All quiet on the blog front

 I've been pretty quiet recently, mostly because I haven't really been up to much, but also partly because my laptop is on the blink.  I'm afraid to say that I was not really up for blogging from my phone so I just haven't really bothered.  I came home from work last night, however, to find that Stu had bought me an iPad out of the blue, so I'm seeing how that goes for today.

So I haven't really got much knitting done recently, just the odd row of my Cria here and there.  Cassie has become a climber extraordinaire over the last few weeks and I found that I was having to put my knitting completely away every time I left the room so I kind of stopped getting it out at all.  I have however done a bit of sewing, including a project bag for slightly larger projects.

The pattern is from 101 Fabric by Fabric Ways to Sew a Metre by yaker and Hoskins.  At the moment it is comfortably housing my Cria and my copy of the Little Red Book so I'm really pleased with the size.  The only thing I'm not too happy with is the closure. I should have used a much slippier ribbon because it is quite difficult to pull open and closed, but for the moment I'm going to leave it and hope that it keeps Cassie out!  I've also finally got around to starting the Clothkits kit for cassie that I bought a dogs age ago. I'm hoping to finish that tonight as it's my night off work and get some pics of it all finished up on here soon.

Stashdown Progress May Edition

Because it is the beginning of June (seriously, how did that happen?!) I figure it is time to post my stash graph again to include the whole of May.  From now on I'll try and post it at the beginning of each month so we can see how I did the month before.  So here it is, I've finally got round to fancying it up a bit in infogr.am too.

Stash | Create infographics

I'm very pleased that this shows a downward trend, even if it is very slight. Start as we mean to go on eh!  You may notice that I have added one ball to the stash so I guess now is a good time to clarify what I mean by 'added'.  This culd mean that I've been bad and bought more yarn, but it could also mean that I have unravelled something and aded the yarn back in to the stash or, as in this case, it could mean that I have finished making some handspun.  At some point I will take stock of the fluff stash as well so I could see that go down as the yarn stash goes up in cases like this. I'll takes some photos of the finished yarn as soon as I can and do a little FO post for it in the next couple of days.

Knotted, erm not!

With Cassie's bolero all done and dusted I quickly cast on to swatch for Knotted as per my plan. However, it wasn't long before I spotted a flaw in this plan.  There was no way I was going to get gauge.  The yarn feels a lot thinner in my hand than other DKs I've knit with and while the finished product may have ended up growing a bit I wasn't going to rely on that from such an early stage.  So Plan B comes in the form of Ysolda's Cria.  While I was flipping through Little Red looking for ideas for my next project I spotted Cria and saw that a lighter DK would be a suitable yarn and when I checked back, as luck would have it, the gauge suggested was the gauge I had been getting when I swatched for Knotted.  I duly cast on and got to work.

This is what I have so far.  It doesn't really look like anything because due to some knitting jiggery pokery, stitch picking up and short rows you kind of knit round and out from the shoulders, so what I have at the moment looks a bit bunched up and weird.  I have to say that when I started knitting and following the instructions I did think to myself that they were a little crazy and wasn't entirely sure how it would all pan out, but I had faith and I seem to be getting something that resembles a cardigan.  At the moment I'm planning on making the short sleeved version, mostly because I have some super secret future projects I'm eager to get to.  But if this turns out to be a reasonably quick knit then I might be tempted to knit a longer sleeved version because I do love the look of the buttons on the cuffs.

FO: Cassie's Two Tone Bolero

Despite all the angst about running out of pink Kidsilk Haze, Cassie’s bolero is now finished and actually it ain’t half bad.  I had a sticky moment where I thought the arm holes were far too small, but I’d fastened the ends of the bind offs too tightly and once they were loosened all was well.

Because I know that there are 2 shades of Kidsilk haze here is does seem kind of obvious to me, but I actually don’t find it too jarring and I’m glad that I didn’t rip back.  Cassie looks super cute in it too so overall I’m pleased with it.  Again the pattern I used was the Baby Bolero by Yarn-Madness and I’ve managed to discover that the main yarn I used was Wendy Mode Chunky along with the troublesome Kidsilk Haze.

