Succumbing to the C-Word ...

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas ... We've even had five flakes of snow in London today!

I know. I know. It's still November. But if I can just hold my nerve for another day we'll be there: December with Christmas (almost) the next stop.

December is a busy month for me. I've got our wedding anniversary, Emi, my son's birthday and my husband's birthday as well as Christmas and trips back to the family in Ireland to fit in. And, of course, I've not done nearly enough preparation for any of it. Crazy days.

To distract me from the madness that is almost upon me I've worked up a new pattern for a mid-sized project bag. I've got one made up, and a few more cut out and ready to sew.

Black Friday

It's Black Friday, which sounds more like an apocalypse than a retail event to me. Are you busy shopping? Or are you safely tucked up at home whilst all the hurly-burly takes place somewhere else? I'm not an enthusiastic shopper at the best of times, so I'm afraid it would take rather a lot to get me to venture forth on a day like today.

We didn't used to do Black Friday here in England. It's a very recent thing, and I have to say I don't understand it. Why do shops discount their goods in the run up to Christmas when they ought to be selling more stuff anyway? I understand that the term Black Friday is so called because it was the point in the year, just after Thanksgiving, when American retailers finally broke even: from here to year-end they were in the black. But cutting costs, and therefore margins, as you move into your busiest five weeks of trading sounds like the turkeys voting for Christmas: it simply can't be in the retailers' interests to do so. What am I missing?

Ivy Leaves

My friends, after beavering around in my garden, and brandishing my garden secateurs with malice, I give you Ivy Leaf Yellow, which is really a muted, slightly acid-green. It's an odd colour, but I like it.

Networking ...

Forced networking is something that I loathe with a passion. I've got lots of unhappy memories of feeling uncomfortable at corporate events, where I was supposed to be working the room and building a contact book to galvanise my career. Don't get me wrong: I'm no shrinking violet, but I guess you either take to that sort of forced bonhomie, or, like me, you recoil from the insincerity of it all. Suffice it to say that networking is not a theme that I would normally have chosen to dwell on in my leisure time. 

However, personal prejudices to one side, I've just read a really fun book: The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson, which is all about the role that networks have played throughout history, and where we stand with network behemoths such as Facebook and Google today. 

All the purples ...

This week I've had a lot of fun using logwood chips to create a dye-bath that's given me a lush spectrum running from inky purples to airy lavenders as it has gradually lost its strength. I've been playing with it for several days now, allowing each hank of wool time to absorb its fill of the dye before mordanting another hank, and dropping it into the bath.

Logwood Dye