On The Hook: One More Washcloth

This is the last one, I swear!

Since finally getting the hang of crochet, or more specifically doing double crochet (I'm still working up to trying other stitches!) I've been getting my practice in by crocheting washcloths for the whole family.

I'm the proud owner of a rainbow washcloth (it'll be two once I've woven in the ends of a second one), my son has a green one with blue stripes, my older daughter has a pink one with purple stripes, while my younger daughter's is purple with pink edging. The only washclothless member of the family is the Spousal Unit.

It was suggested that blue might be the best colour for him, but the cotton I'm trying to use up for these washcloths is getting rather depleted, so I have dark blue, light blue, and a little grey in reserve in case either of those run out.

Cool colours.

As the dark blue ball had the most remaining, I started with that, last Friday evening after finishing up the edge of Miss 1's washcloth. This was entirely the wrong time of day to be crocheting with a dark blue yarn! I do have a neck lamp which is just the thing for these scenarios, but it needs a charge and was in a room with a sleeping toddler; I wasn't about to risk waking her (which would severely hamper my crafting plans), so I muddled on. The first couple of rows were especially tricky, but then I found my rhythm and it was just the start and end of the rows where I was really squinting.

At this stage, I'm happy enough hooking along, I'm planning a stripe pattern for this one, but I'm not following any particular pattern. I'll just go along in the dark blue for a while, maybe about 10cm, then add in either light blue or dark grey, and see where the mood takes me.

Making progress.

I'll share how it goes.

Happy Birthday to Me!

We're having a quiet family day at home, where I'm mostly pretending I have no chores to do and handing over all nappy changing and bum wiping duties to the Spousal Unit; I'm fairly certain the Birthday Bum Wiping Clause was one of the things we agreed to in our marriage vows.

Our original plan was that we would be in Wales this week, with my birthday weekend including a visit to Wonder Wool, but we've rescheduled that for next year instead after after my recent job change. My mum went along without me and sent photos of the squishable yarns as requested.

It's still been a very yarny sort of birthday.

Exciting new knitting book and beautiful birthday flowers.

I gave my husband a list of three colourwork books that I've had on my list for a while and highlighted The Doodle Knit Directory by Jamie Lomax as the one I coveted the most. He delivered and I spent breakfast flicking through it and feeling very inspired. I kept pulling up the hashtags for the various projects on Instagram and was delighted to find that there 'expansion packs' of doodle designs which can be bought and downloaded from the designer's site. I've already got my eye on the Edinburgh and Dinosaur packs!

I've also got money for a Wool Warehouse order so I've started building that. I've been wanting to try knitting socks for a while so have been planning out some colour combinations of the Yarnsmiths Merino sock yarns. Happily they're on offer at the moment.

My colour inspiration is some work dresses I've recently bought myself, since I wear leggings or tights with them, and then handknit socks poking out from my boots. I currently only have two handknit pairs of socks (courtesy of my Mum) so I need to stock up!

I've also got a Hobbycraft birthday voucher too, so my next stop is to shop the downloadable patterns there, just in case I run out of potential projects to knit.

When I started...

As an extra special treat, I also hid down the bedroom for a good hour and a half working on a jigsaw puzzle. I felt kind of bad avoiding the family for so long, though I had extended an invitation to my older kids to come join me (and in the end, they both did) but it was lovely to just get in the zone and power through with getting pieces into place.

... And when I finished.

This puzzle has been my white whale for about three years now. I started it in pregnancy with Miss 1 and, as it's a map of the world, there's a lot of blue! Couple in trying to do it around children, particular a grabby baby/toddler, and it's hardly any wonder it's been taking me a while! I do feel as if the end might be in sight now, I might even finish it by my next birthday!

Off The Hook: Pink Washcloth

When I decided I wanted to master crochet at long last this year, I grabbed my copy of The Bumper Book of Crochet and set out to work through it. 

I actually set out to do this about 3.5 years ago, but I didn't really know how to read the pattern I'd picked to try. And my crochet hook felt unnatural and awkward in my hand. And my tension was off. And all I could think while I wrestled with it was 'I could be getting so much knitting done right now'. So aside from a wonky rectangle, I didn't produce anything at all. 

This time I started at the beginning, skipped the first two projects (involving making jewellery by doing chain stitch) because I didn't have all the required extras, like beads, and set to making a washcloth.

And I recently finished my fourth washcloth! 

