Finished Hoodies

The baby hoodies are finally finished. They seem to have taken me ages to knit. I have knitted a 4" square and that is ready for the next time that the washing machine goes on. I can then tell whether they will shrink in the machine or not.

The wool in the bottom photo is from the Yarn Barn in Shaw. The Navy, yellow and orange is destined for 4 knitted hats with a duck motif on and the beige is for an aran type jacket for my London niece. I have cast on and done about 10 rows of the twisted rib with cables. The pattern is from the Knitter and all the cables are on a chart. As I have got older I find I am increasingly befuddled with charts and I do wish that they would give me the choice of written instructions or a chart. Once I fathom it out then I will write out the pattern long hand and then get on with it a lot faster. I suppose it depends on how you learned to knit. The younger knitters seem to prefer a chart but then their minds are a lot more mentally agile than my poor old tired little grey cells. I prefer a chart for fair isle type knit and crochet but just not for lace and cables.

Today I went up to Bolton to the Knitting Noras Knit Out. It will probably be my last one until the New Year as they are held on the last Sunday in the month and so the December one will be so close to Christmas that I doubt anyone will want to go to that one. The weather was atrocious and I got my trouser legs wet through and discovered half way there that my ankle boots let in water. I didn't actually manage to get any knitting done in the cafe today as I was chatting to a new member and to Sylvia who was there with her foster baby. It's good to get out of the house for a change even though the journey took a long time and I got wet through for both journeys. Sunday services on public transport are not as frequent as I would like and so I spent a lot of the day hanging around tram stations and bus terminals. My knee and back are now protesting loudly. I really must make more of an effort to lose some weight after Christmas as carrying this extra weight is making me breathless when I walk.

My flat screen on the PC has turned temperamental on me and so I think that I will have to buy a new one. It won't turn on half of the time and when it does I have a pale grey screen that gradually goes dark but still doesn't give me any pictures. I have to switch it on and off a few times to get a picture on the screen so that can't be doing the on/off switch a lot of good.

I woke up this morning to not only the cheeping of the smoke alarm (it chirps when it is too cold) but the aroma of cat widdle. Next door's cat shot in last night out of the cold and must have been taken short during the night. He is normally a very clean cat so it was a surprise to smell cat wee this morning. The trouble is that I can't find it. I have felt around the carpets but can't find a wet spot and as my sense of smell is not that good directionally I can't pinpoint which areas smells the strongest. I have squirted everywhere liberally with Fabreeze and pray that it will have faded by the morning.I will not be feeling as sorry for him on cold nights in the future if he is going to repay my hospitality with smells.

The meal on Friday was lovely. I go out to dine so infrequently that it is always a big treat for me. Unfortunately Louise could not come with us as she and the boys have got bad colds. She sent a lovely present of some scented candles and smellies for the bath for me.

Baby Cardigan in Sock Yarn

I am glad to see from the comments on my last blog page to find that not alone in valuing my old patterns and that each one invokes memories for me as I look through them. When I have mentioned it to some people they think I am a bit weird. I am a bit weird, I have always known that but I did think that most people loved old patterns like me but when I have mentioned it in the past most people look at me strangely and say they love New patterns and making new things. I browse through my patterns like other people browse old photographs. I think if my house were on fire that I would be seen dragging my boxes of patterns to safety and screaming at the firemen not to drench them in water. Memo to myself I must make sure that the lids are firmly on my boxes in case of water damage. The storage boxes are, of course, made of plastic which would melt and glue themselves to my patterns in a fire which doesn't bear thinking about!

I have finally finished one of the baby cardigans. I made this in sock yam. I don't know the colour as I have lost the label but it is Lana Grossa Meilenweit Cotton Fun which is a slight misnomer as fun to knit it certainly wasn't. I had previously attempted 2 different knitted sock patterns and even a crochet sock pattern but the wool is so bouncy and slippery that it refuses to stay on the needles half of the time leading to dropped stitches. I felt like a beginner whilst knitting this cardigan as I retrieved more slipped and dropped stitches than I had done in many years. I don't feel that the yarn is suitable for socks unless you like wearing them slouch style shuttering down your ankles as the rib has absolutely no stretch no matter how much I tightened the needles. With my arthritic grip the yarn was too silky for me to get an even tension but as I still have another ball of this yarn (in a different colour) then using it up in this way is better than wasting it as it would never have been finished as a pair of socks. I used a Sirdar pattern for this but I abandoned the broken rib pattern and just knitted it in stocking stitch as all of my efforts didn't show in pattern and the dropped stitches were a bugger to pick up in pattern.

Today has been another abysmal day. It has lashed it down with rain for most of the day which plays havoc with my osteoarthritis. I wish that I could win the lottery and move to somewhere warmer.My old bones don't like all this wet cold weather.

I must go back and get my blood checked again as I have done nothing but sleep all week. I am normally a person who exists on 4 or 5 hours per night sleep so I know something is wrong when I want to go to bed at 10.30pm and sleep until 7 am. I think that the mask from my sleep apnoea machine isn't fitting tightly enough and leaking as I feel as tired as I used to feel before I had the CPAP machine. It's either that I have too much carbon dioxide in my blood stream again or my iron tablets are not working and I am anaemic. I can't absorb ferrous sulphate tablets for some reason and yet the doctor keeps on prescribing them for me. This is not a new problem and I have to be prescribed iron in a different form or have iron injections but trying to convince the doctor of this is nigh on impossible. I know my body and know how it responds to certain things but they always know better. Annoying isn't it? Maybe if my iron levels are still very low he will believe me this time and prescribe something different.

Tomorrow I am meeting up with Sylvia and Kath to go to the Stitch and Craft show at Manchester Central (used to be G-Mex)I hope that it is better than last year as I was really disappointed at the large amount of card craft work and the very small amount of wool stalls there. Let's hope for better things this year. I don't plan on spending a great deal on wool but last year there was a very good book stall there and I bought a couple of crochet books. I could probably have got them cheaper online but there is nothing like a good browse in a book is there? I just wish more book shops sold knitting and crochet books as their selection is usually pitiful and it forces me to shop online.

Whilst at the show I will call in on the Bolton Knitting Noras Naked Knitting stall and perhaps get Sylvia to take my photo there with the stall as any photographic evidence of my involvement with the calendar is woefully small. Once the You Tube videos have been erased I will be left with just 1 photo, one group photo plus hopefully one calendar shot. Good job that I didn't buy a scrap book isn't it?