Aha!

 

Here is the lovely green cotton summer dress. It is little big, but still wearable, and probably will be for the next few years.  It is the Ruffled Baby dress   with one fewer increases so as not to be quite so ruffled, and no sleeves, so as to be more summery. Just a row of shell stitch instead of sleeves, which is cute enough for the Babe. Also got some lovely heart shaped spotty buttons that match the green perfectly from Folksy  but necessitated me sewing up the button holes a bit. The buttons are worth it though. :-)

Also, so nearly finished with these socks that I shall just call them finished and post the photo.

They are made with Violet Green sock yarn, doubled and on 4 mm needles. I started at the cuff with a 1x1 rib, over 42 stitches, and then changed to a pattern of k3 p3 for 3 rounds, and p3 k3 or 3 rounds, to give a checkerboard effect.


Have also started a pair of toe ups, but not really following a pattern, more like following about 5 patterns, as I try to get my head around how to do this. Thank goodness for Knitty.com and this great magic toe-up cast on.

And here is cheeky Babe, who wouldn't stand still or look at the camera while I was photographing her in her new dress, but who was more than happy to climb all over me and do her best to prevent me from photographing anything else, other than her lovely smile surrounded by a few dairy free chocolate brownie crumbs. ;-)

Some people might be interested in...

my other blog where I have started writing about home ed more, so I can leave this one for middle aged happiness brought on by yarn, wool, and growing things in dirt. If only one could grow a Rowan plant.

Gone and arrived!

What is gone are the Gentleman Socks. Frogged. With Glee.

I had gone back to them, figured out where I was in the pattern, turned the heel, kept up that twisted rib, and then suddenly I was missing stitches, and couldn't figure out what I had done wrong (which was knit while watching a film.)  I knitted back and bit, and some more, and eventually just pulled out my DPNs and pulled out a few rounds. I found my mistake, and started picking up the stitches again. Usually, this is a fairly straightforward exercise. But with all of these twisted stitches, it isn't. I had out my crochet hooks, was picking up so many dropped stitches, but I was perservering...I had come this far, I was damn well going to continue!

I only threw it across the room once! And then I went back that next day, nice and calm - again determined to finish these damn socks. The yarn kept splitting - I was picking up bits.  And then it hit me. I WAS GOING TO HAVE TO DO THIS ALL OVER AGAIN! I WAS ONLY ON THE FIRST SOCK!

So they have been frogged. :-)  And I am trying to decide what to do with the yarn now. I thought I would try socks on two circulars, or doing toe-ups- or maybe magic loop? But it was all too much for me. I could not make all of the necessary decisions. So I will do a regular cuff down pair of socks, and maybe stick a cable on them or something.

The thing that has arrived is a photo of the one who has flown the coop in her Rowan Felted Tweed jumper that I knit for her just in time for spring. :-)

The other thing that has arrived (after I went out to get it) is some yarn. I know I am supposed to be on a self inflicted yarn buying ban, but Purl City Yarns are having a March Madness sale, and they have King Cole Merino Chunky for £2.50 a ball. I am meant to be doing the Owls jumper for R before autumn, and this would be really good for that project, so I gave myself leave to buy that yarn. :-) R and I hopped on a bus, and went into Manchester, and had quite a nice time. She introduced me to vintage heaven as well. As for the yarn, she narrowed it down to the cream or the green, and they didn't have enough of the cream, so green it is going to be. But the cream would have been lovely. hmmm......I wonder if I can find that online anywhere.....

Progress and the real world.

So the Ribbed Baby Jacket is finally finished! She has actually been wearing it for over a week now, but I am just getting around to posting a photo.  I immediately wanted to start something new, and talked to R about doing some yoga socks for her, but then she went off to college and I changed my mind about the pattern, so I had to start something else. :-)

Am crocheting a dress for the baby in a rather bright green cotton, but I am not really happy with how it is going. It may fit when she is three. And then I got out an old lapel jacket from a Bernat pattern that I started when I was still pregnant and completely forgot about. It would probably only take me a couple of hours to finish, except that I must have been addled by pregnancy hormones while I was doing it as what started out as a jacket crocheted from side to side with 100 now has about 120 stitches. WHAT!?!?

So I thought I would go back to finish some other things I have forgotten about, and am back on the Gentleman's Socks that I started as a Violet Green KAL in Feb 2008. Oh Dear. How time flies. The socks look lovely, but for some reason, this pattern and me are not a good combination. It is slow and slow and slow. So I gave up. But I am back now, and will finish at some point.


At least I hope I will. (No, really, I WILL!) But the real world does keep infringing on my knitting time. Firstly is the Toddler. Lovely, but has decided to distract me from things yarny by wrapping herself up in my working yarn, or just by climbing on my lap, as if it is hers. :-) She is far too cute to ignore, so away goes the knitting. Until I get insomnia.

Plus Al has got this week off of work, and we are getting jobs done. Spent yesterday in the garden getting ready for some planting and rearranging things.

 

This is my new white disentra (bleeding heart). I have wanted one of these for years, and here is it in a relatively shady part of the front garden, behind the snowdrops, and protected from full sun  by the  Viburnum bodnantense. (Just found out what that one is called, thanks to the lovely staff at Hulme Garden Centre,  so I am showing off a bit.) 

Here we have the other bit of the front garden, which doesn't get much full sun because of the plants in the bit in the first photo. Big green pot is strawberries, little green pot is lemon balm, orange pot (to be changed soon) is my favourite Verbascum, (Southern Belle) some of which I have put in the ground there as well. In the terracotta pot is the dessert gooseberry which I took out of the ground because it stopped anything else from going in.

In the ground are tulips (transplanted at completely the wrong time of year, so fingers crossed) and some lovely dark pink Astilbe which is just coming up, and some trailing ivy to cover a bit of ground. It is all there in the photos, but you won't really be able to see until summer, when things are flowering.

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Here is the veg patch in the back garden.
This was Al's digging. :-)

In the corner you can see a couple of pots, these are two of the tree blueberry pots. They are doing well and will be transplanted soon to bigger pots. In the ground are a couple of dessert  gooseberries. This is where the tulips were and why they had to be moved.

Here are the raspberries in front of the new fence the neighbours put up. I hate it. It blocks us off from one another too much - it is too high. But I pulled up all the weeds around here yesterday, and cut back some new shoots so the energy will go in the fruit growth. They are actually budding, but hard to seen in this photo - it is only my phone camera.


Along the fence on the other side of the garden we have strawberries, Michaelmas daisies, chives, more gooseberries, more strawberries and some other stuff which we are not sure what to do with right now.This patch up against the other neighbours fence is in shade most of the time, except in the late afternoon in high summer. I think we are going to put some climbers in, and train them up to the trellis. There is a pretty white climbing rose behind the compost bin which I may try to move. 

 

We used to do most of this with the kids, but they have other interests now, so Al and I just get on with enjoying our middle agedness. :-) Although we did have the Babe toddling around picking up leaves and putting them in the garden bags with us, and eating dirt. Of course.