The sweater and a hat

I hope everyone is having a nice holiday. We had my brother and his sons here, and they each got some knitting. The guys each got a handy-dandy dish cloth (which led to a discussion of whether or not you should put your Teflon pans in the dishwasher. General consensus: no, use your new dishrag).

Of course, John got his new sweater!

He took off a blue-grey sweater whose elbows were very thin, and put on his new blue-grey sweater. It could have been an inch or two longer, but it's perfectly excellent as is.

Looking like the Rowan model

Stephen also got a piece of handknit loveliness, the Cuss Hat: 

The Cuss Hat selfie

It is for people who swear at the weather, a thing Stephen does a lot in the winter!

Tomorrow, the Temperature Scarf. 

Merry Christmas

I figure if you like a big choir, you can't beat the Mormons. Well, King's College is pretty good, I agree, but they are always outnumbered by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.



Merry Christmas to one and all!

Baby Arthur in his little ball!

I am writing this on the 24th, so I have time to throw in a few pictures of what's been going on here. Primo: Eddie is done! Right now it is drying downstairs, all its little ends sewn in and armpits grafted and everything. This is what it looked like just after I had cast off the neckband.

And this is the yarn that was left!

I worry that the body is too short, but really, tough luck if it is! 

Some cookies have been baked. I think I have driven my family crazy with all the plans and shopping and baking, but they will all be happy when I finally let them eat the cookies!

We are not getting a white Christmas, but there has been rain, and we've been promised wind. Just what we need.

My cabbages never did very much. But now they look pretty with raindrops on.

Now, back to your knitting, everyone!

Keepin' warm with love and knitting

This isn't really a Christmas song, though they do mention the weather in December! We are looking at snow this evening, I hear. And we don't care how much it will storm, coz we've got our love to keep us warm....

Eddie is progressing quite well; new deadline in sight; the possibility of meeting the deadline is not too bad, really.

The expanse of the front

decreasing the raglans

The pattern calls for the pieces to be knit flat and seamed together, and has three stitches before the purls on these raglan decreases. After a few rounds of the whole thing, I realised I didn't need all those three stitches, since if I'd sewed it up, one or two would be lost in the seam. So I just got rid of one on each side. I hope this will be not noticeable in the grand scheme. It is pretty low down in the raglan. I have miles to go... I do really like the look of the purl decreases. A little something to keep one from going mad with all the stocking stitch. I have three balls of yarn left, which I think will do me!

Outside, we finally got around to raking the garden a bit, cutting down hosta sticks, picking up the spruce cones and so on. This is the daylily patch, raked!

I bought some purple cabbages to grow in the summer, but they didn't do much, and now they are frozen and fallen over. Pretty colour, but I wish they'd grown better!

Indoor farming: this is a carrot top! You can put the top of a store-bought carrot in a saucer of water, and since the carrot is the root, it nourishes the green bits. Not a great photo, but you get the idea. They say you can do it with a pineapple top as well.

Christmas lights

I had to include this live version of this song, because I never would have thought the singer looked like this! Not your usual ho ho ho here, but probably not an uncommon Christmas story. Oo oo oo ooooo.


About Eddie: I have finished the second sleeve, joined the sleeves and body together, and am happily decreasing stitches to get to the top! My first pause will be when I get down to 400 stitches -- then I get to decrease only every alternate row, after a few rows of decreasing every row. That Kim Hargreaves is a pretty clever designer, I must say. When I get a few more rows done, I will show you the lovely decrease line. Now, though, it looks like an octopus...

The perils of monogamy

I am knitting solely on my Eddie these days.

No second mitt is getting finished. I started these a year ago, it seems. Huh, I'd thought it was more! I "just" need to get the cable knot out of the way and then this becomes subway knitting. It is not quite mitten weather here yet, so there is hope yet, I suppose.

No Kaffe square is getting added to the pile. I am even stuck in the middle of one! I don't need a pretty cushion for my comfy chair, but I hate to leave it at this stage.

And of course, there are other things to knit, and other things to sew...

I had (ridiculously) wanted Eddie finished by last weekend, but now my (more reasonable) deadline is the end of November, which still means I have to give it all my attention.

Getting there, but alas, why can't I knit more, faster and all the time?!

Some progress on the big grey sweater

Is it blue? Is it grey? Is it, sometimes, sort of purple? Did I mention that I'd like this to be done by the end of the week? Ha, ha. However, I am almost at the point where I get to do some purling.

I don't like to use up too much blog fodder in one day in these NaBlo months, but I would like to ask you all who you think wrote the works of Shakespeare. I saw a production last night called Is Shakespeare Dead? about the almost complete lack of information we have about William Shakespeare. So you just watch that and come back tomorrow and we shall discuss the issue.

Let's play NaBloPoMo again

I tend to take part in NaBloPoMo in November, although unofficially, and I guess I am going to give it a go again this year. I don't register anywhere and I'm sure no new people "discover" my blog because I don't tell anyone about it. Not very good marketing on my part. Oh well.

This November I am knitting a grey pullover named Eddie. So far the only excitement has been the daredevil thrill of changing things a tiny bit to knit it in the round instead of in flat pieces.

This is one and a bit balls out of 15.

I bet we can't wait till tomorrow to see how much bigger Eddie has become! I would love to get this done in a week, but since such a feat would require knitting up two balls a day, I'm not confident that that will happen. I shall knit diligently nonetheless.