Finished things

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Tree by numbers

I was trying to do a new post every couple of weeks but I blinked and seven went by at high speed. Part of the whooshing sound they made on the way past included finishing off some stuff, putting off other stuff, making some random stuff out of the ordinary completely on a whim and a birthday with a rainbow cake (what else would she have?!)

The practice cake was less correct colours and had more interesting decoration (Tiny decorated that one herself) and the official one was only hampered slightly by the whole of the Shire (well the bits of it I looked in) suddenly not stocking food colouring anymore in between the time when I bought the stuff for the first one, used twice as much as I thought I would need and then went to look for more. I resorted to eBay and it turned out ok in the end. By the way, in case you were wondering, yes, my choice of where to live was entirely based on the name of the area with no consideration of the suitability and yes, it was just so that I could pretend to be a Hobbit for two years. Don’t tell the Man in the Shed, I don’t think he has noticed yet.

Here is the secret thing I was making for her, it matches the blanket pattern but has different colours. It’s a bit huge but she really likes it and it is in her rocking chair now.

The finished thing is the grey cardigan with the pockets. I have worn it quite a lot (about six and a half weeks worth) already although it is starting to get colder now (note the woolly socks) so I might not wear it so much for a while. I added in some lace ribbing round the bottom, partly because I was convinced the thing was going to roll up all the time and partly to make it a bit longer because I wasn’t sure about the length and it has turned out about right. I am really pleased with it although I think I would do the next size up another time. Mental note: don’t eat all the biscuits.

The random thing was that I saw a dream-catcher with a tree on it when I was looking for some craft to do with the Joeys and it got me thinking about Fibonacci numbers again so I started collecting some bits and pieces together while I thought about how to make it work.

If you don’t know about the Fibonacci sequence then The Rabbit Problem by Emily Gravett is a very good place to start. The short version is you start with two ones and add the two previous numbers together to get the next one – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on. I started to wonder whether you could make a tree that has a trunk with 55 strings that splits into two branches, one with 34 strings in and one with 21 strings in and then carries on splitting all the branches into smaller Fibonacci numbers until you get down to 55 branches that are all made of a single string. I did some scribbling. I thought I took a picture of my notes somewhere but they’ve been tidied up or recycled or something. There were a lot of notes though. And some circular graph paper.

And then I thought to do some research (if you count believing random things you read on the internet without checking them) and it turns out that real trees already had the same sort of idea. I love how much maths there is in nature, it’s almost as if someone made it that way on purpose… Some trees show the Fibonacci sequence in the number of branches that they have at any given point – suppose that when a tree puts out a new branch, that branch has to grow two months before it is strong enough to support a new branch itself. In  the first month you will have 1 branch, at the end of the second month that branch will split and you will have 2 branches, the new branch has to grow for a bit so the next month the original branch will split again but the new branch will not – 3 branches, the next month the first and second branch will split but not the newest one – 5 branches etc.

My tree has the sequence in the thickness of the branches going from the top down to the trunk and in the number of branches going up from the trunk out to the twigs. I’d be interested to see whether real plants follow some kind of tree equivalent of Kirchhoff’s Law (what goes in must come out) in terms of maybe the cross-sectional area of a given branch being equal to the sum of the cross-sectional area of that branch at a thinner point higher up plus any new branches that it has sprouted on the way but I suspect it might be a lot more difficult to measure.

I put one bead on each string (carefully planned for which size to put where, there were a lot of notes, remember?) and arranged them so that one bead is on each branch (except the single thickness ones) and also discovered that rather satisfyingly there are 21 branches with a thickness of 2 strings, 13 branches with a thickness of 3, 8 with a thickness of 5, 5 with a thickness of 8, 3 with a thickness of 13, 2 with a thickness of 21, 1 with a thickness of 34 and 1 with a thickness of 55.

If you are clever you might have noticed that that only makes 54 so there is one bead over which would be carried on to the next branch if my 55 thick branch were going to join into an 89 thick one.

I put the last bead down in the roots to look like a seed that this strange tree might have grown from. The roots are less orderly, I suppose I should have done the sequence going the opposite direction if I had been thinking about it properly but I didn’t. Also I definitely wasn’t trying to get it roughly symmetrical, that pleasing wonkiness is definitely a deliberate attempt to make it look more like a real tree. Definitely.

