CatsEye has made a team GB Olympic Knitting button in two sizes! I am really spoiled for choice now.

I finally sat down with the calculator this afternoon and did a swatch for the patchwork jumper:

I’m very pleased with it, I think the needle size is right and I like the colours together, and I think it is about the right size. I am planning to wash it before I get too carried away since I want to make sure it wont shrink in the wash. I am feeling very virtuous now, since I think that is pretty much all my training done and I still have time to spare before the start date! I still haven’t totally worked out how I am going to increase for the sleeves yet though, or worked out the joining of the sleeves to the body, I am hoping that these little details will either come to me in a dream or will make themselves obvious once the knitting has started – one can hope!

The finishing up of other bits and pieces is going quite well too. The car went in for its service on Friday so I had about 3 hours sitting around in the garage knitting. I will take some photos soon.

Katie put a link in her blog to some team buttons for the Knitting Olympics and they are just fantastic, designed by JenLa. The only difficulty is there are two different GB buttons, and they are both great.

So now the really difficult decision: which one to put on my sidebar?

I haven’t started my Olympic swatching yet. I thought it might be sensible to finish off a few bits and pieces first. I tend to get a bit overwhelmed when I have too many different projects on the needles at once, as I forget what I was doing with each of them. So I think the next couple of weeks will be spent in the tidy up before the serious swatching begins!

Stephanie has had the marvellous idea to host a Knitting Olympics, the idea being that you pick a project which will be a challenge to you, then cast on during the opening ceremony on February 10th and if you finish before the closing ceremony on February 26th then you get a shiny button for your blog.

I think I am just about crackers enough to try this, and it is the closest I shall ever come to being an Olympic anything, so I will be giving it a try.

My Olympic Project

I will be knitting a patchwork jumper (sweater for those on the other side of the pond) a la Horst Schulz, which I will be designing as I go along. It is the first time I have knitted a garment of that size and complexity using this technique. I have knitted a camisole before, but that didn’t require much shaping, and other than that I have only done samples.

The yarn I’m going to use has been sitting in my stash for a while. The background is cotton in different shades of blue, and the foreground is acrylic turquoise fluff 🙂

I am off to sign up now, and contemplate just how mad this is … I think a few swatches will definitely be in order before the start date.

I seem to get round to jumping on band wagons at about the same time everyone else is climbing off, as is probably the way with the curly whirly scarf. Everyone seemed to be making them a couple of months ago, so I have just got round to making mine 🙂 and here it is, all apologies for my lack of any artistic photography, so I bring you:
Over the back of the chair:

Curled up on the seat of the settee:
and finally as modelled by Percy the Penguin (although black penguin on dark brown settee seems to cause difficulties for my camera):
This is the pattern from Get Knitted, free when you buy a skein of Lorna’s Laces Lion and Lamb, or Shepherd Worsted. I used the Lion and Lamb, and the colour is Irving Park. The yarn is lovely and beautifully soft, unfortunately none of my pictures show the colour up particularly well. For once it is not actually raining today so I might try and get a shot in day light. This pattern is of the variety where you cast on an unfeasibly large number of stitches and then do a couple of k2tog rows among your garter stitch to get the curly shape. I had a little go at the type where you cast on a smaller number and then do strategic increasing, but I knit so tightly that it was actually painful to do all that increasing. I think the decreasing strategy works better for me, and I don’t end up with painful shoulders and neck! Knitting is supposed to be relaxing after all!

Anyway, got to dash now, my parents are staying for the week and we are meeting my sister for lunch in a minute. Tomorrow me and Mummy are going to the knitting show at Sandown Park, so I will hopefully blog about that later!

In the spirit of the New Year and all that I thought I would tidy up my side bar, so here is a list of the things I knitted in 2005 with links to the appropriate blog entries.

Here finally are some pictures of the fingerless gloves:

Knitted from Lucy Neatby Celestial Merino in the colourway Blue Vesuvius, bought from Get Knitted at Ally Pally a couple of months ago. I used 2.5mm needles and made up the pattern as I went along, although I did write it down so I could make the right glove to match the left! The yarn is really nice to work with and a beautiful colour, I am hoping that it will wear well too.

They have already been test driven yesterday on a walk up Box Hill with the family and they were nice and warm.

We had a lovely Christmas with the in-laws, lots of board game playing and a bit of knitting. Then spent yesterday at my sister’s with my parents too. I will get round to taking a picture of the curly whirly scarf soon.

Happy Christmas all!

