Yesterday was roasting-hot. So hot that I nearly turned down some proper wool in one of the charity shops near us. Luckily the knitter in me scoffed at such an idea, and I came away with:

Loweth Shetland Double Knitting Yarn. 100% pure wool. Loweth Woold Ltd, Leicester, England.

and:

Lister Bamboo. 100% cotton. Whiteoak mills, wakefield, England.

All this, for £7.50. Bargain!

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The socks are coming along, but two days working industrial sanders, plus another day of comatose knitting has left me with a very sore left hand, which I’d rather didn’t get any worse. So I may have to postpone finishing the socks until later in the week.  Instead I’m going to have a go replacing the zip on one of my dad’s fleeces, so that it’s ready when he comes to visit on wednesday. (That job has been on the ‘to do’ pile since christmas!)

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News from the garden:

We picked our first strawberries from the bath yesterday! Despite the plants having much more fruit then they did last year, I suspect that we will never end up bringing any of them home. They get eaten as allotment snacks whenever we’re there.

And lastly:

Sweet Williams will always have a place in our home. :)

Here is my backtack offering - A startled rabbit!

She’s made from Matchmaker 4ply, and knit in the round.  I threaded the buttons onto the yarn before hand, so that I could knit them into place, like you do with beading.

I wanted to keep to Wee Wonderful’s bunny pattern, but knit it rather than sew, which meant lots of measuring, and fiddling with the pattern as I went along, but overall I’m pretty happy with.

She has a gathered head - a homage to Jean Greehowe. :)

Poor thing, she does look startled though! She obviously needs lots of love and a nice view, to help her settle in. I’m sure, at Ariana’s she’ll do just fine. :)

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In other swaps and challenges news, I’ve had to drop out of the Nectar Gallery ‘Wall of Yarn’ exhibition. I feel like a total jerk and hate letting people down, but everything I tried just looked terrible. You know sometimes an idea really works and you get into a really creative groove? And sometimes exactly the opposite happens and you wonder why you’re even trying in the first place?

Well yeah I had one of those. 

I guess I figured doing something artistic, instead of useful and pretty was like riding a bike - even if you haven’t done it in years, you can just do it and it’ll be fine. But it’s obivously not, and with hindsight I feel a bit stupid for thinking it would be. It took years to earn my artistic skills and since I didn’t keep them up after university (or rather they morphed into something more practical) they are rusty now that i come back to them. I think maybe i need to back off the deadlined projects for a while?

Either way I feel really bad.

As you read this I am hopefully sanding the floors in our lounge. Assume the ‘publish later’ typepad thing actually works.

but here goes:

W’s mum and I went to Boden, because we both love the catalogues, and have bought stuff in the sales for childen we know. But the clothing isn’t cheap and I wanted to know if their style would suit me or not. (I mean I also love Jigsaw, but NEVER has a piece of Jigsaw clothing fitted me properly.)

So since there is a store in London (though when I say ‘in’ london, i mean, near Royal Park tube, and thus miles away from any other shops you might want to shop in), we decided to give it a go.

And you know what? It was great! We grabbed big armfuls of things we wanted to try, and even snagged a big family sized changing room so that we didn’t have to whip in and out of tiny single booth changing rooms all the time to see what the other person looked like.

The sizes actually did what the said on the tin, for the vast majority of the time, and everything was really good quality.

To be honest I had been planning to try on a load of stuff and then buy nothing, but safe in the knowledge that I could order online once I’m earning again. But then I found a few things that were either too lovely on me to leave (B *made* me buy them. ;) or stuff I needed anyways - like a new swimming costume.

Thus I bought:

This shouldn’t work for me. Ruffles across the hip? No way!

But the first ruffle is actually low down - where your hips turn into your thighs, and at least for me, that bit goes in a bit. Plus the cotton is thin and flow-y. In fact i’m wearing it now and it’s lovely.

These two are to go with the skirt, but will go with lots of other stuff I have. I’m really working hard this year on wearing colour. I’ve been a black tee shirt girl for too long, so it’s nice to have some more ‘go with everything’ tops in pretty colours.

