knit and natter

This past week and a half feels more like a month! It's so strange, when I look ahead the time seems to be flying by, but when I look back everything seems to have gone by so slowly. Not sure why that is...

Anyway, this week I am reading Chronicles of Avonlea on my iPod. I loved these stories when I was little and thought they would be fun to read again. Not quite as impressed with them as I was then, but still enjoying the nostalgia! And it's nice to have books on my iPod to read on the bus or at work or when out and about and waiting for whatever.

I'm knitting a market bag for a friends whose birthday is this weekend. She didn't tell me it was her birthday but I just had this sneaky feeling and checked on facebook... sure enough! So I'm using up some cotton that I had in my stash. The natural is Lily Sugar'n Cream and the blue which will make the top half is Debbie Bliss. I found some pretty wooden buttons at the local craft shop and I'm hoping this will make a nice, rather impromptu, birthday present.

While at the craft shop I just happened to notice they were having a yarn sale... I snagged these beauties, Creative Poems by Rico Designs. They're so pretty and I've already assigned projects for them. Birthdays and Christmas are sneaking up quickly!

So, I don't have much more to natter about today. I've been working in the garden all morning (pictures to come!) and need to go and have a shower and get a few more things done before heading out for my Wednesday knitting group. You can see the rest of the yarn along projects for this week here.

teacher gifts

It's been a long time since I've given teacher gifts... that's not exactly what these are, but it's a close enough description. I made them for the ladies who work at the nursery where I've been on placement this year. They are tulips and citrus leaves from 100 Flowers to Knit and Crochet and I made them into brooches. I wasn't 100% happy with how they turned out, but I'm pretty fussy and I rarely am with projects like these. Time, thought, and effort went into them so hopefully the ladies will enjoy them.

I have really enjoyed my year on placement. The children are all wonderful and the ladies have been great to work with. I'm not saying goodbye to them all as I'll be working there over the summer which I'm greatly looking forward to!

Today was the last day for most of the students so they gave us our thank you cards for the year. They know that I like butterflies so the card had a butterfly, they gave me a butterfly magnet (not knowing that I also have a thing for magnets) and one of the classroom assistants I've worked most closely with gave me a lovely glass candleholder with painted flowers and a butterfly. Like I said, these ladies are wonderful.

I mentioned that I had something for them but decided to wait till my last day next week because the teacher in my room has been off sick but should be back next week. I wrote out the card with her in mind and hopefully I'll get to give it to them when we're all together instead of everyone scattered about the building like we were this afternoon.

It was the end of the year prayer service today and it was so lovely. The children brought in their amy files (binders filled with pictures of them and artwork they've done which shows all the progress they've made this year) to be blessed by the priest. It was almost like an offering. I thought it was lovely. It's a Catholic nursery and I did feel a bit of a sore thumb being the only one who doesn't know the Hail Mary. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about all the focus on Mary, but I do love the rituals and rhythms of it all. Anyway...

I'm kind of just rambling on as I'm tired and should really go to bed... just seems a bit sad as it's 9:30 on a Friday night. I was supposed to go out for drinks with some friends to celebrate things like the end of the school year and chapters of dissertations and theses (is that the correct plural of thesis?) completed and my new job, but when it came to it I wasn't feeling well and it was cold and rainy out and I'm whining now but I just didn't feel like getting fancy and going out. It's been a long couple of weeks and I've got a long day ahead tomorrow. I just need to suck it up and go to bed.

All right, going now.

from Brighton Rock

"He said, 'You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone else the ... appalling ... strangeness of the mercy of God.'"

knit and natter

I finished off the tulips last Thursday (will post a picture soon) but I haven't started a new knitting project yet. I've just been adding a row here and there to my current WIP, a Tea Leaves Cardigan for a November birthday... no rush on this! This is my fourth tea leaves and it's nice to have a mindless project to pick up now and then. I bought the largest skein of yarn ever for this in September in a faint hope that I might've had the time to make it for last November. I definitely bit off more than I could chew when it came to presents last year but have hopefully learned my lesson and have already begun planning and purchasing for the next round of presents. (You see in my family we have six birthdays between August and November. Then Christmas. Then two birthdays in January, a birthday and an anniversary in March and a birthday and two anniversaries in April. That's just family, not friends!) So I've gone ahead and started on this November birthday present in the hopes that it will be finished on time...

