapist could conclude that she categorically isn’t dyslexic. After which of course we had to go into the city to eat Mövenpick ice-creams to celebrate….and well, things went downhill from there!

I’m glad for my daughter that she isn’t dyslexic after all…we have it in the family and it does sometimes make things a bit of an ordeal, although my son has made huge strides in developing his own strategies for dealing with it and you’d never know my husband had it at all – either he grew out of it, or a combination of spellcheck and illegible handwriting mean that nobody notices it anymore. Thankfully we have it in a mild form, because severe dyslexia can make life very difficult indeed.

Daughter number 2 was showing some tell-tale signs, but it turns out that they were really the result of only having formal education in English for the last 2 years.  Being in a bilingual programme at school and speaking English like a member of the royal family, everyone expects her to be able to write perfect English too – but of course she’s never been through all the learning of word patterns and spellings that English children would have done…she spells on the hoof, learning phonic tricks from German and the results can be really interesting! At least now her awareness of the importance of spelling in English has been raised, so hopefully if she continues to make an effort it shouldn’t be too much of a problem anymore. Fingers crossed. Effort is sometimes in short supply where teenagers are concerned, especially where exciting things like spelling are concerned!

So, I’m off now to get down to the apple stewing that I meant to do yesterday and I may even get round to the red onion marmalade if I haven’t got fed up with chopping things up by then.

Have a nice afternoon,

Helen

Today I seem to be having the sort of day when I make great strides with seemingly almost no effort whatsoever. Jobs that I’ve been dreading seem to get done in a trice and although it’s only lunchtime, I’m quite taken aback at what I’ve managed to achieve so far. I’m kind of in shock actually!

1) In my PJs and before anything apart from a life-saving cup of tea I FINISHED the Appunto socks. Here they are in their glory. They turned out really pretty, but I don’t think I’ll be tackling this pattern again. relief does not begin to describe how I feel about having these finished.

(by the way, my calves are not really this chunky, the photo was taken at a very unflattering angle!)

2) Visited the farm shop for fruit and veg and 2 supermarkets for everything else – most of which seemed to be the final school supplies we need for next week and some rather extraordinary baking ingredients for the Nigella session that’s going on round here today.

3) Took other people’s clothes to the dry cleaner

4) Washed windows (something I’m really, really bad at and hate doing, but they had to be done as my dearest husband steam-cleaned the patio a couple of weeks ago and managed to relocate the dirt from the patio to the living room windows).

5) Cleaned the patio of all the dead flowers and leaves that had fallen off the fuscia and the hanging baskets and cleared up the junk.

6) Did the ironing

7) Did a 6 mile training run

8 ) Started hoovering the house, but got a little bored and wandered off to write this!

I so rarely have days like this that it’s all a bit disconcerting and will no doubt go downhill from here…..but right now it feels wonderful and I would like to thank the cleaning fairies, who have clearly been helping when I wasn’t looking, and my daughter, who is baking things that smell delicious and making the whole house seem just….well…perfect!

I’ve still got lots on the list for today though:

• Clearing up the garden – this is really top priority as I’ve just heard that some good friends who are professional gardeners are coming to dinner next week and I don’t want to feel humiliated when they cast their knowing eyes over what has degenerated into a jungle.
• Making red onion marmalade with some of the onions I harvested yesterday.
• Stewing and freezing even more apples from my super bumper crop.
• Recycling.
• Taking the car to the car wash and sticking on my new I heart Darcy sticker (at the insistence of a teenage daughter besotted with Colin Firth)
• Taking the other (non-Darcy) daughter for her final dyslexia assessment meeting…where I hope we will discover that she isn’t dyslexic and just can’t spell at all in English.
• Casting on Soay in delightful purple yarn (swoon!)

After all this If I get it all done, I shall be forced to hit the gin to deal with the shock. I would accompany it with some chocolate, but my special chocolate bar has disappeared into thin air. Funny that.

Phew.

Tomorrow I shall be resting!

Helen

It doesn’t happen very often, but once in a while I make a complete pig’s ear out of a project. The current pig’s ear are my Appunto socks.

The finished sock actually looks very pretty on and I love the yarn (Three Irish Girls), but the pattern ********!

There is actually nothing wrong with the pattern. I’m sure it’s me, but honestly I could scream.

I now know why I was sitting with only one sock made for a very long time. When I started the second sock I had a flash of that feeling that you get when you go into labour with your second baby. You multiple mothers out there know what I mean – that ‘oh no, I remember this, how can I have managed to forget it up till now?’ feeling. That brain blanking out the pain thing…

I should have given up at the point where it took me 6 starts to get the toes going. Toe up socks are very, very clever. Maybe too clever, or too clever for me at least. I read the instructions forwards backwards and inside out, but it was only on the 6th try that I realized I was doing everything inside out and that was why it all looked funny.

I’m relying on reading the charts to knit the socks, rather than the written instructions. At least the charts give me a visual idea of what’s going on…or should be. I still don’t understand though how on earth I have managed to end up with one foot half an inch longer than the other one, despite following the pattern and the cabling working out like it should. The upside of this is that one of my feet really is almost half an inch longer than the other, so that kind of saves the day. All my sock loving friends out there can now breathe out again. You won’t be getting these in your Christmas stockings!

The biggest disaster happened last night though. I was quietly watching the DVD of the BBC Pride and Prejudice series (yes THE ONE WITH COLIN AND THE WET SHIRT!!! – but I haven’t got that far yet!). Actually we were watching to see the National Trust cottage we stayed in in Lacock last month – and unfortunately in my excitement when it finally came up on the screen I managed to drop all the stitches on one side of the heel of the wretched sock.

At this point I know I should have pulled it back and re-knit it properly, wasting a whole evening of sweating blood getting as far as I’d got.

Well folks, that just wasn’t going to happen. Every girl has her limits and I have reached mine and some more where these socks are concerned. So I did what the Swiss call basteln and the rest of us know as getting somewhat creative. I sort of managed to pull it all together. It doesn’t look great, but hey, who’s going to see it and at that point I was more concerned about my blood pressure than about perfection.

So there we are. I’m slowly slogging my way up the leg, reading the chart with my glasses on the end of my nose looking like some kind of demented person. Which frankly, is what these socks have reduced me to.

But I am going to win. And it is going to be over. I just hope it’s soon.

Helen