Woman, 35, in knitted pants horror

I'm knitting a shawl. A perfectly pretty shawl. It's Lehmus and you'll notice it looks beautiful on the designer's blog. But mine looks like this so far.

 

It looks like a pair of frilly knickers. Well, I mean, probably not the sort you would have in your underwear drawer of course. But a pair of BIG, LACY PANTS nevertheless. Got to love lace knitting, haven't you? For the pain, frustration and utter helplessness you feel in its holey little hands. Dear Lace, please stop torturing me and turn into something beautiful. Now. Before I lose the will to knit...

Hmm, okay. A bit more like that and I might consider picking up the needles again. Lace. It's not for the terminally lazy. I like a garment that I can knit, iron (yes, IRON) to the right proportions and then wear. Lovely lace. It likes a lot of hard work. Spraying and blocking, with special fancy-schmancy pins and a spray bottle (last seen in this house when the steam iron stopped steaming). Lace, O, demanding lace. Lace whose intricacies I only just learnt to keep track of by using stitch markers:

(thanks for the tip, Rosee, it's saved me a lot of headaches). O Lace! I curse thy holey knitted face of horror! ahem. Cup of tea, anyone?

The dog finds the whole thing very uninteresting.

He was more interested in what he'd spotted.

A teeny-tiny toad in the garden. A baby I suppose. A toadlet! Look how small he is. And I don't have gigantic hands, in case you were wondering.

Toads, lace knitting...and here are some pretty forget-me-nots and a dandelion for your viewing pleasure. I love my forget-me-nots as you know. I like how my patch of them looks like a fieldful...

Hey, who said "weeds" at the back?!!

In other news: YARN! I've dyed up a few skeins which will go into the shop this week, with more dyeing planned next week. I'm also busy making some bags - they're sold out at the moment, so I'd better stop gallivanting around in the forget-me-nots and get back to the Singer! I hope you are all having a lovely bank holiday weekend :-)

Notes from the dusty archives

Forgive me! Another non-yarn-related blog posting. I've not had any creative energy since the Man Cold arrived, so I've been pootling around with another hobby: family tree research. I don't do it much, as it can work out expensive if you haven't any firm leads and your family name is really common! However, the 1911 census went online yesterday and I was able to find a bit more about my maternal great grandparents...

(click to embiggen!) There they are. Harriet and George, with a baby called Harry (I think he may have been cast out into the unknown as I can't remember him. Mind you we never spoke about that kind of thing), and four lodgers, all crammed into 4 rooms (eeh, that were luxury when I were a lass, I lived in an armpit, etc, etc). They've yet to have my gran, Nellie. Here are some faces for the names.

That's Harriet and George, my great-grandparents.

And there's my great-gran and my gran, Nellie (marvellous boots. I wear Doc Martens to this day, with everything. Wonder where I got that from?) Funny how Harriet, George and Harry as names, have come back into fashion, but 'Nellie' has yet to resurface.

My family were all employed in the cotton industry in Oldham, Lancashire and since we were the kind of family that never spoke about anything, and everyone's dead now (careless as well as tight-lipped!), I have to do my own sleuthing! I only wish I had the researchers they get to do the work on Who do you Think you Are, because I think this is all I'm going to have time to find out for now...possibly a good thing for you though, else I'd be raking through the archives for hours and this would be a family history blog. Hmm. Where's that yarn gone?

 ah, that's better!