Cold weather and warm woollens

Yesterday we seemed to spend the best part of the day in Ikeas, yes, more than one of them! That is almost beyond the call the duty, but the boy now has his big bookshelf/cupboard with doors on. I am from the open shelf brigade and David is from the behind closed doors brigade. I would even like to have all my ingredients on open shelves and can remember my grand-mothers larder in New Holland in Lincolnshire. It was down a couple of steps from the kitchen, and being half underground was lovely and cool. It had a stone floor and marble shelves. I would happily swap this for cupboards and my fridge!

Mr S has taken himself off to the NEC to spend a day amongst model trains so today I have a day all on my own at home, and after the gloomy morning will probably go outside to check on the garden and clear up the leaves etc. I've sat and done some knitting and phoning around. Sadly Aunty Nora is very poorly and is now in Hospital, and a phone call to Aunty Prue put me back in good spirits. We compared notes and I found out that her sweetpeas are already up, so I shall start mine off soon. My tee pee with only a few plants yielded so many bunches last year, and I hope that do as well this coming year.

Although we had a sprinkling of snow in the night, it had melted away by the morning, and thanks to my recent knitted items I am pretty snug. Both the legwarmers and the gloves are knitted in Manos Silk Blend. I'm pleased to have knitted some gloves, but feel that I am rather a nice leather gloves type of person. I do however now wear some rather unflattering performance biking gloves when cycling around, as I ruined a pair of fine leather gloves when they got wet through whilst cycling during the blizzard a few weeks ago.

Anna from Web of Wool suggested I put a couple of drops of hair conditioner in the rinsing water when preparing my new Lace Triangle/Tucker ready for its stretch on my wires. Here it is drying in the conservatory. The design is one based on the techniques explained by Evelyn Clark her booked called Knitting Lace Triangles. I've had the yarn for a couple of years now and was the first of consignments from the shawl club from Poshyarn. It is a lovely shade of Lavender and is warm and soft.