I am posting this primarily for my Mum in Spain to show her some pics of lovely granddaughter Ellie celebrating Halloween with her friends at Uni. Thanks to the miracles of Facebook I can see lots of pics of her (these were posted by her friend Danni) and as Mum does not use Facebook I thought I would share them here.

Ellie will be home this afternoon for a week of Mum’s cooking and being looked after! There is nothing like moving out of home to really make you appreciate it!

We are not really celebrating Halloween here – Jake thinks he is a bit too old for a party and since he is over 6 foot tall now Trick or Treating with the little kids is out but we will be lighting the pumpkin lantern and I have a load of lovely Halloween sweets for any kids who call on us.

We did very well with the fund raising for Breast Cancer Awareness this week at work – all my little pink fairy cakes sold and we had lots of raffle prizes. I won two of them which was very nice – wine and chocs which are waiting for me on my desk at work. Thanks to Tracy and the people in the office for organising this – so far £370 pounds has been raised.

Am off to continue some more Xmas knitting now – am getting a bit more adventurous and am making an item  that uses waffle stitch which seems to be working ok. I am starting a Beginners’ Knitting class at the wool shop in a couple of weeks which will be very good as I have never learnt properly and can only do a limited range of things. I have some lovely books but sometimes you need to be shown how to do things rather than see static diagrams. I would love to be able to tackle shaped garments , lace work and more complex patterns such as this lovely scarf.

This scarf is a free pattern from the fabulous Ravelry web site. There are loads of lovely knitting and crochet patterns there as well as people’s pics of the things they have knitted. I have been spending a lot of time browsing and if you register with the site you can save all your favourite patterns and post pics of your own projects.

 So off to the sofa with my kneedles and more episodes of Little House on the Prairie – which of course is very good for spotting knitting, quilting and dressmaking!