Wrist warmers for J

My latest knitting project, wrist warmers for J! When he works from home it doesn't take long for him to notice that the level of warmth within our home is substantially less than in his office at work. Coupled with him being sat still in front of a computer for most of the day inevitably his hands get cold which makes typing uncomfortable.

When I first offered to make him some I'm sure that he thought that it would be a bit of a joke but the next time he worked from home he was wearing them; all day. I think that he surprised himself!

The pattern was a simple tube knitted on double-pointed needles. As he is slimmer around the wrist than above the thumb  I enlarged the tube above the thumb hole for comfort and cast off using an elastic cast off technique. I wasn't so impressed with this as it left the end looser than I intended but J is happy with them.

Coppicing

Hazel stool

Thanks to the water logging we haven't got very far with this years pruning. I tend to prune plants very heavily and then leave them a couple of years to recover. If the garden were smaller I would probably rethink this but it works well for here.

Wireless internet

Dish at the end of our garden for
our wireless internet 

Spring is the time for big purchases, at least according to J. We now have wireless internet to bring our online speeds up to spec. Good enough for J to occasionally work from home.

Spring clean

Our neighbours have always kept the exterior of their property tidy but this has recently been taken to extremes with their regular brushing and tidying of the gravel. It all seems a little over the top until you realise that they are trying to sell their property and, in the process, are trying to make it look as good as it possibly can. Unfortunately, if you turn your back to theirs you will be faced with ours, a lot less pretty.

I admit it, we hadn't tidied up the front of our place for two years. Thanks to the tractors driving past there was a vast build up of muck, soil and weeds along the bottom of our front wall. Not only looking a little grotty but pretty disgusting. It didn't help that we still had a pile of subsoil sat on our driveway left over from some building work 3 years ago. The regular brushing of our neighbours had it's effect, we decided that it was time to smarten up a bit!

It is amazing what a few hours of hard work can do. J removed the subsoil pile and generally tidied up the driveway. This also included a drastic prune of our wisteria that was beginning to take over the roof of our garage and looked as if it intended to cover up our solar panels. I grafted at the front, removing most of the plants from our little border and introduced a couple of large primulas and snowdrops. My rose, that hasn't been happy for a while, had a drastic chop too and will hopefully come back bigger and better. But the hardest work was cleaning up the edge of the road. There had been such a build up of muck that all sorts of weeds were flourishing that needed hoicking out.

It was hard work but I was amazed at how quickly it all pulled together. Just a couple of hours of hard labour and our home looks so much more inviting to visitors. The results may not be comparable to our neighbours but it is no longer an embarrassment.

Make do and mend

Mending finished!

Much as I enjoy handicrafts there is one aspect that I never seem to get on with and that is the mending. It's not that I hate it, more that I would rather be doing something more interesting.

Too wet for wood

Odd bits of wood waiting to be chopped

I've recently taken a short break from blogging and in the mean time this post has been sitting in my drafts waiting to be shared. Thankfully it is no longer so wet and I've been able to make a start at some of the work in our garden again.

Wood is very important to us. But one of the issues with this past winter's rain is that we've not been able to process any. Dry cold winter days are excellent for chopping wood and in past years the majority of ours has been completed by February. But when it's wet it becomes dangerous to use heavy tools or machinery and it seems as if we have had nothing but wet for the last few months.

Handspun, crocheted socks!

Handspun, crocheted socks from odd balls of wool.

I had to share these ugly mutts, I love them so much! They are made from yarn that I span when I first started spinning hence those bright solid colours. This yarn has been hanging around for a while preventing me from spinning more. After all, why should I spin when I have yarn to use? Sometimes I am too practical for my own good.

Spinning is a lovely therapeutic thing to do. Because the wheel doesn't come out often it hasn't lost it's thrill.

Crocheted socks are a crackers thing to make, they just aren't as comfortable to wear as knitted. But I do enjoy the process of making them and I find crochet is far more portable than knitting on double pointed needles.

Washing.

My washing machine is dying. When on a spin cycle it sounds like an aircraft that is about to take off. So, expecting the worst some day soon, we bought replacement bearings. Unfortunately there is no way to replace the bearings because our washing machine has a sealed drum. We are not happy.