Babbles Travelling Yarns : 125 : Fashion ICON

good morning welcome to babel's traveling yarns it's been a while since i spoke to you last it's a beautiful may morning it's the 5th of may i've just curled my hair so it's fabulous and i have the day to myself so i've curled my hair and i put it out of my way because i'm going to be playing with it all the time if i don't uh james has just gone up to get some cat food so i've got the house to myself for approximately 20 minutes so here we go this is a super quick podcast about all the things i've been doing for the last month and a bit so finally says you cause i've just um yeah it's just been really tough just workers and i've just been not been in the mood and anyway but i'm in the mood this morning yes so it's like i finally got a chance to breathe um so that's really good so i have a couple of things to show you a couple of finished objects which you may notice that i'm wearing um i've got a couple of whips quite an exciting one um and then i'm going to talk a little bit about books that i've read and books that i want to read um now i'm not going to mention all the books that i've read because i actually looked over it someone tagged me in um in a post about like your books that you've been reading and stuff so far this year and i went on goodreads and i've read 50 books so far i mean that's a little bit of a that's a little alarming number and it makes me think that i've been reading to escape a lot of things it kind of screams toxic crutch a little bit so also a lot of the books are complete trash which you know it's fine really enjoy them but complete complete trash so um yeah i'm going to talk about a few of the books that i absolutely adored and i loved and i would recommend and a few books that i really am excited to start reading although i'm in a little bit of a slump at the moment but i'll tell you why later so first things first my finished objects so this is my finished object from my spin and make along project which i started in 2019 um and i've now finished as part of the um fluff to stuff 2021 which is currently running it's being run by myself mina and mars of mina of the knitting expert and mars of hey branberry and i'm so glad we did it because it really just made me finish it and look long sleeves do you see them they're so long now i will tell you a little story about this jumper it was originally going to be a cardigan decided no it needed to be a jumper and it's based on the so faded sweater so basically i just used all the numbers from the stuff from the start and i just carried on i didn't do any uh oyster i did do increases down the bottom here just for the hips because i knew it was going really long haven't finished off these bits that's fine whoops um i it was three braids originally of um irish fairy tale yarns and they all started with blue and then they faded into this brown some of them faded at different rates though as you can see so i decided to start knitting with them all together and do a um what's it called do a helical knitting or jogless join knitting and i've been using this technique for a couple of years now and i have a video if anyone is interested on how to do it um just to fade colors really well especially things like um hand-dyed yarns or which are all in the same batch but might not all look the same or maybe even not died in the same batch and you can blend them really nicely or gradient fades i feel like i'm talking really fast so um so yeah it was three braids of uh irish fairy tale irons 100 grams and and i spun it this is all hand spun as well so i spun it um into two ply which ended up being kind of a fingering weight worsted weight no fingering weight um sport weight and i got to about here and i had another color which i really wanted to put in which is this purple blend it wasn't a gradient and i think i started about here and i blended it in every three every every four rows every three rows every two rows and then at the end it's just the purple but then i realized that i actually run out of this color i just i this is where the sleeves split you can see just here and then i just carried on but he didn't have any of this this color left i had got i've used it all so then what i had to do was go online and try and find the same colors so these kind of browns um and i found a girl actually in limerick who came to my nate night a couple of times um karina and she has a she has an etsy shop but she's um still in siri on it's on instagram so she does a lot of doll making so she has a lot of supplies and she has lovely beautiful merino so i bought the merino off her and hand spun it this is what took me so long you see it was the sleeves and i needed to get the colors and i was really really unhappy with it actually i didn't really like it when i was knitting it but now that i'm actually looking at it on screen it works perfectly i think it works fine it works totally fine so it just blends down does it make my boobs look huge i mean that's a good thing i guess but i'm just like whoa i'm super top heavy in this am i well i look like i've got a waist so that's kind of cute dark on the waist bright on the boobs and hips fashion icon [Music] i didn't plan that there was no plan it was just the way it fell which is mostly what happens when you spin something and knit with it it just happens um not if you are a certain um lovely spinny buns actually if you are interested we are doing every month we are doing as part of the fluff to stuff spin along we are doing uh monthly chats with different fiber creators in our in our community and there was a really interesting one with alanna wilcox and she it's on our fluff to stuff youtube challenge chat channel and i'll put it down below she is the most organized like planned spinner so i know a lot of people wouldn't have the kind of slap dash attitude that i do towards spinning and listening and watching the way that elana works is so fascinating so if you are interested head on over to that because she is so specific and her technical ability is so excellent um and it's she has this she has lots of courses online as well on how to do it so she's this class called the organized spinner and it's just fascinating i really recommend you go over and watch that the interview is probably about half an hour 40 minutes long and it's really enjoyable we really really love to talk talking to talking to elena and she's fab she's joined in a couple of our zooms as well i think the next zoom is um going to be the end of may the 25th of may i think i don't know