Nephew!

Updated: now with photo content!

My SIL and brother's baby, born yesterday at lunchtime (with sharp nails, see photo!), is a boy called Alexander Paul, henceforth to be known as Baby A on this blog - after this report saying that most teenagers are providing way too much information, I have no idea how much everyone will know about this year's generation of babies! Everyone OK, and all fingers and toes counted and so on... yay, and phew!

6lbs though, which is good and healthy, although marginally smaller than the mammoth babies (myself included) of past generations... Which gives me an excuse to knit him something else, as if one were needed. (Yes, indeed, it's another Heartbreakingly Cute Baby Kimono from those Mason-Dixon people; this time with buttons because despite having an enormous quantity of haberdashery round here, it doesn't seem to include ribbon of the correct shade...)


(He's also getting the EZ baby jacket with the rainbow collar shown last week, once I sew the buttons on whichever front boys' buttons go on, and also this hat with tentacles, pattern available gratis thanks to Woolly Wormhead who's knitting, and giving away patterns for, fabulous hats in anticipation of her own baby next year)




Not as cute as the baby, but here's the Bug, helping with the button choice. Well, not really. As far as she's concerned,

Sorry. It was only a matter of time before the lolbug made her appearance...

Otherwise it's Monkeys all the way:

Thursday: progress slightly hampered by my first really huffy seat-companion so far. Not only did he feel he needed to take possession of both seats by that sitting-with-his-legs-wide-apart thing, but he was also going to make seriously exasperated pshaw noises all the way home as soon as I pulled out my knitting. As I'd a) already had to fight my way on and off various platforms due to collapse of Victoria Line and b) discovered that if I plug my dead iPod into my government-issue PC to charge it, it does everything bar calling the police and c) lost a beautiful rosewood dpn in the lunch area (I went back on Friday morning but I suspect someone mistook it for a coffee-stirrer or something and had binned it - the cleaning is very good! and thankfully I very rarely use the 5th needle in a set - it was just very sad, as I'd decided this was my most favourite set of dpns, ever...); I just had to be content with the last (half)seat on the train, and try and tune him out by knitting and humming (irritatingly, I hoped) to myself...


Friday: progress assisted by knitting a bit at lunchtime, and deciding to get a marginally later train in favour of picking up some food for the weekend (meaning 20 minutes or so sitting down at King's Cross in addition to the train).

First step (so to speak) on Monday morning is turning the heel...

Monkeys, and the benefits of evil twin-ness...

Thanks to everyone who commented on the last post - I'm still feeling slightly smug about the shawl...


But on with the next thing, and the amount of time I have to knit on the train is making itself felt in the speed I can knit smaller items. I made a hat on Sunday night and the Monday morning train (can't show you yet); and then started a pair of Monkey socks halfway down to London on Monday. Progress each evening:


Monday:




Tuesday:




Wednesday (about 6 rows to go - will explore grafting on a train this morning, but have some waste yarn with me in case that's an insane idea!):



I'm loving this yarn - and may have best part of a pair of Christmas socks for my aunt by the end of the week, if I continue to get a seat in the evening...

Evil twin-ness - I've been meaning to post this for a couple of weeks. Jan and I have a standing joke about this - it seems that we both discover things at about the same pace, and have the habit of turning up when we meet with a pair of socks at the same stage of completion in the same yarn, or ordering the same needles from the same shop in the same week... When I had my week off at the end of October, I went down to Brighton, and Jan gave me a very beautiful pair of ear-rings as a good-luck-in-the-new-job present. The day before, I'd ordered a pendant/brooch from luckygirltrading. When it arrived....

Scary, eh?

200 not out...

Just realised this is my 200th post. Which is very weird - I didn't think I'd have all that much to talk about when I started this blogging thing...

But I have some actual Finished Objects! You wait for months, and then four - or five, or seven, depending on how you count them - come at once.... If I were sensible, I'd eke these out into several posts, but I'm updating my Ravelry notebook, so may as well upload the photos in both places!


First - TA DAAA!! The Unbloggable Project - aka the "Shetland Tea Shawl" from A Gathering of Lace...

... which turned out very nicely in the end, despite my paranoia at various stages of the process, and was much appreciated by my brother and sister-in-law whose first baby is due next weekend...

I suppose technically it's only 99.995% complete - sitting on the train the day after posting it off, I realised I had no memory of sewing in the last half dozen stray ends, and when I checked with my brother, I hadn't... I'll have to do that when I go up at Christmas, but they're pretty secure...

This shows the additional rows I ended up working in Beech Leaf lace from the first Barbara Walker treasury, once I ran out of chart and it still seemed too small. The beech leaves worked out very well with the leaves on the edging... Here are some close-ups including the obligatory Blocking Shots...

