Dragon Rambles

The first of the year, so time to look back on the last year. It started off great with a visit from friends from Australia. Then on the night they flew home, I flew to Iceland for 2.5 days.

Unfortunately after that, work took over. But in August I decided to claw my life back. And I started crafting and blogging again. Got quite a bit done too. On both the sewing…

and knitting front.

There’s another knitting project I did this month that I can’t show you yet, because the friend I made it for hasn’t got it yet. Ok, I haven’t posted it yet. I was waiting for the xmas – new year postal break to be over so it didn’t go missing.

And of course there was the big decision to change career path. So that wraps up 2011, and 2012 is looking to be a great year. So hopefully, in a year’s time I’ll be here showing you even more craft and have had a good 6 months or more under my belt in a new job, new town, and be very happy. Happy 2012 all!

I’m linking this up to Fresh Sewing Day at Lily’s quilts again.

Yep, I know I was going to pop in yesterday to post feast photos and recipes, but I’ve been distracted. I got a great ball of yarn for xmas from Granny. And since I was planning on starting my first pair of socks this xmas, it seemed kismet. So this first sock was cast on xmas day after I’d finished feasting, and I finished knitting it last night. Grafted the toe closed today, and voila, I show you what has kept me distracted the last couple if days.

Now to make the second one

ETA: What WAS I doing with my foot?! It looks very oddly shaped. I assure you, my foot is really quite normal

I’ve been absent for almost two weeks. Sorry about that. Been busy job hunting and had a lot less craft time than I’d like. This weekend I’m busy making my yearly chocolate offering. This year I decided on fudge, instead of the usual chocolate truffles. Because it’s faster. All of the fudge I’m making has chocolate in it, be it dark, milk or white. On the list is: choc-walnut, rum and raisin, rocky road, peppermint, white-choc pistachio, cherry-coconut, and choc-caramel. Two have been made, I’m just waiting for my grocery order to be delivered, because when I was stocking up on Monday night, I forgot to get butter!

I’m also busy preparing food for our group’s xmas lunch at work tomorrow. Normally we just head to the local pub and have burgers or such, this year I thought it’d be fun to cater for it myself, as I haven’t done that since I moved here. I’m going for a finger food buffet. So I’ve got cheese and spinach filos, mushroom quiches, mini pizzas, vol au vents, vegemite scrolls, rosemary and cheese biscuits, cheese and cracker platter, and a fresh veg platter (celery, carrot, cucumber) with homemade french onion dip. I figure that should be enough savouries. On the dessert side, I’ve got eclairs (going to try my hand at chiox pastry for the first time), belgian cookies, date and pecan pinwheels, something chocolate (either choc mousse or little choc cakes), and something fruity (haven’t decided what but I have both blueberries and strawberries in the freezer so hopefully I’ll think of something).

And I also need to try and make a softie. Never made one of those before, so this should be interesting. So, today will be busy, although there’s onlu so much food prep and cooking I can do today, the rest will have to be done tomorrow morning.

On the craft front, I showed you my first colourwork mitt, well I didn’t wait until the next weekend to start the second mitt, in fact I was finished last Thurs and had already started wearing them to work before last weekend.

Not a great photo, and please ignore the mess on the floor, but here they are.

Since I spent a week of knitting time on these, by cardi was ignored. But I picked up Hazeline last weekend, and it was then sitting just two rows short of finished until yesterday evening, when I finished it. It still needs to have the top grafted together and then be blocked, but here it is.

So, there is me all caught up. I hope you’ve all been well. I’ve been slowly catching up with everyone’s blogs from my blogland absence, but there were a lot so any comments I left were rather short. Sorry about that. Ok, back to food prep. Everyone enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Every year I buy myself a christmas present. The guidelines are the same as buying gifts for other people: what I’d like to have but haven’t budgeted money to buy. My gifting day is fluid though, and I allow myself to get it any time from the beginning of November. Last year, it was a Le Creuset casserole dish. This year, it was the Ghastlies fabric. I had never heard of this until I stumbled across a blog hop celebrating the fabric a few weeks ago. After much internet hunting and waiting (not so) patiently for it to arrive from the states, the parcel faeries kindly visited yesterday.