 

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In which there is a well travelled cardigan

As previously mentioned I’m not that good at making the same thing more than once, the second one goes slower and slower and quite often stalls. I am an advocate of the two-at-a-time sock method for this very reason.  People sometimes say I should make things to sell but aside from the time-spent to price-that-people-would-pay ratio being an issue there is the problem that I find it really boring to repeat things (although for some reason squares for blankets don’t seem to fall into this category but don’t ask me why!) and for me the point of making stuff is to enjoy the making not to be a machine churning out lots of the same thing.

So when my mum asked me to make a cardigan for her the same as one of mine my heart sank, just a teeny bit, not very many people could get away with asking that but she’s my mum so she is one of the ones who can. She wanted it to be the same size too which also filled me with dread a little bit. I’m never great at getting the tension right on things, I’ve just got better at admitting when something isn’t going to fit and ripping out to start again and when I made the original cardigan I started it then realised the tension was not quite right, was too lazy to start again and decided to knit the 36 instead of the 34 because the drape of the fabric was ok and it turned out perfectly (it is my favourite cardigan, I wear it when I am nervous and have to look a bit smart or when I am pottering around in my jeans or over the top of my pyjamas sometimes and most of the time really) so the chances of duplicating this feat seemed pretty slim. Plus I didn’t write down what size needles I used in the end because I wasn’t expecting to make another one!

But she is my mum so I organised the wool with her, measured her very carefully and worked out she is not as tall as me so to leave out the extra length I had added into mine and that she is always cold so she might like long sleeves and said I would give it a go but it might take me a while. I managed to knit the whole thing whilst guiltily thinking I should take some proper pictures for the blog and then ploughed on with knitting it anyway because I was enjoying it so much so these are pictures that I took quickly on my phone just to send my mum some proof that I was really knitting it and not getting distracted with my squares. The pattern is Ysolda’s Pumkin Ale which has a really unusual construction and Ysolda is one of my favourite designers so maybe that is why I managed to knit it all without flagging, her patterns are always fun to make and the little details like the i-cord bind off on the edge and the way the cuff is joined on make them look really professional and I love it when there is no sewing up to do. When I wear mine I occasionally get a random knitter sidle up to me and say, ‘Did you knit that? It’s an unusual/interesting/beautiful/insert adjective of choice here pattern’ or ask me how the pattern works. 

I just spent an hour trying to get WordPress to arrange my pictures in a gallery – nicely but not too big and with the descriptions showing and it seems to be able to do one or the other but not both so here are all the pictures in one column because that is the only way I can get it to look tidy and display all the waffle so sorry it makes the post very long but I’ve had enough of it now and I’ve got some squares to make. Oh and some Smalls to play with before the sea of Lego drifts so far that I can’t reach the kettle. Maybe I can do both at once…

UPDATE: Also I just noticed if you are viewing it in an RSS feed thingy then the descriptions might not show up so have a look on the website instead, there should be a sentence or two to go with each photo but I don’t care enough to try and make it work properly any more!

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In which there is a lot of catching up to do

I remembered my WordPress login, I updated all the stuff that I haven’t updated since March and I tried to upload some pictures but they are all bigger than 2MB and the silly thing won’t let me so now I have resorted to writing the words and hopefully the Man in the Shed will fix it for me later…*EDIT – He fixed it because he’s clever like that. Yay!*

Oops, I was going to write a new post in half term and it whooshed by like all the other weeks and I didn’t. This term has mostly been blankets, there was this one for a soon to be new baby which started off ok and then got ridiculously huge until there almost was no room for my lunch in my bag because it was full of blanket.

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There was this one which was a Stylecraft Crochet Along thing which just had to be made because it is so pretty, you can still get the pattern on their website but I’m too lazy to look up the links, I’m just going for speed and actually getting round to posting something. That was a much more sensible size for my work bag because it is made of small hexagons. It has since been commandeered by Tiny for a bedspread although it isn’t really big enough. I added a couple of rows to the border because I had quite a bit of yarn left over and why would you end with a red and pink row if you could end with purple and blue?

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There was this one which I started before the first blanket (but it isn’t a blanket) and then it got postponed in the middle to start the flowery one which in turn got put aside to do the rainbow one but they are all done now except the pockets on this. It isn’t meant to have pockets but I am incapable of leaving my phone in my bag and people tell me off if I keep it in my bra. It has got some nice cables on the back but you can’t see them because I put it up this way to dry.

