Having bought myself some beautiful dark green wool fabric from Fabrics Galore at the Alexandra Palace Knitting & Stitching Show (without owls - although have you noticed owls and small birds are everywhere), I decided the best use for it was a dress and opted for the Trapeze dress from Merchant & Mills. Coincidentally, I really like their “eye test” cards and have bought a couple to frame up and decorate my craft room with. More on that later. I hadn’t counted on how much fabric I would need for the Trapeze dress so the wool isn’t quite enough – I’m wondering whether to use two different fabrics and see if that might look quite interesting, or to use the stuff I already have for a skirt and invest in some wool suiting fabric.
In the meantime, I'm knitting my first jumper in great big super chunky coral coloured yarn. It's a reverse stocking stitch so I'm having to overcome my aversion to the Wrong Side as that's the side I'll be wearing as the right side. It all seems very bizarre. Running out of a ball of yarn halfway through a row hasn't happened to me in quite a while and now it's haunting me that I didn't tink that row - it was late and I wanted to press on but it's really niggling and I wonder whether I should just pull back to that spot. Reasons not to include the fact that a) it's my first jumper, b) it's for me, c) I'll be hypercritical of anything I make anyway and d) I'll also conversely be delighted that I've managed to knit a jumper. The super chunkiness of it and therefore the speed of it is a great antidote to the fiddliness of the baby blanket.
The craft room work starts next Monday so blinds are weighing on my mind – not least as I haven’t a clue what type of fabric to use for blinds, where I get it from, or where to buy the little fiddly bits for putting them up etc – it’s new territory. Clearing the room should be weighing on my mind more, but that’s the least interesting job, not least as I’ve then got to figure out where all the stuff that can no longer live in the room is going to go. Trying to fish my boots out for work this morning was slightly problematic as stuff is now occupying the middle of the room ready to go into the loft, to the charity shop, or identifying its new home. It’s a nice problem to have though and having spent yesterday evening cutting out the squares for the baby quilt on my living room floor having a work space will be great and I’m itching to move myself in.
I decided that a square quilt would better suit what I wanted to do so I’m now going for 6” squares, 7x7. This has gone from 6x7 to 9x7 until I finally settled on the idea of a square quilt. Having worked out how much of each fabric I had, and therefore the maximum number of squares I could get from each piece, I assigned a number to each of them and then drew out a grid of squares and started plotting according to colour, texture and dominant colour in the main themed fabrics – the owls. The owl range from pink to yellow, green to blue, orange to brown so I wanted to try and complement and contrast where possible. I ended up with the following which I quite like but feel it loses impact in the middle so after work tonight I’ll have a bit of a play – I think the answer is moving some of the orange squares towards the centre, and some of the white spots out a bit to provide balance for the darker green spotty fabrics towards the edges. We’ll see.
Finally, the Afternoon Tea on Saturday was a lovely day. We had about 15 or 20 people there who could enjoy the glorious sunshine from Kate’s beautiful kitchen and raised £200 on the day. With contributions from people who couldn’t make it and other halves we should have around £500 for Pancreatic Cancer UK which both Kate and I are chuffed with. We weren’t sure anyone would come, and for everyone to have been so generous was very touching.
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