Partial triumphs....

I've been away from blogging land for abit - partially because the Ravelry forums are sucking away my life [in particular the pinny thread] and partially because I'm not having an awful lot of success on the fibre front of late.

Finally Pinwheel has been allowed off the naughty step and is currently blocking [looking to be about 5cm to small in the diameter which I think is totally fixable]. I have taken something good out of this debacle however; I have learned that once I have swatched I should go up 0.5mm needle size to get correct gauge for the 'real' knitting. Clearly I tense up a bit on the waste of time that gauge squares always feel like.

[Even though I'm planning on making a big project memory style blanket out of all the squares.]

A Christmas knitting gift [photographed in extreme close-up so as not to give the game away - the intended recipient is a reader] went a bit awry when I realised at the final hurdle that I had cast on the wrong number of stitches. The wrong number of stitches! I can't believe I failed at such an easy level! And then! - not to notice throughout another shaping aspect of the knitting because I ignored such lines as "you should have x number of stitches remaining, etc, etc" because it didn't even occur to me that I might not have the right number of stitches. *Le sigh* Knitty karma has swiped me once again.

I have cast on again ...

Good news - the yarn room is clean and organised - I'm very happy about this. Notice the extra empty pamphlet boxes to accomodate future knitting magazine purchases - I am thinking ahead.

I thought I'd play with my new Ashford dyes this weekend too. Notice my lovely new dyepot - she is pretty isn't she? So the kitchen was clingfilmed, then newspapered...


And the dyeing began. I wanted to create 'Kingfisher' as I saw one this year with the boy and apparently it's quite rare to see one, but I saw it right when I began birdwatching. I wanted the blue to be a Cerulean blue since this was the name of our hotel in Tokyo. The blue was spot on I think.

I used superwash sock yarn so that it was a total fudge it wouldn't matter as it'd be pretty much hidden anyway.

Then on Sunday I added the Kingsfisher orange - the perfect shade! This is where I should have stopped. Blue, orange and white - these are the colours of a Kingfisher.

But for some reason I decided it needed a brown for the muddy banks, and that was where it went a bit blugh. It turned out more purple brown than an orangey brown and doesn't look great. Unfortunately as it's quite a dark shade it's pretty much unfixable - unless anyone knows better? I'll probably just leave it though as my knitting karma seems to be set for October...

The final colours - I'm going to wait for it to dry then ball it up and see if it knits up nicely - I think it will as it's primarily the Cerulean Blue. Oh well, off to carry on with mystery Christmas shopping. Promise I won't leave it so long next time!