Simplicity ... is what I am aiming for

The Secret Pal 14 exchange came to an end on September 30th.
This is not the best picture, but here is my final parcel from Heather , which I picked up a couple of weeks ago.
As usual it took me ages to be at home with enough daylight to take a picture.
(Now I see it on the screen it looks rather too dark.)

What I can tell you, is that once again Heather came up trumps for me.
She excelled herself with this parcel, sending me Noro Silk Garden sock yarn, Black Eyed Susan seeds for the garden, the "Simplicity" soap of my title and the most perfect purple "Velvet bilberry" Jitterbug sock yarn.

She must know just how much I need to simplify my life, maybe using this soap will have the required effect!

While my parcel was languishing in our local sorting office I was at Ally Pally for the Knitting and Stitching show.
I stopped and looked at the Jitterbug yarn, and decided against buying it then.
Somehow this seems most apt.

The UKHKA stand is now called "Knit1 - pass it on".
We had a good day in a quieter position than in previous years.
Not so many school and college groups found us, maybe fewer were visiting.
As a result it was easier to teach those who did find us.
I even managed to demystify cabling for one knitter.

Meanwhile, Keila has been my downstream pal in SP14.
Throughout the exchange I found it hard not to let on to my identity, and had the utmost fun spoiling her.

Finally, I made sense of my camera ...

... and can now reveal my latest parcel from my secret pal. Thank you so much - you got it all just right!And here we have: a fantastic project bag in bright colours, just my style!
Some fibres in a bright jewel greeny blue; some mysterious seeds (they came unlabelled) that I don't immediately recognise; and the most exquisite fine mohair yarn.

All this came recently, but I haven't been at home in daylight hours much recently, and then the camera batteries were flat!!

Excuses! Excuses, I know, but all true.

Meanwhile we popped over to Lincoln for the AIA conference, and took a side trip to Gainsborough where we saw this lovely passion flower creeping out from under the metal hoarding of a building site.

In Lincoln itself I was tempted by the texture carved into this stone plinth. It looks as though it would be really easy to translate this into crochet.

These are the latest socks off the needles: I now have a sneeking suspicion that the bright red wool element might not be machine washable, so their first wash was by hand. I will have to try felting a bit of the leftover yarn before I next want to wash them.

Secret Pal goodies again

When I can I spend a lot of time in the garden. This weekend, amazingly, my one day at home coincided with good weather. All week we had showers of rain, often heavy. Leaving work on Saturday afternoon I got drenched cycling home, so wasn't expecting such luck on Sunday.

But before I get too involved in talking about planting out items, here are the goodies from the first part of SP14: butterflies for the garden, beautifully dyed silk hankies and the handcream to smooth my digits before embarking on the spinning. Thank you, Secret Pal. When I get a couple of other spinning projects out of the way, I will spend some time removing all those gardening roughnesses with salt and oil, as I know that sik hankies are best treated with care. I already tried out the handcream, and it is just right to use before spinning silk and fine wool.And now for the creative bit in the garden. A while ago I found some old carrot seed and planted it in modules in the greenhouse. I have been rather lazy about keeping it watered and yet it survived. For about a week it has needed to be moved on. We never seem to get on well with carrots as our soil is full of gravel from the River Trent in whose floodplain we live. These carrots having survived my general neglect have now had lots of care lavished on them. I found some mature compost and assiduously sieved out all the stones and bits of branches. This has then had more compost and sand mixed in with it, and been put in a growing bag that held early potatoes until last month. Tonight they have perked up, so we may yet get a decent crop.
As you can see, the butterflies felt right at home on our patio. This pot has just developed by serendipity. Originally it held some golden hops and nasturtiums. Several years on it has self-seeded plants some of which I cannot yet identify. But as they all work well together it hasn't been disturbed. We frequently find plants creeping in, possibly brought in by birds. Only the fern in this pot has its parentage in our garden. We are still waiting to see what the other shrubs turn out to be.

Art Room move

I've been a bit quiet here for the past while, and all because we have been moving the Art Room to a new venue.

We have been in business now for a little over 3 years, and our rate of expansion has been phenomenal.

When we moved into larger premises in 2007/8, we knew that it was only until July of this year.

It gave us a chance to work on a larger scale, and that proved to work well for us.

The decision as to where we would be after our lease ran out has weighed heavily on us.

It has been a bit of a cliffhanger, as our preferred premises were not available when we had expected them to be.

We only found out late last Wednesday that we could move in this last weekend.

We had to be out of our premises by yesterday morning.

So we didn't have to do a two-way move via temporary storage.

Now we are moved, and frantically trying to set up for next Monday when we will reopen to the public.

The builders also had no access until this week, so we will be working alongside them.

The good news is that our new landlords walked through with the builders yesterday, and the builders wasted no time, and started this morning.

We have long days ahead of us to get everything in place.

We won't have a telephone line in until Thursday.

So in some ways it has been quiet, as unless people know our mobile numbers we cannot be contacted.

I have been too tired to think much about the Secret Pal 14 exchange, which just started.

I am looking forward to taking part, having missed out on the last couple of exchanges.

But please bear with me for a few days until we are sorted out at the studio.

I did manage some spinning last week when very much stressed.

Some of it was sampling a fantastic alpaca silk mix in "Think Pink" that I bought from Krafty Koala at the end of UK Ravelry Day in Coventry.

I have also started on spinning some fibres bought from Skein Queen at about the same time.

This may be a long term project, and just possibly the recipient may read this, so no more hints.

And now a reminder that I do knit sometimes. Here is a quick snap taken with my mobile phone one evening when fetching the washing in (hence the bluish colour). Ian had hung a load of my socks together, making a burst of colour.

This is one view from bed early in the morning, which may inspire some wire or porcelain - fine spider tracery highlighted by sunlight.

And the little bit of wire knitting I did on my way over to Coventry for UK Ravelry Day - purple wire with gold thread, worn pinned through a piece of porcelain I had fashioned, but that broke in firing. Now (when I get time) I need to make some porcelain with larger holes so that I can pin things on more easily.