A weekend of contrasts

I've spent the weekend visiting a friend who lives on the outside of Cardiff, it was a weekend of contrasts, and a reminder that moving away from a city doesn't mean the end of doing all the things I love doing in cities!
We had amazing Chinese food, and then wandered around looking at amazing architecture.




Today we drove to Barry Island before I had to head home, it was busy, but it felt good to be walking around in the sunshine feeling the sand beneath my feet for the first time this year.
I even braved the chilly March Atlantic and got my feet wet.

Learning

You would think that being surrounded by learning all day would mean that I have had enough of learning in my spare time. However I can't seem to get enough of it. The more I read and discover about fibre crafts the more I want to know.
It started with learning to knit, then I decided to learn to spin, then I wanted to learn to crochet, then I wanted to learn how to prepare my own fibres for spinning, then I wanted to weave.... who knows what I'll do next, maybe if I had a bigger kitchen I'd try my hand at dying...

Yet again I am off to Wonderwool Wales this April, Mum and I used to make a weekend of it but she now lives close enough that we can go as a day trip. Previous years I've simply made a good job of spending my hard earned cash but this year I decided I fancied learning something.
Everything I know about fibre preparation I've picked up from the internet, I've never really been shown what to do, or what to look for in good raw fibre. Hopefully by the end of April I'll have learnt a little bit more.

For now, I am getting on with my knitting, I have been freed from gift knitting and have enjoyed casting on things that are just for me! I'm sat on the sofa listening to the wind, with a pot of sparkly beads beside me. I reckon if I bash on I can get this shawl finished this weekend!

Woolfest

It's that time of year again, the end of June which means Woolfest (and my birthday!)
Woolfest is the largest UK fibre festival and is held up in The Lake District in Cockermouth. This was the area which was hit by devastating floods last November and the area is just being re-built.
Mum and I always go together as my birthday treat and stay in the camper van overnight. On Friday night after a long day walking round spending our money we pulled up on a common round the back of Skiddaw. There were wild ponies grazing which of course made me cooo, and then they came up to say hello. Combined with a beautiful moonrise it really was the perfect end to a fantastic day!

Focusing on the positive

I just spent a weekend in the Lake District catching up with some good friends from uni, soem have now graduated, others are still studying, but I did have a really good time talking, drinking, climbing, laughing, walking, caving.... I mean it's hard to have a bad time when you're surrounded by people who think this is a good evening's entertainment!

A new skill

I am generally quite bad at being shown how to do things, I like to teach myself, and have to fight out my inner demons and struggle through things.
I sort of taught myself to crochet but whenever I looked at crochet patterns my mind went blank, they might as well have been in clingon! I had seen a pattern for squares using crochet that I really liked the look of, so asked at York if anyone could teacher me to make them.

I came away with this...

Not perfect, and I want to make it bigger, but still it's crochet, and I can now follow instructions!
Thanks Melinda, you were a wonderful teacher.

The Chapel

I am not religous, but I do love churches. Quite often the church was the only people with any money and as a result they could pay the best architects, and best artists, and it shows. Aesthetically churches are thing of beauty, it's very rare I go in to one and think "this is ugly". The chapel at the Bar Convent was no exception, very unusual, but still very beautiful, and very peaceful, complete with priests hiding hole!

Winter Walking

This weekend was declared a weekend where I was not going to sit at home working. I busted a gut over the nights this week to make sure I was organised to do it, and then disappeared off to Wales with the new fella. We stayed with some friends of his, which was definitely preferable to camping, Saturday the weather was ok. Not rainy but with all the summits sitting in clouds, with more blind optimism than any real expectation we headed up the Carneddau, and unsurprisingly spent most of the day in the cloud. At least there was snow on the ground though.

I even managed to find a gap between the boulders large enough loose my leg in when the snow collapsed!
Today however was a rubbish day, the cloud was down even lower, and it was raining so we escaped and spent the day at home instead.
All in all a pretty awesome weekend, I even got half a sock done!

Another year, another weekend in Wales...

Freakily I've written a post with this title before!
I spent the weekend in Wales recharging my batteries with the university climbing club. Saturday was spent climbing in the sunshine, and Sunday was spent in blissful solitude walking the hills above Beddgelert. I arrived home ready to face the final week of term, and the stresses that brings about. I have spoken to more parents this half term than I have in the entire of last term!

www.flickr.com

Biblical torrents

Of rain mostly, though maybe also beer after the hangover I had on Sunday!


This is what the campsite looked like on Monday as we decided to pack up and go home.
In contrast this was the sunshine on Saturday.


I have yet to work out how to dry my tent, it's the big green one in the top photo, I'm praying the forecast for Thursday isn't lying so I can hang it on the line while I'm at work.

