Raglan Schmaglan

Tried (and failed) to make a raglan cardigan for a premature baby this weekend. The fifth Long Buckby Regional Day is running a charity drive for them, and I thought maybe just for once I'dremember in time, and contribute. Alas, it was not to be. Something went wrong with one of the fronts - possibly stretched, being left hanging on the machine, with weights, for two days, although I am skeptical it would have stretched by 4cm. I didn't spot the problem until I'd already done the neckband and both front bands. Unpicked the bands and re-did the front. Almost finished sewing it up a second time, and heck, there was something wrong with the sleeve head on that side too. Either I also went wrong on the sleeve (and read the pattern for a front halfway through) or, well, I dunno. A second frogging was out of the question, so the whole lot got binned.

I reckon I should give up machine knitting altogether sometimes, and do something far less complicated, like study relativity theory, Laplace transforms, or calculus! Am now trying to calculate a simple T shape cardigan, and possibly make it in one piece using holding position.

Cheered myself up somewhat designing the heart slip stitch pattern and creating some dbj swatches. Then did a lot of messing about with my laptop, to try and get email working. Got Outlook Express working satisfactorily but Apple's Mail program insists on deleting stuff from the server, which was not the idea. This is all in preparation for exporting my info from Outlook on the home PC, because it desperately needs wiping and rebuilding. My smartphone is rather windows-centric in terms of what it will synchronise with, and doesn't really support Apple, which is a bit of a pain.

Also did some tidying up of the MK treasure chest links page, which is getting almost too long to keep as one page. Found an excellent bit of HTML software (Kompozer) as my copy of Dreamweaver has (a) lost its registration code and (b) was probably written for Windows 95.

Started making a small sheep from a kit I got at My Baboo - mine will be blue. So very cute! The body is garter stitch, and the head is stocking stitch, I should be able to knit it without ending up with an extra leg (one hopes!)