The colours of the season

Warning: Actual knitting content ahead!

Yes, it's true, I have been knitting and even more than that, I have finished some knitting.  Ta da!


It's just taken me two months to knit a plain vanilla pair of socks for myself.  Chief in the acquisition of knitting time was Miss Kitty's decision that sleeping on Mummy is fun, and sitting in the baby bouncer kicking little legs and giggling gummily at Mummy is also fun.  (She also likes watching back to back episodes of Coast while Mummy eats supper with both hands which is wonderful!).

I'm not sure I could manage anything more complicated while she's asleep on me, and it's probably true that my baby befuddled brain couldn't cope anyway so plain socks it is.

Fortunately the stash reveals a collection of wonderful multicoloured sock yarn that needs plain socks to show off the colours to their best advantage.  Very few patterns would be strong enough to match up to this Fire on the Mountain so it isn't really worth the extra effort when these are pretty and soft and warm and so very cheery against the oncoming grey of winter.

They even outshine my sandals.

In fact I like this yarn so much that I couldn't bear to simply tuck the leftovers away in the scraps box, and as I've been meaning to make Kitty some mittens for a while to try to combat the Kitty-Mummy game where Mummy puts mittens on Kitty and Kitty tries to wiggle her hands free without Mummy noticing, I did a little scrap box diving for other STR leftovers:

And here we see that Mummy has won! Port and Starboard mittens for Kitty made out of STR mediumweight in Fire on the Mountain and Lucky and STR lightweight in Dragon's Dance. 

The bright colours are fun for her to look at, and they're big enough that she can wiggle her fingers to her heart's content without falling off, but at the same time her fingers will stay toasty warm.

As you can see she was wildly impressed with them!

We'd gone for a walk to find some autumn colour around Abbey Fields in Kenilworth and to introduce Kitty to the smell and crunch of fallen leaves.

I had a great time and enjoyed the change of scene (and the Scrumpy scotch egg from the Cotswold pie stall), and Kitty, well she had a little snooze:

until we went down one off the off road tracks and she needed to tell me in no uncertain terms that this was too bouncy and not acceptable.  I don't think there was anyone left in Kenilworth that was in any doubt that this was not a baby-friendly track by the time she had fully communicated her point of view!  Sorry Kenilworth.

Aaah-woooooooooo!

Happy Halloween!

I've been baking today (because clearly nothing is scarier than cake) in preparation for any of our neighbour's little monsters that might cross our path later, and I seem to be overrun with spiders.


Actually I think we were overrun with slightly more genuine spiders before I started cooking - I've been trying to convince H that my lack of dusting is for atmospheric decor but I loose that excuse tomorrow - time to find the dusters.

These spiders are much more cute and delicious than the other sort.


The base is a chocolate fairy cake, topped with plain white icing and then I've simply repeated last year's moment of inspiration with the Milky Way Magic Stars and a tube of black icing.


You do have to be a little bit careful with the Magic Stars because not all of them have the face in the right orientation to give a head point, and then the 'arms and legs', so I did have the onerous task of sitting down with a dish of Magic Stars and 'disposing' of the ones that don't work - how we creative types suffer for our art!

I love the stars that look surprised so they turn up in abundance.


The fairy cake cases came from Lakeland in Exeter; the nicest sort I saw in the UK.

I did however, have a little help from a friend ....



L went to Las Vegas on holiday a little while back and as she loves cooking as much as I do, she asked whether there was anything that I wanted - I asked for Halloween cup cases, which she brought me in abundance, together with a Haunted House decorating kit.

I made the muffin-sized cupcake (lemon sponge), and covered it with green buttercream, and the kit had the wrought iron fence 'wrapper', and the little houses and moons on toothpicks.

I have a haunted village.



The spiders are for any trick or treaters, the houses are entirely for us!


If you're into any kind of cake decorating, L and I discovered the Squires Kitchen website recently (to add to our obsession with Lakeland and De Cuisine) and they have butterfly cake wrappers. I'm seriously thinking about 30 butterfly cupcakes for my next birthday - maybe H could have matching trains or dinosaurs?

