our day out

For Christmas, I bought beau a day's wine tasting in our beautiful city. Yesterday was that day. Of course, I couldn't expect him to go alone, so I took one for the team and tagged along! We had decided earlier in the week that we would make a proper day of it and go out for breakfast (Quilliam Brothers, where else?!), and then following our day of wine and fine food, we took a trip to our local independent cinema called the Tyneside Cinema. This place is absolutely lovely. If you get seats upstairs which are a bit more pricy, you actually get a sofa and can get wine and snacks delivered to you. Bliss. 

I started the day wandering around the city, in a bit of disbelief. I'm not a morning person, and seeing the city so early in the morning (OK, 9am) was a bit of a revelation. OK so it's January, and any city in the UK will look dull and grey, but it was so much quieter than I expected. I was practically skipping along the streets. For the first hour of the day, I took a number of photos, and then of course wine got involved and I forgot all about my camera!

This is the Quilliam Brothers. Such a gorgeous place to have good tea and lovely food. We grabbed ourselves a window seat and watched the world go by for an hour or so.

And so the day was lovely. Wine tasting was great fun, and the food at Blackfriars was divine.

Slightly worse for wear, we then head over to the cinema for 12 Years a Slave. For the record, I hated about the first half of this film, and then it started to grow on me. The arrival of Brad Pitt just made me roll my eyes. He was completely miss cast, and frankly irritating. Regardless by the end, I did enjoy the film. Quite emotional. A realistic portrayal of life at that point in time, I'm sure.

I'm back on the love of crochet again. I'm just about finishing a gorgeous cowl for a friend using stash from my cardigan that I recently finished. I've just started a cable cardigan in crochet too. I can already see this pattern is going to be challenging as I've never attempted anything like this in crochet. This is the pattern, though I'm using beautiful aran bluefaced leicester yarn which I purchased last year from Yarndale 2013. This lovely natural yarn has been calling for a special project and so something as delicate and divine below seemed to be a match made in heaven!

Very exciting. And after spending the day in the cold yesterday, I've decided I need some mittens. Found a lovely free pattern so that's another work that needs to start! 

As for #crochertmoodblanket2014, I'm on track still! I'm not sure if I like the square for week 3 and I haven't really thought about week 4! But I have started joining (something else I haven't really done in the past). It's slowly getting there.