Hats, Boots, and Oopsydaisy (or the perils of non-communication in the human male).

Recently I seem to have been knitting a lot of baby stuff. I finished off the Debbie Bliss cardigan and I still had a ball and a half of yarn left, so I decided to use them up on a matching hat and bootees. The hat took a few attempts to get the decreases right - the first attempt was a bit pointy, like a sort of woolly medieval pikeman's helmet, but I was fairly pleased with it in the end and C even joined in and made the bobble.

Then I got an email from an old friend I hadn't spoken to in ages saying his wife had had a baby on New Year's Eve, so I used up a few oddments to rustle up a couple more pairs of bootees, which were duly dispatched and seem to have gone down well (at least with the parents).

No doubt the bootee theme will continue presently, as I know at least two other people expecting soon, but for the time being I've gone back to C's seemingly never-ending socks. I'm hoping to finish them soon, not only because they're boring me stiff but in the hope that a Finished Object might in some way make up for my accidentally scalping him at the weekend. Mind you it was his own fault.

A while ago he bought an electric razor-clipper thing for me to use in cutting his hair (since he has so little of it these days it seems ridiculous to go to an expensive hairdresser). I was trimming his hair with it at the weekend and said to Chris I thought it could do with going a shade shorter at the bottom. Without speaking he handed me what I assumed was the fitting for the next grade down and it was only after I'd laid into the back of his hair with it that I realised it was in fact the shortest possible. So he has a little bit of a chunk missing on one side...only a little one...it's barely noticeable unless you know where to look...well it's more noticeable in the daylight...but it's going to be cold for the next few days, so he can just wear a scarf while it grows back...

However, the socks are progressing rather slowly as I've only really had knitting time on the train recently, and not a lot of that yesterday and today since my dad was visiting for a conference. He got the train down in the afternoon and we arranged to meet at the front of work about 5.* This resulted in a short game of hunt-the-woozle: I went out the side entrance (the one at the front) and turned right expecting to meet him coming the other way. He meanwhile approached the same entrance from the left. When I didn't find him I walked back, while he went round to the main entrance (the one at the side) thinking this must be what I'd meant by the "front". I then phoned him and we each established where the other was. I set off round to the main entrance thinking I'd find him coming back, and he persuaded the man on reception to let him go through the building to get out the other entrance... Round and round they go. Anyway, we finally found one another and made it to the train, but I didn't think it was really very friendly to then produce socks and spend all night knitting, so C will have to wait a little longer.


I soon will have finished them though and will be in need of another train project, so I've also been to trying to find something to make out of this ball of Shetland yarn my brother gave me a while ago. It's 100% Jacob sheep but other than that it doesn't give any information on the label. Since I only have one ball I have been thinking about a hat and I had guessed that it would be about aran weight, so I started knitting swatches for Gretel by Ysolda, but it soon became apparent that it's more chunky than aran, and although the gauge was ok, the knitted fabric was far too stiff and itchy to be comfortable, so back to the drawing board on that one.

On the subject of hats and brothers however, A has sent me pictures of his latest creation. Not sure why he's knitting woolly hats when he's in Oz where the temperature's about 30 degrees, but I'm glad to see he's still knitting (though it does mean I won't get to keep the 8 balls of Rowan Scottish Tweed Chunky I'm looking after for him). I think the hat is probably a variation on the theme of a knitty pattern. Can't help feeling it should be called "Beagle".

* By which time he had been to the Oxfam bookshop and managed to acquire four Odysseys and an Iliad.

'Twas the season to be jolly.

Well not in our house; 'twas more the season to be achy, shivery, and grey in the face with a persistent cough and a slight temperature.

On the Thursday before Christmas I cheerfully returned from singing carols to find C sitting on the sofa wrapped in a blanket and trembling. This did not bode well. C does not malinger as a rule. If he's ill a typical conversation goes along the following lines:
Me - You're never going into work.
C (manfully) - Oh, I'll be ok.
Me - But your arm's off!
C - No it isn't; it's just a flesh wound. I've had worse.
etc...

