Our Little Holiday

We've just had a lovely little holiday in a caravan on a farm near Beverley. We had a great time despite the typical British weather. The caravan was nice apart from our mattress (which was so firm it was only just softer than the floor!) but we fixed that by investing in an air bed and sleeping on that instead. The kids loved the famr. There were only 5 static caravans on site, there was plenty of room for them to play outside and they loved feeding (and chasing) the resident ducks and chickens.

We visited Cruckley Farm, I took way too many photographs of their gorgeous and very friendly greyface dartmoor sheep and Sam found a tractor with his name on it. We visited The Deep in Hull and watched as sharks and rays swam over our head and we spent an afternoon on the beach at Hornsea. The kids braved the north sea and went paddling and collected some pretty stones.

We only went away for 4 nights but it felt like a week. I really enjoyed but I'm shattered now. I think I need another holiday to recover!

Learning lessons the hard way

Further to my last blog post unfortunately things didn't improve quite as much as I hoped. I finished my antibiotics but still had white patches on my throat and the pain flared up again. I got some more AB's but the pain was so bad I went back to the doctors and was admitted to hospital for further investigations and better drugs.

The consultant diagnosed me as having Post Streptococcal Reactive Arthritis. I wasn't really told anymore than that, I was just given antibiotics and stronger painkillers. The hospital stay wasn't too bad (once they'd moved me off the very noisy admissions ward). I had to stay 1 day longer than I hoped because I had to wait for my steroid injection (took over 24 hours to get from the pharmacy to the ward!!!) but I finally made it home.

The steroids have helped a little but I'm still very sore and tired. I can knit again but not for very long as my hand and shoulder get very sore but I am able to potter about a little bit if I take things very easy.

Being an internet junkie hypochondria I googled PSReA and found out a little more about it. Apparently it can take 3-6 months to recover and some people have it for 12 months or more. It can cause symptoms of pain and fatigue and be caused by a number of different bacterial and viral infections. My reserach reminded me of my first major ME relapse. I was 19 years old and was admitted to hospital but not treated very kindly by the nursing staff or doctors. My current symptoms are very similar to the symptoms I had back then and I wonder if part (or all) of my ME has been undiagnosed reccurrent bouts of PSReA. I dont' know if I'll ever find the answer and I don't know who to ask without sounding like an internet hypochondriac but there are too many similarities for it all to be cooincidence.

For now I'll just keep plodding on and hope I can make it through the next few weeks without too much pain.

I don't do things by halves!

As most of you might know I have more than my fair share of health problems. This time I've outdone myself! I've got a sore throat that's caused the symptoms of arthritis!

3 weeks ago I started with a sore throat. Nothing out of the ordinary for me, red, inflamed tonsils covered with white spots, but I had no fever and didn't feel that unwell so I didn't bother going to the doctors. After 3 weeks it still wasn't any better so I made an appointment to get it checked out.

The doc said it was probably a virus and asked if i felt like I needed antibiotics. I said no, the doc did a throat swab just in case and said they would phone with the results next week. Over the weekend my hands started hurting and my right knee was a bit sore. I put it down to overdoing the knitting and spinning. On Friday I managed to drop and smash a brand new jar of coffee and by Saturday night I couldn't use my hands properly. It was like I developed arthritis overnight. Sunday I was in quite a lot of pain, I couldn't hold a knife and fork to eat my lunch and I crashed, barely able to walk. My usual co-codamol didn't do the business so on Monday I made another doctors appointment.

I was seriously hobbling on Monday, I was so slow the doctor called my name twice before I managed the trip down the corridor to his office. It turns out I had a strep infection in my throat and the infection was causing the join pain. The doc prescribed penecillin, Ibuprofen and Omeprazole to prevent the Ibuprofen wrecking my stomach. I'm still in quite a bit of pain but I am slowly improving. I can now knit again which is saving my sanity! Fingers crossed I'll be fighting fit (well as fit as I ever am) soon!

Sari Silk Bag Pattern

I wrote this pattern a few years ago. I set up a knitting website called The Knitting Room but it never really got off the ground. I've long since closed the website but the pattern was linked on Ravelry so I kept the file on my webspace. After a recent (and rather annoying) malware attack I was forced to tidy up my files so I've moved the pattern here. Enjoy!




Sari Silk Bag PDF

Tutorial on Dyeing Blanks

I thought I'd write up a little tutorial on how I dye my wool blanks. I'm by no menas and expert dyer but I do like to muck in and have fun! If you have any questions, tips or suggestions please leave a comment. Enjoy!

Mrs Flowerpot's Tutorial for Dyeing Wool Blanks

First preapre your blank. You can knit your own on a knitting machine or buy ready made sock blanks. Wash the blank and either spin it on the wool setting on your washing machine or roll it in a towel to squeeze the excess moisture out of it. You want the blank to be damp, not wet.

Prepare your work surface. I cover my kitchen table with a roll of bubble wrap and place a couple of old towels on top. The towels help absorb the moisture from the dyes so the colours don't run.

Lay out your blank on the towels. Stocking stitch blanks have a tendancy to curl up so I pin mine out purl side up with blocking pins.



Prepare your dyes. You can use any kind of dye suitable for wool from Kool Aid to professional acid dyes.





Start painting! I use a turkey baster but you can use a foam tipped brush or squeezy bottles with a nozzle on. You want to cover the wool with colour but try not to get it dripping wet. The towel will soak up some of the liquid but colours will run if you get it too wet.

By pinning the blank purl side up you can use the lines of bumps to get nice straight lines for your stripes.



When you've covered the blank in dye take out all the pins and roll up the blank in cling film and set the dye by steaming it or nuking it in the microwave - just do whatever you would normally do to a hand painted skein of yarn.



When it's cool, wash, rinse and dry and then you're ready to knit! You can knit straight from the blank or if you're a complete perfectionist you can reskein the yarn and re-soak it to get rid of the kinks. Hopefully you should have perfect self striping wool :D

Catching up!

It's been a busy few weeks and I haven't had a minute to blog anything so here's a quick catch up!

We were visited by a racing pigeon. It landed in our garden and was looking a little confused so I reported it as found and made contact with his owner. He said to let it go but unfortunately it came back to us! 5 days later he came and picked it up and took it home.



We went to Uk Ravelry Day. It was cold and wet but the people were lovely and we had a great time. It was fab to catch up with old friends and meet some people for the first time including Woolly Wormhead. We spent a lot of time on Babylonglegs stall and I bought some gorgeous rainbow roving. I also accquired some KnitPro symfonie crochet hooks and a fab kimono print book which is proving to be a great inspiration!



I've been busy knitting too. I made up my Suburban Graffiti into a cardigan for Emily. I was working on it during UK Ravelry Day and I must have bored everyone stupid with it as I think I showed it off to everyone I met *blushes* I'm really pleased with how it turned out and Emily loves it!

Suburban Graffiti!

I have a new knitting machine, but I'm not using it to make clothes - I'm using it to dye wool! I used the knitting machine to knit the wool into blanks then I dyed the wool in stripes so when it's knitted up it will be self striping and hopefully will look fantastic.

To the trained eye it might look like a bit of a bodge job, but that was actually the effect I was going for - the random graffiti effect and the natural heathering will give the yarn a very unique and completely unrepeateable character. Ic an't wait to knit with it!!!