The colours of the season

Warning: Actual knitting content ahead!

Yes, it's true, I have been knitting and even more than that, I have finished some knitting.  Ta da!


It's just taken me two months to knit a plain vanilla pair of socks for myself.  Chief in the acquisition of knitting time was Miss Kitty's decision that sleeping on Mummy is fun, and sitting in the baby bouncer kicking little legs and giggling gummily at Mummy is also fun.  (She also likes watching back to back episodes of Coast while Mummy eats supper with both hands which is wonderful!).

I'm not sure I could manage anything more complicated while she's asleep on me, and it's probably true that my baby befuddled brain couldn't cope anyway so plain socks it is.

Fortunately the stash reveals a collection of wonderful multicoloured sock yarn that needs plain socks to show off the colours to their best advantage.  Very few patterns would be strong enough to match up to this Fire on the Mountain so it isn't really worth the extra effort when these are pretty and soft and warm and so very cheery against the oncoming grey of winter.

They even outshine my sandals.

In fact I like this yarn so much that I couldn't bear to simply tuck the leftovers away in the scraps box, and as I've been meaning to make Kitty some mittens for a while to try to combat the Kitty-Mummy game where Mummy puts mittens on Kitty and Kitty tries to wiggle her hands free without Mummy noticing, I did a little scrap box diving for other STR leftovers:

And here we see that Mummy has won! Port and Starboard mittens for Kitty made out of STR mediumweight in Fire on the Mountain and Lucky and STR lightweight in Dragon's Dance. 

The bright colours are fun for her to look at, and they're big enough that she can wiggle her fingers to her heart's content without falling off, but at the same time her fingers will stay toasty warm.

As you can see she was wildly impressed with them!

We'd gone for a walk to find some autumn colour around Abbey Fields in Kenilworth and to introduce Kitty to the smell and crunch of fallen leaves.

I had a great time and enjoyed the change of scene (and the Scrumpy scotch egg from the Cotswold pie stall), and Kitty, well she had a little snooze:

until we went down one off the off road tracks and she needed to tell me in no uncertain terms that this was too bouncy and not acceptable.  I don't think there was anyone left in Kenilworth that was in any doubt that this was not a baby-friendly track by the time she had fully communicated her point of view!  Sorry Kenilworth.

My favourite

I have now recovered sufficiently from my cold-of-doom to rise from my sofa-of-sickness where I spent Saturday and parts of Sunday languishing in a very Edwardian way and having my fevered brow tended to by my ever-attentive husband. I should have been draped in a frilly white nightgown and hazy penoir but instead I was wearing pink flowery pyjamas and the loving husband tucked me up with a spare duvet and went to play hockey; so near and yet so far.

Anyway, it was a gorgeously sunny weekend and as you can see, the leaves are starting to turn.

Thanks to a few autumnal blows we have a lot of leaves down already. In fact there is a substantial tide of yellowy-green washed up on our patio.


I know I should sweep it up but (a) it's pretty; (b) a whole load more leaves are going to fall before winter and it would be more economical to do one big sweep at the end; and, (c) it's much warmer and just as fun as the real sea to go paddling in:



And of course, if you're playing in the leaves, you might just find the prettiest ever leaf - it's rather like playing with pretty pebbles.



Clearly all these colours outside have been influencing my cooking:



Can you guess what it is?


Forget co-ordinating jelly beans to socks, now I can co-ordinate ingredients to leaves! The cooking in question appears to have been consumed before photography could be attempted but then you know what I made - it says so on the tin. I add 1tsp ground ginger and the zest of half a lemon for zing and rapidity of consumption speaks for itself.

Underneath all of the leaves there are still signs of summer, this is Lillian Annetts giving a final flourish:



And the delicate beauty of another fuchsia, Angela Dawn:



The most recent addition, and the most striking is this:


And I have no idea what it is. I think it came from a pack of mixed white summer bulbs but I can only go as far as "it isn't a gladioli" which was the only one in the mixture that I really recognised.

Close up it has these wonderful magenta sploshes that look as though two very tiny wheels have run through a purple puddle.



Does anyone know what it is?



I was down at ground level, and able to see into flowers, because I have been planting out the tulips for the early spring. They have wonderful names - Queen of the Night which is the same dark magenta as that flower centre; Shirley, a creamy yellow dipped in crushed raspberries; Purissima, a classic ivory; Flaming Parrott, a frilly tulip, butter-coloured with flame red splashes; Monsella, a golden yellow with red pencilled stocking lines up the back of each petal; and Carneval de Nice, a red and white humbug.

Hopefully at least some of them will come up in the new year to lighten the darkness.

And finally, H would like me to show you this:



He informs me that this is only the third or fourth time that he has EVER got a 180 at darts. We have taken several photos to prove this achievement to future generations.

Falling Leaves

If I am truly honest, my favourite season is whichever one it is right now. In the winter I keep an anxious look out for snow and revel in it if it arrives, I enjoy the nip of the early mornings, the need to wear hat and mittens and the cozy feeling when it starts to get dark at 4 and you can see the office lights shining out into the darkness and the fairy lights strung up in the trees around Birmingham.

In the spring there is the series of firsts; first snowdrop, first daffodil, first tulip, first day without a coat, possibly even first day in sandals. For summer, and I mean real summer, not the washed out excuse for a swimming cozzie we had this year, I love the smell of hot sun cream on tanned skin, cool breezy evenings, the crash of surf around my ears during the first swim of the season, birthdays and vanilla sponge cake.

At the moment of course, my favourite is Autumn. I know this because I'm wearing orange. Again. Autumn is all about crisp mornings, the first frost, wearing socks again (I stopped in May), particularly all the socks I made over the summer, favourite jumpers and cardigans coming out of the bottom drawer, and peerless sunny days with trees flaming copper against a deep blue sky.

We look out onto a deep brick red wall only a couple of metres away, five floors above a little alley. At one end of the alley is the churchyard and every now and then my eye is caught by a flash of green and yellow skittering past my window as the trees wave farewell to summer.

It really isn't that much of a surprise then to discover that my knitting matches the season:

These knitted diamonds are part of something much bigger which has yet to be revealed so for the moment, they are falling leaves, dropping from my needles and catching round my ankles, waiting to be swept up to be made into something special.