Yarnivorous

G'day all! Feasts and famines - that is what it is like with me and blogging, particularly pics.... Last night was the main SnB night. We had quite a few newbies show up after the group was mentioned in the Age. Hooray! A day after the article was published, we had 19 new members. One of them spammed us - I hope the list mum reported her for spamming, not just banned her. We should have more members now :-) Tonight was my local little craft night. A group of us get together and craft in our own ways. There were four people knitting tonight! Well after the triumph of the sassy stripe socks, which I wore last night and someone picked up the broadripple pattern, I have put Nathan's sock back on the needles. It is almost at the heel stage - a short row heel. Then I get to do 5" of 1X1 rib for the cuff. Joy! The Vogue jacket continues apace! I am now halfway through the armhole shaping of the back. hooray! If I take a pic it will look like a back! Now just to keep ...

G'day all! Waaaay back in hmm, March? yeah March (excuse the pics of the beesting) I decided to make myself a nice top. I decided to make me a pink top with a noice lace edging. Well the top gave me woe and grief but I finally had it licked (it didn't taste too good I admit). I finished it in time to wear to the kandknitters' fibre fest at the beginning of June. Or so I thought. I had carefully worked out my gauge and altered the pattern to be between two sizes cos that should be fine according to th pattern specs. Well, here is a shot of the top after I made it up: Here is the shot of it after I took in a good two inches down the sides.... What the taken in shot does not show is how badly it bunched in the arms and armpits, and how bad the lace looked at the seams. It was just plain bad, ok, and looked very badly seamed and knitted. I didn't LOIKE it! It looked like I was wearing a badly fitting pink bag with lace around the bottom. This is how the top looks now...

G'day all! Well well well (three holes in the ground - old joke in my social circle.) You can find the link to the Age here but you'll need to register. My sock is famous! It is right up the front and so is my hat, my lovely handspun stripey hat! You can also see my current small project up the back on the pink needles, and my candy hat is a blur in the centre. The second sassy stripe sock was in progress - I knitted quite a bit of it whilst the shoot occurred and lucky me didn't have to rip anything bar the cast off, where I got a bit over excited. Can you tell which one I am? I was excited by seeing us in the paper, the best paper in Melbourne though it doesn't have the circulation of the tabloid competition. OK, I nearly jumped up and down on the train when I found the article in the news section, not in the lifestyle part. I did manage not to giggle a lot. I showed lots of people at work. I have a second copy of it too so I can stick one up at work and have ...

G'day all! What a fab weekend! Though it did go past in one helluva rush. It was a three day weekend and I have hardly anything to show for it apart from a heap of fibre, 2 new circular needles, 10 new plants, a completed sock and nearly two bobbins full of 50% silk/50% merino almost ready to be plied up. OK, maybe I do have a leetle to show for it, including a whippersnipped lot of back yard and all the tomatoes pulled out (the two tomato plants, despite us not getting any ripe *and* edible tomatoes off them, covered an area around 3m by 4m), only to discover that they have effectively smothered three or four of my favourite roses. Sniffle. Let's have a lookie at some pics. I haven't set up the Melbourne blog yet, am having enough difficulty finding time for this one! So here's a house in the Albert Park area, one of the better areas south of Melbourne. This house would be over a hundred years old, which is old as far as Oz houses are concerned. It is a Victorian...

G'day all! I think it may be a bit late for the not to thrum question - I've already done it! Mitten two is on the needles, although I am pretty sure I don't have enough yarn to finish it. I am getting even more sure as I knit more of it. My cunninge plan at this point is to use some other yarn that has the same purple/cerisey colour to finish it. (Do you like the length of the grass? After I took the pics I moved a bit of stuff around and then whipper snipped (that's weed whacked) a third of the yard.) I did manage to get me some lovely little bamboo circs - about $14-something each from the Wool Baa. They are the same length so I will have to make one set with nail polish or something to make sure I don't get them mixed up. Plus they are in US sizes, not proper metric sizes. They look very nice reclining on the grass. For the etherknitter , here's an iris in bloom today in our backyard. A Louisiana iris I think. It's washed out - a fact of life wit...

G'day all! Thanks for your comments. I really appreciate them and am/will be off to your blogs to leave little presents behind..... (Karen - I'll be in touch) I found out about 10 minutes ago that Addis come in bamboo! Oh gods, no! I invested in a number of addi turbos last year after various people raved about how good they are. I was disappointed, quite frankly. Two of them were very rough around the join of the cable to the needle and they all are a bit too short for my hands, which makes my hands cramp. Metal needles tend to make my hands cramp in general, so if I want cramping hands, why not pay $5 or $6 for cheap metal circs instead of $11 to $25 for addis? But being a sucker for punishment, and wanting to learn how to knit two socks at a time on circs, I have discovered these (I can guarantee that link won't work forever). At a good price too as far as I can tell. 2.5mm addi natura circs. I need me two of them. I think I'll have to work out how to get...

