A day that started early, ended late (only a few minutes left till midnight, once again) but didn’t seem to go anywhere much in between. Some useful Etsy listing though – hand warmers this time. I am definitely making a dent in the pile, which is satisfying (and also means I can think about making more stuff…)
I really should be using all my very best, beautiful stashed yarns now. I probably already don’t have enough life left to get through them all – though there is definitely pleasure in spreading them out to admire. I think I am waiting for them to shout out to me exactly what they want to become – it does sometimes happen! Until I am absolutely sure, I will probably just keep on stroking and purring….
When I looked more carefully there were not 200-odd bulbs left. More like 400 plus – which makes not far off 1000 in total. So I ran away, daunted. I will have to discipline myself to 50 or so a day this week. And I very much doubt I will be ordering on such an industrial scale next year, even if it is way cheaper to buy in bulk, in 20+ kilo bags.
We escaped to my lovely sister in law’s instead. Officially to help move some furniture (not me!) and to go through some paperwork after a death in the family. That turned into a bit of a family history hunt – some interesting documents, one dating back to 1804.
She lives in an interesting house, too. I especially love that heavy external door and the face on the letter box. The house is old – there is part of an Elizabethan staircase and a beautiful window in the (seriously spooky) bat filled attic that is reputed to have come from Lewes Priory, presumably at the dissolution in 1536.
By the time I was free to plant those 200 odd last bulbs, it was looking like this outside….so it was not the (awful) weather that got in the way and thwarted me but unexpected visitors (delightful) and pitch darkness!
So I did this instead:
And then I cleared away some of the claptrap (including that cork) that the camera had unkindly picked up… It hasn’t really been cold enough yet to ‘need’ the fire but it does make a big difference to the mood of the room. We don’t seem to hang around in there in the summer, it feels unfinished somehow with an empty grate – even stuffed with flowers. Sometime in the next couple of weeks I will have to face up to blackleading the fire surround – down on my knees scrubbing at the filthy stuff like the original Victorian maids, though fortunately for me not much more than an annual rather than a daily chore!
Bit odd to be thinking about next spring in the middle of this endless, grey November rain – but it’s now or never. I have a window tomorrow in which to finish planting over 500 daffodils, and I must get it done, whatever the weather! The bed above is the one I adopted in memory of my daughter – originally just for one year, but it seems wrong to stop now. The centre was planted with dozens of bright red tulips, which flowered a couple of weeks later. They did look good, but quite a lot of them got overgrown or dug up by birds and squirrels. I thought I would try something different this time, so tomorrow I have 101 (I know, weird number) aliums to add inside the daffodil planting. I have grubbed up most of those shrubby things (apparently called ‘bear’s breeches’) but I’ve left the little purple crane’s bill geraniums which flower after the bulbs.
That is about the extent of my horticultural efforts! We’ll see what happens.
I was (briefly) gutted today to receive a four star review for the handspun yarn above. In the 15 years I have been selling on Etsy (1,657 sales to date) I have never before had fewer than the full five stars. (Well, there was one occasion when a buyer awarded me three because she couldn’t fasten her item. She withdrew the low review when I showed her where the buttons were neatly concealed!)
The buyer of the yarn above was very sweet. She praised the wool as ‘very pretty’ and mentioned fast delivery etc But she was disappointed that the colours looked different. I don’t usually have a problem getting accurate photos of those particular colours (some purple/blues are quite a different matter…) and I had clearly taken several pictures on different days, from batt to skein, before and after setting the twist…so there is not a lot more I can do about how they look on different monitors.
The reason I mention this here, though, is because of the online translation. My buyer is French (with a lovely Etsy name involving sheep). The relevant part of her review states that ‘les couleurs sont assez différentes de la photo’. It just so happens that I speak French – and in any case that sentence is hardly complicated. It has been translated by Etsy (Google?) as ‘the colours are quite different from the photo’. NOT correct. ‘Assez’ often does carry the meaning of ‘quite’ – but here it should have been rendered as ‘rather’ or ‘somewhat’ different, NOT ‘quite different’ = ‘totally different’, which is QUITE DIFFERENT and not QUITE FAIR!
I wonder how often I encounter this online in languages I don’t know and so have no chance of spotting it.
PS. I am well over fretting about the lost star! In the scale of things it doesn’t make a scrap of difference and it wasn’t really anything in my control. I shall treat the incident as character building, and a warning not to get complacent!
SpinningStreak 