More stash

The stash diet had another wobbly in July. Not only did I end up buying the four balls of Noema to make a non-wool Conscious, which I hadn’t planned to do originally… but I also discovered some lovely yarn at Swansea Bay Yarns when I was visiting my niece and nephews. It wasn’t my longest visit ever to a yarn shop, but with two toddlers in tow we had to be pretty quick browsing. I chose three balls of Ella Rae Cozy Soft Prints in this gorgeous colourway to make a Beyond Puerperium for LO.

That makes my stash in total for July 1064 metres (oops), giving a total of 4696.4 metres acquired so far this year (double oops). Another Conscious jumper knitted in July used a total of 299.6 metres, totalling 3250.7 metres for the year so far. So, I’ve knitted 1445.6 metres less than I’ve bought so far! I didn’t get any projects finished during August so nothing new to add to the knitted up totals, although at least I didn’t buy any more stash either…

 

 

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Rainbows

So I’ve been doing lots of knitting in July. In my last stash update I reported the purchase of three balls of West Yorkshire Spinners Aire Valley DK yarn in the rum paradise colourway.

This was intended to be knitted up into two Conscious jumpers for LO and her cousin, who is three months older. Three balls should be just about enough for two jumpers in 2-3 year size.

Here we are in progress. The first jumper I was really careful about matching stripes on the sleeves. The yarn is nice to knit with and the stripes are a really sensible size – would look lovely as a pair of socks!
Ta da, here is the finished jumper for my niece.

I weighed the yarn leftover and realised that I had used more than 1.5 balls of the Aire Valley DK already, so decided to use some turquoise oddments someone had given me to finish the sleeves on the second jumper. This is LO’s favourite colour so I thought she’d like it like that. I used up every scrap of the Aire Valley, hence the non-matching sleeves on this one.

 Then, disaster. LO and I went to visit her cousins, and I discovered that the smallest one can’t wear wool, so LO now has two rainbow jumpers!

And I now have four balls of Louisa Harding Noema yarn (a cotton/acrylic mix) to make a non-wool Conscious. It’s a good thing I enjoy knitting this pattern…

Anyone had a similar change of plan with their knitting?! 

Some knitting content

So, what have I been knitting? Well, I started a scrap jumper for LO to use up a few DK oddments where I only had a ball or two of yarn. The pattern is a free one, Scrap sweater for the small ones. The 2 year size came up small though, only slightly bigger than her current chest measurement so I got this far:

And then decided to frog and knit the next size up. This is the, ahem, four year old size, but I think it will be about right for her next winter. The yarn I’m using up is an acrylic – Rico Design Baby Classic DK, which I have in three different, coordinating colourways. With just the ends to sew in and the neckline to finish, it looks like I’ll use up all the purple and variegated yarn, but still have some of the mauve left over. Despite the sizing problem (which might be me – I never checked gauge!), I’d use this pattern again – it’s a nice, basic jumper pattern which you can use in different ways to use up scraps. The suggested pattern includes a fair isle chart, but I just went with stripes.

My other knitting at the moment includes these socks. The pattern is called Tootsie Rolls, and I chose it as I wanted to use some self-striping sock yarn but wanted a more interesting pattern that would work with the stripes. After a bit of playing around (the first go ended up with the plain colours regressed behind the grey/white bits) it worked out like this:

I call them the Very Hungry Caterpillar Socks, as they rather remind me of the caterpillar’s cocoon.

What have you been knitting in January?