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The holidays so far have mostly been making hats, very good stash busting hats. There is a pattern somewhere, I can look it up if anyone wants to know but I am being lazy, as I said, this is also why the photos are wonky and not cropped and well, never mind, at least there is a post. The rainbow one is mine, the striped one is Tiny’s, the scary red one is Small’s and the white one that isn’t finished is for a friend who ordered a lacy one. The Man in the Shed declined to have one made for him, not sure why…

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The Man in the Shed has been busy making an outside box (he didn’t do the bricks but he did do the cat proofing) for the So-Called Tortoise (so-called because she does appear to be a tortoise, I keep checking in case I’ve been mistaken and she is really a cocker spaniel or a greyhound but she remains stubbornly tortoise shaped) after only sixteen months stuck inside, poor thing, she is thoroughly enjoying it and I am deliberately planting weeds which goes against the grain a bit. She has been happily stumping around and sitting in the sun enjoying the flowers, I am starting to wonder if I am secretly a tortoise, we have a lot in common.

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I’m nearly up to date now, I had about nine months of housework to catch up on so the first week and a half of the holidays was mostly cleaning and getting haircuts (Tiny is very pleased with hers and mine is at least tidier than it has been, I’ve only been psyching myself up to get it cut again for three years this time…) The place is nowhere near pristine but I made enough of a dent in it to show willing, both the small people’s carpets have been visible enough to hoover this month and there isn’t that much washing left.

The second week was swimming, tiling the utility room and waiting for the rain to stop among other things and I managed to sort out some new uniform before the week before school starts this year. When I say ‘sort out’ you realise I mean that there is uniform that fits in the house, I still have a thousand and thirteen iron on name tags to do… Ooh and we accidentally managed to sort out school shoes on a day out in Cheltenham which means I don’t have to drag the Smalls into Cardiff, hurrah! I just hope they don’t grow now.

Now it is the third week, it is the first and only week on the calendar with nothing on it, the sun is shining and the garden is calling, it’s a jungle and the vegetables have all gone to pot, mainly because I left them in the pots and didn’t have time to plant them out – the tomatoes have just about recovered but the brassicas didn’t make it out of the greenhouse thanks to a bumper harvest of slugs and snails despite the slug pellets and going out in the dark with a bin bag to catch them (that was a lot of slimy creatures in one night), I forgot to dig up any potatoes while they were growing and had to harvest the whole lot in one go yesterday (ooh, that hurt!)

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I have finally managed to do some weeding (not very much yet but I managed to hack a path to the compost bin so that’s a start, I’m going back out as soon as I have written this) aided and abetted by my lovely and extremely thorough dad who started it off last week for me – there is one border which seems to have been all weeds and no shrubs by the look of it after he had finished but it is full of So-Called Tortoise friendly plants now: pansies, snapdragons, sow thistle and I’m trying to persuade some honesty to grow which I pinched from my grandparents in Hampshire but the soil is very different so I don’t know whether it will work. A couple of weeks ago he attacked a mountain of bindweed for me as well but I’m making him a jumper so I think we’re square.

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In which I got slightly carried away making hats

I haven’t posted anything since half term. My life is now ruled by the school calendar more completely than ever. Counting terms it is a difficult habit to break when you leave school having spent three quarters of your life there, it was just about wearing off when my own children started school and it started to tighten its grip again but now, working in school, I am back to counting down the days of term until the next break. The Easter holiday starts tomorrow and I have time to catch my breath again for a little while.

This term I have mostly been making hats (and a green jumper that I started three times but I’ll tell you about that another day). One of the teachers at school is starting her maternity leave today and she asked me if I could make her some baby hats (I mostly sit in the staff room with my knitting to give me an excuse for avoiding eye contact), she said her mum would do jumpers and stuff but hats were too fiddly.

