It’s looking really nice. However, I appear to have an adequate amount of yarn left to do…another one. But the second one I need to do has to be in a different colour so….

What did I find hard? NOt much. I had a mental blip finishing off the edging and failed to read the instructions correctly and I found the sleeves a little harder than expected. But all told, the pattern itself was easy to follow so I am really happy with how it’s turned out. Hopefully I’ll be wearing it by the weekend.

Photographs to follow.

Because of the order in which things arrived at me from the iPod – I don’t know why – I got to listen to all of the second half – allegedly – of the unabridged version of Good Omens. While I was doing the cardigan.

I have been living with the cardigan since before Christmas. It’s this cardigan – I keep linking to it because I am slowly making progress about it. Anyway, yesterday, after a fiasco called “not reading the pattern properly” I wound up contacting the designer via Ravelry for guidance on “what does this mean.” With the benefit of the response and a good night’s sleep plus one lot of laundry and some food, I now don’t understand why I didn’t understand how to finish off the body of the cardigan but at any rate, by 9pm the main body of the cardigan was finished last night and some of one of the sleeves was done.

The cardigan is still – after another afternoon of crocheting, pulling a part, counting shells and wondering how it is I can’t count to 4 on a Sunday afternoon when it’s no problem for me ot count to 345, for example – not finished. But it’s almost there; in fact if i really, really was motivated, I could finish it tonight. But I’d be dead from grape coloured cotton. All that remains is the left sleeve and having spent the guts of 3 hours on it this afternoon, I’ve had enough for now. I will go back to it – again – tomorrow and hopefully finish it sometime Tuesday or Wednesday. Then I will order more yarn in a different colour and do another one.

In the meantime I am contemplating going back to a long laid aside skirt, a necklace or possibly the pineapple square doily that’s hiding beside my bed at the moment. In the meantime, I am contemplating ordering this. Which probably means I need more sleep.

I am at a cross roads. I have followed the pattern to the letter, and am now trying to decide whether to do another repeat of the four rows required for the pattern. To be honest, I thought it would be necessary because I (a) am quite tall and (b) like my cardigans to be long and (c) until I tried it on, I really figured it would be very short. It turns out to end at a place that I’d never normally want a cardigan to end and yet, it’s hanging in such a way as to suggest I might yet be able to get away with it. But I still wonder would it be nicer were I to actually do the extra repeat and maybe two of them. It’d take about 2 hours I reckon which in the grand scheme of things is not a huge amount of time. Ideally I could abandon the plans to make a chocolate cake this evening and just do crochet instead.

If I were right I’d model the work in progress but frankly I’d need time to set that up and I am not in the mood just now.

Instead, I just hung it on the computer and used the iPhone to shoot it. Very easy.

Sleeves still to go and the picot row that I can’t do until I decide whether to do the extra pattern repeats or not. I have to say however the cardigan already looks lovely when I try it on so what it will look like when I am finished is open to debate. As I have to make a second one for someone else, it’s some relief that it seems to be going according to plan so far.

On the plus side, i discovered I’ve got great, great neighbours. The copper pipe for the garden tap burst today courtesy of the continuing subzero temperatures. I use that tap to clean stuff like kite equipment during the summer; but it hadn’t been turned on for quite a while until it burst today.

Unlike gas fires and electronic equipment, plumbing is not something I even know where to start. My tool box consists of a Skipper Swiss army knife and that’s about it. Next door told me to try the guy next to them again; he might be able to help. He very kindly fixed it for me. I’m really grateful.

I’ve spent the evening doing crochet and watching Catalyst by Cabrinha Kites just to see what sunshine looks like. Currently it is snowing (again). The crochet is coming along. Technically I have just one pattern repeat to go for the main part of the cardigan I am making right now but as I tend to like these things a little longer, I will probably do two extra repeats. All going well then I will start at the sleeves tomorrow. I think I have an adequate supply of yarn for that as well, which is helpful.

I’ve lots of things I want to do and getting in the way is the weight of feeling that I don’t actually have time. I think part of this is cabin fever. Courtesy of the condition of the roads lately, I struggle home from work, once in the door I don’t have any desire to leave. This means I haven’t been climbing in about 3 weeks which is really starting to get on my nerves. As there’s about 4 inches of snow outside again, I can’t see this changing tomorrow.

I  got Amazon.com vouchers for Christmas this year. I have decided to use them on American books I can’t get in Ireland or on amazon.co.uk. I cannot use the vouchers on amazon.co.uk, you see.

