Pink and precious!

Well this week I've been finishing off my pink knitting projects and decided to do all the making up together. It seems to be working so far, but some nights when I get home from work, I have to confess I don't do as much as I hoped I would. So I try to catch up the next day, or evening.
As you can see, my pink knitting has turned out wonderfully, now all we have to do is wait for about five more weeks to see how they fit!



However,this won't be the end of my knitting adventures, I've already sorted through my multitude of patterns to begin again. This time I shall be knitting in cream and white, well we don't know if the expected baby is a boy or girl (or even both) yet, but I may just find some other gorgeous colours whilst I'm in the wool shop.
Last Sunday was our grand daughter's first birthday.


How this last year has flown. It only seems like yesterday when she was born, and now she's toddling about following her big brother.
The birthday cake was beautiful, it must have been so hard to actually put a knife to the cake, just look at this....

The original photo was done in sepia, I think it's a wonderful photograph, and cake.
I've been sorting through my sewing patterns this last week, and have now found a couple of dress patterns which I'm really taken with. So next week I'm off to find some gorgeous summer fabric. We don't have much choice of fabric shops here, so I'm wondering if I should wait until next weekend when we go to visit our daughter and her husband, who live in Wiltshire, it won't hurt to look and I wouldn't want to miss a bargain.
Whilst I'd been searching in my huge button collection for pink and white baby sized buttons, I came across another tin of goodies, which to be honest I'd forgotten about. I found some lovely vintage buttons and buckles.


This started my mind racing with all sorts of ideas, and now I've added a few more things to my list of projects.
The great thing is, all or most these haberdashery items have been handed down to me from my mum, and grandmother, and a lot I've collected too. I know they are quality items which we made to last, not like a lot of the throw away rubbish which can can be bought in many places today and doesn't last five minutes.
I always knew my hoarding and collecting would pay off, it always has and always will. Trends and fashion come and go, but being thrifty is alway in the forefront as far as I'm concerned.

Enjoy your weekend, Linda

A week of wonderment!

Last week we had a wonderful week in Yorkshire. The weather however wasn't, well it wasn't too bad, raining almost non stop on Monday and Tuesday, but after that we did have some sunshine and it was fairly warm.
The scenery and surroundings were absolutely wonderful, but it would be in any weather.

It was my very first visit to Whitby and wow, it was everything I thought it would be, and much more. There's so much to see, we didn't know where to begin. We parked at West Cliff and we walked down to the town, the sun shining down on us. We took loads of pictures. To see the abbey in all its glory was magnificent, it's such a beautiful place.


Lunch time we went to the famous Magpie restaurant for fish (or should I say whale!) and chips. It was the most tasty fish I have ever tasted, but then when it's freshly caught it's bound to I suppose. Anyway, next time we go, we'll be trying out one of the other restaurants.
We were only able to spend a day there, but we'll certainly be going back and hopefully staying longer.
Another day we went to Goathland, Pickering and Levisham. It was great to see the steam trains and take even more photos. It reminded me so much of when I was a child as steam trains were still running, only just!

Now last week seems ages ago, and we only came back on Sunday. So now it's back to reality for a while.
Anyone who knows me, will know that I'm not one for watching the telly much. If I do, then it's mainly factual and practical programmes which I watch. So on Tuesday evening I was flicking through the channels to see if there was anything worth watching (whilst I was knitting) and I came across one of the lifestyle programmes. I think it was "How not to Decorate" or something. Well they seem to spend most of the time telling people how to do things correctly, or the "proper way" or maybe they meant "their way".
After switching it off, it got me thinking about how many times we are told about the correct way to do things. I remember when I was at school, I was in my first year of grammar school and it was in a needlework class. We had all performed a task on the sewing machine and we then had to draw a diagram and explain what we had just done with our fabric.
My friend and I sat at our desks and neatly drew what we had done, labelled, coloured and put a key into our page. We were quite proud of our work and I must say we had done a neat job.
Once the needlework teacher looked at my book she drew a red line across it and yelled " I wanted a diagram not a colour illustration, do it again!" As far as I was concerned I'd done exactly as she had told me to do, and so had my friend.What had we done "wrong" exactly?
On the same day, in the afternoon we had a cookery lesson, we were making stuffed tomatoes, and one of the girls had a good telling off from the cookery teacher because she had fried her onions to go in the tomatoes last and not first.The girl was in tears.
As I grew older I decided for myself that there is no right or wrong way in doing anything creative, just guidelines, and as long as you follow these guidelines you can't go wrong. After all, everything is open to interpretation,

and wasn't it Leonardo Da Vinci who said "Imagination is more important than knowledge?"
Well, I'm with him on that one!
Bye for now, Linda