After a week of house guests, house keeping, book keeping & web development I am finally catching up with the fun bits of my life (well the house guest was obviously fun but the book keeping was not). I have made a pattern for my baby blanket and cut and pinned most of the pieces. Tonight I will start sewing. I expect I will have something worth looking at by tomorrow, unfortunately I won’t be able to show you - it’s a secret.

In the mean time winter has arrived and I have been shopping. Last night I ordered the Debbie Bliss Cashmere Collection and today I ordered 21 balls of Jo Sharp Ultra in Seafoam to make the cabled jacket on the cover. Of course now that I have ordered it all I am panicing that I should have gone with the cover pattern from Jo Sharp Contemporary Knitting Two. It was such a toss up, I prefferred the collar and chunkier yarn of the Debbie Bliss but I think I prefer the cables to the semi bauble effect of the Debbie Bliss. Arrgghhh.

It’s going to take me at least a month to finish this sweater and that is being very optimistic - I have to wait of the pattern and the yarn, finish the velour baby blanket and a scarf that is now a very belated gift for someone special. And I am way too sick of my existing knits, too say nothing of way too cold, to cope without the big snuggly cardi I have been craving until the cabled jacket is done, so this week I also bought a new cardigan. Ready made.

Sorry about the picture, its the best of a bad (terrible?) lot, I haven’t quite mastered the art of self portraits in the mirror while using a digital camera that hates low light. It is amazing how differently I view sweater shopping now that I realise that almost everything I see on the racks is a knock off of something I saw on someone’s blog months ago, to say nothing of so wanting to go through the process of making it myself. I have always been picky, but now I am a shop assistant’s worst nightmare. I looked in 4 or 5 of my favourite shops at every knit on the racks and tried on about 8 in the one store I ended up buying something from (and I did this with a three year old in tow, sheer madness). I bought another one at the same time and spent days agonising over whether to keep either of them. Now that I have decided to keep this one and started wearing it I like it so much I may have to knit one myself next year. Well something like it, possibly in cotton, with cables and shorter sleeves - sounds just like the mohair blend sweater you see above, right? Well they would both be big rectangles with sleeves: