Did I mention Spring?

I may have been slightly optimistic on that one - yesterday afternoon the weather started to look a bit like this:

(That hazy bit in the picture - that's not entirely my photography, that's hail).
Then it all looked a bit like this:

That gentle carpet of white is I assure you dear reader entirely made up of hail. Hail which remained on my car windscreen until this morning and which is still blown up in a little icy heap outside our front door.

Now I appreciate Mother Nature's effort to make a final contribution towards the grey (sky), white (hail) and blue (my hands) of Project Spectrum but seriously if we're going to do the winter thing I want 10ft snow drifts and weather that makes it impossible for me to get to work and leaves me only the option of staying curled up on my sofa knitting.

It is entirely possible that this is how I spent yesterday but we will dance sketchily over that little point!

Now for some yarny tales:

First - what do you get when you put the beads on the wrong end of you yarn (or rather in the wrong order on the available end)? Answer: an excellent game for kittens involving two people, a lot of beads and the stairs!

It's a little hard to see in this picture but the squiggly line is yarn and the green and red vertical line is the beads on the yarn hanging off the bannister (and those are my stripy socks). If you are very lucky you end up with this: Which has now turned into part of a sock which is hiding because it is secret.

For the purposes of the yarny tale we will also gloss over the fact that due to a counting error I had to cut the yarn and rethread a whole load of beads to complete the pattern - my kitten game certainly kept H amused and in typical kittenish mood he kept holding the yarn at the bottom of the stairs where I couldn't see it so I'd come all the way down to work out what was going on before I realise I'd been pranked again!

I also cast on this:

This is a blue hat - honestly I know I stretch the powers of imagination a bit but really it will be.

The green is the inner lining and is the remainder of the Debbie Bliss Pure Silk from the tie front cropped cardi I made in early Jan - wonderfully soft and warm with alpaca for the outside - perfect!

H is away this week and with perfect timing I had a treat waiting for me at home comme ca:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Having acquired said man it is further acknowledged that his wife can never have too many hand-made socks ... and as socks are my travelling knitting (well the hat is at the moment but we may gloss over that too) it is adittionally acknowledged that the wife can never have too many sock pattern books (trust me on this one, there's another one on order!).

I loved Nancy Bush's Folk Socks so I can't wait to dive into these two treasures so that's where I'm off to now.

Finally I leave you with a treat - well I would if I'd worked out how to show you tube clips but instead please pop over to Agnes' blog and check out this - I promise it will make you laugh outloud

[Note to parents. To make this clip play, press play. It will take a couple of seconds to load and then it will play from the web page - you don't need to save anything or do anything. Oh except do turn your speakers on otherwise while funny you may miss the full impact - now go, what are you waiting for?!]