Quick post

Nobody knows? Oh well, I'll just have to sit down with the pattern and try to work it out. I also think I'm going to try to do it with the ten balls. I can always get more if it runs out (it probably wouldn't be the same dyelot if I ordered it now anyway). I'm still very grateful for any tips you can give me, so don't hesitate to tell me :) And thank you Jacqueline for the encouragement.

I'm not feeling well at the moment. My throat is hurting and I've got a slight fever, so I'll head back under the quilts and get some tea and try to get better.

Help needed

In the new Rowan magazine, there's this cute little cardigan. I would really like to do it, but I would like it to be a little shorter. I would like to start mine approximately where the red line is. The problem is, I don't know how to do this because of the curved front pieces. How many stitches do I cast on? How do I know when to start shaping for the armholes? Can anybody help me?



Also, the pattern in my size calls for 13 balls of Cotton Rope. I have 10 (the white ones I showed a while ago). If I manage to make it shorter, do you think 10 is enough or should I get more?

Fiascos and new starts

Sampler Mystery II does not like me. I don't know why this one is such a lot of work and never seems to get anywhere when others who are stitching it are finishing up their parts in about a week. I've barely even gotten a start on part 2. During the weekend I sat down to work on it and stitched happily away marveling at my progress for a good hour or so. And then I notice it. Right at the beginning of part 2 I had made a tiny counting mistake and my entire thing was a stitcho of. So I had to frog everything and now I'm back to square one. I did do one lenght of floss and started part 2 again, but now it is just depressing to work on it :(

While visiting my parents and celebrating my brother's birthday on Saturday I started this:



It's again from the Winter Interweave Knits. And it is a lot of work! So much in fact, that even I realized I could not possibly just work on it alone from start to finish, so I started this (also because I was so bummed about the Sampler):



This is the Sunrise Circle Jacket that's available from the Interweave Knits website. The yarn is something I found while out shopping on Friday. I have no idea what it is as it was sold in hanks without any labels. All I know is it is 100% wool. It is a bit coarse, but I love the look of the fabric it produces and the color is just simply wonderful pale mustard-y yellow.


Thank you everyone for the birthday wishes! I had a wonderful day and lots of good things to eat :)

B is also for...

...birthdays. My birthday, to be exact, because it is today! Happy birthday to me :)



I've mostly done just fun things today, like yarn shopping and knitting and baking. Yesterday I finished the gift I was knitting:



These are my gift to my little brother who's celebrating his birthday tomorrow. (To those who are interested, we have an age difference of exactly seven years and one day, give or take few hours.)

B is for...

Moving on with the alphabets.

B is for bread



I love bread. I eat it in large quantities every day. I do not understand why some people think bread is evil and the diet where you try to eat as few carbohydrates as possible sounds like torture to me. And vice versa: they must have nightmares about mine :) The best bread in the world is one that my mom makes and that I sometimes manage to bake well as well. I'm lucky to live close by to a small bakery (for the moment at least) and can get fresh bread whenever I feel like it :)


Oh, and I played around with the camera and computer last night and gave my blog a makeover (with just a tiny amount of help from DH). Do you like it?

Knitting update

I have a lot of knitting news to tell you about. I finished the ballet-wrap cardigan during the weekend and it is absolutely wonderful! The yarn is Novita Isoveli (a Finnish wool yarn) and it is sooo warm. The yarn's a bit scratchy though so I must wear a long-sleeved shirt under it. But that's okay. I knew it when I bought it. But I just loved the color and the fact that it was on sale :)



I also knit up the Debbie Bliss scarf from the newest VK. Love, love, love the yarn! And the scarf was a quick and simple knit.



And here's what I'm working on now. It's going to be a present to someone and I should get it done by Saturday!

Happy Valentine!

Valentine's Day is mostly celebrated here in Finland as a friendship day, but I did prepare a romantic meal for my DH :) Good wine, delicious chicken, candles and these:

The ABC of me

I joined the ABC-along, where you post a photo of something that tells others something about you. Each two-week period in 2006 corresponds with a letter in the alphabet. This started on January 1, so I have a little catching up to do :)

My A is for Australia

I lived in Australia in the srping of 2004 and fell in love with the country. DH and I are planning to go back again and again, but sadly we don't know yet when it is going to happen. We have so many photos from our time there and it was a difficult task to choose only one that would best represent Australia. This pic has two things that constantly remind me of the country and that I especially loved: koalas and eucalyptus trees (oh the divine scent of them!).

