Spring and the sea and Liberty

At the end of a long day in Brighton I managed to catch the last five minutes in Liberty as I crossed London from Victoria to Marylebone to buy some ''art fabric: Tana Lawn SPRING 2012 Collection.

I had been so very inspired when I watched the video on the Liberty Fabrics website of how the collection was chosen and who had put it all together. I bought two of them and a classic and will show you which ones really soon.  At the moment I'm still learning how to use the new uploading and writing the posts on this blogger platform. It was all changed recently and it has taken me quite a while to find out how to find my saved but unpublished posts and how to edit etc.
Picture uploading has also changed so please bear with me.

After weeks of rain a little sunshine greeted me as I stepped onto the platform in Brighton from the express train: whoopee! I walked to the hotel where the meetings were being held and as I was 45 minutes early I took a few photos of the sea and the wildlife: it was very windy and blustery at the seafront.

Jonathan was first to grab attention. But I prefer the SEA!

 

CROCHET SCARF FOR SISTER

Well, here we are in a warm soft scarf in April?!! Actually I finished this before Easter but it IS still cold enough here in the mornings to wear it!
Day 12 or more of wet ,grey , cold and rainy. Sooo unlike last year.
Back to the scarf: this is EMMA lace scarf from Robyn Chachula's latest crochet book, the exact name of which escapes me for a moment: something to with Simple Crochet or it may be Simply or some such. It's a lovely book by the way although it doesn't quite live up to it's promise of projects out of one ball of yarn in Europe because a lot of our yarn balls don't have thr huge meterage that USA yarns sometimes have. I am briefly only modelling it here because I gave it to my sister in Delft. These are ''her'' colours.

Details for UK residents: Use EMMA pattern as is, with a 3.5mm hook and REGIA hand-dye effect sockyarn from e.g. Hobbycraft. You'll need just over 2 balls, but only a tiny bit from the 2nd ball so you could probably make 3 scarves out of 4 balls....?!!
The stitch pattern is fun and the constantly subtly changing colours keep it interesting.

I made it 36 ''hoop'' repeats long or 288 sts per row.

The yarn is 420m in a ball, 70%wool and 25% polyamid, 5% polyacryl, machine washable and soft enough to wear around the neck. I used colour 6552. There are about 5-7 more colourways to choose from according to the label.

My scarf finished dimensions were: 22 cm wide and 204 cm long.
It took quite a while to do and 3.5mm is not my favourite hook size but I think it's turned out really well? Can be worn in many different ways due to the length.



Bye!

12 April Thursday a day for REFLECTION

Going home day and it seemed a little too early? first a thank you to my elder sister who'd sent us some scarves. Such a cute cow n'est-ce pas?

The day dawned beautifully sunny with glorious BLUE skies and it was warm too!

Can you tell we are lingering here? Soaking up the view and the ancient atmosphere.

Reflections.

And a glorious last breakfast if a little fuzzy, dunno why. The i-phone excelled at photos from a moving train or bus yesterday?

Can't get enough of watching people cycling past.

Yummy kruidnagelkaas!And ontbijtkoek.

Then all too soon the taxi came- about 20 minutes or more EARLY- and we were sped off back to Schiphol. ( 9.10 am)

A tad early for a 12.05 flight which was delayed by 15 minutes anyway?

Finally we boarded and very much enjoyed the speedy boarding JJ had booked for us.

Last views of Holland.

Cloudy crossing and then England:

Back in Luton the same time as we departed Amsterdam. Time travel at it's simplest.

OOTMARSUM and Ton Schulten Day

This was Wednesday and designated as Ton Schulten Day. He's a Dutch painter as above and I have loved his work for many years now. I had a calendar once. So at long last I thought we'd travel the day to go see his gallery and museum. This involved travelling to Ootmarsum which is a 2.5- 3 hour train journey to Almelo and then a number 64 bus for 45 minutes to Ootmarsum.
We waited for a train with only one change as some involved as many as 3 or 4 changes and packed our lunch and tea and plenty to read or do for this travel day.

We were just amazed yet again- as we were a few years ago- how MANY bicycles are parked at the station. It's double decker style or double layering this time. There were many many rows just like this all coded so you could find your bike.

We chose a train where we change in The Hague only, it was funny when Miss E realised that Den Haag was the same as The Hague, a city we have visited a few years ago.

Then there were lovely views from the train...

Chatting and reading.

Sleeping.

Playing Scrabble on the i-Pad.

And I sat crocheting a turquoise and blue/greens scarf for my friend Wendy.

And ate grapes as they have no points on the WW eating programme. I have ''lost'' 15 lbs now but accept that I'll be gaining a few over Easter ( chocolate!, roast lamb!) and then also the lovely food in Holland: poffertjes, stroopwafels, rookworst,appel gebak etc)

Then at Almelo we missed the first bus as the sign for the number 64 was apart from all the other buses and to the far right and with the sun on it we could not see it said #64 at first. Then when it whizzed past us we kind of said oh ***. Half an hour wait. Then on the bus there were nice views again:This is TWENTE a county I have never visited before.

At last in Ootmarsum it was warm and sunny and we walked up through the town to the Ton Schulten Museum- he's still alive but this holds all his older works that he didn't wish to part with. Here's Miss Y standing in front of the house.

And just to prove we were really there:It was amazing, quite wonderful and well worth all that travelling! Many colour coded rooms with paintings and some sculptures too. And there's a film to watch about the painter's life lasting about 20 minutes and really interesting.

Outside we enjoyed the sunshine by the main church opposite which Ton grew up as a baker's son and at first entered the seminary. We had ice creams.

A very pretty village or town, the attraction of their home-grown artist has resulted in many more galleries and smart arty creative and colourful dress fashion shops too.

There's one on the far right there but I only looked in , didn't go inside because the kids were ready to go home.

Nice Dutch architecture and traditional dark green paintwork.

Like I said: many other galleries with fun stuff on display.

This is the high street with the Ton Schulten Gallery on the left. This is where you can buy his current paintings.

Couldn't resist this dachshund!

Tulips - well of course to attract the tourist pound?

The the bus ride back to Almelo and the light was really unusual:

How turquoise the sky and how luminous the grass?

I love these older farm houses with their wide bas and angled low roofline.

Yep, we were all very tired by now. Sleepnig even on the bus.

Then from the train: I took many pictures, mainly to stay awake! Here's just a few.

Willows

This is in Hilversum I think?

In all I came home with 300 photos in just 3 days?