Adventures in Knitting and Crochet

 Its been a quiet few weeks on the knitting front. This has been mainly down to crazy work schedule, childcare, ninja testing and life in general. Also I decided to redo my geometric L blanket. This time I did it in plain yarn and the design is much better. It no longer looks like it was knitted in the dark by a crazy person, I mean to some extent that's true... but still.  I also decided to make it bigger. For some reason as the temperature hit nearly 30 degrees I thought that making a double bed size blanket in chunky yarn was the ideal thing to do. The pattern below is pictured on a king size bed so is considerably larger than the original pattern. I think this yarn suits the design a lot more as as you can see the pattern much easier. Next project is going to be small and portable. No more big blankets until the autumn.  Pattern: The blanket is knitted in several pieces for all except the largest piece you will need to make two to ensure you have the correct layout. Y...

  I went into the office for the first time in about a year last week. While it was nice to see some of my team in person, I realised there is so little of working at work that I actually like. This predominately starts with my commute. However, while rifling through my desk drawers trying to find a document I know that I left there back in early 2020 I stumbled across an unidentified knitting project. It was clearly one I had been working on in my lengthy commute that was the norm pre-covid but it has no identifying marks. The yarn is a beautiful soft raspberry colour and its knit on 4mm needles which would suggest it is double knitting in weight. It has also been balled by me, which suggests that it was originally a skein which had balled prior to knitting. It has no other identifiers. The ball band I assume I lost somewhere on the long cross country train trip. It also had a lace pattern which I was going to need to deconstruct if I was going to finish it. Given my current spir...

I still haven’t got round to sorting the stash. My latest project did not turn out as planned because I really should have learnt to pick a yarn which is suitable for my project. I have been religiously stash busting but because I still haven’t organised the stash and I knew that to properly stash shop, I would need to at least begin organising the stash, I decided to work with whatever came out of the cupboard first for my next project. I opened on my door a fraction and several balls of Hayfield Spirit made a bid for freedom by landing on my head. Perfect, I could make a blanket it would be nice and simple. This was an added bonus as I had a cross country trip coming up and I can only knit simple things in the car. If I start anything complex I will begin to feel ill rather quickly.  I decided to make a variation on the log cabin style blanket where I would knit the pieces in scarf size strips and then join them together in decreasing L shapes to make a simple geometric blanket....

I have finally reached the end of the Cygnet Radiant Prism Yarn. I decided to have a go at a mile a minute afghan, on the basis that 1) it would take no designing and therefore, little thought process after a busy work week and 2) I wouldn’t need a set amount of yarn to complete it. With at least 4 balls still in the bag I got going. I decided to do 150 stitches long strip with a 10 cm diameter. I figured that, if the yarn did really go on forever 150cm is a nice width and if I managed to finally run it down then it could easily be the length and would make a nice lap or cot blanket. The good thing about mile a minute strips is that they are easy and portable. At least one strip got done while sat in a very chilly playground for my daughters extended play session. In the end I managed to do 8 strips with the remaining yarn. I don’t think I did the same pattern twice for any of the end increases but they all measured the same length and matched into shape. To join the strips together I ...

This week I was back at work after the Easter break, which means limited knitting opportunities.  Certainly not impossible but harder to obtain. I have had several interminable zoom calls which a) should have been emails, b) I was really not needed at and c) were really, really, long. These mostly account for the scarf which is my only contribution to knitting this week. I love moss stitch bordered scarves. Stocking stitch alone curls so much when you knit it, that you have no feeling for how the scarf will look when done. I know some people like this mystery but I don’t. The moss stitch around the scarf keeps it flat as it’s worked and means that even after washing it won’t re-curl. This self-striping yarn does lend itself really well to stocking stitch. It has good stitch definition and the colours come out beautifully. Fortunately I still have more yarn left... like, still several balls of it left... I raised this with family members and they have harshly criticised my belief th...

Having too much yarn is a rare occurrence for me. Not in life generally, my yarn stash is a fearsome beast which I believe one day may actually become a self-sufficient lifeform. However, too much yarn for a single project. You are far more likely to find me, having finally got round to knitting with a yarn that I bought four years ago, running out half way up the final sleeve of a project and being reduced to begging for extra balls of that specific dye lot, in the most obscure corners of the internet. However, this time I have too much yarn. This yarn originates in a sale in one of the local yarn shops where the Cygnet Prism yarn was discounted. I bought a bag of the Cygnet Prism in the shade of “Radiant”. It is a beautiful yarn, incredibly soft, and goes through the different hues of reds and pinks to make whatever you knit with it look like a sunset. The yarn was consigned to my stash until I found a project to match it. Years passed. The yarn resurfaced recently for two reasons. F...