Purple, bunny-shaped buttons. How could I resist? Available from Delish Beads on Etsy, just in case anyone else has the urge for cute buttonage. Now I just have to knit something for them to be sewn on to…

BTW, speaking of irresistible things, the Drops Christmas Calendar is back again with a new free pattern every day ’til the big event. I love today’s pattern.

Just a quick message inbetween feeds.

You may have read on Ravelry that The Inside Loop website is closing down. Diane and I have decided that with us both having other commitments that take up a huge amount of our time that we won’t be producing any more issues and to therefore take the site down.

What this means is that the patterns and articles will still be available until the end of January, so there’s plenty of time to download any you want. Yesterday we contacted all of the contributors to let them know so that they could start looking into making their work available from alternate sources. We did want to leave it a few days before announcing the site closure to everyone else until we had heard back from all the contributors, so I wanted to reassure everyone that the site isn’t going to “do a Magknits” and just disappear.

It was a lot of fun and hard work producing the magazine for a year. I ate far too much cake, gossiped a huge amount and other than the mad last minute panics that we seemed to have with every issue, it hardly felt like work at all.

My patterns will be reformatted and then put up for download again, hopefully before the site goes down depending on how much free time I get. I would like to rejig a couple of the designs and remake them, but will post here with any updates. The articles I wrote will also end up on here.

And now it’s time for milk again and by the sound of it, another nappy change!

Being dead to the world by 10.30pm every evening means that pretty much anything could happen in my bedroom at night and I’d be oblivious to it. As it happens, I awoke to a very nice surprise today in the form of this artistic effort on my bedroom wall by Mr B to celebrate our 12th wedding anniversary. Who needs Hallmark, eh?

…and more distraction from the existing WIPs. *blushes*

A post to catch up on a few WIPs and answer a few questions that came via the comments.

Firstly, thanks for all the congratulations on my 4th Blogiversary. I tend to get a bit introspective when it comes to anniversaries. Imagine what I’m like on my birthday! I am proud of my little blog in that I have managed to keep it going for so long and that it proves I do a heck of a lot of knitting. So I imagine I’ll gladly hand over the money to keep it going for another year when the time comes. To clarify the paying part: I have my own domain name (http://www.hauntedyarns.com) where I host my blog. So I pay for the webspace each year and to keep the domain name every two years. Back when I decided to buy my own webspace rather than having a free blog, the advantage was that I had somewhere to host pattern pdfs; this was pre-Ravelry which of course has made it less of a need now as I host them all there.

I am woefully behind with the second clue for the Aurantium Shawl. Clue 3 came out early on Tuesday and is the edging, so the end is in sight, if only I can knuckle down and knit it!

I’ve not even finished the first chart of Clue 2: my excuse being that making 9 stitches from 3 is bloomin fiddly with laceweight yarn and takes too much brain power. Though I can tell it’s going to look stunning when it’s done. Probably too stunning for me to get baby sick on, so I may give it to my Grandma as an early Christmas present.

The February Lady Sweater is also making slow progress. Each row is long and the yarn is in 50g balls so runs out really quickly (the number of ends I’ll have to weave in at the end is depressing) but it’s enjoyable knitting.

Of course, I could get both things done a lot quicker if I wasn’t so easily distracted by shiny new patterns like some sort of knitting magpie..!

This blog is four years old today! I started it to have a photographic record of my finished projects and to have somewhere to witter about various yarny subjects. Over the years I’ve been fortunate to have more and more people visiting and I know you’re there, even if you aren’t commenting.

Back in March/April when I was feeling like death warmed up, I did wonder whether I would ever get back to blogging again. And when the baby arrives, I also think that anything regular is going to be impossible to achieve, not least because I’ll have nothing to write about knitting, just how many nappies I’ve changed and whether I got any sleep the previous night. Which doesn’t make for great reading for a knitting blog! Added to that the fact that I have to pay for the webspace irrespective of how often I blog, right now I don’t know whether I’ll be keeping the blog after January, when it comes up for renewal and whether there’ll therefore be a fifth blogiversary.

