plenty of sewing time

Just popping in with a short post …

Mum is doing well; she has improved physically in the week she has been here which is a good sign. She is no longer stooped and shuffling; being undernourished will do that to you! Instead, she is eating very well and has regained her usual stride. Yesterday she even worked out in the garden with WM for a couple of hours.

Her biggest interest is reading and she spends hours absorbed in books. This frees me up to be in the sewing room so I am getting quite a bit done.

A couple of weeks ago, my quilting teacher donated a partially completed quilt to Caring Hearts Community Quilters – all I had to do was finish the quilting, make binding, attach it and sew it down. I have done all but the last task, so no photos until I show you the finished project!

My Jacob’s Ladder Goes Barn Raising is quilted. Life is so much easier when I think about the quilting before I pin baste; then I can position the pins out of the way of stitching lines. The quilting was done in no time but it seemed to take almost as long to sew in all the ends! You can’t see it here (because the photo is pre-quilting); I sewed diagonal lines about 5” apart through the centres of the squares that make up the diagonals.


The binding is cut and waiting for the strips to be joined.


I have also been knitting! Shock of shocks!!

In the past three days, I have worked on Crinkles Hoodie by doing a three needle bind off on the shoulders and starting the first sleeve (the photo, which is of the back, is really not worth showing but I know you like pictures! LOL)


Last December, I started knitting Charley Bear for my great-niece who will be two next month; I began on the train on 16 December and haven’t touched it since. On Monday, I stuffed the body and head. I am so not enjoying this! There are so many fiddly little pieces to come, of the type: CO 4 stitches, K 2 rows, increase either end of next row, knit 1 row. Bind off! I have no desire to be a toy maker! The head is on the left; it seems proportionally too large for the body!


And I’ve finished a pair of small women’s socks which were started on 21 February. The second sock was cast on 6 March.


My current reading is varied, but includes 100 Days of Real Food by Lisa Leake. She started a blog a few years ago and it led to a book! Our copy only arrived yesterday so I’m not really in a position to write a review just yet. It certainly is an interesting read.

There are some advantages to having had to cut back on my away-from-home activities, at least for a few weeks! ;-)

Linking up with WiP Wednesday and Yarn Along when they go live.
         


PS Is anyone else having trouble with Firefox working very slowly or is just us?

I'm back!

Today life returns to something resembling "normalcy".

My sinuses are still not completely clear but that is normal for me! At least I can do something other than sleep or sit with my head as still as possible. Thanks to all those who sent good wishes and prayers my way during my fight with acute sinusitis.

I have been away from home the past two weekends: the first we travelled to Armidale to my niece's 21st birthday. The second, this past weekend, I went to the biennial camp of the Knitters' Guild of NSW (Inc) - there will be a separate post about that; all I need to say here was I had a great time!

In the week between Armidale and the Camp, we had my mother staying with us. There were visits from DD (mum's eldest grand-daughter) and the Grandboys, a visit to my MIL, a visit to my brother and his family, and a special birthday outing - the subject of another separate post (I need to have something to write about! LOL)

I must be the world's most boring daughter because while mum was here she had time to read two novels: The Tin Ticket (the central character of which is my dad's great-great-grandmother: a convict originally from Glasgow, Scotland) and The Drovers. Mum really loves Australian novels so once she started reading she couldn't put the books down.

The truth is that while mum was here (and reading), I had to finish knitting some samples for Camp. I had knitted samples and written patterns, but I had to test knit the patterns! Let me tell you that is not as easy as it sounds; my brain knows how to do entrelac and it was hard to follow the pattern word for word so some mistakes were, unfortunately, found over the weekend!

I foolishly also thought I could knit a short-sleeved jumper in two weeks! Who am I kidding? I did about twenty percent of it, I suppose. Which, in the end, is just as well, as I have decided to rip it all out anyway. It is being knitted in Moda Vera "Bamboo Wave", which is textured (thick and thin) yarn: 60% bamboo and 40% cotton. I have gauge for the jumper but it's still too loose and drapey - and given that cotton drops a lot, I have decided, after consultation with another knitter whose skills I admire and trust, to rip it out (and, maybe, start again).

