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...

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!