My blogging mojo seems to have taken a hike lately, but fear not, I'm not done rambling yet. Let's do the knitting first. I finished the baby cardi:

And have knitted the body of a to-be-felted bag:

It's the Katie Bag from issue 14 of yarn forward, designed by the lovely Sharon Dreifuss of She-Knits. It's almost a practice project because I'm signed up on Ravelry for Sharon's mystery bag KAL, planned to start in June. It's going to be a real mystery to me; I'm getting the yarn from Sharon and having it delivered to my holiday address - in Florida. Nothing like having your holiday knitting in situ!

The mystery project hasn't grown very much and I have succumbed to casting on yet another baby garment.

Next weekend is "A Scattering of Scarecrows" in the village where we live, so Dave and I have been hard at work making our scarecrow, accessorised appropriately, of course. I hope it doesn't rain because I plan on taking lots of photos of the village's offerings.

The weather being absolutely gorgeous, Dave and I went for a walk today to the washponds where he used to play as a boy. It's wonderful living in country with such good access to footpaths and bridleways. We saw lots of wildlife, including some very nonchalant wild bunnies, but unfortunately I didn't have the camera with me. Can someone settle a point of debate for us? He says it's already summer because 21 June is midsummer day; I say summer starts on 21 June. Are either of us right?

Finally in homage to Megan's podcast, I'd like to tell you about my current favourite thing; our solar panels. We have the gas boiler turned off now and are getting a whole tank full of wonderful hot water every day thanks to the power of sunlight. And the best thintg is that we ordered a bath this morning now we no longer need a flat floor shower. I can't wait until I can wallow in bubbles again!

TGIFATICRS

Apologies to msknottyknits, from whose Plurk I nicked this from:

Thank God it's Friday and tomorrow I can regain sanity.

How appropriate. Today I should have had a day's leave, but there's so much going on at work I snuck in, without telling anyone I was there. Do you have any idea how much you can get done when the phone doesn't ring and no-one e-mails you? No doubt on Monday I will get a deluge, but that's Monday.

I don't have much to show you in the way of knitting. I've cast on four different socks since the last blog post. All have now bitten the dust. This is the one that got the farthest.

Yes, you have to get half way up the gusset increases, and be gently told at knitting night that the yarn is too fat for that gauge before the horrible truth sets in. The pattern is Nanner socks, by Wendyknits, and I was just set at knitting them out of this yellow yarn. Oh well.

The epidemic of babies at work is continuing. The second of my colleagues had her baby last weekend, and a third goes on maternity leave at the end of the month. 2 more are pregnant. I reckon that's about 30% of the women of childbearing age I work with who are passing on their DNA at the moment!

This is what I'm knitting at the moment:

What a cute little top down raglan baby cardigan. The pattern is a freebie and can be found here. I'm making it a couple of inches longer than written, because it's come out bigger around than I'd hoped, so we'll just call it a size or two up!

And I'm swatching for a new project. Any guesses as to what it is?


Dave had his hospital appointment today. The news is good, but he's got another two weeks off and has to attend physio. I'm sure he will get fit again - eventually!

And now I'm off to indulge in a little of what weekends are made for - R&R.

Another FO

Alert Fleet Street and the BBC. I finished two knitted items in a month. OK, so you could accuse me of cheating because of last year's head start on this:


Pattern: Back-to-School U-neck vest
Author: Stefanie Japel, published in Fitted Knits
Size made: 42.5"
Yarn: Elann Peruvian Highland Wool, Harvest Heather, 7 skeins
Needles: 4.5mm and 3.75mm

Don't take any notice of the way it looks. It's not meant to be displayed on a hanger and fits absolutely perfectly when on a human body, my human body to be precise. However, as previously mentioned I don't know what possessed me to buy this yarn. I have the shade card and absolutely fell in love with it, totally ignoring the fact that all shades of brown (apart from chocolate, and taupe if you can call it brown) make me appear more wan and unhealthy than a Victorian lady in the very tightest of corsets. But it was worth it, such a lovely, quick and satisfying project to knit. Mum has it at the moment to see if it suits her any better. Otherwise, I may wear it anyway, dash it all, with lashings of make up to compensate.

The autumnal flavour chez Tarty continues:

To be fair I want a pair of socks to match my new bike (yes, I know that's the poorest excuse ever). The yarn is Eidos from The Sanguine Gryphon. Some of you with very long memories may remember that I won a contest on Wendyknits about a year ago and the prize was a $50 gift certificate from the Loopy Ewe. I sat on it for ages and ages. First there was the sock yarn moratorium when I finally realised how much I had last year. Then I knew we were moving and wanted to minimise new purchases. Then there was sheer indecision over what to spend the precious prize money on. Well, this isn't all I got, but it's my favourite. I love the colour and the yarn is gorgeous; tightly sprung and sproingy. I don't think it will fester in the stash for long and in honour of its origins I plan to cast on something from Wendy's new book. But the dilemma is which pattern to choose?. Out of the 23 available all but the odd one or two are 5* patterns and Wendy is one of my perennial favourites. There is a Socks from the Toe Up KAL group on Ravelry for those who are interested. I've already been seriously considering knitting every single pattern in the book. Ambitious, yes, but so many of these patterns are right up my street.