Needless to say two days later I woke up feeling and looking like the last turkey in the shop. We managed to drag ourselves out of bed long enough to stagger up the road and buy a Christmas tree (which looked very much like we felt), dump it in the back garden and go back to bed. The following day we just about made it to the supermarket, and then back to bed. On Christmas Eve, in between fits of coughing and bouts of shivering, we had to do all the housework and put the tree up. We just about managed to get the place straight before my brother arrived. "Sorry if I'm not very festive," he said as he came in, "only I've got flu".

So the three of us sat about feeling sorry for ourselves while my brother's partner (who is a doctor) tutted and told us to take more drugs (mind you it might have been more worrying if she'd expressed any great interest: she's training to be a pathologist!).

However, the lurgy did mean I got a fair amount of knitting done as it was about all I felt up to doing. The River Stole languished rather as I didn't think my concentration/patience was up to it and from experience, knitting with kid silk haze while coughing and sneezing is a dangerous occupation resulting in a great many dropped stitches. However, I did manage to finish the Brown monkey socks:


and (following Liz's example) to start a mini-version of the Debbie Bliss Classic Baby Cardigan, knitted on smaller needles so as to come out newborn size.


This is for some friends of ours in the U.S. who are expecting imminently. The other part of this gift - requested by C - is to be "Extermaknit" which I haven't yet started. It might have to be sent on later, but I thought the baby jacket was probably the bit to concentrate on getting finished. I'm not quite sure what a newborn is going to make of a knitted Dalek...

I also finally relented and in response to C's piteous cries of "Aren't you going to make me something soon?" bought some yarn to make him the stripy socks he wanted. They are fairly dull but good train and TV knitting. However, as predicted they do seem to be going on forever. I can never quite believe how big men's feet are and spent a lot of the time grabbing C's foot in the knitting equivalent of "are we nearly there yet?". I've finally turned the heel but they may end up as trainer liners as I don't know that there's all that much yarn left to do any leg. I strongly suspect that we will find them far too warm to be comfortable anyway, so it probably doesn't matter.

Today we have also been to JL in Reading and identified a cabled aran cardigan pattern which a) doesn't have to be ordered from the U.S. b) does not involve terrifying amounts of steeking and I might actually be able to knit c) (much to C's chargrin) doesn't have leather elbow patches, horn toggles, or cause the wearer to age by 40 years as soon as it is donned, so if we can agree on some yarn he may yet get the long-coveted cardigan too - possibly even before the end of the year.

Star knitting-related present this year was this Cath Kidston knitting bag from the lovely mother-in-law.


It's happily swallowed up the rather unwieldy collection of needles that's been preventing my stash box from shutting, thereby restoring marital harmony by allowing me to close the lid and put the box under the table out of sight. C also bought me the "New Pathways" sock book from Socktopus but (owing I suspect to Liz's dad snaffling the last available copy) it hasn't arrived yet - grrr.

Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?

This morning we were meant to get up early to go Christmas shopping. 

At 11 o'clock I say to C (who is lying in bed reading), "Aren't you going to get up and get ready to go shopping?" 

"Yeah, in a minute", says C, "I'm just reading this article on procrastination". 

Kiri in action

Well, we're back and Kiri has had it's day in the sun. And a very nice day it was too despite dawning overcast and stiflingly humid and then proceeding to rain torrentially for the best part of the morning. Brisbane has been having an unseasonably damp spell so we were all a bit concerned that the outdoor ceremony might end up taking place in a hastily erected marquee, but fortunately the weather pulled itself together in the afternoon and was beautifully warm and sunny so the wedding was held around the fountain as intended.

O - who definitely won the looks section of the genetic lottery in our family - looked absolutely stunning as is her wont, the groom and his entourage were splendidly bekilted, and the ceremony proceeded without a hitch (apart, obviously, from the one it was celebrating).* There was a slight issue with bagpipes and Amazing Grace, but we won't go into that...