I’m afraid still no photo of the fingerless gloves and we are at the in-laws now without the camera so it will have to wait til we get home again. It always seems to take longer to wrap presents and then pack everything in the car than you think it will.

I have jumped on the band wagon, rather late, and knitted a curly whirly scarf in the last couple of days, photos will follow soon, it was good fun, although the cast-on 700 stitches part took me about 3 hours!

I’m managing to get in a bit of knitting in between all the eating and the board game playing. I even won at canasta this morning which is unheard of.

Happy Christmas and hope you have lots of lovely knitting time 🙂

Well not quite, but a bit of fame at any rate.

The picture of me in my knitted wedding dress is up at the Ample Knitters site. I can’t remember if I have extolled the virtues of the Ample Knitters list before on the blog, anyway, it is a great list particularly for people on the larger side, or anyone who deviates from the expected proportions which patterns are written for. There is always lots of advice on how to cope with one part taking a different size to another part, and how to alter a pattern which you love but isn’t quite right.

I am hoping to get pictures of the finished fingerless gloves done tonight. Unfortunately I haven’t worked out yet how to photograph both my own hands simultaneously so I will wait for Paul to get home from work.

I braved the loft, (and the rubbish in the spare room which is in the way of me getting to the step ladder to get into the loft) and got the Christmas decorations down last night, so I am feeling properly christmassy now 🙂 I do like fairy lights. Ours are multicoloured but not flashing. We don’t have a tree this year as there really isn’t space for it, but I have put the lights round the mirror in the lounge, and also put some tinsel up. Of course the knitted beaded baubles have also come out and are hanging from the shelves. I must remember to take a picture of them.

In the mean time, here is the left hand of the fingerless gloves:

The yarn is Lucy Neatby Celestial Merino in the colour Blue Vesuvius, bought from Get Knitted at Ally Pally. The colour is absolutely beautiful, very bright and I love it! I had first thought that I was going to knit a pair of socks with this, but then read on someone’s blog (I’m afraid I can’t remember who it was) that the yardage was quite short and that they had had trouble getting a full pair of socks out of one skein (100g). So it languished in a bag while I thought about it, and worried about the idea of knitting a pair of socks and running out of yarn just before the second toe. Then I had the idea that I would like to knit some fingerless gloves and suddenly this yarn seemed ideal, after all gloves are smaller than socks. In fact I am nearing the end of the right hand and there is plenty of yarn left so I don’t know what I was worrying about!

Here is the same yarn demonstrating my early Christmas present to myself, a swift from Fibre Crafts:

Its so much fun, I think I might be spending quite a lot of time winding balls of yarn now 🙂
The only problem is that the only suitable table we have to attach it to is the dining table and from there I can’t see the telly or hear the radio unless I have it turned up very very loud. I shall work on this one.

Anyway, I think I shall get back to the right glove, with the help of a hilarious Jeeves and Wooster audio book from the library.

Long time, very little knitting. I have now finally wrapped all the presents I can so far (3 are still winging their way from Amazon as I write) and have written most of the Christmas cards. I still haven’t got the Christmas decorations out of the loft but you can’t have everything! I think the trip to the loft is a nice little job for this afternoon.

Some knitting has been done around here and I finally bring you the two pairs of socks I knitted as Christmas presents.

They are both knitted from 4ply Alpaca from Texere, although oddly the plum tweed colour I used for Mummy’s socks is thinner yarn than the cornflower blue I used for Annie’s – it isn’t thinner by much though.
So first, socks for Mummy:

And these are socks for Annie:

They look a little odd not on feet but I’m afraid I don’t have any sock blockers to photograph them on and they are smaller than my feet.

The alpaca is lovely to knit with and I hope they will be nice warm socks. I have bought some of the same yarn for myself in a bright purple which I will try out soon. I was slightly concerned about the inelastic-ness of alpaca but hopefully with a ribbed leg they shouldn’t fall down too much. They are all wrapped up now and in the box of stuff to go to Annie’s house.

I am hoping things will calm down here a bit now and I can get on with a bit of knitting! I have played in 4 Christmas concerts in the last two weeks with Barnes Concert Band, two of them were outdoors and I had a brainwave that I could knit myself fingerless gloves that would allow me to play without freezing my hands off. Unfortunately as is often the way with these things my brainwave came a little late in the day and I had managed little more than a wrist warmed by the first concert. For the concert last Wednesday though I had knitted one glove so at least my left hand was warm. So if anyone was at the concert on Wednesday at the London Wetland Centre I was the trombonist wearing one lurid turquoise knitted glove. I’ll post pictures soon. You never know I may even knit the other one soon even though the deadline has now passed.