This is the last paper bag series, the bag is one of my own, not one I managed to steal from Belinda. The interesting thing about noticing an object as simple as a paper bag is how it sets ideas off in the brain. This orange one triggered off a memory of 70′s plastic chairs, wooden floorboards and small furry animals… We have recently acquired a Syrian Hamster called Pumpkin and there is a clue in her name as to her beautiful ginger colour, she is not featured on this weeks mood board as she is a bit of a Martin Margiela hamster and wants anonymity, so we found a picture of a very cute Guinea Pig instead!

So its an Orange Monday today.



Another thing …

Nothing to do with knitting but a lot to do with me…

I felt it important to mention that it is 30 years since the brilliant Smiths released their first ever record.. Thank you, thank you, Morrissey and Marr. X

What is it about crochet, eh? Some knitters get positively vitriolic about a crochet pattern appearing in a knitting magazine (see numerous threads on Rav, especially in The Knitter group). I mean, I crochet about as well as an embroiderer embroiders wearing boxing gloves but I wouldn’t get nasty about a crochet pattern in a magazine. I buy Jamie Oliver’s magazine but don’t send hate mail when there are squid recipes in there, and I positively dislike squid.

Anyway, I am honoured to be pals with a very wonderful crocheter, the lovely Nicky of A Like Vera. Nicky can crochet anything, although I should perhaps not encourage some of her wilder thoughts…

She designed this:

Isn’t it beautiful? Slinky, slightly sparkly and with beads (we do love a good dose of embellishment here at TBk as you know). It was published in issue 51 of The Knitter as ‘Arabella’, and it’ll be for sale on Nicky’s Rav page on the 1st June for £2.50.

We are going off piste today with our Monday Mood appearing on a Tuesday!!
I was completely thrown by the unusual occurrence of a UK Bank Holiday combined with good weather, as a consequence I forgot to post this weeks mood board.
So here it is – this is perhaps my favourite bag, a lovely pea green diagonal stripe.
I then found this great pic of a lettuce and these oversize vintage maps and… I am so into this fresh green colour.
It’s the last one in the paper bag series next week as I have currently exhausted our collection.



The Temporary Tuesday Mood will return to Monday next week!!

So I have been playing with my ball point pens again, I really liked the effect with the blue pens I tried the other day so I have had a go with the pink and green ones this afternoon.
These really are just rough sketchbook doodles so I now may try to illustrate one of our actual sweaters in more detail over the weekend.

‘Lately to an Entertainment just off Cable Street, a song cycle extolling the horrors of the recent Plague.’

Or, if we move back into the 21st century, we went to Wilton’s Music Hall to see Marc Almond sing ‘Ten Plagues‘.

Where to start? Well, let’s say that this is in no way AT ALL an unbiased review as I adore Marc Almond and would happily listen to him singing the phone book. Growing up slightly too late to have the seminal rite-of-passage-moment of watching David Bowie sing Starman on Top Of The Pops, perhaps mine was Mr. Almond as one half of Soft Cell singing ‘Tainted Love’.

Whippet-thin with eyeliner and with those bracelets, I was hooked.

Anyway. 32 years, a hedonistic lifestyle and a serious motorbike accident later and here is Marc on stage, alone apart from the brilliant Conor Mitchell on piano and singing his way through 10 songs, written by Mark Ravenhill especially with him in mind and based on Daniel Defoe’s tale of the Great Plague in London in 1665. Wilton’s is the perfect setting for this, intimate, grandly shabby and with an amazing history. If you can, go. Really, really, go, it’s not expensive and worth every penny and it’s on until the 18th. It is one of the best things I have ever been to. There are parts of it that made my spine tingle, especially at the end but I’m not going to say what as it would spoil it I think. It was SO good because it was so unexpected.

Just for fun – Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s banned video for ‘Relax’ was shot at Wilton’s. This is it, you can see bits of the amazing Wilton’s in the background as well as the young, lairy, beautiful Holly Johnson. It seems tame these days perhaps, but I say now – this IS the banned version, and there might possibly be things that might offend some sensibilities in there. There are certainly some things that we had to have explained to us as teenagers (by older teenagers, obviously. We didn’t really believe them, oh the naivety!). You have been warned:

Oh, and not only does Wilton’s have a fantastic cocktail bar (should you need any further encouragement), it’s also gone to the top of my list of ‘places to get married in if we ever bother’.

As mentioned on Monday I have been itching to do a few sketches with my fancy coloured ball pens for a change.. here is the first one sketched very quickly on one of my really lovely tear sheets



Will try a few more and post them soon.

So following on from last week’s Blue Bag board this weeks is much more bold and graphic inspired by this great red and white zig zag bag.

It prompted me to look back at a couple of my old sketch books where I had some menswear tear sheets.. the black and white pic was made to sit next to the paper bag.

I also hunted out some great colourful ballpoint pens I bought a few months ago, I knew they would come in useful for a few mood board scribbles, I think I may attempt a couple of illustrations with them this week… keep watching!



We love the red and white fairisle in the bottom left hand corner too, a simple but really effective pattern.

We are having contemplations about other regular blog spots, if you have any ideas, let us know.. our thoughts so far are “a what’s on our desk spot”, an illustration Wednesday and a truebritknit trend spot! Keep reading.

