I’ve been cleaning out my craft room. I bought some of those new Ziploc bags that hold lots of stuff and has handles. I have put each project into one or multiple like projects into one, ie: several pairs of socks. As I do this I try not to think about how long ago I started each one – that would just be downright depressing and I like to stay out of those places. I have not yet finished, but I think I am close, need to drag out a few that are hiding in the store too. (That’s the trouble with having 2 places to start things.) Anyway, I am challenging myself to get all these things finished this year. After I count them, I’m going to divide them by 11.5 (January is more than half over) and see how many I need to finish each month – not counting anything else I start – have to knit things for the store – hehehe. But if I do start anything else, I have to finish them as well.

Any one want to join me, we can have a little accountability group – no pressure though, just LOTS & LOTS of encouragement and cheering to keep each other going. Trust me, I know how much fun it is to start a new project. But we need to remember how rewarding it is to finish one. Besides we can stop feeling guilty. We can call it the Fiber Finishing Frenzy, unless anyone has any other suggestions….. Now, do we post pictures of our stash of STBFFO’s (soon to be finished fiber objects) before we start or just post the finished items.

This is posted on Facebook too.

Please don’t make me do this by myself…

Tomorrow night is the start of 3 sessions to teach you how to fix your knitting mistakes. Up close & hands on, these classes will have you feeling like a pro in no time.

Tuesday – Nov 8 – Cast-on Catastrophes – What to do when the cast on drops off before you get it knitted and stitch formation.
Supplies needed: 2 distinctly different solid color yarns and knitting needles – you will be making 5 different swatches to carry you through all three classes.

Tuesday – Nov 15 – Dropped Dilemmas – How to get that stitch back where it belongs so you can continue on.
Supplies needed: 5 swatches and knitting needles from the first class and a crochet hook for the weight of yarn you are using.

Tuesday – Nov 29 – Beautiful Bind-offs – Binding off in pattern and keeping them from being too tight.
Supplies needed: Swatches and needles from previous classes

Cost: $25 for all 3 classes or $10 per class
Time: 6-8pm

Hope to see you there!!

Fun Fiber Lunch

No calories here…

Just lots of fun with fiber

11am Tues – Fri

 Knit, crochet, tat, x-stitch…

whatever your craft

You are welcome to bring your own calories

 223 4th Ave          224-KNIT (5648)

A cozy fireplace, good friends, laughter & fiber – come spend lunchtime with us!!!

Saturday was the first sock class. Sandee and Eileen started two at a time toe up socks with the magic loop and made great progress. Sandee had knitted a pair of hand warmers this way, so was familiar with the process and Eileen took to it like a fish to water. Wednesday, Lori picked up her socks again and then came in again on Thursday with Sandee. Can’t wait to see who shows up on Saturday, I think we’ll be feeling like a couple of heel’s by then….hehehe

What is your favorite way to knit socks, toe up or top down, and why?
I decided to learn to make two socks at the same time after making 3 socks and only getting a pair. I made the first one, then after a while made the second one – it was huge, so I ripped it and redid it. Making 2 at the same time guarantees they will be the same size, the bonus is that I don’t have to make the same sock again.

The month of October is totally dedicated to socks, hence a Socktoberfest.

All classes in October will be socks – $45 covers all and as many classes as you want to attend.

Every Saturday, the 2nd & 3rd Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 6-8pm….that’s 9 classes to learn to knit or crochet socks. Dates are:1, 8, 11, 12, 15, 18, 19, 22, 29

If you have paid for & taken a sock class in the past you are welcome to continue your education at no extra charge.

Must know how to knit or crochet at an intermediate level.

Notions & yarn needed: Size 1-3 needles, circular or dpns, B or smaller crochet hook, sock yarn or light worsted and pattern of your choice.

A Flyin’ Skein has a large selection of needles, yarns and books to choose from.

“Aw, gee, darn,” said Fibre’ as I write this. “I wanted to watch another shadow knitting class like you did in Wales and I’ve never done a scrappy scarf either.” “Sorry, Fibre’, not this time,” I responded. “Well, they don’t know how much fun they have missed,” she said. “I know,” said I.

