A Day Out in the Sunshine

Today, after three days, stuck inside doing the part-time retail job, I have been let out for a day.

First we went to Leek in Staffordshire where we scoured the charity shops and I found this -

Then we went here and I bought all manner of lovely goodies.

There was fibre like this -

That's not all for me - some of it is to make a birthday present for my MIL.

And I got my own birthday present a little bit early - Ashford Hand Carders -

And they had lots and lots of wonderful books ( could have spent an absolute fortune there!) but I was quite restrained and I just got two -

That's the Ashford Book of Carding (so I can learn how to use my new carders properly) and the Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook (which I had wanted for ages but had never actually seen a copy of).

And then we carried on to Ashbourne in Derbyshire (only another 12 miles or so) a it was such a lovely sunny spring day. The Staffordshire Moorlands were beautiful and we saw lots of sheep with tiny lambs.

So we had a mooch round Ashbourne which was is a really nice town with proper little shops (bakeries and ironmongers and toyshops and all manner of things), the like of which you hardly see anymore. We stopped in a fantastic little grocers shop which smelt like a grocers shop should, of ham and coffee and cheese. We bought coffee beans and handmade Yorkshire Crisps (they taste great but you probably shouldn't eat too many of them), and free range eggs from a farm just up the road. It was just my kind of town. And then I found these in a charity shop there -

Rowan Magazine #4, a Noro pattern book and a Jaeger pattern book.

So we're home now and I am looking forward to reading my books and spinning the lovely fibre and doing a little knitting - not necessarily in that order.