I have found though that the trouble with teeny hats is they don’t take very long and there are millions of patterns so it is very easy to get carried away and think, ‘That’s a nice pattern, I’ll just do one more…’, on the other hand the good thing about teeny hats is they don’t take very long, are very small and portable and good for knitting in the staff room without having to hide an enormous ball of green aran in the bottom of your handbag just to avoid accidentally giving someone a withering look when they are the fifth person that day to say, “Wow, that’s a big ball of wool!” (For the record it is 400g and a perfectly normal size for a 400g skein of acrylic aran.)IMG_4126

Anyway, I made a lot of hats and thoroughly enjoyed it and I even potted them up before I gave them to her. I haven’t done anything in the garden yet this year, is it showing? Sorting out the veg patch is on my list of things to do in the Easter holidays and I am hoping that BBC weather has got the forecast very wrong otherwise I won’t get far down the list.IMG_4128

My next mission which I had no choice but to accept (the enormous ball of green aran is on hold for a minute, at least for away from home knitting as it is a bit unruly but it was five pounds in Aldi and it is the sort of green that makes me think of Grandad so it had to be done) went something like this:

Me: What would you like for your birthday?

Tiny: A big teddy turtle.

Me: Oh. Right. Where are you expecting me to get you a big teddy turtle from?

Tiny: You can knit one.

Me: Yes. I could knit one.

Pause

Me: How big is a big teddy turtle?

Tiny: About this big. (Indicates about eight inches with hands)

Me: (Breathing a sigh of relief at how big ‘big’ is) Oh. Right. If I did knit one that is quite a small present, what would you like for your main present?

Tiny: (Looks around room for inspiration) A chair. I don’t like that one any more.

Me: Right. What sort of chair? Would you like a rocking chair?

Tiny: Yes, a rocking chair.

Me: Really? You’d like a rocking chair for your big birthday present?

Tiny: Yes.

Me: Right.

This child is unique. So now I am knitting a turtle (whilst investigating rocking chairs). So far it (the turtle not the rocking chair) has two legs, a body, a tail, half a head and no shell. We compromised on the colour – she wanted it to be red and pink and purple but we found one with welly boots and a rain hat so it is going to be green with pink and purple boots and hat. I drew the line at knitting a pink and red turtle.

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A swift report from the abyss

Sorry. I have been atrociously bad at writing any posts recently. I realised as well that I showed you lots of started things and didn’t write anything when they were finished. It has been a busy couple of months.

The treasure chest got finished, complete with added sea creatures by Small and Tiny inside.

Tiny Clanger got finished in time for the birthday and finally got to meet Small Clanger.

The Man in the Shed tidied his shed.

The aquilegias and all the colour in the garden came and went and I forgot to take a picture, now it is a green jungle again.

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I unraveled a cardigan which I knitted for my mum when I was less good at knitting and re-knitted it into a vest which I made up as I went along, was much better and I completely failed to take a photo of.

The Man in the Shed finished the bathroom so I can have a bath again. Hurrah!

I painted a backdrop of a cottage for a thing where it has to sometimes belong to the seven dwarves and sometimes to the three bears – spot the difference (and the mouse, don’t look Grandma!).

I rescued a swift with a damaged wing which has been passed on to the vets who might have a better idea what to do with it than me.

I started making a Sophie’s Universe blanket which I haven’t got a picture of yet. It’s a gorgeous free pattern which is available online and is really easy to follow as it has loads of photos. I’ve been printing the version without pictures but I did wonder whether it wouldn’t save some paper to follow it off a screen. That said it is not the thing I have printed recently that has used the most paper. But that’s another story, never mind, anyway, I paused in making Sophie’s Universe when I realised that the nursery teacher is about to pop and last time she was pregnant I made her a baby blanket and there are only a few of weeks left of term to make something. So I got on with it.

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It is blocking, it is pinned to the bed (which was the only sensible (debatable) place big enough to put it) with nearly six hundred pins to open up the lace edges which now means that a) I know I have well over six hundred pins (I thought I would run out when I started and there are more than half left) b) I have to keep the cats off it until it is dry (it is white and they are black) c) I have to get it dry before bedtime or explain to the Man in the Shed why the bed is slightly damp and d) I have to get nearly six hundred pins out of the bed before bedtime or explain to the Man in the Shed why the bed is slightly prickly…

 

UPDATE: 1303, 24 Jun 2015.

Slightly red faced update – despite having a maths degree I forgot to divide by two – * chain 3, cast off two, repeat from * gives half as many loops as stitches so there are nearly three hundred pins rather than nearly six hundred. But why let accuracy get in the way of a good story? Which is the principle employed, or so I am led to believe, by several of my forebears, well three of them anyway. Who’s been sleeping in my porridge…

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In which we get down to brass tacks

I have been berated by several people for not having posted anything since February so here is one before it turns into April. Things happen and I think, ‘I should put that on the blog.’ and then real life takes over and I don’t. This month I have mostly been decorating the bathroom (it is within the realms of possibility that I may get to have a bath in my own house this year), being an emergency choir accompanist (that was hard, J.S. Bach is so much easier than Pharrell Williams) and just about managing to do all the normal things like drag my children up and down the hill three times a day.

