I think they noticed!

Hedging my bets

So I was quite keen on the idea of a bit of "guerilla knitting". But I thought I'd start small. Our next door neighbours have a hedgehog outside their front door and as the weather got colder he started to look a bit chilly. So I knitted him a very simple 12 stitch 2x2 rib scarf using some left over sock yarn.

This morning on my way out, I popped their Christmas card through the door, put the scarf on the hedgehog, took a quick photo and ran to the car and away.




Doesn't he look much warmer now? I'm not going to mention it and see how long it takes them to notice. They know I knit so will probably guess who did it, but when?

Knit for bees!

I've just seen this post over on Eskimimiknits blog. If you like knitting scarves but have too many, why not donate them to the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.

This is from their blog:

Go Knit! 2009 is well underway and we are so pleased with the response we have had from those of you who want to support The Bumblebee Conservation Trust. Not only are we regularly receiving packages of lovely scarves, kindly donated by you, but we are also getting great coverage! We have so far seen a fantastic response from online knitters (many thanks to ‘Stitch and Bitch’ and everyone else who has made our campaign heard throughout the online world!). We will also be having an interview with BBC radio Cornwall which will be broadcasted next weekend, and have just been told that our event has had a shout out on Atlantic FM! So thank you to everyone who is helping to make this project a success!

Want to join the buzz?
-We’d love you to!!
If you can donate us a scarf to sell (with all proceeds going to The Bumblebee Conservation Trust) we would really appreciate it! Scarves can be dropped into your local Seasalt store or sent to us:
Kathryn Wild
Seasalt
1 Church Street
Falmouth
Cornwall
TR11 3DN

If you have any questions or would like to request a press release send us an email at chloe@seasaltcornwall.co.uk or call us on 01326 312478 (ext 1007)

If anyone from my knitting group wants to make a scarf to donate, I don't mind collecting them up and sending them all off together.

Twisty and Fidget

Ok, I got my photographer on the case and can now show you my two FOs.

The first one is a little neckwarmer. I started this while I was procrastinating over the seaming (not that there is much) on Twisty. It is a very quick little knit and the buttons I got from John Lewis are perfect.

Pattern: The Fidget by Robin Dodge
Length: 23cm
Yarn: Garnstudio Drops Classic Alpaca - colour 3806m - 2 strands held together - used under two balls.
Needles: 5.5mm KnitPro Harmony circulars
Mods: none

The second FO is my Drops jumper/vest thing. Yesterday evening was very warm and it was not comfortable wearing this for the photos. It is going to be lovely and toasty for the winter for work though.

Pattern: Drops 115-24
Size: small
Yarn: Garnstudio Drops Eskimo - colour 49m - 7.2 balls (the pattern says 6 but this is incorrect)
Needles: 9mm KnitPro Harmony circulars
Mods: none

I decided not to go for the Titania top in the previous post, but instead have made a start on another Drops pattern (there are hundreds of them and they are ALL free). This one is pattern number 100-2 which I am calling Red Rib. Strangely, looking at the measurements, I need to make a large in this design(?). I don't mind if it is a bit big in the end, it will be a great snuggly cardi for the winter, as it buttons right up to the neck.


I am using DK yarn rather than aran, so have had to swatch and go up a couple of needle sizes.

A bit of knitting content

At Christmas I managed to get a couple of hats finished and sent at the last minute. Amazingly they were sent by me on 23rd December and arrived on the 24th! My mum then commented that she needed a scarf to go with her hat. So this is what I have made.

Not exactly a scarf, but a neckwarmer instead, much neater without all those flappy ends that have to be tucked in.

The pattern is the Margaret Necklets from the Winter 2008 Interweave Knits Holiday edition, and this is the shorter version. It was a pretty quick knit, it just took me a few days to get some buttons, which I eventually found on ebay.

I am now working on Ingenue from the book Custom Knits by Wendy Bernard. I am using Drops Alaska from SKD, a lovely thick aran weight yarn that is producing a really dense warm fabric. It is growing very quickly, (because I am off work settling the dog in for a few days, not that she needs it - see previous post!) and is knit from the top down on circulars needles, so no seaming, yippee!

