Should you find your self counting stitches on your 52nd row of 54, should you find that you have to many, should you then notice that you entirely skipped a pair of increases back on row 20 - don’t do what I did. I thought about this for quite some time, 3 or 4 hours I guess. I wrote an email to the ever patient and always helpful Alison asking her opinion. I did not then wait for her very sensible answer to just ignore my problem but instead decided it was best fixed by dropping 32 rows of stitches and picking them up properly decreased. I knew that my new stitches would be sloppy and there would be some redistribution to be done. What I did not realise was quite how much yarn would have to be redistributed…. If only I had thought to take photos while I was working you could have a had a good laugh at my expense. Alas the only photo I have is one from after the patch up job was complete. If you look very carefully in the bottom right corner, below the safety pin where the decreases were missed and above the garter stitch base you will find a few stray stitches that I have yet to butcher… those stitches are still pretty, the other side of the bag is looking lovely. Alison tells me that the wonder of felting is that it hides a multitude of sins and I so hope it hides mine….

Sophie is halfway there. Well the knitting bit is half done anyway. If I had posted about Sophie on Monday I would have whined about hand winding a hank of Cascade 220 in a car. Or perhaps linked to this clever invention which I discovered just a little too late. If I had posted Tuesday morning I would have said I wasn’t loving Sophie, the 6.5mm circ I had was too long, double points really weren’t fun for this project and especially while knitting the first few rows of the sides I found the Cascade a bit thin to knit comfortably on 6.5mm needles. If I had posted last night I would have showed you this photo and said that I made good progress at knitting class and was looking forward to moving on to a new pair of 6.5mm circs when they arrived in the morning.

Well the needles came, I have changed over and I have to say am never going to love going to love knitting on 40cm circulars as the needle points are just too short for my hands but it is definitely more manageable with a fatter needle and wool yarn than the combination of 4mm needles and cotton. I need to stop blogging now so I can go knit this thing because despite all the whining Sophie is really growing on me, I want to see her finished.

I do have knitting news, but I am too tired to try to sort out my thoughts enough to make a cohesive post, so that will have to wait for tomorrow. Instead I am posting about something completely different, today was an important day. Today marked a whole week that Isabelle has spent in panties. She still wears nappies to sleep and she is still having occasional accidents but there is no question that she has the hang of living nappy free and that she likes it. Today was the day that Jesse and I both agreed that we are not looking like going back.

When Isabelle weaned a few months ago we threw her a weaning party. Of course we didn’t use the “W” word with her, we called it her “big girl party”. Well now she really is a big girl and I feel there really ought to be another party and more presents but somehow I doubt many people would appreciate an invite to a “potty party”. Here she is, our little “big girl”, so grown up with her ready-for-the-bath “up do” hairstyle that Jesse was so taken with he had to get the camera out.

Look what came in the post today! One skein of Cascade 220 in colour #9407 and two skeins of Lambs Pride Worsted in Khaki. Yum!

The Cascade is destined to become a Sophie bag. I feel a bit unoriginal using the exact colour shown in the pattern but I am having a thing for green at the moment and choosing yarn from tiny swatches online gives me hives.

The Khaki Lambs Pride is what the nice folks at Threadbare chose for me as a contrast to the Raspberry I am using to make my Booga Bag. I had already changed my mind and decided I really wanted pink to go with the Raspberry Booga Bag (and ordered accordingly) before today’s parcel arrived so I am not sure what exactly I am going to do with this Khaki. What I am sure of is that I LOVE it, there is something so inviting and soothing about this yarn in this colour, my photo really doesn’t do it justice but it’s a lot better than the swatch.

Pattern: Yvonne’s Double Flower Cloth
Yarn: Cotton Fredom, colour #11 (green)
Needles: 4mm Addi Bamboo DPNs, 4mm Addi Naturas

Umm, the green is not quite so GREEN in person, green yarn seems to photograph particularly badly. The 40cm 4mm Addi Natura’s and I are developing a love/hate relationship. They are the perfect size for this sort of project and quite nice to use - apart from the part where my hands ache for hours afterwards because they are just too short for my hand. Ouch. No more cotton knitting for a few days I think.

I am feeling a bit uncertain about the contrast colour I ordered for my Booga Bag so I have stopped working on it for now in favour of another washcloth. I was having trouble remembering the cast on the teacher showed me at my knitting class last week so I pulled out The Knitters Handbook and had a look to see what Montse Stanley had to say about casting on for knitting from the center out. She recommends a crochet hook method for this situation and I have to say it looks much better than the method I learned in class. I will definitely be using this method in the future. Just in case I am the only one that can tell the difference, the blue is from class, the green is from The Knitters Handbook.

Pattern: Octagonal Swirl
Yarn: Cotton Fredom, colour #5 (pale blue)
Needles: 4mm Addi Bamboo DPNs, 4mm Tulip Bamboo circular

We were having a very bad day today, Isabelle and I. So bad in fact that I gave her a dose of homeopathic Chamomilla and went off to the doctor’s to get my thyroid checked. The doctor’s main advice was get back into the exercise and make sure you make time for activities you enjoy. I took her advice immediately to heart and went off to a yarn store to buy some more needles - a longer 4mm circular to finish off the above wash cloth and some 6.5mm DPNs to do the icord for my Booga Bag. And while I was at it I bought a couple of balls of cotton yarn, destined to become yet more wash cloths. I also had a look at some Heirloom Cashmino. I wasn’t very impressed with the Heirloom 8 ply I used for the Phildar Baby Hoody but the Cashmino looked nice, it seemed like a decent substitute for Debbie Bliss Cashmerino, with the added bonus of more and better colours.

