Tea and Cakes

I had big plans for knitting in France, and I did spend a good amount of time at it, but certainly not the whole holiday. I don’t like to knit in the car, and I got hooked in to a couple of great books too. There was, however, some fibre aquisition, and I think this, combined with a knit picks incident that I’ll post about later on, means that I may actually have enough yarn. For now. Probably.

Anyway, Phildar shops seemed to be in most towns, and we found a couple of other smaller yarn shops, and one crafts superstore thingy that I ran through quickly. Acrylics and blends seem to be very popular, and there was a lot of fun fur. Some nice stuff though.

Here’s what I came back with.

The purple and fuschia is for a Carolyn cardigan. The red, orange and yellow is for a Jayne Cobb hat, the bright pinky dishcloth cotton is probably for dishcloths, and the pink, green and blue I’ll get to in a minute. See, it all had a purpose. No random yarns.

I needed to finish my Jaywalkers off first. These were almost done - I was about half way through the foot on the second sock, so it was pretty quick to get them finished:

Details: Jaywalkers by Grumperina
Lana Grossa Meilenweight Fantasy Yarn
2.5mm bamboo needles

Now, the new things:

I’d planned to make a pinwheel blanket out of some stash cotton:

But we had a bit of an argument after I messed up a yarnover at the end of a row (I was magic looping, and should have shifted it so I didn’t end on the yarnover, but didn’t, and regretted it) , plus I wasn’t loving the cotton for a baby - too heavy and not soft enough, this one. So, I cast it off and it’s now a scrap dishcloth.

However, I then came across some lovely bright coloured cotton-acylic blend yarn in Phildar, and decided to start again, using the zig-zag pattern from the jaywalkers. I’ve added stitches so that there are 10 stitches between increases and decreases, and I have a 5 stitch garter border for stability. The rows are long, but it’s fun to knit, and lovely and soft and light and pretty.

I started the Ziggy scarf, but I made a mistake on the very first lace pattern row and ended up with too many stitches on the needles, couldn’t work out how to fix it, took it as a sign, and this is how it still looks:

I’ll get around to starting again sometime soon.

So, instead of the Ziggy scarf I cast on for Monkey socks, and it was a great choice.

The pattern is very simple, which is what I needed - interesting enough to stop me getting bored, simple enough that I could manage them with very little brain power.

So, there we go. I’m back now and have a few things to get finished and gifted and then I can catch up with the projects I left behind too.