Another FO

Alert Fleet Street and the BBC. I finished two knitted items in a month. OK, so you could accuse me of cheating because of last year's head start on this:


Pattern: Back-to-School U-neck vest
Author: Stefanie Japel, published in Fitted Knits
Size made: 42.5"
Yarn: Elann Peruvian Highland Wool, Harvest Heather, 7 skeins
Needles: 4.5mm and 3.75mm

Don't take any notice of the way it looks. It's not meant to be displayed on a hanger and fits absolutely perfectly when on a human body, my human body to be precise. However, as previously mentioned I don't know what possessed me to buy this yarn. I have the shade card and absolutely fell in love with it, totally ignoring the fact that all shades of brown (apart from chocolate, and taupe if you can call it brown) make me appear more wan and unhealthy than a Victorian lady in the very tightest of corsets. But it was worth it, such a lovely, quick and satisfying project to knit. Mum has it at the moment to see if it suits her any better. Otherwise, I may wear it anyway, dash it all, with lashings of make up to compensate.

The autumnal flavour chez Tarty continues:

To be fair I want a pair of socks to match my new bike (yes, I know that's the poorest excuse ever). The yarn is Eidos from The Sanguine Gryphon. Some of you with very long memories may remember that I won a contest on Wendyknits about a year ago and the prize was a $50 gift certificate from the Loopy Ewe. I sat on it for ages and ages. First there was the sock yarn moratorium when I finally realised how much I had last year. Then I knew we were moving and wanted to minimise new purchases. Then there was sheer indecision over what to spend the precious prize money on. Well, this isn't all I got, but it's my favourite. I love the colour and the yarn is gorgeous; tightly sprung and sproingy. I don't think it will fester in the stash for long and in honour of its origins I plan to cast on something from Wendy's new book. But the dilemma is which pattern to choose?. Out of the 23 available all but the odd one or two are 5* patterns and Wendy is one of my perennial favourites. There is a Socks from the Toe Up KAL group on Ravelry for those who are interested. I've already been seriously considering knitting every single pattern in the book. Ambitious, yes, but so many of these patterns are right up my street.

Last weekend I played with yarn and Koolaid. Thanks to a very generous swap partner at Christmas I had some undyed sock yarn. I used a combination of cherry and grape on it and got a reasonable approximation of the burgundy I was after. There's no photo here because I think it may get another whiz through the microwave to try and get a deeper colour saturation. The problem is, every time I start with dye I want to do more and more and .......

I hope everyone who is at Wonderwool Wales this weekend is having an excellent time. I was planning to go, but a combination of exhaustion and distance beat me back. Weird isn't it, how you can be so tired but unable to sleep?