photos – Page 2 – Enchilada Sunrise

TdeF Prep

As well as carrying on with the Big Clear Out / spring-clean / whatever, I’ve been preparing for the start of the Tour de Fleece tomorrow. I’ve got the wheel all set up, and the fibre that I’ll be starting with all ready. I’m basically aiming to spin every day for at least half an hour, more if I can manage it, and overall just get as much done as I can.

The first thing I’m spinning are two similar, but complementary, colourways from Limegreenjelly. Actually, everything I’ll spin will be LGJ, since that’s all I have! I’m spinning each of these into singles, then plying the two together. I think it’ll look nice.

And I’m Done

Woohoo, I’ve completed NaBloPoMo for June. I shall give myself a pat on the back… and maybe check if there’s a “winner” badge or something. No big deal if not.

I’ve also been seeing how I can do on the Monthly Scavenger Hunt on Flickr. This is my first month, and I didn’t get something for all twenty items, but I managed to do sixteen, so that’s not a bad start!

1. Abandon hope all ye who enter here, 2. Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking, 3. Call the fashion police!, 4. Veteran, 5. Bubbly, 6. Reflecting, 7. Mad, bad and dangerous to know, 8. Nightlights, 9. Prized Possession, 10. Belly up, 11. Desolate, 12. Walkabout, 13. The north wind doth blow, 14. Microcosm, 15. An elephant in the room, 16. Born to be wild?

So, what next on the blogging front? Now that I’ve managed to maintain blogging through June, I don’t want to just stop again. The Tour de Fleece is coming up, so I think I’ll plan to post an update on how I’m doing each day of that… which will mean it’ll be very spinning-centric around here for a couple of weeks. I dare say I’ll ramble about other things though. I can only say “today I span such and such a thing, here’s a photo” so many times!

T is for Tan (or lack thereof)

I spent most of today on the beach, which was marvellous – the weather is warm and sunny, but with enough of a breeze to keep it comfortable. I sat and knitted, listened to music for some of the time, the sounds of the seaside for the rest of it, and generally enjoyed the fresh air and sunshine. I went and got one of those folding chairs that come in the carry bags, but I actually only ended up using it (still in the bag!) as a lower back rest.

Hastings Beach 23-06-2010 — On the beach, Hastings, 23-06-2010

It was really nice being down there. I really must go more often while the weather is good. I don’t have a garden, but with the beach only 5-10 mins away… well. Silly not to go.

I was working on my Clapotis [Ravlink] and got very near to the end… when I realised that I wasn’t going to have enough yarn after all. Argh! So I’ve ripped back again and I’ll start the decrease rows one repeat earlier. That is, I’ll have one repeat less of the “straight” section. It’ll still be a good length. I should still have it finished this week, too, since the decrease section obviously gets faster as you go.

One thing that had completely passed me by until I got into town and heard all the people in the pubs was that it was the England v (er, someone) World Cup match. We won, didn’t get sent home, and there was much rejoicing. Including a group of blokes parading along the seafront singing the national anthem and then other assorted songs (Mysterious Girl? What?).

Oh, and although I was in the sun all day long, I’m still not tanned at all. Or not enough to notice. Being v pale, I slapped on the Factor 25 – I forgot once last year and got really bad sunburn, so I’m not going there again. Still, if I keep going out to the beach, and the weather obliges, I expect I’ll gain some colour before the end of summer. Even if it will only be noticeable by comparison with my watch mark!

K is for Knitting in Public

So, today was World Wide Knit in Public Day (or at least, the start of WWKIP week) for 2010. We had a little meet up and knit in Princes Park in Eastbourne to mark the event – there were just four of us there in the end, but we had a good time. Or I did, anyway. I hope everyone else did!

We were there from 11am to 3pm, and as well as getting on with knitting and crochet of our own, the heel section of BigSock was cast on! A mere 500 stitches at its narrowest point, should be a doddle. Hah!

Of course, I didn’t get any of my jumper done… and what I did get knitted of my clapotis is probably going to have to be ripped back because I seem to have gained (or lost) a stitch somewhere! I’m out one, anyway. Oh well.

G is for Gallery

I broke the photo album / gallery on this site ages ago, and since fixing it is going to be a long and arduous process, I haven’t done it yet. But I’m going to set myself a(nother) challenge for this month, to get that finally sorted out, so I can have access to my photos on this site again. Which, you know, would be (a) nice, and (b) useful.

Basically what happened, as far as I can tell (and as if anyone but me really cares), is that when I installed a WordPress gallery plugin (NextGen Gallery) to have a look at, it violently disagreed with my already installed gallery software (Coppermine), which had a bridge WP plugin so I could easily access my already existing photo galleries from there when I was writing blog posts etc. Coppermine had been installed for years, long before I’d been using WP as my blogging platform. Anyway, I don’t know what exactly caused it all to have a hissy fit, but I do know that none of my photos now show up, despite them physically existing on the server. Marvellous! I tried uninstalling NextGen Gallery, but since that didn’t help, I’m now going to move everything across to NextGen instead, and drop poor old Coppermine. It’ll probably be easier in the long run, and I won’t have to be maintaining two databases etc any more. But moving it all across is going to take a while, and be a pain.