Now then, to important things. I've finished my Snowbird mittens (currently blocking on the ironing board) and this means that, shockingly, my needles are mitten-free. This state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue so I have lined up the next pattern, the Twilight Mittens from Interweave. My quandary is this; for the main colour, I have gorgeous black Regia Wool Silk left over from H's socks, but for the contrast colour should I go for

(a) Dream in Colour Smooshy in Pansy Golightly

Very close to the pattern colours, a nice plump yarn which will help because I need to go up a few needle sizes (who has a 6" hand circumference anyway?), but possibly better paired with navy or charcoal grey; or

(b) Noro Kureyon Sock

Reminiscent of the sunset in the Lake District in September, definitely set off well by the black, but a thick thin yarn, and possibly a little too different in texture to the wool silk.

Which one would you choose?

In the meantime, have a cake.

Obsession

Obsess - verb - to haunt, fill the mind (Collins Dictionary)


Is it part of the make-up of every serious crafter, that ability to focus single-mindedly on one specific that resonates within them, calling out to their inner crafty soul until the need is sated (usually by casting on)? What else could explain casting-on-itis, or those black holes where you pick up the knitting on your newest and best ever project one sunny lunchtime, and suddenly it's dark, voices are mewling for their supper, and you aren't quite sure where the afternoon went, but you do have four inches of a jumper back that was a soft fluffy ball of yarn that morning.

For better or worse, I have this kind of compulsive focus in spades. The last time I spent a day quilting, H went out for a boys night supper and I entirely forgot about supper, and am still not sure whether I had lunch. I also have a mental list of books that I cannot start reading if I (a) need to go to sleep within the next hour or so or (b) have somewhere to go within a timescale that will not encompass the end of the novel. Robert Goddard's In Pale Battalions (a book I love and cannot recommend highly enough) is one that I know I cannot stop reading, even though I've read it time and time again. I daren't start reading it on the train to work, because I know I'd spend all day resisting the temptation to sneak a quick peak under the desk.

It's always been the same, and I bet I'm not the only one; if I see a film I like I have to check whether there's a book and read the book, and don't get me started on books in series - when I was at uni I once ended up with a substantial selection of teen-lit from one particular series just because the first book was given away on the cover of a magazine I bought to read on the train and I needed to find out what happened to all the characters - literary soap opera at its best!

And so it came to pass that I watched the Twilight film. And then downloaded the audio book with my Audible credit at the end of September. And then bought the audio books for New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn in fairly quick succession. That's 64 and three quarter hours of audio in rapid succession that I finished a week ago (and then started listening to the whole thing all over again).

But that's not all. I found the Twilight fan group on Ravelry, and there was a pair of mittens, a really pretty pair of chunky mittens, named for Bella and 'sight-knit' from a pair worn in the film. And then I remembered two balls of Rowan Cocoon in the stash, and that the gauge was about the same as the pattern, and well ....

I fell down a hole and became a Twilight fan-girl:



And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

These are Bella's Mittens, knit on 5mm DPNs from a ball and a third (ish) of Rowan Cocoon in Frost (which seemed rather appropriate). On most people these would be close to elbow length, on me they come to the middle of my forearm. They are soft and warm and just the thing you would need if you lived in one of the wettest and chilliest places around (which looking out of the window today would seem to be where I live).

I finished these mittens last week and spent ages trying to take a good picture with the timer on my camera - the biggest problem being that the auto focus locks down on the background before I can run round the camera to get in the frame - so these pictures were taken on the auto timer with the camera hung just under my chin.

I was trying to do the traditional fan girl shot (the cover from the Twilight novel) but if I flip the perspective it just looks really weird so this will have to do.

I also seem to be developing a side line obsession in mittens - in the last month or so I've made pair for Dolly, a pair that are now mine, a pair for Mum, the Bella mittens and on Saturday I spent much of the day turning this:


Into this:



(please ignore the fact that it desperately needs blocking!)

Is this the future? Has my sock drawer finally rebelled and started messing with my mind while I'm asleep? Are mittens the new socks? Answers on a postcard!