Settle down now!

Okay, you're all too young to remember Ken Goodwin. Anyway, it's more accurately a matter of nearly settled down now...

Lately I've been trying to intersperse time spent sorting out stuff (piles of wool in the back room - would I work faster if I didn't now have the luxury of a 'back room'?) with some time spent ordering new lines and new colours in old lines. One yarn I'm testing out at present is Crystal Palace Sausalito, a gorgeous and soft multi-tonal 4 ply - a classic sock yarn mix, but not just for socks. Take a look at www.straw.com for all the gorgeous free patterns they offer. This ball looks a bit stunned under the glare of the camera's flash:

If you love sock yarn generally, don't forget we have Bergere's wonderful Goomy 50 in stock - just £3.75 for 50g. Which reminds me, I must finish those wristwarmers I started as a sample knit...another job to add to the list...

Blood everywhere...

These are the blood drops I made and sent off for the NHS knitted blood drops appeal. I managed eleven with the oddments of red wool I had and very satisfyingly mindless knitting it was too. Sometimes you just need a dose of mindlessness, y'know? Forgot to wait for the labels I was meant to attach, but they didn't seem to mind too much. Wonder what's going to happen to all these blood drops...seems to be shrouded in mystery.

And we have up to thirty little heart bags, made by the Thursday knit group, to send off to Ruth and Belinda's Heartsease project, supporting disadvantaged children and young people. If you fancy using up some scrap yarn to make simple little heart-shaped bags, the appeal runs till St Valentine's Day, so you've plenty of time.

It's amazing we can find these really, never mind summon the energy to actually send them anywhere...half the shop's still in boxes, the electricity meter still needs registering and I realised latish on that when the first few customers arrived we still had masking tape around the architraving. Anyway, we're in the new premises - The Old Bank, Silver Street, HX1 1HS, if you're looking for us. It'd be lovely to welcome you to our new location.

Cleaning and painting and packing and unpacking

And feeling very, very tired. That was our Christmas this year. We worked right through trying to knock the new place into some sort of order, but now we're here! It's not perfect, but it's a palace compared with how it was. Old building, been empty a few years...you can imagine. Come and look!

Anyway, when I said we worked through, I exaggerated - we had Christmas Day and Boxing Day off. And I got some lovely yarny presents this year. Here they are:

Yes, those are hand carders - for carding my fleecey fluff which is now approximately clean -  very approximately - but not at all smooth and spinnable. And I got what looks like a fab fiction book of short pieces by writers on knitting. Looking forward to that. And the other book is called Wool,  so I've included it, but it's actually a sci-fi book, so I'll enjoy that too - it has chapters titles like Casting Off...interesting.

Hope you got lots of lovely yarny stuff too.

New address, in case you're looking for us, The Old Bank, 2 Silver Street, Halifax, HX1 1HS. It's the big, grand, old building which looks down Crown Street