Month: March 2018

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Busy doing nothing

I thought it must be about time to write a post, we seem to have been very busy the last few weeks but when I tried to remember what we have done I’m struggling to have come up with anything to write about, it has all been very ordinary things but there have been a lot of them. I’ve got an earworm of the song now, I only know the chorus really, I just looked up the rest of it and I like the line, ‘I must rehearse the songbirds, To see that they sing in key.’ I’ll have to learn the rest of it next time I have nothing to do.

Tiny was sick a couple of weeks ago. A week after that the Man in the Shed took Small and Tiny off on family camp with the Scouts, I still haven’t managed to remove all the mud from the strange places it has found its way into. I got out of camp by going on a training weekend for Joey Scout leaders (Joeys are the equivalent of Beavers in the UK) and it felt very odd to have a night to myself with nobody else in the house but I did enjoy the quiet. This week, when home was being hit by a bout of freezing weather just when it should be warming up, we got hit by a 39°C day just when I was getting used to it being in the 20s again and my body said, ‘No, too hot!’ and promptly sent me to sleep on the sofa all afternoon.

I got all my squares joined together, it didn’t take as long as I thought it might. I had to hold the yarn in my left hand to make the join work because you had to keep the working yarn under the bits you were joining and I usually hold it in my right hand, (I was going to say I hold it the wrong way but then I decided it isn’t wrong, just different and it works perfectly well most of the time) so I had the option of putting the yarn round to the underneath after every stitch or holding it in my other hand. The first couple of squares were slow going but once I had done a few it was quicker. The border wasn’t very interesting to do, most of the rounds have a spike stitch every fourth stitch which messed up my rhythm and slowed me down a little and the last round has 1408 stitches so it was a bit of a slog but I really like the way it looks. It fits nicely on the bed too but if I took a photo if it there then I would have to tidy up the rest of the room for you so here it is on the floor. You can click on the photo if you want to make it bigger.

The pretty cardigan with the pockets is coming along nicely. I got to the end of the body and because it is stocking stitch all the way down with an i-cord cast off it is a bit curly at the moment, I am really hoping that once it is blocked it won’t curl up so much but I am not sure. Maybe I’ll have to weigh down the pockets with all my pocket detritus, that ought to do the job.

The pockets made a lot of ends to sew in because you have to cut and rejoin the yarn in various places and I thought I would sew those ends in before I start the sleeves so instead of doing that I got distracted making a secret thing for Tiny’s birthday. The pattern matches her blanket but it is in different colours, here is how far I have got with it so far. I had to redo the back because I did the number of rows in the pattern and it was humongous (is that how you spell that? It doesn’t look right whatever letters I put) and when I checked the size of the squares for the front from the blanket I realised there was no way they would ever fit together and I unravelled a load of it and redid it smaller. The Man in the Shed earned himself a look by suggesting I could have measured it before I had done the whole square and made it the right size in the first place. He’s right really but don’t tell him or he will be smug about it.

The only other exciting news I can think of is that my mending and sewing pile has reached the critical mass where I decided I really should do something about it. At the moment it consists of a sleeping bag with a ripped seam, a pair of Small’s shorts with a hole in the bum, one of Tiny’s skirts which looks like it has been through a shredder (I’m not really sure it is mendable, maybe a patch will have to do), a hermit crab which I can see nothing wrong with but apparently is coming apart at the seams and has holes in, and a pile of Scout badges. A couple of them are Small’s and the rest are mine – having sent me on my training weekend to make my Gilwell woggle our group remembered that they ought to invest me and give me a scarf to put in the woggle and some badges to sew on. So now I’ve told you I am going to do the mending pile, I’ll have to get on and do it, won’t I?

We’re busy doing nothing,
Working the whole day through.
Trying to find lots of things not to do.
We’re busy going nowhere,
Isn’t it just a crime?
We’d like to be unhappy, but
We never do have the time.

