What I made, by Sharon

On Saturday I went to the Handknitters Guild market - we usually just call it Coburg, because it's at Coburg town hall. This market happens every year. According to my records (this blog!) I've been once before. Generally think about going and then decide it's too far and I have enough yarn. Last year I decided not to go because I was going to Bendigo and I didn't need to shop twice in two months...and then Bendigo got cancelled. So this year I decided to go to both. It was so nice walking into a room full of excited knitters and crocheters and seeing all the beautiful fluff. So much fluff. I was paralysed with indecision for a bit, but then bought this pile: I'm excited to have my next spinning project ready to start. Also yarn for knee high socks, and a mohair carry along for a Carbeth I am planning. Then a few of the Richmond Knitters went for lunch at a brewery - if I'm organising, it's always a brewery.  Kris and i hung our for a couple of hours and the...

There are two finishes for this week, and one very close. Starting with a hat for Rachey as a thank you for not giving me Covid. It's true that everyone reading this also hasn't given me Covid, but Rachey sat next to me all evening, and then tested positive the next day. I was fine. Thanks: here's a hat. Then I plied the yarn I'd been spinning. I LOVE how it looks, but it's only 150 meters. Which doesn't surprise me, since it's 3 ply and quite dense. It also feels like spiky rope. It felt pretty spiky before   s pun it. That's what I get for buying fibre marked "crossbreed". I did learn something about dyeing: the fibre was originally laid out folded in thirds - so the colour  pattern repeated three times. I'm going to get some undyed fibre and do the same thing, although probably to dye a rainbow. Then I'm going to super dilute the colours and dye some for the main colour. yes, I'm planning / dyeing / spinning for Waiting For Rain ...

  Every year at this time is "Good Beer Week." (I've posted about it... a lot! 2016  , 2017 , 2018 , 2019 , 2021 ) This year, the organising body decided not to. I don't know why - it fell between lockdowns last year and was a shining light in a blighted year. Many of the pubs had already bought their beer, so lots of good beer events are happening, even if it is not officially "good beer week". We're taking it a little bit easier, only going on Saturday, Monday, Wednesday and Saturday for a beer festival. I wanted an appropriate project, and cast on  Ginny's Cardigan , a simple round yoke, bottom up cardigan I've had in my queue for ever. I've done the sleeve. You can see the sleeve in the foreground of this photo. Also Leon wearing a jumper I knit him, and Kris all in (her own) handknits. And I cast on the body last night. It has a simple lace panel up the back, so should be easy enough for public knitting. The reading is going better this...

I know these look like a tiny pair of calf length socks, but they are long in the sense of it took me two weeks to make them - and they are a size 5, 56 stitch sock!  I don't know what happened. it's a very simple pattern - I was knitting Rachey Coopey's Gardner's socks , but then I crossed the cables the wrong way in the ribbing and decided I wanted them simpler than the originals anyway. Also, Kris (who these are for) feels the cold so i wasn't sure of the wisdom of lace socks for her. She also feels the bumps on the bottom of handknit socks, so I made "princess soles" - I pearled the bottom of the sole. Anyway, they are very sweet socks and I hope she enjoys them.

Seriously, I published this without a title and had to come back and edit it! The  reading has been rather all over the place. After finishing A Tidy Ending  which was a five star read I started the oldest book on my Kindle - The Paris Model . It was unreadably bad. It had a twelve year old who sounded like she was 30, it telegraphed it's punches and there was something about the writing that was just bad.  Then I read The Pavilion in the Clouds  by Alexander McCAll Smith. I read lots of his work when I was younger, and I think I picked this one up on a Kindle sale. it was not very good. The writing was quite stilted and the plot was odd. The first 80 percent of the book is set in (the then) Ceylon, following a 9 year old - Bella-  and her governess and her two talking dolls and some drama between the father, the mother and the governess. Then the book skips ten years and and wraps it all up. The problem is I never cared. it just all seem so stilt...

 Nat (on the right below) moved to Tasmania last year - the last time I saw her IRL was at dinner before the cancelled Bendigo show last year.  She came to Melbourne for the Coburg yarn show - which got moved to two weeks away on short notice, so we decided to go out for lunch anyway. i voted on the way there - I've never voted early, but I had a fear of geeing COVID and not being able to vote. Lunch was delightful. we were meant to be having the fourth Games Night, but Rachey got COVID, so she couldn't host. On Sunday I did some spinning, with the help of Tarragon and then Leona and I went to the movies and saw Everything Everywhere All At Once , which was multiverse madness at it's finest. We only go to the movies a couple of times a year, but it's always good when we do: at home I'm cognisant that the wall that our TV and speaker is mounted on is shared with our neighbour!  So a lovely weekend with friends, and Leon and crafts and cats.

