But I don't WANT to go home!

Lake Windermere

So, this is where I've been staying this week. Beautiful, right? That's the view of Lake Windermere from the top of Loughrigg Fell, which is opposite the flat we're staying in. In fact, I can just about see our flat on the left hand side of the photo. It's been a fabulous week, very relaxing with mostly good weather. Ambleside is a lovely place to stay in, if slightly short on affordable places to eat. I've bagged two Wainwrights (out of 214...), been to lots of nice museums and eaten rather a lot of fudge. Some of my favourite bits were...

• The Pencil Museum in Keswick, it's a tiny place but interesting and fun and I had to stop myself spending a fortune on pencils in the shop afterwards!
• Zefferelli's in Ambleside, an independent cinema and vegetarian restaurant, they do a double feature deal where you get a reserved cinema seat and a two course meal for £18.75 so we saw Iron Man 3 and ate lots of delicious vegetables
• Climbing Wansfell Pike, lovely views from the top but more importantly we beat all the people who started at the same time as us AND overtook a bunch of other people, go us! (Competitive, me? Noooooo...)
• All the Lakeland Arts Trust places; the Museum of Lakeland Life is really interesting with a good Arthur Ransome bit and lots of stuff about sheep, Blackwell House is a beautiful Arts and Crafts house (if really really crap to get to on foot) and Abbots Hall is a small but good art gallery with a great cafe.
• ALL THE FUDGE!!!

And, I bought yarn! And we all know souvenir yarn doesn't count as stash, right? After visiting the Museum of Lakeland life and reading all about Lakeland wool industry (just so you know, Kendal's motto is Pannus mihi Panis which translates as Wool is my Bread) buying yarn felt appropriate so it was a good job I found a little LYS round the corner called William's Wools. It was mostly Rowan, Artesano and Noro but they had a small selection of locally hand dyed yarns and alpaca from Town End Alpacas, which is what I went for:

 Pretty, pretty alpaca yarn

That's 300 yards of fingering weight pure alpaca in Mushroom, which is undyed. I'm thinking of using it as the contrast colour in one of Kirsten Kapur's new patterns, Carthamus or Rivington Cowl, which obviously means I need to buy MORE yarn for it to contrast with, which I'm obviously very upset about. I think the Shilasdair 4 ply might work well with it, as its an alpaca blend, maybe in Fleece Cloud or Summer Loch or Thistle Bloom... Decisions, decisions.
So tomorrow we head home, and because I stupidly booked the week before the bank holiday weekend off, we're in for a really fun journey as they're digging the line up somewhere between Preston and Lancaster so we're going some mad route via Manchester. I should at least get a lot of knitting done, which is good as I really haven't gotten much done so far...
Anyway, let me leave you with an image you'll like, I bought this postcard in Kendal:

Postcard from Museum of Lakeland Life and Industry

See you back in London!

Posted with Blogsy