Artfully draped over my armchair.

This one is for Miss 4 and I wanted to practice changing colours so asked her to pick two. I knew the main colour she'd want would be pink before she even said; she's very much a pink child (despite all my attempts to aim for non-pink clothes for her). We ran through the other colour options for the second colour and she picked a purple shade.

Crocheting while presenting a radio show.

This is Stylecraft Naturals Bamboo & Cotton, actually purchased about four years ago and I've mostly used it for knitting in the past. These two colours are Rose and Raisin. It's a DK weight, but I'd say it's thinner than other DKs. I used a 3.5mm hook as recommended on the ball band.

This washcloth was my first time going off pattern slightly. Rather than following the instructions and starting with a chain of 35 stitches, I added on an extra ten. But then I didn't adjust the subsequent rows to make it square, so this washcloth is more rectangular than the others I've done so far.

Super satisfying stitches!

The border is in the purple and there's just a tiny wonky bit. I still need to improve my starting and finishing when I join on yarn for the edging. I maybe need to watch some videos to make sure I'm doing it right. There's one bit where the end I'd woven in popped out when I was adding the edging on and I think it's maybe untidy looking now, even though I managed to secure it in place again, but otherwise, I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

Of course, Miss 4 is yet to use it. She's worn it on her head and pretended it was a mask. It even got used as a blanket for a cuddly toy at one point. Maybe some day she'll use it to wash her face too!

On The Needles: City of Emeralds Hat

Do you ever get an itch to create something?

You know that feeling where you have the vaguest of vague ideas of what you want to make, without knowing the exact thing it is? That's how I was feeling in the run up to casting on for this hat.

I bought a ball of each colour of the Yarnsmiths Full of Beans DK yarn a while back but hadn't yet done anything with any of it. Full of Beans was a range of ten different variegated yarns, with a marled effect.

All of the pretty colours!

When I finished knitting the kids' teddies, I intended to go on to knit some doll clothes, but the needle tips I needed were tied up on another hat pattern. Instead I found myself drawn towards the organza bag containing the Full of Beans yarn.

With that decided, I needed to choose the project. Easier said than done.

I felt that the yarn would lend itself to something with a stitch pattern giving lots of texture and I felt like I wanted to knit a hat or a cowl; something with minimal making up required at the end. After a bit of searching, I kept finding myself looking at various colourwork effects, like stranding and mosaic knitting.

In the end, I narrowed it down to a hat pattern, using the Jumping colourway paired with black. I just had to pick an actual hat pattern. I narrowed it down to three and let my husband select the one I should go for; he picked the City of Emeralds pattern.

Teeny tiny bit of knitting.

I'm just at the very beginning of knitting it right now, so it's at that wonderfully wonky, nothing to see here sort of stage, but I took a photo of it anyway, just so in a few weeks from now we can all marvel at (hopefully) how much better it's looking.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter to everyone celebrating today.

Egg decorating by Miss 1, Miss 4, and Mr 7.

This year I decided not to go overboard with chocolate (aside from putting in an order for some dairy free chocs) and then my youngest's ticket was drawn in a local raffle and we received a huge hamper, including a stuffed bunny that's bigger than she is and many, many chocolate eggs!

The bonus is that the kids were all so tired after an Easter fun day in town, they went to sleep really quickly and I was able to get on with some crochet.

Off The Needles: Doll Teddies

My older kids each have a baby doll which is about the size of a small newborn. Miss 4 got hers for her third birthday and Mr 7 got his last Christmas. And since they joined the family, I've been asked to make things for them. 

This led to me falling down a rabbit hole of old doll clothing patterns. It doesn't take much for me to start collecting a particular genre of patterns, but my son's boy doll being short on clothing options was all it took.

A few weeks ago, I handed the stack of booklets to my kids to rifle through and pick out what they'd like me to make. And this was top of the list! 

Apparently, in a house filled with soft toys, what these particular soft toys needed more than anything else, was some soft toys of their own! 

Still, I couldnt refuse.

They knit up really quickly; the blue one for my son's doll was completed in two sittings (and that includes the sewing up too).

It was a good way to ease myself into reading the patterns in these older booklets. The embroidery could maybe be a bit better, but I've not heard any complaints from the dolls!

On The Needles: Wee Willie Winkie Hat

About a year ago, I had a voucher for a well-known online book retailer, so treated myself to the Twenty To Make: Knitted Baby Hats book by Lynne Rowe, mainly because when I had a look at the projects in it, they looked straight forward and pretty quick to knit.

