Isabelle’s butterflies are done, so tomorrow I can cast on those fronts!

While I am always pleased to check the post and find someone has actually paid their bill it isn’t exactly “fun” because cheques in the post mean going to the bank with a toddler. Going to the bank with a toddler is surpased only by going insde the Post Office at a major center in the “Do we have to?” stakes. As far as I can tell the sole purpose of Post Office design in this country is the torture of small children and their parents. Forget candy free checkouts at the super markets, where are the marketting free Post Offices? At least you can move through a supermarket checkout at a reasonable speed most days, not so the Post Office. Actually our local is so small that it is fairly ok.

But I digress, there were no cheques in the post today. Todays post was fun - look what arrived from Germany:

I am really impressed with the Rebecca magazine. There are heaps of patterns I like and it is beautifully printed (on much nicer paper than the two Phildar mags I ordered a little while ago). I like it. I really hope I like kniting the Jacke in Apricot too! As for the colour card, I am still torn between the colours I thought I would like:

3 Apricot
22 Pale Green
46 Green

I have to say that while getting yarn online that I can’t get locally (or getting the same yarn 20-40% cheaper) is great I find choosing colours hard enough with whole balls in my hand, a few strands on a colour card is just really not enough for me to feel confident I like something… oh wait, did I say this was fun? It will be fun once the decision is made…

I cast off “sleeve a”, added the two missing rows to “sleeve b” and cast that off too and look, they match!

That really is two sleeves, just in case you were wondering where “sleeve b” had run off to. When I saw that they matched and no ripping was required I was so excited I put the jigsaw together and look, it’s jacket shaped.

All it needs now is some fronts and a seaming party. There will be no more knitting for me tonight as I am breaking out the sewing machine and going to work on a quilt I am making for Isabelle, I am hoping to have it done for christmas. If I get all the butterflies top stitched tonight it will be quite a milestone for me and I won’t be able to do anymore quilting until I have bought the next round of fabric so I will be casting on the baby hoody fronts tomorrow night I expect. I hope to be done with this project by the weekend ’cause that Lamb’s Pride is whispering to me, can you hear it? “Booga Bag, booga bag….”

It seems I somehow got my two sleeves out of sync after the third increase and “sleeve b” is now two rows shorter than “sleeve a”. Oops. I am going to add in the missing two rows at the end I think, the difference is very small as far as I can see so far. Given I am about to cast off “sleeve a” and then add those missing two rows to “sleeve b” it’s almost no extra work to do before deciding if ripping back is really necessary.

Photos tomorrow when I have made a decision one way or another and have something to show for it…

My LYS offers a drive by service! No, not really; but they were very obliging this afternoon when I went to pick up my yarn with two kids in the car and an afternoon clearway in effect for the street they are on (ie no parking). They had already put four balls of Jo Sharp DK Tweed in Boheme aside for me earlier in the day, so when I called to check the price and explain that I would need to run in and out they laughed and were very friendly about the whole thing. So friendly in fact that when I got there they were standing out front, yarn in hand. I handed over the cash and went on my way without ever having left the car or held up the traffic.

Of course now I am thinking I might need just one more ball…. I am thinking that this yarn would make a lovely vest for me. I like vests a lot. Is seven balls of DK enough for a ladies vest (135m/145yds per ball)? I have a 36 inch bust if that helps.I am torn…

I seem to be running a day behind here… yesterday’s news is that I took the two untouched balls I had left over from the Big Bad Baby Blanket back to the shop to swap them for a different colour. I had 1.5 balls each of the Alabaster and Ricepaper left and a single ball of the Quartz, a little over 4 balls in total. Unfortunately the Quartz ball had been partially pulled out and re-wound so it couldn’t be returned. My plan was to swap the two paler balls that I could return for two more balls of Quartz and then make a baby sweater, moslty purple with a stripe of the two paler colours somewhere along the way. That was the plan… Then I saw this:

You may notice that there are actually three balls there, I couldn’t help myself, I bought an extra ball. Now that I have had some time to sleep on it I have a new plan. My one ball of quartz and the leftovers of Ricepaper and Alabaster Silkroad Aran are going to become hat to go with the BBBB, I dont’ really want to do another large project with the same yarn/colours right now. Of course that frees me up to do something all new with the lovely new “Boheme” yarn. As it happens it is a very good thing that I have a new plan because this yarn is NOT Aran Tweed as both the shopkeeper and I thought it was, but DK Tweed which would not have knitted up nearly so well with my Silk Road Aran remnants. Finding that the new yarn was DK weight was very pleasing all round, not only did it help enable this new plan for the remnants of my BBBB, it is also much better suited to a cardigan for Isabelle. Needless to say the yarn store is holding another 4 balls for me to go pick up at my earliest convenience.