if i'm going to be there actually i'm supposed to be working that day but um we'll see we'll see if i am or not and um yeah so anyway sorry excuse me i didn't bring any water what an amateur oh my goodness gracious so i'm delighted with this sweater i also i finished off the sweater in a in some of the hand spun at the end of one of these one of these was uh one of the browns actually actually faded into this deep dark blue and um i was going to put it up high but i kind of wanted it light up here and i was planning on maybe getting the blue at the end like down at the bottom but i really like it i think it's going to work i think it's working brilliantly it kind of adds a little finishing touch to the top there but yes i thought the d would be a lot of the sorry the d the v would be a lot deeper um but maybe it's just the way that the color maybe i maybe i knitted too tight or something i did it twice the first time was definitely too tight but i like it it pulls everything up i think it kind of gives it nice shape it pulls pulls the shoulders in and um yeah delighted to lie with myself yes so my next finished project is my lovely advent woven blanket so if you followed along at the my kind of shortened um uh what's the word vlogmas i only did like the first couple of weeks but i was weaving this along with it so these are all the little advents and minis and stashes that i have actually received in the last couple of years so there's some um there's some i think this is a self striping then this is like a hand dyed then there's some um just solids there and i just love it so what i did was i actually wove it in big long strips and then i just sewed them together with a zigzag stitch now i should have really used like a white or a gray but i didn't bother changing it out of the sewing machine so now the warp on this so the up and down which i wove it in is linen but it was a linen blend with short linen fibers and they are shedding like nobody's business i'll never use it anything like it again as a as a warp it's just the worst so they're just kind of escaping the whole time so i can't wear anything dark anyway so this is the way that we used to wear them if anyone ever wants to see what old ireland looked like um there's a fantastic uh instagram page called old ireland in color and it's this guy or girl or team of people that are going back over old images old photographs and colorizing them i don't know how they do that i don't know if they make it up or i don't know if they can grab some certain thing from cellul i don't know cellulose or whatever um but in the most recent one actually that was on i saw that this is classically women from galway or the west which is kind of where i'm from i'm kind of limerick but west they would have these shawls they're all ways they're always woven and then they'd tuck them into the top of their skirts or belts or whatever and they'd go about their day and it was basically a jumper and you could use it then as a blanket as a you know to mind a child or whatever you know but it was always more like this and i love it i really like it classically the color was red or gray but red was a very common color um for those women and um it was often uh poor women you know kind of working working women fisher women things like that and he'd be wearing them so i love the little fringe i made a little fringe i cut i cut the the fabric the long strip of fabric into three pieces um but before i did that i actually took out like i actually on wove like sections i cut this i cut the thread at this at the edge i cut the thread at the edge and then i literally on what i took out rows and i took out about an um about two inches of um the weft the warp across or the weft across the way and then i cut along that which gave me these really cute fringes because i wanted the fringes all the way down on one side on both sides i didn't want just one edge of fringe so if you can see there's three now some of them are not the right size i could i could go back and trim them but i'm also terrified that my that my heading isn't very good so i'm just leaving it as it is until it falls apart but i think it's really cute and i really like it and apart from the shedding which i hope will stop i haven't thrown it in the wash i've only hand washed it because there's so many different blends of um fiber in there i don't really want to throw it in a washing machine just because i think i think it'll shrink at different rates and i don't want that um it'll it'll mean like it's puckered in some places and you know that that can be done deliberately sometimes which is cute but not for me so those are my two finished projects and there i haven't really been doing much knitting because i've been reading like 50 books in four months and i've been reading like actually reading them either on kindle or in real life and it's very difficult for me to read and knit at the same time i've just recently gotten back into audio books and i think i just went off them for a while especially because the books i wanted to read were all kind of fantasy books and i've spoken about this before but a lot of the time the uh the narrator on fiction and fantasy specifically uh it can i it just frustrates me sometimes so i like to read them but then i have to say the opposite happened for the from blood and ash series by jennifer l armentrout when i was listening to it it was okay when i was reading it i could see all the spellings of just kind like just like fantasy spellings and i was like nope i cannot do that so i was like oh so back i went to audiobooks so um but i'll talk about that at the end okay so next is quite exciting it's something i've been kind of working on quietly it's in one of my beautiful um my cottage number nine bags and this was a bag i had made specifically for this and i really wanted something with a silk lining on the inside because i wanted to work in silk 100 silk and i got the base i got two skeins of lace 100 silk lace from norn yarn and from tuva and i just got it in ivory and i think you're guessing probably where this is going and i wanted the silk inner inner inner portion on this so that the silk wouldn't like catch and fuzz up um because i do want it to stay as nice as possible now this is a raw silk um and james is going to enter off now because he literally cannot leave me alone hi would you like to come in and say hello to everybody on the podcast oh yes what great timing i had yes is it something very important [Music] i'm glad you love me so much hi hi do you live with the pandemic