the dan hat

here has been quite a bit of knitting action through these winter months, but there's been so little light to take photographs that most of my works in progress remain undocumented. This hat is special though. For Christmas Dan bought me two skeins of Alice Starmore's Pebble Beach, which is every bit as spectacular as one would hope. He asked to have something made with the yarn and fortunately the Pebble Beach acted as a missing piece in the puzzle. Dan has needed a new hat for a while and I've been ruminating on a tweed stitch for a long time too. I combined it with Rowan Scottish Tweed 4 ply in Blue Mist, Apple and Sea Green from my stash and a mystery brown tweed from a cone I bought in a Kentish Town charity shop. I'm quite proud of the result, so proud in fact that I've spent my free time in the last week writing up the pattern. It's not my first design, but it's the most complete and elegant construction I've managed to date. It's up on Ravelry as a free download.

he pictures of Dan and the hat were taken at Alexandra Palace, just after we bought my very sparkly engagement ring from the antiques fair. Ally Pally was an apt place to get the ring, as it's where it all started for us almost seven years ago at our univeristy Summer Ball.

From disaster to hope: February begins

he most amazing thing about a garden at this time of year is how quickly it returns back to life. Even as I was looking at it and feeling completely despondent, that I had let all my previous years of hard work down, things were happening underground. As I've cleared up I've uncovered many things and already the garden looks like the stage is being set for springs arrival. It's hard to express how I feel about the winter honeysuckle, it's the centre of life in our garden and the very first thing to say hello to the new year. It flowers for weeks upon weeks and, thanks to the number of bird feeders hung in it, it's the centre of bird and bee life in our garden too.

s I cleared the leaves from the surface of the pond I found this amazing creature. A very beautiful and very fat frog (with a distinct scottish twang in it's croak of course). Dan and I are hoping that this frog is a girl frog that this will be the spring we finally get frogspawn. She/he was too fat to get through the pond net, so I gently removed some of the leaves and peeled away the net so it could escape into the pond proper.

'm now aware that the world has moved on a little and it's February. This is a relief to be honest, as January was rather crazed. We achieved great things in January - we completed on our flat so it's finally ours, Dan secured a job in Philadelphia and I wrote my first grant application. We also took one or other of the cats to the vet on a weekly basis, but that's another story. January 2011 was epic, but the rest of 2011 isn't likely to be any different. In the months to come this year we are going to get married and then emigrate to the US.