The champagne flowed freely, large quantities of exceedingly good food were consumed, speeches were speeched (it seemed a little unusual that they came before the meal to begin with, but since the first speaker began by detailing the time that D waxed his b*llocks for a bet, we were actually quite thankful not to have eaten!), cake was cut, and generally good time had by all.

Owing to the inevitable preponderance of wedding-related activities we didn't get an awful lot of time for standard sight-seeing and tourist activities during our ten days** - all the more reason to go back - but we did manage to get to the botanical gardens and the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane where we encountered a variety of antipodean critters, including lots of surprisingly docile and deer-like kangaroos/wallabies which would happily take food from your hand.

We didn't get round to seeing the red kangaroos, but since they will apparently eviscerate you soon as look at you I wasn't too upset by that. We did however see a wombat. A surprisingly solid sort of creature it sat and regarded us from the top of a hollow log with an air of mild exasperation, as if we were the ones in the cage and it was waiting for us to do something amusing.

We also, naturally saw a lot of koalas which were quite unreasonably cute, especially the little ones, though how a species that lives in such tall trees can be quite so bad at climbing and still survive is beyond me. We watched while a baby koala tried to climb onto its mother's back, missed, and with a series of increasingly desperate "eeeps" gradually lost its grip until it was hanging by one claw from her fur while she frantically scrabbled at the branch they had been sitting on. At this point the mother seemed to decide something had to give and shrugged the baby off. It spent the next twenty minutes or so eeping and scampering about the bottom of the cage hopelessly trying to shin up all the trunks and poles it could find. Unfortunately the place closed at 5.30 so we never did find out if it made it.




For the last couple of days we left O and D to recover and decamped up the coast to the seaside resort of Noosa, spending an enjoyable time playing in the sea and the sand and working out too late which bits we'd missed with the factor 50. Swimming was fun since, as there's pretty much nothing between there and South America, the waves are fairly substantial, so the whole experience was a bit like being in the washing machine. Not a very strong swimmer at the best of times it was all I could do to stand up and keep hold of my swimming costume most of the time. Sand everywhere. My brothers and I had a go at recreating James Murray's Sand Grendle, but since we only had about an hour before the tide came in, we didn't have anything to dig with, and the sand was considerably drier and more friable than it probably is in North Wales, it didn't really measure up.

Murray's version:

Our attempt:
So, O is now Mrs Whyte and we are back in blighty with only jetlag, two weeks' worth of dirty washing, and occasional patches of sunburn as reminders that we've ever been away. Not to mention the sudden realisation that it's Christmas in a fortnight and we haven't done anything about it. The trip back was long and dull, but fairly uneventful. Needless to say the last 3.5 hours were the worst. That's the time it took us to get the 40 miles from Heathrow by train having previously covered the c. 4000 miles from Sydney to Singapore in only twice that. Ho hum.

* More photos on flickr for anyone who's interested.
** I finally managed to overcome the bootee curse though, and got a matching pair made the first day we were there in between making wedding favours. Though since the yarn was originally Australian, was posted to me, then taken back to Australia, in order to be posted back here with Christmas presents, they have quite a disproportionate number of airmiles on them now!

Sisyphus knits

The problem with knitting on the train (apart from the blue fingers when the train doesn't turn up) is that it is prone to interruption and distraction. This is fine if you're knitting mindless miles of stocking stitch, or something with clear repeats where you can easily figure out where you're up to, but less so with anything remotely fiddly.

For the last month or so (it seems like more), I have been trying to knit a pair of bootees for a friend of my sister's who was expecting a baby. Note the "was" - baby has now arrived. The father is a childhood friend of both of ours though closer to my sister, so the deal was she would buy nice Australian merino and I would knit them. The work of a moment or so I thought. However...

First I tried to find a pattern to work with the fine 3ply yarn but couldn't find anything that wasn't ugly or excessively girly (at this stage we didn't know the sex of the baby so I was trying for something unisex - a slightly tall order given the amount of pink in the yarn). I was also instructed that they should ideally be bootees and not socks. I tried various patterns and versions of patterns but they all produced miserable little curled up things because the yarn wasn't thick enough. I knitted, I crocheted, I frogged and frogged again; it would not cooperate.