And so a personal challenge was born!

I decided that I wanted to make at least one of each hat in the book and have usually had one on the go on my needles at all times since then. 

Technically, I have already made the Wee Willie Winkie hat once before, but I opted to make it in a self-striping yarn instead of the two colour version in the book. In the interests of fulfilling my challenge successfully, I decided that I had to give it another shot!

It actually took me two goes to get started with it. I made a mistake with the stranding yarn at the beginning and so ripped it out and started over. I'm sure for other knitters, this would be a pretty quick technique, but I was just knitting as and when I could, so it seemed to take forever for it to start growing.

Once I got onto the basic stockinette stripes I like I could see it growing much clearer, not least because every four rounds I change colour, so have a visible marker for my progress! I do like the colour combinations but as I started it while I was watching Wicked for the first time, I can't help but feel like I should have gone with a green and pink combo; that's maybe one to try with the next one I make!

Apparently this is the only photo of this project I've taken so far!

This week I finally got to the point where I could start decreasing. That's always a nice bit of any hat project, because you know that with every so many rounds you'll be losing stitches and will have less and less to work with. It's still rather slow going though. I'm only decreasing four stitches every three rounds, and I started with over 100 stitches on my needles! In another twenty or so rounds, I think I'll feel the difference a little more keenly.

As if the fact that I've been working on this hat off and on for about two months isn't enough, I have another reason to get my act together and finish it; Mr 7 has requested a top and bottoms for his baby doll and the pattern calls for the exact needle tips that are currently tied up on the aforementioned hat project. I do actually have those exact tips somewhere else in the house, but I have no idea where, so the best way to get them to turn up is probably to order some new ones. In the meanwhile, I'll frantically keep knitting in the hopes of freeing up these needles for knitting doll trousers.

Benmore Botanic Gardens

As I'm currently in between jobs, we decided to take a couple of daytrips off the island (as well as going places, meeting friends, and doing stuff on the island - it's been a busy couple of weeks!); the first of these was to Benmore Botanic Gardens.

It wasn't until we started planning our visit there that we realised just how long it has been since our last visit. Despite planning to go multiple times in the past few years, our last actual visit was in 2021 for my birthday. Miss 4 was Miss Not-Quite-1 back then, so she had no recollection of the place whatsoever; Mr 7 was only 3 and he thought he remembered Benmore, but once we arrived we realised he was thinking of somewhere else.

Benmore Botanic Gardens are a short drive from Dunoon, in Argyll and Bute, and is linked to the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. It's home to an avenue of giant sequoias as well as a huge collection of rhododendrons. Entry was £20 total for the Spousal Unit and I; entry for the children was free. 

The view crossing the bridge, we paddled in the water at that little bay on the right after lunch.

I'm pretty certain that something happens to you as you get older and wandering around looking at large collections of plants becomes an increasingly enjoyable pastime, I'm sure I didn't enjoy doing this as much when I was younger! I've noticed that other bloggers I follow have come to enjoy gardening and walking more as they get older, so maybe this is something that naturally happens as you age. Maybe there's hope for my own garden and my green fingers wil sprout in the coming decades!

The gardens are still recovering from the damage caused by Storm Éowyn a few months ago, so some paths are closed. Instead of entering the garden over an arching bridge, we crossed the car park and crossed a larger, car bridge to get into the gardens. Due to the closure of some paths, it took me a little while to find my bearings. We let the kids lead the way and they found some metal squirrel signs so we followed those to a squirrel hide. I don't remember going here before, though I think we did visit the pond once before.

I'd intended to visit the Golden Gates and the Fernery. We saw a sign saying that we were 12 minutes walk from the gates, so set off, but whoever made the sign didn't reckon on having an extremely determined and independent one year old. My youngest was dead set on walking so it took us more than twice that long to get there and by that point we figured it was better to head back for our picnic rather than venturing on any further.

This little bird was very brave and was perfectly happy with us getting quite close.

I remember following a similar pattern the first time we went when my son was only about 2.5; we didn't make it to the Fernery until our next visit the following year. As much as I would have liked to have gone on further this time, it was nice to just stretch our legs somewhere a little different. The day was so warm that it felt far more like the middle of summer than the start of April.

