Todays 'art' (ok, creativity would be a better word)

Here are some of the creative things I did today. Today was a day off, so don't worry, I won't be doing this amount of posting every day!

Bread dough ready to rise

Ready to knead again

Drawing our new buddha
(also our only buddha)

Buddha on the first page of my art journal.
I plan to work in this journal every day

Cat enjoying the sunshine

Vince's hat nearly finished

Conservatory plants enjoying the sunshine

Allotment pumpkins
in a lovely old bowl someone gave me recently

Bread out of the oven

Cranachan with raspberries from the allotment

Ok, so some of these are more like appreciation than actually being creative, but hey, there are no blog category police!

"Do it with a passion or not at all"

One of the things I love about getting older is the understanding that comes with all those years of experience. Something about myself that I am getting used to is the fact that I am rather an all or nothing person. I will spin wool or play the guitar or sew obsessively for several weeks, then won't touch it again for six months. This used to bother me. I would feel haunted by the spinning wheel/guitar/sewing and worry that I'd never do it again. Now I am ok about being like this. I know that the urge to do things that are special to me will return.
So, right now I'm into blogging. I've no idea why, I just suddenly feel like putting 'out there' all the things I've been up to. I find it slightly disturbing that I don't know why I'm doing it, I like to know the whys of things. I'm hoping one day it will become clear to me. In the meantime I'm enjoying sorting/labelling/resizing my pictures, and good grief I've even got a little notebook for keeping blogging ideas in. That's a bit disturbingly organised. I'll probably mostly ignore it and ramble on about what comes to me when I sit down. I do dream of being one of those people who is really organised. I dream of being the sort of person who would keep a track of what they spend their money on, what the weather is like every day, when the sowed what in the garden. Occasionally I get to be in that place for short periods of time, but ultimately it's not me, and that's ok. I'm really quite happy as I am, but there's no harm in aspiring to be better.
And so, from my library of (currently) well organised and labelled pictures here are two things I'm working on ..... when the urge takes me.

 One finished hat for the winter for me. One hat in progress for Vince. I'm a slow knitter, and I get bored after a few rows. It always makes me chuckle that a friend of mine will think nothing of knitting a couple of blankets and a  jumper in the time it takes me to knit one hat. I'm hoping to have Vince's hat ready for this winter, I'm making fairly good progress.
Both handspun wool (of course?)

Patchwork quilt in progress. These are quite large pieces, you can just see the toe of my left foot for scale. It's all made from scraps/offcuts/old clothes. Being a peasant at heart I think it's cheating to buy brand new perfectly good pieces of fabric from a shop and cut them into small pieces and sew them all together again.
The plan for this is to make it triangular for our triangular bed in the boat (the bedroom in the boat is in the pointy bit at the front of the boat). The longer term plan will then be to extend it into a normal shaped quilt when we get back from our travels.
These are pretty long term plans, which is a good job because I can see this is going to be a long time in the making..

Bovey Tracy Contemporary Craft Fair

A few more pictures from an amazing (if rather busy!) three days at The Contemporary Craft fair.
We think we helped about 250 children make books over the three days. These pictures were take in a dash round outside in one of my lunch breaks.

I want one of these
- better get pom-pom making!

A quiet moment at the punch and Judy stand

And of course the craft marquees were full of the most amazing and beautiful crafts. I may share my favourites with you if I get the urge. (I'm not a very 'good' blogger, so no promises!)

Learning to knit

I'm on a mission to learn how to knit.

If you are an experienced knitter you may find this dull, if you are a beginner like me you may enjoy this journey with me.

If you've read much of my blog and seen my jumper you may think 'what is she talking about..she can knit..'
Two people have recently said to me, 'oh if you can knit and purl you can knit' Well, on a very basic level I would agree, but when faced with this... hmm, that's a bit more complicated isn't it?

k2 tog I can work out, and 'yon' means yarn over needle, but which needle, and in which direction? And what does (s1) slip 1 mean, and what do you 'pass the slip stitch over' (psso)?
Well, I'm pleased to say that with a combination of a Book Of Knitting and some advice from a friend I did this....

Woh...impressive eh?! Well, impressive if you don't look to closely and realise that although the bottom half looks like the picture in the book, the top half looks like a variation on it...which it's not supposed to be, oops. I found it really difficult to follow all those instructions and this is one of the simplest patterns in this book. So anyway, my long term ambition is to understand why "k2tog, yon, k1, yon, sl.1, k1, psso" etcetera makes the pattern it does. Because, once I've understood the principles I can then make things up as I go along, which I'm much better at than following patterns. I realise this is pretty ambitious, so in order to be realistic and learn to walk before I can run I've also had a go at a couple of other patterns

That's lace wings at the top again, and 'ridged eyelet' and 'miniature leaf 2' at the bottom. Ridged eyelet was seriously easy, after having almost mastered lace wings anyway. I also did a couple more test pieces.
This is some bought wool on 4 different needle sizes. I was supposed to put a row of purl stitches in between each needle change, but I only remembered once. What hope is there for me following a whole jumper pattern I wonder?

And then I did two squares with my own wool. The top is 20 stitches and 20 rows on size 4 needles, the bottom is 20 x 20 on size 10, and err, no I don't know what that is in mm, that's just what is written on my new-to-me old needles.

I'm quite impressed by how different the knitting is on different needles in terms of both density and size, I'd never given it much thought before. I just used to think, bigger needles = knitting grows faster = good.
I can see I've go a lot to learn, and I think I'm going to enjoy the journey, even if it is slow and a little frustrating at times.
Many thanks to Ren for lending me the book these patterns came from. It is the 'Vogue dictionary of knitting stitches' by 'Anne Matthews' and it's really inspiring, as long as I don't look at the patterns that are 25+ rows, eek.