Comfy Cardie ... circa 1600

When I'm feeling a bit shivery and off-colour I like to climb into a certain cosy grey cardigan with huge pockets and a roomy bagginess that perfectly hides the contours of my body. It's not going to win me any points for elegance, but it's so comfortable that it feels like I'm wearing a hug. And the other day I discovered that comfy cardigans have been a thing for several centuries.

I was invited to a really interesting talk at the V&A. It ended in the Stuart section of the British Gallery, where I spotted this amazing knitted cardigan. It wasn't featured on the talk, but, being a knitter, I had to stop and admire it.

The museum sign said that it dated from approximately 1600, and certainly no later than 1620 - so, quite possibly, someone was pottering around in this very cardigan, feeling cosy and snug whilst they chewed the fat with Guy Fawkes and dreamt up the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 ... .

Knitted jacket 1600 - 1620 (back view)

Good-bye January blues ...

I'm cruising. All that angst and the January blues are fast receding in my rear view mirror. My tax return is out of the way, paid and filed for another year, and today I'm set for a nice day out with my bestie, P, and we're looking forward to helping her celebrate a BIG birthday this weekend. I won't say how BIG it is, but it's going to be epic.

Out in the garden I can see little pools of white snowdrops emerging from the muddy brown earth, and the hellebores are starting to do their thing. Thank heavens for the hellebores. They really are the stars of the January garden.

A Very Big Thank You ...

... to all my wonderful customers at the Waltham Abbey Wool Show last Sunday. A big thank you to Kate and Diana, the totally brilliant organisers. You girls rock! It was great! I had a super day meeting lots of charming yarnie folk. I had a ball chatting and joking with Marcia from Yarnsulike, my lovely neighbour, on the next-door stand. We had fun, we had snow and we had the Sockmatician. What more could a yarnaholic want on a cold, dark Sunday in the middle of January?

All the best for now my lovelies,

Bonny x

A knitted auricula ... a platypus-billed duck ... and WAWS!

Gosh it's cold up here in the Big Smoke. This morning was another window-scraper start before we could fire up the engine for the school run. And pity a thought for the WonderDog, who's had a badly-timed hair cut and gone from curly and cosy to svelte and freezing in the course of a single afternoon.

And, best of all, we're looking forward to the very wonderful Waltham Abbey Wool Show (WAWS to the initiated) on Sunday - only 2 more sleeps to go!

First proper make of 2018

Well to be fair I did most of the work on it over the Christmas holidays. I wanted something that I could work on whilst watching the usual marathon of festive television. It had to be a pattern that didn't require too much stitch counting or demand a huge amount of attention. What I was after was something dead easy that I could do after a few glasses of wine with half my brain following a box set.

And this is what I came up with:

Ta-dah!