Yarn Along - Here Comes The Sun!

Today 9 January means 3 things: Yarn Along, Salomé - my niece's 19th birthday and the return, clouds permitting, of the SUN!!!
After 5 WEEKS of no sunlight on the house, today the sun makes its return! albeit only for a few minutes, but those precious minutes get longer and longer each day, until finally my car defrosts itself, without me having to run it for 10 minutes and scrape the windows outside and in.  And maybe this 'extra' warmth means that we all, here in this long narrow valley surrounded by 3-4000m peaks, can turn the heating down a notch - for the greater good!
I took this picture on Sunday afternoon from my bedroom window - see those mountains in the back ground - they have been hiding the sun since December; and see that 'fuzzyness' in the middle - that's pollution!! from heating systems.

But I mustn't complain too much, I have plenty of 'rays of sunshine' to fill my days!  one of which is knitting! With christmas knitting finished I finally cast-on my Shalom and have already found the cutest little button to go with it.

it is a cute button but a really bad picture, sorry!

Just finished a washcloth, which is a bit small so is being repurposed as a jug cover.  I'm going to brighten it up with a few crochet flowers - daisy's I think, thread some ribbon through the holes and add a few beads in the four corners!

Currently re-reading On Angel Mountain, the first of a 7 book series, (yes 7 but each one is as good as it's predecessor) set in 1796 in beautiful Pembrokeshire, Wales.
'18 yrs old Martha Morgan is newly established as the Mistress of Plas Ingli, a small and vulnerable estate on the flank of Carningli (Angel Mountain) in North Pembrokshire.  She is pregnant and suicidal, having just been forced into a shotgun wedding' 
don't worry things get better for Mistress Morgan, but unfortunately they also get much worse. The 7 books follow Martha into old age, her loves (and there were a few!!) and losses, her children and grandchildren, and her beloved 'servants' at the Plas.
On the front cover is a house - Plas Ingli, the fictional setting for Brian John's novels.  The house is on a mountain, a real mountain in north Pembrokeshire, which we (my father, best friend Amy and her daughter Katie) decided to visit.  We found ruins - the ruins?- so we thought but they didn't correspond to the picture on the book!!  Well it just so happens that the author and his wife Inger, a very talented artist, live near by. So next stop, Inger's studio.  Brian wasn't home but Inger patiently explained to us that apart from the mountain, the entire thing - house included - was all fictitious!! I knew that!!  Anyway, we had a good old chuckle with Inger, who reassured us that we weren't to first to get so wrapped up in the story, and my father bought me this lovely candle holder made by this beautiful Swedish artist.

Well, this is quite a long Yarn Along for me!  but I just love these books and want to shout about them from the top of my mountains here in the alps!