What I made, by Sharon

Or maybe it should be more accurately called the 5 countries cardigan. I bought the laceweight silk last year in America. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but I go very excited when I discovered you can make jumpers out of laceweight, and as soon as I saw this pattern I knew I wanted to knit it. I'm now pretty much obsessed with Hannah Fettig, and bought the latest Knitscene because she has three patterns in it. I cast it on on the Transiberian railway in Russia, knitted across Russia, Mongolia and China. I literally knitted across the borders. I knitted it on the plane on the way home and in the passport queue in Australia when we were delayed by an hour due to computer problems. And now its done, and here it is, in the 4th country, on St Kilda beach. Home sweet home.

I'm not always the biggest fan of swatching, especially as swatches sometimes lie, but for Leon's steeked aran jumper I decided to do a proper swatch: I completed a full pattern repeat, steeked it and washed it. This was probably a good idea as now I am not quite as afraid of steeking. Also, if I had continued with this number of stitches the jumper would have been about 20 centimetres too big for him. Not a good look. I spent today at work reworking the pattern to get it to the right number of stitches. Since I got back to work on Monday I have been in three different roles. Here is a sample conversation I never want to have again. Get to work after a month away. Log on to email. Read some. Feel confused. Go to supervisor and say: Sharon: Do I still work here? Supervisor: Umm, lets go talk to the Boss. Oh dear. So then I went back to my old job, but before I could start any work I was told I would be working in team that didn't exist before I left, and I can't work out...

Before I went on holidays I spun 100grams of Bennett and Gregor natural coloured sheeps wool. It came in a three colour braid. When I got back I Navaho plied it.This is what I got: I love Noro and pretty much any self stripping wool. Leon will tolerate stripes, but only if they are in "his" colours. And Leon's colours are black, dark grey, light grey, brown, taupe and beige. So I thought I would spin up some wool for a scarf for him, and try for a Noro style stipped effect. I am also going to spin up three colours of alpaca, and use the two wools together to makes a stripped scarf. I'm still getting the hang of the wheel, and the first half of the plying went fine, and then I had a lot of trouble, I have no idea why. I left the wheel alone overnight and then the second half went fine. I rather wish I could work out what was going on. Still I am happy with the final product, so that is the main thing. On a non knitting related note, we are finally getting proper int...

Hello everybody! Leon and I flew back from China this afternoon, and I want to say "hi'. We didn't just go away for a month. For 28 days we dropped off the digital network. No phones, no internet, no facebook, no Ravelry, no text messages. We could have stayed in contact, but it felt so good to just be in the moment. The trip was fantastic. We crossed a quarter of the globe by train. We rode horses in Mongolia. We got drunk on Russian vodka. We drank and ate and saw amazing things. And I knit throughout. Also, those top bunks were fabulous to spindle from. And the boys we were travelling with thought the idea of "spindling from the top bunk" was hilarous. Althought the trip had many highlights, there were surprisingly few fibre highlights. We saw a yarn shop in St Petersburg. The yarn was very ... bright. I thought Mongolia would be fibre central. there was plenty of fibre on the hoof: And I even saw this sign: but there was no actual fibre to be had. In Beijing ...