So I figured, let’s use the opportunity. I have a couple of main interests, namely 1) kitesurfing 2) photography 3) crochet and 4) digital art. I figured there must be books published in America that would be nice to have but that I’d never consider buying because they cost too much to ship or something. I’ve started looking under crochet.

The idea is that I find a crochet book that looks like it’s got interesting designs in it and which is not by Doris Chan because I can get her books here, likewise Kristen Omdahl or Lily Chin, and then I check it out on ravelry.com. So far, this is not working according to plan.

A brief look at the photography section is revealing loads of books I don’t want, and none that I do want. Part of that is me not being sure what I do actually want.

I started with this, donated by Eamon (thanks Eamon)

and worked my way through this stage:

and this stage

and got to

here

There’s still some tightening work to be done on it but it’s no longer a mess all over the living room floor. And it’s no longer a pile of old rope.

I followed the guidelines here to create the knot – it’s called an ocean plait – and it’s currently about 2 feet by 15 inches.

The thing which struck me most was how tiring it was to do for the first hour or so – this is when you are laying out the rope. Lots of moving about and bending and walking with ends of rope and hopping up and down. When it’s about twice the size as it is in the picture, ie, tightened up a good bit, you don’t do so much moving around, just a lot of rope pulling. If you’re lucky you find mistakes comparatively quickly (they aren’t that easy to miss anyway).

I want to do another one, strangely enough. I know this one is not quite finished but it won’t take so long tomorrow or Thursday.

It’s very therapeutic, just pulling the rope every which way. And I didn’t even get rope burn. In an ideal world, if my flu jab doesn’t lay me out, I’ll go climbing tomorrow – not much opportunity between here and Christmas otherwise – and I’ll show it to the people who were wondering what on earth I  was taking a pile of old rope around with me.

In front of me the cardigan and it’s the cardigan that demands attention tonight. I need to rip it out. At least I hadn’t that much done.

The cardigan is beautiful, or at least, it looks it on the picture. Somehow I counted the foundation row stitches wrong by about six and thus when I came to the end of Row 1, I still had six stitches from nowhere. Bah. Bah BAH. I need to get stuck into it and see if I can actually make it happen because if I can, my niece wants one too and if it looks feasible she shall have it for Christmas, I mean sometime in the next century. She’ll need to be thinking about a colour but I reminded her about that one on twitter.

I hate ripping stuff out. I know it’s normal. I know everyone goes through it. I know that the new technical term is frogging and I don’t care. It’s all time that wasn’t all that productive. The plus point on this occasion is, I’d only gone one row.

I want to get it started because I also want to start work on this skirt as well that might just only take me a day of solid work to do and I can’t start it until I’ve got the cardigan more or less done. I need to get yarn for it as well but like all the US patterns it’s given for a 5 ply I can’t get here so we’re going with a DK cotton instead. That I will order from Scotland where it appears to cost something like 40% less than it does in Ireland.

All Doris Chan designs. I love her stuff. I’m also looking for a small kind of a shrug thing that I can wear at work to keep my arms and shoulders warm. It has been glacial in the office lately, yesterday, for example, when I didn’t have the tonne weight of pure very expensive wool shawl with me. Why’s this I made it again? So am on the look out for something I can throw together quickly and maybe get some not terribly expensive wool for. Something like this for example.

Okay, not getting anywhere here.

Mondays suck. This one in particular. It was bloody cold getting up this morning; I was tired because I did Dublin/Cork/Dublin twice in just about 24 hours, and I was later back than I intended to be, and the drive was harder than it usually is. I don’t know why. I ate loads of junkfood on the way back – Taytos unpeeled crisps are a) addictive and b) indescribable. I use that word to describe things I can’t quite find a good reason to eat and yet, can’t stop eating when I start. I wish they had not been invented.

Today then, also I left work early with the intention of getting double pointed knitting needles. I don’t knit as a general rule which means most of the needlework toys I have tend to be crochet related rather than knitting. Although they weren’t strictly necessary, I desired a set of double pointed needles such as I would probably never need again (but probably have to buy in a different size the next time I bought them). There was a minor glitch though at 10 to 5 when I discovered that the knitting shop was closed. Early/for the day. I don’t know. I had to live without the dpns to finish the item I was finishing and can’t now talk about. As items go, it wasn’t a total disaster. I learned a lot from it. I discovered I could, actually, knit something without the benefit of a pattern. This is no bad thing because frankly I find the knitting patterns to be in a foreign language (compared to crochet patterns which are generally crystal clear).

