This weekend has been miserable. I’m up early to make a few calls, thinking that once they were sorted out, I could at least rest a little, if not go back to sleep. Au contraire.

Not only is the line perpetually busy, but tiles are the bane of my existence today. Perhaps it is a cultural thing or perhaps me and my lifetime of non-tiled showers just don’t get it. The design ideal in the UK (at least for the people I’ve known and the houses I’ve seen) is that every room can and should be it’s own thing. Red walls, mahogany table, Persian rugs in the dining room can absolutely be next door to a super modern chrome and black kitchen and down the hall from a slouchy, studenty rabbit warren with a giant tv and computer cables snaking all over the place. There is no singular design aesthetic. Every room is usually a different color and everything in that room is coordinated specifically to that room. So if your old couch conks out and you find one you love, you might very well have to redecorate, repaint and recarpet the whole room just so your new couch goes. And if you are the particular people I know, you never ever learn from your mistakes and pick something classic and not highly specialized in design (like a super modern square couch in 1970s pub designed tv room). And the colors in every room are not usually muted and light enhancing to make small rooms look larger. No, they’re primary, bright as all get out and usually shiny. Redecorating and DIY is a national pastime.

In my housing vernacular, the original decorating plan is always to have the same color walls through the house, in a neutral color. The idea being that you prepare the house like a blank canvas so that you can then accent and colorize bits of it. That way, when you change your mind, it’s just a matter of switching a few things as opposed to the entire room. And I’m a bit of a sucker for a general design overview. With the exceptions of bathrooms, I’m not actually going to have a 1950s kitchen with a 2000s living room and a 1920s colonial bedroom. I’d like to in principle because I am a design magpie but I think the jarring discord would really bug me. I’m absolutely drawn to taking ideas from each and streamlining them into something like a cohesive style. Bathrooms are the only exception to that, walking into a tiki themed loo-ow (I couldn’t resist, sorry) from a simple and bright house is just a little quirk. Alas, tiki themed anything is a rarity in this country so my ideas of a tiki mad bathroom may not come to be.

All this design aesthetic snobbishness comes from our neighbors tearing out their bathroom tile. Their bathroom is right next to this room and oi, the noise. Crashing cascades of chiseled off ceramic! Aliteration and headaches to boot! And I hate tile cutters with every single particle of my being. Note to people in general: either don’t have a tiled bathroom or pick something classic that you’re going to be able to live with in three years.

Today is so fired.

To make this slightly less gloomy, here’s some knitting.

Brompton

Brompton is done but needs blocking and buttons. So it’s not done really.

Autumn Chevron Scarf

The Autumn Chevron scarf is done though.

  • Name: Autumn Chevron Scarf
  • Yarn: Silkwood Yarns Sock Yarn in New England, just over one skein and Lucy Neatby Celestial Merino Dream in Sugar Maple, less than one skein.
  • Needles: US 5 Denise’s.

And I’ve started two new projects, both with deadlines.

Silk Clapotis

Silk Mini-Clapotis a May birthday. In Hip Knits Silk in Duck Pond.

Purple Gable

Purple Gable in Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece for me.

And here, have a picture I took over the weekend.

Slice of England

Now they’re drilling. Into brick. Today is doubly fired, and it’s only 10am.

*fizzle*