Weekend FO

It feels great to finally finish something! 

Pattern: On the Spice Market by Melanie Berg
Yarn: Gradient kit, plus a skein of cashmere blend grey sock yarn, both from Moonlight Yarns. All bought at Wonderwool (tick another project off that yarn list)
Needle: 3mm
Mods: Unintentionally, I missed out the grey stripes between the colour changes in the first section. I am not fussed about this. I had plenty of yarn in the end.

I am very pleased with this. To begin with, I thought the grey was too dark to make the colours really pop, but I then considered what state a pale grey scarf might get into after a few weeks of hard wearing and being thrown into all kinds of bags with all kinds of other things. Dark grey was a good choice.

I also started to think I should have used a larger needle, since it was not especially big for a shawl; but the blocking has helped a lot with that (big surprise). The picture is of it hanging wet on the line - I will attempt to take a better picture when it is dry.

Now I just need to finish off the linen top I started way back in May and I can move on to chunky, warm, winter sweaters.

Tuesday Ten

Ten Swims of the Summer

1. Italy: Villa Scapone Pool

When Tutt and I stayed here two years ago, I don't think we went into the pool. What a mistake! It was very refreshing and had great views over the bay.

2. Italy: the Adriatic

I had a little swim off the dock while we waited for the kayak man to come back from his afternoon nap. Then Mr Z and I paddled over to the practically private beach for some more wading and general enjoying of the sea.

3. Vietnam: Halong Bay

I didn't jump off the boat, as I had intended. I didn't fancy it. But we did stop at a small beach as part of the trip around the floating village and I was able to have a good splash around.


4. Vietnam: Hoi An Hotel

We didn't know this place had a pool until we arrived and found that our room overlooked it. The only problem was that it warmed up a lot during the day, so it was not as refreshing by the afternoon as it might have been. 'Oh no, my pool is too warm' - this could be the original first world problem.

5, 6, 7 and 8. Vietnam: Fusion Maia Resort, Danang

This place was RIDICULOUS. Tutt found it via a luxury holiday website and, although the travel agent pulled a "How?!" face when we said we'd like it included, she managed to get us two nights there within our budget. How, I will never know.

There were four swim opportunities at the Fusion. First, the sea:

I had a good wade in the sea but didn't really go in. I was a bit put off. When I first approached it, I saw a dead fish had been washed up and was being eaten by birds. As I got closer, I realised they were not birds, but large, spidery crabs, which melted back into the surf as I approached. I decided to kick the fish back into the sea, to prevent any nasty surprises from anything else feeling peckish while I was nearby. This turned out to be a mistake: on my second kick, that dead fish bit me* really hard on the little toe. I was bleeding quite profusely for some time, it hurt a lot and my hypochondriac brain kicked in with fears of poison and so on (Tutt was as sympathetic as you might imagine). As a result, I was not tempted to swim in the South China Sea again; but as you'll see, I didn't need it anyway.

* clearly not actually a bite, but I don't really want to think about what else on a dead fish's face was able to puncture my toe so effectively.

Option two was the infinity pool that led down to the beach.

A trick of the light makes it look short. It was not. This pool was lush - the shallow end was shallow enough that you could loll about on your elbows and soak up the sun - but busy.

Option three was the private pool in our room (I told you this place was ridiculous).

I did spend a lot of time in the private pool.

Loving my GoPro a bit too much at this stage. 600 pictures and videos of pools later...

However, I think my favourite must have been secret option number four, which was in the spa. It had its own waterfall. Under-12s were not allowed. And it was entirely deserted. Result.

9. Singapore: Raffles Hotel

Another place our magician of a travel agent managed to squeeze in under our budget. A rooftop pool, here.

Slightly marred by the unsupervised children who arrived and started spitting water at each other; but I could only smile, remembering 10 minutes earlier when I had watched a dishevelled pigeon bathing in the shallow end.

10. France: campsite

Last but not least, the campsite we stayed at in Normandy had its own outdoor heated pool. This one was nice because it had a sort of ledge all the way around the edge, so even the deep end was not that deep at the edges. It was less nice because the water level was way down (end of season problems) and there was quite a lot of leaf matter in there. And children. But that's always going to be a public pool problem.

Blue Monday

This year, Mr Z and I returned to possibly my favourite hotel from the 2014 Italian adventure, and I took almost exactly the same picture as last time. The original still adorns my Facebook page. Full disclosure: this one has an Instagram filter on it. I love playing with those filters on anything blue.

Here I am practising my standing bow next to it -

I can confirm, having been back to yoga once since returning from my travels, that the practice did not help much.

Weekend WIP

In spite of this being the easiest knitting going and therefore perfect for bus journeys and best kept for a travelling project, I just can't put this shawl down.

It does help that I am attempting to catch up on Narcos so I can watch the second season with Mr Z, instead of after him. Lots of subtitles but I can cope just fine.

