Snow Days

Ah, the pleasure of the unexpected snow day!  Aside from coaching my IB students by e-mail, and mugging up on their next text - "A Doll's House" - I settled in to a regime of cooking, sewing and knitting. 

First, I re-covered this little stool with some classic William Morris fabric.  Then, and less photogenically, I made thermal linings for the living-room and bedroom curtains.  One forgets how much physical strength is needed to wrastle lengths of fabric into position.  Then, the horror of realisation, as it becomes obvious that you have sewn it together back to front or upside down.  Very easy to do with white fabric with no obvious grain.  But curtain linings are very forgiving - no one will see them, after all.

Next, another pair of gents' mitts, this time in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino, lovely to handle, but oddly splitty.  These are in single moss stitch which made for a firm fabric.

Then, my husband requested a long scarf, long enough to wind around the face at least once.  This need has never arisen before, but it certainly did on our winter snow walks this year.  What a pleasure to be able to locate a suitably manly yarn in one's existing stash.  This is a Jaeger Merino Aran, bought from Kerrie of Hipknits after she and her partner acquired the complete stock of a yarn-shop.  They were in Essex and the shop in Scotland, but nothing seemed to daunt them and the yarn mountain had to be seen to be believed.

Some years ago, my mother-in -law passed away, and I inherited her sewing-box.  This fine piece of cabinet work had been made especially for her as a gift from a great-aunt, and, over the years, her unrivalled collection of Hooks and eyes and other notions has been very useful.  however, I'd never emptied it right out until now.  What meanings do we read into this item, still in a paper wrapper with her own mother's writing on it, so clearly a present of some kind? 

Inside, against multi-coloured foils, are sixty sewing needles, all in pristine condition.  Whoever would need sixty needles, no matter how keen a sewer they were?   She did teach housecraft, but this is very much a personal piece of kit. Since there were many other packs of needles elsewhere, I will never need to disturb this collection either, yet what a fantastic resource.