The yarn is laceweight (90% Blue-Faced Leicester, 10% nylon for strength) from bluefaced.com and is more like a cobweb weight; and it took about 90 grammes of the yarn. I actually think it's finer than the Jamiesons of Shetland cobweb I saw at Ally Pally... Anyway. I think I'll probably leave it till after Christmas to start another ambitious piece of lace!!

Next up is the Gryffindor Bag - very nice free pattern from Rosemary Waits. This is for Fiona's 9th birthday, which is today - I'm hoping they're going to swing through the village sometime today and pick it up... As ever, it took me forever to do the finishing on this - I finally lined it and got the handle and fringing on yesterday (because you don't want to do this sort of thing without a sense of impending panic, that would never do...). This picture is fuzzy but atmospheric - the other ones taken with flash make it look very flat and stark, which it isn't... The cushion in the background is a charted needlepoint one from this book by Candace Bahouth - there are some lovely things in the book but I've lost the urge to needlepoint...

Third are the Serpentine Mitts, finally finished... All four of them! And all four from one skein of Jitterbug. I think there's something slightly weird about Jitterbug - the yardage given on the ballband really doesn't seem that much, but it seems to go on for ever...

And finally, finished last night after 2 days' bus knitting and a KTog (huge group of us again at the Grads Café!) , a February baby jacket from EZ's Knitters Almanac. These are so much fun to do - that's the second one and I may well cast on for a third...

Not sure who this one's for, yet... The buttons were a great find at our very large and slightly scary new John Lewis (who decided that making people walk across a translucent glass bridge with views down two floors to get to Haberdashery was a good idea? It certainly deters me from going in there, anyway, which is probably a Good Thing!!) and I've made buttonholes on both sides so once the recipient's decided, I'll be able to stitch them on in gender-appropriate positions. If I can remember which way round these things go, anyway! I always have to go off and look at pictures of men's and women's shirts on the web to remind myself...

So I'm feeling pretty productive and trying to ignore the vast quantity of items on my 'to knit for Christmas' list... Think I'll adopt Tahoe as my train knitting this week - it's coming on, but not as quickly as winter... I need to finish this front and stitch it together (minus one sleeve) to see if it's going to fit. I'm not convinced it isn't a little snug... I reckon a couple of days' train knitting will get me to the end of the second front and on into the final sleeve...

Week 1

Well, I did the first week, I survived and I enjoyed it. Even the commute, mostly. The fifteen minutes on the Victoria Line in the morning, not so much, but I got a seat on the train every day, and the people I sat next to were either nice and smiley, or just asleep... Here's a picture of a thing I found at the end of the road by work on the way to the Tube...*



Saw Yvonne and Sue at Libertys on Thursday night - Yvonne knitting the most gorgeous scarf of many colours, Sue ploughing round an endless frill... I took the Unbloggable Project which is, thanks to the increased train-knitting time, Off the Needles.

Otherwise the knitting's not been quite as successful! Took the second Serpentine Mitt off the needle, to discover




Not so much a ta-da!! moment as a ta-doh!! moment... Actually, this photo also makes one look much longer than the other, which isn't the case - but I have, indeed, knitted two left mitts by the simple expedient of following the instructions re: the gusset but also working the pattern over the opposite two needles, which has the result of creating two identical mitts (apart from the centre cable which I thoughfully twisted in the opposite direction for the second mitt)... Thankfully a) the yarn will make 4 mitts b) I already had a taker for a second pair... So all was not lost...


Still plugging away on the Tahoe cardigan - halfway up the second front, at which point I'll do all the finishing and give it a try-on with one sleeve...


I also forgot to blog my personal trifecta in charity-shop books, found in the British Heart Foundation in King's Lynn last Saturday - total cost £6.

From the left, a book of stories I nearly bought at full price the week before, as I'm currently enjoying Mr Gaiman's Fragile Things collection (I'm not normally a fan of short stories but these are great; more a series of little atmospheres...); a knitting book with actual content as well as the 1980s interpretations of the sweaters); and a cookbook which is both retro and practical. It's relatively unfaffy Delia (she does, for instance, assume her readers know how to make pastry), and very 70s in its nutritional values (I can't imagine today's Delia suggesting a recipe comprising six eggs and 12oz cheese to feed three people); it is, however, a great combination of the basic, the quick and the traditional, and I suspect it'll be used and re-used in the same way as my extremely battered copy of Fay Maschler's Eating In, also a collection of Evening Standard cookery columns but from the 1980s.

*Generally things found on the way home from work in the old job were interesting leaves, or completely bizarre pieces of litter...

Bodging

The last couple of days, I've been fixing little minor niggling things around the house that would irritate me even more when I've even less time... And other things which have gone awry during the week. And am thankful that my not-particularly-frilly girlhood included instruction in the right use of screwdrivers, Superglue and which sort of fuse a lamp-plug needs*. Thanks, Dad.

