The Wool Palace

I've done it, have you?

How can we sleep when our beds are burning?

I've been burning the midnight oil tonight.  I was determined not to go to bed until Gemma's body was finished.  I accomplished this, with the help of the BBC 2 repeat of the TV series of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. 

Too late for photos tonight but it looks fine and fits fine too - maybe a little shorter than I would have liked, but a bit of blocking should help there.  I couldn't seem to get the shoulders to look right with short rows, so I had to cast off and will have to sew them together, rather than do a 3 needle bind off.   The bad news is I have one sleeve left to do.  Still, with only the cuff patterned it should move quickly.

I will leave you with a tip.  If you are cooking rice and you want to see if it is done, you may think that a good method would be to tip the pan to see if all the water has been absorbed.  This is not a good method, rather it is a method that will result in rice spilling over the cooker and also on the floor.  If you are wearing Birkenstocks while attempting this method it is highly likely that some of the (hot) rice will fall onto your foot.  This will hurt.  A lot.  Just take some rice out of the pan with a fork and taste it to check if it's done.

Not knitting, climbing (literally)

It's been a lovely Bank Holiday weekend here at the Wool Palace.  I hope you've all enjoyed your weekends, long or otherwise.

Traditionally in the UK, Bank Holiday weekends involve rain, traffic jams and air traffic controllers' strikes.  However this May Day has been quite pleasant really.  In London we've had pretty good weather for all three days.

We did get our fair share of traffic jams on Sunday.  Josie was at a sleepover Saturday night, so like the callous (sp?) parents we are we picked her up bright and early and headed off to Ashdown Forest.  After informing us that she had had 'no sleep', Josie feel asleep pretty much as soon as we started driving.  That left us and Sam to drive 35 miles, which took us 2½ hours.  Sometimes I really don't like living in London.  We can drive to Taunton (which is almost 200 miles from London) in about 3 hours, yet it takes us 2½ hours to drive 35 miles?

Anyway, Ashdown Forest is a beautiful place.  English countryside at its best.

This was our first visit.  I've been suggesting we go here for about a year but Toby's response has been non committal.  That is, until he got a guidebook to climbing in the area.  Suddenly, he's very enthusiastic.  We took a picnic and spent a couple of hours enjoying the views and lazing around.  Then we went for a walk through part of the forest and then headed off to the rocks.  I got talked into belaying, so Toby got to climb.

Sam did some bouldering.

And Josie did things her own way, as usual.

We left the rocks at 6.30pm, stopped for a (pretty mediocre) pub dinner and managed the drive home in about an hour.  Josie was asleep 10 minutes after we walked in the door.

Back to the knitting tomorrow.