Also OTN is a new pair of Jaywalkers as my previous pair died on me a few weeks ago when both heels went through at the same time. I am using the Regia Kaffe Fassett sock yarn in Landscape Fire for these.

In the words of Eric Morcambe.........

.............you can't see the join!!

Looky, looky what I got today,


KnitPicks Harmony interchangeable needles


Very nice indeed - the joins are smooth, the cables are very flexible and the needles are very pointy and light. I LIKE!! I have used the 4mm to cast on for the Tweedy Waistcoat, which makes for quite dark knitting because of the colour of the yarn and the colour of the needle tips.


This a scarf I finished off last night on Addis. I started this in November 2006, as a first foray into lace knitting, but after completing two repeats of the pattern I was unsure if it was me. While I was waiting for the sock yarn to come last week I picked it up as an in-between project and as it grew quite quickly I decided to carry on and finish it. It isn't blocked yet, but when it is, it will be put away for a Christmas present.


And here is himself on the front cover of the local newspaper, we did laugh. Couldn't have been much happening in the news last week, hee hee. (If you click on the picture it blows up big enough to read the article)

Woolfest 2008

Guess where I went last weekend?


This the bag I filled with goodies, but what did it contain by the end of the day??????

Tah-dah............(click on any of the pictures for a close-up!)


Five hanks of Colinette Iona to make Cherie Amour


Some cute buttons from Injabulo


3 hanks of Manos Silk Blend


3 skeins of KnitWitches sock yarn and 1 of Natural Dye Studio merino sock yarn


KnitWitches silk laceweight (600m) and KnitWitches cashmere laceweight (1000m)


See that grey spotty alpaca at the back?


Yep, this one. His name is Mingle.......


and his fleece is partly responsible for this. 6 balls of WhyNot Alpaca from Sedburgh, Cumbria, to make the Gathered Pullover from Interweave Knits magazine Winter 2007.


We went up to Cumbria on Friday but it was a bit too late to go into Woolfest and have enough time. We did go to the site to have a look and the first person we saw was Chris, dashing out the door. She was empty handed but informed us that her car was already stuffed to the brim!

We checked into the hotel and then had a lovely Italian meal that evening.

On Saturday we "did" Woolfest. I wasn't sure what to expect, but basically it was a big livestock building where everyone had set up their stalls. Yarn stalls, spinning stalls selling wheels and paraphernalia, live animals at one end including sheep, alpacas and rabbits. The Angora rabbits were hilarious, I didn't realise they had such pointy up ears.

There were plenty of stall holders whose names I recognised, and many I didn't and there were loads of ravelry badges being displayed. I bumped into J, Beryl and Chris from the knitting group, but didn't manage to spot Mel, she was probably buried in fleece!!

I bought all the stuff above (not the animals though) and Colin bought me a swift and ball winder stick (but I don't know about them until my birthday!).

The ladies of KnitWitches were very chatty and recommended an Indian restaurant that they had been to so that evening we went there. And they were there too. And Amanda from Natural Dye Studio was staying in our hotel so we saw them at breakfast.

I'm afraid I wouldn't recommend that part of Cumbria for a stay, as we went off to the coast to have a look and it was very run-down and bleak. Such a shame because the Lakes part is lovely.

Since we got back I finished my Vegas Sands cowl. I have made it quite tall and it fits snugly so it is going to be very warm in the cold weather.


Can you spot the one (not) deliberate mistake?


Talking of mistakes I have had an absolute disaster. I finished Colin's jumper as you know and had partly sewn it up when I asked him to try it on "just to see". Well, the sleeves were about 6 inches too long and the cotton was stretching so it was pulling the shoulders down making it worse. I decided to shorten the sleeve from the cuff but the first one wouldn't unravel. I decided to take the sleeves off and frog and re-knit them. But, when I went to take the sleeve that I had sewn on off, I cut the wrong thread and a hole started growing in the BACK of the jumper. So the upshot is that I now have a lovely full bag of balls of cotton and NO JUMPER!!!! I had to frog the lot!!! I will not be making it again, certainly not in the cotton, it just hung off Colin like a sack, ulgh. I think it is now destined to be a selection of string shopping bags.

