Happy start to the day

Morning!

I was woken up this morning by the postman (quickly followed by a bit of a hangover headache - went for sushi and wine last night with my housemate).

I opened the door to receive a box, which I eagerly opened to find it contained this

 I have no idea what this is! I bought a nostepinne, but none of the pictures I've seen of nostepinnes look like this - confused!

Any idea? 

Then the doorbell rang again, with a different post man (from the same company bizarrely). He came bearing German gifts...

Oh yeah! I never knew they included a pattern and some gummy bears - cute! Sabrina is a lot darker than I anticipated (this picture has been taken with a flash) but I love the colour.

A close up of the scarf pattern that came in the package.

Sabrina sitting in the natural daylight (most of my pictures are taken in my room with 3 bulbs).

I quickly ran to dig out my other skeins of Wollmeise to compare them. I definitely go for a certain 'set' of colours, in yarn and everything else!

I think Sabrina feels at home already :)

Thanks Wollmeise!! Mam would love these :)

I also had my first issue of my Making magazine subscription arrive, so I can take that to work with me to read this afternoon. A yummy skein of Wolle's colour changing creations cotton yarn arrived yesterday too (more on that in another post as it's earmarked for my first ever Knit-a-long) so it's been a good 24 hours for presents in the post!

xx

Blimey!

Blimey, I go 'away' for a few days and my visitor count jumps to 700?!

Thank you for dropping by! :)

Normal service (eg lots of shopping, and some pictures) will be resumed very shortly.

I'm currently working my 23rd day of the 26 days in the month so far, and my brain is more than a little fried. Lots of sleep and sushi are helping though!

I cast on an apple cosy tonight, that helped too :)

xx

Cute 'n' quirky swap!

Evening!

Today is definitely good. Just got back from work to a parcel. Turns out it's from a swap I'm currently taking part in! The theme was kawaii critters, organised by inittoknitit94 in the Cute 'n' Quirky Ravelry group. Jordan has an awesome blog, which you can pop along to have a look at once you see what my gifts were! ;)

As there were only 3 of us from the UK taking part this time, we did a round robin style swap. So my partner was called babyjenny83, and she posted to me, while I post to Jordan who herself posted to babyjenny83! A nice little circle :)

Cute right?! There's a little card, a lip pallette, a penguin mirror, a magic towel and some cute blue nail varnish :D Thank you Jenny!

 This is definitely my favourite item of them all, it's adorable!

Haven't peeled off the peel off covers yet :)

The little flower inside the lip pallette kit is so cute and dainty :)

I had fun with this one :D

Unfurling in some warm water...

Love it! It reminds me of Curious George, which is such a good film. One of my favourites, after I watched it for the first time in uni I tracked down a Curious George poster online and it had pride of place on the wall above my desk :)

I'll be posting my pictures of what I sent once I know Jordan's received it - no giving the game away by accident!

xx

Full of WIN!

Morning!!

Yes it is 7.45am, and I would not normally ever be seen at this hour when I'm on lates but last night I thought, well I've been normally getting up at 8.30 this week, so why not try an hour earlier and see if you can catch any Wollmeise. This stuff is like catching fairy dust - sells out in minutes, so I wasn't expecting to get anything.

YEAH BABY!!!

Log on, see stuff on the in stock page. *happy dance*

A skein of the gorgeous sabrina (100% superwash merino) is aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall mine!

*Stock image from Wollmeise.

It's a gorgeous colour! More of a turquoise/green teal than a blue teal I think. Time will tell! I'm hoping that seeing as it's from Germany I won't have to pay tax on it because it's from an EU country.

Happy :) Good morning!

xx

My First Socks!!

Evening,

I am rather proud of these babies :)

They fit perfectly, and are knit in Abstract Cat Crafts Pool Party. Love them! Go get yourself a skein and join in the fun :)

xx

Ravelry Stashing

Morning,

There was lots of lovely sunshine this morning when I woke up. It poured down all night, and now it's nice :)

Yesterday was a good day. Work went pretty smoothly (always a plus!), then Jamie and I went to Yo! for some sushi afterwards. They have a 40% off deal at the moment. Mine came to £14, and Jamie stupidly refused to print out a voucher and his came to £34 :S I did tell him! He didn't want to bother with registering and printing. I bet he's done it today!

After that it was time to head to my knitting class. I met my friend who also goes at the bus stop so we had a good catch up on the way. She's been ill with flue over the last 3 weeks or so, so I hadn't seen her since before Christmas. Last time I saw her she had finished her first sock and was on her second (both fairly small). This time she's finished a pair of massive long socks in Regia yarn. They looked great! And the funniest thing (for me) was that one of the leaders had cast on her first pair of socks in the exact same yarn on Saturday on the class trip to the Knitting Reference Library. (Which I will post about again!)

Last night, due to popular demand, we covered crochet. When we were are the knitting library we found a great book of crocheted toilet roll holders. We all thought they were hilarious, and started asking Gabrielle if she'd show us how to crochet so we could try to make some.