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In which there is a lot of sun

Nothing very much has happened this week. Small’s clarinet has progressed / regressed / digressed (choose a suitable verb) from Jingle Bells to Merrily We Roll Along with occasional bursts of Oh When the Saints (under protest) which if not more exciting are at least more seasonally appropriate and we’ve all been pootling about and slowly getting back into the term time routine. It’s an eleven week term this time, I think that might be a killer for us from the northern hemisphere who think eight weeks is a bit extreme!

The squares are slowly getting bigger, I have enlarged three quarters of them now, the pile on the right is the ones I have left to do. I think I am secretly just putting off the point where I have to join them together because the join in the pattern is a bit awkward. I could just do a different join but that would be cheating, wouldn’t it? I am looking at my pile of yarn and wondering whether I worked out the amounts I need properly, one of the colours that is finished now has a pleasingly small amount left over although it was a bit nerve-wracking while I was using it – I had to keep stopping to weigh the yarn and counting the squares left that needed that colour to see if I had done my calculations properly.

Things to be thankful for number two: The weather here means you can dry your washing (including big thick blankets, sleeping bags and children who fall in the sea) in hours rather than days and it is very good for blocking yarny things quickly. I finished Tiny’s blanket this morning and I am hopeful that it will be dry by bedtime.

The customer requested very firmly that the colours in the border should not go in the order stated in the pattern but in rainbow order with red on the outside and indigo in the middle. I explained that this would not quite be possible and we have settled for as close to rainbow order as we can get with ‘raspberry’ on the outside and ‘heather’ on the middle, it’s a bit heavy in the green section but I think it has more or less the desired effect.

Here is the knitting I promised to show you next time. My tension square came out exactly right first time on the size of needles listed in the pattern so I am a bit suspicious because that never happens and my tension squares always lie, I am not convinced that I won’t turn round one day and measure the cardigan and find out it is three times the size it should be. So far so good though. It is going to be a Luella cardigan by Suzie Sparkles, it’s quite slow because it is 4 ply yarn but it’s going a bit quicker now I have divided for the sleeves and don’t have 340 stitches to deal with. It has got a lace pattern on the yoke and is knit top down all in one piece, you go back and pick up the stitches for the sleeves later. It has got instructions for different length sleeves and pockets if you want them.

I have a thing about pockets, my favourite dress is the one with pockets and I have been known to buy men’s pyjamas just for the pockets. I like to have somewhere to shove my hands when I’m slouching along and to keep my useful bit of string, an interesting stone, a snotty tissue or two to mess up the load of washing and sometimes even knitting in (when it is small knitting and big pockets). I’m a bit ambivalent about the written pattern though, the lace part is written out very clearly but the rest of it could do with a bit more work, I don’t much like instructions like ‘Increase 13 stitches evenly along row’, whilst I am perfectly capable of working it out I sort of expect designers to do that bit for you especially if you are paying for the pattern. It is pretty though and it has pockets, did I mention that?

The pattern also doesn’t tell you the finished length and I normally add a couple of inches to things because of having a long back or a ‘low slung bum’, as my mum refers to it, (I think I have just got my body settings on a different aspect ratio to the one people use to design clothes) so I have been reading the pattern very slowly and scribbling numbers all way down the side to work out how many rows it has and how long it should turn out (assuming my tension square is not trying to deceive me) and where I could get away with adding a few rows without messing up the pockets.

It is one of those patterns that give you a load of instructions and then says ‘At the same time…’ and proceeds to give you a load more instructions so you have to remember which row you are up to with both lots of stuff. It usually involves lots of scribbled notes, swearing and unpicking the last seventeen rows to go back and put in the increase that you missed and wouldn’t, cosmically speaking, really matter if you left out but pride is at stake and it would be one stitch wider on the left than on the right and you would know, all the time you were wearing it that it wasn’t quite right. But it does have nice pockets and beautiful lace. I’m sure the best bit is the pockets. Or maybe the lace, I quite like that too.

I think there is a bit of a wobble near the end to do with how long it is by the time you reach the eleventh buttonhole but I think if you follow the instruction about the number of buttons and ignore the one about the length then it will end up being an inch or two longer than intended and with slightly deeper pockets so that suits me fine!