First up, the Noro scarf. This was interesting to knit, though how people knit three in a row, I don't know. There were several knots, involving quite sudden colour shifts. And it was bought at full price, which isn't my usual practice.
However, it does turn heads and surprise people, because they may be everywhere in blogland, but not in Braintree.
The colour shifts are quite lovely, and I was surprised by how one colourway did not repeat the same colour sequence in the second skein, but introduced new mixes.
The most downbeat response I had was from a fellow knitter who told me that her mother used to knit scarves like it from her scrapbag. I don't think she can have looked properly.
Next, I found myself knitting a tea-cosy, almost an exact replica of one in our kitchen drawer knit by my late mother-in -law many years ago, and which we never use. This one was requested by one of my team, a young man who described his ideal Saturdays as lingering over the papers with a pot of tea. I was pleased to be able to oblige.
Quite a cheerful effect, and knit from leftover yarn, so costing nothing.
In between, a dark green ribbed scarf for another colleague, but no picture to go with it. With double knitting used double this was a quick and very effective knit.
So then, the allotment. Three weeks it has been fine enough to dig and we have made good progress, even though we have to ease ourselves back in to this level of physical activity, after the winter.
My husband, planting up the onion bed.
Images of the allotment tend to focus on its scruffy side, but to be up there as a fine March breeze blows across to dry the soil, and to be pottering about from job to job in the Spring sunshine - most of all, to be ready to go home, tired but content: these are some of the pleasures of life - or,at least, of middle age.
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