Right, well, the blog every day in May didn't happen this year. I very much enjoyed it last year, but since then, we regularly have 'no screen' days at home. This is as much for me as it is for the kids. 12yo, who is a very active child and rarely sits still, has discovered Minecraft in the last year and would happily spend days behind the computer. 15yo is never far from her mobile, like most other teenagers. I find myself sometimes wasting away an evening just browsing, but for no real reason. A waste of time indeed, so now we have two days a week and one weekend day without computers. It leaves even less time for blogging, but so be it. I'd rather make and then blog less frequently but blog about those makes!
Which leads me nicely on to this
This is my
Coal cardigan by Veronik Avery. I may have shown a progress picture before - I'm too lazy to go back and check!
As soon as I saw the pattern, in one of Brooklyn Tweed's pattern collections, I was smitten. I usually like most of Brooklyn Tweed's patterns, he's my favourite designer by far. It's not just the designs, it's the photography and oh, alright, he's pretty easy on the eye too!
Having in the past tried to knit garments with a cheaper yarn substitute and never really turning out how I had hoped, I decided a few months ago that if I was going to make something larger, I'd spend a bit of money on it too. So at my last Knitting and Stitching show I went to Shilasdair, whose yarn I've used before and who don't seem to be able to get any colour wrong, and got some dyelot ends for half price. The colour was called Moss and is mostly green, but has hints of blue and even yellow. It's a colour that you'd never get bored with. All their colours are dyed with natural dyes, and I seem to like every single one of them, even ones I'd not normally go for.
A favourite designer coupled with a favourite yarn seller = favourite cardigan. The only thing I didn't like about this, but that really is a very small point, is that it had to be sewn up afterwards. Apart from that it rapidly turned into my favourite cardigan - in fact, I'm wearing it now. It fits well, it's comfortable, it's warm and I've been told it really suits me. A real winner!
For my birthday back in December Zoe, who runs the
craft school that I teach crochet classes for, gave me a book wrapped in some of her fabrics (she also has a very successful
online fabric shop, worth a look!). I wanted to make something with it and suddenly remembered that I had some floral corduroy in my stash - actually, it had been there for years because I'd earmarked it for a skirt for 15yo... and she hasn't worn corduroy skirts for years :-) Anyway, I turned it into a little bag and just happened to have the right colours cotton yarn in my other stash and made a little flower to go on top. It's only a small bag and apart from keeping my WW journal and other paraphernalia in it, I'm not sure what else I'd use it for, but it does make me smile.
(And as a cheeky aside, I'm teaching a
crochet class soon where we'll be doing flowers...)
