Special yarn

Remember this?

And this?

And this? 

Well now I have this! 

I cannot tell you how excited and honoured I am to have a ball of yarn in a colourway that I have created. I absolutely love it and can't wait to share more photos with you as soon as I'm allowed to! In the meantime, you'll just have to make do with this little tease! xxx

Happy socks means happy feet

I have a thing about rainbows. They are beautiful and have that promise of something a little magical. I have a thing about rainbow yarn too! I looked at my stash on Ravelry for confirmation of that and this is what I found...

I'm sure there's more! This, dear reader, is most likely just the tip of the rainbow iceberg! I just don't seem to be able to resist the lure of all those lovely colours in one skein of yarn. Whilst I wouldn't wear a rainbow jumper, having happy rainbow feet is quite a different matter. So it was a rainbow skein (well, a rainbow cake actually) that I picked out when I wanted something to knit on a recent bus trip. You may recall I blogged about it here. 

These socks were one of my chosen projects to accompany me to Greece and I had plenty of beach knitting time. 

I was quite impressed with my stripe-matching skills too! There's usually a bit of guesswork going on, or I'm often not too precious about having matchy matchy socks. But it all just seemed to work out fine.

These have been given away as a present and made their new owner very happy. Do you have a particular colourway of yarn that you're always drawn to? xxx

Good for the soul

I did it! I made it to Greece! Despite a stressful journey out, where the travel gods were clearly testing my resolve (I ended up being on standby for the flight and had to plead for a ticket, and then it wasn't certain that my case had travelled with me!), I spent a week on my own in our special place on  the Greek island of Kos. During the week, I was able to remember so many wonderful, happy times spent there with Mr JK, and I felt his closeness the whole time I was there. Of course there were a few wobbles, especially when people were being super-kind to me because of what had happened. I spent the days on the beach with my knitting and kindle and was incredibly lazy. I ate at  the same two tavernas each day - one at lunch time where I could sit at a table overlooking the beach and indulge in some delicious salads, and in the evening, at our favourite taverna where I was looked after so well by Nikos. He was very concerned for my welfare and gave me extra wine and dessert each day. The Greeks are so warm and friendly, that I felt at home eating there and being on my own wasn't nearly such a big deal for me as I'd imagined it would be. There were things I found hard - going for walks to feed the cats (although I still did feed the harbour cats), sitting on the balcony of the apartment and enjoying a drink before going out for  the evening and then going to a bar on my own after dinner for a drink (I didn't manage to do that one the whole week.) But I am very, very pleased that I made the decision to go back to Kos as it helped me to focus on both the past and the future and I do feel strangely at peace at the moment. Someone commented on one of my Instagram posts that grief is a lifelong companion and you have to make your peace with it. This week has definitely helped me on that journey. Enjoy some photos of my week and I'll be back soon to share some finished socks with you. xxx