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!