Posted in Knitting

Adventures In Knitting

Gosh we are busy in my house over the past few weeks.  We are constantly on the go with loads of visitors when home.  Working 12 hour days and all the rest.  Why this weekend coming we are in Rotorua friday night, I have a run Saturday morning, my handsome boy and his beautiful partner are home for lunch Saturday lunch time and then we have Canadian Thanksgiving at a friends Saturday night.  Sunday will be made for sleeping I feel.

In the past month I have been knitting A LOT.

My next door neighbour was very pregnant and I still hadn’t decided on what to get her when I stopped at Spotlight on the way home from work.  They were having a wool clearance and I found some lovely soft baby chenille with a blanket pattern attached to the wrapper.  All three balls required normally $20 each but I got the lot for $15 so we had a winner 🙂

The race was then on as to who was going to be done first, me or the baby.  The baby won by a week hahaha And an extremely beautiful baby girl she is.

I discovered a few very important things while making the blanket.

  1. Chenille is bloody awful to knit with.  Learner knitters drop stitches and you can not for the love all things wooly find the dam stitches again
  2. Don’t knit chenille while sitting up on your bed watching telly while darling husband is watching sports at night with only bedside lamp on.  You will drop even more stitches.
  3. Wine makes it harder to find dropped chenille stitches. Also possibly attributes to number of dropped ones
  4. You can darn holes made by dropped chenille stitches very successfully and no one will ever know 😉 except when you tend to tell everyone
  5. Dropped chenille stitches can cause fewer numbers of actual stitches on the needle making one end of a blanket wider than another. This can not be fixed when you are finished and the baby beat you by a week and you just have to roll with it.
  6. Blankets need long needles for knitting. All those weird little bruises at the top of my right thigh are from bracing the needle to push the wool down every minute or so.  It literally took me 2 weeks to figure out what the heck was causing them hahahaha

After 3 weeks of frantic knitting we had a completed blanket that the neighbours tell me they love, flaws and all 🙂 Of course because I was tremendously nervous about the gift as not everyone appreciates home-made I had to tell them the entire tale of its birth and they laughed till they cried but they assure me they are not lying and do love it.

IMG_8623

In the end I was actually very happy with it considering.  There is enough wool left to make another one so I may do that next year at a more sedate pace and see if I can make a nice one 🙂

After frantic knittings of the previous 3 weeks I am, surprisingly, totally in zone and picked up my knitted squares again.  This is a weekends worth of them.

IMG_8672

Diagonal Striped Square

IMG_8674

Mock Rib with Garter Stitch Stripes Square

IMG_8681

Big Checkerboard Square

IMG_8683

Little Ladders Stitch Square

I think I am getting better at this knitting stuff.  There was hardly any back-knitting and only a couple of minor re-starts.  Might be getting ready for some real stuff 😀

Oh, and in a final word.  It was my birthday very recently and my step mother made me the most beautiful quilt.  Check it out! It’s currently residing on the back of my couch but I am going to get it dowled and hang it in the second lounge 🙂

IMG_8593.JPG

Ka Kete Ano xx

 

 

 

Advertisement