Frogging and dithering...

Good weekend. Saturday we visited "Beers of Europe" near King's Lynn - excellent selection of Belgian beers, spent about £75 each. I favour the fruit beers - banana, mango, peach, cherry, coconut, chocolate, honey - whilst the Cog prefers Westmalle Tripel and "proper" ales - he likes the English ones with silly names.

Then we drove up to Hunstanton beach. Us Midlanders get precious little sea air, and I love the seaside, so jumped at the chance to get a bit of sunbathing in, plus two rounds of Crazy Golf! However, owing to me being a total klutz when it comes to timing and geography, we left the beach too late and hit traffic, to pop in to see Knitman. I dunno why, I thought he was nearer the coast than he is. Sorry about that, will try and sort out a proper date!

Sunday I made an attempt to start another Nina Miklin garment, this is a v-neck jacket in pink mohair. Alas, it requires all 200 of the needles for my size, and the Brother 950i I bought (badly packed) on Ebay has a problem with the last 8 or so needles on the left hand end. It works fine for a while, and then jams on every row. I've already swapped all of the needles so I suspect there must be some internal bed damage as that end of the casing is out of shape enough to render the knitleader useless. Need to see if it can be repaired, and if it is financially worth doing. I have a Brother 860 I can use, of course - it's just not set up at the moment.

I did attempt the sleeve, but I think it needs the first part knitted, so I had to give up. Thus thwarted, I turned my attention to frogging a few failed projects - the Rowan Bamboo and a sideways knitted skirt I made from Noro Silk Garden ages ago. In both cases, I have learnt that just because the pattern goes up to (or can be scaled up to) a large size, does not necessarily mean that the finished garment is anything you might want to wear - not unless you have lots of muscles and a penchant for heavy knitwear! One of my fellow knitters expressed an interest in the bamboo. I will reuse the precious Noro for a jumper or cardigan I think. At least having knitted it up once already, most of the chaff will be removed from the yarn. Got a Noro pattern book somewhere... dammit I really need a proper filing system!

Still working on the raglan increases of Picovoli - trying to resist the urge to cast anything else on now until the WIP list has gone down a bit.

To do:

* Finish earflap hat
* Pick up dropped stitch and add closure to peg bag
* Glue loose ends on Cinnabar
* Weave in ends on Carmen
* Steam and make up casual wrap