I am SO CROSS.

Last night I dreamt that Sean Bean was giving me a piggyback and jokingly said "fancy a shag" to which I said yes (obviously) and he was delighted (I think I was someone else) so we went to find a venue. The cottage we were near turned out to be full of my grandmother and her friends and family, the environs of the cottage which should have been very rural and full of helpful hidden places turned out to be built up and wet after the rain anyway, but we lucky found a hotel, run by McDonald's. They were full up for a wedding, but said that we could get a room for about 4 hours to "have a nap as we were tired from the plane journey we'd just come off". However, when they gave me the forms to fill in, they were trying to charge the room to the parents of the bride, and when I tried to explain and asked to pay myself, they accused me of trying to defraud them, even though I NEVER SAID that I was part of the bridal party. And then I woke up, so my sex dream about Sean Bean turned into ADMIN, and not the satisfying kind, the kind where other people's incompetence WRECKS THINGS.

Bookswap haul

I went to the bookswap yesterday, which Nuala hosted in her lovely house. I made cinnamon brownie muffins, which are chewy and rather nice, and tried to make mini doughnut muffins (milk-free), which were a failure. Today I might do some more baking and take it into work. I was going to make gammon and pear casserole, but I think it uses sweet potato, which I forgot to buy any of.

I was comparatively restrained and only came away with 9 books, one of which was knitting patterns, so doesn't even really count.



I feel I have a nice mix there. I recently went through my shelves to winnow down the amount on them, and took out all the ones I wouldn't want to either reread or refer back to or lend to someone else, or just have to have them. What I also did was take off all the things I want to keep but haven't read, and piled them up on the floor to have at hand. I'm trying to work through these before buying new books or rereading books. Here they are:



So that's 151 books I need to read (not including the separate books within one set of covers). I do want to read all of them, at some point, just... not as much as I want all the other books in the world as well.

( Here are the books in more detail if you wanted to see. )

The bookswap also featured a yarnswap. There was a lot of beautiful yarn - I got some kidsilk haze, which I've never knitted with before, some light green merino, some lovely Chilean variegated alpaca, and enough gold silk yarn and beads to make an amazing beaded shawl. Now I have sorted through all my yarn (something I should probably have done properly beforehand), and I really, really have to start some projects. I have three aborted projects to finish frogging, and a cardigan that I have been stalled on for FIVE MONTHS. The pattern is wrong, and I'm at the same bit for the fifth time of starting where I have finished the chart, and I need to start calculating for bust darts, but it's also the bit where I'll find out if it's too big AGAIN and probably have to start again. I was determined not to let the pattern beat me, but I'm not sure I can bear starting again.

So in order to get back in to knitting I think I'm going to start an entirely new project to get me back into the swing of it. Unfortunately my ravelry browsing has mostly led me to patterns I love for yarn I don't have, and that is not at all the point.

Maybe I could make these pretty fingerless mitterns, probably in some fyperspates sparkly sock yarn I got in the yarn swap anglaisepaon ran a few years ago. Or does anyone have an idea of what I could make with 1300m of Kidsilk haze? or 800m of drops Alpaca? or 700m of merino fingering? or, ooh, 1500m of dk linen? THERE IS TOO MUCH CHOICE AND NEVER ENOUGH YARN.