A Peaceful Interlude

Well, as you all might have guessed from the lack of new blog posts, the last week and a bit has been absolutely insane in my neck of the woods. I worked quite a lot, had the first major assignment due in my editing subject, and last but not least, one of my dearest friends got married. I am proud to say that during the ceremony, I got through my reading with only a few small, virtually imperceptible mistakes, and that's really no mean feat, considering the fact that I was reading from Dr Zeuss! Erm, bride's choice, not mine!

Anyway, the wedding went off wonderfully, the bride and groom had a lovely time, and now that they've departed on their honeymoon, I am house-sitting for them and tending to their two lovely cats.




The above kitty is Loki, and there's also a sweet ginger and white boy called Puck roaming around, trying to eat my yarn whenever I attempt knitting. Thankfully I worked yesterday and used the mighty power of my staff discount to purchase a dangly toy to distract them.




With cats distracted, I've been free to keep working on this hat! It's a Druidess Beret, and I'm a bit over halfway through it. I was a little hesitant to start work on a beret, because they tend to look absolutely terrible on me, but then I decided to throw caution to the wind. If it looks awful, I'll just give it away, but I'm hoping it won't come to that - this pattern looks like it can be worn as a beanie too if you just pull it down a little, and I have a better track record wearing beanies. At first I didn't think that the yarn had enough stitch definition to really make the cables pop properly, but it's looking a bit more promising as it grows. The problem was particularly pronounced in the bobbles, so I ditched the method specified in the pattern and adapted a tried and true technique instead, and they're looking much better now.




I also did a bit of yarn dyeing over the last week (I fitted it in somehow, though it did involve frantically rinsing the yellow hank out when I should have been prettying myself up for the wedding ceremony... oh well). As usual, I just used supermarket gathered food dyes, and my lazy take on these instructions for cold-pour technique dyeing. The blue had a few irksome white patches after its first encounter with the dye, so I tossed it back into my trusty dyeing saucepan and heated it in a weak dye solution for a while.

I'm really, really happy with how they came out. Every time I dye my own semi-solid yarn, I always wonder why I don't do it more often. And why everyone doesn't do it - it's so easy!

The above yarn is destined for a pair of warm, stripey socks to get me through winter. I deliberately dyed it as brightly as possible, as I think that come June I'll need the extra colour. Until June 14th that is, because that's the day I will be getting on a plane... On that note, I'm off to drink more tea, eat another English muffin, and do some travel plotting!