UK Travels Part 5

Monday 11 April

Fibre' with Chrissy & Olwen

We had breakfast with Chrissy, Andy and Olwen, then decided to take a different route to Hereford. It turns out that it isn’t as far as we thought it was, just looks like a long way on a map because of all the twists and turns. Caught the train and had a good trip to Edinburgh,  a taxi to the hostel. Really neat place makes you wonder what history was made in that building.  We were in a room with a couple from Brazil, a guy from Spain, a couple from Edmonton and a guy from Norway. Which changed just about every evening, the couple from Edmonton left and were replaced by a couple, he was from North Carolina, not sure where she was from. The Brazilian couple was replaced by a couple from China. Kinda like summer camp.

K1 Yarns

We explored the shops around the Grassmarket, found a yarn shop – K1 Yarns Knitting Boutique (www.k1yarns.com), noted the hours so we could go back the next day.

We had dinner at a pub called Biddy Mulligans. The hostel gave us 2 for1 cards so we splurged and had fish n chips. Sure, go to Scotland and eat in an Irish pub – huh?

Tuesday 12 April

Bill decided to have the traditional Scottish breakfast complete with tried black pudding and haggis. Black pudding is made with lamb’s blood and haggis is sheep intestines. I didn’t even make any attempt to taste it. He said it was “interesting” which means he’ll never do that again.

We joined a walking tour that was hosted by the hostel, it was very interesting.  All the young people had to stop and wait for us old folks to catch up a time or two. Scotland is very hilly so we did quite a bit of going uphill, slowly and downhill fast. We went back to the yarn shop and a few other places in the Grassmarket. Stopped in a little café and shared a muffin and coffee and decided we needed a nap. We didn’t feel much like exploring so had dinner at Biddys again, hamburgers – they were interesting and neither of us finished them. The beef was  a brand called Buccleuch, and tasted like it too (Bleeuuch), unless it just wasn’t cooked right and it didn’t taste like it was.

When we got back to the room, the couple from Brazil had gone on the Highland bus tour and were very excited about it. The more they talked the more we decided it would be fun.

Wednesday 13 April:  Walked up to make reservations for the Highland tour and were surprised to find it was inside the only tartan weaving mill in Scotland. Can’t believe we would have missed it if not for making that trip.

The warping wheel was about 7 or 8 feet in diameter.

The looms were on the level below us. There were 3 going at one time and the 4^th was being warped. It made quite the racket, but was neat to see the tartan appear as it was being woven.

Sooo, ya wanna catch some dinner later?

Sorry, Hon, I don’t think she’s interested, she looks like the silent type.

All the yarn shops around Edinburgh were outside the city bus routes and would have taken an hour or more to get to. We did the tourist thing and got a few gifts to bring back to the grandbabies and did some exploring. So I ask you, who goes to Scotland and has Subway for dinner? Us, of course, and we bought sandwiches for the trip. It was quite funny, we both wanted something familiar after 2 weeks of eating English, Welsh & Scottish food.

Thursday 14 April:

The Highland tour took in several old weaving mills.

This is a Hamish, a Highland cow. He’s really old so is a bit of a legend.  But the locals call them Hairy Coos. The tour driver, Billy, spelled coos for us – “coo-ooo-ooooo-oo-ooo-ooooo and the last o is silent”.

As we went up into the Highlands Billy played his “mysterious mountain music” for us, which ended up being the music from The Last Mohican – he was quite a funny guy.

Fibre' meets Nessie

Fibre' & The Yarn Lady taking a 'wee cruise on Loch Ness"

We took a “wee cruise on Loch Ness”.

I did quite a bit of knitting as we traveled along.

We were pretty tired when we made it back to London. We had dinner at TGI Fridays, it was soooooo good, especially after day old Subway… I’m just glad I wasn’t the driver – 10 hours behind the wheel and most of it was winding country roads.

Friday 15 April: We took a cab to the train station.

