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The pattern is live! *happy dance* These mittens were made to match the Sade hat. Rolled “brim” cuffs, twisted stitches, the same twisted decrease patterning… The only thing missing is the seed stitch. I didn’t see that as being very comfortable on hands. The left mitten decreases towards the right, the right towards the left (mentioning that because you can only see the left mitten’s patterning in the picture). I love these mittens. Could be because I used Malabrigo and omg, I love how soft and warm it is. Plus, they match the hat (I know I said that already). And I love the hat. I’m very much a slouchy hat person. Other hats just look wonky on me. So when I’ve got mittens that match? Even better. I’ve been wearing these with my Skinny Clap which is in a blue that’s close enough to the Malabrigo that I look all co-ordinated. All I need now is blue handbag and blue shoes (all worn with my grey coat, since wearing a blue coat would just be too much). XD

Anyway, a huge thank you to my testers: Sadie, Selana and Morandia. All three had very good ideas on how to improve the pattern and I’m grateful for their input.

Speaking of Sadie, she’s got a vidcast now! And the Sade hat has already made its debut on it. I also hear that the Sade mittens will be appearing on it soon. ;)

This is us doing the Viennese Waltz last Saturday at the Sheffield Social. And thanks to my camera having its settings wonky (I was messing around with it and didn’t put it back to normal before I had to go dance), a lot of the pictures came out blurry. But, occasionally, the blurriness created cool effects, like missing limbs and Monet-esque photos. So now my partner has no left leg. XD (For those of you on Facebook who have me as a friend, I’ve just uploaded a bunch over there if you want to see more.) And we won stuff! The medals are gracing the mantelpiece above the fireplace, along with the rest of our dancing awards.

Then yesterday was NUDC. I went, but didn’t compete. I spent most of the day just watching the others dance and knitting. Which brings me to…. my Marilinda socks are done! Mostly thanks to yesterday when I finished the leg, completed the heel flap, heel turn and gusset decreases. Today was just knitting up the foot and toe. I also knit on Annis, now that I’ve finally sorted out my bead situation. The ones I had originally planned to use were too small, so I found other beads that my crochet hook would fit through. My first choice beads were mainly blue with a few white, but now I’ve had to use blue, pink and hematite. The effect’s not quite what I had in mind, but it’s growing on me.

Ever wake up knowing exactly what you want to knit? That’s what happened with this hat (and the co-ordinating mittens which will be released once the testers are done). The night before I’d planned out exactly what I was going to cast on next (Annis from knitty actually; I did finally cast that on last night) and when I wake the next morning? Hat and mitten pattern clear as day in my head. So, off I went, knit the things, wrote out the patterns and sent them to testers. The lovely Sadie offered as usual. She’s one my favorite testers. Clear advice on what’s not working, fast knitter, basically just awesome.

Anyway, back to the hat. That morning, I just knew what my leftover Malabrigo was destined for. Twisted stitches along with seed stitch? A very warm hat. This one (unlike others I’ve knit) actually covers my ears when I wear it in my usual slouchy style. The rolled brim and twisted ribbing keep it nice and snug on my head keeping it from sliding off. That’s all I really looked for; something that’ll stay put and actually cover my ears.

As with all my patterns, this one is available on Ravelry, along with the mitten pattern that’ll be published later this month.

I’ve just finished the mittens I talked about last week. Tried them on now that they had thumbs (pre-blocking) and they’re still snug. As long as I don’t have long nails, I’m fine with them. So now they’ve had a bath and hopefully once dry they’ll have stretched enough to be comfortable. On the whole, they’re very pretty. And the pattern’s fairly easy (even though I still think that the thumb gusset is way too short).

Since I can’t cast on my next pair of socks until Feb 1st (part of the KAL prize rules), I’ll be casting on Annis with some lovely blue laceweight that Emma Jane gave me for my birthday last year. I think I’ll be substituting the nupps with beads. Nothing against nupps, but I just feel like trying beads for this one.

As for my ankle? I went to dance practice on Friday, hurt it again during Quickstep (it’s always Quickstep!) so now I’ve got an ankle support strap thingy on it and won’t be dancing again until the comp on Saturday. I’d love to practice beforehand, but I don’t want to risk it. I want to be able to compete, darn it.

And speaking of dancing, I gotta go drive O to practice. Next week, there’ll hopefully be a picture of mittens that fit!

So, apparently I’ve got freakishly large hands. I’ll back up a bit:

I’m knitting this really pretty colorwork mitten (Andalus by Heather Desserud). I picked a gorgeous orange and yellow so that I could wear the mittens with my Haruni shawlette. I waited three months for the yarn to arrive. I finally get my yarn and cast on about a week ago. The mitten comes in two sizes: small (knit in fingering weight) and large (knit in sport weight). The gauge for both is 10 sts/10 rows = 1 inch. I figured that since I’m getting 9sts/8 rows per inch, I should be fine. I am aware that I’ve got large hands, even if they don’t look out of proportion with the rest of me (they go with my large feet). Another tiny gripe about the pattern, even though it says sizes small and large, it doesn’t give exact measurements for either. Just how big is large? What’s the total length of the mittens? Just something to give me a better idea of what I’d need to change about my gauge to get the size that I want.

My first stumbling block came when it was time to separate for the thumb. It came way too early if I wanted the mittens to fit comfortably and be long enough at the wrist. One expects the cuff pattern to be on the wrist, n’est-ce pas? Not halfway on the palm. So I delayed the thumb gusset separation by about seven rounds. Now the cuff is where it’s supposed to be and the thumb opening is where I want it to be. The only problem is… now it looks like the mittens are too short. They’re uncomfortable at the top where the decreases are (and I can’t change where to decrease/just knit more rows until the correct length since it’s all worked into the pattern).

