I Aten't Dead

Sorry for my non-appearance last Sunday. It's been a bit of a time, what with my tooth, and going out gallivanting, and the Beamish Boy upgrading my computer and introducing it to Linux. It wasn't love at first sight...

However, now that the BIOS has been upgraded, everything seems to be working fine, and I am no longer under the oppressive thumb of Bill Gates :)

I've spent part of the past week wrestling with my mother's Christmas present. She requested a big lacy knitted circle, with slits left in it for her arms to go through, so that it would just cover her shoulders nicely if she had to go into hospital. Not that she's planning to, you understand, but she likes to be prepared. I faffed about with a number of different knitting and crochet patterns, none of which really fitted the bill. In the end, I dug out one of my favourite crochet doily patterns, and worked it in 4-ply yarn with a 4mm hook. This gave me a good base on which to build, probably by adding a few plain rounds at the end and working the slits into them.

It was at this point that I phoned my mother and told her what a pretty bed jacket she was going to get.

"Oh, I didn't want anything as complicated as that," she said. "I was thinking of just a length of knitting joined up at the ends to make cuffs. I didn't want you to go to any bother."

I told her firmly that she was having a fancy bed jacket and liking it, and then went straight back to my crochet and started working out how to add cuffs...

In the end what I did was simply to work in half-rounds, gradually decreasing as I went, to turn the circular doily into an oval shape. When it was wide enough, I put the edges together and started working round, and round, and round to make sleeves. Of course I would have done this a lot more quickly had I remembered that the doily was composed of 16 motifs. The first time I started on the half-rounds, I counted up and came to 15, so I worked the whole of the first side and sleeve from a beginning of 7-and-a-half motifs. It was only when I'd nearly finished the second side, worked over 8-and-a-half motifs, and held up that sleeve against the first one, that I noticed the discrepancy in width. Luckily crochet is much easier to unpick and work up again than knitting...

Well, it's finished now, and I can get back to my plus size patterns.

And I promise that this week, I really will do the sketches to go with the swatches I made weeks ago, and get them sent off...

Tigger doesn't care what I do, as long as I don't move :)