PS. I finally finished part 1 of Sampler Mystery II. No pic though, as I plunged into part 2 straight away.

I would have never thought

You learn something new everyday. And what I learned yesterday was something that took me completely by surprise. I'm talking about the purl stitch.
There I was browsing through a Finnish craft discussion board and I see a thread titled "The Purl Stitch" and I see there a few pages on it. How can there be so many messages about the purl stitch? I clicked the topic open and was even more surprised! See, I learned to knit in school when I was about 9 or 10 and I've always just knit the way I was taught and just assumed that that is how everybody knits. Boy, was I wrong! Among the messages was a link to this. It turns out the way I've been doing my purl stitches is called the Norwegian method. I tried all of the other ones, but still liked mine the best :) No shifting the yarn back and forth, no wrapping or pushing or anything other than holding on to your needles :) I'm sure the others are just as or even more efficient than mine (excpet the one where you throw the yarn after every stitch, that just baffles me), but since I've never had any gripes about purling, I'm not going to force myself to change it. I'm glad I found out about the others, though :)
Please, don't tell me there are different ways to doing the knit stitch as well. I think this is all the surprise and excitement I can take for a while :)

I'm going to leave you with a couple of pictures. The first one is a quilt I finished over the weekend. I had pieced the top together last summer (!) and for some reason let it languish until now. On Sunday I (machine) quilted it. I'm very pleased with it :)

And I've been knitting the wrap cardigan. Back and one of the front pieces are done (not blocked yet) and the second front piece is started. This one seems to practically knit itself!

Sad news

I just found out from Christine's blog that an online friend, Laura, passed away this weekend. I was on the same BBs as she was and I've enjoyed reading her blog for a long time now. My thoughts are with her husband and her family.

Much better :)

Today I had a look through the new cross stitch charts on Hoffman Distribution. The only thing that found its way onto my wishlist was this new Mirabilia chart:

I like the colors a lot (although NOT the fabric color).

I also went to the post office to pick up my packages (another one came today). The first one was my yarn order from a Finnish online store and the second one was my eBay purchase of two issues of Vogue Knitting (Fall and Holiday 2005). The yarn was delicious and the magazines lovely. And she (the eBayer) had added the newest one as well and the postage was a lot higher than she'd asked me to pay her! This puzzles me. Either she is extremely nice and wanted to just basically give them to me and make me super happy :) Or she's mistaken what I bid on and/or is sitting at home fuming with rage about the money lost on the postage :( This baffles me.

Also, I decided to try knitting today (well, I already tried a couple of days ago, but it was quite painful) and it was fine. The arm is still very week (that's what you get for not using it for two weeks) and it's still swollen where the cut was made. Starting on Monday I am allowed to use it as I normally would. So I figured little knitting now would not be too bad and cast on for a cardigan. This one from the new Interweave Knits:

If you do not want to...

... hear someone (me, in this case) bitch and whine, then skip this post. But my patience and good humor have been stretched to their limits and I'm about to snap and either scream really loudly or cry. They are doing some sort of renovations on the outside wall at the apartment below us for two hours now, drilling onto the concrete wall, and the noise is unbearable! I've got cotton wool stuffed into my ears but it's not helping much. Luckily I got some writing done this morning before they started because concentrating in this noise is impossible (and no, they did not inform us about this beforehand, which would have been extremely nice). It's snowing really heavily so going for a walk is not an option. I could go to the library to pick up some books I've reserved or go to the post office to pick up a surprise package that arrived this morning, but DH has the car and driving in this weather isn't an attractive option in any case (but I would really like to get my package. Aggravating.) I could technically take the bus somewhere, but I really don't have anywhere I'd want to or need to go (did all my errands yesterday). So I thought I'd cheer myself up by ordering the new Rowan magazine, the four magazines offer they have and their Calmer booklet. Great! So, I start adding them to my shopping basket only to notice it doesn't work! It only puts in two items and when I try to add the third, it deletes one of those already in it. Very, very frustrating! I send them an email, but have no idea how long it takes for them to reply. So now I have got nothing to do put sit here listening to the loud (shakes your bones and rattles your brain) drill. Oh joy.

By the way, part 2 of the sampler mystery is here. And it looks lovely. But I'm not even done with part 1. Depressing. I guess it's just one of those days.

But I do have my new socks on and they are lovely and perfectly warm (when I've added a pair of regular socks underneath). That's something, eh?