The Stresses of Knitting.....

on double pointed needles…..

I've been off work since last Monday, so I thought I’d show you one of the things I've been up to. 

I’ve been making these cute little bunny huggies to a pattern very generously posted by Sandra on her blog Cherry Heart .Now I spent half the day trying to get to grips with knitting on double pointed needles! Never having done it before, I’d watched my mum in the past, and I figured “how hard can it be!”….Wrong!! After quite a long while struggling to figure out how to start I eventually dug out an old magazine with some instructions, and still didn’t get it, but I found out why I had 5 needles instead of the 4 I thought you should have! I was about to throw the whole cat’s cradle across the room but resorted to good old Google and YouTube! 

In the past I’ve always managed to teach myself most things from a book, but this one just escaped me… I don’t have as much patience these days as I used to either! There aren’t any pictures of my progress, suffice to say it looked like a dogs breakfast!

Why did I find it stressful? Well, I was just petrified that one of the needles would slip out of the stitches while they were flailing about as I knitted on just one of them! However, eventually I managed to finish one…and of course it doesn’t look a bit like the one in the pattern. For some reason I had one ear longer than the other…but hey, no bunny’s perfect are they?  The second one (the lilac one in the photos)  was much better!

I seem to have accumulated quite a few eggs of different sorts over the years, and they all get brought out at Easter and displayed in this pretty spring egg holder...hope you like the photos, and thanks again to Sandra for the pattern

More UFOs...

I was at the Knitting and Stitching show at Alexandra Palace on Sunday. I used to go every year, but have such a lot of stuff now and not as much time to use it that I stopped going so I wouldn't be tempted to buy things unnecessarily (and also to not pay out the extortionate amount of money for entrance fee!). So for several years I've only bought odds and bits when I have specifically needed them to finish a project. But I thought I would go this year for a change. Although before I go on I have to say how much I cursed the North Circular. It's always busy at the best of times, but there were roadworks and the road I usually turn on to to go to Ally Pally was closed completely and there was a detour...so the journey which on a Sunday morning should only have taken about 20 minutes, took me three quarters of an hour!! So I got there about 11am and all the car parks were already full...I had to drive out of the park, which, if you know it, is huge and Ally Pally itself is right at the top of a very very steep hill, the car parks are at the bottom of it! I found a space out on the street not too far away, but too far for me to walk. So I had to get a bus up to the exhibition centre, boy , was the air blue....I was exhaused before I even started!

But....Oh my goodness, how I've missed it! I was very restrained though and didn't buy too much. I've just taken up knitting again, after getting sucked into an offer on Create and Craft TV, so I now have a new little list of UFOs.

I bought: a couple of balls of sparkly yarn for trendy narrow scarves for a couple of friends for Christmas.

a couple of balls of soft cotton and a pattern book for a little cardi for a friend's daughters new baby

How cute is that?

a set of buttons to brighten up an old black cardi that I wear at work all the time

and a couple of other balls of yarn....just because! (At the back of this little cluster) (Edit to say...I've just noticed my empty jam jars in the background....oops!)

Plus I have the yarn I bought from Create and Craft to knit a little cardigan with, which I've already used some of to knit a scarf for a friend's birthday....well....that's my winter taken care of!

I did have to tear myself away from some of the stalls, with fingers twitching and eyes goggling, and all sorts of ideas running round my head! If you've never been to one of these sort of events it is so easy to get carried away, but they are really great. A lot of the crafts that I do I have started by buying a kit from the show for something I've never done before, and just getting hooked!