Sunday snoozing

I spent yesterday afternoon in a happy warm daze; spreadeagled on my pretty blue quilt and endless cushions in the dappled sunshine, relaxed but conscious that this, this is an English summer - however fleeting.

Our roses are now in full bloom, and, rather overladen with buds, have pulled away from the wall of the house to create a natural arbour across the lawn.

I'll have to do something about it soon, and it was in serious need of a good prune but for the moment we're just enjoying the flowers, the butterflies and the bees.

Did you know that bumblebees have different coloured tails? I had no idea until we saw a poster at Hill Top, and now I have to check out all the bees I see. The ones in our garden have all been white tailed bumblebees so far, but there are quite common red ones and buff ones and ones that are brown all over.

I semi-intentionally planted our garden for butterflies because I think that they are beautiful and at the moment it seems to be paying off - the hebes are a mass of bees, cabbage whites and peacocks and a friend's buddleia was covered with close to 20 butterflies on Saturday afternoon; a good 10 plus Peacocks



A Tortoiseshell that I couldn't get close to, and this Painted Lady that posed for a brief second.


We went to a wedding on Friday where butterflies were the main theme (pink and lilac ones)

The weather was perfect, the bride and groom were radiant,

and most happily perched on the top of their cake (with just a few jokes about the marzipan groom's vibrant orange hair from the best men).

In all of this general summer laziness I have been knitting. I finished H's hot socks on Tuesday and couldn't decide on which socks to cast on next, so I cast on for two pairs:


This is the start of a pair of Cookie A's Kai-Mei socks, from her book Sock Innovation in my handspun sock yarn that started out life as fibre from Freyalynn at Wonderwool.



And this is the start of a pair of stripy Noro socks - a skein of Kureyon Sock (95 I think), 2.25mm needles, 68 stitches and a colour change every five rows.

They are addictive knitting - as of Saturday afternoon the Kureyon sock looked like this:



And as the sun started to float down towards the horizon on Sunday afternoon, I was lying flat out on the quilt finishing A Far Cry by Emma Smith (another great Persephone find) whilst wearing two socks:



Hmm - maybe no-one will notice?