Garden knitting

How lucky am I!? My yarn arrived this week, along with the beautiful weather, and I’ve got all the time I please to sit in the garden and knit a baby blanket.

This is Little Tern by TinCanKnits, in Cascade 220 Superwash Merino in Dark Berry. The yarn is super soft and mega squishy DK weight. It’s quite chonky in comparison to the sock yarn I’ve been used to knitting recently, but it’ll make a lovely squishy bubba blanket.

My garden isn’t very photogenic at the moment, but I’ve also been spending more time doing actual gardening. We have some wooden-framed veg boxes set in the lawn which haven’t seen much use since we moved here, (we managed a few mange tout last yesr, and a pumpkin the year before) but we’ve decided to make a more concerted effort to grow some veg this year. Anyone else getting more veg inclined at the mo?

I took at tip from Phil at The Twisted Yarn and have been growing a few things from kitchen scraps on the windowsill. The leeks and parsnips are sprouting merrily, so will be interesting to see if we can grow actual full size veg from them.

I’ve also got a few packets of flower seeds, so maybe we can have some colour in the garden a bit later in the year.

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Edges

This week I have been out in the garden lots.

Our lawn has a brick edging all the way round, but the gradual creep of grass and moss from one side, and dirt, bark, twigs and leaves from the other has obscured it over time. So off I went to the garden centre and acquired myself an edging iron and set to work. There’s a long way to go, but it looks better already, non?

We also have four veg boxes which I’ve wanted to do something with since we moved in. A couple of months ago I got as far as digging over a couple of them and covering them with a net to keep the cats off, but they’d gotten considerably weedy again since then.

I acquired a couple of veg plants at the garden centre – courgette, pepper, pumpkin – to complement the courgette I already had languishing on the kitchen windowsill, so I’ve dug over the veg box again and prepared it for the plants to go in.

Today, with the weather being so hot, I’ve combined a little more work with sitting in the shade doing some knitting. It’s been a while.

I finished the bind off along the bottom hem while we were on holiday though I’m not entirely happy with it. I kept getting lost in the sequence of steps, but ploughed on anyway. The result is something that I’m pretty sure is secure, but certainly isn’t pretty. I realised about halfway across just how bad it was looking but unfortunately, as it was a sewn bind off, I couldn’t see an easy way of unpicking what I’d already done. At that point though, I took a few minutes to really think through the process and learn how to read where I was in the sequence of steps and after that it got a lot better.

Here it is, looking really bobbly and messy on the left and getting neater towards the right. It’s in the middle of the bottom hem so hopefully it won’t be tooooooo noticeable when I’m wearing it. At least now I understand what I’m doing, all the other edges should be a lot neater. Neckline next!