around my house

Just as I had gotten back to posting… The floods decided to interfere. We’re all fine, and we’re hoping the water is done rising, it stopped just at our threshold (and we’re NOT inviting it in!). Keep your fingers crossed!

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Malabrigo icecream

Before I left London I had to make one final visit to Loop and its yarny wonderfulness… I came away with a colourful skein of Malabrigo that was just too interesting to leave on the shelf.

I had realized earlier that I had somehow grossly miscalculated the amount of yarn I would need for the Side slip cloche and ended up with about 125 grams extra!

Since the leftover yarn is white, I wanted something more interesting to combine it with. This seemed like just the right thing!

I’ve always liked stripes that combine a solid and a variagated yarn and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it out myself. The colours of this yarn remind me of melted chocolate-strawberry-vanila icecream of my childhood and I was really curious to see how it would look offset by white stripes. I’m not so sure about the result yet.

I also added the detail of starting of with one row in the contrast colour, then doing the ribbing in white, before going on to alternate 2-row stripes. I’ve always liked that effect, but I’m not sure I’ve found the best way to do it. It looks ok, maybe it could look even better with a different technique?

In any case, the hat is too big as it is and will have to be ripped. I’m just not decided if I should do something different (slightly or completely different) when I cast on again. It does look lovely on the wrong side, though… :)

sunshine

When I used to tell people I lived in London, a joke on the rainy weather would follow more or less immediately. The only way to deal with those is to grin and bear, I learned, and not even try to explain to people that it really doesn’t rain that much in London, and that it almost never rains the way it does where I come from. As if to prove my point, the heavens came down on Zagreb yesterday… and went on and on and on. When it seemed like we were never going to see sunshine again, though, it appeared all of a sudden. I jumped at my opportunity and snapped a few shots of something that’s been making me smile ever since it arrived in the mail on Friday…

A little summer and sunshine in the form of stickers!

I missed summer this year, it simply got away from me… I tried catching up with it in the last ten days, follow it around Europe, but it managed to escape every time. So this at least brings me a little bit of summer!

And then there’s this snow-white shower mitt! Sorry if the photo is a bid blinding, I am utterly amazed by the whiteness of this thing!

And this perfectly formed shower sponge. I can’t believe someone crocheted this by hand, I am really awed! And all for me!

I love surprizes. I absolutely adore receiving mail. But what I’m loving even more are these ‘surprize’ friendships that I’m developing through the blog and that result in wonderful mail surprizes every once in a while. :) Thank you so much, Misha, you’ve brightened my days! :)

sixteen meridians to the East

That’s where I am now in comparison from where you last heard from me!

Sorry to everyone about the protracted silence, thank you to those who were so kind to check whether I was still alive, and don’t worry to those who thought I might be ending the blog – no way! ;) The last two weeks have been mostly fun, exciting and eventful. At times they were also sad, and even a little stressful, but we’ll quickly forget about those bits! ;) Perhaps surprizingly, there hasn’t been much knitting in them, but packing did make me realize that my London days have made a big contribution towards that stash I showed you about a month ago – I’ll have to get working on using it up soon! In the meantime, here’s a few snaps of the fun things I’ve been doing.

Visited some dinasours – a first-time-ever for me!

p.s. I highly recommend the Natural History Museum in London! It’s a bit 1960s :) but there’s lots of opportunities for adults to forget their age and play ;)

Finally checked out the Grace Kelly exhibition at the V&A and loved it! Don’t you just want to live then?

Another first – my first live football match ever. I loved it (which I found surprizing, but hey, that’s what trying out things is all about!).

Then did some ‘old’ stuff, like finding cool graffiti.

And breathing in some green, green air.

Somewhere in there I fit in moving 50kilos of luggage the distance of 16 meridians… It wasn’t so bad, really! Especially since it contained my brand new outfit for a very special event coming up soon… No more than a peak for you now!

It’s good to be back on the blog! Thanks for sticking around so long! :)

:)

Hello, I am alive. Dissertation is done. Grad school is over. It might take me another day or two to get back here though. After all the stress and lack of sleep, I need some time to exhale and re-centre myself.

Also, in a week I’m leaving London indefinitely.  I might be back (you know how much I love it), but it’s out of my hands at the moment. So I might be a bit too busy with packing and moving to blog as usual. But you can be sure that, wherever I end up, I’ll be bringing you knitting and silly content regularly. All the world is magical and interesting, you just have to pay attention… ;)

Have a great weekend, my friends! :)