Hello Monday and a pair of true monster socks (2015 FO# 11)

Last week flew by in a massive deadline blur. I honestly didn't even realise I'd missed a week of posting until I sat down now to type this. That's hopeless! The days and weeks feel like they're zooming so fast at the moment I can't even keep up. I am seriously tempted to buy one of these gorgeous colouring books to help me be a bit more mindful and slow down. (haha when would I find the time to do that. Bluergh.)

I did take a few minutes time out today to take pictures of my latest pair of socks. These are full-on monster socks, made out of the 5-10g balls of sock yarn left after a pair of socks have been finished.

To make these, I collected all of the similar weight and feel sock yarns I had and divided them each into two balls. I then cast on and spiralled two at a time all the way up the sock, using an afterthought heel.

One thing I didn't do which I probably should have was weigh the itty bitty balls. Although I followed the same yarn sequence for both socks, since some of the balls were much bigger than others, you can see that the colour changes occur at different places in each sock (the right one becomes a lot more blue faster than the right one does, for example).

These taught me a lot about coordinating colours in scrap yarn. If I were to do it again, I'd divde the balls into 'warm' and 'blue' and spiral accordingly, so there would always be a bit of contrast, rather than what I did which was randomly pick the closest ball to me whenever I needed to add a new yarn.

That said, they are super warm and comfortable and when they're on, the colour discrepancies aren't really obvious.

I have now packed these socks up with the helical stripes set and will drop them off at KOGO, hopefully tomorrow.

In other news:

I know I am not alone in feeling like this winter has been going forever. However, I was ecstatic when I popped outside to observe that some of the coriander seeds I planted before this recent cold snap have come up! I was certain that they would have been destroyed by the frost.

So, although spring hasn't actually sprung yet, there are signs that it might be coming soon. 

Hopefully, very very soon - I'm done with the cold (and so is Lucy).

Friday FO: Colour-block cowl (2015 FO #4)

Today I am sharing one of those projects that is really of interest to noone but the knitter and the recipient. You know, like the plain stockinette socks that will be really appreciated and worn till they have holes all over them but look really really boring in a blog post? (I should know - that's the majority of my output!) Today's finished object is the cowl equivalent of striped stockinette sock - it's a striped sockinette cowl.

I provisionally cast on 80 stitches and then knit in colour blocks of 20cm. Once the scarf was long enough, I flipped it inside-out, wove in the ends, flipped it back the right way and then grafted the two ends together, resulting in a simple tube. (For citation purposes, this project was inspired by the look of Turnstile but all design elements are my own). It used 50g each of the blue and white yarns and about 75 of the beige, thus using up almost all of my Patonyle single ball stash (yippee!).

The only problem I really ran into was grafting the last five stitches. They required a bit of fancy needlework and although blocking fixed most of the problem, it still looks a little bit bit wonky. Fortunately, because of the colour blocking, the wonkiness is almost impossible to notice unless you're looking for it specifically, so I'm not too fussed.

Since I finished it I've worn it almost every day. Although the tube means the scarf is double with, it's knitted with 4ply yarn, so I can leave it open when it's not too cold but also loop it whenever it gets a bit chilly. The colours are neutral enough that they go with most of my wardrobe but still very nice in their own right. I am really really happy with the way this scarf worked out and I know I am going to get a lot of use from it.

Please forgive the lack of modelled shots - it was a windy day and I just couldn't not get my hair to sit right! For your amusement, a collage of my failed attempts:

In with a whimper not a bang (2015 FOs #1 and #2: Swirl hat and booties)

Can you believe it's the third week of January already? For me, the year so far has felt full but remarkably, notably uneventful. 

For example, with my Christmas money I bought a huge cast-iron Dutch oven:

It's great! I used it to make seven litres of veggie stock (pictured in the saucepan) which I am using in the risotto that I also made it in. It's wonderful and I love it but really, not newsworthy (although, look how healthy and delicious my dinner is? I love eating in summer.)

I got beautiful flowers and breakfast in bed for my birthday:

I made a cute little hat and bootie set on the request of my favourite Dutch grandma (not mine but I wish she was!)

Rav links - Swirl booties and Swirl hat

My favourite thing of the entire year so far is a gift I received for Christmas:

 a 2000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

Lucy absolutely hates it. She does not understand why we are paying so much attention to it rather than to her.

She tried to join in one evening...

but her method of attempting to beat the puzzle into submission proved somewhat ineffective.

See - all very nice, remarkedly uninteresting! I'll see if I can rustle up some actual events for my next post...