You may have noticed I haven't talked about crotchet here since the fourth of March . I wish it was because I was quietly working away, building my blanket square by square, bu it's really not. I enjoy crochet because each stitch is slightly different and, at least for me tight now in my development, I have to pay at least some attention to what I am doing. so it is a thoroughly "stay at home" business.  But, at some point in the last six weeks I picked out a random braid of rainbow fibre and started spinning. I spin at home, so it occupies the same time a crochet would but a very different headspace. Add to that all the holidays , nightsout and weekends away we've been having and lets just say - I picked up my hook the other evening and had to remind myself which stitch is which. I'm always glad that knitting only has two stitches! Still, I might refocus. I'm probably half way to having enough squares for a blanket, and I ordered a crochet blocker from E...

I'm back from holidays, and having my first 5 day work week in a while. Life is as normal as it gets around here. I'm started a sock for Kris while we were away . I'm up to the toe now. I cannot work out how it's taken me a week to knit one 56 stitch size 5 sock, but it has. Maybe because the reading has been so good. Also, it's a much prettier colour that this, the camera just was not co-operating.  I am reading a NetGalley review copy of  A Tidy Ending  by Joanna Cannon, and it has really surprised me.  When I started it I thought "ugg, Elinor Oliphant meets Girl on a Train" but it is nothing like either of them.  I'm about 80% through and I only started it yesterday. It just somehow sucked me in and I am fascinated by where this is going. If it ends as well as it is going it will be a five start read from me. And that backs it two in a row, because I also rated The Cruel Stars , which I had only just started last week.  And that's what I'm ...

Leon, Kris and I went to Brisbane for the weekend, and all the photos i took were quite bad. We went GABS (a beer festival) and to catch up with Tony and Ingrid, who moved back to Queensland about six months ago. It's the type of trip that really wouldn't have got a mention in the before times. We flew up on Friday, went out for dinner. Went to the beer festival and out for dinner, And flew back on Sunday. I do think Brisbane is more relaxed than Melbourne, both because it's warmer and nicer there, and because they had very little Covid. There was lots of hugging! Anyway, except for the 4.5 hour delay in getting home because the scheduled plan's brakes didn't work, it was a very pleasant weekend, and I'm looking forward to many more random holidays just because we can. 

T his years Richmond Knitters Bendigo Knit-along was Magnolia. It comes in a number of formats -yoked jumper, dress, jumper with lace and bobbles around the hips.   Photo from the designer Not to my taste. Many of the version are in heavier yarn (a 12 ply dress? I'm sweating just thinking about it). The lace is not my favourite. Still, there is also a hat pattern so I decided to knit it from some old Buachalle yarn I had left over from knitting a dress. And here it is: It's fine, and I'm sure I will enjoy wearing it at Bendigo. I don't know why, but I followed the pattern as written - which is top down. I probably would have enjoyed the knitting more if I had trusted my instincts and knit is bottom up. I'm considering making a pair of socks using the chart, just because I can. 

Yep, we're going to Brisbane for the weekend! I'll tell you more about that later, but right now let me catch you up with what I have been reading and knitting this week.  I've been knitting the Magnolia hat . It's top down (why? why?) and I'm up to the bottom ribbing. I wonder if I will have time to watch Stephanie Pearl McPhee's Patreon video on casting off before I get to the actual cast-off? Also, I picked the medium size, but I'm not convinced I shouldn't have done the large. I'll be back on Friday with hat updates. It felt like every-one has been reading poetry, so I requested My Greenhouse by Bella Mayo on audio from NetGalley. It's poems about her first love, and it is so unsophisticated as to be embarrassing for the listener. Each poem is very short, and seems more like a paragraph I would have written to my crush when I was 16. Maybe I'm just old and cynical now. I've just finished reading a romance from Kindle Unlimited The A...

On our r ecent camping trip Leon brought one of his old winter sets . For the first half of walking he was carrying a full length scarf, which is both heavier and bulkier than required - a neat cowl would keep him warm, and take up less space. Additionally the hat did not fully cover his ears. One night he misplaced his mitts, and we started planning a set just for camping. He wanted it representative of the mountains, a bit like the logo of the Hall's Gap Camping Shop. I was thrilled when I found this pattern, Mountain Beanie , as it exactly captured what I was aiming for. I was also pretty happy to have the perfect colours left-over from my Swancho. I was a little less thrilled when i actually started the knitting - the pattern is written to be lined, and I was not lining it, so the long floats had to be caught every few stitches.  I knit the cowl by doing a hat without the top  I free-styled the mitts, doing little triangle mountains. I blocked it on Saturday and...

I recently started charity knitting for a different group - I was knitting for KOGO, ( Knit One Give One ) who donate in Melbourne and need items to be washable. Most of my stash is leftover wool, so when I found a group called AKWAK ( Australians Knitting for War Affected Kids ) I was thrilled. They send a container-load of knits and other goods to refugee camps each  year and they want wool - since the kids are often around naked flames, and I don't think washing is an issue. They are great group, supporting a really worthy cause, and they are positive and communicative on Facebook. They do have a quite a few requests on how to pack and label your knits. Even though they are really clear in their instructions I kept putting it off, feeling oddly intimidated. Yesterday I got my act together and packaged and labeled all my knits, ready to go. The main thing I learnt is, to keep things simple, making the same kind of item (hat, baby jumper, whatever) in the same size would make...