Two whole finished items

I don't seem to have blogged about knitting for ages, but I have had several projects on the go, I just kept forgetting to take photographs in suitable light. But now that Spring is well and truly here it's a lot easier!

I've finished working on the wrap cardigan in Twilley's Freedom Spirit that I resurrected for the Ravellenic Games. I just had one sleeve to finish, plus the border to finish and sew on. I remembered whilst I was finishing the sleeve how much I'd loved the colours when I was first knitting it several years ago.

And this is it all finished and blocked. I think my tension changed slightly over the years and I'm a couple of sizes bigger now than I was when I started knitting it, so it has to be worn as an open cardigan rather than a wrap one, but it's still wearable, and I think will be a useful garment. I (briefly) considered frogging it and starting again, but Freedom Spirit is a nightmare to frog and I couldn't face the thought. It's a little bit pulled at the front, where the border was sewn on.

And I've finished another one of the cabled hoodies for my nephew's eighth birthday. This is size 9 - 10 years, so should hopefully last him a while, and took 4 balls of Sirdar Supersoft Aran. Despite being acrylic, it's nice to knit with and I know washes well, as the last hoodies I made for him and his brother three years ago have lasted well.
This is it pre-blocking:

And post-blocking, where it looks a totally different colour! It's actually more of a burgundy red, like the picture above! Monkey couldn't resist getting in on the blocking action too.

I enjoyed reading the Yarn Harlot's post about blocking the other week and realised that I, too, had been guilty of thinking there was no need to block acrylic. I can certainly see the difference in the pre and post blocking pictures anyway!

I'm now busy working on a couple more Beyond Puerperiums for a friend who is expecting twins, so there should be another knitting update before too much longer.

Christmas

We had a fairly quiet Christmas, staying with my Mum and eating massive amounts of food (including an entire nut roast just for me. It lasted days). We had a few trips out, to look at kitchen showrooms (!) and to meet up with an old school friend of mine. And my brother's family came over with the nephews, who, of course, are now huge.

I received some lovely presents - some of them are here:

Apron and oven gloves to go in the new kitchen (which we haven't got yet!).
A carving fork to go with the carving knife we already have - I do a roast now every Saturday for the OH and was struggling a bit with the lump of cooked dead animal sliding around on the plate when I attempted to carve it.
Fair trade Palestinian olive oil.
Blackboard style garden labels.

Large box of chocolate toffee (apparently I'm meant to share this with the OH. Hmm. We'll see).
Downton Abbey series 3 blu-ray.
Chocolate shower gel and body butter. (Is there a theme developing here?).
SHEEP SOCKS.

A greetings card organiser (I have big plans to Get Organised this year).
A record book for visiting cathedrals in this country - the idea is that there's some information in the book about each cathedral, and also space to write down details of your visit and your reflections on it. As we seem to visit quite a lot of cathedrals on holiday this seems like a great way of recording our visits!

And a really groovy knitting bag.

Oh, and I realised I'd forgotten to take a picture of my Secret Santa gift at knitting group - some stitch markers:

I got a lot of knitting done whilst we were away, including finishing the first pattern section of the South Seas Stole.

This first part was reasonably straightforward, and I managed to do most of it whilst watching TV (yes, including the Killing with subtitles!), but the charts are now getting more complicated so I'm going to have to concentrate. Luckily I've still got most of a sock to go on the Everyone Outta the Pool socks.

Hope everyone had a good Christmas.

A couple of finished projects

I can finally blog about a couple of projects I've been finishing off. The first is my nephew's birthday jumper, the Intrepid Pullover, finished and despatched a week early for his birthday. I liked the pattern, although I made the body a bit longer than specified as it seemed very short. I struggled with the instructions for the raglan neck decreases so invented my own in the end. Apparently he likes it (although I think the Lego went down better!).

The second was a dishcloth featuring Bartleby, the horse from the Archers (pattern is "Loopy the Apaloosa" which sounds a lot more exotic than Bartleby). This was for someone from the Archers Listeners group who was having a civil partnership. I'm pleased with the way the pattern worked out, although the instructions for making the tail were missing, it wasn't too hard to invent a tail! A lot easier than inventing a raglan neck shaping anyway...

