Shalom

Having found my camera SD card, which inevitably was down the back of the sofa, I’ve finally managed to take some pictures of my Shalom.

 I’m still beavering away on the yoke because, despite Autumn quite clearly arriving a few weeks ago we have been in the middle of a mysterious heat wave which is only just waning.  I hate to knit when it’s hot so I’ve been averaging about ¼ of a row per day for the last week or so.  Luckily it is starting to cool now, because at that rate I’d have given birth by the time this maternity cardigan is done.

Also on my memory card, much to my surprise were a whole host of photos from the summer, some photos of fibre I bought ages ago and forgot to blog about (I’ll catch up on that tomorrow) and also this:

 Which on closer inspection appears a strawberry shaped like a witches nose.  The strangest things amuse me.

Latest WIP

For the last 13 weeks I’ve been working on a super secret project, which hasn’t really left me much energy for anything else.  Here’s a pic of my progress so far:

Estimated date of completion is 29^th March 2012.  That’s right, all being well I’m going to be a mummy!  To be honest it is really only just sinking in, it’s only been since the scan last week that I’ve actually been able to get excited about it, plus I’ve been feeling rather awful for weeks now which kind of takes the shine off.  Anyway so now I can tell people, it all seems a bit more real.

So, while I can see lots of baby knitting in my future the first thing I cast on was for myself.  A lovely plum coloured Shalom which will be just perfect as I get larger over the coming months.  Pics to follow when I remember where I put my camera memory card.  It’s been pretty simple so far, even though the going has been quite slow.  I think that might have something to do with the fact that I fall asleep every time I sit down for more than 5 minutes! 

....er, remember me?!

My dining room to be!

Exciting things have been afoot in our little household recently, but as none of it has really been craft related I have been a bit silent in the blog department.  Our plan after we got married was to knuckle down and save every penny, so that we could afford the deposit on our own house.  After we got back from our honeymoon and opened all of our gifts we were absolutely astonished by the amount of contributions we received for our house fund.  Our generous friends and family gave us such a wonderful boost and even though we have still been saving unbelievably hard, we were quickly realistically able to start looking for a house.  Since then most of our spare time has been spend looking for houses on the internet, looking round actual real life houses and having long, long discussions about how much renovation and repair we were willing to undertake.  Luckily we’ve not been able to afford to go out anywhere for a while so we’ve had plenty of time for all this!  However we have finally found somewhere we like and had our offer accepted so the actual process of buying the place has begun.  It needs a fair amount of updating (see groovy carpet in the pic above), but no major renovation is necessary and I can’t wait to get going.

As an aside, here in South East England it’s starting to get a wee bit chilly and it feels a bit like Autumn is on the way.  This is the time of year when I start to regularly settle down for an evening’s knitting every day, so hopefully I’ll have some projects to share very soon.

Invisible tea

I wrote a post all about how my car knocked a cup of tea all over the sock I'm knitting.  When I went to take a photo the sock had dried and no trace of the team was visible.  Good news for the sock, not so great for the post!  Anyways, here's a nice photo of the cat responsible.  Good job she's adorable.

Oops more fibre

Because I am slowly working through my fibre stash, I thought I could do worse than to add a little more to it.  With a wealth of lovely stuff available on Etsy it was a difficult task to choose what I wanted, but in the end I was unable to resist checking out with these bits from Hilltopcloud.

These are lovely batts with merino, mohair and silk.  I love that they are subtle and dark with occasional flashes of purple, I’m really looking forward to these being yarn.  I’m so often drawn to bright flashy colours which can limit what I’d realistically knit with them, but this will be really versatile I think.

 These are little bits of roving with Shetland, merino and tussah silk.  I'm having a bit of a blue thing at the moment, which is quite odd for me, so this is perfect.  I’m anticipating that I will have an empty spindle very shortly, so now I just have to decide which of these fibres I spin up first.

New kit

Yesterday I included a quick pic of some the Yummy Yarns fibre that didn’t get to come on honeymoon with me, although it is clear from the photo that I have now started to spin it up.  I was going to save it for a while, but when I got home from my holiday this lovely IST spindle I ordered a while back was waiting for me.  The next fibre on my list for spinning was an alpaca silk blend, but I only had to spin for a minute to realise that that was going to require a heavier spindle so I swapped to the merino bamboo instead.  I’m enjoying spinning with the spindle, it’s so delicate and refined and it spins for ages and the fibre is spinning up nicely too.

 The other fibre that I did take away with me was a small portion of the merino silk top that I got from Shunklies a wee while back (first blogged here).  I got most of this spun up on holiday and finished it up quickly once we were home and now I have this lovely colourful skein of 4-ply.  It is 68m long and weighs 23g.  I was aiming this to be fairly stripy and it sort of is.  Each section is certainly mostly one colour and I think that the little variations make it interesting.  I’m still rather amazed each time I finish a new skein that I have produced actual yarn that I can actually knit with, once I’ve decided what I want to make that is.

Back again so soon

Here I am, Day 2 of trying to be a better blogger and catch up with everything.  Yesterday I finished with my wedding and the shrug that wasn't, so a good place to pick up would be the honeymoon.  Obviously an important consideration before we went away was which projects I would pack.  Because I was no longer tied to the shrug I thought I'd enjoy some sock knitting, so I packed my plain simple socks which I'm knitting out of some of the first yarn I dyed.  I finished the first sock a while back, but aside from casting on I hadn't worked on the second sock at all.  I'm now ready to turn the heel on that sock thanks indeed to the near apocalyptic levels of rainfall which will forever define my honeymoon!  In all honesty neither of us were at all upset about the weather, to us the honeymoon was an opportunity to drop off the grid, spend some time alone and know that when we woke up in the morning we were free to do, or not do whatever we liked.  It was bliss.

The weather also afforded me plenty of time for spinning too.  I'd packed an ongoing project, which is now finished and will get it's own post later in the week, and as a little treat I'd bought myself some new fibre from Yummy Yarns on Etsy.

Rather nice merino soybean top

Pretty batts full of lots of lovely stuff

 I can highly recommend her shop, the fibre is lovely and I received a wonderful welcome into her group on Ravelry.  After some deliberation I decided to pack the batts to take away with me.  So far I've almost finished spinning up the first one, from one side of the batt to the other so i have three very wide stripes.  Because I could only really fit half of the batt on my spindle this resulted in a bit of jiggerry pokery, winding and rewinding so that I can join the right end of the second spindleful to the first spindleful, I really should think about these things ahead of time.  When I start the second batt I shall be starting from the middle so that when I wind off it will be the right end on the outside.  My problem solving skills know no bounds!