We had 1st class train seats back to London – oh gee, darn, coffee & orange biscuits with chocolate chips the whole way. I got lots more knitting done. The view was spectacular, right along the coast.

We returned the apnea machine and went back to Harrods for some last minute gifts.

We went back to our favorite place and shared one last burger, even splurged on a milk shake.

Saturday 16 April: We took the tube to Heathrow. Had to change trains once as we realized the one we were on didn’t go to our terminal.

Going through Heathrow to come back was interesting meaning I don’t necessarily ever want to do that again. I’ll fly out of somewhere else, thank you.

We left the UK with 20 pence.

Bill was beginning to get sick as we were leaving and by the time we were ready to board, he was quite a bit worse, so I convinced him that we should get on early – you know, for the people that need extra help – he didn’t want to do it, but after I said he could get in his seat, have a sleeping pill and be asleep before we got off the ground he was ready.

I watched movies and knitted all the way back. If you haven’t seen the Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, be sure to see it and The Tourist with Angelina Jolie & Johnny Depp – a suspense with several unsuspected turns…

As we waited in the Minneapolis airport, Bill just kept getting worse and worse. He didn’t even hesitate to say he wanted to get on the plane early. I managed to sleep on the way to Anchorage and when we got there decided to drive home. We arrived about 3:30 in the morning – happy to sleep in our own bed.

Now to put all the things zooming around in my head it a place to be able to work them out and turn them into classes or something before winter…

Friday, 8 May: We had breakfast in Bath and wandered the shops before returning the rental car.

So while we were waiting for the train, there was a fatality just before Bath. For a country that is tied to the rail system this was a major ordeal. We were directed to another platform and had to take a train to a different town than where we were headed. Got to the next station and were reassigned to different platforms twice. Even the train station people weren’t sure what was going on.. This was a little scary as we had no idea where we would actually end up.

The trains were standing room only, with several trains worth of people on it. Never mind finding the reserved seats. So we stood with the locals in the entryway, because that is as far as we could get. Then this guy gets on with a bicycle and guess where we were standing, you got it, where the stand for the bikes was. So the entire mass had to shift.

We were talking to some of the people and a gal from Abergavinney (A-ber- ga-vinney) said she would show us where to go, since she was going in the same direction. Her stop was the one before ours. Barely made the next connection, and would have been totally lost without her. Thank you God for sending angels.

It took the Enterprise people about 45 minutes to pick us up. Once again, no maps and less than helpful on directions, but there was one guy who knew where we were heading. We got it all except the part about going ’round the pub, never did find that, but we did make our destination.

We stopped along the way and had a little picnic of our left over breakfast sandwich.

Fibre got a little sun while waiting for us to eat.

We were at the foot of a hill with a sheep farm and watched the farmer and the dogs drive the sheep to the barn. The swan was oblivious to the whole thing.

We arrived at the roundabout with all the right roads converging at one time, did a once around and pulled over, counted to ten, went back and made an executive decision about which exit to take and it was the right one. Just a couple of metres up the hill was the showground entrance for vendors.

We found Ann & Olwen, followed them up to the housing quarters. Really nice room. On demand hot water – jackpot!!!

We went down to the exhibit building and found Olwen, met Chrissy and got a before the show look at the booths – dangerous, very dangerous. I started picking out the stuff I wanted.

We went to bed way too late.

Saturday, 9 May

Bill in the ticket booth

I helped in the booth and Andy took Bill off to make use of him too. To keep from getting in trouble (wanting to buy stuff) I took pictures of it all.

There was soooooo much more than this….

At noon they had a fashion show…

Fibre’ wanted to be in the fashion show, so this little girl was given the duty to take her along.

There was way more to this as well…

Fibre' chatting with the gals in the Shadow Knitting class

I had nine very fun ladies in my class. I love to watch other people knit and I’m telling you these ladies are speed knitters. Some of them were more than halfway done by the end of class.

