Home»Archive for July, 2011

The Unknown Sunflower

Jul 31st, 2011 Leave a comment

Photo & Video Sharing by SmugMug

This beautiful specimen was photographed at the Thompson & Morgan trail grounds in Ipswich, England.  Each year they open the grounds where they are ‘testing’ new varieties before deciding if they will add them to their range.

Of course this means you get to have a wonderful nosey about, but it’s frustrating when you can’t buy something you’ve fallen in love with.  In fact most of the varieties don’t even have names just alphanumeric codes.  A member of staff kindly explained that they don’t waste names of varieties that aren’t going to ‘cut it’.  So I can’t tell you what this magnificent flower is called, but I can at least share the photo.

Google+ ? and Photography

Jul 30th, 2011 Leave a comment

Are you on Google+ ?  I signed up earlier this week mainly because of the growing photographic community on there.  I’ve taken some pretty decent shots in my time but I never tire of looking at the inspirational work of some of our modern day masters….

Every time I log on someone has posted another absolutely stunning image and I’m just blow away by how awesome it is.  My own offerings seem boring, dull and ordinary in comparison.

Anyway all that said I thought I’d take a little break from posting crafting stuff (just a few days I promise) and post a few images and the stories behind them.

 

Display in the Human Biology area of the Natural History Museum in London

This image was captured at the Natural History Museum in London earlier this year.  Due to the nature of the museum and the restrictions placed on photographers (such as you can’t use a tripod in such a crush of people) all the images were taken handheld.  Some people think this means you can’t get good shots if light levels are low which isn’t really true.  It just means you’re more limited and you’ll probably have to crank up the ISO setting (think film speed pre-digital).

I stood by this part of the human reproduction exhibit for quite a while just watching the reactions of people as they walked past.  Peoples responses ranged from fascination through to discomfort….  Does it effect you?

Oh and if you want to ‘circle’ me on Google+ it’s Mara Acoma. :-)

While hiding from the spiders…

Jul 29th, 2011 Leave a comment

I also took a few other photos.

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These jumbo ‘extreme’ knitting needles didn’t come from Fibre East but a local Summer Fete.  I’m looking forward to some stash busting with them!

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The garden is in that in-between phase where one set of plants have gone over, but the next haven’t flowered yet.  You can probably guess I’m not very good at succession planning.  That said, there are still some flowers about and in one I found this bee.  He was covered in pollen and happily zipping form flower to flower.  Obviously hard at work.

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Some of the roses were also just clinging onto their blooms.  I resisted roses for many years as  I just couldn’t get past the memories of how difficult they were for my grandfather in the 70’s.  Fortunately there are loads of wonderful varieties about now that are much easier to grow.  This one came from Cants in Colchester, but I’m afraid I don’t remember the variety…

Fibre East…. (Part 2)

Jul 28th, 2011 1 Comment

Earlier in the week I posted about our road trip to Fibre East and I did promise to show you what I bought.  Well some of it Winking smile

Given we finally have some nice sunshine I decided to take my cache outside into the garden and photograph it all in natural light in a vain attempt to get more accurate colours.  I had this mad idea of arranging them artily on my patio table and leisurely sitting on one of my chairs and clicking away with my camera – perhaps with a cup of tea beside me.

Errr it didn’t quite work.  My table had blown over and when I lifted it upright spiders, earwigs and all sorts of creepy crawlies started dropping out of it.  I didn’t scream (much) or run for the garden broom (well not very fast as I was worried about tripping over)…  Anyway I retreated to another part of the garden and felt much safer. 

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First up is some beautiful Merino Blend from The Threshing Barn.  This wonderful stand also had the Louet spinning wheels on which had me dribbling so.  Oh I have no intention of replacing the one I have – love him to bits – but it’s nice to look.

