Pssst.... could it be AN UPDATE?!

Well, I promised one... eventually...

Quick rundown of recent projects (clicky for bigger pics):

Wavy Scarf using the Pink Waves Scarf pattern by Emily J. Miller. The Yarn is Posh Yarn Lei that I bought at Wonderwool Wales last year, I love the texture in this scarf and I think the yarn was perfect for the stormy sea feel.

Alpine Frost Scarf from the Winter 2008 issue of Interweave Crochet using one and a half skeins of Araucania Pomaire that I bought in HK Handknit's closing down sale last year (dunno what I'm going to do with the other one and a half skeins mind - they're the same colourway but very different from each other):


Christmas Barrel Scarf from a nineteenth century pattern for a mourning shawl. Why the name? Nearly every winter I re-read The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. At the end of the book, when the trains start running after six months of being cut off the Ingalls family receive their Christmas barrel, complete with a turkey that has stayed frozen all winter due to the cold. One of the items in the barrel is

The most beautiful thing - a shawl made of silk! It is dove-coloured, with fine stripes of green and rose and black and the richest, deep fringe with all those colours shimmering in it.

Well, I took some liberties and found a merino/tencel blend from Krafty Koala and never mind that the mourning shawl pattern was from a good quarter-century earlier, I made my Christmas Barrel Shawl:



Ellie Cardigan from Inside Crochet Magazine for my cousin's 4 year old daughter (second cousin once removed? - the extended bits confuse me). I don't normally do kids' stuff and usually flick past such things in magazines with irritation, but this really caught my eye. Mine is a little lumpier than I would have liked, and I modified the pattern so each motif was crocheted to its neighbour as I went along as I couldn't bear the thought of sewing together 120 motifs. The yarn is James C. Brett Kool Kotton (utter bargain at about £1.20 a ball - I'm thinking of getting some for myself for the River Road pattern from the same magazine). Sorry about the fuzzy photo, I don't quite know what went wrong:



I never want to crochet another blimmin' circle again.

I also made a scarf for my mother's birthday but didn't photograph it. Although I got a new camera for my birthday (a Canon EOS 450D) I've been remarkably sloppy about photographing my projects. I'm trying to hold off on the startitis and get some projects I started ages ago finished. So I'm finishing two cardigans (one started last summer), and I will give my crocheted socks another go - I was put off when I started a top-down pattern, did the cuff and realised there was no way it would fit over my high instep! Then the yarn snapped when I was frogging it which made me very grunpy as it was self-striping.

There has also been yarn dying. Semi-solids seem to be the in-thing with indie dyers right now and I'm not in the mood for them! When I was looking for them before I couldn't find any I liked. I like semi-solids for more intricate things where a variegated/multicoloured yarn would kill the stitch pattern, but whilst I'm not a fan of clown-puke I do like different colours in my yarn. Oh, and I only like pastels for about two weeks in December - if I'm nuts enough to buy any they sit in my stash for months. I'm very pleased with these though:

The right hand one was kettle-dyed, but came out with naked patches so I overdyed it and gave it a good stir in the pot. Lo and behold it still had patches screaming "we'd rather go naked than wear dye." I took the photo and hummed and hawed before finally chucking it back into a pan of dye today. The naked bits are now grudgingly wearing dye whilst the rest of it has lovely rich tones of blue, green and a little purple. The conclusion is "we need a bigger pan." I love dying yarn and am trying to hold off ordering more undyed yarn, and blue and purple dye which I use more of than any other colour.

For once my yarn diet and food diet are going fairly well - 7lbs lost (and 28 to go...) and although the yarn isn't going down, it's not rising rapidly either (but like most dieters I have 'sock yarn doesn't count' moments) - and I've got several projects from stash in progress.

And finally, some pretty spring pansies (or more correctly, violas). I bought these a couple of years ago as annuals, but this is the third year they've flowered, and the ones in the photo are from a stray seed that's landed between the flagstones - and I couldn't bear to pull them up, especially as they're in far better condition than the original plant, which appears to be providing a feast for the resident slugs.