Hot Off the Needles

 as promised. I've been knitting this Aran sweater for a while - C picked out and determined on a v-neck cardigan pattern which he wanted converted into a crewneck sweater, so the sizing required adjusting and the whole front neck shapings had to be calculated. And there was a pause while I knit the baby blanket - but it's done.

 I also made him a shirt. I had ordered 1/4 metre of peacock feather fabric for masks, and when he saw it, he requested a shirt. So that was his anniversary present. For some reason it's very hard to get the colour of the fabric right. I sent my sister a photo of a spare mask to see if she would like it, and when she got it, she said the fabric was even nicer than the photo. It is - I've ordered more to make a summer dress for myself - and didn't think the photo I took of the shirt was worth uploading. There's more jade green colour in the fabric in real life. 

From Wednesday in the park, a coot chickling.

And on Thursday, as C had taken a couple of days off, we went for a drive and a change of scenery. This is Lough Tay, in the Wicklow mountains. Of recent years it's been used to film The Vikings, and the houses and piers visible in the second photo are part of the film set rather than authentic original scenery. From the amount of trucks and vans in the car park above it, I suspect that shooting was happening on the day. 

It was intermittently cloudy and quite windy, but after the prolonged lockdown that started at the end of December, it was lovely to see some totally different scenery. 

May Favourites

 I need more time! I have photos from two walks in the park waiting to be edited.

I shared a couple with a friend by email, so here are two from my outing this Wednesday - the cygnets had finally hatched.  While I was watching them waddling up the bank, one of the herons landed on the fence and was promptly shooed off by the parent swans. 

May was quite a good month on the card-making front, despite being pretty busy in work and not having much energy left over.

I tried uploading a recent video of coot chicks to YouTube, but it seemed to compress it so much that the quality was badly effected and I never even sent the link to my sister. I'm trying the Blogger option of inserting a video file from the computer here, and hoping that it will not be so badly affected. 

p.s - I think their fronts are dirty from the water!!

I hope to be along tomorrow with a couple of "hot off the needles" projects.  

This month's blog header is from Farmleigh last June. 

Hot off the Needles - May Flowers

 I knit this for a friend. I left it a bit late to start something, because we heard so early that she was expecting - probably the best bit of news I got all last year. If I'd had more time I'd have thought about knitting a large cot blanket with jungle animals which was a great hit with both recipients who have got one in the past. I was showing C a couple of possibilities on Ravelry, and instead of any of them, he picked this one out. By the end there were 750 stitches on the needle - I had to order a 60" one, I didn't even know they came that long - and one ball of wool knit about 7 rows. (Editing to clarify that it was knit on circular needles in the round. I hadn't known they came in that length - I couldn't source one in Ireland at all.) It was hard to get a good photo. It's approximately 36" diameter. The pattern was called May Flowers

We had atrocious weather yesterday, heavy downpours - C's motorcycle ride-out was cancelled. I'd warned him that if the weather was half decent this morning, I was hoping for a quick trip to the Botanic Gardens to smell the lilacs and see the peonies. It was very overcast and grey looking, but we headed out anyway. I'll have to swing back with another post for the peonies, whenever I get time for a bit of editing later in the week. But here are some of the other treats we found...the hawthorn in full bloom, a little moorhen chick, rhododendrons. beautifully backlit gunnera. The robin was perched on the border hedging in the peony walk, and so close I could have touched him. 

The herbaceous and annual borders were both pretty bare, with just sand marking where the different seeds had been sown in the annual bed. But it was a worthwhile trip - and it started pouring on our way back, so the timing was good. 

Canal Walk

 Finally  my duckling hunt paid off. It was a beautiful (but cold,  a heavy frost overnight) morning, and as I had bad earache yesterday I decided to go for a walk along the canal rather than cycle in the park. I walked to the lock along the road, because where the houseboats are, and beside the train station, is usually the best place for finding ducklings. Nothing there except a mallard drake enjoying the sun, and a moorhen showing the beautiful browns in its plumage in the sunshine. Normally I think of them as black birds. But, despite the recent heavy rain and frequent hail showers, I decided to risk the mud along the towpath and walk back home canal-side, and that was where I found my chickies at last. They were tiny, I don't think they can be hatched that long. And yet this time last year, any we saw were well past the fuzzball stage. I wonder why they were so much later this year...

Apologies for the brightness - it was, as I said, a very bright sunny morning. I'm sorry, for some reason the photos are showing in reverse of the order I wanted, and it's one thing that is not so easy in the newer Blogger dashboard, moving them around. My walk started at the bottom of the photos here. Many of the houseboats were decked out with planters and tubs full of colourful Spring flowers. The snail was on the side of a barge which does charter trips. 

April Favourites

 In spite of the long weekend for Easter, and the brighter evenings (big boost!), April was not a very good month on the card-making front. Just a few to share. And I'll add a couple of photos from the morning last week when I cycled to the "park within a park", the Peoples' Gardens at the entrance to Phoenix Park. I left the house early that morning, and Farmleigh wasn't yet open. Also I had seen someone post a photo of a mandarin duck in the park, and since I'm sure it isn't resident on the lakes I normally pass, I wanted to take a look at the one down there. No mandarin duck in sight...

Celebrating Earth Day with recycling - two calendars, old jeans, tomato paste tube, packaging and an old book. I suspect I bought the buttons specifically for cards.

Thank you, Lorraine. I need to practice two-step stamping in conjunction with die-cutting, but this was fun to make for a mixed-media wreath challenge. 

There were bluebells planted all along the side of a path down the hill from the road at the top to the lake at the bottom, but not something that the perspective allowed a good photo of. There was also a lovely big patch under a a couple of trees.