I’m pretty much a left-brain type person, i.e. good with numbers, logical, structured, except for when I’m very much a right-brain type person, i.e. creative, intuitive and a bit of a dreamer.

Studying for actuarial exams is about as left-brain as it gets and my right-brain appears to have gone into creative overdrive by way of rebellion. First, there was the coffee cosy:

Then the pirate eye-patch:

Then a new banner for the blog:

I’m quite proud of the banner which is the product of my own photography and GIMP skills. I’ll never be a graphic designer but it’s fun to play every now and again. (All the books in the banner have been digitised, by the way, and are available from Project Gutenberg. The large brown ones are the “Letters of Charles Dickens” and the smaller green ones are the “Fascination of London” series.)

To top it all off, my notebook is bursting with scribbled ideas for new projects and I’ve started swatching for a Spring scarf based on the pattern of raindrops on a window (did I mention the bit about being a dreamer?) and a tea-cosy. In fact, that’s the swatch for the tea-cosy in the banner.

Some day, by which I mean after the exams, I might even be able to put my left-brain to work writing up the patterns for these projects!

Audiobooks are my new favourite things and there is almost nowhere that I won’t listen to them. I listen while commuting, on long car journeys, sitting at home knitting, in the bath or lying in bed waiting to fall asleep. Although I only recommend the last if you are already familiar with the plot!

It turns out that I’m a lot fussier about my audiobooks than I am about books that I read to myself though.  I’m less forgiving of bad plots when I listen to them and I’m absolutely unforgiving when it comes to bad narrators. A good narrator is an absolute must and, for me, there are two qualities that make a good narrator.

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You will need:

• black felt (2 4″ squares or 1 piece 4″×8″)
• black elastic
• thin cardboard (1 4″ square)
• scissors
• pencil
• needle and black thread
• craft glue

Using the outer line on the template below, cut out two identical pieces of felt. (Tip: double your felt and cut through two thicknesses at once to get them as similar as possible.)

(Clicking the template will take you to Flickr where you can download the larger size for easy printing.)

Using the inner line, cut out a single piece of cardboard.

Sew your elastic to one of the felt pieces, making sure not to twist the elastic before attaching the second end. Back-stitching in the shape shown in the diagram should be nice and strong.

Glue the cardboard to the centre of the felt piece that has the elastic attached and then glue the second piece of felt over the top making sure that the elastic is sandwiched between the two pieces of felt. You may want to add extra glue where the elastic has been sewn to the felt.

Once the glue is dry, your patch is complete. If you would like a neater edge around your patch, you could add blanket stitch all the way around.

Aarrrhhh!

It feels more like Hallowe’en around here this weekend than Easter. There are no eggs or chicks or bunnies, instead we have pirates and bluestockings.

Pirates because Steven is attending a stag weekend next weekend that requires a pirate costume. Fortunately, we live close to Greenwich which is a good place for buying general pirate stuff and we whipped up a quick eye-patch as well. (Expect a how-to post with full details shortly.)

Bluestockings was a term coined in the 18th century to describe educated, intellectual women and, with the amount of studying I’m doing at the moment, I think I qualify and now I’m knitting the socks to match.

These are the “Evening stockings for a young lady” from Knitting Vintage Socks and are a great example of what I love about Ravelry and what I don’t like about Knitting Vintage Socks. There are several lacey sock patterns in the book but none of the socks in the book are photographed being worn. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible to see the lace patterns at their best. So, when I decided to knit a pair of lacey socks, I narrowed my choice down to two by looking at the book and then logged on to Ravelry to see what they actually looked like worn. This actually helped me to decide that I didn’t want to knit either of the patterns that I had short-listed but did want to knit these ones instead. I had never considered knitting these socks based on the photographs in the book but I’m absolutely loving them.

A close-up of the beautiful open-work pattern:

There was going to be a much nicer picture of these socks (which are the Pom Pom Peds for my Mum) to go along with this post. It was going to be nicely posed with props (golf balls!) since I found the remote control for my camera yesterday. Unfortunately, it seems that the remote and my mini-tripod can’t be in the same place at the same time since I now can’t find my tripod. Also, the battery in the remote control is dead and since it takes a watch battery, I don’t have a replacement in the house. Add to that the fact that I couldn’t find a single golf ball despite there being dozens of them somewhere in the house and I decided that a nice photo of the socks just wasn’t meant to be. Hence, the lying_on_the_floor_with_feet_up_on_the_sofa pose.

I do seem to be turning into the sort of knitter who can’t knit a pattern without changing something. With these, I lengthened the cuff slightly and used a completely different toe so that I didn’t have to do any grafting. I know grafting isn’t difficult but I do find it fiddly and I actually prefer the finish of a non-grafted toe. This toe is the French Toe as described in Knitting Vintage Socks.

Now I just have to wrap them up and send them to my Mum with my fingers crossed that they will fit!

I try to avoid politics on this blog but having spent today in a building round the corner from the Bank of England and the G20 protests I do have a couple of things that I’d like to say to some of the parties involved. Before I do, it is worth mentioning that lack of sleep and an excess of caffeine have left me a little on the grumpy side today!

Protestors – please don’t put questions on your placards. Especially ones like “Why do we have to pay?” and “How am I supposed to feed my kids?”. It took great strength of will to walk past without answering them and you really wouldn’t have liked my answers.

Bankers – if you’re wearing jeans instead of a suit to try and blend in with the protestors, you shouldn’t really wear them with expensive designer shirts, jumpers and shoes; you weren’t exactly inconspicuous.

Politicians – stopping in front of a handy camera crew to shake hands with the police officers keeping an eye on the peaceful protestors is just cheap; you know who you are.

Metropolitan Police – Operation Glencoe? Seriously? I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’re just working your way through a list of Scottish glens and that this was in no way a reference to a slaughter of innocents by government forces. You can see why that might be a bad parallel to draw, right? Right?

Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, here are some pretty pictures of my walk home through Greenwich Park.

The Royal Observatory:

A weirdly blue-tinged view over the Maritime Museum towards Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs:

I love Spring!