Yep, Spring has definitely arrived, hooray!

We have spent the whole weekend out in the garden, sorting out the lawn (which is now mostly mud thanks to the very wet winter), tidying the beds ready for veg planting and just soaking up the wonderful warmth of the sun. It seems that we aren’t the only ones sunbathing either as the plum tree is a magnet for Peacock butterflies emerging from hibernation. We often find them hibernating in the wood pile – they make the most alarming sound with their wings when disturbed and we’re always careful to rebuild a shelter for them when we take wood away to burn on the stove. At one point this morning I counted six of them fluttering around and feeding from the tree blossom (which must be one of the earliest and most abundant food sources available to them), it was a truly magical sight.

Despite the closed wings I love this picture below because you can see that lovely spiralled proboscis

There must be a feast of nectar up there because there have also been loads of bees buzzing around the thousands of blossoms that are open on the tree at the moment.

It’s so nice to have warm, bright days here again and to be able to be outside without getting soaked or shivering! Everything feels more manageable when the sun is shining 🙂

I’ve also taken advantage of the brighter weather to take some pictures of my finished Dream Stripes shawl (details of pattern and yarn here).

I’m really pleased with how it has turned out and with how blocking really accentuates those lovely points – I’ve never actually been bothered to wet block anything before – a quick steam block under a damp cloth is usually the best my projects can expect, but that wasn’t going to cut the mustard here, so I’m glad I took the time to wet block this time.

Now I just have to work out how to wear it – Amy tells me I look like a granny with the way I’m currently wearing it (you can always rely on a teenager for brutal honesty, thanks my lovely for your kind words). So, any tips on cool shawl wearing would be gratefully received!

It was school half term break here last week, so there were a lot of wood walks in our schedule and not much knitting going on. Today however with the children back at school I’m happily playing with wool again and carrying on working on the next couple of patterns to share. I mentioned the elephants in the previous post so you know that the patterns for those are coming up but I thought I’d give you a glimpse of a little part of the other pattern I’m currently working on.

Back in Autumn I began to pull together my various sweater designs with the idea that they will form a collection along the same lines as the ‘seasonal dresses’ pattern. My plan is to include plenty of different options for the animals to wear throughout the year and most will be based on the designs that you might have seen on the finished animals that I make (skull, pumpkin, aran sweater etc.). I also wanted to play around with a little reversible sweater/cardigan.

When I’m trying something new I like to experiment with a variety of increase methods and I try out different stitch and row counts and various arrangements of stitches for front, back and sleeves etc. all of which means that I build up quite a collection of samples…

The samples that I knitted up last year are all in left-over sock yarns and the Rowan wool cotton 4ply that I’ve used on the bunny and fox patterns but I couldn’t wait to try out that lovely Jamieson and Smith yarn that I showed you in January and I really like how it works up and the lovely range of colours. There is also a basket full of other sweater designs that I’m working on but I’ll show you that another time.

So that’s what will be coming up soonish on the pattern front. I’m still knitting samples to photograph and test knitting the final versions of everything so it will be a few weeks yet before the patterns will be finished but I’ll keep you all posted when they are ready to share.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying having my own little colourful rainbow of sweaters to look at. Mind you there is a lot more colour in the days just lately. It seems spring has arrived as our plum tree is beginning to blossom.

It’s lovely to see the blue sky again and we even had some sunny garden time over the half term break which made Toby a very happy boy. And speaking of happy, I am because my butterfly has flown from the open window, hopefully out into a spring that is here to stay.

What’s colourful and happy with you at the moment, do please share 🙂