That's all for now, I'm just getting caught up with blogging again.

The recent lack of knitting

The eagle-eyed may have noticed a massive decrease in the amount of knitting I've done over the last two months. There is a reason. Exciting things have been going on in part of my life that appeared to be in terminal decline. And I'm very happy about it. ;-)

Yes, Monkey and the nephews are no longer the only men in my life. Actually, are they men at all? One is a knitted monkey and the other two are small, noisy, energetic sprogs who like making Play-Doh hair with garlic crushers and making their Auntie get up horribly early to read books about Big Diggers when she's on holiday with them.

Anyway, a picture I took with a certain someone, as we wandered along the South Bank and watched sunset over the Houses of Parliament.



And I may have got slightly diverted into Stash on the same day and came away with some Koigu PPPM (you would have thought a trip to a yarn shop was enough to frighten any man off, especially on a first date, but not this one). And some people, like Nickerjac, Grit and Michaela saw him (briefly) that day!

Other places we have wandered over the weeks:

Cookham, where we had some lunch, then had a look in the church (bits of which date back to the Saxons), saw Stanley Spencer's grave and then

wandered by the Thames in the (sort of) sunshine.

Another time we wandered along the Thames a bit further down and stopped at Boulter's Lock,

which was evidently a bit busier in Victorian times.

We've also wandered around Wandsworth Common. This is the station, which featured in the film "The Waiting Room", which I borrowed from him a few weeks ago. I loved the film, it appealed to my soppy nature.

And there's a great bookshop (LibraryThing link) nearby too. Very small, but one of those independent ones that somehow manages to pack an enormous amount into a tiny space.

I've had a similarly detrimental effect on the number of books he's getting read...

This Christmas I learnt...

... that garlic crushers and Play-Doh make fantastic "hair". And purple and yellow Play-Doh mushed together make a muddy colour.

How much I've missed having a cat around. Sweep arrived from the rescue place to keep my Mum company a week before Christmas and is settling in well (apart from being terrified by my nephews). All attempts to convince him that he'd love to live in a small flat in Slough rather than a large house with garden in Lincoln have so far failed...


There were baby monkeys present at the birth of Christ. (I'm not convinced about this one, but Monkey said it was true).

And the frost on the top of my car looks very pretty. And I might not have been late for work if I'd got on with scraping it off the windscreen rather than taking photos of it.

I haven't read any blogs for over a fortnight - I had very limited internet access over the Christmas holiday and my laptop is really on its last legs now! However, a new one should be en route to me as I type!

My birthday!

I am now so old my nephews can't count as far as my age (they did try). That is REALLY old. Fortunately they were on hand to help me blow out the candles on my (first) cake:

This year my birthday fell on a Saturday, so I hopped onto (several) trains and headed up to Nottingham for the weekend. On the Saturday we walked in Bramcote Hills Park where there were plenty of leaves to play with.

and some beautiful views.

Afterwards some of us may have been accidentally diverted into Yarn, where we bumped into a crowd from Knit Lincs on a shopping expedition. The nephews had gone home with my brother (for some reason they don't find yarn shopping an exciting prospect?!) so my SIL, Mum and I had plenty of mooching time.


I bought seven skeins of Mirasol Hacho, to make Suri, from the Mirasol Collection Book One. Yarn diets don't apply on your birthday, right?

And then, when I went into work this morning, one of my colleagues had made this:


Birthday cake no. 2!! This one is lemon (the first was chocolate). Between the two of them there were 16 candles so I have declared that I am 16 (again). And I'd booked the afternoon off work, so spent it having lunch with friends, then showing them round the area. Oh, and maybe eating some cake too.

I've been making impressively fast progress on my Irish Hiking Scarf:

I seem to be knitting much faster these days. I also seem to be developing a thing about cables as I've finished off Noah's tank top for his birthday in December.


Thank you for all the birthday greetings I've received - in the post, by email, on Facebook and on Ravelry. I've been a bit overwhelmed by the number but I *think* I've managed to reply to everyone. Apologies if not...