Do I knit?

G'day all!

I am still alive, though I feel like I've got the flu in half my body. Weird, huh? Combing alpaca must be harder than it seems....

Am I definately ill? I like both these Berocco patterns, not that we get that yarn here.

Now I finished spinning and then dyed the yarn for my secret ISE pal's scarf. Hooray! I've got something over 200m of yarn. Surely that makes a scarf? After all 100m makes a feathers scarf. I am starting to wonder if somewhere over 200m of a fingering to sportweight yarn will make a scarf and have brought in some extra players in a different colour (pic later - it is pretty dull here at present) for just in case....

So yesterday morning I had this much scarf and this much yarn:

(Do you like the way the yarn tones with the green painted concrete on the front verandah?)

A problem

Note that one of the balls of yarn is much lighter than the other. That changed my plans considerably. I had three skeins of yarn all dyed in the same bath at the same time and one is much paler. Plus I discovered that the pattern I had chosen requires perfectly smooth yarn, and my handspun is not perfectly smooth. It looked absolutely awful in the original pattern. I had to rip and go looking for a new pattern.

My next choice of pattern was a multidirectional scarf, the ones designed by Iris Schreier. I have a whole book of them. But the dyeing didn't come out as uneven as I planned it to - blasted baby alpaca strikes again. First it is very drapy and lifeless and not nearly even, then it dyes evenly! Evenly I tell you, with only a little variation in colour and tone when I've set it up to dye unevenly!

I have decided to do something tricksy. See how I am doing two ends of the Midwest Moonlight pattern? (It's in Scarf Style on p95, and Peeve is doing one at the moment too! Hers looks a lot more cushy. We didn't talk to each other or anything but are doing the same scarf pattern at the same time.) I am doing two ends off the same ball to get the colours matching reasonably (there is still some variation in the ball, just not proper variegation). I was thinking that I won't have enough yarn to do much of the Moonlight pattern but I will have get about 35-40cm of each end of the scarf in this pattern - the ball of yarn just keeps on going and going. I am sure it will run out at a most inconvenient moment.

The tricksy part is that I'll probably use a different pattern in the middle, just something that has columns of eyelets that won't use up too much yarn. This means it won't matter so much that the new yarn will be paler. It might even look like a design feature! It will only be a lightweight scarf but it should be warm cos it is alpaca, and I would like it to go around my pal's neck more than once cos she lives in a cold winter part of the US.

So what are some other things I got up to this week? Well writing this paper for DH has taken up some time and actually exercised my brain! I've had to THINK! I've had to do research on things I have no idea about! I've learned stuff. A miracle.


(Bandicoots are roughly rabbit sized ground dwelling marsupials and are endangered due to foxes, cats and dogs predating on them. Scuse the South Australian link - it was the one that had the best photo of the most common bandicoot, the southern brown.)

I went for a nice walk at the Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne.


The wind was blowing a gale. It nearly blew me over a couple of times! (and I am a girl with a firm hold on the ground) I was wearing Nathan's old straw hat - thank heavens bloke's hats come with strings on them cos I was clutching that string with one hand and the camera with the other. Without that string I would've done a whole lot of running and would probably be less one hat.


We do get some good wildflower displays in heathland, like this shot in the gardens, but we don't get the huge diversity of species that WA has, or the ephemeral flowers, or the sheer masses of flowers. Most of the flowers in the pic are one species of leptospermum (white), with some pea flowers (yellow) thrown in. Still pretty though :-)



Yesterday it went all dark in the afternoon and we thought STORMS! RAIN! HOORAY!


But the storms passed to the north of us and to the south and we only got 0.5mm of rain. Dang! They cleared just before sunset:

Pretty!

anon!