Finally got around to recycling a fave cardi (has beautiful glitterly bits in it – never found yarn like it…). It had felted a little too much, moths had got at it, and the arms had gone too long. And yet I couldn’t sling it. The British summer was forgotten this weekend, so whilst it was raining outside, I was sewing inside

I don’t think I’ve had so much watercress in my kitchen ever.
This lot was sent fresh from a friend’s farm and arrived in the post!
I’ve made a ton of tasty watercress soup, had watercress salad and watercress sandwiches for tea (a variation of cucumber sandwiches high tea fans; bread, butter, salt & pepper; crusts cut off!)

I’d been tempted to try this waffley, tweedish stitch for a while but could never make sense of the way the pattern was written.
Example patterns include exhaustive, but v. complicated abbreviations, and overly descriptive ones from an ancient ‘mon tricot’ (although this is let off, as it has an extremely helpful picture of double stitch / knit 1 below / K1B, and *900* stitches to peruse!).
Yesterday however, I found a Finnish website explaining how an Italian pattern made sense of it all, in a much easier fashion.. hooray for international knitting blogs!

I had a meeting with E (she just won this btw!) at the V&A on Friday and used it as an excuse to mooch about the gallery for a few hours. I saw my fave embroidered map, some beautiful tiles, this book exhibition and of course, had to check out the Supremes’ dresses at the same time! There were also some books published by Coracle on display – and this butter book leapt into my hands… A joint project between Coracle and the Cork Butter Museum (of course!) the book is made up of prints made with the original butter-wrapper printing blocks and collection of folklore, song lyrics, butter inspection notes and quotes. This appealed to the Goldtop side of me, and somehow reminded me of my favourite books – Sendak’s collection The Nutshell Library…

If you’re in town at all, do check out these amazing Aerogel sculptures by Liliane Lijn at the Riflemaker gallery on Beak Street. The ’space jelly’ contains interstellar dust collected by Nasa as part of their Stardust Project, and moulded by Lijn and Nasa during her residency there in 2005. The sculptures are housed upstairs in the dusty, wooden and creaky-floored Riflemakers – well worth a visit just to see the 17th century building itself – until the end of May.