Completed socks

Last weekend I went down to Ro's. I travelled on the Friday as I was going to have my fitting for my bra making class in Leicester. Michelle, the woman who is taking the class was very nice and turned out to be a Tigers fan too, so as well as the fitting we had a bit of a chat about rugby. We were both looking forward to the Tigers' first home game of the season the following day (in which they beat Baaaaath which is always nice!!).

I finished my socks on Monday and wore them for my run this week. I was a bit unimpressed with the finished result at first as I thought the Trekking XXL was a bit harsh feeling at first, but I have to say that they were very comfortable to wear. They should stand up to some work too, which is good. I'm sure angora socks are fine and dandy but I wouldn't think they'd be up to wearing in big steel toe capped boots on a regular basis.

Got this picture on Wednesday morning in Bourton on the Water when I rolled out of the truck. I'm not sure how well I've captured the light which looked amazing on the leaves of the trees against the dark of the sky. My run was quite busy this week and I didn't get back to the yard until gone seven o'clock on Wednesday night. I was pretty tired! Glad I have Fridays off, particularly this week as I'm going in on Saturday for the stock take.

On Sunday last weekend we went to an open day at Claybrooke Mill, one of the oldest working water mills in Leicestershire. I took the opportunity to do a little sales pitch to one of the stallholders there on behalf of SUMA and took his business card to pass on to our "new sales prospects" team. I also bought some raffle tickets for the Air Ambulance. Imagine my delight when I got a call on my mobile on Tuesday to tell me that I'd won eighth prize; a meal for two at the Ullesthorpe Court Hotel. I thought that for an eighth prize it was pretty good. Dunno quite when I'll get round to using it, but I'm sure I will. I sent Ro to collect the tickets as I'm not down there for another week or so and I didn't want them to think I didn't want it. Suppose I'll have to take her with me as she has custody of the tickets!!!

I'm off to do some carding now. I bought myself a set of digital scales this morning as I want to do some blending and I want to get the quantities right.

So much going on

So I'm going to start with a gratuitous kitty shot. These three are a mother and two of her (three) kittens who appeared at work earlier this year. We think that the mother was a kitten here last year and she's been living wild about the place. When her kittens were old enough she brought them out into the open where we sit out and have lunch when the weather is good.

They've got themself a nice little nest next to the pond and they sit and sun themselves. Mum was captured earlier when the kittens were big enough to look after themselves and taken to the vet to be spayed. The other kitten has been captured and taken to live with one of the SUMA workers and the other two are going in a few days time to live with another. Mum is still looking for a home. I'm sorely tempted but being away one night a week plus regular weekends makes it impractical.

I've started a new pair of socks which were cast on on Tuesday morning when my truck made a horrible noise and gave off copious amounts of smoke as I drove into Cheltenham. I got a fair bit done whilst I waited at the garage for them to find out what was wrong (they couldn't). Luckily it still seemed to be running so I carried on with my run and there were no further incidents. Garage thought there may be some sort of blockage in the fuel system.

Talking of socks I have to show you how Nick has been getting on with hers. It's a bit difficult to see from this picture but after my showing her how to knit, purl and SSK (and why you SSK in some places and K2tog in others) she proceeded to finish the heel flap, turn the heel, pick up the stitches up one side and down the other and start decreasing round the gusset all by herself! I'm well impressed, she's obviously a "Natural Born Knitter". I told her she should get a T shirt with that printed on it but she said she didn't think people would be impressed. I told her that Muggles may not be, but the people that mattered most certainly would!

Last item on Show and Tell is this yarn gauge that I made for myself last weekend. It's the second one I've made as I gave one to Ro a while ago but forgot to take a picture of it first. It's very tactile.

Finished

Phew, what a process that turned out to be. Thanks to you all for your feedback on the choice of buttons. The majority went for the buttons on the right hand side, and they were my choice too. Unfortunately Cris was right (typical bloody man) and they were too small.

Soooooo, this morning I went into town to have another look in the charity shop and failing that to go to the shop in the Queensgate Market that sells such things. It's called the Sewing Box and they have a good selection of buttons amongst other sewing stuff.

And these are the ones that I chose in the end. Lovely.

Here's a picture of the finished cardigan on me.

And here's one of it on the floor. I think it suits me better than the floor, but I couldn't get a particularly good picture.

