Under blue skies

Well it's been quite a week. The unseasonal heat remains omnipresent and oppressive with my car thermometer hitting 27 and Kitty's bedroom egg glowing an fiery red 25 (and that's in the shade and with the curtains permanently drawn to bounce the heat back out again). When dressed appropriately and with easy access to showers, ice-cubes and the Cornettos with the raspberry sauce down the middle it's been pretty nice and we've been out and about to enjoy it.

This week not only saw Kitty discover strawberries but also reach the grand old age of 7 months on 21st , and H and I turned 5 yesterday, 5 years of marriage that is, adding up to a wonderful 12 and a bit years together. The boy has been off work this week so we've been out and about in the sunshine.

Yesterday we went to the pool to cool off at the end of the afternoon; Kitty thinks swimming is wonderful and is starting to co-ordinate some forceful frog kicks, she's clearly turning out to be a little water baby like her Mama. H and I passed her back and forth between us so that we could both go on the water slide - and yes we're both 30 and we both think water slides are fun. Actually I think it might be that we've both got a bit bigger than the last time we went on a slide and the added momentum made it a lot faster than I was expecting. It'll be a few years and another 25cm before Kitty can come on the slide with us but I think she'll love it.

In all of this I've done a little work on the knitting I showed you at the bottom of the last post, it's the Bellyphant Baby Cardigan for Kitty in Baby Cashmerino; I've finished both sleeves and just joined them to the body to do the raglan shaping, and I've been sitting at my spinning wheel in the conservatory under the fan, or in the cool of the morning with Kitty while H has a little catch up sleep.

I'm trying to work my way through my fibre stash in some sort of order, I've got some natural coloured wools that came from Wingham Woolworks that I'm saving for practice spinning, a bag with the fibre from the Socktopus fibre club, and a bag with the fibre from last year's Knit Nation. The Wingham bag I can park until I need it but I'm trying to finish the Socktopus bag before the Knit Nation Bag.

I'd spun up some Polworth and some fluffy angora/wool mix a while back but the rest of the six parcels had sat in the bag waiting for inspiration. I did a little lucky dip and pulled out this:

It's pencil roving and by dint of it being the only loose label in the bag I declare it to be Knitwitches. Beyond that I have no recollection of the details but my guess is 100% wool.

I'd not played with pencil roving before and it is great fun because you aren't constantly stopping to break off another length, and as it's been dyed like that it has enough hold not to fall apart if you need to move it around.

I split it in three and spun for a DK weight 3ply et voila

DK-ish!

The daisy by the way was from H; we were reading a wedding anniversary website to find out what five years should be (wood), and it listed the appropriate gem (Sapphire), modern present (cutlery) and flower (daisy), so H picked me one from the lawn before he mowed it.

The plan is that this will become something for Kitty, I've got 188 yards of the 3ply and another 30 yards of chain-plied leftovers, and she's now wearing a 12 month size so I'm thinking of either another Milo or something like this but I'm not sure that I've got enough yardage.

In the meantime the wheel seems a little empty so I popped my hand in and found ...


It's from the Yarn Yard, 70/30 Alpaca/Merino and I'm spinning it as a DK ish singles.

Why is it that whenever I decide to do a singles or a navajo ply I start to think it would look better as a marled 3ply and whenever I do the 3ply and chain ply the leftovers I think it would have looked better all chain plied - it's a mystery.