I knit the left front yesterday, you can see it here already attached to the back with a two needle bind off. I seem to be knitting tighter as I go along, it’s slightly shorter than than the back despite having the exact same number of rows. I choose to believe it will block out. I also choose to believe that button band will block flat. I seem to have issues with edge stitches. I can’t seem to find the balance between nice neat firm edge stitches and doing them so tight they cinch the whole thing in.

Thank you all for your button advice. I can certainly see where Carol is coming from, suggesting that flowers are still the best option, but I think I am going to go with the majority here and go the lady bird buttons. I will use the time I would have spent trying to learn embroidery knitting a pair of shoes.

In other news we bought Isabelle a trampoline today, you can see it in the phone, right there under the DB Jacket With Moss Stitch Bands. I confess that I was very impressed with myself for building the thing all on my own (Isabelle did help in her own three yearold way). But yikes was that one dirty job, my hands were completely black, my clothes are filthy. I have washed my hands repeatedly and they do now look clean but an hour later they still stink. I keep absent mindedly putting my hands near my face an then wandering where the terrible smell is coming from. I am actually worried that if I knit while they smell like this my knitting will stink too!

A sleeve a day keeps the boredom away… The question is, are these the right buttons?

Amazing what you can get done driving around between saturday activities. I cast on a sleeve as we left home today and had about an inch to go when we returned, maybe less. It’s ages since I have made something so simple, or at least that’s how it seems at the moment. Mindless knitting can be so very pleasant.

I am liking this colour more as I knit with it but it definitely needs a little sprucing up, something to make it a little more feminine. I have some cute lady bird buttons, but only four of them and the pattern calls for six. I can skip the bottom two (or three) button holes easily enough but I am still tossing up whether to go with the lady birds or use plainer buttons and embroider or duplicate stitch some flowers onto the fronts with scrap yarn. Heck I could do some intarsia flowers but that would require making charts and more than a little concentration so it’s unlikely to happen. Anyway do you think I should make the fronts with just three or four button holes and decide later which option to take or do you think I need to decide in advance so I can do 6 button holes if I am going to go for the floral version? I guess another way of looking at this is - do you think a baby girls cardi needs to button all the way down? I know I was often annoyed by cardigans that closed only at the neck when Isabelle was wee, but I think I would have been happy enough to button to the bottom of the chest rather than all the way to the hips.

One down, four to go, and they are all smaller pieces. Though it is true that the remaining pieces are ever so slightly more complicated than the back I still don’t think this one will be long in the making, not long at all.

I cast on the back of the Debbie Bliss Jacket and knit a couple of inches last night. I think it is going to be fun and probably quite quick. It has a very basic construction, lots of stocking stitch, lovely yarn, I am even liking the colour more now that I am knitting with it. It’s good to be knitting again.

About the hat, I didn’t knit the whole thing yesterday! I just knit the last two inches that remained after I ran out of yarn back in July! Yikes that really would have been something.

No, not the kind where you are compelled to cast on 5 new projects at once. I am talking about the sort of startitis I get all the time. The inability to start at all. Last weekend we unpacked the last of our boxes, this house is set up and it’s lovely, the nicest place we have lived in a long time. I am feeling (colds aside) relatively healthy. Life really is getting back to normal. But still there was no knitting. Eventually I had to face the fact that I have trouble getting started on things. I am pretty good at maintaining my momentum, due mostly to a need for closure that borders on the obsessive. If only I were so committed to getting started. I have a terrible habit of just not making a start on things, especially when the task is difficult, annoying or boring. If you were interested in book keeping (I am not) you would find a definite pattern to my book keeping practices…

Eventually I realised that I needed to be knitting again and that it was never going to happen if I kept waiting for the urge to knit that bloody sock. It’s very pretty, I am pleased with the outcome so far, but the Spearfish pattern hovers somewhere between boring, annoying and difficult. Although I usually find stitch patterns easy to remember, I have to consult this pattern constantly and yet keep making really stupid mistakes, which is driving me nuts. Other than that I can’t quite pin down why I am not enjoying knitting these socks, but mentally it’s been hard work to keep at it (or it was before I stopped and failed to start again). Finally it struck me that the Spearfish socks were not my only UFO and that I could work on Shedir - which is my idea of knitting bliss. Less than a day later and what have we:

Pattern: Shedir - Knitty Fall 2004 Surprise
Yarn: Rowan Calmer in Khaki
Needles: 3.25 Addi Natura circular and 3.25 Addi Bamboo DPNs

This hat was just so much fun to knit, beautiful yarn, wonderful cables. As I said, my idea of knitting bliss. I may have to make another one, though it may have to wait a little while. I am thinking of casting on the DB Jacket with Moss Stitch Bands next, hopefully gaining enough momentum along the way to return to the dreaded Spearfish socks when I am done.