But on a lighter note, I have started the Gathered Pullover and the alpaca is GORGEOUS!!!!

Bainbridge scarf

Also congratulations to my friend Mark who has just become a daddy. Click on over and see his cute little son Ben.

KAL, house manoeuvres & The Book Thief

This weekend I started the Bainbridge Scarf KAL. I have more or less finished it, just the ties to do which I will probably finish this evening. I have used Rowan Bamboo Soft and it is REALLY soft!! I also started a pair of Tidal Wave Socks after I finished the Zoknis, using the Opal Neon I have in my stash. The Joma jumper is moving along slowly, it is quite a boring knit, loads of stocking stitch. Pics will be in the next post (whenever that is because the computer will be moved tonight to make way for the decorating!!!)


On Tuesday evening I met up with Becca at Borders. She started a Clapotis while we were there, and she is using a gorgeous yarn in a pale bluey colour, I'm rather jealous of it actually! I think it is this one. It will be lovely when its done.


George is getting on well with the decorating. At the moment we are sleeping in the back bedroom and we have now been turfed out of the living room as he is starting that today. Poor Colin ended up moving all the books yesterday because the dust really got to me and I spent the day sneezing and with a streaming nose. The living room needs to be finished by Wednesday because the new carpet is coming then.


I had wanted to go to Wonderwool Wales this weekend but Colin was due to be on a course all weekend and I didn;t fancy driving down through deepest darkest Wales on my own for 3 hours each way! But Saturday luchtime he abandoned the course so we could have gone. However, with all the removals needed its a good job we didn't. But he has promised to take me to Woolfest instead at the end of June. Mel and maybe Chris are going to this too so we may be able to meet up. I think we are going to make a weekend of it and stay over for a couple of nights in a nice hotel. It is in Cockermouth in Cumbria, somewhere I've never been before.

I have just started reading Grave Doubts by Elizabeth Corley. I'm only a few pages in so no comments on it yet.

I finished The Book Thief yesterday. I really enjoyed it even though it was set in WWII Germany. It was interesting because you get some idea from the German perspective of life during the war on a normal street. They were just ordinary people same as everyone else, running to shelters when the air raids went off etc. There was a slight Anne Frank-ness to it, with the family hiding a Jewish man in the basement for part of the book but the main character is a 9 year old girl called Leisel who is sent to a foster family after her brother dies and her mother is "sent away". She comes to love her foster parents and settles into the local community. They are very poor and she takes any opportunity she can to get hold of books which she reads over and over, finally writing her own book in the basement. The narrator of the book is Death, who comes to carry away the souls of those who don't survive for various reasons, and who takes a special interest in Leisel throughout her life. If that sounds interesting, get yourself a copy! Another bonus is that there are short chapters!

Soup and a sandwich anyone?

We've just had a busy week really.

On Tuesday my car went back to the garage, and guess what? They could find nothing wrong with it. Maybe its just me then because Colin drove it yesterday with no problem either. I'm still going to look to change it though.

On Thursday the decorator came to start giving the house a new lick of paint. He works on his own so will probably be here for another couple of weeks. We are getting new carpets downstairs due to Charlie's lack of house training (!) so we thought we'd have a freshen up of all the walls and woodwork too. And new laminate floors in the dining room and kitchen. Those were done on Friday so it was a bit mad here with the fitters and George (the decorator) trying to work around each other.

Also on Thursday we headed off to Oswestry for Colin's latest scan results. And it was great news. The tiny spot that was seen in his lung 6 months ago hasn't changed at all so they have concluded that it is more than likely some kind of calcified something that is totally benign. They are not going to need to do any more CT scans on it. We were both very relieved. A great birthday present for Colin for Friday in fact. Yep, he is another year older!


On Saturday some friends, Jon, Verity & Molly came over for a visit to the zoo. This is Jon and Molly who is two and a half.


She was really taken with Colin, I think there was some kind of kinship going on between two redheads!!