I had made it all the way to the garter stitch border on the wash cloth using DPNs but the combination of reaching 36 stitches per needle and my purl stitches being slightly looser on the needle was just bound to result in dropped stitches. The circular I bought was “Tulip” brand. It was cheap, which is just as well because it isn’t very good - the needles were fine but the join was very snaggy. As it turned out the new 6.5mm DPNs came in very handy today as I used one of them to cast off the washcloth. Aren’t I good, actually following the advice of my knitting teacher to always cast off with a bigger needle, usually a MUCH bigger needle to get a nice elastic edge. If I had been able to choose a slightly smaller needle I probably would have but the DPNS were the only larger needles I had with me at the time and it worked a treat. The washcloth has a few lumpy stitches but i think it will block out nicely.

Yesterday was my knitting class, apart from the ongoing problems we seem to be having coordinating my class attendance and Isabelle’s bedtime it went much better than last week. Last week you will recall Jesse called me half an hour early asking where I was and the teacher seemed kind of rude. This week I got home on the dot of 8:30 and found Isabelle was still eating dinner! The class was great though. There were less students, which always helps, but I was at a much better point with my projects to feel like I was really learning something. I learned to use DPNs:

Quite possibly I could have picked this up from a book or the internet like everything else but I have to say that this is one thing I was very glad to learn from one-on-one, in person instruction. I could be wrong but it seems that using DPNs is made harder than usual by my particular style of continental knitting and I would not have liked to figure out how to manage all those needles on my own. The other thing I learned last night was how to make icord. I know I have instructions on how to make icord in most of my books but something about it fuddled my dyslexic brain, turns out it was so simple any idiot could do it!

In other news I have been making progress with my Booga Bag.

I haven’t been working that hard on it, mostly because I won’t be sure where to put the stripes until my contrast yarn arrives and I don’t want to find I have to rip back to get the effect I want. My other reason for being so slack this week is that my right forearm has been achy. I think the achy-ness is in part due to having some sort of virus at the moment, I have been a bit achy all over. However, the right forearm is definitely worse than the rest of me and I blame those 40cm 4mm circs I used to make the brown dish cloth. Now that I know how to use DPNs I don’t see myself ever using those needles again. I will order a longer 4mm circ sometime soon, which will presumably have longer needles and be more usable.

I cast on for a Booga Bag last night with my Rasberry Lambs Pride Worsted. These 6.5mm needles are the biggest I have ever used and they’re FUN. I finished the base last night, picked up stitches all the way round the base this afternoon (yay new skill!) and started knitting in the round for the first time ever (yay another new skill!). I think this project is going to be a quick knit. Well it would have been, had I not decided it needed a contrast colour. I called ThreadBear this morning and asked them to help me choose a suitable contrast. They choose Khaki, I could hear three of them all agreeing they liked it on the other end of the phone, I really hope I do too…. From what I could see online I had been thinking Limeaid or Victorian Pink but they told me the Limeaid was pretty lurid, which is what I was worried about. It is always so hard to tell on my laptop screen but we never really discussed the pink properly, I hope they didn’t think I was only interested in green and choose the best of a bad lot…Whatever the case it is done now and they are sending two skeins so I can make a second bag with Khaki as the main colour and for good measure I ordered a skein of Cascade 220 to make Sophie too.

Pattern: Grandmother’s Favourite
Yarn: Jo Sharp SoHo Summer, colour #225 “Uber”
Needles: 4mm Addi Naturas and 2 4mm Addi Bamboo DPNs with stoppers

Thursday evening, just as I was finishing the seaming of the Phildar Hooded Jacket, we received an invitation to a friend’s 35th on Saturday night. Having managed to secure a baby sitter I cast on for this wash cloth during Isabelle and Ella’s nap on Friday, knit some more in the car on the way home after picking up Jesse from work and completed it during some TV knitting that night and one last hour yesterday afternoon.

It was fun knitting something so quick and easy. I learned yarn over, practiced the slipped stitch garter selvage and all up I am happy with the result. As you can see it needs a little blocking as the increasing half has tighter edges than the decreasing half, I would try to loosen the increase edges in the future but I imagine it would block out. Unfortunately I was unable to block this one as I finished it only hours before handing it over. It was only as we were in the car on the way to dinner that I realised I could have steam blocked it with the iron, never mind it is only a dish cloth!

My only real problem with this project was excruciating cramp in my right pinky and ring finger from using 4.5mm 40cm circs. The actual needles are shorter than the width of my palm and I was clearly doing something strange with those fingers to compensate for having nothing to hold onto. About halfway though the washcloth I gave up on the circs and tried this instead:

Yep, that’s DPNs with makeshift stoppers - ugly, but so much easier to work with. Isabelle was very impressed when she saw them and wanted them for herself.