ultimate winter rug

On the geeky side - needle felted polar bear
By FforFelt on etsy

I seem to have been favouriting a lot of polar bears on etsy recently. This needle felted (miniature) rug is the most recent polar addition to my favourites. Isn't it great? Last night I continued being comatose on the sofa and watched the entire 2.5 hours of X Factor. We had the fire on and a couple of happy cats purring away the entire evening. If only we'd had a polar bear rug, the winter wonderland of our living room would have been complete! I should add that straight after X Factor we switched to More 4 and watched the latest episode of Mark Cousins' The Story Of Film: An Odyssey, counteracting the brain rot with a good dose of culture. It's been a really good series so far and there's still lots more to go (15 hours in total!) so you should check it out if, like me, you feel the need to add some highbrow to your Saturday night viewing.

This afternoon I went out to meet a couple friends and saw some bands playing as part of an Americana festival that's apparently going on. It wasn't really my kind of music, mostly, but it was not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon (and I needed something to separate me from the crochet!) plus it made me think that I should really share a relic from my musical past on here... Did you know I had a musical past? Very mysterious! I will reveal all (well, some) tomorrow.

scotland street school

Today Graham and I braved the miserable weather to visit Scotland Street School Museum. If you're ever in Glasgow, you should go. It's such a nice building and has all sorts of great exhibits about education through the ages, all very interesting. This was actually Graham's nursery and it has always been a source of much hilarity for me that Graham is so old that his school is now a museum.

We've looked round the museum a few times before, so today we just went to see the photography exhibition that they have on at the moment, showing scenes of everyday life in Glasgow in the 1970s. The photographs were so good and we both really enjoyed it. It's going to be there until early January, so you should make sure you go and see it if you have the chance.

As well as the photographs, there was a small selection of 1970s clothing to try on. I think this might have been intended for children, but we squeezed ourselves into these classy numbers anyway. You probably can't tell from this picture (an over-small hat makes anyone look not their best) but this is officially the world's best boyfriend. I have been strangely exhausted today and while I have been comatose on the sofa before and after our outing, Graham has cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, sorted out the cats' litter tray, hoovered all over the place and is currently making us dinner. He also carried all the shopping home, made me a tasty lunch, brought me back a cake from his morning cycle... And all of this without me having to ask or even hint.

I am feeling thoroughly looked after and safe and cosy - just what the doctor ordered after all the drama earlier in the week. I guess this sort of treatment could be classed as one of the perks of pregnancy :)

poetry in motion

Ta-da! I managed to get another ball of green wool and finished off the cardigan this morning. I love it so much and can't wait to make more. I'm going to start on one for my sister's impending baby later today. A few months ago my sister decided to give up knitting and crochet because they were stressing her out (I think she had a big backlog of projects she wasn't finding the time to get through) so she donated a big bag full of various wool to me. I'm going to use some of her nice wool to make the cardigan for her baby and this time I am using a colour I have LOADS of for the main body. Yeah, I learn from my stupid mistakes.

Talking of my sister... I couldn't sleep last night and at 4.30am I had a poem that my sister wrote years ago running through my head. It suddenly dawned on me that I should have shared some of my sister's poetry here yesterday since it was apparently National Poetry Day, but I will share it today instead since it has popped into my head now for some reason. Kerry wrote this poem about her cat Bruno when she was just a kitten. Bruno was a lovely cat who died just a few months ago. (Incidentally Bruno was a girl, but by the time that was discovered, the name had stuck and she always really suited it. In the past our family has also had female cats called Ian Black and Elvis.) Here is the poem about Bruno.

Small cat, furry cat

Black cat, purry cat

Eyes green, tail kinky

Drinks her water from the sinky.

Kerry also writes really good haiku (haikus?) about her family. She hasn't posted any online in a long while, but she does have a haiku blog if you want to read more. I will share a couple of my favourites here.

While I blog, silence.

Later, when I kiss my son

he smells of cat food...

Angus eats pasteque.

(That's French for watermelon,

with less syllables).

I think they're really good. When I first started this blog, I used to post old entries from my sister's school diary on Mondays. They are a fun look into country life in the mid-eighties! If you want to read some (and be entertained by photos of my sister and I as children) you can find them all clustered together here.

Oh! The postman just arrived bearing my mustard wool! The colour is great (yippee!) but now I have a dilemma. Should I put the mustard wool to one side and make the cardigan for my sister's baby first, or should I be selfish and make the mustard cardigan for our baby now, now, now? I will decide later. In the meantime, I had better go and have some lunch before my friend Kristy gets here to take me on a trip to Mothercare (oh, the things that excite me these days...) followed by a trip to eat cake. I am rather impressed that I have blogged for seven days in a row now. Are you?

crochet calamity

Disaster has struck and I ran out of wool with a sleeve and a bit to go. Noooo! I'm going to head into town later today and see if I can find another ball the same. I'm hopeful I should be able to since I only bought this wool when I was making the ripple blanket, so it was not too long ago. If not, this cardigan will have to have mismatched sleeves or just one three-quarter length sleeve for that asymmetrical eighties look. I will keep you posted.

If I hadn't run out of wool, I definitely would have managed to finish this cardigan last night. I am so pleased with all the new stitches I learned, especially front post treble and back post treble which are used to make the ribbed border at the bottom. I am feeling like quite the crochet pro :) That said, I am going to have to unravel that first sleeve as I have gone wrong somewhere and ended up with not as many stitches as I should have. It shouldn't take long to remake it though. You can be sure that I would be making do with a skinny sleeve (or throwing the whole project in a drawer) if this had been knitted!