I’d still like to get some of that top one in smoke, but the shop I bought this at didn’t have it in stock. They did however have it priced very nicely, and the customs people passed it through without extra charges, so it came out to a very bargain buy.

Which is probably good, since I put an order in to Old Maiden Aunt for yarn to knit Anne Hanson’s Hourglass throw. Handpainted alpaca/silk may be a bit decadent, but it’ll make a beautiful throw and the day I placed the order, I just felt the need to be bad. Besides, since I’ve been feeling a tad antisocial this month, I was able to combine my spending money and my socialising money to pay for it without blowing the budget. Win, win

So yesterday I settled in to a day of knitting because I really want to get my cardy done and I know I’ll want to ignore it once my shiny new yarn arrives. I’m still not quite up to starting the sleeves, but I’m only 12 rows on one of the front pieces away. As this photo clearly shows.

It was a great day. What could beat snuggling up to knitting, catching up with this season’s House and the latest (pretty awesome) episode of Private Practice. I even had company: Santa! But, he lost his head in all the excitement. I really don’t think he’ll be the same again.

As promised, here’s my update on my yummy winter warmer cardy that I’ve been working on lately. Looks like I’ll be up to the sleeves by the weekend.

You might think that being in bed sick for a few days would mean no getting up to mischief or spending money. You’d be wrong.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across Artist’s Palette Yarns. Or more specifically, I stumbled across a very interesting yarn listing there: Heirloom gossamer. 60% merino, 20% silk, 20% cashmere….. And more importantly…. 2600m per 100g! Yep, truely gossamer yarn. Perfect for knitting some of those Heirloom Knitting projects I have in my queue.

At the time, there were no skeins listed, so I emailed asking if this was still a stocked item. The lovely Juliet responded, yes!, but that she hadn’t dyed any for a while and if I let her know what sort of colours I liked, she’d put some in the pot that weekend. My response of jewel tones was met with enthusiasm, so I sat back to see what the offering would be.

Fast forward to Monday when I was in bed feeling like crap but having already slept for most of the day. What’s a girl to do but to pull out her ipad and go through all her favourite sites looking at the pretty yarn . What a nice surprise I should get when I saw that Juliet had added some heirloom gossamer to the site (just that morning, I found out later).

First I saw this one (photo from Artist’s Palette, therfore it’s only fair that it’s linked to where you can go and buy a skein. Or two).

I drooled and thought that would be the one to buy. Then I saw this one.

After some umming and ahhing over which to choose. My stuck-in-bed-feeling-like-crap brain decided that the second one would make a beautiful Princess shawl and the darker one would be great for the Wedding Ring shawl or lerwick lace shawl. So I bought enough of each colour for those planned projects.

And they arrived yesterday

Of course, that finishes off this month’s and uses half of next month’s budgeted spending money, but hey, I was sick

Ok, ok, lets be honest. I’m not sure I could have decided between the two colours even if I was feeling normal. And we all know that the tried and tested solution to the question “which do I get?”, is “both!”.

The pics don’t do this yarn justice. And in truth of colour, the original website photos are closest. I’d love to cast on one of these projects once I’m feeling better. But I know I won’t. I need to reaquaint myself with cobweb yarn before I take the plunge to gossamer. Plus, I currently don’t want to think about how long it’ll take to hand wind 2.6km of yarn from one skein. Let alone all five of them.

Did I mention that just over a week ago, I caved and started the Koi Rama mystery shawl? Well, I did. I had three friends on facebook talking about it, and I had that Seen the ocean from OMA, so I thought, why not. Of course, I started when the second clue (from four) was published, so I spent a big chunk of weekend catching up. Fast forward to Fri night and I took a good hard look at my progress. I was 10 rows into the third clue and I just didn’t like how it was going.

The first two clues, comprising the hem of the shawl, was very pretty, and in the designer’s normal style. But then the body was suddenly full of double yarn overs, making lots of big holes.