G'day all! I have pictures! Pics for you of recent spinning. The saga of the pink top will have to wait until a later day. It is long and pathetic. So here's some Brianna that I got from AK2. Lush purples and greens and blues and stuff. But if it is turned over: Whoa! Where did all that yellow come from! Here's the spun yarn, navajo plied as always: Soft springy merino - not as springy as the polwarth though. So many pretty colours! Here's some polwarth in moody blues all spun up: This was a devil to spin cos it is full of teensy little neps about 3mm (1/8") long. So many little neps that I gave up on trying to remove them and just spun it up a bit lumpy. This will make a great homespun looking hat or scarf and should felt as well. The yarn is soft and springy. After spinning the pink and blue yarn a couple of weeks ago, I had a fair whack of the pinky/mauvey colour left. I spun it as a fairly thick single and then plied it up with a fine lurex thread. This...

G'day al! Picture some sassy stripe socks. One incomplete but with the heel turned and the lace started. Picture some handspun yarn in various colours. Picture a trip to the waste transfer station and a meetup with father christmas. Picture all sorts of things. I lied. I am such a bad blogger. I lied when I said I would have pics for you today. Because I have a new and better and updated version of my operating system, I can no longer just plug the camera in and have it automatically show up on the desktop. I love the way things get better with new versions of software. Of course I don't know how to get the camera to even plain mount (yep, that is what they call it under linux, mounting a file system, which makes me thing of words like serve as in a stallion serves a mare.... but that is just my mind, don't mind me!). As I took Nathan off to his weekly choir rehearsal, he said "Oh I could've just mounted it for you but it wouldn't automatically mount....

G'day all! Well it is nice to be back. Hello to y'all. Hope you missed me but let's face it there are plenty of spinny knitbloggers out there and I am just one of a thousand or two and not terribly talented at that. So what's been happening here? On Thursday I asked Nathan to replace the hard disk in my computer (technically my FiL's G4 mac). The old disk had been dying for ages and I was getting concerned. "This won't take long," says he of great confidence. After two hours, she of little confidence was getting extremely twitchy. 'I'm just upgrading your operating system to the latest version of Ubuntu ," he says. "It works ok, now I'll swap the disks over." Two days later, he finds a program that will hopefully read the hard disk with all my data on it, the old disk that died when the machine was switched off so the new disk could be put in and the old disk's data copied onto it.... Had he backed up the old disk f...

G'day all! Tonight has been one of those nights. I was bored reading my lack of emails, so I navajo plied up some stuff I spun last night and I am calling it "homespun" yarn cos it is most definately textured. It has a billion and one 3-4m neps in it, all the way through it. It is not easy to spin and if I find larger lumps I hook them out, but if I took out every last one of these blasted little neps, I'd be spinning this stuff until the day I died (as long as I reach 150)! The plied up yarn is definately homespun looking but is very soft. Then I cooked dinner, which meant chopping up a gazillion root vegies and chucking them in a pot and adding a tin of tomatoes and beans and calling it soup. It was quite edible. Then I spun up the rest (about 50g) of the pink fluff from the pink and blue yarn I showed you last time and then plied it with a lurex thread. Apart from the singles falling apart a couple of times it was quite successful. Finally, I finished the knit...

G'day all! I think winter might finally be here. Today was the first day we have had a cold northerly wind - for most of the year it is warm, if not hot. Our cold winds usually come from the south-west, straight from Antarctica. Tomorrow we'll experience those Antarctic winds and we'll whinge and moan mightily about them, but be secretly glad because those same winds usually bring the rain we desperately need. We'll be particularly glad about being inside in heated office buildings or homes. I checked out the new Marta's shop in the city. Ooo err, just as well I have no budget to spend.... Had a good chat with Patricia too. I'll have to take in some spinning to show her. Speaking of spinning, here's what I got up to on Sunday and Monday: Stinky rust and green coloured thick and thin: (it has a slight mothball smell to enhance the smell of acid dyes/vinegar which I adore so I love and loathe this yarn) And this is a special one, spun up from two totall...

G'day all! I have been holding out on you. I finished the pink top over a week ago. I put it on and discovered that it is about 2 sizes too big for me. I worked out my gauge, did the maths and made a top that totally swims on me. It looked like a large pink sack with lace edges. So I sewed the seams in somewhat and that made it better but not perfect. Then I wore it for half an hour without having washed it and it ITCHED! But it is tencel and acrylic! It can't itch! It is soft synthetic, not orrible rough stuff. Plus I started to fry - it was terribly warm. So I washed it to hopefully get rid of the itch And it didn't dry in three hours of sitting outside on a windy day, unlike every other synthetic thing I've ever made or worn. I tried taking pics to show you its ummm errm uncommon beauty and not so good fit but I was so disgusted with the quality of the pics (general lack of focus, my inability to aim and the bathroom mirror turning out to have so many smears...

G'day all! What an excellent Sunday it has been. Not a bad weekend either. Yesterday, well what did I do yesterday? *blush* I didn't knit in public. After trying to get some stuff organised, I got a phone call from my brother, reminding me about the meet-up at my sister's place to go and look at the memorial park where we are going to install the olds. So at midday I trawled off, taking photos of the freaky clouds over the Dandenongs as I drove (btw, that isn't blue sky, that is really blue cloud behind the foggy stuff) and then after lunch and chit chat we hopped in the car and had a look at the possible sites. Here's the view that we want, looking southish towards the Dandenongs: and sorta north-eastish to the Yarra Ranges Why is a view important? Cos here is the view from out the front of Home: And here is the house I grew up in: And the primary school I went to, conveniently only two doors up from Home: I snapped these shots yesterday since I was almost dr...