What I made, by Sharon

At 7.30 last Saturday morning, as I was r ipping back my Rams and Yowes a thought came to me, and it said "spin, you must spin". I haven't sat down at my wheel in over a year, but I was possessed with the desire, the need even, to spin some yarn. So I went through my unspun wool, and found these: some yellow polworth I dyed in 2012 and some beautiful red and yellow Mosely Park which I dyed at the same time. I'm going to spin them both up into a heavy laceweight and then knit a two coloured shawl, maybe a stripe study or a different lines. Or, as I originally intended when dying the yarn, maybe a two coloured Romi Hill shawl . Either way I'll have plenty of time to decide, but right now I am really enjoying the process of spinning, basically for its own sake.

As mentioned last post I'm knitting the border of my Rams and Yowes Blanket. Since the border has more stitches than the body of the blanket, I imagine we will be here for a while! I had a weird week in reading. I started House of Sleep , because Kate wanted to know if I agreed with her about the ended. Well, we will never know because I found the characters unbearable and gave up quite quickly. Then I read the next  Phryne Fisher novel  Murder at the Green Mill, because they are always reliable and enjoyable. Also rather brief. So after finishing that, I started None of the Above , which somebody recommended. It's young adult fiction and it's fine although it does read rather like a case study or a very earnest "how to manage a difficult situation" rather than a novel. And I'm listening to The Witch in the Wood   the next book in the Once and Future King Series. I did take a break from the series to listen to Viktor Frankel's Man's Search fo...

I knit the colour work tube of Rams and Yowes , and I enjoyed every stitch. I reenforced and cut the steek: Then I gently steam blocking it to help it relax. I spent a little while admiring the beautiful effect, and Kate Davies clever design: And, then, as instructed I picked up squillions of stitches. Although not quite at many as the pattern says, but as many as seemed necessary: But I am NOT knitting 76 rounds of garter stitch in the round. NO. That means purling thirty thousand stitches. Luckily Fleegle has a tutorial for how to do no-purl garter in the round, because I cannot say no enough to the instructions as written.

This week I travelled for work quite a bit, which means I'm more than caught up from  my Rams and Yowes mishap. I've just got the final set of black sheep and the edge bit to go, on the colourwork, and I should get that section of the blanket finished on tomorrow's work related train trip. While I've been cruising around the countryside knitting, I've been listening to The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White. I sort of felt like I should, after reading T.H. White's The Goshawk and Helen McDonald's H is for Hawk , which talks about this book a lot. It's an odd book, not unpleasant, but a series of loosely related parables. I'm reading The Decendents , which is decent read. I don't really have a lot to say about it. I guess some books are for passing the time with. Pleasant and interesting enough, but not epic or super trashy or angry making or anything much. I'd sum this book up as: If you see a copy of this at the library or a frien...

It took me ages to get the photos for my latest Colour Affection, which is strange, since I wear it all the time. I did sort of have in my head that I would like to recreate the photo from my first one, which was taken in my local park, but we just seem to be out all the time and it all got so hard, so this weekend Kate took some photos for me/ This one shows how I was actually wearing it, but I cannot explain why I was doing tricep dips:   Did I mention I wanted this Colour Affection big? I added repeats to each stage, and it has come out like a huge shawl / blanket. I'm really pleased with how the colours look together. All in all, this was a satisfying knit, and I am wearing it all the time.

I've been happily knitting along on my Rams and Ewes Blankie. "The pattern is so intuitive"  I said "I can knit this anywhere, the airport, the train, the pub" I said. "The hardest part is choosing the right colours correctly" I said. And on Friday night, after finishing the first of the second half rams, I smoothed out the blanket to admire it, and realised that the pattern is not as it is meant to be mirrored. I'd picked the wrong shade of black for the second half of the pattern, and knit with it for two days. And then this morning, when I went to rip it out I realised that the middle rows were also done in the wrong colour, so they came out too. And this is how it looks now: Ah well, I guess it's just a way of prolonging the joy of knitting with this yarn, right? Right???

So it's not enough to just knit the ducks , I also needed to drop them off, by themselves in public places. We took them with us on our recent holiday , and I managed to drop two of them off, one in a park at Paradise Point: and one at the feet of a statue on the Surfers Paradise foreshore. The idea is that people pick them up and register them on the map . None of mine have been registered yet but that doesn't mean they won't be. Also, only one in three or four make it to the map, and I've only left two. I have these three darling duckies left to set free. It's so difficult though, releasing them into the world to find their own future.