An easy week?

We thought we were going to have an easy week, because we had the day off from child care on Monday. We took the opportunity to go down to Stourhead, walk round the garden, and buy some cheese. (If you got to Stourhead, do go into the farm shop - 30+ varieties of West Country cheese and lots of other goodies.)

The weather wasn't brilliant, but the spring flowers made up for it, although it was sad to see the effects the storms had had on some of the trees.

Tuesday was errands, Wednesday and Thursday were child care (we didn't really have a day off, it just moved - though it was shorter than usual) so it was Friday before I got down to anything serious in the workroom.

Like book making. Five 'books of the week' plus last week's. I used my drawings from Dionne Swift's course, and every variation of the boustrephodon book I could find - some of them twice.  Some of those pages are quite inspiring!

Yesterday I hauled out the screen and tried screen printing from the long neglected bit of net with lace and stitch on it. With very little success, as you can see. The right side resolutely refused to print. The best one was when I printed with nothing under the screen, to use up the paint.

I meant to try using the net with the Gelli plate today, but my arthritis is playing up at the moment, so I decided to spend the afternoon on the sofa with my knitting. But then, when I tried to sort out the photos for this post, iPhoto, on what the VHC calls the high-pad, kept crashing, which meant I had to bite the bullet and deal with the excess of photos I have had on it. Which meant facing up to iPhoto on Big Mac, a far greater challenge. In theory, I save my photos on Big Mac, which has a much bigger memory, and then delete them from the high-pad. In theory I do it every week. In practice - I don't. And because I haven't done it for ages, I couldn't remember what I'd saved and what I hadn't.

But, after an hour or two of muttering and cursing, I have a whole 4.8GB available. Luxury!

Despite this trauma, the accursed fraternal socks have been completed, with only a small striping error, easily corrected, on the second one, and I have started a second pair, same basic idea, just finer yarn and more stitches. (But why do I keep picking colours which are difficult to distinguish in artifial light?)

I have also done a little more on 'Full Fathom Five' for Visual Marks. 

Next week is the Easter holidays, which means we get to spend more time with the VHC and Babybel.  Trips to Mottisfont and 'Spin Tower' are planned, after which more sofa recovery time will be necessary, assuming the technology will let me...

A belated report...

on a Wednesday wander. Despite the fog, we set off on what, on the basis of two trips, we are now calling our annual Christmas visit to Stourhead. The fog didn't clear quite as quickly as we hoped, but there were clearer patches, one of which was at Stonehenge. Emerging out of the mist, and lit by a low, red sun, it was almost impressive. (I always find the view disappointing, even if, unlike us this time, you get out of the car and pay it a proper visit. I think it's because it is dwarfed by the landscape, you can't get close enough to see how big the stones really are, and I find the circling tourists a little incongruous.)

But I digress. We go to Stourhead at Christmas to see the house, and once again it was filled with festive food, flowers and fir trees.

Unfortunately we didn't have any little guys with us to help look for the hidden robins, but granny found a few, not to mention some misguided primroses in the gardens. One of the rooms had a comfortable chair, a foot stool, a lovely work box and some embroidery, set out by the fire - very appealing!

Then our equally traditional Christmas trip to the farm shop - local venison and local cheese - and back home, meeting the mist again. Coming down the Test valley, the tops trees were silhouetted against thesetting  sun, while their trunks were wreathed in pink mist - beautiful. It's the sort of effect I would love to capture in fabric but it would be so difficult to keep that ethereal look.

You wait days for a post...

then two come along together. That's because I actually have something to say. (Not that having nothing to say usually stops me.)

I left you agog with indifference about what I was going to select from my crammed work basket. 

As you can see, the mittens won. And the eagle-eyed will also see that the cables are incorrect. Be warned: this is what happens if you try to knit complex cables while watching complex TV thrillers in Danish. Unless, of course, you speak Danish.

However, they have been tested today, and they are nice and warm. 

The mittens were tested on a Monday meander, to Stourhead. You may remember our attempt to visit Stourhead in half term, when we ended up going to Kingston Lacy. (According to a member of staff we spoke to, the Saturday of the week we tried to go and gave up, they had 7,000 visitors. Glad we didn't persist!)

We thought a Monday in mid-December might be a little quieter, and it was. 

We had intended going round the gardens, but when we realised that the house was open, and decorated for Christmas, we changed our minds.

And, despite it being a lovely sunny day, we're glad we did. The decorations were beautiful - different in each room, mostly hand made, and never OTT. 

I especially liked the dining room, where, unusually in a National Trust house, the blinds were up and the sunlight poured in over the dining table, as you can see at the bottom of this collage, and on the plate at the top.

Then home, in the light of the setting sun.

The day was only marred by the sight of three dead deer by the roadside on the way home, which is three more than I've ever seen before.