I’m stash busting like a crazy fool at the moment. I have PROMISED myself that I can’t spend the £30 John Lewis’ voucher I got from W’s dad and stepmum for christmas (CHRISTMAS! How restrained have *I* been?), or the £25 voucher from Stash that the lovely J gave me for my birthday, until I have used up a load of great wool from my stash. I have some lovely stuff – yarn i just *had* to buy, and to leave it in a drawer, waiting to be used just seems like a waste.

So more knitting. Less shopping.

The problem is, I’m down to thicker sock yarn, and all the patterns I really want to knit are 2.5mm needles, which just isn’t going to work. So I’ve got a few weeks of making my own patterns up and then I think I’ll treat myself to some Trekking XXL or something.

(I did fold a bit when J and I went to ‘I knit London‘ and at the very last minute i bought some Regia, stating – very firmly – that ‘sock yarn doesn’t count!’ – but really I’m just kidding myself at this point. – I was a salve, I tell you! just to get me over the hump!)

Anyways first up is something lovely handpainted yarn that W’s mum Bev (of the waistcoat fame) brought back from the US a year or so ago.

Cute huh? Kinda fish-scaly?

The pattern is very easy:

(multiples of 6 stitches)

Row 1: (Slip 1 stitch, k2, slip the slipped stitch over the two knitted stitches, k3), repeat to end

Row 2: (k1, yo, k4), repeat to end

Row 3: (k3, slip 1 stitch, k2, slip the slipped stitch over the two knitted stitches), repeat to end

Row 4: (k4, yo, k1), repeat to end

Add in your own favourite toe, heal and cuff and you’re away. Currently I’m half way up the leg and I’ve just shifted from 3mm to 3.75mm so that they will be a bit roomier at the cuff. I knit toe up, because that’s just how I roll (or something.)

So, good sturdy house socks – which is useful since all my other ones are in the wash, and there has been so much rain recently, that I just haven’t found a decent day to get the wool washing done. So I am handknitted-sockless until the weather breaks (for the better).

omg I achieved MINUS 6″ of knitting today.

Crap.

Look! Content!

I know… it’s shocking, considering how much I seemed to abandon my old craft blog. I was always making things – it’s just that I got used to not being able to blog about them, and sort of stopped blogging about anything. But – after a couple of false starts I’m properly back, and the business is well on it’s way to being started, so I thought I’d blog about what I’m knitting at the moment, so that people who come nosying over from typepad will have new things to read (finally!)

So lets talk about camel yarn.

Gorgeous isn’t it?

It’s incredibly soft too.

I bought five 25g balls of this camel yarn while in Florence on our honeymoon, and at one point it was being knitted up a very cute scarf, but to be honest I was using needles that were too thin, and it was turning out no-where near as soft as it was in the ball, and I’m not really one for thin, back and forth scarf-knitting, so it got put back into the stash, and I spend a long time thinking about what it should be.

The thing is, I wanted it to be something special, because a) yarn from Italy, b) yarn from my honeymoon, and c) very very soft camel yarn that I can’t get easily here in the uk.

Cue the Comfort Shawl:

A small, simple shawl that would show off the softness of the camel, and be useful, given how cold our house gets in the winter.

And it’s all going swimmingly – except there is an error on row 43 which means that the shawl has stopped growing in width at the front for the last ball and a half. And having looked at the picture again…

Yeah, the decrease the pattern asks for after the border edges shouldn’t be there. Those front panels should be getting wider, and on mine… not so much.

So I’m frogging in. In fact I’ll go do it now.

…

So this is what I lost:

and this is what I’m left with:

However, I have decided to be the optimist, and point out that I now get to spend even more time knitting with this yarn, so it’s not all bad.

(Over half though… that’ll teach me to just blindly follow the pattern. 🙁 )