But all that is in the future and not something I have to worry about for the moment. So do take a slice of cake and I’ll put the kettle on as champagne is off the menu at the moment.

I’ve fallen in love with garter stitch. For a long time, I avoided it because it seemed beginner-ish and dull. But I’ve grown to love the texture and the fact that it knits up in a millisecond. So I’d been debating about whether to knit a February Lady Sweater for a while. I didn’t want to commit myself to anything big with the time til the Big Day rapidly disappearing and far too much to organise before then. But the fact is, I wanted one. It’ll look good with the bump and be nice coverage for afterwards when I’m undressing in front of everyone every couple of hours.

The yarn is Louisa Harding Kashmir Aran from my stash. It’s been destined to be several different projects, but in the end, I think it suits a lace pattern best. The texture is odd as it’s not a twisted yarn but like a length of finely-knitted i-cord. It’s very soft, though, and has a slight sheen.

The hardest part so far was getting to the sleeve division. I had over 300 stitches on the needle and every row was taking at least a quarter of an hour and I was slowly losing the will to knit. But now it’s done, it’s just lace pattern til it’s long enough and hopefully it’ll be a lot more enjoyable!

How can I avoid knitting baby hats when patterns like this one are lying in wait to tempt me?!

The pattern is Blue Rabbit Hat by Mel Clark. I don’t know whether to buy some yarn and cast on immediately, or just stay away from Ravelry until October.

There is progress on the Trellis cardigan after having a break for knitting pant-wearing superheroes and lace. And I may also have given in to the hat urge yet again… but I’m planning ahead!

After giving DS2 his Captain Underpants toy on Friday, DS1 started asking where his toy was. Apparently a hat is not the same as a toy. Even a Manchester United hat. Now the problem is that DS1 wants a Sackboy, for which I do have a pattern. But it’s this one (Ravelry link), an Alan Dart pattern knitted in about a million sodding pieces and with about ten years’ worth of seaming to be done.

It might not be too bad: I’m hoping I can convert parts to be knitted in the round to avoid as much seaming as I can. In the meantime, I have yarn in a DS1-approved colour:

and clearly I now know my place.

Oh dear, this does look bad. But it’s not a baby hat, and I had already decided to knit it AGES ago. Honest!

DS1 is a huge fan of Manchester United. So when I saw this pattern appear on Ravelry, I showed him it and he was practically leaping around the room at the thought of having a special Man U hat, how could I refuse to knit him one? Seriously, getting any sort of enthusiasm from an 11 year old about anything is rare, so I need to make the most of it. I thought I’d be safe from teenage apathy for a couple of years at least.

The pattern is designed by Tori, who also designed the beautiful Hippocampus mittens that were in the Winter ‘08 issue of The Inside Loop (and I will knit them one day, I will!) She’s designed a range of football club hats to raise funds for a new football ground in Lillehammer, which they clearly need from the photos, so if you know any Man U/Liverpool/AC Milan/Barcelona/Juventus supporters who might need their heads warming, then here is a good place to start looking for patterns.

I’m using the yarn specified in the pattern. It’s Dalegarn Falk, 100% wool and machine washable (my heart sang at that point because you really don’t want to know what happens to small boys’ hats over the course of a winter and I don’t think a gentle soak in some Eucalan would cut it) bought from Dragon Yarns and feels really nice. Will be interesting to see how it blooms after washing.

But I’m saving this to start at the beginning of August. I want to get as much knitting done before October, anyway – even winter hats! – but Mr B is off for a gentle stroll some serious walking with the small people and some of his work colleagues in the Cotswolds for the weekend. So I am tagging along and planning to spend the day sitting on a comfy chair with my knitting and a regular supply of tea and food while they’re off sweating. So this should keep me occupied for the day! We’re staying here, so it’s not exactly roughing it.

Now the Moo hat is done, minus sewing on the ears, I decided to go ahead with the urge to knit something on bigger needles as I’m not quite feeling like more tiny needle knitting! Fortunately, I knew exactly what I wanted to knit.