partner i love him i love him anyway i'm getting the wedding dress to marry him it's such good timing actually do you know what spend a pandemic with a person know if you really want to marry them italia natalia anyway i've got something i know i do bless him he just likes to come up and say hello every 20 minutes anyway so i've started knitting i started knitting again um you may remember if you've watched the podcast a couple of times especially this time last year i was knitting a wedding dress with yarn that i had spun um but the thing was it was a bfl which kind of came off very cream and yellowy and all the other fabric i had for the dress was ivory so and i also got the center part and none of the pattern made sense and i was making up the pattern and it just didn't work out so i started again so but i decided just go with a pattern find a pattern even if i didn't like exactly i could change things around but as long as i had the numbers i can work with it so i bought this pattern called um silver mine and it's a pattern by stephanie close and um yeah so it starts off with this beautiful belt with this dragon dragon teeth a dragon scale design so that is the belt so that'll when i have it ready to block it really so it's knit in pieces the first thing i've knit in pieces ever so this is going to be the belt and it's going to actually stretch out quite a lot i'm going to put a backing on this one just because i need it to be a little bit stronger so that's going to be the belt waistband so i've knitted a little bit longer just in case but i can always pull it back i've just got it on waste yarn at the end and i can always pull it back out because i need to knit and sew in like button bands and stuff at the end so then i started to work on the front i've never knit i've never did a pieced garment so i'm a little bit terrified about how it's going to work out like how it's going to how i'm going to finish it and stuff but i think it'll be okay so i need also to use lifelines because it's all lace and now so okay so on the um silver mine pattern she has a couple of different um lace patterns and they're okay but they're very kind of straight up and down and i didn't really want that i kind of wanted more of like a frothy seafoam type lace i didn't really want very structured lace um so i decided to i'm knitting this on 3.75 needles and it's a lace weight yarn so i wanted the fabric to be quite open so there is that is a pattern that is in the silver mine it's called camera which it's like a little leaf pattern leaf design it's quite cute because my wedding is going to be in september so a little bit but it's quite i kind of like the i think i don't know i can't remember what she uses if it's lace or if it's like fingering weight i can't remember but then i love this kind of edging lace so this is the bodice so i've got the leaf lace on either side okay so i've got leaf lace on either side edges and then i've got i've changed the pattern here it was going to be like long lozenges didn't fancy that so i i just made like a mesh stitch which i fell in love with the vienne in the vienne cardigan so i robbed that and sorry it's really not showing up properly and then in the center is the lace that i picked for my original design it's a 16 stitch repeat which fits perfectly in the design totally by accident so that's going to come up the front and it's called the pattern of that lace was i literally cannot find that website i'm sure it's in my notes somewhere um but it's called synergy that's the word that was used to come up with this lace pattern and it's only halfway through now but it is quite like it's quite frothy quite open has some double yarn overs some yarn overs and there's some patches of solid and it's just really nice it's kind of organic as opposed to um rigid kind of geometric so that's what i kind of wanted so i'm gonna have little leaves then little vines on either side and then that and it's gonna come all the way up hopefully god i hope it works so um yeah that's where i'm at um i'm currently learning the patterns as i go um the leaf pattern is fairly simple the mesh pattern is really simple and it's all one-sided lace so uh when i come to the pearl i just purl back which makes it go a little bit faster you don't have to think about that and i added in i keep on changing things every so often and i really need to stop changing things because it's going to get difficult but i added in two little rows of pearls either side i don't know if you can see you probably can't but i added in two little rows of pearls stitches on either side of the synergy lace just to give it a bit of a border and i just went in with a with the crochet hook and just changed all the knits to pearls and i actually invented another i actually just picked up stitches and i was like that's gonna be fine so quite exciting i'm quite i'm loving it i really need to just be monogamous on this which is why of course i decided to knit a swatch i wanted something simple and easy and kind of sensible um so i have this giant ball of iona wool uh cone sorry a giant cone of iona wool that i bought in 2018 maybe 2009 no 2018 anyway uh or maybe 2019. iona i own a mill i own a wool and i bought a load of it just because because and then didn't i buy one then i pre-ordered this book harry potter knitting magic then didn't i see the hogwarts house cardigan so that's going to happen obviously this is a pieced garment as well i'm kind of interested in this i think if i start doing these pieced garments i might start getting into sewing because that's effectively what i'm doing you're just knitting the pieces that you would originally cut out i guess so and i'm just going to use little scraps now i've always been a gryffindor and then i took at all the tests i always took up at a gryffindor and then i took a test there i don't know last year sometime a different test i think pottermore had redone their test turns out i was a hufflepuff and i was like okay i'm a gryffindp that's fine so i don't know what i'm gonna do for the colors but it's so cute um yeah now i am aware i am fully aware that um a certain author who wrote the original harry potter books is quite a problematic person i do understand that she did create a wonderful world which i will never stop wanting to be in and but she is a disaster woman she's an absolute disaster of a woman so i just wanted to say that just in case i have any people who are directly affected by her opinions stupid opinions um so yeah just so you know i'm on your side not her side okay i'll fight