Green and Fragrant

I think I mentioned visiting Yumchaa in Soho the other day? I enjoyed the exotic green tea ('Regent's Park') I had there so much, I got a packet to take home with me. How pretty does it look decanted into a glass jar?

 

It looks like a sort of magical forest terrarium, I think, and it has been scenting my mornings with sweet papaya and strawberries in a cup. 

Brooding over my hat fail, I cast on some green socks, which will be my companions on another pitiless ten-hour Megabus journey tomorrow. 

Also today, I went to see From Death to Death and Other Small Tales, a fantastic free exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Here's me amid my favourite piece of the exhibition, Ernesto Neto's 'It happens when the body is anatomy of time' - great, crazy lycra tubes weighted down with spices. 

The whole room is an olfactory sensation. I'm sorry to keep comparing everything to a magical forest, but that is exactly what this feels like: an enchanted glade of sweet-smelling, elongated elephant's legs. Highly recommended. 

From Edinburgh Mitt Love

I have just finished these fingerless mitts and sent them off to their southerly recipient (with some regret, as it’s starting to get proper Baltic here in Edinburgh). I started them on one of the grimmest bus journeys imaginable, and these little guys kept me company through ten toiletless hours. The basic pattern was this one by the Purl Bee, but I quickly tired of the 2x2 ribbing. Perhaps I should have been alerted by the name ‘the purl bee', that this was a bee who favoured the simple pleasures of the purl stitch above fancy fripperies; who, indeed, may not have been capable of designing far beyond the basics of knit and purl, being a bee. On the other hand, what if the bee could hold a tiny knitting needles in each of its six insect-y legs – what then could it not do? Anyway, I decided to throw in a little freaky free-styling with cables and slip-stitches. The challenge then was to try and match said free-styling on the second glove – a challenge which I absolutely failed at: these are some mismatched mitts. But then, hopefully that just lends them a charming hand-made uniqueness? Yeah? Yeah.

I made my mitts in  Dream In Color Smooshy in the colourway 'Chocolate Night'. I highly recommend this yarn (which I think I got here) - the yardage is fantastic, it comes in a number of beautiful semi-solid colours, and is a real sturdy workhorse. The one downside for the British knitter is that as an Australian merino dyed in America, it’s far from virtuous in terms of yarn miles, but as an environmentally-unsound treat, I think it’s ok. The colour is pretty similar to the colour in the Purl Bee photos, and indeed to that I made my Evolution Mitts in all that time ago (which seem to have gone missing. I suspect my mother - the hand model in these photos. I swear that woman is building some sort of a woolly fort with ill-gotten knits of mine). I really was sad to see these hand-warmers go; I’m writing this in a charmingly petite French café in Stockbridge, and imagining that these might be just the sort of mitts that Amélie Poulain might have worn to ward off the Parisian chill. Perhaps I shall make another pair for myself, and magic loop ‘em both at once to ensure identicality. Hmm.

What’s on your needles, readers? If there are any readers?

A Close Secret

I love the windy closes that extend away from Edinburgh's Royal Mile like veins on a leaf. Their unassuming, dark entrances provide no clue as to what treasures lie beyond. I chanced upon this one on a wander while on the phone.

Dunbar's Close garden, off the Royal Mile

I had to draw on powerful reserves of altruism in order to blog about this peaceful plot of orderly vegetation; perhaps a secret garden should by definition be a private pleasure, lest it become, simply, a known garden. Not to be confused with a gnome garden.

Anyway, I highly recommend Dunbar's Close for those weary of foot or spirit - or those who entertain fantasies of being a seventeenth-century lady, taking turns about the garden before finding a sunny patch to do some stitching. 

Salisbury Crags

A little while down the Mile, the landscape in front of the Parliament ('here for tae represent aw Scotlan's folk') is provides a more dramatic background to my knitting. As for what I'm working on - that is a close secret too, for the moment.