Things to make you go mmmmm!

It's a beautiful day. Crisp, sparkling air, ridiculously clear blue sky, and it's almost mild. A day to make you think hm, I think I've heard of this thing called spring, and now that you mention it, the days are getting longer... Not that I'm so foolish as to imagine it'll come anytime soon, you understand; I've been around, I'm sussed, I know there's at least a couple three months of winter left. Brrrr. But there's a theoretical possibility of a change of weather. Which is nice.

Although if we don't get some snow first, I'll sulk.

But it is a beautiful day, and I had a good workout (yay me!), and on the way back from gym I saw that there's a charity shop about to open on Lamb's Conduit Street. Which is excellent news, because here in London town, the stock of charity shops tends to directly reflect the neighbourhood they're in. And Bloomsbury's exactly the right sort of neighbourhood, and Lamb's Conduit is exactly the right sort of street, to maximise my chances of finding Cool Stuff. There won't be any £150 Max Mara coats, like at the Cancer Research shop in Marylebone High Street, but there also won't be a preponderance of Marks & Sparks, like in most Oxfams. So that made me happy too.

So it's a beautiful day, and I went to gym, and I've just eaten a hot cross bun to negate any dangerous side effects of gymming (like weight loss; we don't want me wasting away. Oh, we do? Oh... ), and I have a new thrift shop to look forward to, and any day now - any day - the latest Vogue Knitting should be popping through my letterbox. And I have some freelance work to do, which is a tiresome distraction from knitting, but very welcome income boost. And last night I finally made it past the planning/swatching/calculating stage and cast on a full 192 stitches, and the nobbly-bobbly-holey tunic has begun. I knit again.

Aside: I'm trying to knit like a grown-up now. This means resisting the temptation to just get started and work it out as I go along; it means swatching, and planning, and writing out as much as possible of the pattern before I start, and it also means keeping one page for rough calculations and another to record what I actually do (because usually I make notes, and scribbles, and changes, all on one page, and then when I come to knit the next piece, for some mysterious reason I get confused. Strange), and drawing a schematic right at the start to show what measurements I'm trying to work with. Very grown-up.

And I have discovered something fascinating about swatching. I always treated swatches as purely a tension test, or possibly a sample to see whether I liked a particular stitch pattern, but not much of that. But with my last few efforts, I tried also to approach it in the proper grown-up designer way, to see what happens if I use these colours, or try that pattern change, and whether these yarns actually do work together at all. It's been remarkably enlightening. Because what always seems to happen is this: I do a swatch, I make a few improvements, I finally finish with a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't, and I put it aside with a revised plan in my head and go to sleep. And then I wake up with, not just a good idea, but the fully formed absolute certainty of what's right or wrong, and what to do about it (give up, in one case, until I have a different yarn selection). Which bears only the most tenuous relation to the plan I had before bed. Somewhere in my subconscious, there's a bunch of elves scribbling away on the drawing board, fixing things for me while I sleep. I like that. They're much smarter than me.

Er, yes, so. There is knitting to do, and magazines to anticipate, and work to finish. And it's a beautiful day. And the only thing that would make it better would be if Beloved were awake to enjoy it with me, and not working night shift all weekend. But he is (sigh). But that means some more money. So that's good too.

It's a good day.