It's a lot different to knitting :) The yarn wraps around the opposite way, and I wasn't very good to begin with. Well, for the first hour or so I just couldn't get an even tension on my foundation chain. After the 3rd or 4th try, I managed one that wasn't too shabby, then tried to learn how to do a double crochet. That took a while! I got there in the end though, and by the end of the 2 hour class I was quite happily crocheting along!

After I got home having promised myself that I wouldn't sleep until I'd finished my socks, all I wanted to do was crochet! Was a very odd feeling! I put on some Criminal Minds (Ravelry has got me watching it) and finished the socks off just before midnight. Then I did a little happy dance in them, and wore them all night to sleep!

This morning when I woke up the first thing I thought of was of trying to crochet something. Then I noticed the sunlight, and grabbed my camera and most of the yarn that I've been buying recently! It's taken a while, but I'm going to update my Ravelry stash, because I don't like not having pictures for yarn. Bit of a completist attitude, but I want to see them!

So for your yarn viewing pleasure, here are some of my most recent purchases :)

Pout from Abstract Cat Crafts.

Tom's Mam bought this for me :)

I joined YarnAddict's sock yarn club (they have a lace one too) and this lovely, squishy skein was the first months prize :)

This is an oldie. I had this in the Beginner's Knitting workshop at the Knitting & Stitching show in October 2010. I love the texture of it, but I'm not sure I'll ever use it.

Some Regia sock yarn to play with.

Some Zitron Filigran laceweight that I haven't picked out a pattern for yet, but I'd like to make a shawl or a scarf I think.

My Wollmeise arrived! This beauty is a WD 100% superwash merino in Fuschia.

These are the 3 skeins together. Left to right: WD Fuschia, Twin Ballerina and WD Vergissmeinnicht (Forget Me Not) at the back.

In their sunlit glory :)

xx

Cupcake Needs

Oh hell, I just found these.

Want!!

I already kind of have a cupcake liner collection problem and I might be slightly obsessed with polka dots..... These are from the amazing shop The Cupcake Social on Etsy.

Go buy!

xx

Officially turned!

I like turning heels, I hate picking up stitches :-(

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Starting the heel

Just about to start the heel of my second sock. This is one of my favourite bits :-)

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I have great news!

Morning!

It's Wednesday today and the last two days have been pretty nice to me.

On Monday it was the return of my knitting course, week 7. It's been going really well and I like everyone there. Although my partner Betty hasn't been for the last 3-4 classes so I'm hoping she's okay. We covered lace this week, and it's given me a bit more confidence to have a go at some lush shawls and scarves I've seen on Ravelry. I suspect that I wasn't doing yarn overs correctly before, which would explain why the scarf I tried for Angharad back in October which needed lots of them every 3 stitches didn't look right! I haven't tried doing them since then so I can't really remember how I was trying to do them.

Good news!! Gabrielle (the class leader) announced that (it looks like) the course will be continuing for an extra 6 weeks, yay! There'll be a 3 week break after we get to week 10, and then the 'new' course will start for 6 weeks and finish just before Easter. This means there'll be even more things to learn :)

Bad news! My jumper is too small. I've always known I'm a tight knitter (something I desperately need to rectify) but so far it hasn't been too big a problem because I haven't done anything apart from socks that need shaping. Well this time it is. My front panel with the diagonal rib pattern is too small by 3 cms, which is a fair amount! And that's with using an already bigger size of needles than the yarn ball band recommends! So I'm going to frog it (unravel the whole thing) and start again casting on 68 stitches instead of 64. It's not too bad, I'm not really attached to the whole thing as yet, thankfully!!

Good news!! I can put my socks in as my project for the class instead! Yay! And *phew* because I suspect I won't get the jumper finished in time otherwise.

Good news!! Knitting trip to Winchester on Saturday to visit a museum which is free and part of the course.

Bad news! Tom isn't impressed that I won't be visiting him instead.

Good news!! Last night we got out of work at 8.40pm. We normally leave about an hour later on Tuesdays as it's one of our busiest nights. We still had shit loads of samples, we just got through them really quickly somehow! Plus we had luck with 2 of the last 3 couriers not having anything for us :)

My second pair of socks is now about 3 inches long. I'm knitting the stocking stitch rounds until I get to the heel. I hate this part :( It's never ending.

xx

xx

New year, new lusts!

Evening!

To distract myself from my chest infection I've decided to post some lovely things I've found on Folksy :) (All photos are from the item descriptions, and copyrights belong to the shop owners, not me.)

First up...

I'm loving my greens/blues/teals lately. I love the teal bits in between the beads, and how the colours all mesh together. I need to find some sock yarn in this colour! You can buy this lovely bracelet from AMIdesigns :)

In keeping with the blues/greens/purple phase I'm in, I found this yarn 'Petulant' from Spinning a Yarn. I think this colourway would make gorgeous socks - it's not too girly for work with the stripes of grey, and it would look really good even knit up as a plain stocking stitch sock :)

And last but not least....

Anybody feel like buying one of these in a size 10 and sending it my way? ;) I adore this dress from Dig For Victory, and this particular dress is just the latest one from their shop that has caught my eye!

xx