I’ve made Trellis before as a baby gift, about four years ago now. IIRC, it was my first ever cabled project and a really enjoyable knit.

I’m using Rowan All Seasons Cotton like the original pattern. More stash-busting, as I got these four balls as my Rowan International membership gift when I was last a member. The colour is a gorgeous purple/lilac/mauve and I have just the right amount to knit the smallest size, so it must be fate.

First of all, I just need to point somewhat frantically at the countdown ticker on the left. 100 days to go! When I say the baby is due in October, it seems like ages away, but it’s less than 15 weeks (assuming she arrives on the due date, ha ha ha). *knits faster* I should have got a bit of a clue from the sudden explosion of bump that has appeared:

I’ve given in and bought maternity jeans after wearing my old, big girl trousers for the past few months and ironically I feel slimmer because they’re not flapping around my legs. And the comfort of a huge stretchy cotton tummy panel cannot be underestimated.

So, to the knitting. I really do not need to make any more hats, but when they have ears on, it’s hard to resist! Plus I had suitable yarn in my stash. The pattern I’m making is from the Dale of Norway #135 I bought last week; picture of hat here top right, page 7. I wonder how many other animals I can make this poor child look like?

It’s an interesting knit. Partly because there’s no real symmetry to the cow print pattern, which means paying attention on every row. And though the directions for the hat itself are clear, the total stitch count for the hat doesn’t match the stitch count for the pattern chart and there’s no indication of where to start on the chart. So I just winged it! The randomness helps as it’s impossible to tell that it *isn’t* supposed to look a certain way.

The worst part really was having to knit the ribbing on 1.5mm needles. I needed to go down to 2mm needles to get the correct pattern tension, so following the convention of going down two needle sizes for the ribbing, that’s what I ended up with. Though it was over quickly enough, it’ll be a different story when/if I choose to knit a cardigan from the book and have to cast on around 200 stitches on 1.5mm needles. I’ve prepared for this by buying a 1.5mm circular needle, which is really just two toothpicks held together with dental floss and frankly gives me the willies. I may go and dig out some aran weight yarn instead.

Thanks to those of you who voted in my yarn shade dilemma. The winner by a clear margin was “Damask”, so that’ll be the colour I buy. I really need to take you lot with me every time I go shopping to help me make all my decisions. With the heat and the expanding bump, sometimes making the simplest choice is impossible.

Due to the weather, my Wimbledon knitting didn’t progress and has been put away in the corner in disgust. Also, I had new squishy yarn to play with, so I may have cast on for the Pea Pod cardigan…

…there’s a lot to be said for four hour men’s singles tennis finals.

I’ve also been swatching for a couple of the designs in the Dale pattern book I bought on Friday. Every pattern is knit at the same tension, which is helpful. Except that I seem to be the world’s loosest knitter and am having to contemplate knitting edgings with 1.5mm (US 000 I think!) needles. My love of 4ply yarn might be wavering.

You might remember I posted a rather wibbly post a while ago about the Cabled Raglan Baby Jacket and whether it was too girly or not. Well, now that I know the bump is definitely girly, I can knit it without worrying. Except I can’t decide on a colour…

I’ve chosen to use Sirdar Balmoral. I was looking for a DK-weight alpaca yarn like the one used for the original (which is Plymouth Yarn Baby Alpaca DK; not particularly common round these parts!). I did consider Inca Cloud, but then after browsing for a while, I remembered Sirdar Balmoral. I rarely buy Sirdar yarns because in the past they’ve gone mad for novelty yarn, so I don’t usually think of them when choosing yarns. But recently they’ve had a few nicer yarns, such as Balmoral which has no synthetics and is really rather lovely. So Balmoral it is.

The problem is, I can’t decide on a shade. So for a bit of Friday fun, I’ve created a poll. I’ve listed the colours I like best, but if there’s another colour that I should clearly choose instead, then there’s an option to add that as well. I’ll use the most popular colour for the cardigan and it’ll save me poring over shadecards til all the colours blend into one.

