Spring refreshment

Look what the postie brought me!

A beautifully-wrapped parcel all the way from Wollmeise in Germany, complete with super-cute worsted sample and ?partridge feather tucked under the raffia ribbon.

Inside? Ooooh! Two skeins of the most glorious springy superwash merino sock wool (and you know I am a sucker for springy merino!) in SUCH COLOURS!

This is Wollmeise superwash sock wool. 150g per skein, at 350m per 100g... so plenty for knee-highs! Clessidra here I come! I can't get over how much of a bargain this wool is - such HUGE skeins in such gorgeous colours, and it is really delicious-feeling wool too!

There are too many exclamation marks in this post.... but WOW!!!

The colours are: Poison Nr. 5 (the searing fuschia / magenta and black one) - you can see some of Cookie's pattern knitted up in this one over at Knitters Anonymous.

And Veilchen: this is an elusive-to-photograph combination of violets, with undertones of periwinkle blue. Definitely more violet than blue. When my daughter asks me "What is your favourite colour?" I always answer "purple" - but this is the colour I really mean. So why have I not bought sock yarn in it before?

I didn't make it to Pennan yesterday. We had a day "at home" sorting things out - ripping up old dusty linoleum, having a bonfire of woodworm-ridden furniture and motheaten carpets, tidying the front "patio" (loose term for an area of concrete slabs where things collect on their way to the tip) and best of all, shopping for furniture!

The Inland Revenue has finally realised that they owed First Love a substantial refund of several years' worth of overpaid tax - yes, really! So we went to a lovely shop called the Candleclose Gallery (what an evocative name!) and bought my daughter a chest of drawers (Victorian waxed pine with a mirror and little drawers for hiding her secrets) to replace the worm-ridden one (with nails instead of handles) which was in the house when we moved here, and my son a bookcase in a wood which might be cherry, to replace the 1950's dark plywood monster cupboard which used to lurk at the top of the stairs - again a relic from another life.

Our home is refreshed! And so am I.

The children come home from their holidays tonight to find bare boards, new furniture, and dairy-free chocolate Easter eggs - they will be so surprised! But hopefully happy!