I just had to share this!

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2010/07/26/funny-pictures-come-out-nao/

This week I have been feeling skippity because of:

Meeting my brother Mike, Kelly, Luke and Erin for dinner when they were on their hols

Giving Lisa a crochet lesson

Passing 4,000 hits on this site in the same week that I had more hits on one single day than ever before.

A couple of reminders of my love of typography, from Anka and the BBC.  However, I have to say, the BBC article has the title ‘Do typefaces really matter?’ got my pip a little!  It was perhaps meant to be a rhetorical question, but I felt it makes it rather dismissive of the subject!

Two parcels: one rather hefty and one teensy tiny but both filled with gold:

A massive bundle of Granny Striple Blanket Yarn from Masons (who I can’t recommend highly enough: great value and loads of colours and flat delivery charge of £2 and arrived 36 hours after I placed order.  Brilliant!!)

and lots of yummy scrummy good enough to eat [joke] buttons from Paper & String:

Wishing y’all a happy week ahead xx

I wouldn’t say I’m getting bored with the granny stripe blanket, but it gives me lots of time to think while working on it and I got to thinking about how many stitches were in it, and its a lot!!!

63,441 to be precise!!!  And that’s before any border (because I haven’t decided what sort of border to put on it yet)

I reckon I’ve completed approximately 19,000 of those stitches to date.

That’s 19,000 down 44,441 to go!!

I love spreadsheets so what else could I do but work out the formula to calculate the number of stitches:

A few blogs I read share their Happy Stats every week so I thought I’d give it a go too.  I don’t know if there is a format they use or if it’s a group or something that someone has started but I’ll happily credit you if someone lets me know.

So my Happy Stats will be about 5 things that made me smile or skip over the course of the last week, and I will try to share them every weekend.  Well, that’s the plan!

Here goes:

• Being linked by Made for an angel jewels under ‘I could spend hours reading these…’
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett – brilliantly thought provoking, funny and really quite shocking
• Aiming to do more housework and be tidier, and succeeding
• Giving a presentation to over 60 people and not making a fool of myself
• Speaking to Lisa (a committed knitter) about teaching her to crochet and planning a trip to Fibre and Clay.

I’ve been a busy bee getting on with my granny stripe blanket and really, really enjoying working on a relatively zero thought required project.  Since my last post about it I’ve now completed the second round of each colour and started on the third.

I keep changing my mind about which colours I like best, with a view to those that I can use as an outer border when all the stripes are finished.  At present I am really liking the moss green and raspberry shades that are in the middle of the picture above (perhaps with a lighter one too), and these are the first and last colours in every round.  I also love pink and green together – hence the colours of this website!  However, no doubt by the time I get to the point of starting the border I shall have considered every colour combination available!

And then there are all the loose ends…

Two ends for every single colour change to be precise!  That’s over 80 so far!  And guess what… I haven’t sewn a single one in yet: shame on me!!  I will do some before I get very much further.  Promise!

I am starting to get a bit concerned that I will run out of yarn before the blanket is the size I want it to be so I have done some weighing and calculating.  With one ball each of 19 colours at my present rate I will end up with a blanket approximately 170cm square, before I put any border on it.  I think I will prefer it rectangular so I will be getting some more yarn.  Each stripe uses around 20g of yarn (remember I’m using a 4.5mm hook).  I’m going to aim for 7 repeats of the stripe rounds so another full set of yarn will give me plenty to do that, complete the border and have plenty left over for a few cushions. 

On the basis of 7 repeats I’m about a third of the way through so far, and thankfully its still a pleasure to work on.  I am likely to start getting a little distracted and working on a few other bits and pieces now and then before this is finished, but its a great make and I can’t wait until the colder days (did I really say that) when it’s finished and I can use it.

Caveman and I have just booked a week away in late autumn to our favourite Yorkshire cottage so my aim is to be finished by then.  A while off, yes, but these things can’t be rushed!

I’m always impressed, and more than a little jealous, at the remarkable ‘finds’ that people find:  beautiful old crockery, immaculate hand embroidered linens, colourful vintage glassware!  I never find anything.  Until now that is!!!

On a recent incredibly hot day Caveman and I stopped at a local ice cream parlour (don’t you love that term? ‘ice cream parlour’ it just conjours up images of the 1950’s for me) which was next door to Wowie Zowie.  It’s a great retro shops which sells, in its own words, ‘fabulous vintage things from the 20th century and beyond…’

And look what I found!!!

Can you believe I walked right round the shop once before I spotted this!!??  It’s a really beautiful old cantilever sewing box.  It is in brilliant condition and even inside the drawers are really clean.  Although I am very untidy, I do love places to keep things, even if I don’t always put things in those places!

This is a great little piece of furniture, beside the settee, to hold all my little bits and pieces of sewing and crochet equipment which do need to have a place.  These are actually the things that I am good at putting back because I find nothing worse than getting into a piece of work and needing a thimble or a particular type of needle and not being able to find them!

I might line the drawers with pretty paper just to add to the delight every time I open them and I am yet to fill it up.  Maybe that will be a gradual process as I use it.

I’ve had a very busy few weeks with lots and lots of housework and organising because my sister and her two kids have been to visit this week.  We had a fab time wit lots of icecream, laughing and fun.  They left on the train yesterday and I was more than a little sad waving them off.

Also had an (unsuccessful) job interview which took up a lot of time in application and preparation so still somewhat disappointed after the amount of energy I put in. 

I have found a plenty time between those activities to crack on with the granny stripe blanket and I am really enjoying that.  I have found it goes particularly well with Wimbledon and World Cup!!! 

So back to normal now with nothing major on the horizon for a while but it gives me some time to get on with some making and doing.  The other benefit is that I now have quite a tidy house, which really isn’t normal (that table top in the pictures is normally covered in sewing machines and related paraphernalia), and might help keep my mind a little straighter.  Hopefully I will be able to keep it up.  Time will tell…