i'll fight them i'll fight anybody who says that you're not who you are i will anyway so a little bit of violence for the podcast just what you need um those are kind of the main oh it's not sorry there's another project that i'm working on which is my new fluff to stuff whip using um my sweet georgia fiber which i got as part of my sweet georgia ambassador package so i got these amazing braids and they're all slightly different colors but they're all kind of in the same base so i've got one which is aurora now i don't know which one is which celes i think celestial is the blue i think this is the aurora one and then there's another one yeah fairy tale which is the one i've just spun up which is the pink and purple one this is the fairy tale one so um i am an ambassador for sweet georgia and i do have a 10 off discount if you want to use the link down below you can use my my code which is um ambassador grace10 i think look down below and get get it directly because i can just copy and paste it from my previous post so if you are interested in purchasing any of these stunning stunning starting i got the paul worth base polarworth and silk and so this is another sweater project which i started with the grand idea of following um kind of instructions on how to not have this problem where i forget how to forget that i need yarn for the sleeves again right that's what i want um but then i decided to do a traditional three ply which of course just knocks back my yardage so this definitely isn't enough for one sweater now if i'm gonna do a traditional three ply so what i have an idea for is to possibly do a color work cardigan using commercial yarn as the as the contrast as using this yarn as the contrast and the color work and the commercial yarn is just like the plain background so that's my plan anyway i had this genius idea to um basically split my braids let me just get this off because it's i need to be so you need to soak it and everything but i'll i'll spin them all and then i'll soak them into all that just business so how i managed to make sure that i had enough for the sleeves and for the body oh my god i saw swallow the swallows are back from africa thanks lance how did you get on have a great time great tan so these are my three plies my traditional three plies and actually i you can't tell until it's knitted up to be honest but what i did was i got a one of my braids the pink one fairy tail and then i split it in half and i put one half aside that's for the body then i just got this the the half that is left over i split that into quarters so you've got one half and then the other half split into two which means it's a quarter of the full braid then i got one so that was the body and two sleeves right so then i got one of the sleeves doesn't matter which and i split that into three lengthways down the braid and i spun them each individually and then i spun all three of them together onto one bobbin i am terrible at splitting braids evenly because there's an awful lot left over so there's a there's a lot more waste than i wanted sad face um but yeah anyway it should work out that my colors should knit up okay so that's my plan i don't know whether to do stripes or to do a color work pattern or what to do really but i'll keep an eye out there's a beautiful jumper color work pattern by dragon horde yarns which is like all moons and stuff and i'm like oh that's really nice um i might have a look at that and see how that would work but anyway so that's what i'm planning to do with all of these with all three of these is to have a body skein and which would be 50 grams and then two skeins 25 grams each supposedly i mean they're probably they're not because i have leftovers um because i when you when you split them and then you spin them you're like oh i have loads left over on one bobbin damn it so um yeah so that is my plan is to keep going with this and see how we go basically um i could have made it easy on myself and done a a chain ply but i've never actually done a traditional three ply so i'm kind of pushing myself out of my my my boundaries here and hopefully i'll get better and better but just look at these beautiful colors i love it so yeah it should be interesting so i've got some sections which are darker and some sections that are lighter so hopefully they'll spin up into stripes into like even stripes but then they'll blend nicely i'm very interested to see how this is going to work out i have a feeling it's going to be a disaster but at the same time nothing you make is a disaster it's just experience isn't it and uh i love these colors so much so i can't go wrong essentially which is my my main my main deal my main bag speaking of bags oh good segue grace can i show you this incredible baby she's a beautiful baby so this is a bum bag a handmade bun bag it's got cows on it because i love cows not to eat to to pet they're such gentle funny creatures and um it's made by a company an irish company called maulabum and um he the person who's making it is actually jamie oh my god what's your second name kennedy he he was on the um the great knitting competition with uh sylvia from with cherries talk too uh oh but yes malabam you should definitely have a little look he's making these claws bags they are not boring whatsoever and so we call them bun bun bags and an irish bag is maula so mala bum is bum bag i love it i think in america it's called fanny pack but uh in ireland funny means a different thing hope that's not flagged so bum bags fanny packs i love them i'm so glad they're back because amazing amazing so yeah so those are the bits and bobs that i've been working on let me just see if i've done everything i have oh i have a project which i want to cast on um like a really quick project which i think will be really satisfying as part of the um as part of the fluff to stuff uh challenge and this is um alpaca supreme it was a set that was gifted to me actually by john urban and it's absolutely gorgeous squishy soft this is this is another three-ply i think i'm just in a three-ply mood um but this was chain plied and um it's turned into like this lovely iron weight squishy squish so what i want to do is make a color work um cowl slash tea cozy so i want it to be multi-use just in case so i basically want to make um a cow but have a ribbon around the top like have a little channel around the top that i can pull close so i can just literally make it like a hat on top of a tea cozy and it's going to be color work or stripes i might just do stripes wouldn't that be nice i might just do