Another raglan sleeved jersey

Another raglan sleeved jersey is complete! This time for Jess. It was actually finished on Thursday, but I didn't get a photo because Katie drew on Jessie with a purple felt tip and then dropped the pen, sans cap, into the hood (yes, this one has a hood!) of the new jumper. So I had to wash it... and wash it... and wash it. If you look closely at the photo you'll see that it now has yoghurt all down the front but I'm so over handwashing for this week! The hood got away on me a little. I just started knitting it without really working out what I was going to do, and then I started worrying that it would be too small... So Jess now has a hood that she could sit in. We live and learn.
I've begun my third raglan sleeved garment - this time a cardigan for Katie, with stripes of red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue and purple - great for using up all those half balls of wool that are tangling themselves around everything in the house.

Baby talk

Jessie, the one year old, has been very vocal lately. We had a spell of 'blah' being the favourite sound which was like living with the radio permanently tuned to parliament; endless streams of 'blah blah blah' interspersed with bouts of shouting. Her latest noise is 'lodle-odle-lo' so Katie (the 3 and a half year old) and I have taken to singing 'High on a hill was a lonely goatherd...', cue 'lodle-odle-lo-odle-o' from Jess.
Katie is also very vocal - constantly. And you know, I have grave concerns about that child sometimes. Today she got an invitation to a party at a house we haven't been to before.
"I went there before I was born," she announced, "when I was a baby koala."
"You were a baby koala?"
"Actually," she said (that being the current favourite word), "did you know, we were all baby koalas before we were born. You were a baby koala before you were born, Jessie was a baby koala before she was born..." and so on through most of the extended family. Where the hell does that come from???

On the knitting front I'm been racing through things lately. The raglan sleeved pink jersey worked and, what's more, fitted. I doubt that the makers of Excel intended that it be used for graphing sweaters, but gee it works well! So I've started another, but I couldn't be bothered doing a proper swatch (when will I learn) and I'm using the wrong sized needles for the wool (when will I learn), so we'll have to wait and see... I've done the front, back and three quarters of one sleeve so it won't be long.


I knitted a hat to go with the pink jumper and made my first pompom for about twenty-five years. It looked great for a few days and then disintegrated (the pompom, not the hat) on the way to kindergarten on Friday. Must practice more...

Gotta love hats and scarves

Feeling very productive this weekend indeed. I finished sewing up the sweater for two year old Molly, finished the revolting scarf (complete with pink fringing - truly a vision!), and I knocked off a woolly hat for the baby. (Must stop calling her a baby, she'll be one on Tuesday). The baby's hat has some dreadlock-like plaits to compensate for her baldness. She looks grumpy in the hat because she's got a cold and she'd just got up from a nap, not because she hates the hat...

Molly's sweater is what I call a 'knitting-with-ADD' piece. The pattern across the bottom I did in (poorly executed) intarsia on the back, and by carrying the wool across on the front. Heaven forbid I should stick to one technique for a whole sweater! There's a pocket on the front because I got bored halfway up and decided to learn how to do pockets. If she'd been any bigger I might have had to throw some cables in...

Knitting with kids

People sometimes ask how I manage to knit with small children around... Well, the obvious answer is that I am the one holding the sharp pointed bits of metal.
As this picture shows, it also helps to store the kids tidily away while I'm getting on with my real work...

Works in progress

So now the thneed is done I can continue with my other projects. I'm halfway up the front of the bright pink sweater - the first time I've tried to knit a raglan sleeve sweater so we'll see if my poor grasp of maths lets me down again! I'm also knitting a hat for the small one - it's turned really cold here and she's still refusing to grow hair so a wooly hat is becoming urgent. Also knitting a revolting scarf in revolting novelty wool... I tend to buy odd balls of bizarre wool with no clear idea of what to do with them - this time the three year old asked for a scarf so off we go! It'll be interesting, not least because my partner keeps picking it up and knitting a few rows and we tend to have quite different tensions...
What I should be doing is finishing the sewing up of a sweater I knitted for a friend's two year old. I finished the knitting for her birthday (April 27th) but I put off the sewing because there were so many loose ends to weave in that it made me come over all faint. Then when I finally steeled myself to get on with it I sewed one arm in back to front and now I have to unpick it and start again. This is what sleep deprivation does to you!

Well what do you know

O there is great rejoicing and jubilation here. The thneed turned into a poncho at last. And a better poncho than I'd dared to imagine!
In fact it was so nice that the three year old is now insisting that she get one too. Her knitting request list already has a bright pink sweater and a white cardigan with embroidered flowers on it so it'll be a while...
Her other new request is "Mummy can you knit a Snow White dress?" To which I reply, "the question is not can I, but will I, and the answer to that my little chickadee is never in a million years." We are living with a revolting obsession with disney princesses at the moment that is driving me totally and utterly doolally. I'm with the wicked stepmother and the bad fairy - all the simpering princesses should die horrible deaths.

There's a reason for patterns

So I finished the second piece of the poncho thingy, only to discover when I pinned them together that I had created a poncho that would only fit over the head of a barbie doll. This is partly because of my stupid aversion to patterns (of which more later) and partly due to sheer laziness - I kind of suspected that I wasn't making my rectangles (or parallelograms) long enough but I got bored so I cast off. What's most disturbing is that I've done similar things before - you'd think I'd learn wouldn't you? So I've now spent the last week or so frantically knitting extra panels to add on... I have no idea how this rotten thing is going to turn out but I suspect I may be creating a thneed.
On the up side, I beat the baby in a rasberry blowing competition yesterday. It's the little triumphs that keep me going...

Why?

Why am I starting a blog at half past five in the morning? Because my evil children (watch those heads spin!) have had me awake since 3 and it's now too late to go back to bed.
I love my babies dearly but at this hour on a freezy cold morning I can't help wondering why the hell I ever had them. The three year old (who hasn't stayed the whole night in her own bed since she turned two) has decided that the middle of the night is a good time to chat; while the little one (who USED to sleep through) doesn't want to miss out on the midnight partying, and has taken to waking three or more times every night. O the joys of motherhood.

Strange Knitting

Of course one advantage of being up with the birds is that I can sit and knit without having to use the needles to fend the children off.
I am in the middle of an interminable poncho/wrap/shrug thingy for my niece. I have no idea why it's taking so long - it's just two lacy rectangles, and I'm knitting it with 5mm needles - but strange things are happening to it and I'm pretty sure that it's warping time as well as its shape. I say 'rectangles', but the stitch I'm using (turkish stitch: y fwd, slip 1, K1, psso for one row, followed by a knit row) has turned it into a parallelogram which is kind of odd but, cross fingers, will look intentional when it's sewn up. Anyway, I've been knitting it off and on for weeks and the second rectangle (or whatever it is) doesn't seem to be growing at all...