frippery, my arse

Okie dokie.  Have recovered from the fug of gloom which seems to go hand in hand with the end of Christmas and I am feeling pretty positive. 

All the Christmas decs are down, packed away and up in the loft once more.  That helps.  Incidentally, there were heated discussions over the storage of these, in so far as that I insisted on buying a couple (more) plastic boxes and purpose-made bags for the tree and wrapping paper.  The result is that getting it all away was easier, neater and will not be dust-damaged next December.  The other result was that I received the standard lecture on frivolous money wasting fripperies which led on to further, not complimentary opinions on my other non-frugal qualities.  Ya di ya.  This from someone who puts on the central heating rather than put on a jumper.  And I am a hypocrite.  Apparently. 

I am of the opinion that some frippery, providing you are not taking food from the table nor the shirt from your child's back, is quite justified if it makes life a little sweeter.  And I am sick to death of struggling with odd sized cardboard boxes and reams of sellotape.  Every year for about the last ten years I have sworn I will get plastic boxes for the decs.  This was my year.  ha ha.

What else....hmmm.  Well, Oliver sat down and pasted together a timetable of which subjects he wants to tackle on a daily basis, and I am very confident it will be successful.  We are trialling it from Monday, I reckon a month should give us an idea if it will work for us.  Bear in mind each 'subject' will take 15-45 mins TOPS depending on interest levels, this is not beyond him, and personally I believe it will be better to  do both daily things in the morning, and chill out together in the afternoon.  I really want him to understand the concept of work=reward, so if he wants an afternoon/day off, then he has to look at his timetable and adjust accordingly - and in advance of 'time off'.  I will not allow us to drift on this. 

Let's have a crochet update.  I started a ripple blanket (sorry again Kim) at the end of November, and think I have reached the halfway point.  I am really enjoying this, and love the rich colours.  This yarn (Rico baby classic) was purchased to do my 'big blanket' (granny squares), but since that particular WIP stalled suddenly, I am using it to ripple.  I have read on many blogs about yarn being 'lovely to work with' and been very sniffy about this theory, but I have to say that working with a soft yarn is smoother on the senses.  If you know what I mean. 

My granny stripe which I started in France for Oliver is hanging around the halfway mark too, but temporarily sheved in favour of rippling. 

In the last few days, I have been poking around in this book which I had for Christmas:

I have done a couple of these squares, which I very much like, and then decided I would knock out a few in different colours of the 'middles' of these.  Will post about how that turns out another time.

My Christmas journal is done all bar the shouting.  The A5 folder is not big enough, so it is currently housed in two folders - a very unsatisfactory solution.  I am looking for an A5 lever arch file - seemingly very tricky. Pleased with how that turned out.

Onwards and upwards my friends.