The dreaded baby blanket strikes again!

Today was supposed to be about my few FO's but yesterday, just as I started on the second pattern for the baby blanket I realised I had 126 stitches instead of 128! With four stitches each side as the border I now just have to design the rest of the blanket myself because there's no way I'm starting the damn thing again. Cables are out because this project has pissed me off enough already but I'm sure I will find something that works well.

Wraps per inch (WPI)

As I've got quite a few odd balls of yarn I needed some way to find out what weight/thickness they were so I've made a reference table to help me:

UK	Wraps per inch
2ply	18+
3ply	16
4ply	14
Light DK	12
DK	11
(US worsted)	9
Aran	8
Chunky	6
Super Chunky	5 or less

To measure the wraps per inch, wrap your yarn around a large knitting needle/ruler/pencil and measure the wraps in an inch. The yarn should just be touching comfortably, not squashed together or spaced so that you can see the object underneath. As you can see from the picture on the left, the yarn used wrapped 10 times which makes this yarn a D.K./worsted weight.

Its amazing how a walk can floor me

I walked to the post office on Monday to post my first ebay sale, it wasn't a long walk - maybe 1^1/2 miles there and back but a few hours after I got back my sore throat started and it felt like I had the flu.

This is the part where I admit that I have M.E. and obviously crashed from walking... Monday night was spent in bed, Tuesday I managed to sit at the PC for an hour, yesterday I actually managed some washing up, put some washing on the line and worked with a client on their web site. Today I'm still feeling awful but I'm trying to do as much as I can.

On the bright side I made a very quick bed caddy with some of the Sirdar Bigga in my stash, it knit up in just a few hours and I'm using it already.

Here are my notes on Ravelry:

CO 30 stitches. Stocking stitch for approx 2/3 of the drop from the bed, change to reverse stocking stitch until it’s long enough to start under the mattress, garter stitch for at least the same length of the reverse stocking stitch (to hold it under the mattress). Sew up the sides of the pocket and make one or 2 small pockets for the front.

I am not a fast knitter but I knit this up in less than four hours.

amendments - if I do it again I will do a small garter stitch border at the beginning to stop the curl - this time I accentuated the curl and stitched it to stay like that

It took three balls of Bigga and there is a second pocket but I haven't put it on yet

I have also cast on the dreaded baby blanket again, this time using the white Juicy DK. By the way I dread it because of the reason I am making it, the pattern is easy to make.

First ebay sale - Yaaaaaaay

I have just made my first sale on ebay - 250g of the cream Sirdar Snuggly Tiny Tots D.K. I know it might not seem like anything huge to celebrate but hopefully its the turning point in what has generally been a very bad week.

If it isn't then I'm going to crawl into bed and not get out til Monday LOL

Curbing Bag - frogged

I was really enjoying this knit and then I realised two things:

1. I really hadn't thought out the colours I was using very well
2. Using two strands of two ply cotton on 6.5mm needles was fine on the main part but looked awful where the round was finished (can you say BIG hole LOL)

So I decided to take it back to the row before the cotton but as this week is turning out to be one of stupid mistakes I messed it up. So the first curbed bag becomes my first knitting failure of the year and I will choose my colours very carefully for the next attempt.

That leaves me just one wip - my chunky sweater jacket. I think I will work on that for a while before I start another one. I could really do with a nice shrug at the moment. I have a blanket I use when it gets cold but it can't cover my shoulders and arms and still allow me to knit and type. Then there's the teddy I need to make for my nephew and the dreaded baby blanket! Watch this space.

More nice surprises from the postman

Yay, I finally got my Mothers day gift from my middle son. In his defense I asked for this and it did come from the States so I was expecting it to take a while :-) If you look at my quick profile on this blog you might understand why I wanted this so much LOL. Knitting got me off Prozac and also stopped me from going crazy and killing people (insert evil grin here).

Another box came with it too - my newest additions to my extra large book collection. Anne McCaffrey is my favourite author - I have most of her books, Deluge is the third book in the twins of Petaybee series and Dragon Harper is added to the 20+ Pern books I have already. As I loved the film twilight and know that usually the book is better than the film I also ordered the first three books of the Eclipse series: Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse.

I'm a sucker for a well written fantasy book as then I don't have to deal with the real world. Oh and I have a fascination for dragons and vampires too LOL

Wow two posts in one day - I am doing well :-)

Finally!

Finally got my Drops felted slippers finished. I would definitely do things differently next time but I am happy with them.

I have also finally put the baby wool up on ebay and if they go OK I've just about convinced myself to put all of the click up too.

With the baby blanket frogged for the moment because I read the pattern wrong, I only have the sweater jacket and curbing bag in progress at the moment. I'm in the middle of the hood for the sweater jacket and I'm on the sixth lot of curbing for the bag so I suppose I'm not doing too badly.

Whats the betting I will start another project in the next seven days LOL.