Just a quick note to say that Ferret's book will be launched at the Festival of Quilts, but you can pre-order it now, via her website. She'll even sign it for you!
I've seen some of her student's quilts, made using the pattern, and they are really good. It is a world away from the sampler quilt I started as a beginner's project.
I've got some news! But first you have to read the rest of the post :-).
The children seemed to enjoy the ancient Greek maths I talked about in the last post. I was a bit thrown by the boy whose dad had already shown him how to draw equilateral triangles. However, my book about maths showed you the next proposition from the Elements - how to copy the length of a line from one place to another, and the two of us worked through that together. He seemed to enjoy it.
What really impressed the children at the end was showing them how to draw a hexagon, using only ruler and compass.
There were several people helping and teacher organising the day mentioned that her mother (she is a young teacher) would be having a similar day at her school. So I muttered something about being willing to be run a similar session if the mother was interested.
And here is the news:
I had phone calls from people at two different schools.
One was from the aunt of one of the pupils. She was wondering if I'd be willing to a similar session for her school. (I was willing, but there has been no follow-up from there).
However the teacher's mother got in touch as well. It's all arranged: I will now be doing a similar session for a completely different age group at a completely different school.
This could be the start of something!
One idea I've toyed with for a while is the idea of learning Koine Greek so I can read the New Testament in the original. This is slightly (very slightly!) less daunting for someone with a maths/physics background, because so many of the letters are used to stand in for various parameters - lambda (λ) for wavelength, pi for 3.14, etc. Alpha, beta and gamma particles come in to nuclear physics (needed in astronomy), delta is a variable in calculus and so on.
However, I'd put that aside because it is more necessary to learn the seventeenth century language of Science: Latin.
This weekend I'd gone back to Greek, for tomorrow I will be teaching a session on ancient Greek mathematics for Year 5 (9 - 10 year olds). I couldn't find all the notes I'd made last year, so I was checking up Greek maths words still in use today. I stil get a small kick out of the fact that the modern words for parable and for parabola are the same in Greek (which came first? I wish I knew).
The topic I will teach is the Elements, the famous Greek geometry book used for 2000 years as the basis of geometry. And in my surfing, I came across this website, about learning Greek to be able to read the Elements. The text of the Elements that we have is written in the literary koinh/ typical of the 1st century AD it said.
So now comparing the Elements (second most published book) and the Bible has another strand: it uses the same language.
Now that it is nearly used up, the ball of Kid Silk Spray glows translucent in the morning sun.
But will there be enough to finish the sleeve?
As I get closer to the end, with six rows to go (and the casting off), it is looking uncertain...
Having shown you some of the material, I ought to show you the resulting purse (that's purse in the UK sense of coin purse):
Opening it up, you can see several of the pockets. The front pocket and the one behind are from the material shown here - the back of that fabric is completely plain.
The pattern was the Lazy Girl Designs Wonder Wallet: 
(I didn't use all the material in the background)
Firstly it is simple to make: it took me less then two hours, and I was going quite slowly, admiring it at intervals. Secondly, the pattern is well-written. You have to read it through first, but there are no places where the instructions are unclear. I think if I made it again I might make the opening for the change pocket narrower (you'd see what I mean if you had the pattern in front of you). Also I'd consider a popper to keep the back pocket shut.
So over all, a thumbs-up from me.
I found my missing knitting needle. It was in the door pocket on the driver's side.
I have not yet worked out how it could have got there - if I'd put it somewhere in the car, I'd have put it on the passenger seat. But I'm just glad I found it.
This will be me this morning: there is a planned electricity outage in the village this morning
see more Funny Graphs
Secondly, I thought I'd nearly finished my waistcoat. That was until I tried putting it together and it became obvious the armholes were much to big. However because I'd changed the stripe pattern on the back, I needed to frog back to that and change it back. Lots of knitting, but it was also the s'n'b night. By this point, there was one needle upstairs with my knitting, where I had been trying it on, and one downstairs: I took everything downstairs and made sure I put the downstairs needle in my bag.
I got to the knitting group, did my frogging, and went to start my knitting. But I only had one needle. They are an unusual size, between 8mm and 9mm, so no-one else had one I could borrow. I had no alternative project, and no-one had brought along any spare magazines. It was this project or nothing. Luckily the wool was quite 'sticky': so I did a rather convoluted thing of putting the stitches on a (borrowed) smaller needle, knitting onto my needle, pulling the needle out and putting the stitches onto a small needle again.
When I got home, I looked in all the places where my needle might be, it wasn't there. I think I must have taken it to knitting, and while I was frogging, it dropped silently to the floor and rolled off. Normally when it is time to go home, I stay and help tidy up the hall, but last night there was someone going early and my car was blocking her in. Seeing as I had to move my car, I drove home anyway (the space is constricted, and parking again would have been a complex process). Hopefully someone spotted it and picked it up, and will return it next time. In the meantime, I'll just have to continue with the removing stitches marlarky.