In other great crochet news, I found some mustard wool at last! Hooray! It's a bit of a gamble buying this online, but I'm quite hopeful about the colour since I saw a ball of Patons 4-ply cotton in "gold" (the same name as this wool) in a shop and it was the perfect colour. I have ordered gold, teal and brown and am looking forward to making another one of these crocheted cardigans with a pair of matching cowboy boots. Yee ha!

I should really do some non-crochet crafting today. I've got some bunting and brooch kits to make for Made In The Shade and they are long overdue. My craft room is a serious tip though, which is putting me off getting started. I should go and clear myself a little space now. If I was organised, I could drop off goodies with Made In The Shade on my way into town to look for green wool.

RELAX! NOW! DO IT!

Well, best laid plans, etc, etc. Today I have neither returned to work nor full sanity/ease of mind. Sigh... But on the upside, look at the lovely crochet I did last night and this morning! I think I'll be able to get this cardigan finished today (if I can work out the three stitches I don't know how to do that are needed to add the sleeves and button border) and then I'm going to choose some really lovely wool and make a few more. This is really my first time following a proper crochet pattern (as opposed to a repeated pattern like the ripple blanket or a granny square) and it has all been surprisingly straightforward. So far I would definitely recommend the pattern (available here for just £2) if you have any babies to make for - it has been really easy and is already looking ridiculously gorgeous in real life, even in the cheap wool I decided to use for a first attempt. And it would have taken me weeks to make the equivalent of this in knitting. Discovering crochet has definitely been my craft highlight of 2011.

So last night was not a lot of fun. After trying so hard to relax all evening (and I was getting there!) I climbed into bed and instantly started bleeding everywhere. Poor bleary-eyed Graham's requested early night was ruined as we had to jump in a taxi and make our second hospital trip of the day. We were there until the wee small hours of the morning before being told everything was fine and we could go home. I am trying hard to trust this diagnosis, but it is hard not to feel a bit uneasy still. Last week I was really enjoying how cosy and secure the baby felt bobbing around inside my tummy. Now everything feels a bit precarious :( But there's not really a lot we can do, having been thoroughly examined and told by people who know a lot more than us that things are OK. And the baby has been reassuringly head-butting my bladder all morning, so things could definitely be worse. Plus last night's hospital trip was the first time Graham had heard the baby's heartbeat, something he'd been really curious about.

So I haven't had much sleep and I feel a bit... meh, but I am going to carry on crocheting and giving myself reassuring pep talks for the remainder of the day. And I have a week's annual leave starting tomorrow, so this relaxation can carry on for a full eight days now. Hopefully everything will return to "normal" soon and I can stop worrying that the baby will fall out every time I stand up! How annoying that everything went pear-shaped just as I vowed to blog every day, eh? Onwards and upwards.

and relax

I spent most of this weekend knitting. It must be months since I started this simple cardigan to go with the rabbit-ear hat, but somehow I was not getting around to finishing it. I was actually beginning to get stressed out just thinking about it and its unfinished state, so it feels good to have it done and the process of getting it done was really quite relaxing, helped along by listening to Jarvis Cocker's Sunday Service on Radio 6 while I tackled picking up all the stitches to make the border. All the cardigan needs now is some buttons, but that can wait for a while yet. For my next trick I plan to (try to) crochet that lovely cardigan pattern I got from etsy. Hopefully it will be a bit more exciting to look at than a plain black cardigan too!

Talking of stress and relaxation, the last couple of days have actually been horrible. Some weird stuff was going on this weekend (I will spare you the gory details of my bodily malfunctions) and it all made me a bit uneasy, so when the baby decided to go into hibernation yesterday, I pretty much freaked out. I had a horrible day at work, not managing to concentrate at all and just wishing I could feel the baby move, even though it is really always pretty quiet during my working hours. The logical side of my brain told me I actually had felt the baby move a little bit (which I had) but the illogical side of my brain told me I had only imagined feeling it and that something was horribly wrong. When my line manager cornered me in the kitchen to ask if I was OK, I just... well, broke and started blubbing into the pasta I had just prepared. One of the lovely lady managers at my work took control of the situation, threw my pasta in the bin, switched off my computer and sent me home early. I spent all of last night staring at my belly and waiting for something to happen, but it was all still pretty quiet. There was one little kick of objection when I played it Wandering Star by Lee Marvin, but this was not enough to convince me that everything was OK (wasn't it possible that I could have imagined it?) and I spent the whole night worrying while awake and having terrible anxiety dreams while asleep. So this morning I phoned work to say I wouldn't be coming in and took myself off to the hospital. When the midwife put the heart monitor thing on my belly, the baby kicked it so hard it actually leapt in the air, so even before I heard the heartbeat it was fairly obvious that everything was fine. The midwife says the baby has probably been lying with its arms and legs facing outwards for a while and now it's turned round the other way so I'm just not feeling its kicks as much. She also said that this would be what was causing my bump to seem suddenly smaller and more squidgy, not the baby dying and starting to decompose inside me as I had managed to convince myself was the case. I do find that ridiculously extreme thought kind of funny now, but it definitely wasn't funny when I really believed it with one half (the crazy half) of my brain! Anyway, as I suppose I knew deep down, everything is fine. I came home from the hospital and had a great nap of relief on the sofa, and intend to spend the rest of the day deep breathing before returning to work and full sanity tomorrow. I did have my doubts about sharing the crazy paranoid lady side of myself here, but I would like to be able to look back on this blog one day and be reminded of what it really is like to be pregnant, mental warts and all. And hopefully I'm now re-entering a happy and excited phase of pregnancy for a while, touch wood.

Now, does emptying the dishwasher count as relaxation?

hushabye mountain

I love this song. Once when we went to see Richard Hawley (swoon!) he said he'd been planning to do a cover version, but changed his mind because someone else had just released one. I really wish he would cover it. This week I have been considering writing to him to ask if he might. Hope this gives you sweet dreams.