Yesterday was my birthday, this is why I'm pretty sure it's July. I'm a bit confused, because it's been relentlessly hot and dry for over a month now, and I live in the UK. We don't get summer. What usually passes for "summer" here is one randomly lovely week in April that get's everyone's hopes up, followed by a lot of rain, then 2 oppressively hot and humid weeks in August, then some more rain.
When I last updated this blog it was still snowing. But then it continued to snow until well into April, but by the time we reached May, we already had the sunshine. It's messing with my brain.
Anyway, I am still alive, and I am still going to be blogging, but I have to apologise for how infrequent it is/has been. There have been several reasons for this: my health, dad's health, my small laptop needing a reinstall, my gaming laptop being too big to carry up and down the country, most of my knitting energy going into just one big project, and hardly doing any yarn shopping, so I had nothing new to post about, sorting out the garden, being too hot to think...
But! I'm alive now! The weather has cooled down a bit. I haven't heard anything at all from the DWP in months, so I'm just hoping that they haven't lost my PIP appeal paperwork (I have been told that it might take several months for an appeal date to be set). I have a shiny new gaming laptop that is light enough to travel with, at least a little bit, and I have recently been awarded a little bit of money from a claim for mis-sold loan insurance. So of course I've spent this on yarn. And a new laptop.
FO's
I'm going to include the sweater here as finished. I have in fact been putting off writing this blog for almost a month longer than I should have, because I finished the sweater, except for blocking, and sewing on 2 decorative buttons. I still haven't blocked it, or sewn on the buttons. However, I have decided that if I don't do this post now, it might never get done, so here is the (almost) completed sweater:
I will try to put a better photo in a future post, once I've blocked it and sewn on the buttons. I don't know when that will actually happen though!
This is the Smart and Stylish Sweater, by Pat Menchini, published in Let's Knit! Magazine, issue 123, from October 2017, and the yarn is King Cole Luxury Merino DK, in the colourway "mildew".
I wasn't going to bother including this, but it is a thing that I made, so I may as well. Using some of the left over yarn from the sweater, I knit this simple cylinder, to protect my fingers (or my dads, as he's back on the chemo, and it makes him sensitive to the cold) from freezing cold cans, fresh out of his over-zealous fridge.
These are socks for me. I finished them while sat in the park enjoying the sunshine. The first sock is perfect, the second sock has a number of mistakes, mostly where I accidentally missed out cables in a few places. They're for me, and only I am ever likely to notice, so I decided not to bother ripping back to fix the mistakes.
As usual, these are knit according to my own internal sock pattern, adapted to fit my feet, and in this case with cables, rather than plain 3&1 rib. I've been thinking, and I might actually write up my sock pattern, and some instructions on how I adapt it for different sizes of foot and ankle. If I ever get the time and energy at the same time.
The yarn for these is Shoppel-Wolle Crazy Zauberball, in the colourway "Indisch rosa".
Remember that I said we'd been working on sorting the garden out? Well this is part of that. The photo shows the framework of the lovely gazebo, and garden table and chairs, on our lovely new deck. Hurricane Hector came along and destroyed this gazebo 3 days after we built it. We have built a new one. The project however, is this little crocheted peg bag, because finally I have a washing line outdoors for drying our laundry! Yes, I'm middle-aged, I get excited by things like this.
I didn't use a pattern, this is just a simple granny square of individual doubles, to make a fairly tight fabric. 3 rows from the end I made a chain to form the base of the stitches above this on the next row, and rejoined the row leaving a large enough gap to put my hand in, and this became the hole to put the pegs in. The back of the bag is a square made of straight rows, and the 2 squares were sewn together, leaving a small gap for the hanging hook to go through.
The yarn for this is Lana Grossa Cotone, in the colourways 108, and 308.
Most recently completed are these socks for Gemma. She has temporarily misplaced the last socks that I made for her (she has 2 small sons, a cat, and a crazy dog, any one of them could be responsible for the missing socks!) and she was distraught, as apparently these are the best socks that she has for keeping her feet warm in winter, and cool in summer. So I thought she should have some more, especially as she is one of the leaders of a scout camp this weekend, when decent socks are a must have item.
I did have one issue with these socks, and it wasn't in the knitting itself, it was the yarn. This yarn has the longest self-patterning repeat of any yarn I've ever come across. I finished the first sock without encountering a pattern repeat at all, so I had come to the conclusion, that like the crazy zauberball, this yarn has no repeat. So I started knitting the second sock, only to finally find the beginnings of a colour repeat after knitting about 2 inches. On my own socks I don't care if both socks are a perfect match, but when I'm knitting for someone else, I prefer to make them match if I can. So I ripped back to the start of the colour repeat, and started the second sock again. I've kept the little bit of sock that I'd started knitting, because I can join some other scraps of yarn to it at a later date, and make ugly scrappy socks.
As usual, my own sock pattern was used, and the yarn is Schoppel-Wolle Admiral R Druck, in the colourway "Magic".