stripes all together because i love the colors i think that would be super cute yeah i was thinking about maybe doing um the pattern from my pattern which i am working on i'm just emotionally psychologically not able to do anything complicated at the moment but i'm hoping to have it out for my birthday which is the end of may if you are looking for that pattern um the all my testimonials are finished and i've gotten all the details i just need to finalize it take some pictures and get that out and about um so i'm very excited about that um and then if you need it over the summer then you have it for the autumn although it might be a little bit warm to be knitting over the summer though not in ireland because it's always kind of a bit dodge weather-wise so i want to talk a little bit now about some books which i've been reading um so guys i don't know if you heard but there's this show on netflix called shadow and bone and i'm obsessed with that it is so much better than i thought it was gonna be i was dreading it to be honest i was really dreading it just in case it was like real cheesy it's a little it's a tiny bit easy but it's so the cast are stunning oh they're perfect perfect like a perfect cast so then of course i had to reread not shadow and bone all i wanted to do is really reread six of crows so in case you in case you don't know leigh bardugo is the author of all of the books of all of the characters in this series on uh on netflix called shadow and bow the first series that she wrote was shadow and bonus the trilogy and it's a classic young girl finds out she has a power doesn't really know what to do with it she's torn between this kind of dark um prince who's kind of teaching her how to do how to use her powers he has he has the opposite powers she has the power of the sun he has the power of darkness there's a kind of a cute opposites attract thing going on there but um alina who is the the young girl has a best friend called mal and she grew up they grew up at the same orphanage and he is kind of separated from her and she super duper loves him but they all they never you know they were just friends blah blah blah oh so cute anyway so it starts on that's her story of like how she learns how to deal with her powers and how she is apparently the key to solving a massive plague on the land called the fold it's a shadow fold which has separated the land um between the landlocked major part of it which is ravka or east ravka and then west rafka which is kind of the more rich side because they have access to the ports and there's kind of like political intrigue and where's how's this fold happen and they can't go up and they can't go down because the fold extends into their enemy territories top and bottom it's full of intrigue now there's a whole there's three series there's three books on that on how she kind of grows and that whole series and how that that all gets worked out and then three years later there's another she writes another book set in the same kind of world but on a different uh in a different country called ketterdam which is kind of based on amsterdam and um ravka is based in based on kind of russia so that's the sort of you kind of got your eastern european sort of influences there so you've got russia uh the southern continent is kind of china based on china shuhan and then the the northern continents the scandinavian countries so they all hate each other they're always fighting and then ketterdam is just in the middle a little like seafaring country who's who's god is profit and money and that is like they literally have a god of profit who's gazin and that's sacred money is sacred trade is sacred so that's their whole concept so it's so fascinating so kenadam is basically um just a pit of villainy and that is where these books are set six of crows and the crooked kingdom so six of crows first then the crooked kingdom and i had to get these books because it's so shiny look at that oh and look at the pages sprayed pages give it to me um then of course i was reading them and then i realized i had the audiobooks and the audiobooks are fantastic so six of crows is based on six characters and who one of them is kaz brecker who is morally gray awful person but we all love him he's he's a bad boy but secretly he's a good boy but mostly bad also all the time bad i love him so much um yeah so this story um is kind of it's kind of a heist um story uh so it's based on these six kids basically from a gang in ketterdam and kaz is kind of the it's kind of the leader of the gang but he's only 17. the rest of them are all pretty young as well and they have to basically break into another country another country's highest prison to rescue somebody to get uh i can't remember how many million kruger but a lot of money um so kaz organizes these six people to go and get to go and kind of sort out this heist now in the show they've combined the characters they've combined three characters from six of crows and the major story of the shadow and bone so what they've done is basically they're writing a prequel that she's written a pre story so she's gotten the the three three major characters and she slotted them into this into shadow and bone story before six of crows so you're kind of getting to see who they were how they got to be where they were a little bit more of the back story and then there's also there's two other people as in the six which you're starting to see the backstory you see that's the backstory which is spoken about in six of crows and they're kind of like a complete separate story who come together just at the end and they're my faves and nina is written it's um acted by an irish girl called um danielle galligan and she's amazing i love her so much she's fab i love her so um yeah i highly highly highly recommend reading the books and watching the show to be honest like the shadow and bone the original shadow and bone books probably won't make much sense if you watch the show and then read the books um but i think you could probably get away with not reading shadow and bone and just reading six of crows yeah yeah and then crooked kingdom i listened i just finished the audiobook of crooked kingdom oh god and this kind of finishes off she does she does do allergies really well you know sometimes you just don't need a third book if you're if you can get it into a nice solid two books that's a nice solid yeah nice and then she's got another two books afterwards which are set in ravka again another another couple of years after uh crooked kingdom ah they're so good and it