WIP Wednesday- everything edition (again)

So, apparently when I get busy this blog falls a bit by the wayside…in a bid to catch everyone up with what I’ve been doing, another everything WIP Wednesday!

1) I did, in fact, sew the sleeves into the OLAS cardigan. It’s now blocking by the radiator. Then I’ll cut the yarn ends and sew in the buttons and pockets. Still on track to finish for next weekend when my friend comes to visit to collect it!

2) The headband is nearly finished. I have a decision in front of me- do I use a couple of buttons to hold it closed, or just sew it??? I only have one button, so I would need to order another one online, which I think shouldn’t be a problem… (Edit to add: I can’t find the original button, so sewing it together it is)

3) I did a short row heel! My mother’s first sock is coming along swimmingly now! I also decided to go with a pattern, rather than make up my own which would need more attention. This is Hermione’s pattern, so it’s easy to get into the rhythm.

4) I (nearly) finish-finished my cross stitch (I guess this is a FO Friday but it can hide in here!). I gathered the fabric at the back, but I can’t stick the felt to the back because I appear to have misplaced my superglue…*facepalm*. Ahh well.

5) More spinning! On Saturday the spinning group met again and I finished off all the blue. Now to decide- do I start knitting the scarf now or wait until I’ve finished spinning all the yarn??? (Side note: could you please tell me what the spinning and knitting widgets on the side say? They’re coming up as innacurate for me, but I’m not sure if it’s because wordpress isn’t updaing the widgets or my laptop isn’t updating the widgets). (No picture because it’s just more cute skeins which I haven’t yet washed. Anyone want to give me some tips about washing handspun skeins???)

6) I ordered some things…the kingfisher sock yarn, more knitting needles and some sock yarn to get free shipping. And then some project bags for socks. Gotta keep knitting socks 😀 (No picture on this beause it hasn’t arrived yet 😦 )

7) I updated all the pictures on my ravely at the weekend, and in the process found a circular knitting needle I had forgotten I owned, in a scrap project. Naturally, this meant I had to knit some more squares on both my scrappy projects. They’re coming along nicely (but I still need to knit socks to feed the small squares one) (No pic because scrappy projects start looking the same after a while!)

8) No progress has been made on the wolf cross stitch. After the OLAS cardigan, this will become the main priority until it’s finished (or I get bored of it) I think. (No picture because no progress!)

9) I (badly) darned a sock! I think it was a knot in the yarn which had come free, but I darned a row above it as well as the row the yarn ends were on, and after a while it should start felting together nicely. And that will hold the ends in, so I decided to be lazy and not darn them in that well 🙂

Extreme Stash Enhancement

So, I graduated on Friday. And then on Saturday I went on a yarn crawl with my old friends from Uni. I bought rather a large amount of yarn…2.1kg to be precise. Totally worth it, even if it technically wasn’t everything I wanted to get…*whistles innocently*

So I’m knitting 9 pairs of socks for my mum, specifically out of the WYS bird range. Which involved buying 17 balls of yarn for contrasting toes and heels (they didn’t have kingfisher so I’ll get that online later). The contrasting colours are a bit dull, but they match perfectly which is amazing (the WYS website lists which yarns work as contrasting colours, which is reall nice). My original plan was to use the leftovers to knit hexagon flowers (centre hexagon in the bird yarn, surrounded by plain colour hexagons) into a blanket using the Beryll pattern, but now I’m also thinking that I could knit another 9 socks the other way around, so bird yarn for toes and heels and the main part in plain yarn and pattern. And then do a smaller scrap blanket with just random placement. We shall see…

I *think* these are matched correctly…I will check before I start knitting them!

I also (as promised) bought the yarn and buttons for buttonbox. Plus an emergency skein in case. So that’s the other 400g.

