I don’t want to stop things while the posts are coming thick and fast but I have a major website building deadline for the end of this month, and general life, plus the snow, plus the fever/throat virus I got last week means that I really need to step away from the internet and get the site properly out the door.

I’ll be back in early February. Have fun!

(ps. The Shop will remain open, just so you know.)

I don’t do big resolutions any more. I have never found that they work, and always made me feel bad.

However there are some small do-able things that would make a real difference if I got to grips with them and so here they are:

• Use the breadmaker more. We eat a lot of bread in our house, and making it at home means I don’t have to keep going to the shops to get it. (Also it’s quicker to set up the machine – assuming I do it in time – than going to the shops.) Plus it allows me to make it lower in salt, which is better for FB.
• Stop buying commercial sweets, and make your own instead. I bought ‘Life is Sweet’ by Hope and Greenwood and a digital thermometer before christmas, and after making various things as christmas presents I’m enthusiastic to carry on once every couple of weeks or so. Plus I don’t buy anything by Nestle any more, and I feel really uncomfortable buying chocolate that isn’t fair trade given the links between commercial chocolate, child labour and slavery. So homemade sweets are the way to go. I’ll let you know how I get on.
• Buy drinks in glass bottles. I have given up my fizzy drinks but I still drink alot of sparkling water, and while I know we can re-cycle our plastic bottles I think it’s probably better that I drink more water from the tap, and that the drinks that I do buy come in glass bottles.

I think that’s enough for the first few months of the year.

Despite my general need to go into the guts of my phone and turn off whatever I turned on that started date stamping my photos, it’s kinda useful to have it here, since it’s proof (of sorts) that it *is* in fact August, despite needed my walking boots and an umbrella just to go into town.

But anyways it’s good for the veggies (apart from the tomatoes which are likely to start blighting pretty soon. But even that means we’ll just have more green tomato pickle for the winter. So really there isn’t much of a downside, if you look hard enough.

Yeah, so the bump is pretty damn big now. :)

Anyways… KNITTING!

Currently on my needles is a version of Something Red by Knit and Tonic mixed with the visual style of Gloria from Noro (Ravelry link).

The stripes are half Jo Sharp Silk Road DK tweed, which I originally used to make the Picovoli Jumper a couple of years ago (and then ripped because I loved the yarn, and never wore the jumper. I’m fearless like that.) and half the wensleydale Handspun that I have been working on. Despite W’s protests, like with the Gloria cardigan, the body of this cardigan is reverse stocking stitch, since I’m not big on stripes going the width of my body. Plus I love the dottiness of it.

Then, instead of 2×2 rib for the body, which I think might be a bit harsh so soon after giving birth, given I’m planning to wear this this coming winter, I changed it to lovely mistake rib, which gives a similar – but softer – effect.

Oh and I’ll probably make the sleeves full length.

(Aside – I wish places in the UK stocked Silkroad tweed, since it’s wonderful stuff.)

(Written, not as an entrant to Bowerbird’s Contest, but because what she was asking of people struck a chord with me, and made me want to write something. )

What I am planning (or at least hoping) to do to challenge myself creatively in the next year:

Well, in two months (to the day, though due days come and go I hear), our first child is going arrive into the outside world, which I’m well aware is going to bring a million and one changes to our lives, and is going to turn my creative life upside down for a fair while, so my first plan is to ‘carry on being creative’ in whatever way I can. Including parenting.

Especially parenting.

I want to carry on being a good partner to W, and try to carve out some time, just him and I.  I don’t want us to forget why we like each other – especially after the amazing most recent couple of years we’ve made for ourselves.

I want to keep my two businesses afloat. I like them both. They make me happy, and they have the potential to grow (a bit) and establish (a bit) and hopefully turn into something more lasting.

(By the way, don’t read ‘how to start your business’ books. They are very scary.  Start businesses that can be started with very little money, and grown quite slowly, where possible. Mind you I’m not in this to make a million, or even 50,000. I like being little.)

I’m pretty sure it will be a major challenge to sort out the time to get some work done – no I don’t expect to get much done while the baby sleeps. I think I’m going to have to become an expert in eatting the elephant one tiny piece at a time.

Actually I’m going to put that right up there:

Next year, I’m going to learn how to eat the elephant one tiny piece at a time.

The knitting and the spinning (yes – and there are posts in the wings), are luckily things that can also be split to fit into tiny snatches of time, so it would be useful to keep a project on me, ready for a row or a round in a spare minute or two. (Like Elizabeth Zimmermann on the back of Gaffer’s motorbike.) They are likely to continue to grow – I keep finding things I want to do, make, and learn. So hopefully I’ll do, make and learn in whatever time I can find.

But specifics?

I want to spin up one bag of the alpaca roving into 2ply during the Olympic Games. (I want  to spin the rest too, but I’m not sure I can spin 900g in 16 days, and get sleep, and work done.)

I want to spin half the yarn for a striped jumper for W. (I might even dye the roving…)

I want to dye the yarn for the baby blanket and get that all knit up.

I want to knit myself a useful cardigan or two for my post-pregnancy self.

The rest I don’t know about, because it hasn’t lit a fire under me yet. But it will. It usually does.

Most of all I want to keep looking for joy. To keep breathing, and smiling, and moving. I want to keep my sense of hope, and smile and nod at all the bullshit, and let it pass me by…

Oh and take baby-h to some track cycling before the end of the season, since that’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last four years.

So I used to post quite a bit, and then I posted a bit, and then I didn’t post for ages.

But what really happened was this:

I decided to start a business.

And I just couldn’t talk about it until I knew it was going to happen. And now I know it’s going to happen, I can talk about it.

Basically in the next few weeks I’m going to start selling my own natural dyed yarn. Currently everything is dyed in our tiny galley kitchen here in Oxford (hence Oxford Kitchen Yarns), by me. And I’m loving it!

I get to play with colour, and yarn, and boil stuff up… what’s not to love? :)

So basically that’s why I’ve been so quiet. But now I’ve told you, I’m not going to be quiet any more. There are a ton of finished projects that have never seen the light of day monitor, and a few adventures I haven’t yet shared, but now I’m back and I can post about them.

The old typepad account is dead, but all my earlier posts are archived here, and I’ve been undating over the last week since I moved so that there are new things to read about, new projects to see.

It’s good to be (properly) back!