A Blustery day

My goodness it was windy today!

And also surprisingly sunny. At gone 7pm!

I love that change to BST, suddenly life feels better and more productive. It’s light for longer, it’s warmer now. I’ve applied for multiple jobs this week and managed to free some time for more creative pursuits.

Enter, exhibit A: I TOTALLY MADE PANTS!

Look at those almost matching stripes!

I used the free Rosy Ladyshorts pattern from Cloth Habit. It’s great!  Really easy to follow and they’re just as comfortable as bought underwear. I  got the fabric from an old top. It was badly made and twisted so I didn’t wear it much. It proved perfect for this! I finally managed to find a fabric shop near me with stretch lace and bought several bundles so there will definitely be more pants in the future :)

I also got some more spinning done.

Clockwise from top left: Yellow/blue gradient singles. Yellow/blue gradient plied. Blue/pink singles. Finished balls of plied yarn.

I’m so pleased with how the gradients have turned out! I’m not sure what to make with this yarn though. The colours are beautiful but the fibre is very coarse in laces so it definitely cant be worn near the skin. I’m thinking maybe a bag? The idea is to be able to knit something with a continuous gradient, from yellow to blue to pink to brown. I still have quite a bit of wool left to spin!

Finally, today I’ll leave you with the meal that our family called dinner on Sunday night. It was a bit of a  mixed up day and we ended up having a cooked lunch at about 3pm and decided to have pudding for dinner instead of another meal in the evening. I made a plum cobbler with some fresh plums from the market. One of the best things about working on the market is that I get to know which products are at their absolute best. I’ve been loving these plums for weeks and snagged a box of ‘pig food’ plums for myself last week.

Fresh plum cobbler, mmmm :)

I was really reminded of my time in Germany where pudding for a main meal seemed to be a fairly common thing. Well, certainly in the canteen at work anyway where one of the meal options was frequently apple strudel, sweet dumplings or Kaiserschmarrn. What a country!

I’m spinning around ♫

Lots of fluffy goodness

As the official dumping ground for all our friends and acquaintances who want to get rid of things but can’t bear to throw them away, we have a huge hoard of wool-craft related products. This includes bin liners full of wool in various conditions, from lanolin-pungent fleeces straight off the sheep’s back, to randomly dyed mounds of semi-clean  tufts.

Look at my pretty colour gradient!

Bravely deciding to help Ma out with this mammoth task I’m learning to spin using a drop spindle. Since getting a job and moving away from home is still a priority I opted for a more portable method than using a wheel and it seems to be going ok!

Sorted and fluffed* wool ready for spinning (*Not a technical term)

I sorted the wool into colours and divided it into two so that hopefully I will be able to make a plied yarn with a gradient from yellow, to blue, to pink, to brown. At least that’s the plan anyway!

I went to my first Dorset Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers meeting at the end of February and picked up a few  tips on how to ply on a drop spindle which should prove useful :) It was nice to get confirmation that I was doing ok too!

Some WIPS currently in the Big Bag of Knitting next to the sofa are:

The beginnings of a blanket. This yarn has had several incarnations along a similar theme starting with the Iceland pattern by Stephanie White for Rowan. I made the jumper then decided that it wasn’t for me and the yarn I used was probably too heavy for the pattern. I then tried to use the leaf stitch pattern to improvise a jumper for myself which turned out a bit small for my liking. Finally I’ve decided that this warm thick yarn would be put to best use in a blanket so that’s what it’ll be. More on this as it progresses.

All the leaves on this blanket

A colourful cowl. This is a project for Ma to use a skein of hand dyed yarn she created at Wool Workshop. The colours are beautiful, although she wasn’t so sure about the result so I offered to knit her a cowl. I’m using the Irisa Cowl pattern from Knitted Bliss (One of my favourite knitting blogs – I love Mod Mondays!)  At the moment it’s very nearly finished, having been mostly knitted on the way to, during and on the way home from an assessment centre for a grad scheme (Eeek!) so FO post coming soon!

Bright cheerful colours on a quick knit

Half a dozen hexipuffs! This is a really great idea for using up small amounts of yarn and I’m riffing off the Beekeeper’s Quilt by tiny owl knits. I’m hoping to make at least one hexipuff from each other project I complete so I can make a quilt full of reminders of what I’ve made!

A small puffet of hexipuffs

Is there a collective noun for hexipuffs? I think of mine as a puffet of little puffs :) They’re so lovely to play with!

A spot of sewing

Aldi sewing machine anyone? Yes please!

Until now we’ve always just used Ma’s old sewing machine at home, there’s nothing wrong with it apart from the slightly too sensitive foot peddle that sometimes sends the needle whirring if you so much as breathe near it…  more fool you if you left your project under the needle and didn’t turn the machine off when you went away for a bit.

And the fact that it’s a Japanese machine that requires a massive great ancient transformer to be brought out every time you want to use it means it’s not always terribly convenient…

When I saw Aldi had Singer sewing machines in stock I took a chance. I’m guessing this is a cheapo version that is produced especially for Aldi as I haven’t been able to find many reviews of it or any trace on the Singer Website. It seems to work well enough though and here is its first proper project:

Elephant pyjamas for Darling Sister One! I picked out the blue elephant patterned fabric in our local fabric shop because it was the cheapest  I knew she would love it. Unfortunately, on getting out the pattern it turned out I hadn’t bought enough. The direction of the print meant that other arrangements of the pattern pieces wouldn’t work, so it was back to the shop. As I’d bought the end of the roll they had none of the blue fabric left but we managed to find a matching pink elephant print for the other leg!

I used the same pattern as I’d used before for my pyjama bottoms but I forgot that Darling Sister One is quite a bit shorter than me. After cutting out the pieces and sewing them all together, I got to fitting the length and realised I should have thought of this before-hand… It would have been rather easier to turn up the hem if I’d shortened the leength in the first place and didn’t have to cut several inches off the bottom!

That said, they turned out alright and I think she likes them!

She’s also become the first person (apart from me) to get something with one of my fancy new labels in, lucky girl!

I didn’t get the hang of using these fancy decorative stitches though…

Any tips on what I’m doing wrong would be lovely! Do I need to change the plate? Or the stitch length settings? I couldn’t get the fabric to feed through at the right rate to make nice smooth scallops :(