Post 551 Time's Winged Chariot

It's been quite a week - a bit of an emotional roller-coaster.  On Wednesday, as I was acting as 'desk hostess' at the Guild, a phone call to the office reported the unexpected death of a Guild member. Lee was a friend, and had been at our August WES meeting. I often did her online book shopping for her, and she was the one who gave me packets of her favourite soup at the beginning of this winter.  I have been very much taken aback and saddened by the news, which was confirmed by a death notice on Saturday. Lee was on the distribution list for this blog, and frequently discussed it with me. I found removing her name from this list profoundly sad.

The uplifting part of the week was an 80th birthday lunch on Sunday. I rarely socialise outside a small group these days and I did not know everyone at this celebration. I came away energised, relaxed and immensely grateful for the friendships, the hospitality and the opportunity.

On Thursday I received the call that my coffee machine was ready to be picked up. I made it by 4.30, after Pilates and calling on friends.

The technician had rerun the cleaning process and it’s working. I’m now nervous but hopeful. The team are helpful and have provided me with a video link to supplement the written instructions. What is missing is an explanation of what went wrong. On the plus side, the coffee is good and I know the shop will continue to help if I hit trouble. I will be a bit on edge until the cleaning light comes on and I have to initiate the process again - but I just have to wait and see.                                                                                                The reason I called on friends was to deliver the healing blanket, which I finished on Wednesday night. I have blurred the message to preserve privacy. Details in my embroidery blog. It has been really important to me to complete this before my friend began chemo yesterday.

When I finished I had a bit of a clean up of left-over wool. Both the blanket and the previous Andes Cardigan were in Rowan Tweed, with some of the colours overlapping. I have just over 700 gms left (yes, I weighed it). 300 gms of that is in unopened balls. It's enough to knit another version of the blanket. I'm not going to do that, but I have been looking at patterns of shawls to use it.   There is one in a Noro book that looks promising and worthy of the colours I have.          

Before I settle on that, however, I turned to the free Cleckheaton Pattern and Verve 10 ply I bought two weeks ago.  It was fabulous to relax into a pattern I could remember after a couple of rounds - and bulky yarn that knitted up in a trice.  I also love the surprise of variegated yarn, in this case 70% wool, 30% acrylic. I now have two beanies.  The detail is in my AlwaysStitching blog.                        I have no recipients in mind for these hats (they will join my supply of tote bags for a rainy day).

I nevertheless stayed on theme, and dug out the Uradale yarn I had purchased for this year's Shetland Wool Week hat. A stark contrast - from 10 ply chunky to Shetland 2 ply! From 80 stitches on my needles to 144 - for roughly the same circumference. It took a few hours to adjust to the feel but I'm now enjoying watching the fine pattern emerge.  There are five different colours in the example!

It rained quite heavily on Friday morning, and I could hear water continuously dripping inside a corner of my apartment. There was no physical evidence inside the apartment. The sound lasted for the roughly three hours it rained. I reported it. It was investigated and (hopefully) fixed on (rain free) Monday morning. It seems to have been a gutter leaking through the roof and dripping down either into the lift well or into the wall between my apartment and the liftwell.                                                                                              I also took advantage of Monday's weather to wash my dressing gown and slippers. The latter took 36 hours to dry.

On Saturday I took a break from knitting and  from worrying about drips and aging, to get out my Derwent Inkintense pencils and try my hand at colouring a bag I bought some time ago. The ink sets permanently after wetting, so you can work with dry pencils on wet fabric, wet pencils on dry fabric or wet the fabric after you have worked with both pencils and fabric dry. I chose the first. I got quite a bit of bleeding, which I ameliorated but couldn't eliminate. I found the activity relaxing and will continue to work on it over time.  I figure I might be able to create a water wash over the background to incorporate the bleed.                                                                    Dinner was a bit later than usual on Monday because of parent-teacher interviews. This meant someone missed out, and I worked a bit of a shift for another but it was a good evening from my point of view - plenty of contact, news and food.                                                                                                                  The coral tree is now in its full glory - and birds are loving it.  Their cheerful noise, the blossom, light and greenery, along with my stitchery, and friends, are keeping me sane in the light of several remindeers of mortality and loss, real and potential.

Every day a gift.