Next time we go, I think we'll carry our picnic with us, rather than returning back to the car for it, as that would allow us to spend more time exploring the gardens. The kids found a huge rhododendron to play inside outside Benmore House and I think this would be a perfect spot to sit in to enjoy lunch.

Not a cloud in the sky!

After our wander around the gardens and a very sunny picnic, we had a little paddle in the river, before driving the 20 minutes or so into Dunoon for a bit of retail therapy. I had hoped to visit the wool shop in the town, but it was a Thursday so the shop was closed. I did still manage to come home with a granny square pattern book from a charity shop though, so definitely a successful day out.

On The Needles: Elder Throw

I mentioned in my previous On The Needles post that when I was on the hunt for a pattern for my son's temperature blanket I stumbled across a number of blankets that sparked something in me. 

I was particularly drawn to the patchwork or sampler style of blanket, where you have a number of panels in different stitches. Once I had established that none of these designs would be suitable for the temperature blanket I had in mind, a new seed started to grow: I would make a blanket for myself.

This new blanket would be a patchwork one and it would challenge me to learn some new stitches or techniques. It would be a slow burn project which I could work on over the course of the coming year. I would start on the 1st of January 2025 and by the end of the year I would (hopefully) have my very own blanket to snuggle under. 

Through all my searches, there was one pattern which kept cropping up; the Rowan Elder Throw pattern.

Mitred square making early in the year.

It had originally been released in 2020 as a knit along project from Rowan and had become a lockdown knitting project for many people. It was initially released in eight parts so I estimated that I'd be able to dedicate about 6.5 weeks to each one.

My colour inspiration came from one of Attic 24 blanket patterns. I loved the Stylecraft Special DK colours in the Cosy Blanket, so approximated the Yarnsmiths Create DK equivalents. The original design was to be knitted in Rowan Felted Tweed, but I have set myself the challenge of getting one of each colour of the Yarnsmiths acrylics, so it made sense to shop my stash for this one.

Lovely warm colours.

I was worried that I would get hung up on colour combinations, so decided to go totally random. I numbered each of the 15 colours I'd chosen, then used a basic random number generator to select which would be used for each part of the project. Each colour gets ticked off and I won't return to it until all the other colours have had a turn to be worked.

The first release called for five mitred square panels, four of these consist of four squares and one features nine. Initially, I felt like I needed to concentrate quite closely on these squares; it had been a while since I'd tried using the mitred corner technique. Now I can work the initial two squares on virtual autopilot and just need slightly more attention to pick up the stitches in the third and fourth squares.

I optimistically planned to finish these by the middle of February. And here we are, into April, still no nearer to getting started on release two. But I don't really mind. This one is all about the process, if it takes me a little longer than the year that I'd originally planned, so be it. Along the way, I'm learning some new things, so that makes it all worthwhile.

I'm now at the same point with my final square for this one as I was with the third square when I took this photo.

Expect to see more photos of this one cropping up here this year.

I Quit!

No, I'm not quitting blogging. Or knitting. Or even crochet, for that matter. And I guess technically I'm not actually quitting, I'm resigning. But 'I Quit' sounds more dramatic and I'm sure you'll excuse me unleashing a bit of dramatic flair here, it is my blog after all. 

As I mentioned in my previous post, after 13.5 years in my job, I realised that the time had come for a change. Ironically, that realisation came after a change in my role; the job I had been doing was moved away and I was placed into a totally different role and one that I just didn't gel with at all.

Not only that, the environment was entirely different to the one I'd been in previously. And not in a positive way.

I don't make New Year's Resolutions each year, but I do set myself a word of the year and this year's was Acceptance. I use my word of the year to help shape the way I think about things and to help me make decisions, in this case it was a question of accepting that the situation wasn't going to change for the better and that perhaps the time had come to move on.

Luckily, my new job came along at just the right time and I couldn't be happier to have been offered the role. It's going to allow me to help make a real difference in the community and maybe even open doors to things I'd never previously considered doing.

Congratulatory flowers from the Spousal Unit and kids for getting my new job.

So last night, at 10pm, I hung up my headset for the last time. It was a bittersweet moment. I'm looking forward to all I have to come, but at the same time, I'm going to miss the friends I have made there. As we're all homeworkers, we are based all over the country, so it's not like we'll just bump into each other in town.

Now I have a couple of weeks before I start my new job so I'm going to spend some time with my kids and tackle my Knitting Nook once and for all!