toppers or top down

Hats.

Yes this is all about hats. I knit a lot of hats, a great way to use up scraps and they are quick, particularly the newborn sizes.

I've been asked to share the patterns and so I shall. Already the Umbilical Cord hat pattern is up, and the Snail beanie has a rough pattern guide for you as some people couldn't wait. Full patterns featuring different weights and sizes will be up soon. There will also be brimmed sun hats and a Mr Squiggle Hat.
The snail hats are based on hats my grandmother did. If you are familiar with the pin-wheel patterns floating around, well all it is is this pattern turned into a beanie or sun hat.

And yes, knit these, sell these, knit them for charity.

The Snail Beanie hat pattern also features photos on how to do a looped cast on for beginning with a circle and not getting those HUGE holes.

what i've been doing

I've been lusting after these and wishing I could draw between the lines.

And I'm thinking I should just stop whining about too many things on the needles and start knitting with


these by signing up to this.

And I adopted one of these


and have already been doing this.

chasing tails

That's what it seems i've been doing for the past few months.
The lead-up to crimbo is always mad in this house. There are birthdays as well, deadline sewing and knitting and getting stuff done in advance for the paid job.

So a quick look see at one of the latest projects and I'll be back soon with lots of goodies, from things that have been found in the PO Box to goodies scattered around the web.


This is the Fish Hat (dead or alive) from knitty. It is chasing and trying to eat a newborn sized hat. I've sat down with a calculator and worked out the maths for a newborn, 6mto 12m and a toddler size as well.
Here is the pattern for the newborn one. enjoy.

new eyes

Finally I caved and after five years updated the camera. The old one, clunky and large, was good, but not brilliant and finally stopped downloading properly.
So off I went and visited officeworks where I discovered to my delight that they price match and if they have to price match they take off an extra 5% and that also includes the cheapest on-line Australian-based price you can find.
So I got a nice little Cannon and I've had a little play. Only a little one mind you, as I'm yet to read the instructions and really discover what this little beauty can do.
So I've been rephotographing my Melbourne haul and the photo is some Jitterbug from Sunspun in blues that scream water and blue icypoles.

On the knitting front, Tomato is almost done, or potato as I've dubbed it as I suddenly realised why every thing I've knitted for myself as been oversized, despite getting the right tension. It seems that I've gone down a bit, deflated, but thankfully not at the front. There I was thinking that my bras were stretching out quicker than normal leading me to have to do them up on the tightest hooks.
A check with a tape measure revealed that I don't have a stretch issue, I have a disappearing back, cause I'm still filling the front if you know what I mean.
Which is great, that means a lot more pattern are available as I'm in that twilight zone of sizes, not much gets done over 44 and there I was thinking I was a 47.
Yes I did feel foolish, but not for long.

warning, system going down in

10 seconds. warning system is down.

This is what we used to hear at work when our old Harris computer system was on the nod. Often the warning would bellow out of the walls after we'd started standing up and yelling at our blank screens. In those days you had to manually save, no automatic save functions on these little babies. No save by you and all was gone.

Now this warning is going off all around me, well not really but it should be.

For starters I can take photographs but for some reason I can't transport them into the computer. It just won't do it. Yes the photos are in the camera and I'd love you to see the latest Liesl, the wool from Melbourne that followed me home. The fellow is looking into replacing batteries and checking leads.

The next computer issues is more of a down and now up. We've gone wireless finally, although it did take him a week to get it installed properly.

The next thing going down is my work hours. My doctor has reduced my working hours to five hours a day, still Monday to Friday, in an attempt to find a nice happy medium that allows me to work and not be swallowing pain killers like lollies. A visit to a pain management specialist is scheduled. Which means work may react nicely and be supportive (that would be my immediate boss) or lash out like the spoilt toddler it normally behaves like (that would be the ed) and try to push me out the door.

I'm really looking forward to the reduced hours. Unfortunately it means hanging around town for an hour or so after work to wait for the children to finish school, but there is a wonderful library down the road from the school, in walking distance for the kids so they can come and meet me there. Imagine having time to read for pleasure!


And now for Bells seven random things about me:

I once lived in a place where the back yard was full of coffins and inter-continental body transporters (those are the big sardine tins). It was a goth household above a funeral parlour on Parramatta Road.


I get strange food cravings. At the moment it is all about mint and chocolate. It's not just a pregnancy thing for me, these cravings last for months or, in the case of mint, years and then suddenly it's somthing else. Tins of ready made caramel during my second pregnancy was probably the worst.


I love films. I love everything from the old B Grade monster, zombie and alien movies and have everything made by Ed Wood not to mention movies with titles that include Attack, Zombies, Vampires, I think you get the picture. Then I love films by Hayao Miyazaki which I first discovered after watching Porco Rosso (yep the pig one) late one night while breast feeding the eldest. The kids have grown up with these tales, yes both the zombies and the anime.


Both my thumbs are double jointed, I share this trait with my brother, but not my children.


I've sung all my children to sleep when they were little. Songs ranged from Drunken Sailor to the theme of Red Dwarf.


I am the Stig.


I stopped using shampoo and discovered I have really curly hair. Ringlets in fact under the canopy around my neck, I doubt I'll ever get the rest to ringlet because of all the dye I throw in there to cover the silver.

a black hole

That's what it feels like my life has become, a black hole where time is just funnelling through.
There has been no time to just stop and smell the roses, but piles and piles of manure to wade through.
The kids have been sick; gastro and chest infections. I've been sick, work sucks the big one and people are getting shafted left right and centre and I can only see it getting worse as the rampant egos take over the place. I managed to take a chunk of flesh out of my arm when playing with Mecanno and didn't realise until the kids pointed out I was bleeding every where. That's because of the nerve damage to my arm which according to the specialist is mine for life. So long term adjustments have to be made, but as I've already found a spinning wheel I can use fairly easily, the major panic is over, now it is just a case of the big things like modifying the house and the car and looking at long term pain management strategies. Oh and I've been advised to where protective clothing when playing Mecanno.

But really that's not to bad considering what manure has been thrown at the people around me.
There's been a baby, and therefore a life of dreams, lost and another woman, my age, has been diagnosed with second stage breast cancer which had spread to her lymph glands but thank the flying spaghetti monster no further.
In both these circumstances it is hard to know what to say to the person. Really nothing you can say can convey you're sorry and having miscarried several times while some of the words of sympathy can be like a warm hug, not all are even if they are intended as such.
So to cope with this shit I've cried for the first and for the second I knitted a boob. A completely selfish act, an act that let me think that maybe I have done something to help. But I know there was a giggle mixed with the tears when my offer of giving her a perky set was passed on to her.

In other knitting there has been a Liesl done in Lion Brand Cotton (no, not cotton ease I used the dish cloth stuff) from spotties. It used less than 2 and a half balls of the stuff and I love it and can see several others in my future, particularly as it was a nine day knit and all knitting done after work and after the kids were in bed.
The mods were I ditched the original purl or garter ridges in the pattern after the first repeat for the neckline and knitted smooth all the way down to the end of the body where I did 1.5 of the normal repeats. The sleeves were to above the elbow and I did one repeat of the normal pattern on the ends.
Under the arms where you cast on stitches for the body and then pick these stitches up for the sleeve I cast on the same number of stitches on waste yarn and knitted off these for the body and then pulled the waste yarn out and picked up live stitches for the sleeves.

Next post there will be more knitting and I'll do the seven random things meme that I was tagged to do.
And maybe some pics of Melbourne because I'm heading down south and there has been a promise about visiting yarn shops, and pubs, and mills!

WTF

Fair Go Fairfax


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