As it was so cold the animals weren't that active but there were a few out and about, we even got to see a Spectacled Bear which is very unusual, they usually hide away.


The penguins were out and the flamingoes were looking particularly pinky-orange.




The tigers had their lunch and had a little doze indoors.


Then we came back to our house and had something to eat and watched Mary Poppins. I was very jealous when Jon announced that their Boosh tickets are FRONT ROW!!!

Because it was Colin's birthday on Friday and it is our wedding anniversary on Wednesday we decided to treat ourselves to a cooked breakfast on Sunday morning. We went down to the Blue Moon Cafe on the Groves and had a full English breakfast each before heading over to Winsford to look at cars. There were 2 possible Polos so we asked for the keys to have a look at them. The first one had a deposit on it so we couldn't look at it, but the other one looked promising. From the outside it was fine but once we were inside we noticed a cigarette burn on the leather bit round the gearstick which then made us notice the smell of stale cigarette smoke. Yuck, no thanks. Colin then started noticing a few cars he quite liked so we ended up sitting in a Mercedes and a BMW too!

On the way back I mentioned lunch (you can see life revolves around my stomach!) and Colin said "We could go for soup and a sandwich somewhere if you like." Does this make sense to anyone? The way I see it is you have soup with bread or toast, OR a sandwich. Not soup AND a sandwich. The whole point is that you dunk the bread or toast in the soup. You can't dunk a sandwich in because it has a filling. How yucky would that be? Am I wrong? Anyway, we decided that we had enough stuff at home so seeing as we had already had brekkie out, we went home instead.

On knitterly things, I ripped out the six inches I'd done on the Joma sweater as it was so obviously going to be too small. I have now acquired another 5 balls of the organic cotton so I have started again on a larger size. As for the Zoknis, they got a bit of attention while I was waiting to make sure I could get more cotton for Joma. So I have 8 more pattern rows left until I can do the toe decreases and cast off the second sock. I hope I can do that tonight so I can take the finished pair to show Becca when I see her tomorrow. The Clapotis is getting quite big too, I have finished 3 straight section repeats and have dropped three stitches so far (for those of you not familiar with Clapotis - is there anyone out there? - you drop stitches on purpose!). With the possibility of having only two WIPs later on this evening I think it is time to scout out a new project. Oh hang on, I'm doing a quick KAL next weekend with the Coconut Lodge group on ravelry. We are making a Bainbridge scarf in honour of Dixon Bainbridge!!

FOs and more socks!

A couple of FOs this morning..........


The finished Argosy scarf














And my Lorna's Laces toe-ups. The first skein of the LL had longer green sections and the second one had longer purple sections, so I have one sock more greeny and one sock more purpley. I need to knit something in a more uniform colour next to avoid the problem of
handpainted yarn being so random.



So I have cast on some Zokni socks using the strange stranded yarn I got from Fauveline. I'm not sure they are going to be a success and I may get frustrated with all the strands and rip them out but I'll see how I get on.

I've made a start on the rib anyway. The first row was a right old pain but the subsequent ones weren't too bad.

Spot the difference

Beach and celebration

As Colin is going over to Manchester for a course this weekend, we decided to take Thursday and Friday off. Today we are just pottering and doing bits and pieces but yesterday we decided to take The Gorgeous One on a little outing. We jumped in the car and headed up to West Kirby on the Wirral and here is where Charlie got his first experience of sand.




Not sure what he makes of it really but he was quite interested in some horse droppings on the beach!










There were lots of other dogs around and he managed to get on with all of them. Here he is saying hello to a couple of larger dogs. He was also quite taken with a rather attractive lady jogger and set off running to heel with her for a few metres until we managed to get his attention back to us.





And here he is trying not to have his lead put back on when it was time to go home.











I am getting through my Argosy scarf but the second skein is a bit different in colour to the first, I guess that's a risk you take with hand-dyed yarns. There is a darker blue in the second skein but i don't think it would be that noticeable when wearing it because there are so many other colours there. It is about 70% done so will be in time to be a present I think.

