Some Modest Proposals

I said I’d post again with some plans for autumn winter knitting and so here they are. I went on a bit of a shopping spree in Winnie’s before I headed off on maternity leave. I have plenty yarn in my stash and lots of projects lined up already but as we all know you never have quite the right yarn for some new project that takes your fancy.

I seem to have become obsessed with baby hats, since my last post I’ve finished yet another baby hat. It’s called Propeller and it’s from Woolly Wormhead‘s excellent e-book Wee Woolly Toppers. It’s a great collection of baby hats mostly in double knitting yarns so it’s easy to knit them from stuff you have in your stash already. The patterns are very clear and very cute. I fell in love with the pattern for Kilkenny as I’m from there and it’s cute so I bought a skein of Sirdar baby crofter to make it with.

I discovered that I have the pattern for Woolly Wormhead’s weekender beret in a magazine so I decided I would make that for myself. It’s done with Rowan Cocoon so I bought a lovely skein of it in a neutral colour so that it will go with a lot of my knitted scarves and shawls. Cocoon is a lovely heavy feeling yarn, I also really like that it comes in 100g balls. I really dislike chunky yarns in 50g balls as you always need more than one of them to make anything and then you have the added hassle of joining them. 100g balls make things much easier as they go further. I can see why companies put yarn in 50g balls as the price for one sounds much more reasonable but it makes for a more annoying knitting experience.

So far my plans are pretty reasonable, two hats isn’t an insane amount of knitting. I know who say that I won’t be able to knit anymore when I have a baby. I’m not entirely sure about that as many of my knitting friends have young children and many of them took up knitting as a hobby when they had a baby. So I think I’ll be able to snatch a few moments here and there to knit. That’s the good thing about knitting and crochet, you can do a row or two and put it down without affecting it. You don’t need to be in a special room and you don’t need much equipment that has to be set up to do it either. If you have to stop in the middle it doesn’t matter. If you try doing that when brewing or some other hobby disaster will ensue. Saying that I’m hoping I’ll get to do a brew at some stage before the winter is out.

As a challenge to myself I have bought the yarn to make one of Aoibhe Ni‘s beautiful crochet shawls. I fell in love with her Dublin bay shawl the first time I saw it. It is gorgeous. I also have no idea how it was done, the stitches and pattern are so very clever. That’s part of what attracts me to lace patterns, some people do jigsaws, play chess or do crosswords, I work out lace patterns. I will probably wait some time until I start this one as baby brain and new baby tiredness would probably mean I end up with a tangled mess. It will be there waiting for me but in the meantime I’ve started crocheting Aoibhe’s winter warmer. It’s a crochet hot water bottle cover done in crochet cables and there is a crochet a long for the pattern over on Aoibhe’s Ravelry group. I love my hot water bottle in the winter but to my shame I don’t have a hand made cover for it. I’m using yellow studio Donegal aran tweed. I hadn’t really done crochet cables before but they are fun to do and I’m finding it easy to remember the repeat.

That’s all for now. New baby is due to arrive very soon so there might not be much blogging for a little while. Happy knitting and crochet!