Stashdown Yarn 3

My third choice of stashdown yarn was this handspun yarn, made from 50% BFL, 30% Baby Alpaca and 20% Silk which I purchased from Picperfic.  Her new shop is here.  I spun the yarn as a 3-ply and then plied them together with gold sewing thread so it is kind of a 4-ply.  I've measured it as around a 4-ply weight and I have about 200m to play with.  Because I don't have a great amount of yardage for a 4-ply I was a bit stumped when I started to look for a pattern.  I don't really have enough for a shawlette and I couldn't really think of anything smaller that I wanted to make, so in the end I plumped for making a baby item.  Once I realised that it wasn't so hard to choose.  I've been thinking that I need to make Cassie some legwarmers for a while.  If she's wearing trousers when I put her in the sling I find that they get all bunched up, it's hard to pull them down and I worry about her getting chilly ankles.  Legwarmers are the answer to that and these Baby Frog Legs are perfect.  Nice and simple, because I'd like to finish them quite quickly, I'm looking forward to making these.  I'd better check the yarn goes with our new woven wrap when it gets here in the post!

Stashdown Yarn 2

The second of my Stashdown Trio is some Rowan 4 ply Soft which I bought in a cone a lot of years ago.  I've finally got round to winding it into balls so now I know for sure that I have around 500g which gives me around 1750m to play with.  Now, apart from socks, I very rarely work with 4-ply so I knew that choosing a garment for this yarn was going to be a tall order.  Especially as I've attempted to knit with it before and gave up once the endless rows of stockinette with tiny needles became too much and poor old Hanne from Rowan Studio 3 has been sitting in a drawer for years until I finally ripped it back last week.  I'm pretty sure that I have actually moved house 3 times since it went in the drawer!  So from long neglected yarn to long neglected pattern books, I have decided to try knitting Laika from Ysolda's Little Red in the City.  Like Custom Knits 2, which I mentioned yesterday, I received Little Red as a gift at least 2 christmasses ago and I still haven't knit anything from it so I'm glad to be finally trying one of the patterns.I'm hoping that the lacy pattern should add interest and distract me from the fact I am knitting with 4-ply.  I guess we'll see.

Stashdown Yarn 1

While I'm charging along finishing Cassie's bolero I can get on with outlining my plans for the first of my 3 chosen stash yarns that I mentioned a few posts ago.  My first chosen yarn was 7 balls of Rowan Felted Tweed, which is 350g and 1222m.  I originally purchased this, along with 3 balls of Rowan Kid Classic in order to make Celtic from Rowan 40.  I must have really liked it because I actually bought the same colours of the one in the magazine, quite a rarity!  Clearly I didn't actually like it enough to get around to making it though and after purchasing Thrown Together by Kim Hargreaves I decided that the Felted Tweed would be put to much better use as an Olivia.  Now I've spent some time thinking about this and although I do still like Olivia a lot I'm a bit unsure of whether it would suit me and I've decided to use the yarn for something else.  Third plan lucky, eh?  After a bit of searching I found 2 likely candidates.  Caramel by Isabell Kraemer and Knotted by Wendy Bernard.  I absolutely adore Caramel and I keep coming back to it as a favourite, but ultimately I want to make a stripy one and that would mean using a completely different yarn for the stripes so I'll keep it on ice for the future.  For this reason and also because it is nearly summer now and Knotted seems like a more appropriate garment, I'm going to make Knotted.  It has loads going for it, I can make the basic sleeveless version and then if I have plenty of yarn left I can add a hood and even sleeves as I go.  I like the idea of that after some of the 'running out of yarn' issues I have been having later.  Also I have all 3 Custom Knits books and have yet to knit a single thing from any of them, so I'm happy with my decision.