Firstly, happy birthday to Diane! And seeing as it’s her birthday, I can finally reveal some secret knitting!

Pattern: Large Rectangle in Leaf and Trellis Pattern from Victorian Lace Today
Yarn: Garnstudio Alpaca, 6 and a tiny bit of a 7th x 50g balls, colour #6347
Needles: 4mm Inox circs for the slipperyness

Making this present has taught me that no matter how much I organise my knitting, giving myself months and months for a project to be done, it doesn’t change the fact that I am the most fickle person on the planet and the longer I leave a project, the less urge I have to pick it up again and finish it.

But I am very pleased with the final pattern I chose. The finished shawl is HUGE. It’s as tall as me and probably as wide. I knew Diane would like the yarn as she picked it herself from my stash, and there’s a similar pattern in her Ravelry queue, but even so, it’s still nerve-wracking giving a present to another knitter.

This is the first pattern I’ve completed from Victorian Lace Today and I suppose as it’s My Year Of Lace that if I didn’t knit a pattern from the book *this* year that I never would! The pattern was error-free, although the cast on directions were vague. It required a provisional cast on, but that really wasn’t obvious and it wasn’t til I was knitting the border that I realised it would be quite useful..! I picked up the stitches from the cast on edge instead which a bit trcky and something which I would have liked to avoid, but not too traumatic.

I also didn’t enjoy knitting the double and triple joins for the corners. To me, they looked messy and bulky; using a fingering weight yarn probably didn’t help with this. And sure enough, once the shawl was blocked, they flattened out nicely. And it’s another technique I’ve learnt, which is always a good thing.

As I blogged previously, I had the horrible experience of running out of yarn within a centimetre of finishing the shawl. I had reduced the number of repeats for the centre section in the first place because I didn’t want to run out of yarn and also because the shawl was pretty much big enough. In fact, it took almost as much yarn to knit the border as it did to knit the main section - roughly 2½ balls. Fortunately, the spare ball arrived really quickly from Scandinavian Knitting Design and though I didn’t expect it, it was even the same dyelot.

So why is this post titled “The Perfect Summer Shawl”? Well, yesterday was wet, cold and miserable and the shawl came in very useful indeed.

Chocolate cherry cupcakes from How to be a Domestic Goddess, including one special one for someone’s birthday tomorrow…

I’ve been eager to get my fluffy little paws on the Fall issue of Vogue Knitting for some time. There are so many lovely patterns in this issue that caught my eye in the preview:

And even if it’s a year or two until I get around to knitting them, I wanted the patterns! But I had problems getting this issue. My usual online sources didn’t have it, and I was wary of paying huge amounts of postage to get it sent from the US. Then I picked up a copy of the new Verena magazine in WHSmith. I should write a review of that, really as it has some nice stuff in it. Though I find it ironic that it’s a European magazine but we Brits have to wait til it’s published in the US before we get hold of it..!

Anyway, there was a price sticker on the front of Verena, with a website address for Magazine Café. And they have Vogue! I ordered the magazine on Tuesday, and it arrived this morning - free postage, as well. Eagerly I opened the wrapper and then had an “oh crap!” moment, because I thought they had sent the wrong issue:

But this is actually the Fall 2008 issue of Vogue Knitting. Just for some bizarre reason, it has an entirely different cover. The inside even refers to the green mitten cover photo. Maybe this is a rare and collectible magazine that I should wrap in plastic in case it increases in value. But more likely that someone just cocked up somewhere along the line.

So I’m off for a cuppa, a read of the magazine and to plan my knitting for next two years!

Other than the magical blocking, yesterday we popped along to WHSmith to buy Captain Underpants and Astrosaurs books and the fixings for a brilliant (but unoriginal) idea I had.

