Sunday, June 17, 2007

Nearly finished


All pockets complete!
Originally uploaded by girl_of_bats
All the knitting is now done for the knitted knitting needle case. My favourite yarn to knit with was the dark green Rowan wool cotton. The pink Rowan cotton glace, on the other hand, was horrible stuff that made my hands feel funny. I'm still undecided on the dark red "kid classic" - it's nice, but it's all too easy to accidentally poke the needle through the actual strand of yarn rather than the stitch. That's probably just a practice thing though.

The cabled pocket was the one that gave me the biggest sense of achievement. The beaded one was fun, once I'd found some appropriate beads. The stripes weren't so enjoyable, although it wouldn't have been as bad if the pocket had been more than nine stitches across - it felt like all I was doing was changing wool. On which note, it should not surprise anyone that I hated the Fair Isle pocket (pink with green dots, in the middle) with a fiery fiery vengeance and hope to get away with doing as little of that as possible in the future.

The cluttered nature of the photo is because my flat is very small. I have a bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room with a kitchenette counter. The needle case is 25inches square. Even on the tidiest of days, I do not have 25inches square of floor space in the bedroom or the bathroom, and it was pushing it to make space in the living room.

I was pleased to find that my iron still works - I haven't ironed anything since I got ill. I am very impressed that I did not burn myself or mess up the knitting with it. The inner and outer panels of the needle case fitted together nicely, which reassures me that I did it right - even though in the picture on the pattern it looks more rectangle than square. I've sewn the two panels together neatly and it looks good. Now it's just a matter of sewing on the pockets. I'm humming and hawing about whether I should stitch the pockets on using the colours used for each of them - could get tricky on the stripy pocket mind - or if I should use the remainder of the pale blue yarn.

Next project - little sister wants a hat. Unfortunately I had to put up with a certain amount of rubbish from her earlier today and am feeling less than inclined to put time and effort into such a thing. But, I have to knit something. I already feel strange not working on this...

Oh, and to whomsoever of my readers it may apply, happy father's day.

Edited 21.35 to add tags.

4 comments:

Carie @ Space for the Butterflies said...

Wow-ee - it looks really good and you've made cracking progress since I last saw it in person. If you wanted to you could make a feature of the stitches to attach the pockets and do them all difference colours on different pockets! - or perhaps that's just too crazy :)

Maggie said...

You'll be knitting socks before you know it! ;-)

Hugs from grey Liverpool...

Oh yeah, please spare John and me a thought at 4.30 today as we have an appt with Mum's consultant. Am dreading it.

Maggie said...

Thanks for visiting and your question.

It was dreadful. Demon mum come out to play. Accused John of stealing Dad's money and her money. Refused to say hello to him. Ranted at me, asked why Helen hadn't visited (she has last Tues, was in London till Sunday). She was so unpleasant we went and waited for Consultant Dr S elsewhere. As John trundled my chair away we overheard her telling the lady in the next bed and her daughter that there was lots of money and we had stolen it.

Dr S very nice, wants to observe her a couple more weeks to see if she improves, but she is refusing to walk with the physios and won't do OT (from something she was ranting about to me I think maybe they were wanting to assess her ability to cook or make a cuppa). She will only walk with the nurses.

So we went back to her to tell her consultant wanted her to stay in and she wept and ranted and went on about how awful it all was. We tried to tell her that she should walk with the physios, she said she did, I said the doc told us she didn't and she accused him of lying. I'm afraid at the end we just walked out (it was way past visiting time anyway).

Consultant doesn't think she will go back to the flat, and asked if she would go into the same nursing home as Dad. We wonder if they would actually take her (as she has been visiting there several times a week and telling them how to do their job and also being generally rude and obnoxious to the staff there).

But we're surviving, and mostly we can find something to laugh about. Generally highly inapropriate stuff! And I might go on a knitting needle hunt later this morning to see if I've got any 2mm needles. Expect to find all sorts of interesting crafty
knitty/sewy stuff that I'd forgotten I had, which will doubtless sidetrack me completely.

Hope the knitting's going well.

Cusp said...

I haven't been here for a while but boy have you been on a rock and roll: rock (or rocky) with the s***ing DLA people and a roll with the kintting. I've tried and tried to learn to knit but it's no good --- just can't get it.

I've also played with the rough children (aka the DLA gang) in the Benefits playground. I got turned down flat too and I also used to work for an organisation that included our local DIAL so, if I had any sense at all --- like what you've obviously got ---I should have phoned them too but I just didn't have the fight in me at that point.

At the moment I'm trying to get my pension plan people to give me a lump sum instead of paying my premiums and it's hell. They are pestering Drs Mitchell and Gerken too -- so between us, the people at JP Hosp. must be taking a right hammering about their patients ;-)

I hope your 'reconsideration' goes well and if it doesn't perhaps you coud knit a lovely big red raspberry and send that to them !