This was supposed to be last week’s FO Friday post, but I’m a dingbat.
I did manage to finish one mitten, which I’m pretty proud of considering all the pattern-wrangling it took to get to this point.
And I hardly dare mention the ends.
But then it came to the second mitten. I worked away at the thumb, getting more and more excited as the end approached, until I reached the penultimate round… and realised I’d forgotten to do the first round in the back loop only. Argh.
So I frogged it right back and started again in the back loops. No problem. Until I realised I’d added in a few extra rounds on the first mitten that I forgot to add to the second, so I had to frog back again. Argh!
Then I got halfway up the thumb and only then noticed that I’d sewn the top of the glove in a way that made the thumb hole right in the centre of the palm. So I unpicked some of those flipping ends I spent hours sewing in, which I made such a mess of that I had to frog the final 2 rounds of the mitten. ARGH!!!
Right now it’s sitting in the naughty corner to think about what it’s done. But I thought I would share as a reminder (mainly to my future self) to actually think about what I’m doing, instead of rushing on and making silly mistakes. So many silly mistakes.
Keep your fingers crossed that next time I get it right and get these mittens finished before summer comes around!
I hit a bit of a snag with my Tunisian jumper, which serves me right for not reading the pattern fully before I started. I thought the section I’m working on now was the whole body piece, and I calculated the number of rows of each colour accordingly. Turns out this section only goes up to joining the sleeves and there’s a whole other section for the yoke.
So I had to frog aaaaaaall the way back to the first colour combo, leaving me with this.
Oh well, next time I will definitely remember to read the whole pattern first!
I’ve also been playing around with cables on a super duper simple cowl, using my favourite Lion Brand Landscapes colourway.
It looks like a skirt right now because my circulars are so small, but trust me it’s a cowl!
I could really do with a row counter for this so I don’t have to keep going back and counting them manually every time I lose track, but hey, first world problems! It’s just a bit of fun for myself to practise my cabling, so I’m not terribly bothered if I go a bit wrong.
So that’s my WIPs for this week. What’s everyone else working on? Having a good week now the cold has finally naffed off? Let me know in the comments!
I’ve tried not to be too quiet over the last couple of weeks, but I was rather busy being on my travels! This is going to be a loooong post with very little crafting involved, so feel free to skim read/just look at the pictures/come back tomorrow when I get back to crochet.
Here we go!
Before I even got to New Zealand, I had a 10-hour stopover in Sydney. Luckily, you need a visa to be in the country more than 8 hours so I was allowed to leave the airport and got to spend a lot of that time outside.
Having come from snow and single digit temperatures in Scotland, I actually enjoyed the feeling of heat hitting me like a toasty wall. My plan had been to find a café not far from the airport and go there for some coffee and food, but it was just too gorgeous to be inside so I found a pretty bench by the river, slapped on some sun cream and sat in the sun.
Then it was off to Christchurch. I landed just before a tropical storm, and kiwis don’t seem to have the Scottish attitude to rain (if you only go out when the rain stops, you’ll never go out) so my first couple of days were spent getting over the travel, catching up with my Aunty, and getting to know the fiancé and his children.
When the skies cleared I went out for a run
We went for a drive to Akaroa, a harbour town across the mountains. I took over 100 photos of the scenery along the way.
Akaroa is gorgeous, as well as boasting not one, but two fudge shops, and a yarn shop!
On the way home we called at Birdling’s Flat, where a shelf at the end of the beach makes the sea boom like thunder as it throws up enormous waves. It’s amazing, but it does remind me why I’m terrified of the sea.
Next day we had lunch at the Botanic Gardens
and I went for a wander around the city centre. There is art everywhere in the centre, from graffiti-style paintings
To serious monuments
To funny little pieces of indeterminate use
It’s a square sheep. Of course…
I saw the Cardboard Cathedral, the ‘spire’, and New Regent Street, before making my way home for a girls night in.
Saturday was the big day, the whole reason I was in New Zealand; my Aunty’s wedding. It was a lovely sunny day with a breeze so it never got too hot, everyone looked beautiful, and it was just the most lovely, relaxed, enjoyable wedding I’ve ever been to.
This is my favourite photo of the whole day
And this is my second favourite 😉
Of course I cried all the way through the ceremony, I am so like my mother. But I learned the trick long ago of not putting any make up under my eyes so I managed to avoid the panda look.
The next day a few people came over for a barbecue and we sat in the sunshine chatting for hours and hours.
Then late afternoon we went for a wee trip to New Brighton.
It was a bit windy.
