From one extreme to another

So, after doing all that weaving in (all that endless weaving in) and then buggering up the finishing of the cardigan I decided that I would a) do something simple (with minimal weaving in) and b) follow a pattern for once!

I found a pattern in a book I had lying about for a cowl neck, garter stitch tunic. Garter stitch! And all in one colour! I had some nice variegated wool in a box and off I went.

Boy, garter stitch palls after a few rows. And even though this is for my four year old, it was still 33 cm of garter stitch before anything at all was due to happen. And that was only a little minor armhole shaping before continuing for another 16 cm.

So I figured I'd do a more complicated one simultaneously so that when I got bored with the garter stitch I could switch to something tricky, and if it became too tricky I could switch back.

The garter stitch has seriously addled my brain because I have decided to have a go at my first ever cable sweater. And it's a doozy. You've got to love a pattern that says these 32 rows form cable pattern don't you! Thirty two rows??? Oh boy!

But, trumpet fanfare please, I have completed the back of the garter stitch tunic and the front of the cable sweater.

So now I have one front and one back and my lovely partner is wandering around the house singing, 'put 'em together and what do you get? Bibbidy bobbidy boo' incessantly. I'm loving the cable I have to say - it's a lot of fun, and the garter grows so quickly that I keep having a warm glow of achievement. I'm working on the cable back now, and I can see problems ahead... not with the back, which is straightforward, but when I get to the sleeves... there's this nasty little phrase: keeping continuity of pattern as you shape the sleeve. Shaping the neck nearly killed me so we may yet wind up with stocking stitch sleeves. I'll keep you posted. The other bit that's going to be interesting is the collar, which involves strange stitches I'd never heard of, and diagrams I can't follow. Thank goodness for KnittingHelp.com, which has video instructions for something that seems to be the same. Let's hope it is...

Nine months between posts! Well, it's a good job nobody much reads this!

There are reasons for my absence... a couple of weeks after my last post my mother had a totally unexpected stroke and nearly died. She is now, thank god, almost back to her old self and doesn't seem to have sustained any major lasting damage. But it was a horrible time - especially the first few months. Because she is such an amazing woman, she has friends (and family) all over the world - all of whom were wanting constant updates on her health and progress. So we discovered yet another use for a blog! I don't know what we all did without the internet. I set up a blog and my sisters and I constantly updated it so that everyone could keep up with Annie's progress. It was fantastic, and something I 'd really recommend to anyone in similar circumstances. So this blog slid while we worked on that one...

By the time Annie was well enough for me to think about knitting or blogging, Jessie had learnt to climb onto the sofa - which put paid to knitting for a good few months - very hard to concentrate on knitting when an eighteen-month old has firm hold of one end of a needle, or is seeing how many rooms she can stretch a ball of yarn through. And then of course it was summer and who wants to knit when it's 30 degrees.

But by February, although it was still hot, Jessie had learnt that No means No (to an extent, my she's a stroppy little thing!) and I managed to finish off the rainbow striped cardigan I was knitting back in June. All those loose ends! There were fourteen stripes on the back, two fronts and two sleeves, and they all had two ends to weave in. Never again!

There are no photos. Maybe once I've ripped out and reknitted the collar and button bands... and first I should probably learn how a collar should work...

Anyway, it may all have gone horribly wrong but it got me knitting again! :-)

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...