Well, September flew by! I had a two day demo at the Alexandra Arts cafe, where I made two pairs of socks and a pair of fingerless gloves on the CSM and flatbed respectively. L helped me make some hats, which need a smidge of steam to control the flippy up mock ribs. Oh, and I made it to page 6 of the local newspaper, misspelt as usual (the photographer wrote it down correctly but someone always thinks they know better!) and not my best shot!
The following weekend was the guild AGM, detailed in the previous post. Last weekend my partner and I had a short break in Gent, or Ghent (the H appears to be optional and doesn't appear in the train station name so I will go with the former!).
Gent was lovely, although someone narrowly missed hitting me with a properly dangerous full size umbrella, dropped off the bridge on the second shot (I was about level with the red life preserver at the time!). Not sure if it was an accident or a student prank, that bridge ballustrade is pretty thick! The weather was a bit hit and miss, but we loved the pavement cafes, cobbled streets, excellent beer and food, and the friendly people. We visited two of the churches and the bell tower, and I picked up a lovely tapestry handbag in the sale. Suitcase space was severly limited so we did not bring back chocolate or beer, alas!
This weekend I learned to do this:
I picked up a copy of "Learn Tunisian Crochet in the Round" by Sandy Walker at the AGM, along with two other tunisian books. The photo tutorial in the front was a bit confused - at one point it refers to working into the legs of the tunisian stitches, when you are still in the foundation crochet set up part of the pattern. Some of the pictures are clearly out of sequence, though that might be deliberate. I could not understand the bit about closing each round with a tks so decided to skip it in the end, having watched someone else do this technique on youtube - she did the corner increases differently - I might try that method next time, tss, yo and tss into the same loop is fiddly - and didn't join. I do wish they'd get such books read by a proofreader who tries the technique from scratch. It would also help if they'd put all the tunisian stitch diagrams on one page, instead of peppered throughout the book - this is an Annie's Crochet book and they have a comprehensive page of crochet stitches in the back, most of which aren't even required in this book. I did try and contact the designer via Facebook but you have to join her FB group before you can message her (and I haven't been approved yet) and anway, it's academic now...
Anyway, those small gripes aside, my version is a true spiral - the lack of a join doesn't seem to be making a difference anyway! I love this technique and can see how I could rechart it for other designs - no idea what I'm doing with this sheep design but I'll figure something out! A cushion cover perhaps? It's supposed to be 16" square when finished though of course it's US DK which might not be quite the same as UK DK. There's an amazing fairisle sampler afghan in the back of the book - what a pity I'm mostly out of DK yarn, other than the two shades I'm using here! I suspect I might have to tackle that at some point, despite the fact I have no need of more blankets here! I just love making them and seeing the patterns appear, especially as in this technique the aspect ratio seems to be 1:1 so much easier to design things to come out in the correct proportions.
This morning we were greeted with this as we made our breakfast. Got to love those autumn sunrises!
Current mood: 
impressed
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