Bee Stole by Anne Hanson
My Ravelry Post: here
Yarn: Jaeger Baby Merino 4ply, that we got while we were on holiday earlier in the year. I had 4 balls, and used about 3 1/2 in total.
Needles: 4mm addi lace. <3
Notes: I cut the width of the stole down by two repeats, which worked out well mathematically, and meant there wasn’t really any serious fudging to do. It was exactly the knit I needed - always interesting, and with lots of mid-points to aim for, which is probably why it knit up so quickly.

Hopefully my mum will like it, and find it useful, but either way I’ll find out when I see her this weekend. :)

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PS. The camera is back! So there should be a shop update next week. :D

Rhubarb, Ginger and Cream

(Since this is my own recipe, I get to share it. ;)

Ingredients:

• a few ginger nuts
• some double cream
• some mixed spice
• about 4 stalks of rhubarb
• 2tbl spoons of brown sugar

1. Crush the ginger nuts up so that they are crumbled and powdery in parts.

2.  Cut up the rhubarb and put in a pan with the sugar and a splash of water. Cook till the rhubarb is soft and starts to break up.

3. Whip the cream until it firms up.

4. Assemble in bowls: first a bottom layer of crushed ginger nuts, then the cooked rhubarb, then the cream, and then a dusting of mixed spice.

5. Eat quickly before the cream melts into the rhubarb.

Delicious!

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Food Things:

The ice cream isn’t made, my grandma’s birthday cake is made, but needs re-making because I just found out that the prunes have stones in them - however this means we get the first cake, so let’s not cry too hard. I was going to make the lemon merague from the book, but ran out of energy so whipped up the above pudding instead.

Knitting Things:

I spent two days knitting Angle in wonderful orange alpaca silk, (I know - orange yarn! Kind of a busman’s holiday. :), only to realise that I was definately going to run out of yarn, and that getting more was going to make the cardigan very expensive.

So i did the sensible thing and frogged it. The wonderful alpaca silk will become something else for bump, and Angle will get knit up - probably - in some Jo Sharp yarn I have in my stash (which is also lovely stuff.)

However, the Bee Stole is done, blocked, and just waiting to be photographed… which brings me to:

Oxford Kitchen Yarns Things:

The camera has gone awol in the post - the post office say they have delivered it, but don’t have a signature, which makes them think it is back at the depo. Unfortunately getting to the depo without a car and while pregnant, is a nightmare, so I have used the automated redelivery service to attempt to get them to find it and redeliver it without being able to stand over them and *make* them find it and redeliver it.

Tomorrow we will see if that works or not.

Long story short: I can’t take photos of the yarn accurately until I get the camera back, so it’s likely that the shop won’t get updated this week. Which is incredibly annoying all round.

(I want my camera back!)

So one thing I haven’t mentioned so far about the pregnancy is that for the first three months I COULD NOT KNIT.

Let me pause for dramatic effect.

Ready?

I. could. not. knit.

At all.

At all at all.

Everytime I thought about knitting I felt so incredibly sick. PLUS my brain felt so foggy that patterns that would have previously been a piece of cake suddenly felt impossible and unmanageable.

Of course the extra fun thing was that we weren’t telling anyone, and so i would turn up to knitting week after week with my garter knit washcloth, do a few rows then rip them all out when I got home.

And as someone who will cram at least an hour of knitting a day (even if it’s in tiny snatched five minute segments), not to knit at all was horrible, because it’s what i do, and suddenly what i did was making me feel incredibly ill.

So yeah, I REALLY wanted to blog about it then. But I couldn’t.

But luckily it’s better now.

Which brings me back to bees.

I have been knitting for my female relatives for the last couple of years. My mother-in-law got a kiri, as did my grandma, and my other grandma - nannan - got a faroe shawl. And my poor mum is last on the list.

(There is a good reason for this - both my grandmothers are OLD and i wanted to make sure they got something knit by me, and frankly I wasn’t willing to risk waiting a year for another birthday.)

So this year is my mother’s year! Only then I couldn’t knit for months.

However, her birthday is in three weeks time, and is going to be totally overshadowed by her mother’s 90th birthday which is two days before. But she will get her knitted stole.

(Given that my mother is going to be a grandma for the first time this year she does not need a triangular shawl. Plus this is a woman who has had both her knees replaced and has just taken up aqua-running. She needs a stole!)

But I’m picky about my stoles, and - right now - extra picky about my knitting. I needed something that was complicated (but not too complicated), something i could complete in a month, and that would give my mum something to show off to her friends.

So eventually I picked the Bee Stole from Knitspot, which I’d been eyeing as a good knit for a while. Only I wanted to make it smaller, and with 4ply. So I took the pattern apart, did a little maths and realised I could remove a couple of repeats in the width, and come out with something both do-able and the right size.

SCORE!

I have four balls of Jaeger baby merino in cream, and I’m onto my second ball, and nearly at the end of the second chart, and - as long as i keep plugging away (I’m re-watching/listening to my skateboarding dvds), I’ll have it done in no time.

I hope. ;)