Wool on Sunday...

The baby blanket I was making for Abigail got put on the 'back burner' while I made the birthday bunting for Holly. But by the third week in May, I was back working on that knitting project. And except for one stripe, there was no more 'reverse knitting'; obviously I had finally got the hang of the pattern! Lol.
And it's now finished! All ready to hand over this weekend...

I used Paton's Cotton Blend and because I've made a total of 4 baby blankets in this yarn, I had a lot of part balls of this yarn left as well as a number of full balls, including the white. So there are 18 colours in this blankie...I was surprised how many colours I had! ( the pattern is the Bounce Blanket from Tin Can Knits)
I have started a new knitting project which I will donate to our Parish Art and Craft Show in July...

It's very 'early days' obviously...just an inch (2.5cm) of knitting on circular needles with 194 stitches.
And in other yarn related activities, I can see that I will be busy joining a lovely lot of donated squares into blankets ready to be distributed to the needy. It's been suggested that it will be a cold winter this year here in SE Queensland so my plans are to work on these for part of each evening.

Linking up with the Rainbow Hare blog for Wool on Sunday. This month Janine did a teeny tiny knitting project. 😉

The UFO Challenge update...

This year each of the Sunday Stitchers has a list of projects that we will work on each month. The UFOs are numbered 1-12 and each month a number is drawn and we each work on that numbered project on our list. And then we bring that item along to the monthly meeting for Show and Tell; it may be finished or there has been progress but still some to go.
February ( which was #12) was my Hexagon Liberty cot quilt which I made progress with. I even brought it along to the March meeting as I had continued to add rows...

And after the March meeting I worked for a week or so more and added 2 orangey/yellow rows, but they aren't fully Stitched in place yet.

March UFO number had been #10 which was to start using the long hexagons that I'd cut out of Christmas fabric quite a while ago. I had thoughts of a table runner, wall hanging or tape topper but no real plan. For Show and Tell in March, I had this much done...

During that stitching day I worked on another row...

The squares in the middle might end up being little Christmas embroideries or maybe just cut out of gold/silver/white fabrics...that decision can be made at a later stage. But in the month, my pile of cut out hexagons started to become 'something'!
April's UFO number was 9...experiment with making different styles of granny squares from a lovely book I received for Christmas one year...


But I had already started working on a knitted blanket for our newest granddaughter, Abigail. Realistically  I could have crocheted squares from the book and made Abi a blankie that way and put the knitting aside. But the knitted one had become such a challenge that I was determined to keep doggedly onward with it. But I didn't have time for both...so...

I tampered with the list! 😉( Aussie readers might get the nuances there!)
This blanket is taking me a lot longer to knit than I normally take on such a project. Making mistake after mistake...especially with the lace part...so much frogging!  I really had to 'take myself in hand' to make progress with this project. Each row in the lace pattern repeat was different.  All those old strategies and memory aids came into play; I made checklists of the 12 row pattern and marked off each row. This was after I inadvertently knitted the same lace row twice...duh!
I started counting the stitches after I completed every row...with some form of 'Knitters' Dementia', I was forgetting the occasional 'yarn over' stitches in rows...lethal!  And of course the missing y o would be near the beginning of the row, not at the end! I sat in a room by myself with no DH, iPad or TV. On the fiddly rows I said the instructions out loud as I knitted...bad eh? 🙄
The only strategy I didn't use was the 'life line for lace knitting' as I figured I had the 4 rows of white garter stitch in every pattern repeat that I could always frog back to, and where it was easy to pick up the stitches again...no wretched y o stitches to manage! So it wasn't one of those all over lace patterns...
Photo taken from the internet showing how the life line works where you can unpull the knitting to that row and the stitches will be 'live' on the piece of yarn.

So here is a front view of the progress on Abigail's blankie; the Bounce Blanket by Tin Can Knits. This is a Canadian company and I'm grateful to You Tube videos for explaining some terms/abbreviations that I wasn't familiar with...

This project will be put aside for a fortnight as DH and I are heading off on holidays from Thursday night and believe me, this isn't a holiday project. I will take some easy crocheting instead. 

Wool on Sundays

Yes it's that time again; the first Sunday of the month means joining in with Janine over at The Rainbow Hare's blog to write a yarn related post. Janine's post is a tribute to Easter and features a lovely visual story of two knitted bunnies and a beautiful knitted daffodil. Here
I managed to get a fair bit of knitting done during March. I finished the rainbow colours baby blanket that I had just started in the last Wool on Sundays post. It was the same pattern as the other 2 baby blankets that I'd made earlier in 2018. The mum may have been born in the 1980s but she is so much a 60s girl, so a 'rainbow blanket' was called for.
When we took the parcel over to my neighbour's place, we each enjoyed a cuddle with baby Willow...

The new mum loved the rainbow colours...

( the shelf behind has lots of yarns as H uses yarn to make Dreamcatchers which she sells at the Markets)

And what goes with a rainbow blankie? Why, a unicorn of course! Lol

Also this month I have been knitting yet another baby blankie using a pattern I purchased from Tin Can Knits. It is only half way through but deserves its own blog post. Let's just say that a lot of 'frogging' or reverse knitting has gone on in the last few weeks...maybe even 'some hair torn out' type situations too 😉😉. So just a little peep at the back...once again I've used Patons Cottonblend. Sharmayne from the Country Fragrance blog told me of some other brands of cotton that she recommends. And one day I will buy some Bendigo cotton; it was the 200gram balls that put me off a bit originally; especially as I wanted to use lots of colours.
The back of the latest project...
The pattern is The Bounce Blanket by the Canadian company, Tin Can Knits.