December 4th

Here's hoping we see some of this this Christmas



Photo by Michael Schlegel

December 3rd

Just about now the adverts are starting to appear for the festive delights that we can look forward to on TV, every year the BBC airs something cracking. Just to celebrate here's a video that says why I don't mind paying £13 a month to support this fantastic channel.

Giftmas

Last year I wanted to make a Christmas stocking, I couldn't find any I liked. I wanted it to be in red, white and green and be traditional looking, or and because I was skint I didn't really want to pay for it.
Over the Christmas holidays I sat down with a notebook containing square paper and I drew things. I am not a good drawer, I can sketch given enough time, but I am not one of those people who can produce a realistic looking drawing in 5 minutes. However designing colourwork motifs involved colouring in little squares until you're happy! I can do that sort of drawing.
I worked out how many stitches I wanted to do the stocking on and adapted the sketches to fill that many squares and minimise the floats on the reverse side.
It was just the sort of therapeutic work that averts all the stress of Christmas. I then looked back at features I'd liked on other socks and stockings I'd knitted and reminded myself how to do them.
By the end of the holidays I had a stocking. It then was put away with all the other Christmas decorations. Roll forward 9 months and I decided that I'd quite like to knit another stocking as a present for a friend. If I was going to reverse engineer what I'd done I thought I might as well write down the pattern.


And here it is-

Meet Tis The Season Stocking
It's available from p/hop which stands for pennies per hour of pleasure. If like me you're skint then download it and donate what you can afford, if you can afford more later come back and donate again, if you really can't afford anything download it anyway, come back when you've a bit more spare cash and donate then, no one will ever know as it's an honesty box system.
All money raised goes to help MSF who are a fantastic charity helping people all over the world every day of the year.

December 2nd

I would love to own this skirt (in case anyone want's to buy me something... it's getting a little late for the postage to the UK from the US though)

Available from the sewmoe Etsy shop

December 1st

To start us of in December, a sunrise.
At this time of year I see a lot of sunrises as it's only just getting light as I arrive at school.
None of them are quite as pretty as this though.



Buttermere at Dawn taken by mark_lj

Sledging

Cars haven't made it up or down our street all morning. We're now at a foot of snow with more falling. However the tea and milk situation was reaching rock bottom so we had to venture out.
While we were out there it would have been rude not to sledge down the hill wouldn't it?



It's a proper winter wonderland out there, we just un-burried the steps that lead to my front door before I killed myself by falling down the snow slope that existed instead of steps, however with more snow forecast I'm not sure how long they'll stay safe for.

Winter

Winter has arrived in the UK. Some parts of the country are under several inches of snow. We only had a light covering 2 nights ago, but it's very cold out there.
For now the sun is shining and it was perfect weather for a winter walk. I went in the opposite direction to normal and stumbled upon yet more evidence of how industrialised this edgeof the city used to be.



Heading out further along the valley the evidence of the city disappears and countryside begins. Quite a few houses have Chickens and horses, I don't envy them being outside in this weather, though with a coat as fluffy as this maybe it wouldn't be too bad