Oolong knits

La Maison Rililie is one of my favourite designers and the BlueSand Cardigan is her most popular pattern. A must for stripes' lovers.

I applied for an allotment site, but, there was such a long waiting list, I expected it would take years to get one. I was very lucky and I got one in less than a year. It is not a great plot. There is nothing but weeds, grass and trash in it. It is small, because, in order to accommodate more people in the waiting list, they have divided already relatively small plots in half. Part of it floods and its soil is pure clay, part of it is half pebbles half soil, most of it is not flat but very irregular. But, some of it has surprising good soil under the grass. So not everything is bad. We have already dug and dug for hours and managed to recover some soil and plant some things. I have found that my initial estimate of one meter square per hour of digging per person is actually optimistic. It is only a good estimate when the soil is in good condition with not too many stones or trash or hard to remove weeds. If I sound a bit negative, it is not that I am, just realistic. The truth i...

A lot of shawls and scarves look great stretched out, but all the beautiful lace or colour work is lost when wrapped around the neck. Not true for Russel Street by Megan Doherty. A very simple idea, but not so easy to execute. Kudos for the designer. I love the result and may try this one for myself.

Anke Telschow's Loop 66 is a cowl, but what really attracted me to this pattern is the very unusual stitch. It is not done with slipped stitches, it is a type of tuck stitch. I love the way the right and wrong sides look so different and both so beautiful. Hard to decide which one is which, isn't it?

Soil, water and sun are the three most important things in gardening. Where I live, water is taken care of naturally and gardeners never have to worry about it. If plants do not like a lot of water, they will not thrive and there is nothing one can do about it, except keeping them undercover. Sun is another matter as there is not much to go around, not even in south facing gardens (not even if the sky is blue!). But most plants still do well with what is available. Although my garden is north facing, so I am always on the look out for plants who do not mind a bit of shade. Soil can be more tricky. To begin with, there are different types of soil, according to the RHS : Clay soils are heavy, high in nutrients, wet and cold in winter and baked dry in summer Sandy soils are light, dry, warm, low in nutrients and often acidic Silt soils are fertile, light but moisture-retentive, and easily compacted Loams are mixtures of clay, sand and silt that avoid the extremes of each type...

Corrosion by Julie Nandorfy is a very simple textured cowl. It is really the lovely yarn that makes it stand out. But I do love texture and I sometimes simple is just the best way to go.

In this post I am going to give you some reasons to invest your money on your own and some reasons not to do it. Bookshops are full of books that promise to teach how to become rich by investing your meagre savings on your own. And so is the internet full of webpages. There is one good reason for this: very low interest rates. Usually finance advisers charge a percentage for their services. In the past, it was relatively easy to make returns that were well above this percentage and hence most people did not consider it necessary to go to the trouble of learning about investment themselves. However, in the last decades, getting high returns has become a lot more difficult. It is already non trivial to simply beat inflation and it takes a lot more to "beat the market". The result is that, except if you can afford really good advice, you can see your returns being significantly diminished after paying the fees, that is, if you are lucky. If you are unlucky, you may even loose...

I love the idea behind the construction of this sweater: a lace panel (knitted sideways) and a very visible 3-needle bind-off in the middle. Bolan by Leila Raabe.