Goings On's in Clare

Well where will I start?

I have been away for the last few blissful days, in Clare, in the cottage, chilling out.

The idea was that we spent a few days doing a bit of work on the cottage, painting and such-like. It was also Micheáls birthday so we wanted to be away for that.

We arrived at the cottage very late on Tuesday night (there were train strikes going on and the traffic was horrendous even going from work to Micheáls place so we decided to wait and let the worst of it die off) so we were pretty wrecked and pretty much fell into bed. We did of course have a chance to check out the place before we did so, and came across these in the conservatory:

The conservatory gets the full whack of sunshine whenever it cares to grace us with its presence and we never thought that leaving candles there would be a problem.

Pretty funny eh?

We made sure that the fresh ones we put there were removed when we left this time!

So the weather was windy and wet for the majority of time we were there, apart from the odd few hours, and Saturday.

We did some cutting back of hedges, putting up the post-box and painting of the hallway and bathroom (although I did some preparation for the painting, I wasn’t actually involved in it, preferring to watch the Munster match in the pub with friends!).

We took a trip here

Saturday, Micheáls Dad came down to help, and we met him in Corofin where I was meeting my friend and went to her Mums place for cups of tea (and drooling over her gorgeous Siamese and Burmese cats) before we went to Ballyvaughan (through the Burren) for lunch. The lads then headed off to paint while I stayed on to watch the match.

Fantastic game, and of course Munster swept the board with Biarritz (sorry Isabelle in France (or should I say Switzerland at the moment!!) but they were the better team!)

You can check it out here

I took my time coming back through part of the Burren, nothing to do with prolonging the inevitable painting, honest! It was a lovely bright day and I was enjoying the drive.

Part of the drive brought me up a windy road, and at the top of the road there was a point to stop and get out to admire the view. It was impossible to capture the view, to tell you the truth, it was fantastic.

Windy road below, Burren to the left and the right, and the sea right at the bottom.

Sheep in the fields to the left, making their presence known by all the baa-ing they were doing.

Plenty of places to explore at our leisure the next few times we are down in Clare. Spread it out!

There were plenty of crafty shops along this route, mainly aimed at tourists, but I came across a couple of interesting things, which have given me more food for thought

Despite the fact we were away for 5 days, I actually don’t have many knitted items to show. I bought some yarn at the shop in Ennis that I found, in order to make a bag from it, then looked at the yarn and decided to play around with it a bit first. I started making a mitred square (along the lines of what Sharon and Isobel are doing), and although I have no photos to show you at the moment, this is the yarn I’m using:

The one on the left is Sirdar, the same yarn I used to make Sherri's Bag, (must put up pattern for it sometime this year!) and the one on the right is the yarn I bought in Ennis (details of the shop will be found in the olannban site shortly)

I think if this works out well, it may be a secret project for someone that I know reads this blog (but never comments!!) so it may be a while before there are pictures. I successfully finished 2 mitred squares anyway during the time.

I also worked on this:

For a friend of M’s, whose birthday is this week.

And this took a long time to get where it is now. I cast on 180 stitches, worked one row, increased into every stitch, worked one row, increased into every stitch…. can you work out how many stitches that makes? 720, that’s how many! And then if that wasn’t enough stitches to be working on, I decided that as the yarn I was using was so thin (3 ply), I would do a yarn over after every stitch in order to lengthen the work slightly (in fact I started off with doing a 2 yarn over, but after about 10 stitches it was already becoming obvious that something had to go- my hands or the double yarn over…). So, about 3 hours later, and not all in the one go either, I had a row with yarn overs after every stitch, and ready to knit the next row, dropping the yarn overs as I went. It became easier after that row was finished, I can tell you!!

So, I’m now ready to work one last row and then cast off. I am wondering however, should I cast off using this:

It’s a mohair yarn, nice pink colours with bits of yellow and green in it. What do you think? Would it compliment it?

Any suggestions would be appreciated!!

posted by tangelled angel @ Wednesday, May 24, 2006