Category: Life

Fuzzy Feet

Dilemma of the day:

My feet have pins and needles and a burning sensation, which makes it quite difficult to walk without a walking stick.

My hands also have pins and needles and a burning sensation, which makes it quite difficult to hold a walking stick.

Tricky business.

My list of ridiculous and frustrating symptoms is getting longer and more annoying as the months go on. I do have an appointment with my doctor next week, but I don’t honestly expect anything to come of it. (Although I’m hoping for a referral to a rheumatologist, who can at least arrange for some tests I haven’t had already.)

Hey ho.

At least it’s a bit easier to put up with having very uncomfortable feet when you get to put them inside some lovely comfortable shoes. Fairysteps Holly, in case you were wondering. I wear mine with the ribbons around the ankle rather than across the instep.

Just as well I sold my entire shoe collection in order to buy these, really. I can’t imagine I’d have been able to wear a single pair of my old shoes right now!

Neat and tidy

Almost tidy stash...

Last month I took a weekend off work, to celebrate my birthday. I’d decided to have a picnic, but in case the weather was bad, we had to be able to move everybody indoors if necessary. This involved tidying the house to within an inch of its life. The main thing making the living room look untidy was my yarn stash, so the next day we bit the bullet and did something about it.

The wooden box is actually a toy chest, from Argos. I’d have liked something larger, a proper blanket box, but this was the biggest piece of furniture that we could fit into the space and still open the door. All of my yarn has now been sealed into freezer bags (to prevent moths) and squished inside. As you can see, not all of it fits, but I’m knitting as fast as I can!

The paper bags at the front house the projects I’m currently working on*, plus some yarn that absolutely wouldn’t fit in the box. The decorated chest on top of the box contains, yes, you’ve guessed it, more yarn. The little bag on top of that is for my current sock-in-progress.

Tidy needles!

I have a long orange plastic box that holds most of my straight knitting needles. I inherited it from my Aunty Val. The ones that are too big for the box are stuffed decoratively into a glass pasta jar. This work of organisational genius however, is the brainchild of Lettice. All of my double-pointed and circular needles are now neatly sorted into DL size plastic wallets, courtesy of WHSmith. These fit sideways inside a CD storage box, alongside my needle sizing gadget. All I need to do now is label the wallets with the sizes of the needles inside. Perfect!

The stripy tin holds all the little gubbins that don’t fit anywhere else – scissors, stitch markers, tape measures, cable needles, that kind of thing.

There is one more box of yarn, a canvas one that zips closed, bought a very long time ago from Muji. That houses knitted things that are waiting to be unravelled, and some extremely chunky wool that I don’t really like to knit with any more but is too nice to get rid of. And then there are the four balls of yarn that Paul brought back from Canada for me, which won’t fit into the toy box or the treasure chest. Or the canvas box. Oops.

Best get knitting then, I suppose!

 

*By “currently working on” I mean “haven’t finished yet”. Including a little cardigan that I started knitting in 2007. I’m hoping that being able to see these projects all the time will encourage me to actually finish knitting the damn things.

An old lady and a wet rabbit.

Old Lady moth (Mormo Maura)

Today, the rabbit escaped. He lives indoors, but I must have left his gate ajar, because he managed to make a dash for it into the garden. Paul came home from work to help me capture him, and while he was moving some pieces of wood around (Paul, not the rabbit), I spotted this great big moth.

It turned out to be an Old Lady (Mormo maura), and I took this photo of it while we were waiting for the rabbit to decide whether he was going to stay underneath my Shed all afternoon.

Eventually Paul managed to capture Mister Stinkyface (real name Johnny Depp, long story, not our fault!), and we took advantage of his captivity to unceremoniously dump him in the bath and give him a wash.

After more than an hour of wrestling with an angry, wet rabbit, we eventually decided he was as clean as he was ever going to be, and let him go.

Johnny after his bath.

As you can see, he is NOT IMPRESSED by this outrageous treatment.

Perhaps that’ll teach him not to go around escaping in future!

State of the Shed

State of the Shed

Today I have been mostly playing Fabric Stash Tetris.

Most of my stuff was stored in a set of Argos canvas and pine furniture. Sadly it hasn’t been able to take the weight of all my fabric, and over the years it’s been gradually getting more and more wonky. Today I bit the bullet and offered it all on Freegle, so I had to get my act together and empty everything out of the wardrobe and off the shelves.

The wardrobe, small shelves and bedside table are now rather inconveniently shoved in my kitchen, while I move everything else around in the Shed. All of the furniture in here (except for my lovely sewing table) is either a hand-me-down, or something I’ve had for a very long time.

All of my cardboard haberdashery boxes (from Muji, about 10 years ago) are kept in place by a shoe holder, hanging from a clothing rail with shelves. That had been stashed in the loft since the days I used to take a t-shirt stall to Infest and Whitby. It took absolutely ages to put together, so I hereby apologise to all those people who helped me to put it up and take it down again over the years!

The last thing I need to clear is the shelf unit on the right hand side. That’s an Argos canvas-and-pine piece too, but it’s been dismantled and reassembled a couple of times, and is now very wobbly indeed. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to replace it with, but I’ll cross that bridge when I’ve sorted out its contents and figured out how much storage space I need.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get all of this stuff into some vague semblance of order by the end of the day – I really want to be able to spend tomorrow actually making things!