So, lots of plain stocking stitch is needed for the next couple of weeks. But not so much that I go insane. I decided to raid my vintage baby knitting pattern stash for something completely different to all the modular EZ knitting I’ve been doing. I have several issues of the old Vogue Baby Knitting magazine which was published in the 1950s and 60s and aside from the knitting patterns, they’re just fascinating to read. The long-gone yarn companies, the adverts for baby layettes from department stores and prams for £4!

This pattern is originally from 1966 and takes up barely a column of space. It’s written in the “do this for one side and then mirror everything for the second” style and makes me wonder at the pages I use up just to write a sock pattern.

I’m using RYC Cashsoft 4ply in cream, which probably adds to the vintage look of the cardigan. I’ve lined myself up for lots of seaming, though I did amend the shoulder directions to a three-needle cast off instead as I can never get shoulder seams to look like they’re supposed to. Just the sleeves to knit now, and then the button hunt starts again!

To add to my baby pattern stash, I’ve also managed to get my paws on a copy of the out-of-print Jaeger 29, which is full of gorgeous designs. Mainly I bought it for the completely girly ballet wrap on the cover…

…but there is also a cardigan with bunnies on it!! They’re worked with the dreaded intarsia, but I could maybe get away with just one bunny.

There’s a lot of it to do. Since Monday’s post I’ve added another finished cardigan and a boring but useful tension swatch and finally it’s all laying out to dry on copious carrier bags. I washed them all in a few sample sachets of Soak that I bought from The Little Knitting Company. Like Eucalan, it’s no-rinse, which I like as it appeals to my lazy side. I should have known not to try any of the scented versions, though, as I now have a headache from the aquae scent, and the citrus one smells like loo cleaner… I do like the unscented one, though, so will probably buy a large bottle of it, and it only needs a tiny amount each time, so it’ll be pretty economical.

Now to keep small people and cats away from it all ’til it’s dry!

I’m in need of a blocking session, I think.

The Tomten Jacket has its second sleeve now, so I just need to block it before I can work out the length of zip that I need. In the meantime, I’ve completed a couple more hats, one of which needs a ribbon. It’s probably the girliest hat I’ve knitted so far.

I should really stop the hat knitting now, but my reasoning is that it’s good to have a selection of sizes and as it’s going to be October when she’s born, she’ll need plenty of headgear over her first few months. I do want to knit some more cardigans, though, and some legging things, so will have to curb my urges for now. From experience, lots of thinner layers are going to better than buying a big snowsuit. DS2 was an October baby as well, and trying to carry him in a sling while he was wearing a snowsuit was like trying to carry ten pounds of baby-shaped marshmallows.

I’m also trying to plan it so that I have something moderately mindless but big to work on so that I have perfect Wimbledon-watching knitting. Last year I was knitting the Peacock Feathers Shawl which meant that I only really paid attention to the tennis on the wrong-side rows. I’d like something a little less complicated this year!

The hood and one sleeve of the Tomten Jacket have been completed and I’m almost at the point where I have the “fun” of zip hunting.

Now, I’m not usually *that* anal about matching colours when using variegated yarns, but that’s usually because the yarn is for socks and no one really notices them when they’re very far away from your eyes. But having odd sleeves Bothered Me, so despite having plenty of yarn left to knit the other sleeve, I’ve ordered more yarn so I can match the colours.

So in the meantime I had to do something else and I decided to do the i-cord edging instead. I’d planned to knit the border in Jamieson’s Shetland Spindrift because it has a similar texture to the Kauni and comes in about a million colours. I spent a long time looking at the shade card and deciding which colour went best with all the colours of the jacket, before choosing one of the reds. And then when I found out that it would cost as much as the price of the yarn itself in postage to get one tiny 25g ball of yarn sent to me I thought “sod that” and went to my stash.

I have a couple of colours of Spindrift that I bought two years ago and have been helping bulk out my stash ever since. The Foxglove colourway is a sort of mottled purple and though I wasn’t convinced it would work, I decided to give it a go, figuring I could always rip it out if it looked terrible.