This picture makes me very happy for two reasons.
1) Firstly, I am making the purse pattern bought on Friday. The intent was to make it using oddments different stash fabrics, so I selected some stash to make it with, photographed the fabric and ironed it. But when I unfolded this L-shaped piece, I realised that the fat leg was exactly 6.5 inches wide: I have a long-term project that involves squares of fabric that have sides 6 to 7 inches long.
Reviewing the sizes needed for the purse, I could cut out two pieces (marked 1 and 2 in the picture), the 6.5 inch square (marked 3) and that would leave me a selvage piece (marked 5) and a single other piece which was approximately 14 inches by 2.5 inches (marked 4). Having such neat pieces left over makes me feel happy.
2) Secondly I now know more about using the GIMP graphics program then I did this morning. (Noted here for future reference.)
To draw the straight lines, you go to the Tools menu on the image pane and select "Paths". Click on the original image for the first end, and then again at the other end. This effectively shows the ruler you are about to draw along.
Then go to the edit menu, and select "Stroke Path". This gives a pop up window, allowing you a variety of options for the line. I selected "Sroke with a paint tool" and my tool was pencil.
The numbers were added using the text tool.
Remember the pansy fabric I bought on the shop hop?
Well I bought some more.
At the shop hop, they were handing out 10% off voucher for June as the shop is moving at the end of the month. So I had a day out today, taking in the nearby garden centre and Ikea as well.
I bought to the end of the bolt of the small pansy fabric - 1.45m, so not too extreme. I got 1.5 m of the large pansy fabric. There was also a fabric with just purple pansies, so I got a metre of that as well.
The other purchase was a pattern for making a purse, and the velcro necessary to finish it. The pattern isn't on their website.
Unfortunately the weather today was not conducive to washing and drying it rapidly. And tomorrow I have my Latin tutoral.
Whenever I try and take photos of our front garden from our front door, we get a wonderful view of a neighbour's car. It's not their fault, it is just the way our houses and garages are laid out. From other different angles, the photos have our other neighbour's garden providing a beautiful backdrop, but fooling casual viewers into thinking they must be part of our garden. So, much as I love our front garden, I've never put up pictures.
Today, however, the neighbours opened their garden in the National Garden Scheme. Of course, I went to have a look, and I got a quite reasonable view of our front bed. 
The wall is the boundary between our garden and the shared driveway. The roses are in our neighbour's garden: the two little beds you can see clearly make up half our front garden: the other half is very similar, but hidden by the rose bush. The paths with the wide paving slabs go round our house, although you can just see where the path changes to gravel. You can't see our lovely statues: two Easter Island style heads (bought ten years ago, when they were unusual) and a rock with a Celtic Cross carved into it.
We didn't just visit one garden but walked through the village and utilised a sneaky footpath. This led us through a field completely full of buttercups.
It put me in mind of Wordsworth's host of daffodils.
During the weekend, the whole family painted the summerhouse. It had been plain wood, both outside and inside: now the outside is "wild thyme" and the inside "country cream", like the colours of the arbour in the link here. Suddenly it has become a place for the children to hide away in, to flop on the chair in there, to read, to chat, even to take the laptop.
There are on-line transformations as well.
I might over-think things, but I feel that my avatars and blogger profile pictures must be personal and unique. This can be tricky: I can't use a picture made by anyone else and I can't use a picture of an object made by someone else. Hence no balls of wool, or knick-knacks of any type. No matter how lovely a photo I could take of my favourite material, it's a no goer as far as avatars are concerned.
My blogger picture features a bag I made some time ago, but by the time I needed avatars for Ravelry, the bag was worn out and no longer in regular use. So I used the photo I had taken of the fabric pieces which Kate sent me a while ago and cropped the background out. I've been using it every since.
However, I've been wondering whether it is time for a change of picture. Not any old picture but a specific one. This specific photo has many meanings for me. It is of a place that is specifically connected with the future I want to create, it is the actual place where an exciting future will be forged.
However, it is also a symbolic picture. It reminds me that when you look ahead at an apparent dead-end, it might just be that you can't see the way out. It reminds me that sometimes the path is all you can see. It reminds me that the other possibilities and the destination are unknown and unexpected. It also reminds me that just because the path looks constricted, there can be choices at the end.
But to change it all at once, I feel, would make me unrecognisable. So yesterday evening, I experimented and played and finally came up with a series of images which enable me to slowly change my old avatar for my new one. The new look is only slightly different, just like dying your hair is only a slight change in appearance:
PS I did want to have this picture as my blog header, but the one I took is fuzzy and out-of-focus on the large scale. It looks fine in the small scale, such as a 100 pixel square (or the screen on a camera), but not on the large scale. Well, I took two, the fuzzy one, and the badly composed one.