If I do it a little at a time, though, it shouldn’t be too bad. I think I’ll try to spend maybe an hour a day on it. Surely that way it should get done pretty quickly?! And also I’ll know for sure how long it does take me, rather than it just feeling unending. I think giving myself permission to stop working on it after a specific period will help, too. Let’s see how it works out.

F is for Friends, Family, and Food

Which three things sum up my day fairly well, really. My whole weekend, in fact. Like I said, we went to see Ally and family yesterday and out into the park where I saw several people I’d been at school with and their kids. I think I must be the only one who has no offspring! It was a lovely sunny day for it, and today was lovely as well although there was lots of rain and thunder last night.

Charlotte has gone now, but we went over to my brother and sister-in-law’s place for Sunday dinner today. Mmm, Sunday roast! I’m feeling pretty wiped out (but full!) so I can’t think of much else to blog about, so I’ll go and check out the prompts for some inspiration:

What’s the first thing that pops into your head when you think of your father?

His smile; a feeling of safety; and woolly bobble hats! Dad liked to keep his head warm, and embarrassed me horribly (as parents will!) when I was in my mid-teens by taking my into town still wearing his slippers (moccasins, so I’m sure no-one knew but me) and a woolly hat. Later on, of course, it became a lovable eccentricity, and when I learned to knit, one of the very first things I made was a hat for Dad:

A is for Ambition

I’ve decided that a good way to keep myself going with the daily posting is to do the meme / exercise that I’ve seen on some other blogs, and do a letter of the alphabet each day. Obviously that leaves four days, so I’ll do a week of alphabet then a day of either something random, or doubling up on a letter. I’ll decide that part when I get there!

So, A is for “Ambition”. Which can be broken down into both short and long term goals:

Maintaining the daily blogging through this month, and also doing IComLeavWe at the end of the month.
Possibly do 750words.com (depending on time).
Sort out the photo album on this thing!
New site design (also for here).
Finish at least one knitting project – try sewing up the Menace jumper, for example. And keep working on the Clapotis.
Make some blog posts updating my knitting progress – what I’ve been doing over the last few months as well as what I’m doing now, since I haven’t posted for so long.
Write up the patterns I’ve designed. Finally!

“Ambition” also works pretty well for the NaBloPoMo prompt for today – I may or may not do these every day, it depends what appeals to me. But the one for today is:

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a teacher. Boring, I know! Specifically, I think I wanted to be an English teacher, because I loved reading and writing. On slightly more mature reflection, I decided that the idea of dealing with a classroom full of teenagers was an appalling one, so I changed my mind to librarian. Needless to say, I’m in neither profession now, although I have done some one-to-one music tuition and enjoyed that.

Merry Christmas everyone :-)

I’m just popping by to wish everybody a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from both me and the Xandermog.

Happy Christmas from Lou and Xandermog

I’m looking forward to spending a lovely day with the family¹, cooking together, eating til we feel slightly ill, giving pressies², and of course watching the Doctor Who special and other Christmas telly. I hope you all have an equally excellent one planned if you’re celebrating, and if you’re not, then have a lovely day regardless.

Do I have a New Year’s resolution? Try to post more often, of course! ;-) Probably also some others, but I’ll go in to that more in January.

In other news, if you’ve been here before you might notice that I have a new seasonal theme for the site. I was going to do a little bit of tweaking to get the Ravelry progress bars working with it, and change the non-blog pages a little, but I haven’t had time, and I think it looks fine as it is anyway. Hooray! Thank you to the Amberpanther team for making it available :-)

¹ Mum, brother and new sister-in-law.
² Which is more fun than the receiving to be honest, since I pretty much know what I’m getting already.

I killed it!

My photo album, that is. Ooops. And yes, this time I think it really is gone – I was attempting to set up the new version of it using the NextGEN Gallery plugin within WordPress, and I guess that clashed somehow with the Coppermine script, because it’s all fallen down and the photos themselves won’t even show up as direct links. They’re definitely physically there on the server, but I’m getting 404s when I try to reach them. I don’t know why that is (though I have a suspicion). So strange.

Anyway, that means that pretty much all of the photos on the blog are broken for the time being. I’m going to try to get that fixed over the next couple of days, but I doubt it’ll happen tonight. I have a concert to sing in! But I might be wide awake after that, so I might make a start then after all. Now, though, I’d better finish getting ready. Concert blacks, here I come…

Crimble Shopping

Yesterday, I went Christmas shopping with the family in Canterbury. I had some kind of idea in my head that I’d blitz through and buy presents for everyone. Uh, no. I managed to buy cards, wrapping paper… and a new dressing gown and slippers for myself, since my old ones had pretty much died. However, I think I do now know what I’m going to get for everyone. I’m just going to buy it online!

We did see some reindeer, though, in a pen outside BHS. Okey-dokey! They seemed quite happy with all the attention, though, and two of them kept pushing their noses though the fence and getting their heads rubbed by the people who’d come to see them (anti-septic hand gel was provided to use afterwards, probably because of that thing with kids catching E.coli after stroking farm animals). I just took a couple of photos:

Reindeer in Canterbury

Aww, look at the baby one!