We will be seeing the olds and the very-olds over Easter (shh, don’t tell them I call them that or I’ll be in big trouble next week! Hmm, oops, I think it’s too late anyway…) so I thought they would like to see this one before then. I finally got round to turning this:

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into this:

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The piano stool belonged to my great-grandma but the top she had made for it was worn out by so many bottoms and I was doing a new one to replace it. I’ve been making it for several years (Small was considerably smaller when I began it) and it stalled after I had done the interesting bit in the middle. In January I gritted my teeth and did the twenty or so rows of beige that were left and the border and then put off turning it into a finished thing for a bit. The best bit was when I eventually dug out the box of two thousand (minus a couple of hundred) 3mm brass nails that were left from something else (because it appears you can only buy small brass nails in boxes of two thousand) to put the bit of trim around the bottom and promptly tipped the entire box all over the floor with my usual style and panache. Tiny very graciously agreed to pick them all up and keep me company while I nailed the rest into the piano stool; her job took her nearly as long as mine did.

The tapestry is stretched around a piece of MDF which looks a bit boring inside so I lined the lid with some interesting paper which we got ages ago in Sheffield to do something with and didn’t. It is Roobarb and Custard doing funny things (with descriptions like ‘Running away’, ‘Sitting (worried)’ and ‘As if rolling up sleeves’) if you can’t make it out. You can click on it to embiggify it if it helps.

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The other thing we have been doing is this:

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There was a large box with only one flap that had lots of plumbing in it (thank you Mr. Screwfix) which was crying out to be made into a treasure chest. It is to put all the Octonauts in which no longer fit in the box that contained the world at Christmas (it is a globe, not really the whole world, there aren’t that many Octonauts) and is much more fun than buying another plastic tub.

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Apologies for the second picture, it was taken by an unsupervised small Photographer C-class who doesn’t know about the flash but I never took a decent one of it in that state so I thought it would have to do. In case you were wondering, because I know you want to know, there are eighty-five rivets each made out of a scrumpled up sheet of loo roll. I counted.

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It’s not quite finished yet, it needs a few finishing touches. Oh, and all of the inside still wants painting.

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Good job there’s no school this week.

 

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In which there are some things that are older than they look

This week I’ve been having a getting-things-finished campaign. I’ve been plodding on with the tapestry for the old piano stool which I started several years ago (when Small was smaller) and stalled with twenty rows of background to go and sixteen rows of border all the way around; there are four rows left to do now so I’ll show you that soon. The painting is all done on the landing and we put the doodah rails back up at the weekend (that is what they’re called, isn’t it?) so it looks a lot more finished. I thought it was a bit bare though, it is a big wall and I was having a tidy up and I remembered that my grandma gave me these a while ago:

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They are embroidery which was done by my great-grandma at least fifty years ago (according to my mum who has been racking her brain) and the frames had disintegrated. I never met her and don’t know much about her except she did a lot of knitting and sewing and when she got a bit older she used to go down to the greenhouse to drink sherry and sleep (which doesn’t sound like a bad idea some days). Grandma gave them to me ages ago (being the only person in our family who does very much with pointed sticks and string and who would appreciate them) and I think she said they would ‘go with our house’.

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They took longer to reframe than I expected – they looked like they were just taped to a piece of card but once I got the tape off I realised they were sewn to the card which must have been a tough job. I cautiously gave them a wash, stretched them round some new card and found some frames which are near enough the right size and they are finally up on the wall by our stairs. I don’t think they are looking too shabby. Now I wonder if I have any sherry…

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More puddings and paws

The paws are finished. I still don’t have long enough arms to get a decent photo and I would have waited for some bigger hands but I wanted to get the paws into the post. It’s as cold as a witch’s wotsit here (by my standards anyway. Standards of tolerance to the cold, I hasten to add, not standards of coldness of wotsits…) and the paws need to be sent to the Wild North where it must be even colder so I thought the Bear might appreciate having his paws sooner rather than later.

