Tess Young Designs & Makes

Well, it has been a while since I last blogged and lots has happened. Since last posting we have moved house. It wasn’t on the agenda until we saw that a house on a street we’d always liked was for sale. So we had to act fast. That involved finishing up all those DIY jobs on the old house that just needed a few final touches, Tidying my stash and years of accumulated ‘stuff’ so our house could go on the market and viewers could actually see into cupboards etc. and all the associated buying and selling stuff. Then there was the move itself…

Anyway we’re now in the new house and feeling a little more settled and dealing with the leaky roof and the leaky broken sash windows – I nearly chopped my finger off by trapping my hand in one whilst discovering the sash cord was broken; new house enthusiasm + inattention = accidents!

We’ve also been on holiday. It was great to get away and leave the long list of DIY jobs behind and just enjoy being warm and dry and walking for hours in the most amazing surroundings; the Pineta Valley in the Spanish Pyrenees. As usual it was a bit of a road trip going first to Italy to catch up with family over from America, then along the south of France and into Spain. Today I’ll just catch up with some pictures of what we saw, some of which will work their way into knitwear designs once I’ve caught up with a backlog of pattern publishing and get back to my sketches:

Things didn’t get off to the most auspicious start as the poor weather followed us to our first camping spot in Switzerland:

But things brightened up in France:

We camped at the excellent municipal campsite in Massat overlooking the town:

The Church had some wonderful wall paintings:

And high stained glass windows mean the spiders work undisturbed:

From here we headed over the Col de Peyresourde, keeping up the tradition of exploring the mountain stages of the Tour de France:

There was plenty of evidence of Team Sky having been up here this summer with ‘WIGGO’ painted on the road. I think it would take a lot more than a bit of paint to get me on a bicycle around here:

From here we headed over the mountains into Spain, but appeared to be going against the tide:

More of Spain in another post…