In the Making...

When these gorgeous new colours of Rico Soft Merino Aran came into A Good Yarn - well I may have got slightly obsessed. It’s not the first time I’ve used this yarn, nor the last. There’s a beautiful array of colours, it’s supersoft, pure merino, good yardage and a decent price too. I’ve got tons of knitting to do but they were beautiful and squishy and warm and well…. Last week, we had a lot of driving to do (he had a very nice birthday at Alton Towers Water Park) and Mr was happy to drive so over a few days I managed to get this lovely, squishy and colourful shawl finished. Can you tell I like it? The pattern is the Betsey Shawl by Amy Miller . Here's my Ravelry project page . It’s a very simple shawl and in my infinite wisdom, I thought I didn’t need stitch markers. Well, turns out I did. I was fine until I started the stripes and just assumed the double decreases lined up on the middle stitch. They don’t. This meant I had an extra stitch...

I got my spinning wheel out last week. It’s been quite some time since I did any spinning because my schedule has gotten a bit hectic. I had a bit of a craving to spin though. I finished what I had started – not good practice to leave singles for as long as I did but I didn’t have too many issues with it ( as long as you don’t look too close). The fibre is Frog Prince roving from hilltopcloud – it’s a blend of BFL, merino, bamboo and sparkle. Using my new WPI tool from hilltopcloud, it’s about 10 wpi, which makes it worsted weight. It’s 3 plied. There’s about 172m, so probably enough for a hat. I’ve started another lot of fibre. This one is from Countess Ablaze .It’s BFL and I got it quite some time ago. I hoping to make this into a 3ply fingering weight yarn. There’s about 164g of fibre, so that should be plenty. I’m not sure at the moment whether I’m just going to go with the flow or navajo ply it. I’m just going to spin the singles first then...

The Woolly Wormhead Mystery Knitalong 2014 has started. I started mine as soon as it was out on Saturday morning – didn’t have a lot of knitting time Saturday but it was done by lunch on Sunday. I won’t post a picture, as I know some people like the surprise. If you are interested in seeing the progress so far then follow this link . I think for a second there, I may have forgotten about the Mystery Hat Knitalong. It’s got a bit colder recently here and I was thinking about my winter wardrobe – so I thought I could knit a warm winter hat. Ahem… so bought yarn, then remembered I was already going to be making one! Oh well, they’re different colours, so I will have two new hats! The pattern I’ve used is Kernmantle – another Woolly Wormhead pattern. I just takes one 100g skein of yarn for the largest size. I’ve used Malabrigo Merino Worsted in Vaa for this one. It's a beautiful deep bottle green colour which is quite hard to capture in the photograph.