kind of deals with like the aftermath of the civil war and everything that happened in shadow and bones so they're good anyway anyway really recommend those i know i spoke about them earlier on this probably last year but i just wanted to reiterate and that the show had come out how much i love the show and how much i love the books so there's another few um books that i've read a series of books that i've read and one of them was a really interesting one it's a very simple easy read very fairy tale based it's by emma ham and the first one is called of goblins and gold and it's actually based on this series of this this poem called the goblin market and other poems by christina rossetti and this is a poem that my dad used to get me to read and and it just like it really resonated with me and the story was based on this sort of fantasy so i'm just going to read a little uh the first little section of this poem which these books are set on morning and evening maids heard the goblins cry come by our orchard fruits come by come by apples and quinces lemons and oranges plump unpicked cherries melons and raspberries bloomed down cheeked peaches swart-headed mulberries wild freeborn cranberries crab apples jewelries pineapples blackberries apricot strawberries all ripe together in the summer weather mourns that pass by fair eaves that fly come by come by are fresh grapes from the vine pomegranates full and fine dates and sharp bullishes rare pears and green gauges damsons and bilbrays taste them and try currants and gooseberries bright fire like briberies figs to fill your mouth citrons from the south sweet to the tongue and sound to the eye come by come by and then it talks about um evening by evening among the brookside rushes laura bowed her head to here lizzy veiled her blushes crouching close together in the cooling weather with clasping arms and cautioning lips with tingling cheeks and fingertips lie close laura said pricking up her golden head we must not look at goblin man we must not buy their fruits who knows upon what soil they fed their hungry thirsty roots come by call the gold gold goblins hobbling down the glen oh cried lizzy laura laura you should not peep at goblin men lizzie covered up her eyes covered close lest they should look laura reared her glossy head and whispered like the restless brook look lizzy look lizzy down the glim little men one hauls a basket one bears a plate one looks a golden dish of many pounds of weight oh it's just i love it i love it i love this um the little poem it's fantastic and then the book series talks that like drags them into the world of the goblins and um she's got she's gonna have four books out two books are out already another book is coming out at the end of may and then she's got another one in august she's like firing ahead i think they're mostly self-published but i love it i'm really enjoying that series another series which is quite similar is another kind of fairy based um uh not really fairy bases kind of like two races who don't really mix and one of them is terrifying and what the other one is like human um but it's called radiance by grace draven and um it's a really cute duology it's just it's just two books and um it's kind of like a arranged marriage kind of friends to lovers really cute very nice um and i just finished red white and royal blue as well which is kind of like a gay romance super cute and it's total fiction set in 2020 lol but at the 2020 where um a woman um won the american election like a hispanic woman and uh she won the election and her son uh kind of is fighting with the prince of england who is turns out to be gay and turns out they're both gay and learned that they fall in love and it's a massive international incident it's so cute and it's just so opposite to what actually happened so it's a lovely little fantasy anyway um and then i started reading the first book of cinder of the lunar chronicles i really enjoyed it really really really enjoyed it so i've just started on the next book which is scarlet so cinder is based in china in the future it's a kind of a sci-fi dystopia no i'm not really dystopian but it's like kind of in the future far in the future people live on the moon and they went up there and apparently their kind of genetics change and they have like some sort of like magic who's able to influence people and get people to do what you want um and then people down on earth there's like cyborgs and there's magic and very interesting and then cinder is a retelling of cinderella just in the future in china cool and then scarlett is i think the red riding hood a retelling of red riding hood and it's starting out in france but it's a continuation of the the whole story with cinder so quite good so i'm really enjoying those um so i'm gonna i'm gonna read definitely the rest of the lunar chronicles because i'm enjoying them quite a lot i'm quite excited to get to chris which i think is a rapunzel retelling and she i heard that she is supposed to be like in a satellite so she's really like sequestered away from everyone which makes sense because she's rapunzel and i'm really interested in that story too um yeah another book which i actually got as a recommendation from sophie white is um line by nyle burke and this is a story um it's kind of a dystopian future story um so willard and his mother and his girlfriend nyla have spent their entire lives in an endless procession where survival is dictated by the ultimate imperative obey the rules or lose your place in the line everything changes the day willard's mother dies and he finds a book hidden among her few belongings line is a speculative fiction and is most ambitious leading the reader on a journey to make sense of a world that is ultimately not so different from our own but the whole thing like it starts out basically the whole all of the population of the world i think is in a massive line for something i don't know what the i'm gonna need this varian now but i don't know what is at the end of the line i don't know what is happening i feel like is it the line at the front of little i don't know what it is but they're all intense and they're all kind of like and if you marry someone you can only marry someone you can't move up you have to move down so if you marry someone you know five tenths ahead they have to lose their place in the line and come back to live with you so you have to just be true love or something i don't know interesting anyway so i'm quite interested in that i need to sit down and read it really um a book i'm listening to so i've