I decided to have a second go, but with a different set of yarn, and I remember that in one of the stash boxes, there was the remnant of a ball of wool which I bought last year to make a shawl with. That shawl was a) very expensive and b) highly useful as it kept me warm in work and given I sit next to a 1960s window, this is a Good thing. But it left me with a useless amount of very expensive wool which I didn’t know what to do with, until today. It meant I had to look into the stash box.

Stash boxes are bad. I have a problem. I buy yarn. I even occasionally buy it for specific projects. This is why, for example, there are 30 balls of Schewe microfibre in that box, along with 6 balls of something by Patons and a load of 2 ply for a skirt which I need to rip out. There are 2 balls of some sort of mohair along with 2 balls somewhere else which is probably not enough to do anything much with. Anyway, I digress. I decided, in my wisdom to start registering the stash on the Ravelry site. It was depressing.

I have yarn all over the place. Right now, beside me, are two balls, or ends of balls; the remnant of expensive wool which I mentioned above, and the remnants of the ball that I used to make the experiment last night. There are four balls in another bag beside me in the process of being turned into a scarf, well, until I run out of it, that is. I will because when I tried to calculate how much I’d need, I got it wrong. There is a little box of very light thread that was bought for the purpose of making very fine lace jewellery and in my craft room I’m not entirely sure what there is but definitely the start of another half a dozen projects. I need to stop buying and start crocheting.

Which is why I’m doing something off the wall with this ball of blue stuff that was bought for a shawl last week and actually Knitting with it. Two fecking needles. Well, circular thingies actually because only the best will do and anyway, last night, they were the  only 4mm needles I had. Everything else – the paltry selection, that is, is for thicker wool.

I’d love a craft room that doesn’t look like my craft room now. As I rent, I don’t get to choose my furniture so there’s a bed in the craft room that’s “fitted” as in “ain’t coming out, girl”. Can’t even get it out of the room and down to the shed, for example. It’s high and soft. I hate it. Even though it has 4 drawers in which I can stash more yarn (all the Noro, for example), the tapestry (seriously), my diplomas (at least 3) and work documentation, and a pile of newspapers that published my photographs. I really want wall to wall shelfing and an armchair, and an iPod docking station. I’d be happy then.

Anyway, the 4mm needles are too light for this latest ball of yarn, so I must see if the others are any bigger (5.5mm would be useful. And then I will try not to feck up the pattern this time and, more specifically, the sewing together of the four little bits.

It’s a labour of love, this thing, a labour of a bit of love. I must be mad.

So I made this with my very own lillywhites, so far. Work in progress. Not currently frogged, nowhere close to being finished. The plan is for it to be a scarf. The reality is that I may run out of yarn rather sooner than expected as the amount used and the size of fabric created do not match my expectations. I’m using a 25mm knitting needle as the broomstick. I have found it easier to do this in bed.

Funny the way life turns out sometimes.

Bought one set of cardigan patterns which, if I am honest, there is no chance I’ll touch until I finish the cardigan that I recently started and am doing no work on because I’m just not motivated. But I saw some really nice Lang silk/mohair mix and picked up four balls of it for a project which shouldn’t talk more than about 10 hours if I get a rhythm going.

Lots of craft stuff. Lots of cardmaking stuff. Not so much crochet stuff. Some yarn but very little I couldn’t live without. The fact that I am swimming in the stuff – my mother says she has three boxes. I must have at least that and more too. I like the Lang stuff though; wish someone in Ireland would sell it. I prefer it to the Noro plus it’s half the price of the Noro and a good deal more regular – that’s the sound of frustration in the voice of someone whose household project with the Noro is going Nowhere.

The scarf though…I could go to the IBL in DCU to take photographs tomorrow (I will, probably, for a little while, just to see), and then go climbing myself and then spend the evening trying to get the broomstick lace to work. In some respects it’s easier without the broomstick lace than with. Could do with a slightly larger hook, however. Never happy.

I was hoping for more crochet books, or knitting lace books. I didn’t really find any I liked of either apart from the pattern book with 4 cardigans in it. I still have a yen to make a dress or a skirt but I didn’t see any yarn I liked for that (oh wait, maybe I might siphon off the Noro that I do have into a project there….hmmm….evil thoughts).

Anyway, have a new work in project and a deep desire to do some work on it this evening so time to go.