clean slate

Well here we are, well into the second week of 2013. I hope everyone had wonderful festive period. After months of anticipation it slipped away far too quickly for my liking. Is that what happens when you get older?

2012 was a rollercoaster of a year. There were some amazing highs, and some utterly crushing lows. It was a landmark year for me, and I miss it already, but I can’t say I’m not glad to be moving on.

I’ve had a thousand false starts with this post, and in the end I decided to just draw a line under all of them and just start afresh. After all, isn’t that what new years are about? There’s a lot of finished projects that I haven’t shared here, but I’m going to trickle them through gradually and keep things simple for now.

Clicking away on my needles at this moment, is a Featherweight Cardigan. It seems like everyone else has already knit this (4793 projects on Ravelry, and counting!), but I’m a little late to the bandwagon. The truth of it is, I’m on a bit of a cardigan binge. I start a new job on Monday, and the office attire is stated as being business casual. There seem to be so many different grades of business casual that I’m not sure where to land on the sliding scale, but I figure I can’t go wrong with smart trousers, simple, long sleeved plain tees, dressed up with a pretty cardigan. This has caused a bit of a cardi queue-fest on Ravelry, and Featherweight seemed a nice simple one to kick things off with! I’m knitting it a heavenly squishy merino laceweight from Colourmart in a beautiful soft charcoal, and it’s knitting up surprisingly fast for such a fine yarn! I cast on (for the third time! I’m all about the false starts at the moment.) last night, and I’m already a good 5 inches into it. I’m hoping that I’ll be up to the sleeve division by tonight… The Boy is seeing some friends after work tonight so I’ve got a nice solo evening planned with tea, knitting and Damian Lewis in Life. Yum.

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cheating…

I cast on for a new project a few days ago, and it wasn’t a sock!

I do feel like I’m cheating on Socktoberfest, but I’ve been wanting a new not-too-slouchy hat for a while, and when I saw the new Cloudy Apples pattern collection, the Puffin Apple hat by the lovely Jen Arnall-Culliford seemed perfect. The name alone is too adorable to pass up!

So I went behind my socks’ back, dug up some cream aran in my stash, dyed it up and cast on. Working with tiny needles and skinny yarn so much, I often forget how quickly thicker yarns knit up. This is a super quick and satisfying knit, and I’m completely in love with the gorgeous texture and cable pattern!

I’m sure the socks will get over it.

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notes from the weekend.

I sat in the garden in the morning sun with some knitting and a book,

I cast on for new sock,

and I cooked a roast dinner and baked some yummy pumpkin muffins.

These things are seriously good I enjoyed one this morning for breakfast, along with a mug of apple cinnamon tea. Oh how I love autumn.

The only thing I changed from the recipe was reduce the sugar slightly (I used 1/2 a cup rather than 3/4), but the next time I make them I think they’d be lovely with a handful of chopped nuts or some chocolate chips. It’s a testament to how yummy they are that 21 muffins came out of the oven yesterday afternoon, and only 14 remain today….

Back to the socks, I really can’t decide how I feel about them. I cast them on wanting something plain, and although I like the subtle variegation part of me feels like it’s missing a bit of texture. I’m half tempted to rip back to the cuff and start again with Hermione’s Everyday Socks, but I’m almost at the heel and I’d hate for all of my weekend to have to go to waste!

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back to business

Well hello there, I seem to have unintentionally taken my annual summer hiatus from the blog! The last few months have been a bit of a rollercoaster. Not long after my last blog post I was called back in to my ex-workplace to help out with a project that was close to deadline for a few weeks. And then I got some incredibly tragic news about a friend which just pushed everything out of focus while friends and family tried to wrap our heads around it.

Things are starting to get back on track though, and I’m kicking off my return with a sock for Socktoberfest!

Pattern: plain top down vanilla socks with a short row heel (notes on Ravelry)

Yarn: Rico Design Superba Poems and Regia Stretch Color for contrasting cuffs, heels and toes

Ravelled here.

These socks were an emergency cast on as the Boy was dragging me to the cinema to see Looper (great film, by the way. I thought it was going to be one of those stressful, difficult to watch films but it was brilliant and I enjoyed it so much more than I was expecting to!) and I had… *shock horror*…. no vanilla socks to take with me! I kept the cuffs short so that I wouldn’t be knitting ribbing when the film started. I’ve been caught out with that one before; I always get so engrossed in the film that I lose track of what I’m doing, can’t remember if I’m supposed to be knitting or purling and end up with a couple of mistaken yarn overs and a mess of rib. Not good.

Once I got started, these socks zoomed by and were off the needles in a little over a week. I even don’t mind the fact that they’re not matchy matchy. I initially thought I was going to get a little twitchy about not being able to match the gradients because I forgot to make a note of where I joined the colour on the first sock, but then I decided to embrace the idea of fraternal gradient socks. If these were striped or patterned I would definitely be getting a little bit of twitchy rage at them not being identical, but I quite like it in the gradient, there’s something softer about the mismatch that almost works.

This yarn seems to provoke quite a vitriolic response in the Ravelry comments, but I quite honestly can’t see what the fuss is about. I actually quite like it. It has an almost handspun look when it’s knit up that to my mind translates to something cosy and comforting, and until I get around to spinning my own sock yarn these will do quite nicely. I did want to offer my counter to a lot of the negative comments I’ve seen surrounding this yarn though, so here goes:

• It is on the hairy side for sock yarn, but it’s not scratchy or itchy.

• It’s not soft either so personally I think it’s best for socks, but unless you have particularly sensitive skin it would be fine for a shawl or a scarf.

• It is not plied, it is a single. Because of this I’m not sure how hardwearing it’ll be as a sock yarn, but I’ve used my favourite workhorse Regia yarn for the heels and toes so hopefully it won’t fare too badly. We’ll see…

• It is a little splitty, but not too bad. I’ve knit with a lot worse before. I managed to knit this in the dark at the cinema and worked quite a few inches without working any split stitches, so it can’t be that bad :)

The needles have not been idle this past few months so I have quite a few things to share with you, but I’m going to ease back into things. I know I promised a couple of recipes in my last post, and I will get round to doing them! The pictures are all done, so I just need to sit down and write them up. In the mean time, I’ve got a lot of blog feeds to be catching up on….

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ennui

Sorry for the extended absence this past month, but I have been suffering from some major ennui lately. I think it was possibly sparked off by how crazy things got towards the end of May when my godson decided to put in a very sudden and unexpected appearance a whole two weeks early! This was immediately followed by the Queen’s Jubilee, I had to go on a course for some volunteer work I’m doing, and then there’s my new found motivation to get fit and finally lose the pounds that I’ve been packing on over the past six years, and amongst all that the needles have been strangely silent. Even my reading slowed down; I’m still on the fifth Game of Thrones book!

I’m slowly finding my feet again though. I started a new pair of vanilla socks for some cinema knitting, and after an agonising yarn stash deliberation I settled on a predictable grey but thought I’d spice it up with some bright yellow heels and toes. Of course I didn’t have quite the right shade of yellow, so out came the dyes…

… and whilst I was at it, why not stick some roving in as well?!

And this is what I pulled out of the dyepot in the first picture. I love it so much that I’m dyeing up some more to stick in the shop, as it’s looking shamefully bare in there at the moment.

I’ve got a couple of recipe posts lined up, but here’s a little sneak peek for now!

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