A good list

I'm having a funny old time at the moment, people close to me having OMG Dramaz and the like, so I've been a little preoccupied of late.  However, good stuff has been happening too and because I'm a cheery sort I'll skip right over the crap.

Good thing no.1.  Izzy is much much better now, she actually feels like a cat now rather than a bag of coathangers.  On the flip side she has now turned into a speshul snowflayke princessy nightmare.  Obviously she got a little too accustomed to being fattened up and now we can't even go near the fridge without her shouting at us for titbits.  Sigh.

Good thing no.2.  I won a year's supply of Tetley tea!  Twitter is a marvellous thing you know.  I've been retweeting every Friday for weeks and never thought I'd win, but win I did and when it arrives I shall finally have an answer to the question of how much tea is a year's supply of tea.

Good thing no.3.  I dyed some yarn and it is good.

I've attempted brown a few times by mixing up colours and got something unexpected each time.  This time I used some brown Sugarflair paste which seems to have worked really well.  I used 3 jam jars for this yarn, the brown in one, some pink Silver Spoon food colour in another and some lemon lime KoolAid in the third.  I dunked a corner of the skein in each and microwaved the lot.  In an ideal world I'd have left a little less yarn in between each jar because I think I have too much white but I like it anyway.

Good thing no.4.  Rowan have finally brought out a magazine I like (which is sort of bad because I really don't need to add projects to my queue!) after I stopped my subscription a couple of years ago.  There is even something in there that I might knit for my wedding - although I'll have to get cracking on that one if I want to get it done on time, so maybe not.

And Good thing no 5.... will have to wait until tomorrow when I can take some pics of the really great new fibre I got in the post the other day.  It's worth waiting for, at least it was for me!

So....

I've finally got myself into gear with the photos of my Christmas knitting and I guess this would be a good time to talk about all of the knitting goodies I got for Christmas too.

In the end I finished 5 projects before Christmas and they all went in the Christmas box until I decided on a recipient.  Only 3 items ended up being given away as it turned out I'd been rather efficient buying presents.  I could have given a couple of people something extra but I decided against it a) because it is so easy to forget the value of handmade items and give them away as a 'little extra' when they represent a huge undertaking and b) because I had rather taken a shine to the cowl I made and rather liked the idea of keeping it!  Last seen modelled on the cat, you can see why I wanted it can't you?

I did however give Rob, my pub landlord this hat
Subtle twist hat (rav link) in Knit Picks Wool of the Andes

This scarf of my own design went to Emily, my sister in law to be

It's also made from yarn I dyed so I'm really quite proud of it.  I'll be putting up a pattern for it as soon as I manage to find where I wrote down how many stitches there were before I started decreasing after the point!

Also an improvised pattern in a hand dyed yarn, this went to my auntie.

As well as all that I finished my 22.5 degrees shawl/scarf I've been working on for a while, pics will have to wait til I've blocked it though.  So, that's what I gave but what did I get?  So much lovely stuff, that's what.  Stu's brother got me some Hiya Hiya sock circulars which I have been wanting to try for ages.  I wasn't sure if I'd like them but I've nearly finished my first sock using them (will take pics of that soon too) and I'm getting on just great with them.  I still needed dpns for the heel and will need them for the toe, but I have so many 'loose' dpns floating around that I won't need to hold a set back just for heels and toes when I'm using these needles.  Stu's sister got me Cookie A's latest book Knit. Sock. Love.  I love Cookie's patterns and I love this book.  Em is totally knitworthy so I'll be making her a pair of socks from the book as soon as I can.  She also hand made me this bag for my projects:

See, totally knitworthy!  I also got Vickie Howell's Not Another Teen Knitting Book from Stu's mum and a scarf kit as well - lucky old me.  I didn't get any knitting stuff from my own family though, I think they are all still struggling to understand that it's not just a phase.

Well, that was Christmas, I'll get back to looking forward again from now if you don't mind.

The cat sat on the.....

As I still haven't got my photos sorted of my Christmas projects I'm sticking with looking forward today.  Although a lot of my time (and daydreaming) is being taken up by spinning, I have finally managed to cast on for Stu's cardigan (the cardigan from Knits Men Want which I mentioned a couple of months back).  I never normally knit for men because... well because I am lazy and I don't like to knit for anyone bigger than myself - unless it's a hat or something small.  However, the silly man is going to marry me so I guess I can break the rules for him!  I started knitting about a week ago and I've got a couple more inches to do on the back so it's knitting up pretty quickly in acres and acres of grey Cygnet Wool Rich Aran I got from Modern Knitting.  Unfortunately I don't really have a good picture of it so you'll have to take my word for it.  I did take pictures, but this happened:

I suggested that to Izzy that she might like to go and sit elsewhere.  She responded thusly:

That's right kitten, make yourself comfy!

And this was when I knew it was game over for that little photo shoot.

However I do have a reasonable picture of my latest dye job, mainly because the cats haven't worked out how to photobomb a picture of things hanging from doors.

It's not a great picture, but it'll do.  This was achieved with yellow and red Wilton's, poured in opposite sides of a dish so that the stuff in the middle sort of mingled into orange and then microwaved..  The red isn't quite as red as I'd like but the overall effect is what I was after.  Hopefully it will be dry tonight and then I can twist it into a skein, because it always looks prettier like that.

Photo story

Ok, because it has once again been a wee while since I updated I'm just going to add a whole load of photos of what I've been up to and try and bring this up to date.  I've got a few irons in the fire at the moment so the sooner I'm all caught up, the sooner I can talk about those.  Onwards!

So.. dying occured - it went well I think, 2 lovely skeins of sock yarn to be proud of:

I started knitting a little triangle scarf/shawl with some of the Araucania I bought a while back

 I finished my Charades and I love them

And... last but not least, my man, he knits!