How was your weekend?

We had a great weekend. I spent a while catching up on CRB (criminal records checks) admin for church on Saturday morning. I'm Child Protection Officer for our church and we have a lot of Sunday School Workers and youth workers at our 3 churches and it's been a while since I've had an admin session.

After lunch we met up with a friend,Jo, to go for a walk at a local beach. I forgot to bring my camera but it's our favourite beach to walk the dog so I've used some photos from a beautiful day in February last year. It was sunny on Saturday but not quite this sunny.

As soon as we got to the beach we ran into another local knitwear designer, the lovely Tina Barrett (who designs regularly for several British magazines). I haven't seen Tina in far too long so we had a long chat. A little bit too long for Simon and our friend Jo who took the dog and went for a walk. By the time I'd finished talking they were long gone. So I walked along the beach till I found them coming back. So my 'walk' on the beach consisted of a long chat followed by a short walk. It was great seeing Tina again though.

There's a lovely beach cafe next to the beach with outdoor, sheltered seating. We decided we deserved hot drinks after our walk and seeing the cakes they had on offer, Jo and I decided we deserved cake too. I wish I'd taken pics of those. It was the best Victoria sponge I've tasted in a long time. A huge slice too.

Saturday evening Simon, Emily and I headed down to Truro to the Ben Cantelon concert at Truro Methodist Church. Ben Cantelon was the worship leader at Spring Harvest about three years ago and I've got his 2 albums. We all love his music. The concert was a mix of songs from his latest album, Everything in Colour, plus some classic worship songs by Tim Hughes. It was a great evening of precious worship and a very moving testimony by a young lady who had been sponsored through Compassion as a young girl in Uganda. My only complaint was that they opened the doors far too late. It was very cold to be kept waiting outside and the sound was too loud for a small venue. And that's not just me being old (or middle-aged as my kids keep telling me) as Emily said it was too loud too.

After church on Sunday I devoted the rest of the day to swatching. I crocheted some swatches for a couple of new design ideas then spent the rest of the day and evening knitting some swatches. Most of them were for some new lace designs so I can't share those yet.

I also knitted a fair isle tube for my upcoming Steeking workshops at Spin A Yarn and Purlescence. This morning I knitted a second tube. The first tube, on the right, is Rowan Felted Tweet. I love Felted Tweed but I got fed up with all the yarn that got stuck to my black dress. The blue and orange tube was knitted out of Knit By Numbers merino and took me 1.5 hours to knit this morning.

I've just noticed both swatches are photographed upside down. oops.

I'll be talking more about these swatches and my Steeking workshops later in the week. For those coming to the class one of these tubes will be home work prior to the class. Tomorrow I'll be cutting these two tubes up. Does the idea of cutting up your knitting fill you with panic? Feat not, book a space on one of my workshops instead. I'll show you the result of my steeking later this week.

This morning I was back to working on my deadline crochet project. I'm nearly 3/4 of the way through now. I'm hoping to get it finished by the end of the week but I have two knitting deadlines this week too (actually that's 3 knitting deadlines) and there's some finishing work and sewing up for me to do on those too.

How was your weekend?