Flutterby Patch

Ameliaranne and knitted elephants

Aren't these illustrations just wonderful? They can be found in the book 'Ameliaranne at the Circus'. The first Ameliaranne story was published way back in 1920 in the days when families like hers were very often large and very often poor. Over the years the stories were penned by a variety of authors but the wonderful illustrations were always produced by Susan B Pearce. (This book was written by Margaret Gilmour)

 
 
1). In this story Ameliaranne finds a runaway elephant with a sore trunk and takes the injured animal home.
2). At the sight of a wild animal at the door her poor overworked mother cries "Mercy me, it's an ephelunt! We shall all be trampled to death!" and with that she snatches up an armful of children and rushes indoors for safety.
3). Mother has to sit down and fan herself but after gaining her composure she suggests the elephant's trunk could be bandaged with a dish-cloth.
4). With a bandaged trunk the gentle elephant allows the children to ride on its back. It is, of course, an animal that has escaped from a travelling circus and for their kindness Ameliaranne and her family receive free tickets for the next performance. Wonderful!

This little elephant pattern is easy to knit. Each one is just 12 stitches wide and can be knitted as a repeat pattern or as an individual motif. 

 

You could make each elephant a different colour if you wish or, if you're not a knitter, then why not try using the graph for cross stitch. I'll be posting another pattern in a few days. Have fun!

What a silly computer!

Yesterday afternoon my computer had one of its moods. Everything was working well in the morning but after lunch it decided it didn't want to access any blogs with 'typepad' in the URL. Any other blog, fine, any other web site, fine, but typepad...forget it. Firstly I made sure it wasn't a Typepad problem (it wasn't) and so I tried all my usual fixes but was unsuccessful. I did some washing, went shopping and generally kept myself busy, returning every so often to see if it had recovered, but it was having none of it.

And so in the evening I had to resort to asking my daughter for help. Young people must be sick of us 'oldies' seeking their advice but so many of them seem to have a second sense when it comes to computer problems. She lives some distance from home now but over lengthy phone conversions that lasted most of the evening she talked me through various tweaks, twiddles and virus scans and eventually all came right. I'm convinced computers know just how to annoy us and mine certainly succeeds from time to time. So for my clever daughter, for curing my computer ills yet again, a big.....

Nice weather for ducks

This summer's constant rain has caused large puddles in our road, a nuicance for car drivers but a great playground for the local duck population. You should have seen cars trying to steer carefully round them. On the whole the ducks won the day!

These ducklings look really cute on kids sweaters and the pattern is easy to knit. It repeats every 12 rows but you can spread the ducklings out by making the spaces between them wider or mayble knit just one duckling as a motif. The choice is yours.