Not much to show for a week

G'day all!

I have spent the week crafting and running around after a new mobile. (I can't believe how hard it is to get a new mobile - all I want is a cheapish flip phone, not a candy-bar, not a smart phone, just a phone that can make flipping phone calls and receive them!)

I regret that I don't have a lot to show for all the work I've been doing.

I decided to make DH a jumper (sweater) for his birthday. I have fleece that I dyed in appropriate colours (he wants olive, he's getting sorta olive) and have been blending the fleece with some natural coloured brown fleece, an almost black fleece, some dyed clown barf fleece (using up old dyes, managed to make fluoro yellow!) and a little hand-dyed not by me top. It takes about six hours to flick out and card enough fleece to fill three bobbins, and about the same to spin the yarn and ply it.



So far I've managed to spin roughly 600m of yarn. It has taken half my week.



I think it will be worth it though.



It is going to to be paired with some of the orange yarn I spun for the Tour de Fleece as a highlight/fair isle pattern. DH wants a green and orange jumper so he is getting a green and orange jumper.

I thought I was going great guns on the first of his birthday socks. I was already knitting the gusset after only knitting it for three hours or so.

Then I realised I was using 3mm needles, not 2.5mm needles. That would explain why it appeared so open. So I ripped it out and started again.


This is roughly 50 minutes of knitting. I feel like I am a bit behind on the socks now instead of being well ahead of the game!


And the horror. The tangerine top. With intarsia/fair isle. It looks pretty good in this shot, surprisingly good actually. You can't see where it gets more messy. Still not impressed with the lack of thought the designer put into the use of colour, how the thing can be knitted and all the ends that need to be woven in. It still strikes me as being PRETTY! but not well thought out. I'm having to do a lot of thinking about how to get it to work and that slows down my knitting a lot. I've been watching Lucy Neatby's intarsia DVDs too to see if she has any insight that could help me.

I've also spent hours pressing seams open on the new quilt - argh, the tedium! I put on some Abba so's I had something to do whilst ironing. Then I've spent more hours making sure all the squares are pretty much square... but it looks good in principle!


(That is some of the blocks pre-squaring laid out to see if it is still looking good. After squaring I have to sew the blocks together and line things up so they make nice neat zigzags.)


Plus I made a curtain for the door cos I am sick of showing off all our crap to passers-by. We like to have the door open cos it lets the place breathe. The curtain is actually part of a sheet I bought at the op shop. I thought it was all white with white stripes but it turns out that it has two massive iris prints down each side. The regs here say we can only use white curtaining material (to the outside) so I figured I had best leave the irises out!

Looking at all the pics, I realise that nothing is in "me" colours. No blues, pinks, mauves, light greens. It is all oranges or darker greens. I can't really knit anything in "me" colours either for the nonce cos I have so much to do and so little progress logged.

Best get to knitting more of the intarsia monstrosity before knit night and even better, a carpark showing of Grease in downtown Campbell! I have to take our chairs and some stuff to sit on the ground with in the bike trailer cos I think some of Nathan's entourage will show up too.

anon!