finished Fair Isle knitting

Finally finished,

after almost a year of intermittent knitting

the waistcoat is done. I like the colours, the fair isle patterns, the ribbing and the pockets

but.....now it is finished, I realise it really is just a bit too big. 

Sigh. 

I knitted the smallest size, the pattern is from this book, but I neglected to read the bit telling me the actual measurements of the finished garment. I'll remember to do that another time.

Now I'm off to do some very plain, single colour knitting for a change.

thousands of snowdrops

Thousands and thousands of snowdrops at Welford Park. The grounds and woodlands surrounding the  house are open to the public for a few weeks each year at snowdrop time.

There was once a monastery here and the monks planted snowdrops in the monastery grounds for flowers to decorate the church for the Feast of Candlemas on February 2nd and also to use the plant to produce a medicinal essence to treat headaches.

The dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII took place in 1536 so the original snowdrop bulbs must have been planted over 500 years ago.

This week the flowers were just perfect, in some places growing so densely they looked like a drift of snow.

It is amazing to think that these delicate flowers have been growing in this spot every spring for hundreds of years. These are just a few of my photographs, it is a very special place at this time of year.

half-term

It is half-term here. Of course now that the boys are grown, the only person in the family who lives by school term dates is me.

Still, this is my week off and we started it with a trip to London. First stop the British Museum to look at the Grayson Perry exhibition.

It was a cold grey day in London today and when we left the museum we walked briskly towards Covent Garden

to find somewhere warm for lunch.

Suitably refreshed and warmed we wandered round Chinatown

and did a little shopping.

Now we are back home and I'm making butternut squash soup for supper and looking forward to my week.

more snow

Apologies for several consecutive snow posts but we haven't had much snow yet this winter

and this morning it did look very pretty.

snow roll

The snow has almost disappeared now but I thought I'd post this photo I took of the snow melting on the car. I thought as it melted it would slide down the windscreen into a lump at the base but it seems it wound itself into a sort of snow swiss roll. Very cool!

A little snow

The first snow of the winter for us though very little compared to some parts of the country, just a light covering on the lawn.

 We walked up into the woods to take photographs before it melts away.

The temperature this afternoon above freezing and already the snow is melting away,

leaving pretty droplets of water behind.

Our road has mixture of snow, slush and puddles so I hope the temperature stays above freezing tonight or it will be very slippery in the morning.

A heart shaped puddle!

February already

The beginning of February and maybe because we haven't had any snow yet, or many days of cold weather, it really doesn't feel as if we are already in the second month of the year.

February can be very cold and we could still get heavy snow but in the morning sunlight this week the countryside seemed ready for spring.

The calm was broken by the noise of hedge cutting,

a process that always seems very brutal with the modern machines tearing at the hedges rather than cutting them

and covering the lane with fragments of sticks and twigs.

I know that within a few weeks the hedges will be green again and the broken branches will recover. Already the small shoots of honeysuckle leaves are emerging, braving the cold and facing the sun. Although there may be still some winter weather to come, here spring is slowly beginning.