I’m really pleased with how they turned out because it was only a vague idea and I thought there would be more patterns already written for bear paws but they all just looked like mittens with pads on which didn’t seem quite right. In the end I used this one which I think is supposed to be a webbed foot but it looks like a paw to me, it has sort of fingers but they don’t come right down as far as fingers on a normal glove do. I added some extra stitches to make a bigger size and the cuff seemed really tight so I did the increases slightly differently. The Man in the Shed tested them out for me because he has almost the same size hands as the Bear (just a little thicker) and he said the paws were enormous. I thought they looked ok and he doesn’t like the way his fingers rattle around inside mittens anyway but I thought I would humour him and have a go a making some linings to take up some of the slack – I had some offcuts of fleece left from something else (me, a hoarder?! No!) which I used for the pads so I cut some hand shapes out which I thought would be plenty big enough but by the time I had sewn them together they were pretty snug even on my twiggy fingers. The second attempt was much more bear sized so now they have cosy linings which help keep your fingers in the right place a lot better and they are lovely and snug and warm and going in the post this afternoon.

 

 

The puddings look reasonable although one of them crunched up the plate it was cooking on and they formed a really thick skin which we weren’t sure whether you were supposed to take on or leave off when you changed the cloth. When it came down to it half the skin had welded itself to the cloth anyway so we peeled off the rest to even it up and are munching our way through rubbery, floury Christmas pudding skin (like Victoria Wood eating tofu, I was going to put a link to a video of it but I can’t find one so you’ll have to use your imagination) because it tastes ok and it seems a shame to throw it out. We put clean cloths on them with less flour this time and hung them back up in the cupboard where, for some reason, out of the corner of my eye I keep seeing them as a nice brace of pheasants lurking in the corner, must be something to do with ancient memories pootling about in the back of my brain somewhere. This picture is before we changed the cloths so they are about half an inch smaller all round now.

 

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The other Christmassy experiment I am doing is I dried out a bunch of slices of all the different coloured citrus fruits I could get my hands on. The idea is when they dry out they are less sticky and a bit translucent so you can hang them up on a string and they catch the light and look pretty. I only burned a couple (oops!) and I am waiting for them to air dry the last bit before I try and hang them up but at them moment the all look a bit brown and the room smells vaguely of festering oranges so I’m not quite sure how it’s going to turn out yet…

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In which there is some catching up to do

Sorry I haven’t posted anything all week, I meant to do one on Monday and now it is almost next Monday.  The trouble with not posting things very often is there is too much to fit in and I don’t know which things to write about so then I put it off even longer and it gets worse and worse… (By the way it is almost the summer holidays so apologies in advance – I suspect the frequency of posts may become even more erratic than it is at the moment for a few weeks.)

This week I learnt to do Tunisian crochet which is interesting but probably needs its own post to explain it.

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The secret stash of Christmas presents is growing: there is a robot

and also a mouse. At Bible study the other day were talking about being made in the image of God the other week and what that meant; I am unlikely to ever breathe life into anything but I do love the moment when a pile of pieces turns into a little creature with some character.

The garden is full of life as well. I have been told I must prune the fruit trees once we have the fruit off them as they are impeding progress across the garden. The greenhouse is looking a bit jungly as well and we have had various vegetables (mainly purple, although not really intentionally) to eat from the veg bed and caterpillars (mainly green and definitely not intentionally, but did you know they go white when you cook them?) from the purple sprouting broccoli.

The morning glories have been looking glorious in the sun, they are more bedraggled this morning but I did notice this one lurking in at the bottom. I’m not sure where it came from because all the others are dark purple or pink.

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It doesn’t quite match the colour of my bottom after I fell down the stairs on Thursday but it’s not far off. I won’t show you a picture of that one, you’ll just have to use your imagination…

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In which there is a stripy wee beastie

The wall is coming along, I should be able to show you a picture of it more or less done tomorrow, British Summer Time permitting.

Today the stripy jumper is done, I swear the child has grown six inches in the two weeks since I began it. It should be massive on her so that is still fits on 1st September when it gets cold and miserable (just in time for school going back) but instead it is only slightly oversized. Maybe the sunshine has been making her grow along with all the weeds in my vegetable bed. She seems to like it anyway and is refusing to take it off despite it being about 25°C at the moment and I get points for having made an entire jumper without buying any more wool…

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