Oh and I do have some news from today after all. A pair of 6.5mm Crystal Palace circs came in the post today so now I am ready to start working on the Booga Bag the second the Phildar Hooded Jacket is done. Wonder if that will be enough motivation to see me knock of the rest of the sleeves and the fronts this weekend, so far it has been a very quick knit.

I cast on the sleeves for the Red Phildar Hooded Jacket yesterday, while Isabelle was playing the fountain at the Centennial Park Cafe on a 39 degree day. Apparently the hottest October day on record in Sydney with the runner up some time in the 1940’s.

Knitting in the shade while Isabelle played so happily was lovely and I expect there will be more of it to come as the days where water play is an absolute requirement increase in frequency. The only real problem with yesterdays splashing and knitting excursion was the sun block. I had not yet bought Isabelle outdoor swimmers to replace the ones she outgrew last summer. I had to sun block all the bits that stuck out of her clothes before we left home and then smear on even more once she was getting her swimmers on. I hate sun block at the best of times but it is impossible to get it completely off your hands without multiple soapings which just isn’t possible in a public park and that made for some knitting frustration. In the end I had to change how I hold the yarn to compensate and off I went.

Happily for me Isabelle now has a new super cute neck to wrist rashy and a matching swim hat and shorts. Which means she is better protected and I don’t have to get the sunblock out after leaving home. Woohoo!

As for the sleeves, they are coming along nicely after yesterday’s effort and some car knitting this afternoon.

It’s a hood:

This is my second attempt at Maggie Righetti’s three needle bind off and seam process. It worked really well the first time, and gave such a lovely neat seam that it was quite distressing how hard it was to seam the last little bit of the join that had to be done with a needle where the decreases were.

When I was done I was at first pleased, but also a bit puzzled as to why the rows looked so wide apart at the seam. As I lay in bed trying to sleep last night I realised that the rows were so far apart because I cast off on what would have been a right side row. While waiting for an hour or so at the doctors today I ripped out the bind off and the previous row and then bound off again. I am much happier with this version.

The last bit of the seam (which was sewn over the increases) seems to look better binding off a row earlier too, but is still not ideal. I am not sure if I fully understand short rows, but if my understanding is correct then I probably would have been better off using short rows rather than decreases and then seaming the whole hood with the three needle bind off. But it is done now and I am not undoing it again; however, I will know next time I make a hood in this style.

The first piece of my first sweater is complete:

I have decided to try out Maggie Righetti’s method for binding off and seaming two pieces together at the same time - so the shoulders are on stitch holders until I have finished the fronts and I will then bind off the front and back shoulders at the same time. I have finished knitting the hood too and tonight I am going to bind and seam this in the same way as the shoulders will be done. I can’t wait to see how it will go….

One of my more exciting moments today was the arrival of this pacel:

Unfortunately I can’t open it because it contains the yarn and pattern for Carla - Isabelle’s christmas present present to me. I am waiting for Jesse to open it and fish out the All Seasons Cotton I ordered for Kate because I want that RIGHT NOW.

I am a thirty year old woman without a handbag. In fact I have no bag of any kind other than my nappy bag and this thing here. I have always had accsesory issues, but the situation became dire when my last perfectly sized black leather back pack died, oh, probably a year ago now. Yes folks, I have let this problem fester for a year, or maybe more.

A bag is one of the few projects I would like to make that is likely to be significantly cheaper to knit for myself than to buy ready made, so I have been pouring over bag patterns and trying to choose yarn for weeks (months?). According to my local yarn store felting isn’t very popular here in Australia yet and they couldn’t recommend anything they stocked to make myself a felted bag. On their advice I decided my best option was to order some Lambs Pride from the US as pretty much all the patterns I liked seem to call for this yarn or similar. After agonising over a variety of websites that stock Lambs Pride and carefully comparing colour swatches I realised there was no real hope of getting an accurate idea of colours online and I just picked something that looked hopeful and prayed. It came in the post today and here it is:

I like it! Yay!! If only I still liked the pattern I had chosen when I ordered only two skeins….

I was planning on making a PackySack but now I am really not sure I like it. That I don’t like any of the colours used in the samples doesn’t help. This one here is pretty cute - only problem is the bag is supposed to be for me, not Isabelle.

Now that the yarn is here I think I want to make a Booga Bag, or possibly Lily.

The problem is that I probably have too little yarn for either of these bags. I have to go do some research and some maths… I like the plain red Lily shown in this photo better than the stripped verison on the pattern. If I do have enough Lambs Pride I think I will make Lily with the yarn I have, freeing me up to buy some Kureyon to make the Booga Bag in beautiful stripes.

UPDATE: Turns out Kureyon comes in 50g skeins, not 100g like Lambs Pride and Cascade 220. My two skiens of Lambs Pride will do nicely for a Booga Bag but fall a bit short of completing Lily - so a Booga Bag it is. If it works I will think about a second one in Kureyon.