This i never expected to work, but actually I really love it! I have a long body, so swimming costumes can look a bit weird. Plus they are a pain if you want to go for a wee. But these is cute, (polkadots!) and in my favourite colour, and when the top rides up a little bit, it’s kinda sexy - but in a ‘but i’m actually covered up’ kind of a way.

In fact I loved it so much that I rang W while I was on the bus home, and got him to meet me at the new local pool so I could try it out, and have a splash around for a while. 

So yes, I spent money, and maybe that was bad, but it’s all great stuff, and it was nice to have a good clothes shopping day for a change.

On a related note, I never posted a picture of the skirt I made, just before we went to france.

It’s munki munki pool party fabric which I love because it’s turquoise AND lime, and it doesn’t get much better than that.

Keeping with my ‘wearing more colour’ theme, and because B had made me re-think my whole ambivalence to yellow, I picked up the yellow vest at one of the charity shops near where we live. Afterall i’ve been wearing a livestong band for the last two years, and it looks pretty good on me.

Turns out this outfit is so cute that some lads shouted ‘hey sexy’ at me from their car window while i was walking home from seeing friends last night. *rolls eyes*

Also - You know, all the colours in that photo are pretty much correct apart from the colour of the wall. If it actually was that colour it’d be great!

As I mentioned before, on friday I met up with W’s mum and we went clothes shopping*, and then toddled along to John Lewis’ because we both love that store.

I bought the new Jaeger baby/toddler pattern booklet. It’s the first thing I’ve bought like that and thought, ‘you know what? i’m buying this so that when we have kids I can knit them things.’  When I picked up all those ones from the second hand shop that was still pretty much about other people, but time passes and now look at me.

Anyways enough of that. What you really want are pictures:

I would have bought the booklet even if this was the only good pattern in it. Maybe it’s the photo? Maybe it’s the cute baby? regardless I will end up knitting this at some point in the future.

Having seen pictures of W when he was little (huge hair!) I’m pretty sure that if we ever have a boy, then he will really suit a jumper like this. (Though, thinking about it, maybe it’s that the kid in the photo has exactly the same haircut as W does right now.)

Also - check out the blanket! There isn’t a pattern for it, but I’ve been making dishclothes long enough to be able to figure it out for myself. :)

Dots! So cute!

The cardigan is nice but i really just included this to show off the blanket more. I love it!

I hate the colour way of this jumper, but argyle is fun to knit, and I’m sure there are alternate colour ways that wouldn’t make your eyes bleed.

See, and now i just want to watch Amelie again.

I have been wanting to knit a cardigan like that for myself for the past six months!

It totally passes my minimum of four patterns I would definately knit, and thus was snapped up by me, and rightly so. Now I just have to hope that what i’ve written doesn’t send the W running for the trees. ;)

The other very cool news from the trip, was that it was sock yarn handover day! W’s mum had been in the US a few weeks beforehand, and I’d asked her if she could pick up a couple of skeins of sock yarn, since there are lots of great brands that we have a really problem getting over here.

*cough*koigi*cough*

What I meant was ‘please could you pick me up enough yarn for one pair of socks and I’ll pay you for it when you get back.’

However she came back with all this:

And then she wouldn’t take any money from me! (Or W when he tried, a couple of days later.)

I was utterly blown away! I mean I love B, because she’s lovely and has been nothing but kind and caring since I first met her. And then she showers me in sock yarn!

The textured yarn at the far left is actually 100% wool, and will be made (probably - although she’s having second thoughts about it) into another pair of slippers, since she wore out the maya ones I made her for christmas.

The bumblebee lorne’s laces (I own some lorne’s laces sockyarn!! *dances*) is going to be a pair of socks for W, and the pale yellow Gems yarn is going to be a thankyou pair of socks for B.

She looks great in yellow.

The rest i’m not sure about. I really want to knit the redish-brown handpainted yarn into some socks for me. maybe some jaywalkers? I just fell for the colourway as soon as i saw it. But the others I will save in the stash for a time when I really need to cheer myself up with some socks.

And then I’ll go to town! :)

*which went FAR better than expected, but i’m saving that for another post.