See? And this is before blocking! While there’s nothing wrong with this airy pattern, it just doesn’t look right to me. So I visited ravelry to see what it should look like. Nope, I’m doing it right, it’s supposed to look like that. A bit more thinking, and a comment from my friend’s on facebook that they too weren’t sure they liked it, and I made the decision to abandon this shawl. It just looks to me like it’ll be bottom heavy and I’d much rather use that beautiful yarn on something I like.

So….. Rip, rip, rip, down it comes.

Instead, I picked up the project that I had put down when I felt I just had to start the shawl: my blanket style cardigan, PattiAnn. I got quite a bit done by lunchtime on Sun.

But I decided it was a bit too much of a mindless knit. So I’m relegating it to my weekday evening project, and started Hazeline with the gorgeous Posh yarn I showed you. It doesn’t require much thought either, but since I also managed to get rather sick this weekend, I probably don’t want anything too mind bending right now. Maybe by next weekend I’ll be feeling up to starting a nice intricate lace project that’ll see me through the winter. Because, of course, it can’t really be called intricate unless it takes months to knit

Some furious knitting, combined with ignoring most of what I was supposed to be doing last weekend, meant I was able to finish Jaali on Tues night. I blocked it Wed and popped it in the post Thursday. Isn’t the colour just gorgeous!

I’ll definitely be buying some more. And the lace pattern is impressive given it’s a pretty easy knit.

With it on it’s way to it’s new home and with the sofa bed pulled out from one night of blocking, I decided to finally get around to blocking my Aria scarf too. It looked great before, but now? Loving it!

And there’s already something new on my needles

After my unsuccessful yarn shopping trip last Wed, I went back to Old Maiden Aunt Yarns and systematically worked my way through all the 4ply bases to look for colours where 2 skeins were available. Normally this would be easy, but remember, Lilith was on holidays so her shop was decimated. I narrowed my selection down to two different colours on two different bases, and decided I’d wait and see which one would be best for Granny.

Friday morning, I was not yet out of bed and a knock came at my door. Postie! But there was not just the one parcel, but two! Made my day.

First up was my OMA order. I got some merino/bamboo in bean nighe

And some alpaca/silk/cashmere in seen the ocean.

Both of these are beautiful and I think Granny would love them. But the bean nighe called to me the loudest, so I’ll use that first.

My second parcel was wool I’d kind of forgotten about. Not that I’d forgotten I wanted it, or what I wanted it for, just that I should be expecting a parcel. I’d gotten a good deal on some merino dk wool on ebay, 20 balls in all. In mulberry (lovely colour, looks better IRL).

Sound like a lot? Well I need it for this.

This will be my next project after I’ve knitted Granny’s shawl and sewn my coat together.

I actually made it down to the shops today instead of telling myself “tomorrow”, like I’ve been doing for the last 2 weeks. I decided to stop into my local yarn shop while I was there to pick up some yarn to knit Granny’s birthday present (since OMA is pretty much sold out until she’s back from holidays this weekend and can start making us some more pretties).

Of course, I found plenty of beautiful colours and bases that would work well, but finding two skeins of the same colour was the trick.

Ooh, those two will do nicely for Catkin.

Ah, here’s two of the same colour, and in 100% BFL, so perfect for those structured patterns I have my eye on that the silk or bamboo blends are no good for. Hmm, dark purple to black. Not really Granny’s colours? Oh well, it’ll make me a nice shawl.

Btw, the photo has completely washed out the colour. It’s much darker in real life.

Ah, now there’s a pretty yarn. Ok so it’s a silk blend and there’s only one skein of it but it’ll makeup something nice and maybe I can contact the seller for a second skein that sorta matches.

Now I’m thinking about it, have I ever actually seen Granny in pink? Green, yes. Blue, yes. Pink….., um……, not that I recall. But possibly. Hmm, maybe it’ll make up into something nice for my brother’s girlfriend. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do with it.

Now, what about yarn for Granny’s shawl. Oops, better hit the online shops again.