I promise to try and blog a bit more, but last week was a bit manic. I had 2 job interviews and then of course was off to the Lake District on Friday night. Can you forgive me!

Some slate climbing

I do hope you're all enjoying the advent calender. I'm back from a really lovely weekend where it didn't even rain! As a result I got 2 days of climbing in. I don't have masses of photos, as I spent the 2nd day taking lots of photos on someone elses better camera. As soon as they go up on Facebook then I'll share them here. However here's what I did get taken before then.

The winner of the mitten contest was Abi, I've sent her an email so hopefully she'll get back to me.

A quickie

Just a short post to say I hope you're enjoying the advent calender and also to remind you that you have until midnight GMT on Thursday to enter my competitionI've only got 1 entry so far so you could stand a chance of winning!
I'm off on another club trip away this weekend hopefully I'll come back ok, I really don't want snow! Cooking Christmas dinner for 35 will be stressful enough!

Fireworks

The reason for the posting silence was yet another weekend away with the uni club. Yes I know I've graduated, but all my friends are still students, and besides it's a good laugh.

There were games



and fireworks



and even some walking (sorry no photos, as usual I took my camera and it never left my rucsac, I'm waiting for someone to upload some on to Facebook!)

There was also some drinking, minibus driving, and a broken leg. However we don't want to go in to details about that, it all worked out ok, and it's a risk we accept when we go climbing.

Grey

The weather is very grey at the moment, if you look over at the side bar you will see I'm knitting something in colours to counteract this, definitely yarn to look at when you have a hangover! Also to counteract this are some photos from a couple of weeks ago when I was climbing in Wales, I've almost forgotten that the sky could be blue(ish!)



On another note, I was awoken at 11.30 last night by a slightly frantic housemate who had noticed water pouring through our living room ceiling. Turns out one of our taps had sprung a leak! After some attempts at a DIY fix we started playing hunt the stopcock to turn off the water. By this point water was starting short the light so we had to switch the fuse for the lights off. All the while we're trying to ring the landlord to find out what to do, with no response. She eventually rang us at 7.30 the next morning, and true to her word did indeed come round with someone and sort out the leak. Unfortunately the ceiling looks a little worse for wear... though it could have been worse, some night's the first we'd have known about it would have been the crash as the ceiling fell through!

Another year, another weekend in Wales...

A few selected photos from this weekend. Saturday was spent climbing, for which I have no photos.. hopefully my younger brother will put the ones he took up on Facebook soon. All the ones above are from sunday when the weather was mostly rainy and windy so we went to Dinorwic slate quarries just above Llanberis. The abandoned industrial setting is both bleak but in it's own way beautiful. Seeing the quarries when they were being fully worked before the age of true mechanization must have been amazing.

The tyre shot is what happens when a minibus tyre tries to argue with a rock and looses, luckily they're double wheeled so we made it to a car park before we even realised anything was wrong!

I'm keeping it short and sweet for this post, I'll be away on holiday for all of next week, if I don't squeeze in another post between now and then it will be because life has caught up with me again...

I'm off to unravel a sock heel that took me 2 hours to knit, because I was in denial about how large the heel needs to be on a mans sock.. this thing is child sized, why it took me so long to come to my sense I have no idea!

We have a winner! (and a loser)

Well the winner part is Han5nah T. the Manatee, I used a random number generator to pick a comment number and then just counted from the top and hers was the one I got to. I'll put them in the post as soon as I get an address.

The loser on the other hand would be me, the reason for me falling off the face of the blog last week was a crazy busy week made worse by the lack of a car. My brand new car broke down 1 week after I got it, and then spent a week in the garage due to the part that arrived being faulty! I finally got it back today, and managed to drive all of 500 metres before I got stuck in the middle of the junction with no power in a repeat of the same problem that was supposed to be fixed.... I'm ringing the guy I bought it from tomorrow. Spending £700 on a car I only just bought has broke my heart!


Hopefully tomorrow I'll post some pretty pictures of my trip to Wales this weekend, tonight I need to sleep, cooking for 60 people and driving a minibus about all weekend will do that to a girl!

Camping weekend

So I'm back from teh weekend, the house has been tidied up, all the washing has been done, and the mud scraped off. You could say it rained a bit on Sunday, but I prefer to believe that the puddles appeared magically so I could splash about in them in my stripy wellies!

Yet again it was an awesome weekend. I even got some climbing done (though yet again there is no photo evidence of this!). I went shopping in Keswick so got to update my wardrobe which is a good thing as it's suddenly got warmer and it's now about 25 degrees! I also went for an amazing walk and found some really cool disused mines. In true club fashion we had 4 torches between 6 of us, forgot to say exactly where we were going, and didn't sign out despite disappearing down small holes for most of the day! However they are possibly the most awesome set of mines I have been in to. They stretched in to the hill for ages, and led in to some huge caverns.


