Somewhere over the rainbow

There's been alot of knitting going on here recently. Okay, there's been a whole lot more than that really, as I gaze over to my studio desk I can see that at the moment it's piled high with bead paraphernalia and stuff, but I've had a number of little knitting projects on the go due to some OWS claims over on Craftster. Knitting is portable and I can loll on the sofa with a small knitting project on my lap, well, with Pippin on my lap, the knitting on top of her, and Joe on my feet. It's also lightweight and reasonably cheap to post, which is important to my almost destitute situation at the moment! 'What are you knitting?' I hear you ask in a resigned voice, because, you know I'm going to tell you anyway, right? Well, I claimed Holliewood in the OWS for a pincushion and then noticed that she had a Calometry (I think that's how you spell it) in her Wists, so I whipped this one up for her. I made it waaaay shorter than the pattern calls for (I think I cast on 80 stitches) because I remember when I made this before that it was quite big. So I used a couple of yarns held together to created this glorious tweedy variegated effect, so it's lovely and warm. It's all kinds of blues, with a vintage blue button at the back.

She also had a coffee cosy on her Wists, so I thought I'd whip one of those up to. These are both great stash busting projects by the way, can you tell?! Now I'm kind of fascinated by these cup cosies; I really feel like I want one, but I don't drink takeaway tea or coffee, so I'm never going to use it (unless I'm at a Christmas market and drinking hot mulled wine, although I don't know if that's allowed now. Hey, hang on, doesn't heating alcohol make it less alcoholic?? Is hot mulled wine a good thing for me??? Hmm, I'll have to investigate that one!!) Anyway, before I go off on a complete tangent, back to the cosy. So, I decided to make one for Holliewood, even though I had nothing to go on size wise. So I made it adjustable with two sets of button holes so that it could be adjusted to different sizes. I also made it ribbed so that it would stretch or contract to fit different sizes. I knit it longwise like a scarf with about three strands of thin yarn in different colours and created the ribbing effect by knitting two rows and then purling two rows. I did the last three rows in moss stitch to stop any curling tenancies.

Here's the pincushion I made for her. It's a teeny tiny mushroom bottle cap pincushion. I added little white beads to the top on pins to make the spots. I filled the squishy red top with scrap felt filling (chopped up into little pieces) and the bottle cap part is filled with foil. The reason I did this? Well, I know that when I want to sharpen my pinking shears, or hole punches up, I cut or punch through foil, so I figured that foil might keep pins sharp. What do you think?

I started to knit these yoga socks for me, I had a small ball of this glorious rainbow coloured yarn which I figured might just be enough to complete the pair for me. I figured wrong. Pah! I've just got to the main part of the second sock and I know by looking that I'm not going to have enough left. I'm going to frog them and maybe make the ribbing in another colour and make the main part of the socks in this lovely rainbow colour. It's so happy and bright and I was thinking alot on the subject of rainbows whilst knitting with it. Now in recent years the rainbow seems to have been adopted by the gay fraternity. I don't have a problem with that, but I was curious as to why? I like rainbows in a hippy way, and because of the chakras they represent, and I found a lovely ring on eBay the other day (not shopping, just surfing) which had tiny stones in all the colours of the chakras around it, but it was marketed as a gay pride ring. Anyone know why this started out? All I could think of was the Judy Garland/ Wizard of Oz song, but is it that obvious? Amazing what your mind wonders at one o'clock in the morning.

I've also been working on my BPT hoodie, but I find it a little hard going as there's currently over 300 stitches on the needles and it takes forever to get to the end of the row, so I knit that in short bursts to stop me getting too bored. It's growing very very slowly!

So I go now to post off various OWS packages containing knitting and pincushions, and books for my book swapping site. The post office will love me! If Joe is lucky he'll get a wander round rabbit field.