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After my run in with the spiders I ended up putting my goodies next to one of my cat ornaments and when taking the shots of the fibre I just couldn’t resist giving her a fibre scarf for a few minutes…

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This is some other undyed fibre I picked up.  Unfortunately I can’t work out which stand it came from since it was loose with no sticker Sad smile

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Then there was dribbling at the Purl Alpaca Designs stand.  I’ve been eyeing up one of their designs ‘Olivia’ for a while and just couldn’t resist buying the pattern.  Actually no, scrub that, I promised I wouldn’t buy anymore patterns till I’d knitted some of the existing ones up….  So lets rephrase.  I was walking past this stand when a pattern jumped off it’s shelf and assaulted me.  It kept hitting me repeatedly until I agreed to buy it and take it home…  (You don’t believe me?  Meh, it was worth a try and I wouldn’t believe a lame story like that either)  The photos above are taken with permission from their website.  I have to admit that I’m a sucker for long cardigans / coats and how could I resist this one.  They had samples made up which you could try on and this highlighted that I would need to knit a different sized front to back.  Narrow back and big boobs strike again!

I bought lots of other stuff as well, such as some more circular cables and a few presents, but I won’t bore you with all of them.  It was a great day out and I’m sure we’ll be going back next year…

Where I Sew…..

Jul 27th, 2011 Leave a comment

Recently while surfing the blog-o-sphere late at night I came across the Pink Chalk Studio blog and something caught my eye.  Someone (I assume Kathy Mack who runs it and was very nice when I spoke to her by email about all this) had come up with the idea of a month long feature on the blog called ‘Where I Sew’.  This is a series of posts on various people from the fabric world and photos of their sewing area.  What an outstanding idea!

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Included are designers, shop owners, quilters, dressmakers….. the list goes on….. and all with beautiful photos of where they doing their sewing. 

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Now at this point I thought about including a photo of my own little spot – but then I realised how untidy it is.  Very unlikely to inspire anyone.  Anyway pop over and have a look, although I’ll warn you now, it may lead to the desire to tidy and get your sewing machine out Winking smile

Pebbles Walking Hat Testing

Jul 26th, 2011 Leave a comment

I’ve been absolutely amazed by the responses to some of the hats I’ve been making.  Especially to one particular silly little hat……

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This hat was only ever intended for me to keep my ears warm while walking the dogs.  I wanted something warm with ear flaps, inspired by the big floppy ears of Pebbles the dog.

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However, when some friends were over visiting, they loved it!  Then another day I took it into work (I was the only person with warm ears that day believe me) and my colleagues all loved it as well.  In fact just about everyone wanted to put it on!

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There was a lot of pulling faces and clowning about (yes my boss really did pretend it was the helmet of a medieval knight and rode an imaginary horse around the room while wearing it – I think it might have been an imaginary jousting contest but I was laughing to hard to ask).  The one thing this hat did for everyone who tried it on was to cheer them up and put a smile on their face.  Eventually I decided sometimes it’s cool to look that silly at work……

So this silly little bit of yarn has now been christened the ‘Pebbles Walking Hat’ and I’m hoping to have it test knitted real soon Smile

Fibre East… (Part 1)

Jul 25th, 2011 Leave a comment

This past weekend was Fibre East and we decided to have a little road trip.  So we piled into my car we set off westwards (I’m sure something called Fibre East should actually be in the east not central England but hey ho).

We had a little fun and games with the satnav as we knew the fastest route involved going along the A120 to Stansted airport.  However, despite buying updated maps from Tomtom, many of the bypasses are still not appearing almost 10 years after they were built!  Add in that the voice on my satnav is a ‘cylon’ from the original series of Battlestar Galactica that thinks roundabouts are called traffic circles and I’m sure you get the picture.

Anyway we eventually made it to fibre nirvana.

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There were marques full of yarnnie and fibery scuminess….

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Sheep shearing being demonstrated…

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Beautiful things to look at and buy…

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and spinning wheels to play on (and buy if you wanted).  I loved this stall as they had Louet wheels.  My own is a Louet S10 (the stall holder, whose name I forget cos I’m still so sleepy, told me she finds it hard to get excited about the S10 – but I love him) and I now have a couple of companies to talk to regarding bobbins and replacement flyers etc that I didn’t know about before.

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You could play on the wheels.  I didn’t spin this but loved the mix of colours on the bobbin.  Rather late in the day we also found a ‘play tent’ where you could have a go at carding etc.  I think Ann thought she’d died and gone to fibre heaven in that tent!