Anyway here's some picture goodness, I'm off to wash up and have a shower before going out to sit in a ber garden with some friends.

Fix-it-Friday

Well it's Friday again (how did that happen????)
For once I'm still in bed at 8.30am, which has been a bit of a rarity lately but I have a day off school today to go in to university and I don't need to go in until 11.15am. In that time I have a mountain of things to do, like packing for the weekend away I'm about to go on. Do you remember a while ago I ran for catering officer in the university club I'm a member of? While when I did I didn't quite realise that my living room would end up looking like this!


And you can't see the piles of vegetables and bread that are still behind me!
Yesterday started at 6.20am and didn't stop until 11.30pm, I practically fell in to bed unconscious! Shopping for 40 people for 3 days is a lot of food, and I don't think my body is liking me today for what it went through yesterday, too much carrying of awkward heavy crates, bending over and generally standing up for hours at a time has done nasty things to my back!
Anyway a list of things to do today-
Shower
Pack
Put clean washing away
Find things to take in to university
Collect wool from the post office

And I have to leave the house at 10.45am! I don't quite think it's going to be done in time.

Anyway I promise to be back on Tuesday (or maybe wednesday) with some entertaining photos of the weekends activities.

Which leads to me todays fix it friday before I go and shower. i thought today I'd share a few of the programs I've downloaded for my gorgeous macbook that I couldn't live without.

Planbook- this is what I use to organise all my teaching, it's an amazing piece of software ad I'd be lost without it.
You Control Tunes- this puts a play/pause, and skip button in the top menu bar, meaning I can leave iTunes minimised but still pause what I'm listening to.
Flickr Uploader- this is my newest discovery, but make uploading photos to Flickr so easy.
VLC- For some reason the volume on my macbook is stupidly quiet, all the programs that come with my mac don't let me increase it anymore, however VLC lets me increase the volume further than any other DVD/media player.

And you know what's the best thing, they're all free!

On strike

As you might have heard alot of teachers are striking on Thursday. Unfortunately I will not be one of them, as a student teacher I am not technically employed so can't withdraw my labour..... however school is officially shut on Thursday, but teachers who are not striking need to come in. This includes me.... and I have no work to do, marking 1 set of books is not going to fill the day. Looks like I could be getting lots of knitting down. If I was home I would have loads to do, I've got a pile of Guiding paperwork, and loads of stuff for which I need internet access, I could even go on a resource hunt. However as I don't I am going to be very bored.
The Rainbow overnight was a huge success, I can't put pictures up on here, but the photo of my Rainbows holding a lamb was so cute. We had a wonderful time, with not too late a night, and not too early a morning, though eating breakfast at 7.30am on a Sunday did feel a little odd.
On the job side of things there are 3 jobs in Sheffield that I am applying for, this is after a big drought of jobs in Sheffield, there is one at my first placement school that I would love to get...
Right time to get organised for Rainbows tonight, and then I'm going to chat to someone about the food on the upcoming camping weekend. Catering for 50 people for 3 days is going to be interesting!

Festive weekend

I've just got back from a very wet weekend wet. If you want to see how wet I'll be putting a few photos up here, but the whole album is on facebook here.
Anyway I went for 2 lovely walks, and managed to stay mostly dry, until we had to pack up the van, I've been under showers that had less water coming out of them.
All in all though a lovely weekend, the food was good, the minibus got us home, and I had 2 nice walks.
However the minibus roof leaked, I broke a piece of the rear light trying to reverse in driving rain, and the windscreen broke. The journey home was spent praying that the large crack didn't carry on spreading... (sorry no photos!)



A wintery Welsh woodland, and a very full stream.



The high point of my walk with Moel Siabod in the background.




Me looking a tad chilly.



The stream outside the hut bursting its banks.

Christmas is coming

a week since my last post, how did that happen?
All is well at home and at uni, I'm really starting to enjoy teaching as I get more of a relationship with the kids.
Anyway, slight rant, I am waiting for a parcel of fabric to make the advent calendar I talked about in this post. However rubbish royal mail has taken over a week to deliver a first class recorded delivery parcel, and then of course they try to deliver it while I'm at work. Guess how long until i can collect it at the local sorting office? 3 days, how can it take 3 days to be ready to collect? That means I can't get it until Monday, which just happens to be after December... I need to start doing these things earlier next year!

I'm off to Wales this weekend, should be fun, as it involves the first Christmas meal of the year!