Heather Knits

Where Heather waffles on about knitting and anything else which crosses her mind.

Friday, December 30, 2005

The Return of the Fingerless Gloves

Here finally are some pictures of the fingerless gloves:



Knitted from Lucy Neatby Celestial Merino in the colourway Blue Vesuvius, bought from Get Knitted at Ally Pally a couple of months ago. I used 2.5mm needles and made up the pattern as I went along, although I did write it down so I could make the right glove to match the left! The yarn is really nice to work with and a beautiful colour, I am hoping that it will wear well too.

They have already been test driven yesterday on a walk up Box Hill with the family and they were nice and warm.

We had a lovely Christmas with the in-laws, lots of board game playing and a bit of knitting. Then spent yesterday at my sister's with my parents too. I will get round to taking a picture of the curly whirly scarf soon.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas all!

I'm afraid still no photo of the fingerless gloves and we are at the in-laws now without the camera so it will have to wait til we get home again. It always seems to take longer to wrap presents and then pack everything in the car than you think it will.

I have jumped on the band wagon, rather late, and knitted a curly whirly scarf in the last couple of days, photos will follow soon, it was good fun, although the cast-on 700 stitches part took me about 3 hours!

I'm managing to get in a bit of knitting in between all the eating and the board game playing. I even won at canasta this morning which is unheard of.

Happy Christmas and hope you have lots of lovely knitting time :-)

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Fame and Fortune

Well not quite, but a bit of fame at any rate.

The picture of me in my knitted wedding dress is up at the Ample Knitters site. I can't remember if I have extolled the virtues of the Ample Knitters list before on the blog, anyway, it is a great list particularly for people on the larger side, or anyone who deviates from the expected proportions which patterns are written for. There is always lots of advice on how to cope with one part taking a different size to another part, and how to alter a pattern which you love but isn't quite right.

I am hoping to get pictures of the finished fingerless gloves done tonight. Unfortunately I haven't worked out yet how to photograph both my own hands simultaneously so I will wait for Paul to get home from work.

Monday, December 19, 2005

Fingerless Gloves

I braved the loft, (and the rubbish in the spare room which is in the way of me getting to the step ladder to get into the loft) and got the Christmas decorations down last night, so I am feeling properly christmassy now :-) I do like fairy lights. Ours are multicoloured but not flashing. We don't have a tree this year as there really isn't space for it, but I have put the lights round the mirror in the lounge, and also put some tinsel up. Of course the knitted beaded baubles have also come out and are hanging from the shelves. I must remember to take a picture of them.

In the mean time, here is the left hand of the fingerless gloves:



The yarn is Lucy Neatby Celestial Merino in the colour Blue Vesuvius, bought from Get Knitted at Ally Pally. The colour is absolutely beautiful, very bright and I love it! I had first thought that I was going to knit a pair of socks with this, but then read on someone's blog (I'm afraid I can't remember who it was) that the yardage was quite short and that they had had trouble getting a full pair of socks out of one skein (100g). So it languished in a bag while I thought about it, and worried about the idea of knitting a pair of socks and running out of yarn just before the second toe. Then I had the idea that I would like to knit some fingerless gloves and suddenly this yarn seemed ideal, after all gloves are smaller than socks. In fact I am nearing the end of the right hand and there is plenty of yarn left so I don't know what I was worrying about!

Here is the same yarn demonstrating my early Christmas present to myself, a swift from Fibre Crafts:



Its so much fun, I think I might be spending quite a lot of time winding balls of yarn now :-)
The only problem is that the only suitable table we have to attach it to is the dining table and from there I can't see the telly or hear the radio unless I have it turned up very very loud. I shall work on this one.

Anyway, I think I shall get back to the right glove, with the help of a hilarious Jeeves and Wooster audio book from the library.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Whew!

Long time, very little knitting. I have now finally wrapped all the presents I can so far (3 are still winging their way from Amazon as I write) and have written most of the Christmas cards. I still haven't got the Christmas decorations out of the loft but you can't have everything! I think the trip to the loft is a nice little job for this afternoon.

Some knitting has been done around here and I finally bring you the two pairs of socks I knitted as Christmas presents.

They are both knitted from 4ply Alpaca from Texere, although oddly the plum tweed colour I used for Mummy's socks is thinner yarn than the cornflower blue I used for Annie's - it isn't thinner by much though.
So first, socks for Mummy:

And these are socks for Annie:


They look a little odd not on feet but I'm afraid I don't have any sock blockers to photograph them on and they are smaller than my feet.

The alpaca is lovely to knit with and I hope they will be nice warm socks. I have bought some of the same yarn for myself in a bright purple which I will try out soon. I was slightly concerned about the inelastic-ness of alpaca but hopefully with a ribbed leg they shouldn't fall down too much. They are all wrapped up now and in the box of stuff to go to Annie's house.

I am hoping things will calm down here a bit now and I can get on with a bit of knitting! I have played in 4 Christmas concerts in the last two weeks with Barnes Concert Band, two of them were outdoors and I had a brainwave that I could knit myself fingerless gloves that would allow me to play without freezing my hands off. Unfortunately as is often the way with these things my brainwave came a little late in the day and I had managed little more than a wrist warmed by the first concert. For the concert last Wednesday though I had knitted one glove so at least my left hand was warm. So if anyone was at the concert on Wednesday at the London Wetland Centre I was the trombonist wearing one lurid turquoise knitted glove. I'll post pictures soon. You never know I may even knit the other one soon even though the deadline has now passed.