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Maytheweed forgot her camera and loaned my phone for the purpose of something nefarious involving sheep.  When she handed it back I ended up with a shot of her feet!   I’ll admit I didn’t take my proper camera as I didn’t know what we would find.  Besides I tend to get a bit preoccupied with the Canon in my hands and forget about things, like watching where I’m walking…

There was also lots of tea drinking and HUGE jacket potatoes for lunch.

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All to soon it was over and the long trek home began. Once home I hid my treasured purchases in the dining room away from inquisitive noses and flopped on sofa with my knitting, a very happy Pebbles curled up next to me.  Bliss…

I’ll do another post on what I spent all my pennies on later…

I like my morning routine….

Jul 23rd, 2011 2 Comments

I do.  I know it’s silly but I have things timed down to an art.  My beasties know the routine as well and it allows me to get to work in a relatively ‘sane’ frame of mind.  Except…

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is now in pieces because

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had an ill timed jump up onto the kitchen worktop.  Now I would love to be mad at Fire the cat, but I can’t as he didn’t do it deliberately.  Yet I am upset.  I searched through my cupboards but no suitable replacement could be found.  All my other mugs and cups are for drinking tea later in the day and so just don’t do the job right.

I suppose I’d better explain that before I start to sound like some sort of freak!  The shape of the cup alters the speed at which tea cools.  All my other mugs are comparatively tall and narrow at the rim giving a much smaller surface area at the top when compared to the over all volume of this fabulous amber nectar.  If I use any of my other mugs/cups my tea stays to hot for me to comfortably drink before I have to leave for work.

So I’ve been looking for a replacement cup with just the right proportions, but no luck.  It appears that this shape is out of fashion at the moment… sob…

The closest I’ve been able to find was hidden at the back of my cupboard (a gift from someone who meant well)…

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and forms one of these cup and teapot sets

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(I’ll pause now to allow the screams from Maytheweed to pass me by)

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So this is now my morning cuppa.  And what exactly is wrong with this I hear you ask? Well you can’t tell from the photo but that cup is TINY and ahem check out the colour……  I can honestly say it’s the only thing in my cottage that is pink.  If you love pink, good for you, but I just don’t.  Lilac yes, blue, yes, black red green yellow, yes…. but I simply can’t get my head around pink Sad smile

New Shots of Alchemilla

Jul 22nd, 2011 1 Comment

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Finally the weather has played ball long enough for some shots of the Alchemilla Slouchy Hat.  This is Charlotte who kindly agreed to model for me.

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The photo shoot was more laughing and giggling uncontrollably than the serious sort of thing you see on Americas Next Top Model…

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Of course tree hugging had to be involved.  What photo shoot with a tree as part of the backdrop would be complete without giving the tree a hug to say thank you.

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Oh and did I mention the giggling and laughing?

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Thanks Charlotte, our quick little shoot really brightened my day with laughter……

(OOooooo and I’ve finally got this up on a ‘Patterns and Tutorials’ page all of it’s own.  There’s a link at the top of the page or you can check it out here)

Alchemilla is up on Ravelry… Scary!

Jul 21st, 2011 Leave a comment

Remember that annoying pattern idea that jumped into my head a little while ago.  The one that bullied all the other ideas out until I agreed to knit it up?  Well I did, and then a wonderful group of people test knit it for me and now it’s finally up on Ravelry.

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Photo taken from Maytheweed’s Blog with permission (she was one of my fab test knitters)

There was quite a debate about if it should be a free or paid for pattern but in the end I decided to put it up for free.  It also changed name, eventually becoming the Alchemilla Slouchy Hat.

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You can find it here on Ravelry and I’m looking at putting it up on the Fantasia Yarns Website as well.  Unfortunately (or should that be fortunately, I’m not sure) it seems to have invited some friend in to settle in my mind.  So I now have another two designs.  One (The Pebbles Walking Hat) is typed up and ready for test knitting, the other (Daisy May) is in the process of being written up.

What I really need now is for the weather to play ball so I can get out and take some photos.  It just doesn’t seem right to ask people to test knit something without some decent shots to show them what they’re letting themselves in for……

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