Christmas cheer!

D, Mollie and I went away for three days over Christmas, coming home yesterday. We stayed in a rural part of Staffordshire in a dog friendly B&B, surrounded by Labradors (two other guests and eight who lived there!) and just having a lovely time.

I spent a lot of time with my Rico cotton finishing the bathmat:

And finally on Christmas evening, it was done:

We also took a trip to Leek on the 24th and stumbled on the yarn shop in the quaintest arcade – which was having a Christmas Eve sale! I normally look up yarn stores and I hadn’t, so this was a genuine bonus. D took Mollie to a cafe (it was in an arcade so we were outside but inside if you see what I mean! I bought 10 balls of mocha coloured Debbie Bliss babycashmerino (as previously mentioned this is probably my favourite yarn that isn’t Noro) and four balls of King Cole Riot. This particular yarn is new to me and I just think the colour way is so sophisticated I had to have it.

The shop was The Wool Shop in Getliffe’s Yard; it was very well stocked with lots of brands and with a good price range. I don’t think they had any local hand dyed skeins or anything I couldn’t have got elsewhere but it’s definitely worth a visit. My only mild grumble was that while the women in the shop were perfectly pleasant to me, they were more interested in chatting to eat other and people they knew that popped in than to me. I was in the mood to buy wool and quite possibly might have spent considerably more than I did.

Next door was Sweetpea & Boo, a fabulous boutique that sold hand made collars and leads… Oh as soon as saw it we were always going to come home with something!

My wonderful D proved he is the perfect husband for a yarn obsessed person on Christmas Day by giving me some 4mm Knit Pro Cubics and two glorious skeins of Countess Ablaze DK yarn in the Bounty Hunter colourway. I hadn’t added them to a list and they hadn’t come from my LYS Marmalade Yarns (a shop he has quite wisely in the past gone into and put himself in the hands of the lovely owners) so he had made an effort to remember I’d been excited about a purchase from The Countess six weeks or so ago and also that I’d said I wanted to try the Cubics after Sam bought an entire set at the Knitting & Stitching show!

He also gave me other lovely gifts including a Cath Kidston backpack to match my little handbag, a Kindle and Chris Hadfield’s You Are Here – Around the World in 92 Minutes, which is fantastic. He also, rather more randomly, decided to wrap up two bottles of shower gel and two deodorants so he had some little gifts to put in my stocking…! He is adorable.

Other knitty gifts came courtesy of my lovely friends Sam & Josh who provided this amazing sock knitting book and some sock yarn you just unravel as you knit from a machine knitted piece!

While Mum gave me these very useful Knit Pro blocking mats.

I have had a lovely Christmas time and was very lucky to have both time to crochet and to receive all the gifts I was given. I hope you also had a wonderful time and were similarly spoiled.

Now, after a little tidying up, I get to decide what my next project is!