Picnics and new beginnings...

The Coventry Knit Wits had a pot-luck picnic in the park to celebrate Worldwide Knit in Public day 2010. There was far too much food, and it was all lovely! The weather stayed nice, and I think I may even have caught the sun a bit towards the end! There was an impromptu archery session and a discussion about how to make frog juice that had me in stitches, and I can't even remember how we started talking about that!

I cast on 109 stitches for the Ballet cardie/wrap (design B) from the Sirdar Crofter book, and got bored with it about 8 rows in. It's a self-patterning yarn, so the pattern is pretty plain in order to show off the colour changes. Hmmm. Almost tempted to chart the pattern, work up a swatch and machine-knit it instead. When I got home, the Cog was busy painting the hallway (we are finally getting rid of the yucky cheap carpet), and I sat down and started crocheting "Cameo", a vest top from the Everyday Crochet book, with the yarn left over from the Cinnabar cardigan. Might need to pop to Hobbycraft tonight and see if I can pick up some more of the yarn - the cardigan only used 7.5 balls (I bought 13), but Cameo is a denser fabric and a smaller hook size. Have deliberately done the straps already so that I can gauge how much more yarn I might need.

Loving Cinnabar - it washed very well, and the arms have stretched a little. I don't like anything too long on the sleeves, anyway. As is my wont, I spilt a bit of coffee on it within an hour of putting it on. But at least it was expensive, Starbucks coffee, haha!

Decided to give up on ever making anything sensible from the lilac Rowan bamboo tape, so will collect it all together and give it to Julie to make into a shawl/blanket. Hope she has better luck with it!

Football fever has descended upon the UK and our house is no exception. Being the home of two engineers, the place is full of high-tech gadgets (mostly belonging to the Cog - my particular fetish is mostly knitting machinery, ha!) that can be relied upon to not work when required. Our tv runs from a media centre, basically a fancy-pants computer with two Freeview cards, that can happily go off and record a series of something automatically. Upstairs there's an extender box which theoretically allows you to watch something you've recorded downstairs, on the tv upstairs. I poked and prodded it a bit but it didn't want to play, so I dug out a DVD of the first series of "Coupling" and watched that instead. I suspect the Cog, who is in the process of transferring his VHS tapes to a DVD format, has probably unplugged something important and forgotten to plug it back in. I always tend to plug things back in when I've been doing something, in the same way that I'll put the flour back in the cupboard - but he's quite absent-minded in that respect.