Falling Out With Olive

I took 4 balls of KingCole Riot DK with me on holidays, and, having searched for a simple pattern before we left, I'd decided to start an Olive Twist Shawl, inspired by the lovely lovely Meredith of mereknits.

I looked up the Olive Twist pattern on ravelry, saved it on my phone, packed up my yarn, hooks and an empty dental floss box, and boarded the plane. What? Don't you always pack an empty dental floss box when you fly ? You mean it's not on your essentials-in-hand-luggage list ? Nop, me neither, until my local crochet group pointed out that whilst crochet hooks are allowed on planes, scissors aren't. Their suggested solution - should you need to cut your yarn at 30,000 feet (is that how high a plane is ? No idea, but it sounds good :) - use the little metal thingy on the dental floss box. Genius!

And so I joined the mile-high-crochet-club! Rock and roll baby! Yeahhhh!

I wish I could say that whilst on holiday I spent many a happy hour hooking by the pool. I did spend quite a bit of time doing just that, but it wasn't happy. Let's just say Olive and I did not get along. Determined though, I had lengthy email conversations with Meredith (who by a bizarre twist of fate actually only lives about 20 miles from where we were staying) and still the pattern somehow evaded me. Stubborn as a mule, I persevered.

After over 2 weeks of crocheting, frogging, crocheting, frogging, frogging more , shrieking, frogging more, crocheting, swearing, frogging again, crying ( ok so I didn't actually cry) and then finally realizing that I had actually invented my own pattern - which I didn't even like - I gave in. Yes, I admitted defeat.

I couldn't bare to rip the whole thing back though, (in fact what I wanted to do was burn the wretched thing) but I was very sensible and calm (unusual) and finished off the row I was on, and then gave it to Little Miss for her new doll.

I wasn't very much in love with King Cole Riot at this point either, but had three and a half balls to use up, so I had a flick through one of my new books, One Skein Wonders.

The eagle-eyed among you will remember I blogged about it before here. I really really love this book. My crochet book collection is quite extensive, I am a bit addicted to buying crochet books (nearly as much as buying yarn), but this one ranks up there with my favourites. I had a flick through and found a great pattern for some doll clothes. 

I made the jacket of the Rainbow Doll ensemble, but left the sleeves off to make it a sleeveless cardigan. It was a bit big for dolly - she was being cuddled in bed by Little Miss at the time and so wasn't available for a fitting.

So I made into a sort of double-breasted-wrap-sleeveless cardy, complete with button and loop fastening.

Little Miss finger-crocheted some bobbles for Dolly's hair, and a bracelet. We like the finished outfit, what do you think ?

One other twist of fate - I bought a magazine whilst away, which turned out to have the Olive Twist pattern in it! Total accident!

I still haven't made up with Olive, however now I was back on speaking terms with the King Cole Riot, but I needed a project for the flight home. It had to be really simple, an overnight flight with 3 children and the hope of maybe watching a movie doesn't leave much brain capacity for complicated crocheting .

Being unable to find anything that seemed simple enough I decided to do a sort of granny stripe-come-simple-filet-crochet scarf-cowl thingy (catchy, huh), of my own design. For now I will leave you with a sneak peek, and I'll post more pictures, and the pattern, another time :)

Home Sweet Home

Hello bloggy friends, remember me ?! We are home from Florida safe and sound, and have come back to earth with a big bump :-/ Back to the drudge of housework and laundry but also to the crazy colours of loom bands, sticking, marker-ing, and, with autumn in the air, leaf collecting has commenced, and the fingerless mittens have put in an appearance.

 

It's been over 2 weeks since I posted and such a lot has happened. I'll try and keep it brief : we enjoyed the remainder of our Florida holiday - the highlight being swimming with dolphins. Wow, that was such an amazing experience, we felt very privileged to have had them let us get so close, and even be taken for a ride! They truly are gorgeous, so strong and powerful and yet graceful and gentle at the same time. We have no photos except official ones of us looking fetching - NOT (in my case anyway) wetsuits and I am NOT sharing that picture with anyone !!! So here's a lovely last pool shot instead .....