This morning I received some yarn that i ordered from a German seller on ebay. I had seen this seller mentioned on another blog but now I don't know where it was.

This cost me about a fiver including postage from this seller. It is 50% wool, 20% merino, 20% acrylic and 10% viscose. The colours are darker than on the ebay photo and also a bit redder than this photo. The colourway is called Celebration.







It is quite unusual because it is 5 strands of very fine yarn and it hasn't been plied together so you are effectively knitting with 5 strands held together.





It is a bit like the single strands of the DMC embroidery cottons But the resulting swatch is so amazingly soft. I'm not sure what it will be like trying to knit a whole pair of socks with 5 strands but hey, I'll give it a go sometime.





My Mighty Boosh series 3 DVD arrived yesterday at last. I have also now got Cesar Millan's second book "Be the Pack Leader" which I am trying to read along with the Matthew Reilly, and knitting and keeping an eye on the dog. Huh, multitasking!! Over the weekend i'm going to sort out my printed off knitting patterns into a ring binder cos at the moment they are scattered all over the place.

I have done another 2 reiki treatment over the past week, but you can read about that here. Well, off to do a bit more of the scarf before lunch.

New for nattering knitters.

Exciting news!! I have started a knitting group!! Well, there are two of us doing it actually. I came across someone else on ravelry who lives here in Chester and got chatting through the messaging system on there. She said that she would love it if there was a knitting group that met at Borders at Cheshire Oaks so I said "why not start one". She made some enquiries with the store and they were really keen so yesterday we met up there and spoke to the supervisor, Simon. He showed us where we could gather the group and was very accommodationg.

So the upshot is that the new group will be held at Borders, Cheshire Oaks on the second Tuesday of the month starting on 11th March, from 6.30pm till 8pm-ish. All welcome if you are in the area. One of the ladies who works in the LYS is telling customers about it too so hopefully it will be more than just the two of us on the first night.

On the recommendation of Clarabelle I have started an Argosy Scarf from knitty.com. I'm not sure whether to rattle through this for a present or to finish my socks first. I am just casting off the first toe-up sock. The scarf is so squooshy that I would be loath to part with it. I am using the Fyberspates DK that I got last week.


There is progress on the Gorgeous One front. We had another trainer round yesterday from BarkBusters and rather than trying to teach him "tricks" like sit, stay etc which the other one did, she actually showed us how to stop him doing things he shouldn't. Ah relief. I think he was so pooped afterwards, because he actually lay and fell asleep in his bed during the evening rather than chewing it and dragging it around the room. And today he actually seems to be showing me some respect instead of chewing my trousers and being a pain in the arse. He's so cute.

My mum & step-dad got to see him via the webcam last night. I finally got round to setting it up and after a few teething troubles we managed to get a connection between us via Windows Messenger. Charlie was so funny, my mum was calling him and he couldn't work out where she was!!

I had a surprise on Saturday. The new Matthew Reilly is out and was half price in Waterstone's. I couldn't grab it quick enough, and in the process broke my resolution of not buying any books this year. I think one slip up is allowed and as I said to Colin "its not a book, it's a necessity!". He promptly took it off me and said "Well you have to finish the book you're reading first and I've just finished mine so I'll read it first!". Humph! He gave it back this morning saying it was all too ridiculous (that's the point of MR) and that I could have it after all. I shall start it later today.

I am Sooooo lucky

I am so lucky to have a wonderful friend. And the daft thing is we have never met. Our first contact was through a bookring that was running on bookcrossing.com. And then we became blogging friends. I won't mention her name as she prefers to stay anonymous if she can but she knows who she is and some of you know her too. Anyway, she sent me this Ilga Leja Diamonds on the Diagonal scarf out of the blue!! Just out of the goodness of her heart because I have had a dodgy time of it lately. What a sweet person she is. Thank you so much.

It is made with Posh Yarn in a wonderful mix of pinky purpley grey colours with a hint of a yellowy green. Gorgeous. And just the right size for this time of year when you don't yet need a really big scarf. In fact I shall wear it today!

No sign of my Lace needle yet so I shall carry on with the other project for the time being.