A bit of change!

I'm going to completely ignore the nearly year and a half absence. 
My year has been somewhat eventful, A new start just the kids and I (single for the first time in 13 years!!!), new house (well its rented, but it's home), new town (well not quite seeing as we have lived here before), new school's! 

It's been tough on some of the kids, especially A (the 9 year old) carrying her into school and weeks of rearranging her bed so everything is in the right order or sitting next to her bed till she falls asleep. 
P (the eldest, 12 year old) has been diagnosed dyspraxic which to be honest it's more of a relief and a light bulb moment. It's always been put down to part of her dyslexia at primary school and I'm glad she will be getting some more support. She is an amazing girl, she just is who she is regardless of the world around her. 
I (my nearly 5 year old, only boy in a house of girls) is starting school in September! Which should be fun seeing as he has been adamant for years he doesn't like school and he doesn't want to go!
That just leaves my sensitive K who is almost 8 now, who is my crafty little shadow and wants a go at everything I'm doing.
Then the "baby" who at 2 is an independent, determined, bright little thing who really brings her sibling's together. 

It's been a good summer, we've had two camping trips over the holidays which was a lot of work but fun, and we all survived which is always a good thing!
A few days out and a lot of being lazy together!

I think that's enough for today,  I will hopefully be back tomorrow with a crafty post. 

Has it really been that long?

Well I guess it has.
I'm sat under a sleeping feeding baby, with nothing but an iPad, a toddler and my free graze box for company. So figured it was maybe time to say hello.

My last post was about my third sock knitting attempt and I am a little embarrassed to admit that the pair are not yet finished! Though I am now onto the heel of the second one so the end is in sight.
I am still suffering a serious case of procrastination with a side of distraction and a touch of chaos, so things tend to take me longer than expected.
I am trying breakdown my projects and stick to deadlines, which helps a little, but I find moments like this when I could be fitting in an hour of knitting I'm wasting it online. Even my sewing machine is suffering neglect (in fact it hasn't been used in about 4 months!!)

One day I hope to combat the procrastination (again! I've done it before back when I only had one child, a smaller, less cluttered house and no mobile Internet) unfortunatly there does not seem to be a miracle cure.

I'm trying out the blogger app on my iPad right now and am not sure how to add pictures. So for now I'm going to go back to being held hostage by Pinterest while warming my toes by the fire and enjoying my sweet sleeping baby and tomorrow will try to post a complete pic spam from the last 5-6 months!

Sock knitting: Take erm... Three!

So about a year ago the urge to knit socks took me, I don't know what it is about hand knitted socks I guess they are pretty yet so practical. So I had a go with some lovely rainbow opal yarn and got about an inch of ribbing on a plain sock that seemed to take forever! Then my not quite two year old at the time son ripped the needles out and I gave up.
Around Spring this year I found a book called cute knits for baby feet or something along those lines and came across the cutest baby socks and had to give them a go, I made a very cute baby sock with a messy heel which appeared to be too small. Once again that's as far as I got, plans to knit a whole range of cute baby socks never actually materialised.

Then a couple of weeks ago someone tempted me with their pretty hand knit socks again and I rose to the challenge and picked a lace pattern that wouldn't get boring (dragonfly socks) and have now made it to the heel of my first sock. It went pretty quickly, when I compared the measly 60 stitches a round with the 200+ I've done on a shawl it just didn't seem such a daunting task. I know I still have another sock to go but this time I am hoping third time lucky. I think I'm hooked!

Yarn dying fun continued.

I decided to wind up my first skein of yarn I dyed yesterday and thought whilst I was at it I may as well get some more pictures of all three skeins.

The first attempt: on the swift

All wound up.

Attempt number two, I wasn't happy with the basic red/blue/yellow I wanted purples and pinks and greens but wasn't really Happy with the products of my colour mixing skills, so firstly a trip to Hobbycraft was in order. I was going for a sort of rainbow, so after mixing a bunch of colours up and dying some 4" strands of yarn to see how the colours came out, I started on the pre-soaked skein (vinegar and water) I was too lazy to wind the yarn into a longer skein, so just tried to spiral the colours around which although not going as planned didn't look to bad, then I wrapped it in clingfilm and microwaved it as before. Unfortunately the colours mixed even more during the microwaving and came out rather messily! Attempt #3, I just decided to go for blue, pink and purple, covering a third of the skein in each colour and mixing gently where they met.
I had a very willing helper, in my eldest daughter, who was quite happy to help me rinse and squeeze out the yarn, though it may have had more to do with delaying bedtime and spending some uninterrupted time with me.

