A quick fix

The weather has been a little chilled this week. Today I picked up my crazy stripes cardigan to keep me warm and as I lifted it up to throw it on, the light from the window behind it illuminated a hole! I cannot fathom how it came to be, but I’m glad I spotted it.

Fortunately, having been digging around in my stash just last night, I knew I had leftovers that could be used for a quick fix.

A little duplicate stitch, running out a few stitches either side of the hole, weave in the ends, and voila!. No harm done.

Finally finished!

Please forgive the utterly dreadful photo, but I just couldn’t wait to show you this. Its been about 2 years, and an awful lot of procrastination in the making, but today I finally knuckled down to sewing in the last few ends and attaching the buttons.

Loooooooook!

It really needs blocking, but I’m so pleased it’s done that I’ve just thrown it on and started wearing it. I’ll block it when it gets washed.

Now I can allow myself to move on to other projects. Hooray!

What’s the longest you’ve worked on a project for?

Being brave

There are changes afoot in my life at the moment. As part of that, I am having to make a conscious decision not to be held back by fear, but choose to be brave and see what happens.

So, today, I am binding off the sleeves of my cardigan. It’s taken a while to reach this point, not just because of fear, but I’m doing it today!

 

Fear

What do you do when you’ve been working on a project for so long, and you’re so close to the end, but you have fear that it’s all totally wrong?

I love the pattern, I love the colours. In general I like how it looks. I’m terrified that it doesn’t fit well, the neckline is too wide, there is way too much ease around the body. I have no idea what blocking will do to it, whether it will grow or not, whether the sleeves will end up too long. I’m not sure I like the texture of the neck band. Will I even wear it once it’s done, if it ever gets done? Could I bring myself to rip the whole thing if I decide it’s just not right?

Is this a normal part of garment making or am I overthinking? I’m so close to finishing it, but so terrified of the end result not being what I want.

Collective crafting

Tonight I had an impromptu craft evening with my best friend and fellow craft enthusiast.

We had a lovely chilled out evening, listening to music and chatting over her dining  table; me with my knitting, and her on the sewing machine. Check out the cute cupcake pouch she made for me!

I took my cardigan and we looked at the sleeve length and decided it needs a couple more rows before the cuff. I should be able to get that done in the next couple of days as long as I don’t get distracted, (I may have cast on another colourwork hat…) and then on to the second sleeve. The end is surely in sight now!

I’ve even done quite well out of the evening. She’s tried knitting and crochet, but sewing is definitely her forte, so she handed me a bag of the most gorgeous alpaca fluff to finish off a scarf she’d been working on, and to knit her a matching hat! Lucky me!

Oh October!

It’s October again. October always seems to be when silly season begins and then, well, it’s non stop til Christmas really.

Rehearsals are stepping up a gear for the show I’m performing in at the end of the month. We still have our little knitting corner when we’re not required for a particular scene, and generally it’s all very enjoyable.

I’ve also just auditioned for two more shows – a musical and a play – and have ended up being cast in the role I wanted for both of them! They’re like buses. I did heaps of auditions in the summer and was only cast in one and now two come along at once! Typical! Should be lots of fun though, as long as I don’t wear myself out with all the rehearsals!

As for the knitting, it continues, just very very slowly, not helped by the fact that one of the new needle tips I bought was already catching in the grain so I had to get back to the shop to exchange it. Fortunately Knitpro have a great policy of replacing faulty needles so it didn’t cost me any more.

I took a calculated approach to the remaining grey yarn. I weighed and divided it into two balls, then I cast on and knit a cuff to a length that would match the other edges of the cardigan. I weighed the cuff and the remaining yarn to work out how much I had left for stripes. Then I ripped the cuff out again and got to work. I managed to do the two stripes at the top of the sleeve out of what was left and know I still have enough for the cuffs at the end.

I’ve started striping in the lighter grey yarn and quite like how it’s looking so far, I’m just not sure how it will look with the whole sleeve done in a different grey. Time will tell.

As if I needed anything else to work on, I just spotted a small but solid pine coffee table outside a charity shop which I thought I could tidy up by stripping it down and painting or waxing it. We don’t have a coffee table in our living room and I’ve wanted one for ages and at only 8 quid and with some paint leftover from the desk I did a couple of years ago, it couldn’t hurt to try and see what happens. Just gotta find the time to do it around everything else!

The eagle-eyed amongst you will also have spotted that we’ve done absolutely nothing more with the study. Still a sidelined work in progress. As is the garden currently. It’s silly season out there too as the garden is gradually getting covered with leaves and chestnuts and I remember how much hard work it took to keep on top of it last year. Speaking of which, it’s very nearly a whole year since we moved in here and I just can’t fathom where all that time has gone!

I’m still running. After doing very little over the summer it actually felt great to get back to parkrun. My times were much slower than back in July, and then I ran a couple with the boys – both of them have now run/walked a full 5k – so I was pleasantly surprised to get a new PB last week when I ran it on my own again. Unfortunately rehearsals mean I can’t do parkrun for the next couple of weeks but I’ll keep up the weekday running and get back to it as soon as I can.