The pretty thing on the right? a pen. Certainly mightier than the sword; as long as you aren't sitting in the dark with your muse, waiting for some chap to sort out the light-bulbs for you...

*and, since I posted this, the art of cassette-tape splicing has also come in handy...

Holiday at Home: part 2

I can't believe how quickly this week has gone. Although I have done things. Which I'll catalogue tomorrow, I think.

On Tuesday night, I knitted at the Lamb with E-J (whose blog needs to be seen, and particularly today, for the pastel which makes even our route to our former office look romantic and burgeoning with possibilities) and Rosie (whose blog always needs to be seen...). We had a very strange start to the evening, with an incredibly inebriated, extraordinarily scatological, racist, South African (not a guess, she told us about 32 times) woman who decided that standing at the counter and screaming at an assortment of staff about their nationality for 10 minutes was the best way to go. The staff all behaved with extraordinary grace in the circumstances... The new menu was slightly hilarious in the description (the word "napped" has reached Ely in the sense of 'covered in sauce', rather than in the sense of 'fell asleep for a bit in the middle of the day', which I suspect has happened for centuries) but really extremely good in the execution...


On Wednesday I went to Brighton to visit Jan. And although I took my camera, the only shots I took were some very grey ones of the Thames as we went over Blackfriars Bridge.



.. and adding to my geographical bemusement this week, went back over the river near Borough Market... Oh, I don't know, doubtless I'll pick it up... I chose the only dull, grey day this week to go to the seaside, but it's always good to get together, and we went to see the Indigo exhibition at Brighton Museum which was excellent. I love textiles exhibitions with historical/anthropological background, and this was good; and it was well-labelled, which is my usual complaint... And although it's boring shopping, I did find a Good Coat for work, and it was extremely nice to have a second opinion in the choosing! After that, we went to one of Jan's local knitting groups, at Borders in Brighton, and I met Up Knit Creek and several other really friendly knitters... (as if "friendly knitters" wasn't tautological...)

There has been some knitting. I'll show you the shot which shows some actual created Thing...
Tahoe - one sleeve, one back, nearly one front. Quite a quick knit - or it will be up to the neckband which will take a little while. Doing it in a week wouldn't have been unrealistic if I hadn't been trying to finish the Unbloggable Thing too. As it is, I think I'll have one sleeve and the neckband left to do...



The rest of the knitting has been on the Unbloggable Thing - which is now halfway round the edging after 16 hours' knitting - only another 2 working days to go on that!

And I picked up the Hemlock Ring blanket to watch the second Pirates of the Caribbean film with a friend, and realised that I'd managed to do something really, really weird about three repeats back on one (but only one) of the 8 segments... So that's actually made negative progress this week!

Holiday at home: Norwich

I've been here this week, generally getting things sorted out for work and so on...


Funny sort of day on Monday. I decided to try Marks and Spencer for work-clothes. Checked their website, verified which stores had a Plus department, decided on Norwich (I'd been to Peterborough earlier in the summer)... Got there after an hour and a half on the train and half an hour's walk up the hill - no Plus department. None anywhere, apparently, now! I'm not going to have a rant here - I've channelled my energies into a stinking complaint letter with attached rail ticket for refund, which should have got to them today. We'll see whether it brings any results. But evidently the M&S website is pretty out of date, so don't trust it for any other details either!

Given that I'd drawn a blank there, I made the best of the rest of the day which was sunny and warm. Country and Eastern, one of my favourite Norwich shops, had moved; but they'd left directions to their new store on the shopfront of the old one and it was spectacular, a renovated Victorian skating rink.

This photo was sneaked from the top balcony, where the small textile items are, looking down at the furnishings, architectural features etc. below... There's a picture of how it all looked as a skating rink here. I only bought one small item and it's a present...

I also had a thoroughly lovely holiday French lunch at a basement place in the market-place I've been to before. I think it's called the Wine Cellar now - I'm pretty sure it was called 'La Vigne' or something last time. Anyway. They do something called a 'meze' which was actually a plateful of warm duck confit and merguez, caperberries, tapenade, grilled baguette and salad... there are fish and veggie versions available too. And a very nice glass of Picpoul de Pinet. Perfect. I could almost hear the cicadas.

With my usual unerring sense of direction, once I had really, really tired feet I headed out of town back over the river... forgetting entirely that Norwich is in a loop of the river. I should know this - I did, after all, go to school in Durham, which is a more extreme version of the same phenomenon. So I saw a bridge, crossed it - and, it turns out, headed dead north for the station, which is actually at the south-east of the town... After a while, I found the bypass - and had a not-so-happy 45 minutes following it round the town to the station... By the time I was getting back to the river, though, the sun was setting, and it did all look very pretty...