We drove into Builth Wells for fish and chips. Had a delightful chat with two ladies who had been at the festival and were heading home. When we got back to the grounds, we wandered down and joined those gathered outside the exhibit. We met Louise, the “Big Fish” from Woolfish in Scotland and her son-in-law Nathan, enjoyed the conversation laced with the Scottish brogue. He was the one in the kilt…

Sunday, 10 May

Fibre and I took advantage of watching as many demos at the booths as we could. I went to the felted bag class I had signed up for taught by the ladies from Finland. Had just enough time to catch another demo, before my class.

Fibre' & friend

Fibre discovered she had a lot in common with one of the vendors…

Headed to the room and got in my jammies. We turned the Welsh subtitles on while watching tv. It was quite interesting listening to them and trying to follow along with the words.

In Wales all the road signs are in Welsh first then English. After a while I knew what they were before I got to the English meaning.

It was a very good weekend, saw and touched many beautiful fibers and creations, gathered too many ideas and made new friends, it doesn’t get any better than that.

UK Travels Part 3

Tuesday, 5 April: Spent the morning calling car rentals. Met up with Ann who directed us to the train and car rental. Went to the train station and got our itinerary sorted out. Jumped on a bus and went to Islington. Stopped in the post office to change some money, the rate was 1lb to $1.91, ouch! Sent a birthday card to mom 1.30L I will not complain about 44 cents ever again. Took the bus back, met Ann for dinner. Found a used book store and bought a couple of books one  being an atlas of the UK and the other a knitting pattern book, what else?

Wednesday, 6 April:

Took the train to Bath. The Enterprise car rental guy was there to pick us up. When we got to the rental place I asked for a map of the area, they didn’t have any. In fact, they have no maps for anywhere and getting help from them is like pulling teeth. The guy finally made a photo copy of the town from a book he had. Later I noticed that there was an inset that made note of a larger map for the heart of the city, would have been nice to have had that one. We did ask about the local hostels and the other guy (just a little more helpful) gave us the name and actually looked up the phone number for us.

Vroom, vroooooooom

And away we go...

Not to be deterred, we set out to explore the city. My cell phone minutes had run out, so we stopped at the grocery, charged my card up and went around the block twice before getting on the right road. We found a parking garage, I called the hostel and booked us a room, we could only stay there for one night and went to explore Bath.

Wandering around Bath we found the yarn store – Wool (www.woolbath.co.uk).

Wool Yarn shop

We found the visitors center and had to buy a city guide that was supposed to have a better map than the one we got from the car rental place – NOT.

Just up the alley from the wool shop., we found another hostel and went in and talked to them, they did have rooms for the following night, but we decided to wait until we knew what we were going to do before booking a room.

After we did our exploring, we decided to find the hostel before it got dark. What they didn’t tell us that everything out of the main part of the city is up hill and I do mean UP hill.

So here I am, driving on the “other right side of the road” (after all they think their side is the right side) in a stick shift. OMG!!! Have I mentioned that there are NO street signs and if there are they are overgrown with plants. So up the hill we go. At least the gas, brake and clutch were in their proper places, but that shifter on the left….hmmmmm. Of course by now it is 5 and everyone is going somewhere in a hurry. There are cars parked on the sides of the road and someone has to stop for the other side to go by, except I can’t figure out who should stop, it is different each time and then there are the city buses and the bus stops….

We went up the hill and figured out we were on the wrong road, but luckily the one we wanted was at the next intersection of 5 streets, just had to pick the right down one. We turn and go down, all the way to the bottom. Dodging other cars & buses and have to turn around and go back up. We got almost to the top and my nerves were just about shot. We managed to find a side street that actually had a street sign. I called the hostel and asked how I could find them. His answer was, “We’re halfway down the hill.” “Oh, fat lot of good that does me, how am I supposed to know when I’m halfway down?” I ask. So he elaborates just a little more and I tell him that If I don’t find it on this trip down, he’s going to have to come and get us.

Ok, shift into first, turn around and head down again. Just by chance I see the sign and manage to pull into a parking space (yes, it was a legal one). The sign was about 6×8 and almost covered with ivy. Luckily there was a house just behind us, so I backed into the drive, waited until it was clear, then zoomed across the street and up a winding stone-wall drive. After parking I had to sit and wait for my hands to stop shaking.