Although I have a set of Denise interchangeable circulars, they only start at 3.75mm. I knit a lot of projects with needles smaller than that, e.g. shawls, so I have a fair collection of circulars in different lengths. Until now I’ve always kept them in their packets in a shoe box (men’s shoes come in the best size shoe boxes, so I always steal Mr B’s!), along with all my dpns (except for the sock-size ones, which have pride of place in the Piddleloop dpn holder that Cairi gave me for Christmas last year).

This was fine as I knew where they were, but I’m slack and untidy and would just shove the circs back in the shoebox when I was done with them, without finding the packet for them. Occasionally I’d have a tidying session, but mainly I didn’t, meaning I was getting an unruly tangle of cords and having to fish around for a needle gauge each time I wanted to find a needle.

So I’d been looking around for some other way of storing them that didn’t cost a fortune (I’ve been using a shoebox for storage, after all!) but did the job. Plus it had to accommodate a lot of needles. All the pretty fabric needle holders I’ve seen on Etsy hold maybe 10 circs at the most. And there’s no way of labelling the sizes.

Anyway, I’d read about people using cd binders (the ones with the little plastic pockets) but they always seemed a bit small and I wanted something slightly bigger so that the needle cords didn’t get too curly. Then I found A5 size plastic pockets. And an A5 binder. Add some stickers, and the job’s done!

It’s not perfect. I’d like to find a bigger binder, like a lever-arch, because this one is already full and there’s every chance that I’ll buy more needles… And it still relies on me tidying them up properly, though I only have to find the pocket I need, rather than rifling through the shoebox. And I’ve yet to find needles that tidy themselves away after use. But each size and length is in a different pocket, labelled with the sizing, so all I have to do is flip through until I get to the right one A lot quicker than rifling through a shoe box to find the packet I need. And then find that the packet is empty…

My dpns are still in a shoe box, but as they’re all sizes I don’t need very often (i.e. larger than sock size) it’ll do until I can think up an equally Blue Peter-esque solution.

If you decide to block a large shawl in your bedroom in order to avoid it being trodden on by two small people, make sure that you leave yourself enough space to actually get out of the room without performing a strange, tippy-toe dance around the edges of the carpet to dodge all the pins.

Secret knitting #2 is done! I’ll finally have some finished projects to share. I’m planning a to finish off a couple of pairs of socks now, as well as planning a new project which has to take priority over Christmas knitting. A certain wizard is getting married and I am knitting a shawl to go with The Dress (which I’ve been given a sneaky peak of, and it is gorgeous; makes me want to get married all over again!).

This is the first time I’ve designed something for a particular person. I mean, I’ve knitted gifts, but this is designing from scratch. So that means my bedtime reading pile currently looks like this:

I already have a fair idea of what I want to do. The only request is that it is rectangular, and with the yarn on its way, I can start swatching very soon!

The spare ball of yarn, my squishy and soft alpaca saviour, has arrived.

And two small people are currently not arguing but playing their new PS2 game. Things don’t get much better than this.

I’m spending today editing the patterns for the next issue of The Inside Loop, which is online in less than a week. I’m very excited about this issue and I can’t wait til everyone gets to see it. I could show you all the patterns now, but that would ruin the surprise. And Diane would kill me and I quite like breathing.

Trouble is, it’s the school holidays, so it’s not so much of a fun day for the small people. But they’ve been bribed with a trip to buy a new PlayStation game tomorrow if they don’t drive me too mad today. Half-arsed parenting, I has it.

So currently I’m on my second tea break of the day. Tea breaks take ages when there are three people and two of them are under 11. I can’t just go and make a cuppa for me without making hot chocolate for them as well. Except that one small person doesn’t like the instant stuff, so that means one instant chocolate and one cocoa, which means mixing cocoa powder with milk and then heating up some milk and making sure it doesn’t boil over while I mix the instant stuff with boiling water. So a tea break which is supposed to be my relaxing break from going cross-eyed looking at numbers ends up being a military operation.

And now I’ve spent ten minutes writing this post, so it’s back to checking numbers and making things pretty for the website.

ETA: I’ve ordered more yarn. As long as it arrives by Saturday, I’ll be okay (just!).