Weekly Rundown

Although this week hasn't been as busy as the last couple of weeks, I've still been quite busy. Mostly busy doing things that I probably could've put off instead of avoiding the things I should've been busy doing, but anyway.

I got the results from my latest TMA back, with 75%. I still need to work on my introductions and conclusions but on the whole I seem to be improving. The next one is due on the 13th of February. I've also spent the last couple of days getting all caught up with the last three chapters of my course I have a terrible habit of giving myself a week off after each TMA which inevitably means that I end up rushing to get through material in the final week before my TMA study week.

It's not really helped by the fact that I've fallen a bit behind on my reading. I've been reading The Stories of English by David Crystal for the last few weeks and it's quite long. I enjoy reading non-fiction, particularly linguistics stuff, but you can't lose yourself in it in quite the same way as a good fiction book.

Oh, and I had forgotten to order the next three books which didn't help in getting to read them. Luckily I've had Swallows and Amazons read to me before, as well as watching adaptations of it before. I've read Tom's Midnight Garden before and although Roll of Thunder, Hear My Call is new to me, hopefully I'll get through it relatively quickly. I started Swallows and Amazons this morning and I'm already three or four chapters into it.

As for TV viewing this week; we're still watching Silent Witness and Friends. We've just finished watching series 9 and it's kind of sad to think that we're going to be watching the final series. We've got The Good Life to watch next though, so it's not all bad.

We've also finally started watching ER again. We were watching Friends in bed at night and ER while we ate our tea, but since the Blu-ray player doesn't always like the ER discs we've switched them round. It could be argued that this is for the best, since ER isn't always the best mealtime viewing. We're heading for the end of ER now as well, though we've still got a couple of series left to go.

As for films, well, we acquired three more Michael Caine films, so spent a good chunk of Saturday watching those. One seemed a bit like a made-for-TV movie and despite being on DVD was pretty bad visual quality. On the whole it was a fairly good film, picking up towards the end, but at times there were subtitles for people speaking German that were virtually unintelligible. The best of the three was The Fourth Protocol, with Pierce Brosnan, and had Michael Caine trying to prevent an atomic bomb attack.


I'm still working on my octopus. I love the Jean Greenhowe patterns, but as a character in Love Actually says eight is a lot of legs. I've finally finished knitting up all eight of them, and I've got three of the eight sewn up. I tend to alternate doing a leg with at least one hexipuff to keep myself from getting bored. Though I've recently realised that this is actually drawing out the process even longer and I'm better off just sucking it up and sewing them all up as I go along.

I'm trying to hold off knitting his scarf and hat until I've got all the legs complete and sewn on, so that the knitting is a bit of a reward to myself. But that hasn't stopped me from trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to work the stripe pattern on the scarf and hat.

And I've been hexipuffing like crazy. The photo above shows all bar one of the puffs that I've gotten finished up to this point. The Daily Puff group on Ravelry had a 'Rainbow Week' challenge, which although I didn't complete, encouraged me to try some new things that I wouldn't have thought about doing before.

Up until this week all of my puffs have just been plain stockinette stich, which while they look nice, doesn't make for a huge amount of variation. This challenge had me coming up with purled designs, having a go at cabling, playing with stripes and multiple colours on a puff, and also digging out a stitch dictionary that I bought years ago but never really did anything with until now. In the photo above you can see a slightly wonky looking VW logo that I did in green and yellow for Mr Click. I'm thinking I'll redo it in orange and white/silver to match our old campervan; I did it in Fair Isle which meant it's pulled to one side slightly but I think I'll redo it in duplicate stitch.

I'd set myself a challenge of 31 puffs this month and I've smashed it. I laid these all out to photograph and wound up with about six more than I was expecting. I'm going to try and get at least 30 each month. I'm also starting to think about how I'm going to join them all together. I don't want two puffs of the same colour touching each other and I'm thinking about putting designs onto more of them which symbolise important things to me and Mr Click; then I can sew them into groups of seven with a design at the centre. Then if I'm really clever I can have one half of the blanket with Mr Click's designs on it and the other half with mine, with stuff we share down the middle.

That's how it'll work in theory, anyway.