Third time's a charm!

G'day all!

This will be my third go at getting this posted. Pity I didn't save it as a draft before I tried to post it! Seems like ebay and blogger both like to use the same cookie space, cos if I have ebay open in another tab, blogger stubbornnly refuses to work. Or maybe it is just coincidence...

Now what is the most important stuff? Ah yes, the SWATCH.

Do you like this swatch for the new jacket? Tell me what you think of it. Your opinion may not sway my eventual opinion but I'll take it into consideration! The girl with the best style sense in my area at work thinks it is fab.



(I admit this is the sleeve. Or maybe it is a really big swatch)

Remember, this is the jacket the swatch is for:

FINISHED OBJECTS!

Now I have managed to get a few things that have been hanging around off the needles and fixed up a bit.

Voila!



(OK, I admit I finished this a week ago) When i bought the yarn,I bought it cos it was "cheap" Noro - only $11.70 a ball. It is Noro Shinano. I wanted to try it. In the ball it looked ugly but as I knitted it I came to appreciate its subtle beauty. The camera has highlighted the changes in colour. Even though the yarn is pretty rough feeling, it doesn't seem to irritate my skin much. The yarn looks felted to me. And it is giving me ideas about what I should start spinning. This hat is a keeper! Oh and the pattern is an amalgam of two or three different patterns with the cable out of Knitting on the Edge, but you would find that cable in any aran pretty much.


And another hat, same style, different gauge. This hat is the teensiest bit small for me due to me overenthusiastically applying the band to the cap. Am contemplating re-doign the seam.... It is in Noro Silk Garden. Classic colour.




Then there is this silly little poncho-thing that I thought I finished ages ago but it didn't sit right so I ungrafted the "shoulders" and reseamed it to just be two joined rectangles. Much better. This was a three ply ball of mohair/silk and two threads of merino from Marta, and I sat and laboriously unwound the plies into three small balls of yarn.




I knitted up the world's easiest shawl (cast on 2-3 stitches then increase at the start of each row, knit all the way until you have enough only to cast off with - v.hard to judge that!) in some Colored Jules hand-dyed silk. I can't find a link to this yarn on her site at present. This is very pretty too I think. The colours are as close to true as I can get my monitor but are not perfect representations.





I don't think I have blogged the sleeve of the new pink top. Someone remind me - I am too lazy to check it for myself! I knitted up 8 rows, including five of the lace pattern (and two of those rows were figuring out how to knit the purl rows knitwise cos I decided to do it on circular needles) and discovered that I was knitting a top for a BIG girl. I do not qualify as a big girl so I frogged it and bought myself some 4mm bamboo circs today. Addi turbos are just too slick for me to use on most yarns and my tension is terrible....

Have I said how much I love my bamboo needles?

A bit over a year ago, I would have never thought I would be using expensive snobby bamboo needles. Plastic fantastics are my go. I can't use metal needles. They hurt my hands badly. Circular needles, including addi turbos, hurt my hands cos until recently I could only get metal handled needles. (DPNs also tend to come in metal only.) One part of the problem is I have near man-sized hands. They are wide and long and the needle-plastic join sits right on the pad of my hand. This causes my hands to cramp up after only about 15 minutes of knitting. WOE!

Plastic needles bend and flex and don't stick into me. Bamboo needles are warm and for me less grippy than plakky fantakkies. Metal needles are an invitation for the yarn to slide right off, along with all the knitting.

My first set of cheap bamboo needles were quite quite poor quality. I think I only had two needles in the set that did not snag the yarn (or me!). But they felt nice to my hands, warm and inviting. So I bought some expensive bamboo needles. Ah. Luverly.

Since then I have been a convert. By preference I use bamboo but sometimes use plastic and occasionally for knitting large things on big needles use the 7-10mm addi turbos.

As the girl in Clegs said to me last week, buy yarn and invest in needles.

Leg update

Back at work today. Blah. Spent half the day fixing up all the things that I should've done on Monday. But on Monday I could hardly walk. Today I can walk easily. Dang. Forgot the antibiotics. Back in a tick.... Ah, that is "better." Swelling is down a lot - I have tendons and veins visible in my foot now and an achilles tendon. The infected and "burnt" area is still pretty disgusting. Must get a picture when it is daylight. I am getting good mileage out of it at work. It often itches like mad so it must be healing.

heh. On the way home tonight, my left foot slipped on a bit of rubbish or a leaf at the station and now it hurts instead! We'll see how it goes overnight.

Spinning update

Jeez, this is becoming a monster post! And I can't even blog about the rest of the trip a couple of weeks ago cos I have so much to say today. Can't even say what happened on the weekend!

Here is the yarn I have spun up for my MIL for Mother's Day (second sunday in May here in Oz). See how it is two-ply? I can two ply stuff up but I do prefer Navajo plying. See the subtle heathering in it? Silk, mohair, ?alpaca, merino mix. Yum.




And here is my first thick and thin yarn (I boast but even my first spinning efforts were not very thick and thin....). This was spun from some tops I got at the Stitches and Craft fair.




Now in case you think I have gone subtle in my dotage, look at this and weep. Singles. Plied. Skein.







Okey-dokey, that's yer bloomin lot!

anon!