I have made some progress with my rag mat. I've been saving up all of Emi's old cotton T-shirt pajamas since forever. They've been shredded with my rotary cutter and hooked onto the canvas of the mat. What I've learnt from this fairly painstaking process is that my child wears a very restrained palette of blues when he goes to bed.
He broke a bone in his hand a little while ago, and had to have a plaster cast. The lovely medical people offered him a choice of colours, and to my surprise he chose a lurid pink. I was roundly chastised when I suggested to him that pink may not be the wisest colour choice; in my defence for being so stereotyped: I was worried that he might get bullied at school by some oik who operated from a more strongly gender-prescribed palette. They told me that I ought to be proud that he had the self-confidence to defy convention and opt for pink. I bit my lip, he went for pink and that choice seemed to go down well with the girls as it came home signed by lots of Lily, Julie, Elena and Zara-types. So, who knows, maybe this pink thing was a long-simmering reaction against his pajamas ... .
The problem that I'm now facing with this project is that we're all out of too-small pajamas, so until he grows a bit, and I can justify sending a few more to the cutting board, I suspect that this mat is destined to remain a wip for the foreseeable future.
I have finished the Sue Hawkins scissor-finder kit that I bought back at Ally Pally before Christmas. It took me forever as I didn't totally follow the instructions. You sew two squares together to create a sort of twisted octagonal shape. I'm sure the fault is all mine as I have a serious failing when it comes to reading other people's instructions - I tend not to ... and then things don't go to plan.
It was a lovely little project. I loved Sue's palette of colours, and I really enjoyed making a Dorset button. We'd seen some lovely examples of Dorset buttons at the museum in Shaftesbury, and, whilst mine isn't quite up there with them, it's not too bad for a rookie.
And, as always, I've got some socks on the go. This is a pair being knit from Regia's Pairperfect Arne & Carlos range. I'm happy with them, but if you're going to knit from self-striping wool, which has obvious areas that should correspond with the cuff, the heel and the toe, then you have to be prepared to knit the lengths to fairly standard sizes. I've got a marked preference for socks that are rather longer in the leg than most people knit (like almost up to the knees!), and if I'd knit these to that preference I'd have had a strange band of plain brown just above the heel, which would have looked really weird. As a result I'm going to have a nice pair of socks that are slightly shorter than I'd have ideally wanted them to be. Also with this sock yarn they attach great lengths of yellow at the beginning of each sock-stripe sequence, which you're supposed to cut off. It's just there to guide you to the beginning of the yarn repeat so that the two socks end up striping to the same sequence. It's fair enough as an idea, but this chopped-off yarn is pretty much unusable, and therefore the strategy feels a bit wasteful in my book. Moreover on the ball of yarn that I had the second pattern repeat could only be achieved by rewinding the remaining wool after the first sock was knit, and working the yarn in the opposite direction. It took me a false start going all in the same direction, and a serious ripping out and re-winding session before I got to where I needed to be to begin the second sock. There were two prepared easy-start points with the ends conveniently fastened into the wrapper, but they were sequenced in reverse of one another. So unless I've lost the plot the idea didn't seem to work in practice.
Anyway that's all I've got on my needles at the moment. Hopefully I'll be able to get started on some more interesting projects really soon.
All the best for now,
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