NaNo Uh Oh

Hmm - I think I may have crashed and burned on that one - that or I've had a lot of naps in the last 24 hours. There isn't really any reason for the complete failure to post anything in the last few days except that I was tired; really, really tired, and I have been asleep.

Or, if not asleep, I have been knitting very nice simple basic things, designed to keep my fingers moving and my brain unfettered by considerations such as a pattern.

The first past the post is my Mermaid Hat - from the Colinette Arboretum book. I finished the knitting on Sunday when my SIL was with us and then sewed it up on the train on Monday and Tuesday. The final touch according to the pattern was a round of double crochet along the hat edge. I've no problem in doing that but the whole hat seemed far too short and it seemed that I was stuck in limbo with a hat too long to pick up and knit a new edging because some of the existing hat would have to turn too, and too short to be really satisfactory, as it was I looked to be averaging a 1cm turn-up, which looks like I'm skimping. However, a straw pole of Tuesday night knitters decided that it would look fine with a smaller turn up if I stitched up the turn up every now and then to stop it falling into my eyes Dulux puppy-style.

Wednesday night I crocheted it and decided that it didn't look that bad, and decided to give it a little gentle block. This is the point at which I got rather carried away with playing in the stash for H's Christmas present yarn and forgot the hat having a little bath in Eucalan.

At least an hour later I remembered it with a kick to the base of my stomach.

The water was an intense shade of dark purple-grey, but the hat was at least still in one piece. Kicking myself for being 50 thousand types of fool I gently squeezed out the water, pulled it into shape and popped it on the ironing board to dry out.

It was finally dry on Friday morning (having spent a good deal of it's later drying time sat on top of the radiator), and I discovered that a miracle had happened - it had grown in exactly the right way and I now have the inch or so turn up as seen in the pattern picture:


(Hat by Carie; Styling by H who decided that a mermaid should be on rocks near a lighthouse to distract the sailors. We live in Warwickshire so we had to improvise.)

It also seems that it hasn't suffered too much from having a bath that would turn a prune wrinkly - thank goodness for that.

Moral of the story is: if you knit this hat, and it is both lovely and easy, block it. But not for quite as long as I did!

The second of my sleepy sleepy very sleepy projects marks a reintroduction to sock knitting after the last two months of knitting for tiny people. H picked out some yarn a month or so ago when he walked past the sock yarn wall in Web of Wool and as he has been perfectly sweet in helping me out with emergency thread missions involving dashes across the countryside to get enough gold to finish the Fairy Godmother, and he has helped to prevent our home degenerating too much while I stitched in concentrated fury to meet the deadline, he deserves some socks:



The recovery socks; off the needles at 4.31, on his feet at 4.32. A 68st sock on 2.5mm needles, with a heel flap turn and a square toe. The yarn is Regia Brasil 4ply Rio (5476). I can't say that the colour particularly says Rio to me, or Brazil for that matter, what with is being more of an English winter weather kind of colour spectrum but the socks look good and, and this is a very big AND, and a first AND; the pattern repeat is exactly the length of the heel. If you look at that photo you can only tell where the heel divide falls by knowing where it should fall, the pattern continues uninterrupted - how cool is that.

And finally,



Something that I'm trying to grow isn't dead yet - it's amazing