Collage

Collage
Hello and thanks for visiting my blog. I have been knitting on and off for 50 years and I recently learned to crochet. I love looking for wool bargains and making them into something useful. I mainly knit for charity. I occasionally knit for myself and family members if I find a really good pattern or if they ask nicely!!

Saturday 20 February 2016

Scarf and hat set finished....




It's been all about grand finishes here this week.  We now have lovely new floors and a very strong oak staircase that will still be here in a hundred years time.  I have miles of new skirting boards to paint.  This week I finished the dining room and all the furniture is back in place.  Woo hoo!  The lurid background in the photo is actually an antique dining table that Hubby paid an obscene amount of money for at an Antiques Fair.  It will be starring in a lot of my future photos and I promise it looks better in real life than it does here!

I finished the scarf I have been knitting for some time.  It is a one row pattern.  Sadly, I have mislaid the link.  But there are lots of one row patterns and I can recommend them as very therapeutic mindless knitting.  I was using 6mm needles and two strands of 4ply together. I'm really pleased with the soft texture.  It will be very warm.  My scarf is 59" long and weighs 97g.  It definitely took longer to make than a crochet scarf.  But sometimes I am just in the mood for knitting.

The hat is from the Two By Two Basic Beanie pattern by Kate Gondwana.  I love this pattern for its simplicity and many sizes from baby to large adult.  It is really written for dk yarn, but 4ply doubled worked fine.  I knitted the "younger child" size and used 22g of yarn.  

These will eventually be going off to Operation Orphan.  They would make a nice matching set for someone, though I don't really expect them to end up on the same child.  They will probably be separated at the sorting stage and it would be a very lucky moment if they managed to reunite.

Tuesday 2 February 2016

Nothing much happening here.....



.....well that is not strictly true.  The downstairs of my house is slowly being ripped apart and put back together again.  Our kitchen has been replaced and all the floors have been renewed including the floorboards and joists.  We have taken the opportunity to put insulation under the floors which should make this cold house a bit more comfortable. 

The carpenter is now working in the last room.  Woo hoo!  Then I will be able to put all the furniture back where it belongs and come back down from the bedroom where I (and the poor cat) seem to have been hiding away for weeks!  To make matters worse the road outside my house is being dug up by the National Grid.  So I am being bombarded by drilling noises from all directions.

The dust gets everywhere.  So my crafting activities are restricted to the evenings when the cloud of dust has settled.  I don't have anywhere decent to take photos at the moment.  But I managed to take a photo of my current project.  It is a scarf that I am knitting with two 4 ply yarns held together.  The variegated yarn came from a charity shop and the plain blue was donated to me.  I chose to use 6mm needles and the texture is beautifully fluid and soft.  I'm using a one row pattern.  It is so simple and mindless as every row is the same.  

I can't remember where the pattern came from.  So I sadly can't add a link. But experienced knitters will probably be able to work it out from just looking at the photo!
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