Last weekend I played with yarn and Koolaid. Thanks to a very generous swap partner at Christmas I had some undyed sock yarn. I used a combination of cherry and grape on it and got a reasonable approximation of the burgundy I was after. There's no photo here because I think it may get another whiz through the microwave to try and get a deeper colour saturation. The problem is, every time I start with dye I want to do more and more and .......

I hope everyone who is at Wonderwool Wales this weekend is having an excellent time. I was planning to go, but a combination of exhaustion and distance beat me back. Weird isn't it, how you can be so tired but unable to sleep?

There's a little nip in the air

It's spring right? Then why does everything in my crafty life have an autumnal flavour?

I've got this roving on the Lendrum:

Which is spinning up into these singles:

It's a fibre I got from Natalie at The Yarn Yard when I was in her fibre club. I think it's Shetland, and when I first received it I was, it has to be said, less than thrilled. Sludgy brown, green, yellow and russet are not my colours. But once I got it on the wheel (and let's be honest, I picked it out of the stash because I didn't like it that much), it started to turn into a very beautiful thing indeed which makes me take my hat off to the talented lady who created it in the first place.

Then on my needles is the Back-to-School vest, which is also very reminiscent of the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness:

Even my bike is orange, so what's going on? I think the Easter Bunny must be very confused this year.

What goes up, must come down

Usually I struggle to find something to feed the blog with. After keeping quiet for four weeks, now I don't really know where to start!

Well, I know you're dying to know. Did I finish the shawl? Oh yes indeedy.


It's a terrible photo, taken in a hurry. I didn't even have time to block the shawl before I got the camera out, but it was finished on Monday (30 March) after nearly 3 months of monogamous knitting (well, apart from one evening at the knitting group in Bridport when I was unfaithful with a mitten). Here's a closeup of the border:

Did I finish before the babies were born? No way. They arrived the day after my last post. Meet Daisy:

And Frank, with his doting Mum, who was so posing for the camera, but is truly besotted nevertheless:


They were born at 34 weeks one minute apart, Frank being the elder, and ever since have been in the SCBU at Dorchester hospital, where I got to see and cuddle them on Monday (yes, 2 hours after I finished the shawl). They just needed a little fattening up and I believe they are now at home where they belong. Mother and babies are, as they say, doing extremely well. And Jenny, who is a knitter herself, was delighted with the shawls. Although they were not intended for such use, they have been proclaimed as Christening items. Oh good - more cute baby pictures to come.

As far as the knitting goes, I have resisted the urge to cast on items in all colours of the rainbow and haven't actually started anything new. The mittens, as well as looking a bit scrappy, when I tried them were a bit tight, so they took a dip in the frog pond and will be restarted on larger dpns, but I haven't got the will just now. In the end I picked up a UFO, the Back-to-School U-Neck Vest by Stefanie Japel, (thanks to Knitpicks for the non-Ravelry picture, but I'm less than thrilled with both the colour and the fit on their model) and have been cracking through a couple of rows of rib every evening. I do have plans to start a couple of new projects with stash yarn, but there's no hurry, is there? And after all, my spinning wheel has been neglected for months.

In other news, I got a new bike, a Kawasaki ER-6N. Isn't it lovely?

Whilst I loved my Bandit, it was really, really heavy. So heavy I never really got the knack of manoeuvring it around car parks and the like. I used to have to find a convenient man who would do the heavy pushing for me, and to be honest it was a bit restrictive. I always had to think twice about taking off on my own for instance. So I thought long and hard over the winter and decided it was time for a change. The Kawasaki is about two-thirds the weight, and is slim, light, nimble (unlike me) and corners like a dream. It's also in biking terms, naked, i.e. it has no fairing, so minimal protection from the wind at speed, but as I spend most of my time hooning around on A and B roads rather than motorways and dual carriageways, that's not a hardship. It's not as fast as the Bandit, lacking 2 cylinders and about half the engine capacity, but it would still hit 130 if I made it, and let's face it, you'd have to be mad to attempt that sort of speed on the public road, so I'm not sure that really isn't a good thing.

Looking at biking from a more negative angle, unfortunately Dave had an accident last Sunday and broke a collarbone and two ribs. I didn't see, because I was 2 bikes and several cars in front, but he came off when he braked on an urban dual carriageway just after a roundabout and thankfully was only doing about 15 miles per hour. A car suddenly appeared in front of him, turning left into a side road. He says he glanced in his mirrors and when he looked back at the road in front the car was just there. Not only Dave, but also our friends following behind think the car just cut across in front of him from the outside lane. Apparently Dave's acrobatics as he took his unintentional sideways dive off the bike and barrel-rolled down the road would have got 10 points even from Craig Revel Horwood! So that's my husband laid up and off work again for another six weeks and he'd only been back for seven working days after his hip resurfacing operation!

We're both optimistic about the situation, after all we don't need to be told how much worse it could have been. Unfortunately we were going on holiday on the bikes again at the end of the month but of course there will be other opportunities.