Another highlight for me was having a ride in a hot air balloon :D That's another one ticked off my bucket list :) Disney have a very tame, tethered hot air balloon and you can take a quick 20 minute ride in it (straight up, hang around admiring the view for 15 minutes, straight back down). 

I would love to experience a "proper" hot air balloon sometime, but this was a really great surprise, I hadn't expected to fit it in, it seemed a bit self-indulgent seeing as hubby had to stay on the ground with the Little People: they didn't want to do it (and 20 minutes to myself was heaven, I don't mind admitting). Look, there they are right in the middle, looking up. Little Man is in a green shirt leaning over the fence along the promenade thingy.

We had a day at the Magic Kingdom .....

Colour everywhere ....

And of course fireworks at night ....

And so with heavy hearts (and heavier suitcases) we said goodbye to Florida :(

The journey home was draining, lots of sensory overload for Little Man - cue lots of tantrums, crying and refusing to get up from being in a ball on the floor, and then some really spectacular vomiting (sorry!) from him (poor soul) when we finally arrived home.

We had 2 days to recover from the jetlag and unpacking chaos before the Little People went back to school. Little Man has started at Secondary school. It's been pretty horrendous, he's really unsettled, not coping at all. We've had to enlist loads of help, make lots of phone calls, and I've been into school soooooo many times. One day last week I kept him at home for a day so he could take a breather and calm down. We went on a lovely bike-ride-come-nature-ramble. Autumn is nearly upon us, the days are still warm but the leaves are turning and there's that early morning chill.

We gathered loads of lovely autumny treasures Including this wonderful teasel ....

The whole school thing has been very hard and it's been an incredibly stressful couple of weeks. However, I think today we turned a corner and he had an o-k-a-y day. And okay is good enough for me. I'm pretty sure that this is why I've felt like starting blogging again, I couldn't be positive about anything and didn't really want to blog whilst feeling so negative. But now there is light at the end of the tunnel :)

Since coming back Little Tomboy has celebrated her 7th birthday. 7??? My littlest Little Person is 7. Really ? It doesn't seem possible.

And so I'm settling into my new routine of school runs, school runs, and more school runs :) I'm getting some crochet done - hurrah - I have a couple of little ta-dahs to share soon, and my current project is very exciting!

But it's late now so I need to log off for the evening, I'll be back with more tomorrow:)

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August Break Day 20 : Peaceful

Hello, and welcome to Day 20 of the August Break.

Today's theme is "Peaceful". Wow, Day 20! Awesome!

I am not, by nature, a peaceful person. Mind always on the go, brain always busy, hands never still. I do almost feel a sense of calm though when I'm looking through my camera lens at flowers and foliage.  Perhaps it's a sense of being in that moment, focusing on the framing of the image, just for a second shutting out the mayhem that usually surrounds me.

These pictures were all taken on our holiday these last couple of weeks. I'm surprised, pleasantly so, at the richness of plant-life around us in Florida. With 3 Little People in tow I wasn't at my most peaceful whilst snapping these pictures, however they do evoke a certain contentment whilst reviewing them :) Hope you enjoy them too :) And if anyone would like to attach names to any varieties, please feel free to inform me!

So many wonderful colours and textures ....

August Break Day 18: Jump

Welcome to Day 18 of the August Break.

Today's theme is "Jump". Golly gosh really nearly caught up, only a few more days of multi-posting!

I've been REAALLLLY looking forward to this post :) All week I've been messing about with my fancy-pants camera and it's various fancy-pants settings. One such setting is a sort of "Action mode" where you hold down the clicky button thing and the camera takes a series of shots, paparazzi style, for as long as the button is held down. You get loads of action shots that would be really hard to get with a one-click setting (well, for me, anyway). I've taken loads of the Little People jumping into the pool. The pictures speak for themselves. Enjoy!

There :) Doesn't that just make you smile :D

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