Belinda has been knitting with these:



And this:



This has made her delicate little hands ache. Still, not looking bad for leftovers, eh?:

So here’s the rest of the marathon story.



That’s Jim up near the start in Greenwich Park on Sunday morning. Bizarrely he’d declined my kind offer of holding out a TVR at the 22 mile mark in case he needed pepping up by then and opted for running gels instead. No accounting for taste, is there? There were a few other people there, too:





Whilst Neil delivered Jim to the start, Jen and I decamped to the Highway, as waiting there we had the chance of seeing Jim at the halfway point as well as around the 22-mile mark as he headed back into town towards the finish after running around the Isle of Dogs. The pics get a bit less reportage-like at this point as we were concentrating hard to start with on spotting Elite runners and then waiting to see Jim and hoping we didn’t miss him.

We’d also been given these at Excel on Saturday.



You can make an AWFUL lot of noise with laminated, concertina-d cardboard, it turns out. Especially if you’re yelling at the same time.

We saw the ‘WeirWolf‘, David Weir, swoosh past us in a very tight second place at the 22-mile mark, no pic as he was moving too fast and we were screaming ‘go on go on GO ON DAVID’ at him. Classy, me and Jen, you know.

We also saw Richard Whitehead, the astounding runner that we first saw when winning his 200m Gold (‘Gold! Always believe in your soul…’) medal in the Paralympics last summer. This is him going through the halfway mark:



Then we saw him again on the way back, at 22 miles. We were very excited at this, so much so that I might have shouted ‘David’ at him rather than ‘Richard’. Ahem. Still, he seemed to be enjoying himself, and unless I’m hallucinating he waved at us too (not caught on camera):



(he’s behind the chap in the orange, obvs.) Also spotted: Iwan Thomas, referred to as ‘Jen’s New Boyfriend’ all weekend as we’d seen him at Excel whilst we were fetching Jim’s number and Jen’d come over a bit all unecessary at seeing a person from the TV in the flesh (she doesn’t get out much, you know).



We also spent a lot of time shouting encouragement at other runners (whether they wanted it or not). If anyone reading this knows the chap who ran with ‘Stockport Dave’ written on his shirt then I shouted ‘Stockport Dave, Stockport Dave RUN’ at him both ways. He looked up and saw me both times, so if he wonders who the mad woman was shrieking at him at 13 and 22 miles that he’d never seen before, well. Wonder no longer. There was ‘Suit Boy’, who was running in a suit (obvs), a Captain Jack Sparrow (very close to the front and running well) and, sadly, several men in mankinis that we sort-of wished we’d not seen. Not a good look at the best of times, one can only hope that they were getting paid an AWFUL lot of money by friends and relatives to run in such outfits. There was also some chap who had supporters that had a sign saying ‘No Finish, No Vegas’. We liked that a lot. We hope he gets to Vegas.

But we were there for Jim, who finished in a super-swizzy fast 3 hours, 20 minutes and 11 seconds and raised more than £3000 for Refuge. So he gets the last pic:



(sadly we were all FAR too over-excited to think of making him move so that the background is not mainly taken up with a rubbish bin. Ooops.)

As some of you may know, the lovely Jen Arnall-Culliford has been a pal for a few years now, and we’ve met her husband, the just-as-lovely (and somewhat long-suffering, if you believe his alter-ego, @VeufTricot on Twitter) Jim Arnall-Culliford a few times too. So when we heard about Jim running the London Marathon for Refuge, we offered to put them up for the weekend and help in any way we could. Both Wendy and I are only just over the river from the start (well, in global terms) and both TBk households are seasoned Marathon spectators (this year was Wendy’s 15th consecutive marathon, I have chickened out on the years when the weather was bad…).

So, Jen and Jim arrived Friday evening. Saturday morning we set off to Excel for Jim to go through the final registration bits and pick up his number and microchip. Here is Jim in the queue for his number:



and here he is with his number:



no longer Jim, but Runner 45699! Have to say, the organisation at Excel was fantastic. Super speedy, teeny tiny queues. We did a bit of wandering around the associated exhibition, and then thought we’d pop over to Greenwich so that Jim could see where he’d be starting from. We thought we’d go the scenic route, so we popped onto this:



and ‘flew’ over the Thames. Here’s Neil (Mr. TBk) and Jen in the capsule:



and here’s the view just before we set off whilst waiting for our capsule:



looking back to the Olympic Stadium and The Orbit:



and back to the ‘flight’ once we’d landed:



We wandered along the Thames Path towards Greenwich, crossing from East to West along the way:



And when we got to the top of Greenwich Park, just outside the Observatory, we saw this little sweetie:



It was the coat that made me excited to start with (so cute!) but then we noticed the claws… Never seen a dog with painted claws before. Considered painting Iman’s, briefly, but decided that having functioning fingers was more important in the general scheme of things.



Anyway, wandered over to the Start, showed Jim where he’d be then set off home. Saw this sign at the bottom of the hill, which amused me.



Got home, Neil made fresh pasta for dinner to go with the ragu I’d made the day before (requested specially by Jim) – Jim ate rather a lot of it:



(ok, perhaps not quite all of that dish full), and then it was time for bed. I’ll tell you all about the actual Marathon day tomorrow, this post has been long enough I think. Just in case you’re wondering, that hoodie Jim is wearing is going to be a pattern available from Jen fairly soon… I think she should call it ‘In da E9 Hood’…