More signs of spring

Oh, it’s a glorious morning in Winwick and I hope you’ve got the sunshine too, wherever you are!  How are you doing, have you had a good week?  I can’t believe how fast it seems to get round to Friday again (and the week is a bit shorter as I posted on Saturday last week), but the weeks are just zipping by!

I’ve been out in the garden this week having a look at what’s starting to appear now that the weather has been a bit warmer – although it dropped by 10℃ overnight the other day so it’s no wonder that many people (and no doubt the plants) are all confused about what the weather is doing!  I love this time of year when all the new buds start appearing.  There are still plenty more to show their faces, but this is what I’ve captured on my camera this week …

Catkins on the twisted hazel tree (Corylus avellana “Contorta”) … those little red things on the branch are flowers – I only learnt that last year and we’ve had this tree in the garden for years!  They’re so tiny and if you get up really close to them, you can see that they are real flowers.  There are more on the tree this year too, maybe they’re all coming out now that I’ve noticed them!

It’s Hellebore season!  Ohh, I LOVE hellebores!  This is Helleborus argutifolius or the Corsican hellebore.  It’s got big spiky leaves and large green flowers that never fail to make me smile.

I take photos of my hellebores every year so if you put all the posts side by side, you’d see the same flowers but I don’t care!  This beauty with the pink edges is Helleborus foetidus or Stinking Hellebore – I’ve got to say that I’ve never noticed that it smells particularly bad, but it does like to spread itself around the garden!

The magnolia tree is in bud, and the tree is covered in these soft, furry leaf cases …

Narcissi by the front door – always a welcome sight when you come round the corner!

Snowdrops!  I showed you the snowdrops at Skipton Castle last week and we don’t have quite as many in our garden, but they are popping up in all sorts of places!  These ones are in the cracks between some paving stones and there are some right in the middle of the lawn!  I have no idea how they got there, unless the bulbs had a bit of help from a friendly squirrel that thought it would do a bit of gardening 🙂

The rest of the trees in the garden are starting to show signs of life too, and I’m a bit worried about that as I still haven’t done the heavy pruning that I needed to do on some of them – I might have to see if I can get out in the garden this weekend to do that.

You’ll have seen that I’ve got some narcissi in a pot in the photos above, and I got an email this week from the RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) with a survey about mapping the UK’s daffodils.  If you’ve got them in your garden or you see them out and about and would be interested in taking part, the link for that is here.

 

This week, despite not getting out into the garden, I’ve been busy with some other things … Pinterest being one of them!

Do you use Pinterest?  I’ve had an account for years but until the last year or so, I didn’t tend to use it very much unless I was looking for inspiration for something that I couldn’t find through one of the usual search engines.  I’ve been much more engaged with it recently and I really like it – it feels more like Instagram in the “olden days” when it was all about the photos with a few videos and that suits me very well!

Did you know that Pinterest isn’t social media but is in fact a visual search engine?  I like to think of it as a filing cabinet full of drawers of pictures, and you can use keywords and hashtags much as you can with other social media and find out about pretty much anything!

The idea is that you create boards about things that interest you, and then you “pin” ideas (called pins) to those boards so that you can save the information in a visual format.  Pinterest is very good for vision boards, or for wedding planning or interior decorating as you get so many visual options – but because it’s a search engine and not just a scroll-through platform like Facebook or Instagram, you can choose what you get to look at.  You can also choose to have public boards that anyone can see on your account and private boards so if you’re planning for birthdays or you want to keep your vision board to yourself, you can do that.  It’s great, and I find it very useful to look through for inspiration for all kinds of things – I’ve got boards on all kinds of visual inspiration from snow and ice to mountain-top views that I go to from time to time!

As you can see, my public boards are all about the socks and I’ve been busy adding photos of patterns and tutorials to my “drawers” so that they all contribute to the image searches.  I like that you can save pins to your boards and then go back even years later and they are still there with the link and all the info attached so that you don’t have to search again – it might not sound like rocket science, but it’s a huge time saver not to have to keep searching for the same things over and over again!

