lovecrafts | The Little Room of Rachell

How’s the second week of January been for you? Here it’s been mostly very, very grey and white skies, no sunshine or brightness at all. Quite hard going. Everyone I’ve spoken to lately seems to be struggling a bit post-Christmas sparkles. But what I’ve noticed is when we do get the occasional bright day, loads of people have also swarmed outside. I’ve tried to move more. Yesterday that included half an hour of hoovering; it counts, it’s still movement!

I’ve fancied some crunchy salads. This was tinned mackerel with a homemade honey and lemon dressing and pumpkin seeds sprinkled over the top.

And I’ve made a spicy chickpea sauce, with chunky slices of red onion and leek, crushed garlic, tinned and fresh tomatoes, a little veg stock, smoked paprika and red chilli flakes to liven it up. I cooked some cod fillets on top of the first half and served it with green veg. The rest I turned into a mushroom curry, cooking off some spice paste first, then adding the chickpea sauce, some sliced chestnut mushrooms and jarred peppers snipped into strips. We ate that last night with roasted cauliflower and Brussels sprouts sprinkled with salt and pepper. Yum.

I’m quite into the idea of two different meals out of one. Last week I made a spaghetti Bolognese and turned the other half of the sauce into a lasagne on Saturday. Do you do this one into two thing? Shall we share some ideas which might be useful inspo for meal planning?

Yesterday I added more to my Sleep Under the Stars blanket. The pattern link can be found here.

Here’s when I started this blanket. I can’t believe it’s nearly 2 years ago…

And here’s when I (prematurely) decided it was finished. That was more about my hand pain than anything else I think. Now I’m on a mission to make it bigger, slowly slowly, and then I *think* I have a cunning plan for it. This is the year of finishing things I’ve started in the last 3 or 4 years. Sure I said that last year too, but I’ve got my determined chin on, can you tell?!

So relaxing to sit and crochet while I listened to the rest of Blackberry & Wild Rose by Sonia Velton. It was a good story and I liked the two narrators. Crochet or knitting with an audio book or podcast are such a winning combination. Deeply relaxing.

Still reading the Crawdads book, I haven’t picked up the Mudlarks this week. I’ve been reading more of Tim Spector’s The Diet Myth. It’s fascinating. What are you reading?

And some cheery blue sky and sunny pictures from my walk on Wednesday.

It was a bracingly cold morning, but once I got warmed up I ended up tying my jacket around my waist, because I was glowing! Others trudged past wearing all the woollies and looking quite chilled. I walked just over 5 miles and treated myself to a slice of very delicious Victoria sponge for lunch! I know, I know…!

I appreciated some small kindnesses this week: B. saving me a seat at an event we were both going to and giving me a strip of raffle tickets she’d bought me. A. messaging to say there’s a new series of Vera on TV. (She does every time and for new eps of Shetland. So kind, always needed too since I’ve usually missed the ads for them.) And there was something else, but I’ve forgotten. D’oh!

Let’s call this post 6 good things? 1. Blue skies 2. Getting outside 3. Crochet 4. Books 5. Cooking 6. Kindness

What about your week? How’s it been? Do you want to list some of the good things?

This afternoon I made a decision to finish the Sleep Under the Stars blanket. It’s lovely and squishy. The yarn is soft and great to crochet. I’ve enjoyed working on it. Crochet is sporadic, because otherwise it’s just too uncomfortable to do much of anything without discomfort for days afterwards. Dratted hand, but never mind it’s just the way things are and at least I can still do a bit and not zero. So that’s fine. It has to be, doesn’t it?

It’s now a nice warm lap size blanket for an adult, or a good sized blanket for a baby to snuggle under. I hadn’t really thought about it one way or another, but this afternoon I found myself thinking that I’d do one more round then darn in the ends. And that was it!

Of course it means I’ve got quite a few balls of lovely chunky Paintbox yarn to use on something else, however my plan is now to work through things I started agessss ago. I think this working through means to either undo or finish them. There are definitely a few things lurking that I know I’m not interested in wearing, or making any more. At my current speed this might take the rest of the year and perhaps till Easter next year! Depends how many I abandon…I could go ballistic in an unravelling sort of sense. That’s a dodgy looking sentence and no mistake. I’ve obviously been reading too much Engleby lately (I can’t put it down. There have been a few books like that since May when my reading and concentration picked up again.)

No worries either way – crochet is not about speed or productivity anymore. It has got to be about making things I really want to make. I just decided on a whim that I didn’t really need a full-sized star shaped blanket after all, and a happy byproduct of this is that I get that old whoosh of relief and happy feeling of having completed something nice.