Granny's Heiland Hame

The boy and I are just back from a lovely weekend in Elgin. We stopped on the way, just past Carrbridge for some FO shots of the Honeycomb vest. I finished it the day after the Olympics, but had to block it. I'm quite pleased, but I picked up too many stitches around the arms, so it's sagging a bit - I think I'll try weaving some elastic into it and reblocking, before taking the drastic action of reknitting.

It was quite a hard pattern to follow - there's an expectation of a knitting level I feel. Luckily I managed to grasp the pattern, and how to adapt it when waist shaping leaves the stitches out of sync with chart pattern. I modified it to knit in the round (notes here)




We also popped up North to Brora to see some relatives. My granny mentioned that she had aquired some Hunters of Brora yarn and I've been desperate to get my hands on this for some time.

Sadly, this yarn was found in bags out the back of Hunters after it closed. They threw out bags and bags of it. I wish we had known and we could have hired a moving house-sized lorry to remove it.

The 2 shades I got are stunning though - a 4ply, enough for 2 cardigans or jumpers - yay!

On the way my mum mentioned a traditional song about the area from her childhood Granny's Heiland Hame. I've never heard it, but found the lyrics online.



We hadn't meant to travel that far North, and had only popped out to try spotting some dolphins at North Kessock and Chanonry Point at Cromarty. I really really wanted to get the yarn though, and the boy hadn't been up to see where my family are from.

We set the sat nav from Cromarty, just to see where it would take us (even though we know the route) and it took us a different way... 'take the next left, and then take the ferry'. Ferry!? What?!

The sat nav alerts you when your route will include toll bridge, so it never occured to us that it would take us on a ferry route without warning us first.

And a ferry? On a Sunday? We were doubtful, but sure enough, there was a two car ferry, every half hour, every day. So we thought why not (after checking on ye olde-fashioned paper atlas that we weren't about to go on an island-hopping detour)






It was state of the art ... well perhaps not, but it was totally cool to find this adventurous detour. If we hadn't been using the sat nav we would never have come across it - and we shaved a good hour or so off the trip. The pic above is of me trying to keep my balance.