I’m also having a lovely time finding other people’s boards and pins, and I’ve got a special board for projects knitted from my patterns (that’s the Sock Yarn Projects one) where I can share photos and link to Instagram or other social media posts – it’s lovely to show off the photos of my patterns that people have knitted up, and I love to be able to link to someone else’s account as well so that someone else can find them.  If you’d like me to include your photos, just let me know!

If you’d like to go and have a nosey around my boards, my Pinterest account is here: www.pinterest.com/winwickmum – and do let me know if you use Pinterest too, so that I can come and have a nosey at your boards as well! 🙂

 

On the subject of socks, I have been working on a new pattern which will be released soon … well, I say “new” but it’s actually quite an old pattern – it’s the Ryegrass socks pattern that was published in a magazine years ago – and I’ve updated it and re-written parts of it to make it easier to read.

I’ve also decided that it’s time to set up a group of test knitters and I wonder if that’s something you would be interested in?  My patterns are always tech edited and the PDF proof-read, but I still make mistakes from time to time and adding in the extra step of test knitting will hopefully catch those typos before the pattern goes out!

This is the pattern …

It’s a mosaic pattern (the first one I ever wrote!) and as always, it’s written for anybody to have a go at so don’t feel that you can’t sign up if you are still quite new to socks.

Basically, it works like this:  I’ll send you a copy of the pattern and ask you to knit it within a certain timescale (don’t worry, it won’t be a few days or anything like that!), and check that the pattern makes sense.  You can choose your own colours and although this isn’t a paid job, you will get a fresh copy of the PDF and another of my patterns of your choice to say thank you.  What do you think?

If you’d like to join my test knit group, please send me an email – hello (at) winwickmum (dot) co (dot) uk – I have to write it like this because of spammers – or use the contact form in the left hand side bar.  I just need your email address, your Ravelry and/or social media handle (if you have one) and where you are in the world (because I’m interested!).  If you want to tell me a bit more about other test knits you might have done or what your sock knitting experience is, that helps me to get to know you a bit better.  I know a lot of designers use Ravelry as a base for their test knits but I also know that lots of people prefer not to use Ravelry for a variety of reasons, so I would rather know a bit more about everybody first and that will help me decide what will be the best way for us to keep in touch.  As soon as I’ve got the pattern ready to go, I’ll be able to send you more information.  Thank you!

 

Changing the subject, let me show you these photos!  I found them on my camera roll from when I was at Ruthin Castle last week …

Peacocks are so very elegant, aren’t they?  The one in the photo above had been strutting across this bridge and then took up residence on the railings.  It wasn’t bothered at all by anybody walking past it and its feathers were so shimmery and beautiful in the sunshine.  I think it knew that too … 🙂

 

I’m going to finish off today by showing you something that I did not expect to see this week!  Last week, I told you about a new game that I’d been playing with Astrid the cat and ping pong balls in the bath.  She thought this new game just involved lying down on the balls so that I couldn’t flick them around because she didn’t see why she should have to run round the bath after them – but then Hattie spotted them!  Hattie did like flicking the balls around the bath and Astrid was very interested in watching that, and even wanted to get into the bath to get a closer look.  And then she lay down on the balls so that Hattie couldn’t roll them around either.  “Ah, sorry Hattie,” I said.  “She’s just not that bothered about them!”  Hattie got out of the bath, closely followed by Astrid, and they went to find something to eat in their dishes.

It was about an hour or so later that I heard a strange noise from the bathroom so I went to investigate …

And there they were, playing their own game in the bath!

They’ve been in several times since, I can hear the balls pinging about when I’m downstairs and usually it’s not just one of them in there.  Astrid might be getting a bit more exercise after all!

 

And that’s me for this week!  I’ve got lots of jobs to do this weekend – finishing the tidying of the garage being up there at the top of the list … but weekends are for having a nice time, not sorting through junk in the garage, wouldn’t you agree?  I might just leave that till next week …

Have a lovely weekend, whatever you are up to! xx