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.

I’ve finished my Christmas knitting! It was just two pairs of socks. They are both waiting for a wash and pat into shape so in the mean time as not much knitting has been done here recently I finally got round to taking some pictures of some socks I finished a while ago.

The yarn is Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in colour Purple Club, bought from Get Knitted . The pattern is Go With The Flow Socks from the Summer 2005 Interweave Knits magazine. I did alter the pattern a bit though, I didn’t like the cuff so just worked a k4, p3 rib over 77 stitches for 20 rounds and then worked one round of k4, p2tog, p1 to give me 66 stitches for the leg (the original pattern had 60 stitches round for the leg so I just added in an extra pattern repeat).

Here they are from a different angle:

and a close up of the stitch pattern.
I am very pleased with them. The LL sock yarn is lovely to knit with and very soft to wear. I have only worn them a couple of times so far but they seem to be wearing well as well.

Yesterday was knitting group Christmas meeting which was good fun. After seeing all the curly whirly scarves I am almost tempted to actually get a move on and start one myself 🙂

In the end I took both the mobius scarf and Mummy’s Christmas socks with me to Paris, and am glad I did. I managed to finish the socks so they are just waiting for a wash and then I can wrap them up! Goodness I am organised!?

So now onto the other knitted Christmas present. If you are reading this Annie please look away now.

I bought the yarn for Annie’s socks and Mummy’s socks at the same time, and it is supposed to be the same, 4ply alpaca from Texere, although the blue for Annie’s socks came on cones rather than in balls. However as I started knitting with the blue it felt a bit thicker than the plum colour I used for Mummy’s socks. This seemed fine though, the knitting is just more dense, but I am knitting Annie’s on fewer stitches anyway so they shouldn’t come out too big. All was going swimmingly until when I was about half way down the foot part (these are knitted top down) I glanced down at the cone and felt the first twinge of an approaching panic. I could see the cardboard of the cone through the yarn, there really wasn’t much yarn left on the cone.

It is always odd the compulsion to knit faster when you think you are going to run out of yarn. So yesterday was spent in a frantic rush to the finish. Which would I reach first? The end of the sock, or the end of the yarn? Luckily the sock won, so here is the first sock:

and the yarn left on the cone:
That was cutting it very fine.
I have started on the second sock, and am knitting away hoping that there will be at least as much yardage (it is odd we don’t seem to use the word metrage) on the second cone.

I am feeling very virtuous that I am 3/4 of the way through my Christmas knitting already (it always helps to set nice low targets, then you can enjoy the feeling of reaching them 🙂 ).

Just a quick post as I am off to Paris in the morning for a conference. Since I finished writing my talk I have been worrying about the second most important thing: what knitting to take with me. It had to be something small and easy but which could occupy me for several hours on the Eurostar and possibly in breaks too. So I have cast on for a mobius scarf (does anyone know how to do umlauts?). Here it is after knitting the first row.

Should be a good bit of fairly mindless knitting, and is vaguely appropriate since the conference is history and philosophy of maths, and I am talking about geometry. The yarn is baby silk, 80% baby alpaca, 20% silk bought from Elann. It feels absolutely gorgeous. I have cast on 336 (approx, it is a scarf after all) stitches on a 3.5mm, 100cm addi turbo and now the dreadful first row is out of the way it seems to be going quite well. The cast on is in Cat Bordhi’s Treasury of Magical Knitting, and is really clever, although I haven’t yet mastered the art of not doing it too tight. It all seems to work out ok in the end but the first row is a devil to knit.

Mummy’s christmas present socks are coming along, I have just passed the heel of the second sock. I’m not sure whether to take them with me to finish off or not, I might see how the space goes.

Here they are with the second sock on my Brittany birch needles.

Anyway, better dash, time to try and work out what I have forgotten.