The icing on the cake of October is of course Pumpkin’s birthday. He’s very into Mario Kart at the moment, since Mr Jack busted out the old GameCube – retro gaming! – so ideas on a postcard please, for how to make a Mario Kart cake without it being insanely complicated!

I must say, I’m very much looking forward to half term. The boys are exhausted from new school adjustments but they’ll be packed off to the grandparents for half the week while I’ll be rehearsing all hours. But a change is as good as a rest, and I’ll hopefully get a few lie ins.

What do you have going on in October?

Solutions

Yesterday I discovered a new yarn shop. My car was in for a service and MOT so I walked nearly an hour to get there, (which was very enjoyable until the pavement ran out and I had to walk on the road and hop onto the verge every time a car passed.) Unfortunately they didnt stock knitpro needle tips. They had a good selection of yarn though so I hoiked out my cardigan and had a chat with the proprietress about possible solutions to my lack of yarn dilemma. I ended up buying a skein of sock yarn in a lighter grey which I will try incorporating into the sleeve stripes to see how it looks. I’m anticipating it looking too odd to work but I’ll try it and if I hate it I have something else in mind for the grey sock yarn.

Since the needles were still lacking, I paid a visit to my regular yarn shop today. They had the knitpro tips I was after and I also picked up some 2.25 fixed circulars, since anything less than 3mm is a bit too delicate for the knitpros. I also grabbed a spool of knit-in elastic for socks. I wore my one and only pair of hand knit socks yesterday evening and decided that they would probably benefit from a little elastic so i though I’d try it in whatever future pair I make.

It’s not going well

The button bands are finally finished. I knitted and frogged, knitted again, tinked, knitted and tinked some more before I was finally happy with it, but its all cast off.

The only problem now is that I am rapidly running out of yarn. I have plenty of the teal colour – in fact, a whole skein I’ve not started yet – but this is all I have left of the grey.

I roughly measured it this afternoon and I reckon there’s just under 50m there. That’s barely going to be enough to do the two cuffs, let alone any stripes down the sleeves. I guess I’m going to have to do the sleeves as a solid colour, but its not really the look I was going for. I was hoping to at least have enough grey to do a handful of stripes. I did try to get hold of another skein of grey, but its hand dyed and seemingly a very unusual shade of grey as I couldn’t find anything that came even close to matching.

To make matters worse, I just managed to snap one of my knitpro needles. This is not going well.

What would you do with the sleeves?

Buttons and bands

One button band is finally bound off! I used the tubular bind off again, which I’ve really got the hang of now. I just remind myself how it goes using the Very Pink Knits Tubular Bind Off tutorial, http://verypink.com/2011/12/01/tubular-bind-off/ and that gets me started.

Now I need to pick up the second band and decide where the buttonholes need to be.

Seasons may change

I’m kinda itching to knit at the moment, but I’m at the tricky stages of Crazy Stripes with bind offs and button bands and I need to be able to sit down and concentrate on it so as not to mess it up at a vital moment. And I have to be monogamous or it’ll end up in a wip pile forever more while I get distracted by new pretties. So knitting just ain’t happening at the moment.

In the meantime, I’m in more of a reading phase. I ploughed through 4 or 5 books while we were on holiday. A couple of them, admittedly, were actually children’s novels, so a fast read, but even so it was lovely to have the chance to just chill out with my nose in a book. I’m now back onto Game of Thrones. Having stalled a bit on the previous one, I’m now on to the final volume that’s currently published. I have a feeling I’m going to be a bit frustrated at the end of this one as the next one isn’t released yet, but hubby is catching me up a bit now, so maybe we can move over to the TV show instead.

Our holiday in Germany was great. The campsite had excellent facilities, the boys swam every day in the indoor pool and we loved the local area. The landscapes were stunning and the views spectacular. We did a lot of walking and went down to the local town of Saarburg a couple of times and even found a yarn shop there!

I had a browse but restrained myself from buying as I know I’ve got some stashbusting to do, whenever I get the chance to start a new project.

We returned home to wilting tomatoes, a moderate sized pumpkin and a lush patch of unexpected autumn crocuses.

We moved in almost a year ago now, so we’ve nearly gone full seasonal cycle in the garden and as autumn approaches I know I’m in for a month or two of hard work raking leaves and chestnuts.

The boys have started their new school and seem to be settling in well, and I now have daytimes all to myself. I’ve been doing jobs and running errands this week, but once things shake down into the new routine, I’ll get the cardigan finished and then I can make a start on some new projects. My head is swimming with ideas, so it’ll be nice to have to time to actually execute some of them. I’ve also just finished sewing nametags onto the last of the school shirts. I’m so glad I made an early start on it and did it over several sessions instead of leaving everything to the last minute like I usually do!