YHA Hostel Bath

So we go inside, get checked in and I ask if the car is ok where it is parked and the guy says “You can’t park there, you have to park on the street.” He is very lucky there was a tall counter between him and me, I wanted to strangle him. “Why didn’t you tell me that when I called?” He just shrugged. ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

We decided to unload what we needed then go the other halfway down the hill (I know this because we are already halfway down at the hostel – they aren’t gonna pull anything over on me…) and get some dinner. It’s just dusk when we head out and I was in the roundabout with cars coming at me and there was a sign ( they also don’t have stop signs) so I stopped, but was urged to continue by the insistent honking from the guy behind me. They all let me have the right of way after that…..haha, don’t mess with me. “Oh, Thank You God for protecting us” was all I could keep saying. I didn’t really want to purchase a car in the UK, especially a totaled one.

I found a parking place and we found a nice pub to have dinner. After dinner we went window shopping since everything was closed. Actually, I was avoiding the inevitable, driving halfway back up the hill to the hostel. The hardest thing was to figure out when we were at the halfway point in the dark. But it all worked out quite nicely as we had managed to remember a few landmarks, like the house where I had backed up earlier, went to the next house up, turned around and right there was a parking space, God is good.

It was a good thing that we had gone window shopping because if we had tried to hike up to the hostel just after eating, we would have hurt ourselves.

Thursday, 7 May

We had to stay in separate rooms at this hostel. We were both tired and failed to make plans about what time we were going to meet and where. I was up showered and took all my stuff to the car and hiked back up and still didn’t see any sign of Bill. I finally asked one of the guys at the desk to see where he was and let him know I was waiting.

We had breakfast and studied the “map”, we finally gave up and decided to just take our chances.

The guy at the hostel in town told us to park at the police station parking lot, it was the closest one. We got out the “map” and found our way to the parking garage where we had parked the day before, but we needed to go further in to get to the police parking lot. I went around the same block twice before I decided to just make a random turn and see where it took us. By this time I was doing much better driving. I just went with the flow of traffic and if I got rattled, I found a parking space and waited until I could handle it again. It was a much better way to go than to get too upset to drive – not a good idea, while trying to stay on the other side of the road and shift.

Yea, we actually found the right parking lot, after only one turn around – we had to, it was a dead end – oops. We booked a room and headed for Stonehenge.

Fibre' buckled up and ready to visit Stonehenge

It was a beautiful day and the road signs were good. The first sight of Stonehenge from the car gave me goose bumps, kinda like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time.

The walking tour was narrated by recordings on a “radio” type device you wore around your neck. It was quite informative and you could start and stop at your leisure.

We made it!

Hey, look, I'm really here!!!

Now I wouldn’t have thought that Stonehenge was out in the middle of a sheep pasture, but it was. The highway was just a few hundred yards away and there were sheep all around it, there were fences, but nothing fancy. I liked that, it was just Stonehenge and not a lot of hooha.

Here, sheepy, sheepy...

After we had examined Stonehenge from all angles, we headed back. The road signs were not as good going as they were coming. An untimely veer to the right instead of the left, sent us in a wrong direction. Not too wrong though, we stopped at a gas station where were some very helpful people. Back on the road, we had no problem finding our way back to the Police parking lot. We got back later than we had wanted, because of our detour. The restaurant we had planned to eat at was closed, so we found a pizza place. What a surprise, it was one of the best pizzas we have ever had. The crust was very thin and the flavor was perfect. I know where I will eat if I ever make it back to Bath.

We stayed in the Funky Bath Hostel. We actually had a room all to ourselves, although 10 people could have shared it.

Funcky Bath Hostel

There were no "pictures" on the walls

If you are ever in Bath, (there is also one in Oxford) it is a great place, the people are friendly and when you look out the bathroom window you can see the Quilt store & the Wool shop – what a great view!

The quilt and yarn store in the same alley....perfect!

Hope you enjoyed this installment of our UK travels, more to come, soon….