Quickie 'finished' post - now with added photos!

Wow – a whole month without a blog post! Instead of trying to explain, as always, why I haven’t added any posts through September, I thought I’d look at it positively. I enjoyed a month-long blogging holiday!!

On the up side, I have a heap of knitting that I have actually completed. Blocked and photographed!

‘Fetchings’ are done, knit in Jo Sharp Silk Road Tweed in Aran weight. I liked knitting with this stuff, it’s got a lovely cushy, rustic feel to it - sort of like knitting with something a little bit felted already. The yarn was still able to highlight the cabling in the Fetchings quite well. I gave them to my dear friend Ali last weekend, as a very very late birthday gift - she's moving to Adelaide very soon for a year. Does is get cold down there in winter??

Okay, so at this point the ends weren't woven in, so they weren't 'finished' in the legal sense, but WonderBoy looked so cute modelling them that I couldn't resist using these photos to showcase them!

I feel like I'm on top of Lola-Frog's blanket squares, with all of August and one of September done and blocked here. I've also done the last two for September and the first for October, but they're either not blocked or not 'finished' (ie ends woven in) and blocked. I'll get there.

August Square The First;

August Square The Second (the Apple is to signify both Lola-Frog's first solid food as well as to have a Beatles reference within the blanket without resorting to anything gauche and obvious);

August Square The Third, and

September Square The First.

Another finished object still yet to be blocked (and I must do it this week, Dianne was asking to see it last Thursday at KnitNight) is a lovely chunky cabled scarf for a friend who is definitely going somewhere cold - New York - in November. Photos to come soon.

One of the reasons I've not blogged lately (and I've just now realised this) is because of all the spinning I was doing! That, and we got our hands on 'The Beatles: Rockband' game...

You go, Ringo!

...and both these pursuits have taken up considerable portions of spare time. I've spun up 200g of lovely naturally fawn-coloured merino roving that my mum brought back from Tasmania for me a long time ago now.

I have to say, now having spun with both raw fleece and prepared roving, that I find spinning with the pre-prepared fibres much more satisfying - in a totally instant gratification kind of way. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee once said that to learn how to spin well, you should start with good quality fibres. I think that since I'm certainly no professional at cleaning and preparing raw fleece, I certainly wasn't learning with anything approaching 'good quality' fibre, and this was affecting my ability to focus on the spinning itself. Plus, I'm an impatient person at the best of times. Who can wait for fleece to be cleaned and prepared properly when there's spinning to be getting on with?!

Photos to come, as well as a new idea I've been tinkering with to reintroduce some fresh 'randomness' into the blog...