Woe of the Unfinished (Boring) Project!

I was doing something over summer! Really!

On a suggestion from a work colleague, I started experimenting with cotton, after complaining about how I don't knit in warmer weather because it makes my hands all sweaty. I hadn't seen many patterns involving cotton before, but I came across one for a facewasher that looked really pretty. I wanted to make a set of 3 for a friend for her birthday. Here are some pics:

Pink facewasher nearly finished; 'petals' for green facewasher

Close-up of pink facewasher
However, there is just one fatal flaw in the pattern - they are a PAIN IN THE ARSE to make! Each of the 5 petals is made separately using garter stitch, then they are attached together into a ring, and you use 5 double-pointed needles to reduce, reduce, reduce, until the hole in the middle is closed up. There are 3 main problems with this:

1) It results in a huge number of loose ends to weave in, which have to be done neatly because there is no 'wrong side' to the facewasher.
2) Working with double-pointed needles is bad enough, but FIVE of the damn bastards??!!
3) The method of increasing used to shape the petals seems very strange to me - it's one of the methods used when you want to make a decorative hole in the work. I reverted to the good old 'knit-into-front-and-back' method.

To make things worse, the author uses a special method of starting and ending each row, supposedly to keep the edges neat, but I found it made them look even worse, and was logistically almost impossible to do. I found the way the pattern was written was very wordy and confusing. Is this supposed to be for beginners? Phah!


Needless to say, my friend did not receive any home-made facewashers for her birthday. (It was last August.) So, it seems, the facewashers are destined to sit, not-quite-finished, in their little plastic bag for the rest of their days. I can't see me hating myself enough in the near future to pick up them needles again. The lady in the picture can press her own soft, springy chenille-cotton facewasher to her smug face all she likes. I'm moving on!!

On a more positive note, if not more interesting, I'm renovating my Works In Progress and Finished Projects pages in the next few days. (See the links to the left.) [this information is now defunct]

Boo!

Hi, everyone! I'm back!
I told you that as soon as the weather got cooler, I'd feel like knitting again. This is really a seasonal blog.
I don't have anything to show you at the moment, so here's a picture of me!

I just happen to be wearing my skinny scarf that I made a few months ago, though. See, not totally irrelevant!

Project thought long dead.

I thought that, seeing as I'm on a roll, I may as well finish a few other things as well.
This is a pair of socks that I actually knitted about 5 years ago. All I needed to do was sew them up. And I finally did it. Then it took me another week before I put them on!

Notice the little oversight in the stripes?

I don't think I'll wear them in public....

Not another scarf!

I finished the Purp Scarf! Yes!

I used the same technique I used for the scarf I made for my friend James, i.e. just basic garter stitch with an added strand of the contrast colour on every third row. I thought it would look good in light colours, with a creamy colour and a pastel. At first I was thinking shades of blue to look like the ocean, but you have to work with what you can get, right? Plus it was on sale, so you can't complain.

I wanted to do something a bit different and knit it 'sideways', but I knew I'd have to use circular needles for that. I was pretty daunted because I've tried to use them once before, and they were hellish! But I used the trick of steaming the plastic parts of the needles to straighten them, because they're all bent from being folded up and squashed into the packet they came in. It didn't take long to get used to them after that. Once I actually got on with it, it was really quite quick to make.

The only thing is: the scarf doesn't wear very well. It's too bulky to fit around my neck properly without feeling like I'm drowning in a sea of wool!

Foodie

Tonight I made Bara Brith:

It's a traditional Welsh bread made without yeast - although I don't think it's supposed to be that flat! It has sultanas soaked in tea, brown sugar and flour. Oh yeah, I just realised I was supposed to use self-raising flour, not plain flour. D'oh!

It tastes quite good though! The recipe says to leave it in a tin to mature for 2 days, but I couldn't wait.

Cute, fluffy animals

Lately I've been working on my toy penguin more than anything else. I have an odd and not entirely unjustified feeling that I might actually finish it quite soon - and successfully too!

Here's a pic of it's guts:

Yes, that could be a flipper.

I'm eyeing off the Wombat to do next. Updates as they happen...

I have room to spare!

Lately I've been seriously considering the idea of having a set limit to the number of projects I've been working on at any one time. 12 seemed like a good number. 12 also just happens to be the number of projects that I'm working on right now, so it seems to make sense. That just means I'll have to finish one before I make a new one, which really would be the sensible thing to do.

But then, guess what? I just thought I'd count the number of projects I have listed on my Works In Progress page [link defunct], and I'd miscounted! It's not 12, it's 11! So I can start a new one if I want! I'm so excited!!!