I've been reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It's a rather unattractive copy but it was free so I'm not complaining. I do really like Dickens and this is no exception. I'm a little over halfway through, Estella has just come to London. I loved the part *spoiler* when Mr. Jaggers tells Pip that he has come to have great expectations, and that it's not just for the future, but is changing his present as well. I just think it's a great picture of what the Lord does (not to get too cheesy). He comes into our lives and says, "I've got a future filled with hope for you." And that changes not just our future but our present as well, it opens up the opportunity for us to live life well, now.

You can find the rest of this weeks yarn along posts here.

fruit and veg

Recently a friend gave me a lovely present... a gift voucher for a produce delivery service. I've been wanted to get a "veg box" for a long time now but just never managed to get around to it. I really do want to be someone who eats seasonally and locally (within reason, if that's okay to say) and I think a box scheme is a great way to do that.

This particular company supplements the seasonal/local produce with a few not quite so local things and you're always guaranteed to have staples (potatoes, carrots, onions, apples) in your box. All in all I think it's a fabulous scheme. For £12.50 I get enough fruit and vegetables to last me for two weeks delivered to my door.

This was my last delivery. (I think it's pretty safe to say that the bananas and pineapple were not grown in Northern Ireland.) But I'm pretty sure that the carrots, spring/green onions (I can no longer remember which is the American and which the British term) and broad beans were.
Also, hiding way down in the bottom were some absolutely delicious Comber potatoes. They were definitely grown just a few miles down the road and they were lovely!

This is one of the meals I made: I boiled the potatoes and then sautéed them a wee bit in butter. I had never had, much less cooked, broad beans before. In the States they're called fava beans. I just shelled them and lightly boiled them. You can take the whitish skins off if you want and then they look just like edamame (and taste pretty similar) but that seemed like too much effort for too little return. I had the salmon in the freezer from a time I found it on clearance. I marinated it in soy sauce and lightly fried it. Yum!

knit and natter

This is my last week of college for the year. We had end of year interviews yesterday where we looked back over the last term and were offered a place on the second year of the course. Mine went very well. I do so love learning (even when I'm a bit burned out with all the work, thank goodness for summer!). Tomorrow and Friday I will be out on placement for my last official days, although I'm planning to go in next week as I'll just be twiddling my thumbs, and it seems rather silly to miss the last week after being with them all year.

So this is the last week of Wednesday as Saturday and it's a rather busy one. Since this is my last official week on placement I'm scurrying to finish up gifts for the ladies who have been so lovely to me all year. I'm making tulip brooches from 100 Flowers to Knit and Crochet. I have finished knitting four red tulips and four purple tulips and (even though the picture only shows seven) all eight leaves. (I used the citrus leaf pattern.) All that's left is to weave in ends, sew them up, and assemble the brooches. Yesterday while I was waiting for my interview I nipped over to the craft shop and bought the pins. I also popped into the bakery I've been passing longingly all year and bought an Iced German Biscuit which I ate at City Hall in the sunshine.

We've been given the advice to keep working over the summer as we have quite a large research paper to write plus portfolios to assemble for each unit we'll be doing next year. So gathering articles, information, and reading will continue (at least for me) throughout the summer. At the moment I'm reading "Just Playing? The role and status of play in early childhood education" by Janet R. Moyles. It's one of the more obviously academic books I've read so far, but I am enjoying it. I keep a little notebook with quotes from the books I read so that later when I'm writing papers I have plenty of references to choose from. Here are a couple of quotes I've liked so far:

"Play develops creativity, intellectual competence, emotional strength and stability and ... feelings of joy and pleasure: the habit of being happy."

"We must value play as a child's culture which, like any culture, has its own language. Like any culture, play can provide its own barriers to 'outsiders,' and communication with adults about play may be difficult not only because of the differences in values but also because adults do not belong to this particular culture." (any longer)

I think it's so funny that it took me so long to realise that working with children is wanted I wanted to do with my life instead of just something I happened to fall into when I was 11. It all seems so obvious now and I think that even if things don't go to plan and I'm not able to stay in Ireland forever I'll go "home" and be a preschool or Montessori teacher instead of the interior designer I've always claimed to really want to be.

You can see all the other lovely yarn along posts for this week here.

it's finished!

I have finished my wispy cardigan! I've already worn it twice, but I haven't blocked it yet. Oh well, priorities! It will eventually need to be washed and it can be blocked then. In the meantime I'm very much enjoying my new summer sweater!It wasn't very easy to get a picture of it. Webcams are tempermental things, as is the light in my room. I wanted to show the back off and that proved especially hard, but nevermind. I just sing the Big Booty song when I look at this picture...