The jumper is the Morning, Noon and Night Sweater (Ravelry link - third photo) by Gwen Bortner, in her book Entree to Entrelac. I was quite happy with most of it (apart from the slowness of entrelac) but, as explained, it must be ripped out -- when I can bring myself to do it.

I have also been knitting on my garter stitch blanket (since I came home, happy, but exhausted, from Camp). I am just past halfway with that.

What you see here is approximately 40 inches wide and 45 inches long. The top edge is on a Knitpicks cable, ready for me to knit in the other direction. The bottom is on the 4.5mm circular needles I am using to knit this DK blanket. I got bored with one row per colour so I am now knitting a Fibonacci sequence: 1-1-2-3-2-1-1-2-3-2- etc. Yes, all those ends are still hanging out but wait till you see what I do with them!

There has also been some sock knitting - again the subject of another post.

Why so much knitting? It was the only craft I could cope with for the last month or so! And even then the pattern needed to be fairly simple! I knitted in front of the television for up to five hours a day, staring straight ahead - moving the head as little as possible!

In the midst of my pain and woolly-headedness, I just couldn't face sewing so there has been very little of that. In fact, I have only used my sewing machine twice in this past five weeks; once to do the block which was the subject of this post, and on Monday last week when I went to sewing class for the first time in three weeks. I attempted to make another block but I have either lost my ability to sew in straight lines or perhaps I never had it in the first place! Either way, patchwork is dependent on cutting and sewing accurately - the more seams there are, the more accurate one must be! Much, much more accurate than one needs to be for dress-making! And I have discovered that I am not accurate enough!

Sadly, these two blocks were to be sent to So Sarah Sews to be sewn into quilt tops for girls in the foster care system who have been doing it tough. I really wanted to be part of this, but just felt that my work wasn't up to scratch. I had to write to Sarah and ask to be allowed out of the group -- I feel bad for letting her down but I'm sure it will be easier for her to make two extra blocks than to make mine fit! I could make new blocks, but Sarah wanted them by 7th October - two days from now; she lives in the USA and I live in Australia so it was never going to happen for me!

Having been away from my computer since before the trip to Armidale, I have spent hours since I came home from Camp trying to catch up with other people's blogs. Since there are 165 blogs on my Blog Reading List, this is no mean feat. I spent three hours today reading all and commenting on some of the posts that were published three days ago and two days ago, so another few hours should find me caught up.

I cannot set even weekly or monthly goals - they seem too daunting; I will just have to take things as they come for the next little while.

So now, I'm off to re-acquaint myself with Jan, before she forgets who I am entirely!

an old jumper

I knitted this jumper (sweater) back in the dark ages, before I had a blog. I finished it in 2003 and I think I worked on it (on and off) for about three years.

taken in artificial light but reasonably true to colour

It was inspired by Kaffe Fassett but is not one of his designs - it's one of my own. The theory is the diagonal patches of light colour would cause the eye to travel up or down rather than across as horizontal stripes would. I wanted something more interesting than stripes anyway!

I'm proud of this jumper but I don't love it. It's very thick and heavy; it's made mostly from 8ply (DK) weight yarn - with some 5ply (sportweight) and some 12 ply (chunky). It's mostly wool with a little bit of mohair.

I don't wear it very often - whenever I do, someone always wants to talk to me about it - it's not a jumper I can wear when I want to be "invisible"!

Now that I've seen the photos - it looks more like a man's jumper, doesn't it?

Today it formed the centrepiece of a workshop I gave on "colour theory for knitters". How did it go? I felt it went okay but it fell a bit flat! But you'd have to ask the participants for the real story, wouldn't you?


Can you guess how many different yarns are in the jumper?