Lucy's 6th Birthday and BLOGIVERSARY

It was Lucy's 6th Birthday and these days life spins by so fast and busy that I am always trying to catch up with this diary!
There's so many photos filed and waiting to tell their story. Including the amazing Brick Art exhibition I went to last week in London's Brick Lane ( yep truly, very well chosen wasn't it?)
And this blog is now also 6 years old so there will be a BLOGIVERSARY celebration too, but some time later this month... And there's 3 Balls coming up now in quick succession, all in March with practice dances beforehand, oh my things are just so hectic.
Dresses to sew, dances to learn, kids to support, dogs to be walked to say nothing of the Dissertation and research project which have hit a big hitch last week too.

BUT FIRST let's celebrate the fact that our beloved adored Lucy was 6 yesterday and was born at the vet due to an emergency Caesarian AFTER a long labour at home, with me as ''midwife'', but came home with her baby puppy brothers by 5 pm on 28 February 2009 with proud and excellent mum Pippa.

 HELLO!

 Time for a tummy rub, I'll roll around.

 Rolling around here, when are you going to stroke my tummy?

 See? Paws outstretched, demanding ATTENTION!

 Well, what about it?????

 Hmmmmm, OK I'll sit up again then?

 ???????

 I'M TALKING TO YOU!

 WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

 Sulking.

 Thinking.

 Looking at you.

 Woof, woof time to go for a walk!

 Oh goodie,  you took the hint!Out for a walk at last and at Cuttlebrook, one of our favourites.

 SNOWDROPS!

 These were weirdly multi petalled snowdrops? At Cuttlebrook.

 These are the ones I like so much better?

 Look at this huge shelf mushroom: at this time of year?

 Fabulous snowdrops!

 More mushrooms, must be all the damp weather we've had.

 I CAN out-stare you! Very unusually for a dog, Lucy will stare back and hold eye contact for ages.

 Just before she yawned,

 I'm looking the other way now.

Mmmmmm this is my sulking face.

 

 I'm getting a bit bored by this.

 What are you still there for?

WOOF WOOF you can stop all this photo taking now, please.

 side by side you can see Lucy is a bigger dog than Pippa with a larger head and slightly longer body.
Pippa is a mixture of beige and grey now.

 It was a very windy cold blustery grey day.

 Pippa just under half-way on the walk, tutned about and pulled the other way suggesting it was time to go home, ''THIS WAY please''. But as due to work and rainy days they'd hardly had any decent walks this week I prevailed on her to finish the walk properly and walk for an hour not just 15 minutes! She loved it in the end, but the rain at the end got us all running back to the car through much mud! No photos of this, running!

Back home Lucy pranced about among the balloons we had for Miss E's birthday.

 Even tried to kick one...

 And finally she and Pippa shared her birthday TUNA -CAKE!
No candles though. They ate it all within 5 minutes...

Can of tuna in spring water, 2 large eggs, 150 g plain flour, 2 table spoons sunflower oil,

Mix together well and bake in shallow tin lined with baking parchment at 200 C elsius for about 20 minutes or until firm to the touch and golden.

Let cool and cut into strips or slices and feed to - exceedingly happy- dogs.

They LOVE this!

Happy Hookey Day- knit-lookalike-stitch cowl tute with links

Happy Day recently hooking a cowl out of some stash trial yarn from our recent Delft trip in October?!

I saw this fab pattern in #crochet 57 magazine or may have been #59, in Hobbycraft but it was £8 and I only liked the 1 pattern! And I have this resolution /promise NOT to buy anyomre magazines or paper patterns as I am bursting out of my workroom and and and I have so MANY already.

That's almost 10 years of obsessive crochet and crochet collecting for you!

I can;t believe how it's flown by, it seems only yesterday in 2005 when I took it up again?

Anyway don;t let me ramble on , with luck I found the SAME pattern FREE on Ravelry so here's the link with tutorial:

http://www.allaboutami.com/post/102338144071/tripleluxecowl

It's called the triple luxe cowl and I made mine from 2 balls of MEDIO lana grossa and did the start chain of 78 sts with a 15 mm hook, now a 12 would have been much better or even a 10 mm but I could not find those in a hurry so I winged it with a 15mm.

 Bit on the loose side, eh?

 Then you close it with a slip stitch and work a half treble all the way around. With a 9 mm hook.

 See? There I go...

 After that you either spiral or close each row and chain 2 to start again BUT the KEY thing is to work the half trebles in the back back loop! That is the loop you see if you tilt the V stitch top towards you... IT'S BEHIND YOU as they say in the pantomime. The link above shows it as a video really well I think. When you tilt the work you see a very small tight loop on the right and then a long diagonal loose loop to the left of the wee little one, THAT's the one you want, the long one.

 And that tilts the top row of work towards you which shows up like a line of V 's just like knitting?

 Here can you see the little loop of the next stitch to the left of the long loop that my red hook is into?
It's the LONG ones you want not those little ones.

 See? I am trying to show you? I am working a half treble so there's two loops already on the hook and I'm positioning my hook into the long loop at the back of the work.

 The back of this stitch is all curly wurly looking, cowl shows both in the photo below.

 End of ball 1, 9 rows completed.

 Also I used a RUSSIAN JOIN to start the new ball of yarn: I will demonstrate:

 Take both ends and curve around each other thus:

 Take one end into a darning needle and squiffle it into and inside the yarn going back on itself:

 Then pull that tight, can you see on the left I have done this now.

 Repeat on the right.

 Both ends done.

 Now trim with scissors the bits sticking out.

 VOILA now pull at it and use it to crochet onwards.

 The 2 ball cowl, 180 metres of chunky yarn.

 Because I had those supersized loopy chains at the start I needed to disguise them so I top or surface chained over them: thus

 With the hook above the work and working up and down tambour style you crochet along and over those manky chains.

 SEE?!!