WIP's
I've been working on only 2 projects, other than those that I've finished. The first is the blanket that I started for my youngest niece almost a year ago. I reported in October last year that I'd made a mistake in the sewing up, and the project was set aside in disgust for a while. I have now repaired that mistake, but I promise you that knitting, and sewing up, a large blanket in persistent temperatures around 30°C, with high humidity, is not a fun task. This is also not a convenient project for carrying around, so progress continues to be slow, but at least it is progressing again, and will hopefully be ready by the time it gets cold enough for my niece to need it.
This is the project that I'm working on whenever I have to travel anywhere. This is a pair of socks for my dad that I cast on before Christmas, but they were set aside while I worked on knitting presents.
I'll be honest, they've been picked up again partly because last week daddy gave us a major scare. As I mentioned earlier, he's back on the chemo. His scan results in June showed that the cancer had begun to grow again, but as he was still otherwise fit and healthy, they decided to put him straight back onto the 3 drug regime that had been successful before. We were warned that it might not be as effective this time, and that the side-effects might be more severe. We don't yet know how effective it is, but certainly the side-effects have been worse. Although it is also possible that there were other contributing factors, last week dad was exceptionally ill. He couldn't keep any food down, he became very weak, and lethargic, he was nauseous all the time, and was having great difficulty just taking his regular medication, he visibly lost weight in the space of just a couple of weeks. It terrified all of us, as we worried that he'd re-started the chemo too late, and that this might be the final decline caused by the cancer. I am absolutely NOT ready for that yet! (I probably never will be). However, it seems that dad isn't ready for that either, as after a bunch of medical appointments, including rescheduling his next chemo, to give him a bit of time to recover from this dip, and altering the dosages of several of his medications, including the chemo, he's back to normal, and working his ticket at full strength again.
However, seeing him so poorly made me decide that I wanted to get these socks finished as soon as possible, because the yarn is so soft! He needs to get plenty of opportunity to wear them!
This is my usual sock pattern, but adapted for finer yarn, and smaller needles, as well as to fit dad's feet. The yarn is Shoppel-Wolle Edition 6.0, in the colourway Waschtag.
Stash Acquisition
Until a few weeks ago I had literally bought no new yarn since February. Then I received the payment from my mis-sold loan insurance, and the first thing I did was go yarn shopping! I should also say that I haven't been totally frivolous with this unexpected windfall, I have spent a fair bit of it on things for the garden, I've put a significant chunk of it into savings, and I've bought my new laptop, which while not essential right now, is something that I would be looking at replacing within the next 12 months anyway.
The lighting in this photo absolutely does not do justice to the colours of these yarns.
On the left are 4 skeins of Fyberspates Vivacious in the colourway "Plum Imps", and I actually have a plan for these. I intend to turn them into a nice summer cardigan/shrug/bolero for myself.
Then we have 1 full sized skein, and 6 mini-skeins by Ring-a-Rosie, all in one-of-a-kind colourways. The full sized skein is a 4-ply Donegal with colourful neps, the mini-skeins are all 4-ply high twist merino.
You may recall that in July last year I bought myself a birthday present from Homespun Wonders, as they were doing a monthly box themed around birth stones. This year they are doing the same, but the theme is birth flowers. I didn't know what the July birth flower is, but I decided to buy myself a birthday yarn box anyway. It turns out that my birth flower is Delphinium, and so I received this gorgeous tonal purple yarn, and box of goodies, which does of course include seeds to grow my own flowers, as well as buttons, stitch markers, sweeties, a decorative candle, a beautiful necklace, and this:
I love this butterfly ornament for our garden! Stephen loves it too, but a bit less than me, because he is tall enough that he walks into it quite often!
Miscellaneous
We all know that the internet spies on us, collects all of our data, and builds up a profile of us. We assume that this could be for some dark and nefarious purpose, but actually it's just so that retailers can target their adverts at the people most likely to want to purchase their product. Knowing this should make me less susceptible to their wiles. Mostly it does, I think, but not when what they're selling is this:
A dog paw print, yarn and knitting needles, and a cup of tea! It could only be more perfect if it also had a penguin on it!
Penguins
Speaking of penguins, I actually have very few of those to show you too, penguin products are less prolific in summertime.
Contrary to popular opinion, this is NOT a sex toy. This was a gift from Kelly, and if you pull the head off, it's a container designed to contain toothbrush and toothpaste, keeping them safe from bathroom dust and germs. So it appeals to my neat-freak side, as well as my penguin obsession.
While Knitting and Penguins are definitely my top 2 obsessions, I have several others too - puppers, and tea have both been mentioned, but I also have a mild (non-sexual) stationary fetish. Obviously I've included this photo because it has the penguin themed sticky notes, but I do love my holographic organiser, and rainbow pompom pen!
That's all for now my dears, hopefully it will be less than 4 months before I post again!