I took it in to work yesterday and nearly lost it to a colleague who tried to run off with it. Luckily I managed to catch her and wrestle her to the ground before she escaped.

In reply to some of the questions on my previous post; it wasn't difficult to knit with hand spun, it was quite nice wool to knit with (she said modestly) I'll put that down to the sheep rather than me though. I plied three singles together as I'd read that this creates a better yarn for knitting and it came out at about 12 WPI.

I found a link to the pattern on Abby Franquemont's blog Abby's Yarns though there are a couple of other people on Ravelry that are knitting it. I knitted the medium size and just had enough of the light coloured wool to complete it, to the extent of missing the last two rows at the neckline and breaking off the tails of yarn under the arms to complete the last row!!! I have nearly a whole ball of the dark grey left though. It's a tiny bit tight on my butch truckers arms but apart from that I'm happy with the fit. The only adaptation to the pattern that I made was that when cabling I cabled to front on one side and to the back on the other which the pattern didn't specify. This was probably a tad anal of me.

I got a text from a friend yesterday telling me a balloon with 90 on it had landed in his garden and it had come all the way from Formby.

I was quite excited at this being a big fan of balloons, in fact I took a picture of this one that had just taken off in Bourton on the Water when I parked the truck up on Tuesday night. Imagine my disappointment when he revealed that it was only a party balloon that had landed! He said that the old boy who'd released it was quite excited when he rang him to tell him where it had landed though.

I had quite an exciting run this week as I met the Tour of Britain going over the Malvern hills on Wednesday. Unfortunately going through the Wyche Cutting I met an Eddie Stobart truck with a trailer on the back coming in the other direction just as the race had passed and floods of spectators were attempting to get back to their cars. I managed not to run over any spectators despite the road being particularly narrow and windy at that point but managed to take out one of the barriers or flags or something and bent the under run bar on the truck! RATS!!!!

Finally here's a picture of the little beggars that are trying to destroy my house. It has wood cladding on the top half and wooden window frames (mostly) and I think they come for the insects that live in the cracks. I'll be sitting at the computer of lying in bed and I'll hear a tap, tap, tap, tapping noise; and there they are! Cheek!

ps, you may need to click on the picture, apparently you can't see who (or what) is destroying the house otherwise.

Another difficult button decision

There you go, Sprout is now finished (bar blocking) but I can't decide which buttons. So I'm asking you!

The fifth emergency service

(I believe that the coast guard is the real fourth) and I am the fifth this weekend; emergency sock back up.

I bought some sock wool and needles at Playful; the toy shop on Gloucester Road and gave it to my friend at work who wants to learn to knit socks, along with the basic sock pattern that came with the yarn. She's recently discovered that she's getting a rash from her bought socks and thinks she may be allergic to elastic. She has knitted before, but not for a while and "never got on with purl" so we've adapted the pattern to a sock with a rolled top a la Crusoe, rather than a ribbed top (I'll worry about the heel flap when we get to it!). When she dropped me off at home after work yesterday we'd got as far as the second round. Her husband and son were out for the evening and she was looking forward to some quality time with her sock! I told her that if she needed any help to give me a ring or pop up and I'd help her but as I haven't heard anything I assume that things are going well.



My current work in progress is "Sprout" by Amy King (Spunky Eclectic). I'm knitting it in the yarn that I spun from the Bleu de Maine Fleece from Yorkshire Woolybacks.

I'd got to the bit where the sleeves are joined to the body before I realised that there be cables!! Hey I never won prizes for being observant! We're coping though, and I'm pretty pleased with progress so far, had a two hour meeting first thing Monday morning at work and made significant progress then.

It's funny but I find that if I'm knitting in a meeting I feel that I have to take an active part in said meeting so people realise that I'm not just knitting but paying attention too. If I'm just there I tend not to make as many comments as I don't have to prove I'm concentrating on what's going on. I think people are pretty used to it now, no-one comments unfavourably (at least not to my face).

I had my annual member review at work yesterday and was on the whole pretty happy with the feedback I received from my colleagues. I did get a couple of people who said I should do more driving, and another who said that I should do more desk based work and less manual work so I'm probably getting things about right on the whole!

Oh I forgot to mention that I've received my invitation to Ravelry and I'm called Tigggr (couldn't be knit-tigger as you can't have hyphens!). My notebook's a bit empty at the moment, but I'll get there eventually I guess!