Then we had a quieter day at home to recover, which Whisky the dog enjoyed very much. Fun story – I went to visit my Aunty 4 years ago and Whisky decided I belonged to him; he followed me everywhere I went, and jumped up and barked at anyone who tried to touch me (a bit of an issue when you like hugs as much as I do). I thought 4 years was a long time for a dog and he would probably have forgotten me, but I was so wrong! I had two shadows the whole time I was there.
My second shadow
That’s the best picture I could get, because he was never far away enough to photograph him properly!
The next day was a bit of an experience. I never do very well on buses, and at 30 years old I really should know better by now, but in a moment of madness I tried to get a bus to the art gallery. It didn’t take the route I was expecting at all, but instead of getting off when it turned into an area I didn’t recognise, I sat there hoping it would turn back and start heading where I wanted to go. You can guess how that turned out. When I finally gave up and got off, it took me around 45 minutes to walk to the gallery.
It was worth the walk though, I do love me some art and I even got to join in with a piece!
Plus they had an excellent café.
Then (deep breath) I had to get the bus home again. Long story short; I took a wrong turning, ended up walking for over an hour through streets I’d never seen before, and I actually cried when I finally saw the bus stop I needed.
When I finally made it home and collapsed into a chair, Fitbit told me I’d walked 7.3 miles and taken over 17,000 steps. I slept well that night.
My last day in Christchurch came around far too fast. For my last trip, my Aunty took me to Halswell Quarry Park for a last bit of Hobbiton lookalike scenery and sunshine. We did the gentle walk so my poor knackered legs didn’t fall off.
And finished it all off with an amazing iced coffee and a slice of cake.
Now I’m back and I have to say it’s surprising how quickly you can get used to the heat. We’re dealing with the tail end of the Beast from the East in Scotland and I just cannot get warm, despite being pretty hardy before I left! It is good to be home though. Much as I love NZ, this is where I belong. Three feet of snow and all.
Tunisian is so much fun, I decided to learn another stitch this week. Quite a few people mentioned the knit stitch after my last post, and I love the regularity of knit stitches, so I decided to give it a go.
Turns out it’s not as easy as the simple stitch (shocking, right?), and at first I made a whole swatch using…I don’t actually know if it’s a real thing.
For the knit stitch you’re supposed to pass the hook through the loop of the previous round, right here:
I totally misunderstood the tutorial (it wasn’t great) and went through the space at the side of the loop, like so:
Which meant that I had to increase one stitch every single row or skip one at the start, which gave me a very wonky-edged swatch. It did look pretty though.
But considering I’ve never seen knitting like that in my life I figured I must have got it wrong. I frogged it, found a better tutorial, and had another go.
Much better! That’s the column layout I’ve come to know and love, so I’m now officially adding the Tunisian knit stitch to my repertoire.
Does anyone know if my first attempt was a different stitch or did I just make a mess? What do you think of the actual knit stitch? Let me know in the comments!
“Barring any major disasters”, I said. How’s that for famous last words?
This is the multi-faceted knot that I have now spent at least 4 hours trying to untangle:
Apparently some people enjoy unknotting yarn. I am not one of those people. The only reason I haven’t put this down to work on something more fun is because I know full well it would end up shoved to the bottom of my WIP drawer forever more. If I stop I will never want to start again!
So I will be spending my Friday night doing battle with a ball of sock yarn. What an exciting life I lead.
Who did better than me and managed to finish something this week? Any tips for dealing with mahoosive yarn knots? Let me know in the comments!
I’m fully moved in to my new flat now, but unfortunately the internet is not, and earlier this week I used up my data allowance. So when the time came to crochet a picot border on my star blanket, I wasn’t able to Google ‘how to crochet picot stitch’.
But I’d read some instructions a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t actually try it out at the time, even though I’m definitely a kinaesthetic learner when it comes to crochet, but I was sure I would remember it anyway. It’s a simple enough little stitch.
I mean, my memory never lets me down…right?
Wrong (of course). The only part I remembered accurately was that a picot usually involves 3 chain stitches. So here’s what I did:
Two single crochet
Slip stitch in the next stitch
Chain 3
Slip stitch in the same stitch as before
Which I think looks quite pretty, but is not a picot stitch.
Of course I made it almost halfway round the blanket before getting some internet access at the library and discovering that I was doing it wrong. So now I’m dithering about what to do; rip it all back and do an actual picot border, or just carry on with my pretty, made up stitch.
What do you think? Picot or pic-not? And has anyone else ever accidentally made something up? Let me know in the comments!
Quiet Water Craft 
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