gotten into audiobooks again which is why i've because of because i really need to get going on this knitting glance it's not going to lit itself is it so i started listening to this book called oath taker by audrey gray and it was recommended to me by someone i can't remember who thank you so much to everyone who's recommending books by the way i really really love love that um yeah so oath taker is set in a completely fantasy world and it's based on uh because i'm listening to it the names aren't coming to me very well i think it's set it's base it's it's from the viewpoint of the princes the royal prince's um royal companion guard who is a girl with pink hair cool um and her name is ray haven something like that um anyway so there's a mystery curse on the world and if there is any magic if if the line of the princess has any magic they're kidnapped and um yeah so she used to go on this adventure with a thousand-year-old handsome demon man or an angel man or whatever and i'm sure they'll fall in love and that's gonna be exciting whatever although i am getting a little bit a little bit tired of the thousand-year-old ancient being who falls in love with a 17 year old i mean sorry now but it's a little mid-life crazy don't you think like i don't know i'm just saying i'm getting a little bit tired of it i'm just i i don't know why a really old man is attractive apart from the fact that he looks attractive i don't i don't know i don't know i it would just annoy me that he knows much more than me and like he thinks that he knows much more than me all the time he's like that would annoy me a lot that you couldn't grow together because he's done all his growing he's done he's a thousand years old what more what more could he possibly learn you know like no he knows it all oh anyway i just it's a it's a bug bear that's getting me at the moment that i'm just maybe i'm just over maybe i'm just i've kind of been overwhelmed with all these kind of old ancient females kind of dead um yeah so there's a couple more books that i wanted to read i am i'm about 20 through spinning silver by naomi novak and i'm finding it a little bit hard to push through on hers uh i don't know whether i don't know whether it's the writing style is a bit slow or not sure it's an interesting it's a world that i'm not um and i'm trying to get trying to gather she's got three different viewpoints and i think the last viewpoint has just come into play and i'm a little bit confused about who she is um yeah so but an amazing artist fan artist that i follow color pem drew some stunning pieces of action sequences and i'm like oh i have to get to those at least so thank you for drawing those because i have to finish it um yeah and then i have literally read the first page of never night by jay kristoff a lot of people have recommended that to me and it's sounding really good sounding really fun so i'm gonna enjoy that um i just need to get the other books out of my way first i'm kind of i read i like to read one book at a time and just finish it but i'm kind of you know if i'm stuck in a book like i i got about got about 50 of the way through air awakens and i just couldn't read anymore um same thing with crescent city now myself and a few friends are gonna try and do crescent city again in september okay fine okay fine another 10 000 year old man or whatever i don't know ancient decrepit annoying people wandering around preying on 17 year old girls they're always 17 anyway [Laughter] there's another book that i'm really interested in we hunt the flame by faisal i'm just reading them i've got a list of them my little tbr my little to be read um so yeah i really want to read that i have that already downloaded on my kindle so i want to get into that um i read another book um called the wrath of dawn um and that was that was good it was okay it was a bit slow i thought and it didn't make me want to read the next one but i can't remember why which probably isn't a good sign of a book but i really like the premise you know the premise was really interesting um so the prince goes and he marries a bride uh every week or so or every day or i don't know however many and uh then the next following morning he kills them or they're dead they die so they are effectively sacrifices um and there's like yeah he's like a monster but then this girl goes in and she's like like determined to be the one who survives the dawn who survives and um yeah it's really interesting premise but i'm just the prince is just i think he's i don't know i don't know i just couldn't uh couldn't relate not really yeah i suppose you have to be able to relate to characters right um so yeah it was a telling of i think it was a telling of the um the 40 thieves or something or a thousand nights or even nights i can't remember i can't remember which one it was anyway i don't even have it in front of me it just came anyway behind the flame is uh by haspel fazel and that's another interesting one which i do want to read now i have a couple of books which i want to read for research purposes from my own book and there's this one is the seven virtues of the rising and it's um in irish and english so you've got stories in irish and english and it's by a famous uh as uh storyteller called poraca connora and he actually wrote um i think he put together some parts of peg theirs so a lot of um a lot of irish uh people who did the junior cert or leaving search will probably remember paraguakanar from different um different books that he's written that you had to study sorry about that but i was really interested in this it's the seventh reaches of the rising and it's it was first published in irish in 1918 shocked noah and an airy amok um shocked muah on area mock uh seven virtues the rising and a collection of seven stories by paraguay canara the most innovative writing to emerge from the gaelic revival although not directly concerned with the events of the 1916 rising the stories deal with the ways in which the revolt intervenes in the lives of ordinary men and women arguing be arguably the most important fictional response to the rising this is the first time all seven stories about whatever so they've been translated so it's basically these stories kind of allegories of how people reacted to the rising and normal people you know just who are just living there living their normal lives so i'm very interested in in reading those in english because i don't speak irish unfortunately i can understand a little bit of it but i wouldn't be able to read a whole whole thing knock so the musicians the