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Bath Endurance Weekend

I spent this weekend in Trowbridge taking part in the Bath Endurance Weekend organised by Hot Chilli Triathlon club (I think they have a great name) I did this last year too but I found the quarry water too cold and I only managed to do 1 lap but this time it was a lovely 12 degrees and I managed 2 laps, hurrah. I was very pleased with that. I'm still swimming the entire distance breaststroke, which is fairly slow but I made it and at some point I'll get round to learning to crawl.

So I had to get up at 5 again, which I could tell was too early because radio 4 was playing Farming Today'. I made the two laps in 46mins even tho' my leg kept threatening to cramp on me during the last 500m or so. My Garmin watch completely failed to calculate my distance, it decided I'd only managed 8m.

Walking back up the hill after the swim I realised that it had been hard work, after the first 500m I felt like I could pretty much carry on forever. My brain did try and panic me when I was at the furthest point away from the shore with its silly worry about something going wrong but I didn't listen to it and the safety canoeists looked pretty competent anyway.

I made it back to the car and I had about 3 hours before I started the bike distance so I ate my yummy rhubarb and ginger jam sandwiches and all the other food I had, drank all the drink and managed to fall asleep for 40mins. 

 The bike was fun and exhausting, I was worn out after 30k, my chain didn't fall off so that was good and I managed to overtake a few people. After that I went home to rest.

The next morning I headed back to do the 10k, +Shaney Orrowe and +Greg Wilson came too and both of them beat me again! The run was hard work, I already ached everywhere from Saturday but the weather was glorious so that helped motivate me onwards. 

I had a brilliant time and I hope they continue organising this event.

Westonbirt sprint triathlon 2014

I really love racing at Westonbirt, the scenery is beautiful and I got lucky again with the weather during my race. I did this race last year too. This year I marginally improved by 1min :) it would have been more but I managed to dither longer in transition this time. Importantly I beat my boss by 10mins and Kate, Alex and little Edward turned up at the end to say hi. This race was organised by DB Max. s 400m, b 24km, r 5km. Completed in 1hr 48m 9secs

City of Bath Triathlon

Yay, I got to finally do this race again. This was my first ever triathlon 2 years ago and there were quite a few people doing it as their first one this year too. It wasn't quite the same, as the swim was only 400m rather than 750m. The bike route seemed very similar to how I remembered it, very hilly and the run seemed similar but didn't end on the race track this time.

It was still impossible to get out at the end of the pool, this time I swam to the side and got out there instead.

swim: 400m bike: 23k, run 5k

Organised by DBMax and Bath Amphibians

Results

Rhubarb Jam

I was running out of jam and there was lots of new rhubarb growing in the garden and some of last year's frozen in the freezer.

I made Ginger and Rhubarb jam, it isn't as gingery as I'd like but it's still yummy. 

 

Dragon Patch

Another patch for a pair of trousers, this time it was on stretchy fabric. I need to do some playing around with the tension on my machine as the first attempt didn't work at all and all the bobbin thread was pulled into the front. I only tricked it into working by putting the same colour bobbin thread as top thread.

I used the Gilded Heraldry - Dragon design and made it slightly smaller so it would fit on Gabe's trousers.

Here's the finished result:

Big T Sprint

Bank holiday Monday and it's the first triathlon of the year :) I was a little nervous but felt fine as soon as I started swimming.

Organised by Hot Chilli Tri Club

swim: 400m, bike: 25k, run 5k

A mostly flat course which was a nice surprise, so unlike the Bath Triathlon I'll be doing later this month.

No medal for this one, but I did get an oversized T-shirt, yay! Finished in about 2hours 6mins.

Ripple blanket

For Kate and Alex's new baby I made a ripple blanket. He took so long to appear I managed to finish it in time :)

This pattern is available as a free Ravelry download.

BSG patches

1/05/2014

A Scylla patch

27/04/2014

Next I used a spring leaf design to create a logo for the Agrius (a hydroponics ship).

02/03/2014
My character has somehow become a viper pilot in the BattleStar Galactica game I'm playing in, so I felt she needed an appropriate outfit. I found an excellent jacket from a charity shop and a friendly designer +Lynellen Perry with an Etsy Shop  :)

 

Another Pair of Patched Jeans

I decided to patch another pair of jeans that I ripped a hole in when I fell off my bike. This one I stitched onto a different piece of fabric which is going to fray and then handstitched it to the jeans. Hopefully it will only fray to the edge of the stitching and my handsewing will hold up. Oooh experiments...

 

Dance Macabre

 For +Max Moore's birthday I embroidered a T-shirt with dancing skeletons on it

Teatowel

 I embroidered a tea towel with a bunny sleeping in a stack of teacups for Cass' birthday.

 

Steampunked trousers

I split my jeans :( so they became steampunk jeans  :) I've put two patches on so far:

Tempus Fugit

Steampunk Butterfly

I had to add another one

Compass Rose

Jeju 10k

I went on holiday to visit some friends in Jeju and Tokyo. Alan happened to be doing a race while I was there so I ended up doing 10k along the coast of Jeju, which was really nice, much better view than Castle Combe.

Purple top hat

A friend requested a purple top hat for a LARP, eventually I managed to make it the right size!

A free pattern is available for this top hat. I used Rico creative cotton, Kardinal which is 100% cotton from Get Knitted, my bricks and mortar yarn shop of choice.

Cushions

I made some cushions for +Alison Woogara  and +Nadine Woogara 's birthdays. Mum gave me an extra challenge by only providing me with enough fabric to comfortably make 1 cushion, so they ended up being a bit patchwork on the back.

I used the following patterns:

• Here Comes the Sun
• Ruby Sun

Chilly 10k

 Ran this race with +Greg Wilson and  +Shaney Orrowe both of whom beat me :( must sport harder next time.

Izzy's birthday clothes

So Izzy is 1 in a couple of days so I thought I'd try to embroider some things. First finding plain tops for kids is really hard, especially for girls so I went for two boy tops. Then I discovered that the large hoop is too big for the tiny tops so I had to reduce my designs down to the size of my smallest hoop. Luckily I have Embird and eventually figured out how to do it.

I used the following designs:

• Bee Happy
• Sweet As Honey
• Fancy Feather
• Light as Air

So I happily stitched away:

Yay a bee design :)

Then I thought about some wings:

'cos, you know, only girls have wings. Then I got carried away, and decided to stitch the front of this top too.

You'll note the surprise Cthulhu in the corner of that feather : 

 Well that's because he was my solution to the hole that I created by stitching the front to the back. Grrr, I think it must have got bunched up underneath the hoop when I wasn't paying attention. So this top is inspired by Dark Crystal with added surprise Cthulhus. Happy birthday Izzy :)

Sea creature towels

 I looked around for some more stuff to embroider and found towels :) I used the following designs:

• Jellyfish doodle
• Seahorse doodle 
• Dolphin doodle