Snappy Happy Monday

Another weekly round up of my week, as seen through my Instagram feed:

All of the fruit in my garden is really starting to grow now

I spotted this oak tree growing in the middle of the lawn -
I suspect the squirrel buried an acorn there last year and forgot

On Wednesday the Olympic Torch came to town
and the route went right past my house!

Rodriguez the fox

I finally unpacked my jewellery this weekend. Tutorial on the
jewellery racks is here

Year of Projects update 15th July

My focus this week has mostly been on the Cwtch Shawl. It's been an absolute pleasure to work on, as the plain stocking stitch means I don't need to concentrate too much!

It's a bit scrunched up on the needle, so I can't really show you just how big it's getting! I am only five rows away from the border, having already increased the size of this section to accommodate two more heart repeats in the border chart.

It's hard to show, but I think you can just about see here the really subtle colour variation in the yarn. It sort of fades from one shade of pink to another and back again, but not so strongly that it stripes obviously. It's gorgeous.

The two stitch garter border looks fab as well. I can't wait to get to the heart border and see how that looks. I'd love to say this will be finished by next Sunday, but as we have a LRP event this weekend, I will be in a muddy, waterlogged field from Wednesday until Monday, so will most definitely not be taking this shawl with me!

Wednesday progress

The urge to cast on all of the things from the list has struck again. Last year, I had a similar experience. There's something about setting targets that makes me want to achieve them all at once! I know I've got a year to finish everything on the list, but I want to start it all now.

What I have done this weekend is start picking up the stitches on Eleonora. After my enormous headache trying to figure out how to spread the stitches evenly across the entire piece, I finally relented and created an excel spreadsheet to help me figure it out!

I've been using a crochet hook to pick up the stitches, as it's much easier than trying to do it with only the needle. I'm about halfway around now, so hopefully over the next few days I will complete this onerous task and get back to knitting. I'm finding the whole picking up stitches process quite tedious, I have to say. But it's better than seaming, so I am going to just have to put up with it.

I've finished the knitting on my second Capucine hat and have been making tassels. I need to block the hats before I attach them though, as even though I did the maths and increased the size of the second hat, it's still a bit snug so needs to be stretched out a bit. As the yarn is acrylic, it should be a fairly quick job to pin out and steam them.

I needed something less complicated to knit while I was watching the Wimbledon finals on Sunday, so I decided to cast on another project from the list: the Cwtch shawl in a gorgeous skein of Natural Dye Studio silk/camel blend fingering weight yarn. The yarn and pattern were part of my most recent swap parcel and so far I am loving it! The yarn is so soft and has a beautiful sheen from the silk content. I'm motoring through the plain stocking stitch section at the moment, and can't wait to get to the heart motif border.

Snappy Happy Monday

Danielle over at A Stash Addict recently started up a Monday blog meme to share Instagram shots from the previous week. I thought today I would join in the fun, and show you some of the things I've been up to lately.

Mum and Dad came to visit, and we celebrated our engagement
with a couple of bottles of champagne

I found myself in casualty on Sunday morning last weekend
(nothing serious, I promise)

The weather has been so terrible lately I've not had a chance to mow
the lawn, which is turning into a bit of a jungle!

Our friends threw us a surprise engagement dinner party on Saturday

Hazel challenged me to photograph red, which meant I got to
play with me new picture framing app on my phone

I am quite sad because I decorated a cupcake in work on Thursday last week, and it was beautiful, but I forgot to take a picture of it before I ate it! I have a new phone now, with a much better camera, so hopefully will be more inclined to get it out and snap random things like that when they happen.

Year of Projects update - 8th July

I know, I know, I said I'd finish my existing YoP WIPs from last year before I started on this year's list. Well, I couldn't resist the lure of casting on something new, so when I failed to do the maths to pick up the stitches on Eleonora, I turned to my list to find something simple and quick to do while I waited to figure out the stitch count and for my new circular needle to arrive.

I dug out these two yarns from my stash, and found my 5mm needles to cast on for Capucine.

I found the endless rows of garter stitch rather soothing, and quite enjoyed the transition from knitting flat to knitting in the round, where the fabric shifts from garter to stocking stitch. Very quickly I found myself casting off and thinking "job well done".

I'm so pleased with the way the stripes turned out!

I quickly realised I had an issue. Let this be a lesson to you all in checking gauge before starting a project! As I hadn't checked mine, I didn't realise I was hitting 4 stitches per inch instead of 3. So my hat is tiny! Well, not tiny, but definitely not adult size! I estimate it's a 16" circumference hat, whereas I need 23". So once I've weaved in the ends and added the tassles, I will be gifting it to the nearest child.

Of course, I was sad about not having a hat for myself, so I sat down with the pattern and calculated how many stitches I'd need at my gauge to get a hat that would fit. Half an hour later and I had a pattern that I thought would work, and cast on immediately!

I am a little sad that I have now run out of the brown yarn, so my hat will just have a brown edge and the rest will be green. The tassles on the small hat will have to be plain green too. If I hadn't cut my yarn each colour change, and carried it up the work instead, I might have frogged the original hat to reuse the brown. As it is though, I shall be content with a bright green hat.

Life is a blur

I've been ridiculously busy these last couple of weeks. Work has been manic, so I've been doing some stupidly long days in the office, and we haven't had a weekend to ourselves since the start of June!

It's not all bad though, as we've been doing quite a bit of planning for the wedding, and got to spend some time wandering in a tropical rainforest on Saturday.

I am not sure what this is, but it was very pretty

My parents came down for the weekend, so we took them to the Living Rainforest as we weren't sure the weather was going to behave to do anything outdoors. It's mostly plants, but they have a few primates, reptiles and insects, with quite a few free roaming tropical birds.

This is a bat flower. We were lucky to visit when it was in season!

We weren't lucky enough to see Cinnamon, the two toed sloth that lives in the canopy, but I did make friends with the Goeldi's monkeys they have.

This little guy came right up to the glass and kept mimicking my head movements.

There were lots of plants currently in bloom.

One great thing about the Living Rainforest is that once you've bought a ticket, you can keep going back for a whole year without paying any more. So if at any point we fancy going back, we can do it for free!

Almost there...

I knit as much as I was able to this weekend, and am pleased to say that I bound off the second sleeve on Eleonora yesterday afternoon!

Now all that remains is to pick up the stitches around the body and knit the border. I've got 280 stitches to pick up, and I have to do it evenly otherwise it's going to look really weird. After a lot of thinking, I decided the easiest way would be to pin it out and divide the edge up with stitchmarkers.

I screwed up my maths the first time I tried, so it's currently in time out on the table while I figure out the right way to do it! I'm also not sure my circular needle is long enough, so I might have to order a longer one to do this part!