first virtues the musicians and i wonder so the first virtue is the musicians then revenge then two courageous women then the bishop's soul the antiques shock news the big fellow secret my dark and slender poet so yeah that's i really really i'm interested in that and another one which i bought which um is uh i was looking up kind of the story of like kind of information on uh the travelers so the travelers in ireland um are a their own ethnic race in ireland they they evolve the same as we did just they have their own kind of culture and there's a book called why the moon travels by aiding vardoon uh sorry by owen e o e i n o and i only fired and it's um it's basically a book of stories and fairy tales that um are told within the traveler community in ireland and i'm really fascinated by that so i have that on my kindle and i want to read that and there's loads of little stories about like stories that your mother would tell your your mother would tell you as a child which i find as like in a cultural uh in a cultural part that like those childhood stories really build who you are as a person so i think they're super important they're really really much more important than we give them credit for i think so um yeah so i'm excited to read that as well because my story kind of might impinge on traveler community traveler society and traveler culture and lore a little bit so i just want to make sure that i'm not stepping on toes or you know anything like that so yeah so lots of research lots of fun reading and yeah so i i i have read so i read a couple of the books that i was really excited to read um the leigh bardugo rule of wolves oh my god lived up to itself i loved it so much i still keep thinking about it fabulous and then there was another book um crown of gilded thorns by jennifer l armentrout and she wrote the from blood and ash series and the kingdom of flesh and fire turns out it's not a trilogy it's not going to be six books and she spent this last book just setting up the plot for the next six books and i'm bored oh lads it was torture it was absolute torture getting through that book i've never looked at a percentage so many times i was like is this nearly over no it's only 30 to kill me now it was very exciting at the start because the last book ended in a very sighting like cliffhanger and then i was like okay let's let's go let's go let's go give me give me what's happening something's finally going to happen because they spent the entire last book just traveling grand fine you know building characters relationship enemies to lovers cutes cutesy foods uk had that going for it and then this book was just oh my god first couple of chapters super interesting really stuff going stuff happening very exciting all that jazz and then she was just in meetings for 50 to the middle for all of the middle of the book she was just in meetings going to meet people going to see people talking to people people would talk over her people who would explain things to her she would think about it for about three pages so patronizing i just felt really patronized by the author because everything had to be explained like so many times and i was like i get it or if i don't get it i shouldn't have to get it because this is too complicated like what are you doing oh god and either something about modern words like shocker or she i think at one point she mentioned the word hormones and i was like this is a medieval country right they ride horses around the place and and people are fighting each other with swords right how the hell do they know what hormones are oh and that she said it in like like you know in a kind of like a sarky kind of like oh my god these may these men are so hormonal and you're like nobody the rage i think she'd be fine as a contemporary romance contemporary romance should be absolutely fine but just the the style of the style of um and it was always like you good i was like stop it it was just the style of the speech that got me so much and the inordinate amount of ellipses used in her own thoughts painful painful book and loads of people loved it i don't understand what's wrong with me am i just a big snob it was so boring it was so boring so boring and the same jokes dropped it out again and again and again from book one like not even kieran could save it not even karen no no sad so that's that maybe that's put me into a reading club i had to go back to something that i knew was good which is six of crows and now i'm like what do we do now but i know that um i know that um emma hamm's next book which is the third book is coming out soon and i think she's also releasing another thing about the sister i don't know is it is it just me or do you know when there's like a main character and there's a few side characters with side plots going on and they release instead of the next book of the main characters they release the side character story i'm like i don't care what the hell give me the real story i don't care about these agents anyway i mean that was what tower of dawn was wasn't it but i did really enjoy tariff dawn anyway basically the story the moral of the story is i'm hypocrite we've reached an hour and five minutes of me banging on about myself i'm really glad i got to chat to you guys it just it took a long time for me to kind of just get my ass in the chair and just gather stuff together and have a chat with you i think it's because my my pattern isn't ready yet because i haven't um sat down and done it because i'm lazy that it made me feel a bit like oh i can't do a podcast if i haven't got the pattern to release but you guys don't mind so thanks so much for being there for me i love you all so much i hope you're taking care of yourself i'm doing my best to take care of me i'm real tired and um but you know we've got books we've got knitting hopefully september could everyone just really quick cross all of your fingers and toes and say a tiny prayer to whoever you fancy that grace's wedding will go ahead in september and 100 people will be allowed to visit to cut to come that's probably not realistic 50 or 100 it would be fine 50 or 100 please please please please please i really want a party god whoever is listening to me i really want a party i'll see you i'll see you next time

Channel: Grace O'Neill

Views: 5,096

Keywords: Babbles travelling yarns, Knitting podcast, Irish knitter, Flufftostuff2021, Knitting with handspun, Booktube, Booktok, Bookstagram, Bookish things

Id: xVQcdVgzVe8

Length: 65min 27sec (3927 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021