Well, it didn’t. It blends with the reds and blues, and contrasts with the oranges, yellows and greens really well. Possibly better than the red would have, so being tight-fisted clearly has its advantages at times.

The Applied I-Cord Edging is one of those things that I think are just impossible to get my head around until I actually do them and then it becomes blindingly obvious. A bit like figure of eight cast on, or Magic Loop! You begin by picking up stitches all around the jacket with the contrast yarn. And I mean all around – along the bottom edge, up the front over the hood and down again back to the bottom edge. It took ages. Then simply cast on three stitches with a new needle and transfer them to the pick up needle, k2, sl1, k1 (picked up stitch), psso and return the three stitches to the pick up needle and start over again. After the first few rows, suddenly a strip of i-cord appears attached along the edge of the jacket and it Looks Good.

Now all I have to do to bide my time until the extra ball of yarn appears is to sew up the sleeve seam..!

Oh, Donna asked how I was finding the yarn. It’s true it’s not as soft as something like Baby Cashmerino, but I don’t find it rough at all. It’ll be worn over clothes rather than next to the skin, too, so there shouldn’t be any problem at all. Plus any baby of mine is not allowed to be sensitive to wool.

Also just wanted to share another baby knit. Not knitted by me, though. Kai and Diane came to visit yesterday and we spent a lot of time knitting. Me with the jacket and manly sock, and them with mysterious and identical miniature projects. In the afternoon, I was presented with this tiny pair of baby socks. Tinier than the Hugs and Kisses Socks I knitted. Absolutely minute and newborn sized. They make good finger puppets for the moment, too.

Whoever came up with the phrase “I knit so I do not kill people” had it right. I’ve spent most of today on the sofa in my pyjamas with the Tomten Jacket, calming myself down with every row that I knit and feeling much better by the time I reached the hood. It makes sense, really. Murder is messy and I bet you can’t get decent yarn in prison.

Getting the colours to match up on the fronts after the divide for the armholes wasn’t hard, fortunately. As each strip is only 14 stitches, I used very little yarn for each section, so there was plenty of the green left over for the second part. For the back, which you can’t really see, I did wind on the yarn until I got to the next green section, though. Hoping the sleeves will start from a purple section to be a nice contrast to the green, but I can always help that along if it doesn’t work out…

It’s such a simple but clever pattern. The fronts and back are joined together now and the hood will grow upwards. Then there’s just the sleeves, which are picked up and knitted down from the armholes. The reserved stitches are included at the end of each sleeve row so that there’s very little sewing up to do at the end, and it’s such a quick knit! It’s been said many times before, but Elizabeth Zimmerman was a genius.

I’ve only just started baby knitting, but I do want to progress beyond hats and footwear (more about those soon!) and knit sweaters and cardigans. The trouble is that I won’t know the sex of the baby for another month (and that’s assuming he/she plays along and poses legs akimbo for the scan!) and I don’t want to knit anything that’s definitely girly or boyish.

Then this cardigan popped up as a free pattern on Knitting Daily:

The Cabled Raglan Baby Sweater is knitted with alpaca (swoons!) and is so cute that I really want to knit one for The Bump. But is it too girly? Even if I knitted it in a fairly neutral colour? The photo has it knitted in cream and even that looks a bit feminine to me.

I wonder if I’m just bigoted when it comes to knitting baby clothes and should just knit what I like and not care if it looks like it should be on a baby of the opposite sex. People are unobservant anyway. DS2 was often mistaken for a girl when he was little because he had curly hair and long eyelashes, despite him being dressed top to toe in blue and green clothes with pictures of cars and tractors and other manly vehicles on them. If he was a curly haired girl, why would I not have dressed him her in something pink and frilly? Gah.

Anyway, all opinions welcomed. Even “you’re just being sexist”.

I’m sorry for the complete lack of updates. It’s partly because I haven’t knitted for almost a fortnight, which doesn’t give me much to actually blog about. Hoping that it won’t be long before I can pick up the needles again, though, and start writing more interesting posts.