The results:

I have two un-dyed skeins left. I definitely need to look into methods of placing the colours as I have no idea how the knitted product will come out (knitting time is somewhat limited at the moment, and I have a lot of wip being ignored) but think this may become a bit of a new hobby. In case I forgot to mention yesterday the yarn is organic merino aran from Yarnundyed.

My sewing machine made a bit of an appearance yesterday, it has been a bit sadly neglected lately. It was a bit of an experiment really, I sewed an extra panel into a T-shirt to make it into a nursing T-shirt. I haven't tried it on yet, but am hoping it works just like my h&m nursing tops, which I love but don't really come in a wide range of colours or styles. Hopefully with the machine out though, I may get back into sewing again.

Yarn dying adventure

This is something I was thinking about a few months back but never got round to buying the yarn,then something reminded me and I ordered 5 skeins of organic merino aran from Yarnundyed.
It arrived super fast, so I dragged my poor kids round the supermarket looking for gel food colourings.
I found a pack of red, blue and yellow in Tesco and just dived straight in, the first try wasn't exactly as I was expecting. I soaked a skein in vinegar/water mix for a few hours then mixed some of the blue gel and red gel with a bit of water, trying to go for pink and blue. I then squeezed out the skein and attempted to paint it with a brush. With an impatient baby and a couple of small people eager to help it was taking too long, so I tried to suck up the food colouring mix with the empty tubes the gel had come from and squirted it on the yarn itself, then I wrapped it in cling film and put it into a microwave container and put it in the microwave for 3 minutes and then let it rest 3 minutes. I did this 3 times in total then rinsed it off.
It wasn't quite what I had expected, the red/pink was a lot paler than I had hoped and the blue was rather dominant.

I have since dyed another 2 skeins but as I don't seem to have the photo's I am certain I took I will share them later.

Introducing......

I haven't been around to much, I've been a bit busy growing and growing, and on the 16th of June we got to meet our squishy baby girl!

There has been lots of knitting going on too, so hopefully I shall be sharing that soon!

As usual a little late to the party!

But (and I know that But with a capital B is probably against the laws of grammer or something) as I am working on 3 projects at the moment (after saying in a public forum that two was nough for me) I really wanted to share!
So WIP wednesday! (on a Thursday!)

First up, the Mizzle, which I think I will be working on for a while as I am only doing about 2 rows of this a day, need to check how much of this yarn I have because I am thinking I would like to do the larger version.

Then My second baby cardigan, Bitty cabled cardigan. I really think I need to check my tension. This is newborn size but seems teeny and rather than frog I think I will just pass it off as a teddy/dolly cardigan if its too small for Bean.

I know it looks very un cardigan like at the moment!

I am using my first set of knitpro cubics and I am not sure how I feel about them right now, they seem a little rough actually and the yarn catches where the square part of the needle starts after the join, though to be honest seem to be struggling with knitpro joins at the moment and I am kind of lusting after a set of interchangable hiyhiya sharps.

And last but not least! I have cast on my first ever pair of longies (ultimate longies) with some gorgeous yarn from Pixieknits

This pattern is really testing me. I struggle with written instructions sometimes as I have to be able to process/picture it in my head, and there are instructions for 3 different weights of yarn and 5 different sizes, but it has some picture instructions to help with the short rows etc at the end of the pattern. It is certainly giving my brain a fair bit of excercise!
I am also a bit concerned these might be coming up a bit to small too, but they are on 30cm needles, these seem a bit difficult to find in the uk, I was eventually pointed in the direction of  some fixed addi's, which I haven't tried before but am quite liking (once I got used to how short they were)

So there we go, and for some actually timely WIP wednesdays, head over to Tami's Amis.