Thankyou all for your kindness, it has meant so much to me, really. I am sorry I have been silent for so long but there just hasn’t been much to say, well not about knitting anyway. I did knit three rows 9 days ago - hows that for scintillating knit blogging?

What I have been doing is recovering from the IVF, unpacking, enduring a little food poisoning, unpacking, trying to find a school for Isabelle (so that I can find a preshool), unpacking, fighting off some sort of nasty cold or flu, unpacking. You get the picture. Oh and having more blood tests, because you can never have too many blood draws you know. There is something about seeing new doctors that makes me drivel on like a lunatic, all the while trying (and failing) to at least be humorous since I can’t seem to keep my mouth shut. It takes hours to recover from these little episodes. And this was just a garden variety family doctor that I will most likely never see again. Anyway not much time for knitting. But as the house begins to resemble a home I have begun to ponder when I might resume knitting and I am yet to come to a precise answer.

There have been goodies in the post this week, I am hoping they will provide some sort of inspiration or temptation. I am determined to finish the Spearfish socks but to be honest they aren’t much fun, which is probably delaying my return to the needles. But just look at these irresistible goodies, I will have to finish my socks so I can play with the pretties! In the order that they appeared in my mail box.

Markers from Jenifer, sent as part of the stitch marker swap, aren’t the gorgeous? Just what I need right now.

More Khaki Calmer in the right dyelot! I had to email every single internet distributor listed on the Rowan website to find it so I cannot tell you how happy I am! Sadly while I have been waiting for the yarn to finish Shedir a family member has been diagnosed with breast cancer and is currently waiting to find out if she will be needing chemo or not. This hat was meant for someone else but I will now be sending it to her and wishing that I wasn’t. Not because I wouldn’t love to make her hat, I just wish it weren’t this hat, for this reason.

Koigu! Alison, who mentored me through my first real knitting project has yet again reached out from so far away to enable my knitting.

And finally does anybody know if there is some rule spammers have about spamming you more the less you post? I have been receiving an INSANE amount of spam the last week and I seem to recall a similar pattern in the past. Do the think that if we aren’t posting we aren’t moderating? Ugh.

Thankyou all for your kind words. I am not pregnant and neither is my sock progressing. Now that it is quite certain I am not pregnant my unpacking seems to have stopped progressing too… I shall be back some time soon when I actually have some knitting to report.

Once we get through the next week or so life should be much more mundane (in a good way) than it has been for quite a while, so hopefully when the knitting does resume there will be far more regular progress than there has been of recent times.

And yes, we really do have an outside loo, but there is no need to panic - it is not operational, not even as a wireless modem site. We have had to resort to dialup of all things.

Our Internet connection was rudely interrupted when our phone line got switched to the new house last Friday and the backup wireless system failed to get reception at the new house. Who would have thought that a man that runs an ISP could find himself without network access? Poor man spent a large part of Sunday wandering around the backyard with the wireless modem and a very, very long extension cord, to no avail. There was no access to be had from on top of the grapevine, nor from the roof of the outside loo. I spent most of the weekend at IKEA. Why is it that when you go to IKEA once you then have to go three more times the next day? And it’s not over yet.

No news on the embryo yet, though it’s not looking that hopeful at this point. No news on the sock either - I have boxes to unpack, yarn storage to organise….

Is that heel too pointy? It looks kind of pointy to me. Too pointy or not, I confess to being rather pleased with myself for getting it done hassle free on my first try a few nights ago. I thank Knitty for my success in turning the heel, how surprising is that? Not surprising at all. I cannot tell you how I love the Knitty articles. As for avoiding holes in the gusset - check out these wonderful photos. The instructions for the heel in the pattern are completely correct and I am sure more than adequate for someone who has knit a sock before, but I would have been lost without these two resources. It is so cool that you can learn just about any new knitting technique from the web. Funny how that never seems to reduce my lust for new knitting books…

Today’s post is brought to you by the lovely Annette who is playing endless games with Isabelle while I continue my new habit of doing pretty much nothing all day. I am not exactly on bed rest, but neither am I supposed to do anything more exciting that wandering around the house lest I agitate my ovaries. Confined to the house may as well be confined to bed as far as Isabelle is concerned and she is not impressed, though her patience for it all has improved enormously since we explained exactly why I was being so unspeakably dull.

I had an embryo put back this morning. I cannot tell you how exciting that is, all those drugs, all the pain, all the whining about the drugs and pain, actually resulted in a transfer! Which means there is finally some kind of chance of a pregnancy - who would have thought it? Of the 10 embryo’s we had on Saturday the one that was put back this morning was the only one at blastocyst stage so far. The rest have another 24 hours to catch up and hit the freezer, hopefully 2 or 3 will make it. It would be awfully nice to never do this again.