I don't normally worry too much about the weather. I don't like it if it is too cold, although I have spent time north of the Arctic Circle in winter and I coped well but I did have the right clothes for the conditions. I don't like it if it gets too hot in this country, yet I seem to manage quite well when I am in Corfu in the summer and I have experienced very hot weather in Australia and managed that. But at the moment I would love it to cool down a few degrees and if it could rain I wouldn't complain.
I've just had a look at the local forecast for the next 24 hours and I see that London should be getting a thunderstorm in the morning. So, if the thunder and lightning wake me up I do not intend to feel guilty when I turn over and go back to sleep again. On the other hand, I may just get myself out of bed, put on some old clothes, and go and stand in the garden for the sheer joy of feeling the rain on my skin.
I hope that it is a really big storm, with a fair bit of rain (although hopefully not so much that flooding occurs), because one of the best smells in the world is the air after a period of hot weather that has just been ended by a good downpour of rain.
Showing posts with label hot weather. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hot weather. Show all posts
Thursday, 2 July 2009
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
A Bad Day With The Knitting
It's been another hot day and I am flagging in the heat. They say it's going to be hotter tomorrow and I know that if I am going to venture out it will have to be early in the morning because I am finding it difficult to deal with outside temperatures after about 10.30 in the morning.
The net result of this is that I have been spending a lot of time indoors knitting and watching DVDs. I would love to say that the knitting was going well, but after a period of rapid progress on the shawl that I am knitting things have slowed down dramatically over the last couple of days. I keep making mistakes and not spotting them until I have done several more rows. This means that I have to unpick the knitting stitch by stitch and this is a soul destroying task when you have to do it more than once. I am on my second major unpicking stint at the moment and after working at it for about an hour this afternoon, I put my knitting down and I have not touched it since.
I will probably return to it tomorrow, but I know that I am going to have to take a bit more care when I start the row in which I keep making the errors. This will mean sitting in a silent room, no television, DVD, radio or CD to distract me, and knit each stitch after carefully referencing the chart. I know that I can get it right in the end.
Sometimes I ask myself why I chose to knit such complicated lace patterns, but I suppose that it is because I have always faced up to a challenge and knitting is after all just two types of stitches; it's just what you do with them that makes something fancy rather than plain.
And knitting is one of the life-saving things in my life. I would be totally lost without it.
The net result of this is that I have been spending a lot of time indoors knitting and watching DVDs. I would love to say that the knitting was going well, but after a period of rapid progress on the shawl that I am knitting things have slowed down dramatically over the last couple of days. I keep making mistakes and not spotting them until I have done several more rows. This means that I have to unpick the knitting stitch by stitch and this is a soul destroying task when you have to do it more than once. I am on my second major unpicking stint at the moment and after working at it for about an hour this afternoon, I put my knitting down and I have not touched it since.
I will probably return to it tomorrow, but I know that I am going to have to take a bit more care when I start the row in which I keep making the errors. This will mean sitting in a silent room, no television, DVD, radio or CD to distract me, and knit each stitch after carefully referencing the chart. I know that I can get it right in the end.
Sometimes I ask myself why I chose to knit such complicated lace patterns, but I suppose that it is because I have always faced up to a challenge and knitting is after all just two types of stitches; it's just what you do with them that makes something fancy rather than plain.
And knitting is one of the life-saving things in my life. I would be totally lost without it.
Monday, 29 June 2009
Another Hot Day
It's nearly 10.30am on this Monday morning and it is already too hot to do any more work in the garden. I've managed to finish the job that I was working on, but there is still more work to do and the rain on Saturday night coupled with the hot weather means that the grass is growing at an alarming rate. I guess it will be out with the lawn mower early tomorrow morning.
Moving back indoors to get away from the heat of the sun means that I will probably have time for more knitting today than I would normally have. I'm still being very naughty and not finishing the summer tops that I have been working on. Instead I have been concentrating on the shawl that I started last week.
There are eight charts that make up the pattern and I have just finished the fourth one. I now have something like 560 stitches on the needle and each row is taking longer to knit as the number of stitches increases. There are still 82 rows of the main shawl to be knitted which means that there are still another 328 stitches to be added to it. By the time that I reach that stage each row will become quite slow going.
I still have not decided what sort of edging that I am going to use on it. I think that I will wait until I have actually finished the main pattern so that I can work out the best way to finish it off. I'm thinking of making it quite a deep edging as it seem that I will have a fair amount of wool left for the finishing off, but it will require some careful calculations for me to determine how many 'points' the edging should have on each side and on each of the corners so that it gives a pretty edging that will ripple a little. The problem with this is that maths is not one of my strong points. I have number dyslexia and find it very difficult to work these sorts of problems out so there will probably be a lot of numbers being written out on paper and drawings of how things break down before I reach a successful conclusion.
This will be the first time that I have designed anything like this. While I have adapted patterns a little in the past, I have never created something like this from scratch. However if the it turns out successfully, I intend to try to design a lace shawl from scratch and if it works out well I may see about getting it published. Lace knitting is increasing in popularity again and with so many beautiful yarns available to do such work, there seems no end to what can be achieved.
Moving back indoors to get away from the heat of the sun means that I will probably have time for more knitting today than I would normally have. I'm still being very naughty and not finishing the summer tops that I have been working on. Instead I have been concentrating on the shawl that I started last week.
There are eight charts that make up the pattern and I have just finished the fourth one. I now have something like 560 stitches on the needle and each row is taking longer to knit as the number of stitches increases. There are still 82 rows of the main shawl to be knitted which means that there are still another 328 stitches to be added to it. By the time that I reach that stage each row will become quite slow going.
I still have not decided what sort of edging that I am going to use on it. I think that I will wait until I have actually finished the main pattern so that I can work out the best way to finish it off. I'm thinking of making it quite a deep edging as it seem that I will have a fair amount of wool left for the finishing off, but it will require some careful calculations for me to determine how many 'points' the edging should have on each side and on each of the corners so that it gives a pretty edging that will ripple a little. The problem with this is that maths is not one of my strong points. I have number dyslexia and find it very difficult to work these sorts of problems out so there will probably be a lot of numbers being written out on paper and drawings of how things break down before I reach a successful conclusion.
This will be the first time that I have designed anything like this. While I have adapted patterns a little in the past, I have never created something like this from scratch. However if the it turns out successfully, I intend to try to design a lace shawl from scratch and if it works out well I may see about getting it published. Lace knitting is increasing in popularity again and with so many beautiful yarns available to do such work, there seems no end to what can be achieved.
Friday, 26 June 2009
Difficulty Sleeping
As though I don't have enough problems trying to get a decent night's sleep, it now seems as though we are heading for a heatwave and that the temperatures are not going to drop significantly at night.
Today has been very hot and humid and we are still waiting for the thunderstorms which were forecast for London today. I live in hope that it rains later this evening or tonight, so that the air is a little fresher tomorrow. I know that it is nice to have some summer weather for a change, after all the last couple of summers have been pretty awful, but I have problems dealing with the humidity and I can do without it.
I've been very naughty as far as my knitting is concerned. I should be working on a couple of summer tops, but having started work on the shawl/blanket on Wednesday, I have been working on that and I have now completed something like 85 rows. There is still a long way to go though, and the rows are getting longer; there are almost 400 stitches to a row at the moment and the number will continue to rise as I carry on knitting. I've moved from working on double-pointed needles to a circular one and I have just had to change from the shortest circular needle (50 cm ) because of the number of stitches, so I am now using one that is 80 cm in length. This should be suitable for quite a while now as there is room for lots more stitches on it. I still have to find a pattern for the edging of it, but that can wait until I am ready to knit it because I need to see how much wool I will have to work it. If I have a lot, then it can be a deep edging that is very fancy, if there is not so much then a narrower edging will have to suffice.
I did actually manage to take a couple more photographs of the shawl as I was changing from the short circular needle to the intermediate one. It doesn't really show the shawl to best advantage but it does show how the pattern is progressing and how the colours in the wool are starting to build into small areas of each colour. This pattern will obviously change as the rows get longer but whatever happens this is going to be a very colourful object when it is finished.
Today has been very hot and humid and we are still waiting for the thunderstorms which were forecast for London today. I live in hope that it rains later this evening or tonight, so that the air is a little fresher tomorrow. I know that it is nice to have some summer weather for a change, after all the last couple of summers have been pretty awful, but I have problems dealing with the humidity and I can do without it.
I've been very naughty as far as my knitting is concerned. I should be working on a couple of summer tops, but having started work on the shawl/blanket on Wednesday, I have been working on that and I have now completed something like 85 rows. There is still a long way to go though, and the rows are getting longer; there are almost 400 stitches to a row at the moment and the number will continue to rise as I carry on knitting. I've moved from working on double-pointed needles to a circular one and I have just had to change from the shortest circular needle (50 cm ) because of the number of stitches, so I am now using one that is 80 cm in length. This should be suitable for quite a while now as there is room for lots more stitches on it. I still have to find a pattern for the edging of it, but that can wait until I am ready to knit it because I need to see how much wool I will have to work it. If I have a lot, then it can be a deep edging that is very fancy, if there is not so much then a narrower edging will have to suffice.
I did actually manage to take a couple more photographs of the shawl as I was changing from the short circular needle to the intermediate one. It doesn't really show the shawl to best advantage but it does show how the pattern is progressing and how the colours in the wool are starting to build into small areas of each colour. This pattern will obviously change as the rows get longer but whatever happens this is going to be a very colourful object when it is finished.
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