I am three coloured stripes off the undoubtedly interminable bind off finishing. On the plus side, the stripes get narrower by four rows each time. One the minus, they grow a little longer as I come to the end. That is the only problem with knitting shawls using this method.

Tuesday Ten

Carole and I are both back from our travels and this week she has prompted me to consider...

Ten things I miss about home when I'm away

1. The cat. She always plays up her minders if we're both away - when Mr Z and I were in Italy, she refused to come into the house from Wednesday onwards and Jo had to feed her al fresco. The tortoise ran away last year on Jo's watch she blames herself (I don't know why: that tortoise was Houdini incarnate) so she was a bit nervous. But Mitten did not run away. She waited until we got home and then yowled at us for the best part of an hour, in between hoovering up three packets of food. Little minx.

2. Mr Z. You'll have noticed I don't often take him away with me (at his request, it must be said). I missed him a lot while we were apart this year. Luckily everywhere had wifi. Even the taxis.

3. My home that is almost always the right temperature. It's always cool downstairs in the heat.

4. Being able to sleep with the window open, without any noise or worrying about the air conditioning.

5. Reliable wifi. I don't want to sound ungrateful because I'm almost always using free wifi when I'm away; but I am so used to Googling any little fact I can't instantly remember that it becomes irritating when I can't do this.

6. My routine, and the friends that fit into it. I miss seeing my friends for sushi, going to knitting group, catching up over coffee...

7. Having a wide variety of clothes to choose from. I try to pack light these days but then I end up terribly bored with all my clothes at the end of the fortnight.

8. Bacon and avocado sandwiches on those nice giraffe batons from Sainers. Nobody makes them like I do at home.

9. The tap. Weird, I know, but I never manage to drink enough when I'm on holiday, for some reason. When I can't just drink straight from the tap, it gets even worse. I think I was semi-dehydrated for my entire time in Vietnam.

10. The outdoor rocking chair I bought last year. I like to sit in it when I get home from somewhere feeling all hot and bothered, because it's in the shade from midday onwards.

Fun topic this week!

Also, this is my 1000th post on this iteration of this blog. Hurrah! In October it will be my 18th anniversary. Who knew I had so much to say?

Oh yes, just everyone who knows me, you're right.

Blue Monday

On our first full day in Hanoi, I went for a wander by myself after it became clear that Tutt had little motivation to move from the hotel room. I was looking for the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum; it's probably lucky I didn't find it as I was not dressed conservatively enough to file past his body*

Instead I wandered towards a nearby body of water in desperate search of a cooling breeze (there was none to be had). I came across these rather fetching mosaic park benches on the way, in various hues:

There was a dark blue one as well, but someone was kipping on it and I was already attracting enough attention by being a sweating, gigantic westerner, wearing clothes made in Vietnam but shipped halfway around the world for me to buy and carry back there.

I sat by the lake for a while, avoiding several men who were trying to sell me motorbikes, until a young man dressed all in black (wtf) came over and asked me to fill in a survey about tourism. The survey was all about Saigon, which made me suspicious, but I didn't want to be rude so I did what I could. He then told me he worked for the Red Cross and was selling toothpicks for a blind man. It was a real mish-mash of charitable opportunity for me, but I was not in the mood. Eventually I managed to make him believe that I didn't have any cash of any currency on me - he had stated that he would happily take British pounds - and he went away in a huff.

If he'd told me he was desperate to buy some clothes that weren't black, I might have been in a more giving mood.



* not actually his body, if popular gossip is to be believed. And what is with ignoring the wishes of communist dictators when they die? Ho Chi Minh wanted to be burned. Lenin wanted to be buried next to his mother. Both (ostensibly) ended up embalmed in glass cases, being goggled at by ignorant tourists. It's like the ultimate revenge of capitalism.

Weekend WIP

I started this the day we went to Italy and have been working on it off and on over the summer. Mostly off, tbh - it was too hot in SE Asia to consider working on it much, and I have been trying to read up on the Tudors ready for new jobs next month.

In spite of that, it is getting there. The gradient kit is from Moonlight and I got it at Wonderwool in April; it was meant for a particular pattern but, unlike the Wingspan kit, she did not include the pattern and I didn't like it enough to pay for it. I LOVE this one: like polka dots, almost. The grey is maybe a little on the dark side (it looks lighter in the picture) but other than that I really like how it is knitting up.

Naturally, there's a mistake. In the first colour gradient section, the final few rows should have been worked in the grey. I missed this: the pattern instructions says, "In CC1, work x repeats of pattern 1. Work one repeat of pattern 2. In CC2..." etc. So, I just carried on in CC1, missing the instruction contained at the start of the pattern 2 instructions, which begin, "In MC..."

Der.

I realised when I started the grey section, which was on the flight home from Singapore, and I was in no mood at that point to pull out the entire summer's labour. I quite like the way the gradients stack against each other, anyway; my only concern is that I will run out of the colours.