Look! A Yule Pig!

My gran sent me a pile of knitting patterns from her ladies' magazines. I always enjoy looking at these patterns. Many are reprinted patterns from yarn companies' leaflets, but they are recent reprints and often patterns I would not have had access to by virtue of being in another country. I have never made any of these patterns, though. Until now.

Just look at those POTHOLDERS! Yes, fair isle potholders with traditional Scandinavian Christmas motifs (a Yule Pig! a Yule Buck!) with crocheted edgings! I'm terribly excited by these super-Scandinavian potholders and I have the urge to buy some Rowan Handiknit Cotton right this minute!! Exclamation Mark!

(Sanity? What sanity?)

My gran also sent me various craft kits for Christmas decorations. It's a bit early for me to get crafty but I predict that next Saturday will be spent at the dining table with scissors and superglue. I'll be making kræmmerhuse (stitching not included) and julehjerter whilst scoffing gran's peppernuts and IKEA's pepparkakor. And Dave will be somewhere else because he always bit nervous when I go into full Scandi-Christmas mode.

Unrelated: stay tuned for a finished object. My Byronic Percy Shawl is currently blocking and it's very, very pretty (and very orange).

Recovery

Today marked the first day that I've been outside in about ten days. The weather was lovely: crisp and on the cusp of winter. I walked through the arboretum down to the newly opened Waitrose where I hoped to find fresh baker's yeast and buttermilk .. and maybe even a loaf of rye bread. I had to queue to get to the milk section(!) and, nope, no buttermilk and no fresh baker's yeast and no loaves of rye bread. The quest continues - although technically I am intolerant to buttermilk and technically I can buy buttermilk at an organic green grocer's a brisk thirty minute walk away from where I live. But: bah! Knitting-wise I have conquered the dreaded Chart B on my orange shawl and in my utter joy to get to the relatively easy Chart C, my brain went out the window. I have now tinkered back seven rows (not easy in splitty 2-ply baby alpaca) and am about to start Chart C again. Hopefully this time I will concentrate and not just go "Ha! Only half the rows are important now. Which row am I on again?"

I don't know how many of you watched (and thus loved) the Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog webcast earlier this year, but those of you who fall prey to anything Joss Whedonesque, you might get a kick out of the prequel, Horrible Turn, which is a fanmade prequel. I have only watched the first episode, but liked what I saw much more than expected.

And now our dreams of travelling on the Orient Express have been crushed, I have been looking into other possibilities. I'm quite taken with the idea of the Transsiberian railway. Instead of spending £3,700 on a 36-hour train trip, we could spend £5,600 on a 26 day long train journey running Moscow - Ekatarina - Irkutsk - Ulaan Bataar - Beijing. I even speak rudimentary Russian (handy and useful!). I have long wanted to visit Russia - so why not go all-out? At the moment it is not feasible for us to do this - money and work reasons - but in my head the Transsiberian sounds like much better than the Orient Express.

Ah.

The Reading Survey

15. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read? This is being written whilst I’m gritting my teeth: Ben Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String. It’s a very, very short novel. I spent a month reading it. Then Stupid Boyfriend said: “Oh. Did you try to make sense of it? I didn’t. I just read it for the beautiful words.”

&/#”/! The book was excellent, actually, and said really interesting things about ritual language and how language acquires meaning. I am never going to read it again.

That question/answer and thirty-one others can be found at The Reading Survey which I have posted as a static page as it is too long to post here.

Thank you for all your well-wishing. I am still under the weather and have developed a nasty cough. This means I'll miss out on tonight's Guy Fawkes events but there will be others.

Also, in case you have not read it, this little post by Ysolda Teague summed up everything I wanted to say today (and it reminded me that I need to make a batch of Apple Butter as Casa Bookish's usual supply from the St. Alban Church Fete has finally run low after I have been unable to attend/stock up for several years).