Blocks and Hanging Garden

Two things:

Blogger vetoed me adding yet another photo to the last post; so here's Caroline sitting in front of the blocks from 200 Knitted Blocks, kindly donated by Jan, which meant we had a whole wonderful library of stitches and techniques to play with, and people could also see how different colours might mix... I was sure I had a photo of just the blocks because they looked brilliant all spread out with people poring over them; but I think I might have taken a film of the blocks by accident! But anyway; you can see them behind Caroline - the wall of cabinets was about 2.5m long, so they were still stacked pretty deep - and also one on the table in front of Addy. In fact, they were all over the place by the end of the week; several in front of each person... thanks, Jan!

Once I got home, feeling suddenly as if I'd been felled by a blunt instrument, and spent an hour in the bath reading, and bunged a supermarket curry in to heat up, I spent a couple of hours watching some episodes of Firefly and knitting on the Hanging Garden KAL from Sivia Harding.

I cast on at the Cambridge Ktog in the Blue on the 25th, but only did the cast-on and 6 rows of garter stitch at the time (it took me 6 goes to get the cast-on right; on the penultimate try, I stared blankly at a stray bead sitting on the table in front of me throughout the cast-on; and then realised I was one bead short... "One bead short of a cast-on"; it doesn't quite compete with John Irving's "One oar out of the water and one wheel in the sand"; but almost). Anyway; I was hoping this was going to be the most difficult bit, and so far, it's proved to be so; I have to look at the pattern at the beginning of each row to start, but it's easy to memorise, and I'm two-thirds of the way through the first repeat and loving it so far...

I'm using a denim-coloured "heavy laceweight" cashmere from Colourmart, bought on eBay - the yarn is oiled so knitting it is like working with sewing thread, but it ought to bloom afterwards. The beads are from Beads Direct and are called 'raku' - they have some of the blue from the yarn as well as the brown... They're not the colours I usually knit with, but I think I'll actually wear this one more often...