Can't blog, too busy knitting!

I've been in a bit of a blog slump lately.

Which is funny, because there's lots going on.

I've been knitting away on Margot, and she now has about 26cm of one sleeve (not certain if it's a left or a right, the pattern is completely reversible, so I guess it depends on which way around it is when I go to put it on). This is more sleeve length than is called for in the pattern but I've decided to make the sleeves full length.

After getting that far, I decided to enforce a go-slow on Margot for a bit, for a couple of reasons. One, I've found that knitting with the 30cm circular needle I'm using for the sleeve is hurting my dodgy wrist a bit so I'm trying to only do a couple of rows at a time, a couple of times a day. Two, and this is the more important reason, it suddenly occurred to me that my little sister is due to give birth to her first baby in about 15 weeks, and I didn't have anything finished for the little munchkin.

It was clearly necessary to redo the knitting plan and to get a move on.

New plan:

1. Dig the hibernating Little Petal out of the pile and sew on the remaining sleeve and buttons. I started this some time ago and put it aside when I started Margot. It is now all done, but is in desperate need of a good blocking. This is the 3-6 month size and I only made a couple of mods - I knitted the body in one piece rather than three, and did the skirt about 1cm shorter than called for in the pattern as I was concerned about running out of yarn. I didn't measure the leftovers but there wasn't much left. The scans are strongly indicating "little girl" at this stage, which is a good thing, as the Little Petal is unfussy, but in my opinion very girly.

2. Start a Felix's Cardigan, a Ribbon-tied Wool Vest or a blanket. I didn't start the Felix as I didn't have enough of one colour of superwash wool to do one in. There will probably be enough left over from Margot, but I'm not entirely certain and I don't want to run out later when I finish Margot's sleeves. I'm waiting on needle tips for my 40cm Knit Pro cable so that I can do a Ribbon-Tied Wool vest in the round, so I dug out the BWM Denim Cotton 8ply that was meant to become a dress for my (other) neice and started a Pinwheel Baby blanket.

I'm using my KP Harmony/Symfonie needle tips for the cotton as I suspected that the yarn might feel a little bit slippery on the Options nickel tips.

It's a pretty simple pattern, more or less - increase 10st in every second row, knit until your hands drop off, or something like that. I worked out that the minimum diameter I want the blanket to have is 1m. I'm getting a row gauge of 3 rows to 1cm, so every 3 rounds gives me 2cm more on the diameter of the blanket. It's deceptive at the beginning because it seems like you're getting heaps done, but then you realise that the rounds are getting larger and larger, and over time it feels like you've slowed to a crawl even though you're still knitting the same number of stitches.

So despite the really exciting nature of the recipient of the blanket, I realised that I was in real danger of losing momentum on the project due to the perceived lack of progress. My solution was to devise a small excel spreadsheet to work out how many stitches in each round, how much I gained in diameter with each milestone, and, calculated on number of stitches, the percentage of the minimum size I have completed. It's made it a bit of a race with myself - how fast can I get the next milestone completed, and it means that even on days like today when I didn't feel like I got much done, I know I did about 3%, and that the blanket is 28% of the minimum size. Since I only started on Saturday, I don't think I'll have trouble finishing by the due date!

Work is very busy at the moment - one member of my team is on two weeks leave, and we're lending one member to another team, so that leaves me, our remaining normal team member and one person we're borrowing as backfill for the person we loaned out. The borrowed person was off on carer's leave today, and is inexperienced in some of the systems we support anyway. Added onto that is the fact that it's performance review time so we're all needing to do our self-reviews on top of the ordinary workload. I see the point of performance reviews, but I hate doing them. I'm more in favour of continual feedback to my team so they always know how they're going. I'm always put in mind of all those report cards at school - "Alexia is a conscientious student and a pleasure to have in class", or the report I got for Textiles and Design in year 7 (and I'm paraphrasing from memory here) "Alexia seems to be an intelligent student but has no aptitude for this subject". Note: they didn't teach knitting that year!

So I will apologise now if there are few posts in the next couple of weeks and if what I do post is rambling, sparse or nonsensical. When work becomes a big mountain of stress, like it is now, I tend to get a bit tired and grumpy, so it's probably a good thing that I have my knitting to restore my sanity!

I hope things are less stressful for you at the moment, or at least, that you have knitting or something else to take your mind off it!

Some updates and a hiatus.

The CT scan results indicate that there isn't anything seriously wrong with my neck or brain. We think it's just that stress and poor sleeping and sitting positions have resulted in my shoulder and neck muscles being so tight that they made the Physiotherapist laugh, and that was pushing on one or more of the nerves to my arm.

I saw the afore-mentioned Physio last night and I have sore but more relaxed shoulder and neck muscles and a little list of homework exercises to do.

So that all turned out well, I think.

I've managed to get Margot all caught up to where I was before I ripped out 38 rows, and then some. I'm now 1.75 inches beyond the division for the sleeves, and it's motoring along now. I still can't knit as much as I'd like as I am still getting some pain in my wrist, but the wrist has improved and I have high hopes for the improvement to continue.

Today we dug out The Boy's christmas stocking, which I made for christmas in 2005. It's a normal top-down sock pattern, sized up, knitted in 8 ply acrylic (if you look closely you can see the colour change in the red when I ran out of yarn) with a much-shortened foot. It turned out a bit bigger than I was originally thinking of, but it seems kids like big christmas stockings. Could it have something to do with lots of room for presents perhaps?

So I'll wish you all a Merry [insert festive season of your own choice] and I hope Santa brings you something nice.

Here is my version of the Twelve Days of Christmas!

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
12 Storage boxes
11 Lexie Barnes bags
10 Ysolda patterns
9 skeins of mohair
8 knitpicks cables
7 bags of roving
6 top-whorl spindles
5 DPN’s
4 blocking wires
3 sock yarns
2 spinning wheels
and a skein of yummy malabrigo.
(I wish!)

As a final note, I will be taking a short break from the blog and will be back in mid January.  I hope you all have a safe and happy time over the next couple of weeks and get to spend some time with people you love, and who love you and cherish you. I hope you get to have a rest and to take care of yourself and your friends and family, and that you get to eat and drink well, but not too much.

I will be spending time on what's most important to me - my family, and some knitting, of course!

Where did Margot go?

Usually I knit for at least 30 minutes every day, quite often a lot more. Recently, with my dodgy wrist, I've done a lot less knitting than normal, some days as little as 10 stitches in the day, some days none at all. So I was really happy to have reached the last raglan increase row on Margot, all ready to divide for the sleeves and body.

I did one final count to make sure I had the right number of stitches and my numbers were off. None of the four sections matched their opposite number, so I'd obviously missed some increases, and when I investigated further, one of the side sections, which would become the top of one sleeve, had increases in the middle, where there should have been none. I contemplated fudging it, as I certainly could have done that without too much trouble, and it wouldn't have mattered in the scheme of things, but I knew that these errors would play on my mind, and I would always know they were there.

So I had to rip out 38 rows. I worked out where I had to work back to, and picked up stitches all the way around. Then I ripped out until I reached my picked up row. I painstakingly wound up the huge pile of crimped, unraveled yarn. Now all there is to do is to knit all of those rows again.

Sometimes I wish I could just ignore those little mistakes. 

ps. Thank you for the lovely comments about my February Lady Sweater yesterday. I feel really special when I wear it, and I love that I can feel that way about something I made myself. It's a wonderful thing, this knitting caper, itsn't it? Although I do have to wonder sometimes when I'm recovering 38 ripped out rows!