I also got a cross stitch kit as a present from my mum as a ‘congratulations’. It’s going to be amazing, but I really can’t justify starting it anytime soon 😦 I just have so much other stuff to do first! It’s pretty much just in shades of blue and grey, with some red for berries on the bushes, and (apparently) beads and sparklies. I just can’t see them without opening the kit which I’m not going to do yet. Still very exciting 😀

And finally- this doesn’t really count as new stash, as I got it over Christmas- when I went to stay with a friend and we went to visit someone, and they decided to give both me and my friend a crochet Christmas tree decoration (I am hilariously amused that this both describes what it is and what it’s for…)

New stash: Christmas edition

O…kay, so I may have gone slightly overboard… But it’s Christmas, so who can resist really? (Actually, now I’m thinking about it, it was 3 balls of yarn and two cross stitch Christmas tree ornaments, oh and a new set of sock needles…)

So, three more balls of sock yarn (one of which has already been started…naturally!)

and some more cross stitch ornaments!  (Even though I haven’t done the Mill Hill kit I got ages ago…)

That’s it! No more craft purchases expect for already planned projects! That means (off the top of my head, I reserve the right to have forgotten things!) yarn for a masc buttonbox (one of the jumpers I talked about making) and the sock yarn for my mum’s Christmas socks. Oh, and anything else I need for other Christmas presents. I think that’s it. Let’s see how well this goes! (And a set of scales, as I would really like to start measuring how much yarn I use in a year!) Right, I should get back to crafting, I have 20+ things to make (it was 19, then I remembered the wolf cross stitch, so we’re up to 20 plus assorted extras)

WIP Wednesday- wolf edition (with bonus stash enhancement)

Wolf focus again this week!

We were here, at 20.5 hours

My vague original plan was to go up and around anti-clockwise, which I started doing for a while, and then I got bored and decided to move the fabric and head over to the bottom right corner. I’m still having fun with this, but it’s starting to creep towards the ‘I really want this done already’, which is annoying. My normal routine when cross stitch hits the ‘finish me already’ is to stick it in time-out, which I don’t really want to do (because I want it finished…see the problem?). It can stay out for now, mostly because nothing else really needs finishing, so I can concentrate on it.

Anyway, 5.5 hours further along (to a grand total of 26 hours so far on this thing), we’re at here

As I mentioned rather excitedly at the weekend, I’m not only about 7 inches away from being finished on my mum’s Christmas shawl. Excellent news, but no new photo because a) it looks exactly the same as last time and b) I left it at work. Oops. Use your imagination 😉

And now for the bonus stash enhancement: I got myself some new interchangeable knitting needles 😀

These are the addi clicks long tip interchangeables. The 4.5mm needles are missing because naturally I had to try them out 😉 I managed to unclick them within one round of knitting the sleeves, but I think that was because I hadn’t twisted them in properly (they have to go in quite a way, then sideways then pull out a bit). Having rescued all my stitches and reconnecting them, they seem to be working fine now 🙂

And because I can’t just order knitting needles from the online yarn shop, I had to get some more sock yarn too 🙂

This is 400g of sock yarn from West Yorkshire Spinners, in a variety of colours. Socks!

 

Start-it Sunday and some new stash

So, last Sunday I went to Hobbycraft. Gotta love popping home to visit the parents and them suggesting a trip there!

I picked up three cross stitch kits, and promised to knit my mum a shawl over Christmas (lucky her!)

Firstly: a new start! It will eventually say ‘make today amazing’

I didn’t think the start recording how long it’s taking me to make this but hopefully I’ll remember for the other kits I have! When this one is finished, it will go in a hoop as a Christmas present for one of my friends, who expressed a desire to fill her house with hand-made things 🙂

I also got a similar one for myself

I’m looking forward to making this for myself, it’s so bright and colourful! Again, will go in a hoop when it’s finished.

And finally, a gorgeous wolf head!

This is also quite small- 5 by 7 inches I think. But it’s on 18 count, so detailed and fiddly to do! Again, looking forward to doing this when I get around to it!

So much to do, so little time! (And I may or may not have ordered the yarn for another 2 jumpers, but it hasn’t yet arrived so I can’t talk about that yet…)