Making fairisle arm warmers

Making fairisle arm warmers

This project has brought together threads from all sorts of unexpected and sometimes long forgotten thoughts. I am so keen to visit Fair isle now as well, all the Sottish Islands come to that. I rediscovered a beautiful book that I so enjoyed to read. From the very first page ‘Love for Lydia’ enchanted me with it’s gentle descriptive narrative of an english winter. It could have been here …. “Across the valley the floods of January, frozen to wide lakes of ice, were cut into enormous rectangular patterns by black hedgerows that lay like a wreckage of logs washed down on the the broken river. A hard dark wind blew straight across the ice form the north-east…… It was so cold that solid ice seemed to be whipped up from valley on the wind, to explode into whirlwinds of harsh and bitter dust that pranced about in stinging clouds. Ice formed everywhere in dry black pools, polished in sheltered places, ruckled with dark waves at street corners or on sloping gutters where wind had flurried the last falls of rain. Frost has begun in the third week of January, and from that date until the beginning of April it did not leave us for a day. All the time the same dark wind came with it, blowing bitterly and savagely over long flat meadows of frozen floods.”

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Making a capsule wardrobe of extraordinarily pretty things

Making a capsule wardrobe of extraordinarily pretty things

Recently I went to see the film ‘Little Women’ (twice). Have you seen it? It is Greta Gerwig’s new interpretation of the novel and I loved every second of it. In fact I was so enamoured of it that it plunged me into the world I used to inhabit as a teenager of Victorian style fantasy. I always desperately wished that I could wear the clothes of days gone by when women looked like women and wore what I may describe as ‘extraordinarily pretty things’. I remember when we were over the US a few years ago and we took the kids to Gettysburg. Driving away from it, I saw a shop selling civil war costumes - Scarlett O’hara style for sure. Oh how I wanted a crinoline dress. My husband laughed ‘what on earth would you do with it… wear it do the washing up???’ Of course he is right - I am neither actress or a drama queen. But after seeing ‘Little Women’, I saw lots of ideas that could easily be adapted to today’s wardrobe, which in my case, would absolutely have to include jeans.

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