And finally...

Birds on a, erm, string.

I made these little paper birds to hang across the kitchen windows.  I love the colours but I also love the silhouette when it's getting darker.

I might work on invisible-ish strings.  One day.

The new view from my kitchen window...

...and seriously, the only thing that could make it a better view would be if I actually owned them.  But this will do nicely for now.  The black one is a little terror and keeps mercilessly aggravating the grey, who is impressively fit from constantly running away.  Nothing nasty though, just playfulness.

(Killer)Baby likes to watch them too... from the safety of indoors.

She probably thinks they're a bit stupid, with all that running around in the cold and eating stuff off the floor.  Actually she probably thinks most things/people are a bit stupid.  Why don't they get themselves an Aga to sleep on?  Duhhh.

You can always tell when I've got time off work...

Found these letters in a little shop in Norfolk.
They're about 12cm tall and I just love the designs. Most of them were especially chosen because of some special connection to me.  The rest were especially chosen because of some tenuous, possibly entirely fabricated, connection to me.  And because they're groovy.
I found a stretched canvas in a good shape, stretched natural linen over it and mounted the letters with spray mount.  I now have spray mount all over my hands and I've washed them 7 times with industrial hand cleaner.  Aint coming off.

So yes, call me egocentric if you want... but I'm the guinea pig here so it's acceptable to start with my own name.

This week...

...I have mostly been making origami cranes.
No, I'm not an expert and no, I'm probably not going to make it to 1000.
It's good though.  It's satisfying when your fingers reach the level of familiarity required to be able to do the job without too much input from the brain.  Which is a mildly stupid idea.  But you know what I mean.

Knitting and stuff... yeah I'm SO rock'n'roll

It's cool to knit.  It also sets my teeth on edge... something about the time it takes to get through a row, even if you're a fast knitter, and the endless repetition.

I'm a semi-fast knitter.  I quite liked knitting tiny-sized clothes (when my children were tiny-sized), although I wasn't always quite so keen on putting the knitted stuff actually on them, but I really can't be doing with knitting the vast areas which would be required to keep any of them warm now.  Quite lucky really, seeing as I can't quite imagine them all running around in badly-knitted cardigans. Or tank tops?!

My granny was a staggeringly slow knitter.  I can remember her starting a yellow polo-neck jumper for one of my older brothers to go riding in (yellow polo-necks for riding?  What was all that about?) and it still wasn't finished when I'd already outgrown the notion of it.  Not quite sure what happened to it after that, although I do know my youngest brother wouldn't have touched it with a barge pole (and I suspect the YPN-for-riding vogue had passed by then)... perhaps she turned it into yellow knitted dishcloths or something.  Useful.  One thing's for sure, she wouldn't have thrown it away.  My granny recycled and re-used everything and wasted nothing.  Quite impressive, really, although I'd have drawn the line at feeding my (grand)children mouldy bread, if I was her.  My brother and I attempted to flush it (the mouldy bread) down the toilet but she could smell a rat from miles away and came marching up the stairs to find the evidence.  We were in trouble for that one.  Wouldn't do it any differently now though.... still couldn't force down a green, furry sandwich if I tried and I'm still not convinced by the 'Don't you know they make antibiotics out of this?  It's GOOD for you!' argument.  Even when I was seven I had an inkling that they must DO something to the furry green stuff before they pump you full of it to fight infection.

So anyway, what I do to fool the knitting demons is find ways of kidding myself that there's not much to do, and one of the ways of doing that is to knit everything in small bits/different colours/varied stitches.  This is my latest thing...

I'm really into these colours at the moment.

I have a mildly genius way of constructing my knitted pieces onto an existing cushion, which at least means I don't have to go through all the agonies of the knit and then follow it with a huge amount of sewing.  Actually it took ages to make this work really nicely, but there was a fair amount of self-kidding going on here too.  

Ho hum.  Good job I'm clever enough to get one over on myself all the time.

Spring??

Just wanted to share this... because it's lovely and it's a beautiful day and it makes me (rather naively) hopeful for Spring.

If you are in the UK, you can get one from Tesco right now, for the princely sum of £7.00, which I think is pretty good.

Go on then!