So now I’ve got my fingers crossed: blocking will magically give it an extra half inch to an inch and make them fit right. Right?

(P.S. If you want pretty feet, don’t dance. Both of my feet now have lovely purple-y patterning from the bruises I got during yesterday’s dance practice. And a swollen ankle from landing awkwardly during a scatter chassée. Just an FYI.)

That picture there? Christmas Eve dinner. So delicious. That’s exactly what I wanted. Didn’t care about presents, just wanted the fish. And boy did I get my fish. :D (It’s a bit odd really, that I can’t find fish I like here in the UK. It’s an island for crying out loud! There should be lots of fish. But no, I can’t find fish I like. /rant)

Anyway, December happened. The dance comp kinda threw off my blogging groove. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. The snow came, then I worked tons of overtime to make up for not going to work because of the snow and then for leaving early to fly to Finland for Christmas and then we were short staffed and really, I was just plain tired most days. So I knit. And did not blog. And played lots of Rock Band 3. O & I spent New Year’s Eve by playing Rock Band 3 and Halo with two of our friends. (Well, the boys played Halo. I played Civ5 on my laptop.) Oh and a pipe burst in our kitchen the day that I left! So that was interesting news when I spoke with O the following day. Things are fine now. Our landlords are really great. We have a problem? They try to fix it asap.

I’m still planning on getting a bookcase and O wants a games table, so it looks like we’ll be going to IKEA at some point (unless I can find them in a charity shop first). I have cleaned out the yellow room a bit and now I’ve got plans for that, but I’ll need O’s help so that might not happen for awhile. And if I rearrange stuff up in the purple room, then I might be able to turn that into my little sewing corner.

I have finally updated my Rav projects. Pictures have been uploaded. Lots of pretty things. And speaking of knitting, I’ve just finished a pair of socks! The very first pair for 2011 was Cookie A’s Pointelle pattern. The yarn I used was Cascade Heritage Sock that I bought while in Chicago a few months ago. I’ve already cast on something else, but I won’t talk about that until it’s ready for its debut. I will be needing test knitters again, if anyone wants to volunteer?

Just made my first snow angel of the season. :D I didn’t go to work today. I did try. Got up at 7am as usual, made breakfast, got dressed, packed my lunch, all the while watching BBC Breakfast and checking Twitter and travel websites for updates. Katie also happened to be on Twitter while I was doing all this and tried checking bus websites if there was any news for me. Turns out that the almost foot of snow that we got was enough to grind everything to a halt in Sheffield. Even the very few buses that were reported as running limited services (none of which reached my neck of the woods as far as I could tell) were cancelled by 9:30am (and still aren’t running as I type this at approx 2pm). So even if I had made it to work, I don’t think I would’ve made it back by bus. And I really don’t fancy the idea of walking over 3 miles in almost knee-deep snow.

We cleared off our car last night at about 6pm. This is what it looked like at 7:30-ish this morning:

Doesn’t really look like we did anything at all. And we cleared it off again just now, but since it’s still snowing, it’ll probably look like that again in a few hours. But yay for snow angels! Later I might try convincing O that we need to build a snowman in our back garden. :D

Well, I’m back from Chicago. Spent a week with my older sister’s family. Awesome time. They predicted snow for Thanksgiving, but none fell. So guess what I came home to? The above! That’ll sure make tomorrow’s trip to work interesting. I took today off to help with recovering from jet lag, so I haven’t really left the house since bringing our car home yesterday. I know I’m not experienced enough to even try driving in that, so it’ll have to be the bus for me. If they’re running that is. According to Travel South Yorkshire they aren’t running right now, so who knows what the case’ll be in the morning.

And with that, the rest of my updating will have to wait until later. Now, it’s time for bed (since I still do need to try to get to work, even if the weather’s not ideal).

Those of you who follow me on Twitter or Plurk already know this: a bus hit my car on Saturday. The car was parked and we weren’t in it at the time. It hit the rear of the car, so now there’s a dent and some scratches. After a few days of playing phone tag with the bus company, the manager came out to see the car last night. His first response after seeing the damage: “Yep, that’s us. Sorry love.” So they’ll fix it.

As a thank you for the neighbor who saw it happen and got all of the details for us, I’m baking. Tonight, it’s mocha brownies from the book I got for Christmas from O’s sister. And tomorrow morning I’ll bake some peanut butter cookies. We’ve got to head out to O’s parents’ place to give O’s dad his birthday present, so I’m dropping off the baked goodies then (we were parked outside of O’s parents’ place when the bus hit the car).

I’ve never met the neighbor, but his dad was my driving instructor, so it could be an interesting visit tomorrow.

I got some very good mail yesterday. I bought some perfume from a destash and as an extra, she threw in that yarn. It’s perfect for my blanket (I’ve actually run out of leftovers so this is a great help for keeping my blanket going while I knit up other stuff). I’ve already tried out two of the perfumes (one yesterday, one today) and they’re exactly what I’d hoped. So yay! ^_^

Those books in the background are O’s sister’s. She lent them to me back in August and only today have I been able to start on them. I blame Lucy for lending me her copy of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. That is such a good book and it immediately jumped to the front of the queue. But I finished that this morning, waking up at 7:10 (thanks to the clocks falling back an hour, otherwise it would’ve been 8:10am) and then just zooming through what I had left of the book. So now, it’s back to reading about vampires. I’ll be starting with the Sookie books since I’m about halfway through the series already so it makes sense to finish those off before moving on to other books.

As for knitting, it’s still all secret stuff. Except for the socks that I’m about to cast on as soon as I’m done with this post. Those will be for me. I’ve decided to only make socks for me unless people request them.