Let There Be Glove

My “Damson Gloves” [Ravlink] are my current main knitting work in progress. I have no gloves, you see! I lost mine a couple of years ago, and it seemed silly to buy new ones when I could make some, so I started on these. And, um… I finished one plus just past the cuff of the second! It wasn’t even like knitting the fingers were as fiddly as I’d been afraid they might be. I think I got distracted with gift knitting and things with deadlines, and just lost the momentum on them. And of course, every time I remembered them again since, it was already cold weather. I do have nice warm fingerless gloves, although that’s not quite the same.

This year, however, I’ve picked them up again. Or picked up glove no.2, to be more accurate. I’d actually knitted up to part of the thumb gusset, but I didn’t actually know exactly how far up. So I ripped it out (it was only a few inches, after all) and started again. Honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t do so sooner. Well, I do – I had lots of other knitting that I was concentrating on, and these didn’t have a deadline. But now I want gloves, and the weather is getting colder! So this is how I’m doing:

Actually, I’ve now got a little further than that – those photos are from a couple of days ago, and I’ve now knit the little finger and started on the ring finger. If I concentrate on them for another couple of days, I should be finished. Hoorah!

I don’t think I ever did a project info post for these gloves, so here it is now:

Pattern: Basic Glove Pattern (from The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns) by Ann Budd [Ravlink] using a 1×1 rib cuff, Wavy Rib up the thumb and Claw Pattern Cable with Bobbles on the back of the hand (both from The Harmony Guides Vol.2, pp.70 & 76).
Yarn: Yarn Yard Hug in ‘Damson’.
Needles: 3.25mm Addi Turbo bamboo circular (80cm)
Ravelry Project Page: Damson Gloves

With a bit of luck, my next post about these will be to show off the finished versions!

Where did the photo album go?

Honestly, I have no idea what’s happened: my photo album section has seemed to vanish off the face of the web. Only, all the files are still there, the database seems to still be up and running… I’ve tried repairing and restoring back-ups, the whole shebang, but with no luck. Eh?! The little plugin that links the album script to WordPress is still working perfectly though. You just can’t get to the album via its URL. Not the front end or the admin section. I wonder if it’s a conflict with a WP plugin, or if I maybe need to upgrade Coppermine?

Or perhaps it’s a sign that I should do what I’ve been considering for a while, and import the whole thing into WordPress. Makes the template easier, that way.

ETA: I upgraded Coppermine, and no luck. But then it occurred to me that the upgrade page had displayed, so it must be something template-related (I hadn’t re-uploaded the template files). So I put up new versions of those, and oh look – the photo album is back. I’m still going to change over to using a WP plugin for it sometime soon, though, to make maintenance easier in the long run.

41: A knitty post

Since I don’t think I actually posted here when I finally finished Mum’s birthday shawl, I shall do so now! I was almost a year late giving it to her in the end, so instead of it being finished for her birthday in April 08, it was finished for Mother’s Day in February 09. The border had taken me *so* much longer than I anticipated, and then I had blocking anxiety so it took me ages to screw up the courage to do that in case I messed it up! But the finished result was worth all the work:

Actually, I don’t think I ever put put the project stats here for this, since it was Sekrit Knitting, so here they are now:

Pattern: Wild Flower Shawl by Dee Bamford. [Ravlink]
Yarn: Posh Yarn Sophia 2ply (100% cashmere) in ‘Strawberry Shortcake’.
Needles: 3.25mm circular (Addi Turbo bamboo)
Ravelry Project Page: WFS

And would you believe, this shawl is now almost-famous? Our knitting group was in the Readers Projects section of The Knitter magazine, issue 7, and this shawl was one of the ones we sent off to them to feature. Hee!

26: Xandermog strikes again

Ah… oh dear. Look who found my empty dinner plate:

At least I was finished with it! Should have remembered to take it out the the kitchen when I did the washing up!!

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Listening to: Candie Payne – i wish i could have loved you more
via FoxyTunes

17: Workspace

The blogathon site challenged us to post pictures of our workspaces – I’m late for the challenge because I only just saw it, but here’s mine:Yes, that’s a didgeridoo in the corner with a bunch of fake sunflowers in the top. And The Master’s laser screwdriver (the sonic screw driver is hidden behind that dagger shaped letter opener in the desk tidy). There are two mobile phones because I’m in the middle of changing from one to the other. Lots of bits of paper, remote controls for the telly and hi-fi, hand cream, nail varnish, and way more jewellery than I ever wear at once – I tend to sit down at the desk, take it off and leave it there. Keyboard, monitor, landline phone, speakers are obvious. As is the desk tidy full of pens, pen drives, a lip salve, nail clippers and sundry other stationery items. Um… mp3 player, watch, meds, a stone with a hole through it, notepads, an inhaler, some fingerless gloves that Charlotte made me. Oh yes, and a sheep and a tiny Dalek. Hooray!

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Listening to: Florence And The Machine – Girl With One Eye (Bayou Percussion Version)
via FoxyTunes