What a week!

I am, currently, an archaeologist. It's a job that I find mostly interesting and have stuck at the longest so far. However, the form of archaeology that I do isn't the Time Team stuff. This is my profession and I am more likely to be working on a construction site than not. Commercial archaeology in the UK is intimately tied to the construction industry and since that has died a death, archaeology is beginning to suffer too.

Well on Friday I was offically told that I would be made redundant on at the beginnig of June. And it was a shock but not a surprise. The company I work for has been trying to find work but there just isn't any so I completely understand the need to shed staff if they are going to survive. They are a business and will have to work hard in the next months to avert more job losses.

So there you have it. I have become a statistic of the credit crunch but am already looking for work. As I said there's not much in archaeology but I have office skills, and project management skills so who knows where it will all lead. I am also going to make a bigger effort to start selling things on etsy and folksy and de wanda and artfire and the other crafty websites. I am also going to build a website for me - that will have some of my photos and craft stuff on as well to see if I can generate some interest in what I do.

Been away . . . again

Well I am back from another exciting and thrilling work at the archaeological coalface. Okay, I was standing around watching a big yellow jcb dig a slot trench in Gloucester which amounts to the same thing. It's dull work: we uncovered a Victorian cellar, a cobbled surface and a 1930s drain but (as everyone is saying at the moment in this weird economic climate) IT IS WORK!

Anyway this has meant that I have not been able to blog and really I haven't had as much time to knit as I would have liked. But I did manage some knitting so hurrah for that at least. I started a sock last Saturday and have now finished it. It was my first attempt at doing the heel flap last and it looked very odd but it worked and I now just have to get the other one done.

I didn't really have much time for looking around Gloucester but did manage to find the market and they have 2 yarn stalls in there. Granted much of the yarn is acrylics and others oddities but there are some interesting bits too. I bought a couple of skeins of unknown green, pure wool that was quite scratchy and which had the lanolin smell but also that greasy smell that comes from coned yarn.

It's a bit of an experiment and at 69 shiny new pence it was a bargain even if I use it only for making felted bowls or something like that. It looks like a 4 ply so I thought might bloom to a double knit but after knitting a swatch on 3.75mm needles and then soaking it before washing it it has blossomed to a rather lovely, but slightly thinner than normal, aran weight.

It's still a bit scratchy but I am going to knit another swatch and drop a little bit of washing up liquid into the bowl and let it soak a while, then add some conditioner in the final rinse to see if the itchy factor can be reduced.