Weston-super-Mare in Pictures: January-March 2018

I live by the seaside, I go for a lot of walks... and I take a lot of photos!

I share a lot of my seaside snaps over on Instagram; I love having a space to share the lovely views and interesting details that catch my eye. This year I'm also doing a quarterly round-up of my fave photos here on my blog - I hope you'll enjoy following along as the seasons change.

It's been so cold and wet and grey this winter, I've not been for nearly as many walks as I'd have liked. The walks I have been on have been rather wonderful, though.

This grey winter day was beautiful, but so incredibly cold. I kept having to stop walking to jump up and down a bit and wiggle my fingers and toes to keep them from getting too chilly!

The light when it was sunny, though? Oh my goodness. So bright and clear and gorgeous.

The winter sunsets can be pretty magical, too.

This sunny day followed several days of heavy rain, the paths were little muddy rivers and I narrowly escaped slipping and falling several times. It was totally worth it for these views.

I get why people don't think to visit the seaside in the winter, but look what you're missing out on!

In March the weather went a bit weird, and the beach was covered in heavy snow thanks to the Beast from the East. I was particularly smitten by the combination of the snow and my favourite seaside shelters.

Later in the month, it snowed again: not as heavily as before, but with a similarly transformative magic. (I blogged about this walk - click here to see all the pics!).

Finally, at the end of March I walked a slightly different route through town and discovered a new-to-me bakery (yum) and what is now my new favourite door (you can't beat a good door).

Follow me on Instagram for regular (ish) updates from Weston-super-Mare.

Catch up with my faves shared in February to August last year, and in September to December.

The Evolution of a Rainbow Blanket

Blogging about my mini patchwork squares blanket last month made me realise that I never got round to properly photographing my rainbow blanket when I finished it a couple of years ago. I blogged about it being almost finished, and said I'd take photos of it finished "sometime soon" but, alas, never found the time and here we are two years later already.
 
I love my rainbow blanket, and really enjoyed making it so (as with the mini squares blanket last month) so I'm taking a look back at how it's developed over the years before having a "yay! finished blankets!" photo session.

 

In my teens I knitted a couple of blankets as gifts for my family, and also knitted a whole bunch of squares that never got used for anything. I rediscovered them in my 20s and began very slowly knitting more squares so I could finally turn them into a finished blanket. Or, rather, two blankets, because teen me (by accident? or by design??) had been knitting two different sizes of squares!

I finished the first blanket in 2013 (click to see pictures!), and in 2014 was busy knitting squares in assorted bright colours to add to the second blanket. All the squares were knitted in plain garter stitch, using double knit acrylic yarn and UK size 8 (4mm) knitting needle, casting on 30 stitches to make squares measuring approximately 14cm. 

At this point I had a whole bunch of dark grey squares in the mix (knitted with yarn left over from my sky blanket) and was thinking about putting the squares together in a block design similar to the one I was using for my mini squares blanket.
 

I wasn't totally happy with this layout, though, so I just focused on knitting squares from the yarn I already had and added in a few more colours I thought would blend in well.

In October that year I took out the darker squares and arranged the others in colour order and they just POPPED so the grey definitely had to go (I unravelled them and re-knitted them as mini squares for my patchwork blanket). 

By July 2015 I had 70 squares knitted, but the colour mix was looking a bit imbalanced.

I thought about just adding in some greens to balance out the "hot" reds and pinks, but decided to go for the full spectrum and cram in as many bright, happy colours as possible. So I bought a few more balls of yarn in zingy shades and continued slowly knitting more squares.
    

Frustratingly, when playing around with possible layouts for the blanket, I realised that a whole bunch of the squares were too big! (I guess I must have muddled up my knitting needles at some point?) I unravelled them all and started re-knitting them the correct size in the summer of 2015.

I spent the autumn of that year knitting a lot of blanket squares...

 

  ... and by November my stash of squares looked like this:

In December 2015 I finally sat down and planned the final layout. I'd been building up my rainbow spectrum stash without any real plan and was very pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to fit all the squares together; I just needed some more green!

 

I started stitching the outer sections of the blanket together...

... bought a final ball of bright green yarn, and began knitting green squares.
 

I finished knitting the very final square while watching Eurovision in May 2016 (I love Eurovision), then immediately started adding the remaining squares to the blanket.

I couldn't stop smiling while weaving the in the last few yarn ends; those colours just burst with happiness!

I wove in and trimmed the last of the yarn ends on May 25th 2016.

I've used the blanket a lot since then (I'm actually sitting on it right now as I type this) and it brings me joy on a daily basis. I hope I'll have a chance to take lots of snaps to capture that rainbow joy and properly show it off in another blog post sometime soon!

In the meantime... for more blanket-y goodness, follow the links to read about the making of my patchwork mini squares blanket, or my sky blanket.

Weston-super-Mare in Pictures: September-December 2017

Since moving to the seaside a year and a half ago I've been on a lot of walks, and taken a lot of photos of my new hometown! I started an Instagram account to share the photos, but I thought it would be nice to do occasional round-ups of my faves here on my blog as well.

I blogged last year about my fave photos I'd shared between February and August, and I'd planned on doing another "six months of seaside snaps" blog post... but then when I came to actually choose the photos I realised I had far too many faves to fit in just one blog post! What can I say - I love it here and I take a lot of pictures!

So, this year I'm going to try doing roughly quarterly round-ups and see how that goes. Today I'm catching up by sharing my faves from the end of last year, then next week I'll share my faves from January to March this year. I hope you'll enjoy the photos, I really enjoyed looking back through my snaps to choose my favourites.

An end-of-summer-holidays sandcastle:

Rocks on the beach near Uphill:

Rock meets concrete - I love these pretty pink rocks at the North end of the beach!

A very angry wall:

Pink twine:

Autumn light:

One of my favourite houses in Weston!

More excellent houses in the autumn sunshine:

Deliciously textured tracks on the beach, during preparations for the Beach Race:

A tiny silver shoe on an overgrown wall - I walked past this wall last week and the shoe is still there, like a tiny bit of public sculpture.

Just one of many gorgeously moody sunsets:

A gate being swallowed by sand:

Reflections on a calm, clear day - it's almost always breezy here, so it's a real treat seeing the water in the Marine Lake this still.

More reflections, because how could I just pick one photo from that beautiful day?

Boats on the river:

This is essentially just a photo of some bins but I love it:

And finally, bright boats on a gloriously sunny winter's day:

More seaside snaps coming soon!

Follow along on Instagram for more frequent (albeit slightly irregular) updates. Check out my travel archive for blog posts about my walks and trips around the UK.