Finally baby appears on the scene (still booteeless) and is a girl. Hurrah, think I - Saartje's bootees. I knit one in record time throwing in a little bit of kidsilk spray (vino) to give a nice pink fuzz and am very pleased with it.


I embark on the second and run out of kidsilk spray before I reach the appropriate point. Nuts! I spend my lunch hours scouring every yarn shop in the district (all two of them) to no avail. It is now less than a week before the bootees are expected and I don't have time to order yarn from elsewhere or go further afield to buy any. No one I know has any spare kidsilk in the right colour.

I decide I will just have to start again and make a matching pair without the kidsilk spray. In the remaining two days of the week I frantically knit one bootee each day on the train to and from work because it is the only free time I have. Come to sew them up last night and the bootee curse strikes again; I find I have made two (different) mistakes, one on each bootee so they don't match.

I now have about a third of the ball of yarn left and 4 different bootees, only one of which (the one I can't reproduce) is really presentable, and I have run out of time to make them. Grr.....might as well throw my sticks in the bin, give my stash away to the needy, and give up knitting for good!

Round and round they go

Happy Birthday to me... a very happy birthday indeed since I spent most of it happily playing with my new yarn swift and ball winder (not to mention the generous quantities of new yarn C's mum kindly sent me by way of presentage).

I have been very good because the swift etc. actually arrived early last week (from the Handweavers Studio who were very helpful and got it to me the day after I ordered it) but by dint of will-power and the simple expedient of hardly having any free time at all, I managed not to open it until this morning. C of course couldn't resist the lure of something vaguely technical (either that or he feared my poor little brain would overheat with the excitement) and was soon happily winding away. It was skein number 6 before I even got to have a go!


We started by balling a variety of things I've been saving especially, including the lovely Oxford Kitchen Yarns "Storm" sock yarn (hand-dyed with woad) that I bought at the IKnit Stitch and Bitch day


and the equally lovely Italian mulberry-coloured lace weight that I also bought there.


Then I basically spent the rest of the afternoon working my way through my whole stash, reducing what had been a horrid tangle in a variety of unseemly plastic bags to a stack of gratifyingly neat little cakes.


And they fit in the box and the lid shuts for the first time in months! A Sunday well-spent say I.

Here Kiri, Kiri, Kiri!

Well, after a weekend of concerted knitting, all three are finally done. Still the odd end to sew in, but that doesn't really count.


On the whole I'm very pleased with them, and I hope my sister will be too. She is marrying a New Zealander and will be having New Zealand ferns in her bouquet, hence the original choice of pattern. I haven't got a New Zealand fern, so my asparagus fern will have to do for the purposes of comparison, but it seems fairly ferny to me.

For the third one I used, what I can't help thinking of as "Liz's accidental bind-off" (a method which apparently resulted from a slight misunderstanding, but in fact turned out to be much more successful than the original) and the edge gave me no trouble at all and came out nice and pointy. I am still trying to decide whether I dare try to tink the already-blocked Kiri No. 1 and tweak it to be the same. Not sure that my nerves are strong enough for it really, but I would like them to match. I'll think about it. If I attempt it fairly soon I suppose at a pinch I still have time to make a fourth...


Now all I have to do is get the rest of my outfit together. I have the majority of it but am still on the look-out for what I am told is called a "fascinator" (I reckon it'll be too hot for hats and anyway it's got to be packable). While visiting my mum last week I had a quick look in various likely-looking shops, but without much success. Really what I want is something the same sort of iridescent green as my shirt, but since this isn't one of "this season's" colours I couldn't find anything that matched. In fact the whole selection was somewhat uninspiring and surprisingly pricey. In one shop C proudly presented me with something that looked like the result of an unfortunate encounter between a pheasant and a lawnmower and I was rather taken aback to realize the price ticket said £265! Perhaps I'll get myself a bull-dog clip and some ribbon and then go out and mug a pigeon...