Blocking

It's been a weird couple of days for fancy dress. Friday morning it started raining on the way to the station and by the time the train had been delayed for 10 minutes everyone on the platform had taken on that defeated drowned-rat look. At Cambridge, grim-faced end-of-the-week commuters were met in the entrance hall by poor unfortunates who'd decided to dress up in big furry animal suits to collect for a children's charity. I think they realised they were on a hiding to nothing as we all charged snarling through the ticket hall, dripping with rain and lacking any benevolence whatever...

Last night there was a fancy dress party somewhere nearby. On the way over the Green to the village shop, I met a man clad in boxer shorts and an apron, wielding a cardboard meat cleaver; Jin at the shop had spotted two Morticias, a Frankenstein's Monster and a guy dressed as a huge pumpkin who'd had to stand outside and shout his order in through the door... it had all calmed down again by about 3am...

OK: knitting. Thought I'd block the couple of scarves I finished this month, both Christmas presents although I'm not sure who they're for...

Here they are pinned out on the bed (on manky blocking-sheet):

On the left, Branching Out; and on the right a Traveling Vines scarf, made longer than the original pattern suggested. I've gone on about the yarn for Branching Out elsewhere; Trailing Vines is Patons 3-ply Baby Wool, which I dyed turquoise originally, and then overdyed in purple. It makes a good laceweight if you live in a relative yarn desert and own some dye...

Stitch detail of the Traveling Vines:

And a close-up of a Favourite Thing, a Clover forked blocking pin.

I have two dozen of these babies, and if anyone who might read this has any influence with Clover Europe, we need to start a lobby to persuade them to make the pins available this side of the pond along with all their other lovely stuff... they're just so much easier to work with than any other type of pin...

The audience for this process was quite keen and alert to start with, but as the several-hundredth pin went in they lost interest somewhat.

Serves me right for leaving my sweater on the floor last night...

Taking stock...

Not much knitting went on today - the first sleeve of the Mexican Wave sweater got finished and the second one started, and late last night I finished a sock. Most of today was spent cleaning, tidying and generally removing the swathes of assorted dross (and several kilos of assorted yarn) I seem to have assembled in the dining room over the last couple of months since I paid attention to it. The tipping point was the arrival of these:


ex-library filing cabinets. They look as if they ought to be in a display at Bletchley Park containing vital code-cracking information, but in fact they came with an archive (unrelated to defence) we acquired for microfilming at work, and apparently the organisation didn't want them back once they'd been filmed so they were offered to staff. I think the manufacturer's mark on each drawer is particularly fine


and will use them for storing bits of embroidery kit, tools etc. Each drawer is 20cm wide by about 40 cm deep by 15cm high, so there's quite a lot of space there... But this whole plan does centre on being able to get them into the back bedroom... so that's tomorrow's job...

(You can see by the first photo that Tilda likes the cabinets just about as much as she liked the scarf yesterday. She's difficult to please. She likes Whiskas, Greek yoghurt, sleeping on people's feet at night when it's really, really hot and sitting on knitting patterns. Anything else is beneath notice.)

Curlywhirlism

I'm not a crocheter. I'm a left-hander who learnt to knit, use scissors, etc. right-handed, and this has never posed me a problem in everyday life (I don't count school art classes as everyday life; they were some sort of weird training in ritual humiliation) except with two implements: a carving knife and a crochet hook; which hand to use is a perennial puzzle. At least my travails with a carving knife result in something which is still vaguely useable; I can't say that about most of the crochet, although the smaller cat approves of the wobbly superchunky doormat I made earlier this year.


But all this talk of curlywhirly scarves on UKHK, and the acquisition of a couple of balls of gorgeous DK/aran yarn at Ally Pally, and a friend's impending birthday (the birthday is past; the gift-giving is impending), and a present of a stunning set of crochet hooks from friends in Texas, and the I'm-not-going-to-push-you-but one of-these-days-you'll-fall-and-happen-to-grab-a-crochet-hook-on-the-way-down attitude of a friend, and finally Pixeldiva's photos got me started. So, ta-da

a pile of crochet. And because I have no human model to show it on and haven't managed to get a proper photo of myself wearing it, here's Tilda; I may also post this pic to My Cat Hates You...


I hope Suzanne likes it more than Tilda does; because otherwise I'll have to wrest it from her and take it home again. The yarn is Limbo Color (colour 2539) by Schoeller and Stahl from Web of Wool and it took nearly 2 balls. And I'm a right-handed crocheter. I think...

It's generally been a crappy week, so a finished object to round it off is wonderful...