Like many of you, I love old books. My house is bursting at the seams with ‘em. (Although while I was ill, I did amuse myself by reaaranging the bookshelves according to genre, and in the process, weeded out about 60 books. Worryingly, you can’t see the gaps that this created. Possibly this has something to do with the Amazon order I placed round about the same time. Ahem.)

I’m always on the lookout for books from the 1930s-50s, light fiction, preferably with a touch of wit and charm. I have an especial fondness for classic whodunnits, but its not easy to find ones that I haven’t already got. So I was very happy to stumble upon Greyladies, a publisher who is reprinting books from the period, specialising in children’s books, adult novels written by childrens authors, and vintage crime. So far, I’ve read Death On Tiptoe, and Murder At The Flood, both of which were excellent (although the cover graphics of Murder At The Flood was a bit lurid and OTT, in my opinion). Next on the list is Murder While You Work, which is described as a creepy thriller from Noel Streatfeild.

You can read more about Greyladies here. I must say, so far, I do like the cut of their jib.

The shop preview is up, and the update goes live at 7pm on Sunday. We hope to see you then!

More favourites tomorrow.

As you will see, I have changed the layout of the yarn photographs. It was suggested to me that perhaps having the large expanse of white background around the yarn was throwing off the white balance/exposure values, etc, so I’ve filled as much of the frame as possible with yarn. I think it looks nicer too, and you can still see lots of the skeins in detail. I’m particularly pleased with the photos this week, a lot of them are very punchy, but that’s because the colours are super punchy!

Here are some of my favourites from this week:

More tomorrow.

Do you remember the Winter Cottage mittens? I’ve just made the pattern available to everyone, and it’s free! The Ravelry link is here, and the pattern is here.

On a completely unrelated topic, I don’t know about you, but I don’t like change. I mean, I really don’t like it. I resist it with every fibre of my being. Old, goooood. New, baddddd. It drives Tony crazy. He is one of those people who embrace change, actively seek it out. he is constantly looking for newer, better ways to do things, innovations, adjustments, inventions. While he creates the new, I cling tearfully to the old.

As an example, my laptop has been on its last croak for about a year now. When your entire life is dependent on the Internet, a reliable, fast computer is essential. So, about 7 months ago, we went out and bought a new laptop. You may have heard me mention it. It was new and shiny and superbly fast. I loved it. And so, I couldn’t bring myself to use it. I used it only for the yarn photographs, using the old laptop for everything else. I had to tread on eggshells with it, especially on the Sunday updates, when everything moves fast and I have to have several programmes running. My poor old laptop could barely cope with Internet Explorer, let alone a whole bunch of programmes. And, to add insult to injury, it went through charger cables at about one every 3 months, for some reason.

So last weekend, I came to a momentous decision. After months of Tony nagging me to use the new laptop, and rolling his eyes at me every time I complained about the old laptop’s slowness and habit of freezing and crashing at the worst possible moments. I would make the change over.

Don’t tell Tony this, but why did I wait so long??? It’s bliss working on the new laptop (even though the shortcut keys are all in different places, which is still throwing me off).

Maybe change isn’t so bad after all.

Maybe.