Busy, busy, busy...

Alas, aside from this brief post, the blog silence will be continuing on for a little while yet. I am having one-of-those-weeks as far as university goes: three assignments due over the course of four days. I am a very busy girl.

But it's okay, because I have stress-free knitting, in the form of the previously mentioned tasty-warm Malabrigo scarf for The Boy:




I'm also back home, and have my beloved fish to stare at. And a capsicum - I try and make sure that I have some sort of vegie plant growing at times of academic stress, because they're fun to take five minutes to go look at when things are getting hectic. Hah, I'm turning into such a hippie...




Hopefully I'll post sometime late this week, possibly with a completed scarf and news of other projects. In the mean time, enjoy my paltry attempts at home-grown foodstuffs!

Out the other side...

Well, I officially survived exams! Actually, they finished nearly two weeks ago, but unfortunately even once they were done my schedule didn't really include a lot of free time. I spent a lot of time working, and a lot of time catching up with all of the poor people I neglected while I was sitting exams and writing essays. So unfortunately I'm still tired, but at least the things that have been eating my brain have been more enjoyable than exam revision (and involved a lot more beer).

At any rate, I've at least found time for various new creative projects - though don't I always? Especially when I should be doing more constructive things...




I taught myself to needle-felt - it really wasn't very difficult. Basically you stab things with a barbed needle until they stick to the surface (felt/felted wool) that you've placed them on. I probably don't need to explain how this can be a useful stress relieving activity... I used the technique to decorate the felted bag that I'd made ages and ages ago. I liked the finished product well enough - it's not really structurally suited to daily out-and-about use, but I'm currently using it as a very pleasing and colourful laundry bag, a purpose which suits it very well as it holds a lot.




I also taught myself the bare bones of beading/wire jewellery, and made some basic earrings and stitch markers - I had gotten tired of all of the cool knitting kids having nice stitch markers while I continued using the dodgy plastic ones from Spotlight. I already had the bits and pieces for this lying around the house, as I'd been meaning to get into it for a while, so the gratification that comes with learning something new was pleasingly quick to arrive. I suspect that this might turn into yet another addictive hobby, so watch this space for more beading adventures.

I also started knitting another shawl as part of the continuing stash-bust - a red, lace-edged triangular number. Started and finished, to be more precise - I knitted the last few rows and bound it off this morning, and it's blocking as I write this. I'm very much looking forward to tomorrow when it's dry - it already looks rather lovely, if I do say so myself, so expect an enthusiastic post about that in the next few days.

Other than that, it's been business as usual around here. My mind is boggling at the amount that I've baked over the last week. I took some things into work on the weekend, and it was my father's 60th birthday yesterday, so in under a week I have produced three batches of brownies, a batch of cupcakes, a fruitcake, and as of tonight, a batch of almond biscuits. Not bad for a girl whose oven is on the brink of collapse.

I've also been dutifully cat watching. The poor old man is still around, but probably not for much longer. He's persisted for much longer than the vet was expecting, but now he's getting a bit dazed looking, and when you pick him up he hardly weighs a thing. So we're keeping a close eye on him, and when he doesn't seem happy any more, it's off to the vet for the last time. I will miss him horribly when he's gone.

Oh, and I've been playing around with the idea of a zombie-themed colourwork hat. Because that is what mature adults do, right?

Progress and plans

Yes, yes, I'm a lazy bum and haven't been blogging here as much. Life has been a bit crazy lately. And it's only going to get crazier - I go back to uni next week. I'm taking a full load of law subjects for a change, hopefully wrangling some volunteer legal work with the Student Union, probably taking a Japanese language class on the side, and working part-time. Um, what was I saying about crazy? I won't have time to breathe. But I'm sure I'll still find time to knit and procrastinate, and everything else will flow from there...

I'm doing some smaller projects at the moment. Okay fine, one of them is a cardigan, which I suppose doesn't really count as 'small', but it's lace on big needles and apparently doesn't take very long at all, so I am optimistic.


The lighter green item on the left is a hat I'm making from some very lovely Wired for Fibre yarn. It's my own design, so it may or may not actually work out. But in the meantime, the colour is absolutely beautiful - it's varigated, but without any of that nasty obvious pooling that sometimes makes me twitch a little.

The darker green is the aforementioned Liesl cardigan. I was curious about all of the fuss being made over Malabrigo yarn, and then when I found an Australian vendor who sold it, I decided to check it out. I can now see why people go on about it so much - it is lovely and soft, and the colours are beautiful. I don't think that I'd want to use it for everything, but it is very pretty. It was originally earmarked for a Sand Dollar Pullover (Ravelry link, because I couldn't find a decent picture elsewhere), but then after taking a long and hard look at this jumper, I realised that it was probably not likely to work very well with my body shape. As we know, I'm rather tall, and most of my height is in my torso. I don't want to end up with a midriff jumper - it's not a good look. So the yarn is going to be a Liesl instead. Hopefully it'll work out well (though I've already arsed the pattern up a little bit - oops).

(The orangey-gold yarn is a skein of Sundara that I have no idea what to do with. I love the colour, but I'm really not sure that it will suit me in a garment. It's in the photo because, well, it looks really nice with the other yarns, and it might as well earn its keep by posing for me until I figure out what to do with it!)


And there are other things that I'm in a perpetual state of working on. What can I say - I have somewhat of an impulse control problem when it comes to casting on for new things. The above is a kind of armwarmer-esque creature, born from a perverse whim to attempt some colourwork with the Dream in Colour yarn I had left from my Corona jumper. It's languishing at the moment because I can't be bothered to make the thumb hole (that requires, you know, thought and concentration). There's also those long-neglected colourwork socks I started late last year, and also a soon-to-be-felted bag. And who knows what else. Like I said, impulse control problems.

I also promised my Dad that I'd make a jumper for him too - he saw the moss stitch on my Terra jumper (see last entry) and liked the way that it looked in the yarn I was using, so now he wants a jumper. Laugh at me if you want, but this is quite exciting. Normally my family view the knitting as somewhat odd. I mean, I've made things for them, but unless we're actually in sub-zero temperatures (and living in Australia, that doesn't exactly happen often), they don't tend to get worn. On this note: Abby - you asked if I knitted much for others. The answer is no, not really, but it's more because of lack of demand for said knitting than any overt knitter's selfishness on my part. So a family member actually requesting a garment is unprecedented! I'm having fun fossicking through potential patterns...

Anyway, that's enough rambling. I have overdue items to return to the uni library - whoops...