Monday
Today Steve and I did the Darn Walk again, this time with a lovely lady Tricotonrideau (Danielle), on Ravelry, from Ottowa, We were supposed to meet with Modeknit, (Annie), but my messages didn't reach her in time! Danielle took this picture of me while we were on the walk.
I was smelling the flowers and didn't even know I had been snapped!
During the afternoon, I sat and knitted and knitted in the part of the Uni called the Atrium. I tried to catch as many paople as possible to sign a card for Jo.
No pictures of the tea party, I'm sorry, but Jo didn't want anyone to take any. She had had so much pressure from so many quarters and all sorts of things that I don't want to mention here had not gone according to plan! Steve took a pic of me with Ewa Kuniczak, here is a link to her website
http://www.feltheadtotoe.com/ She is a lovely lady and SO full of fun!
Here is a picture of the finished lap throw for Jo, which was given to her at the Clapotea Party. Thank you to everyone who contributed! Jo was very touched by it.
I hope you all aprove of the way I finished it.
Tuesday
Today was the day I had enrolled to be with Liz Lovick all day for her Introduction to Fairisle workshop. What a lovely lady! If ever you get the chance to work with her...jump at it! She is a great teacher! She will put you at ease straight away! Whether she is teaching you a knitting or a spinning technique, she will teach you that it's ok to make mistakes, after all, as she says, with knitting, you can always put them right!
Here is the link to her website:
http://www.northernlace.co.uk/NIFA10.html
While we were busy having fun in a rather hot classroom, Steve took himself off on a train trip (such a chore for him!), to Perth. He spent the time having a look round. He said that Perth is a good shopping centre which still retains many of the smaller independant shops and has a brilliant toy shop!
Wednesday
Today began wet. We had planned to go up to Abbey Craig, but thought that the paths would be rather soggy. We therefore hopped on a train and went to Edinburgh. On arriving there, it was still raining, rather hard by that time and we weren't sure exactly what we wanted to do, so we hopped on a tour bus for a described ride all over the city. We learned where Robert Louis Stevenson had spent his time writing. How the streets of the city had got their names, and where the Irish had settled when they had migrated from their homes during the time of the Potato Famine, amongst many other facts. During the circuit, a Museum of Childhood was mentioned. I thought this might be interesting, with the added attraction of being free of charge. If ever you find yourself in Edinbourgh, do go! It amazing! There are four floors dedicated to toys! Unfortunately Edward Murray, although a collector of childhood items, seemed not to have liked children very much, but you can read more about that on your visit. Here is a link to the museum, with it's address:
http://www.gnws.co.uk/edinburgh/childhood.htm
We arrived back at Anam Cara where we stayed, after a tea of scampy and chips at Allan Water Cafe. Here's the link:
http://www.allanwatercafe.co.uk/
The yogurt icecream is very good too!
Thursday
Today we once again chickened out of doing the walk we have been promising ourselves all week! It was wet again over night, so once again we took a trip out on the train. This time, it was to see the Falkirk Wheel.
This was my first ever attempt at video on Steve's camera! Hope you think it's ok!
Friday
During the morning Steve andI had a date with a dye pot! We had a morning clss booked with Debbie Tomkies, Debbiet on Ravelry. We had so much fun playng with colour!
Aren't these colours fantastic? This is just a selection of colours produced by our class.
Have we been together too long We didn't discuss the colours we were going to use, but here is the result. Mine at the top, Steve's beautiful randon yarn at the bottom!
We knew we would need to conserve energy for the evening, I will come to that later! But there was a very local walk that we had been planning all week but never got round to. Up behind the university, which used to be a country estate complete with loch and castle, there is a wall, now falling down in places, with many gateways to the mountains out from the uni, take one of the pathways through a gateway and you find yourself clibing steeply! We didn't go right to the top, but through a lovely piece of woodland until we found a road. The road led us back down to Bridge of Allan. We then walked to the station where we took a train to Stirling where we knew our card for the savings account would work.