Anyway, last Thursday was my birthday, so I have some yarny present to share. Other than a gift voucher from my sister for Stash in Putney, which I’m really going to enjoy spending soon, Kai sent me this beautiful handspun yarn – Merino/Silk laceweight and DK weight Merino/Alpaca. The DK weight will be a hat for next winter, I think, and the laceweight something triangular and nuppy.

(Sorry, Kai, I pinched your photos because mine don’t show the yarn colours properly.)

Diane gave me a soft and squishy pair of No-Purl Monkey socks, knitted from Malabrigo sock weight:

I’m going to be GOOD and not over-wear these and handwash them in the hope that they will last more than five minutes.

Hoping there will be a knitting update to share on here soon, but if not, there will be results of my voucher spending and I think everyone can always appreciate a bit of yarn ogling.

Thanks for the replies on my last whiny post. I’m still feeling really weird, but I dragged myself outside today as I had to visit the sorting office, do various mumsy things and pick up a couple of books from the library.

The selection of knitting books in my library isn’t great, but there’s the facility on the librarys website to search through the entire borough for books and have them delivered to your local branch for the princely sum of £1 each. So it was that way that I managed to snaffle the only copy of any Alice Starmore book in the area and whilst I was at it, I added Fitted Knits to the list as I’ve never seen it in any bookshop and wanted to have a flip through.

The Celtic Collection is gorgeous, of course. The yarns are all Rowan and probably all discontinued, and the styles of the sweaters all a bit dated, but that doesn’t matter. The patterns are knit in the round and some are steeked and have given me a big knitting thrill. So many cables and colours!

Fitted Knits is completely different. The patterns are all fairly simple – from my point of view, anyway – and none use any stranded knitting but they’re all knitted mostly in the round (woo!) and I like the shapes.

I hope my knitting mojo returns soon, as I’d love to knit several of the designs from these books, but when every time I look at the needles I get a headache, I know I’m really not well enough to start anything that needs thinking about.

I am suffering. For a few days now I’ve had an annoying sore throat and now it’s decided to become a full-blown cold and general acheyness and bleurgh.

I’m spending the next couple of days on the sofa reading, I think, in between the occasional internet visit. Knitting will have to wait, sadly, so in the meantime, here’s a cat in a pullover to ensure this post has yarn content.

more animals

I’ve got as far as I can with the Cargo trousers as I need buttons and elastic and have neither, so I’ve started on the matching tunic instead. It’s a Knitting Pure and Simple pattern (number 211 to be precise) and I’d really recommend them if you fancy knitting something top down but don’t quite have the confidence to go it alone, although Diane’s article is also really helpful if you want to try it and has a photo of a monkey.

And, yes, it is a tunic, even though it looks like the beginnings of a knitted bra in the photo, or a pair of cat ears.

I had to stop knitting on the tunic a couple of days ago because I didn’t have the right size circular needle. This is mostly my fault because I decided a few weeks ago to sell on my set of Denise Interchangeables. I bought these as an investment instead of buying several separate circular needles. But I just didn’t like knitting with them. The cords are too thick and the needles too sticky. I have tried other interchangeable sets, but I can’t get along with the screw fittings and I think that truly, I’m happiest when using Addi Turbos or Bamboo (or KnitPicks for Magic Looping) and I’d rather buy a needle as and when I need it from now own.

I forgot to mention the yarn I’m using for both the trousers and the tunic. It’s Rowan All Seasons Cotton, which I’ve had in my stash for ages and can’t even remember why I bought it now, but I have plenty for a little matching baby set, so I can’t complain. It’s interesting to knit with as it has the squishyness of a wool yarn without the stretch. Many years ago I knitted smallest person a very simple Debbie Bliss jumper with it and it pilled terribly, but looking at the ball band, I might have perhaps tumble dried it by mistake/being ignorant, so that wouldn’t have helped. Interestingly, the description on the Rowan website say it’s acrylic microfibre, not just acrylic like the lot I have. I wonder whether it feels or knits differently now.