Knits

I have a voodoo ability when it comes to making it rain. Seriously. I notice that it is bright and sunny and warm so I put washing in and days later, it finishes (honestly, can someone please explain to me why washing machines in this country are half the capacity yet take twice as long to do a load of wash?). I grin and wander outside with an armful of wet washing, sun in my eyes, and pin it up. I go back inside, make a cup of tea, settle back into whatever I was doing and within five minutes, rain. I don’t mean a light little sprinkle that you can ignore. I mean rain. ARGH. A mad dash outside to pull it in as I sigh to myself about once again being tricked by whomever is in charge of such things.

Anyway…

I finished something. A tea cosy. I know, awesome. Last week I decided I MUST HAVE A TEA COSY because, as my friend Don pointed out, I’ve turned 80. I started knitting one right then and there - ignoring the fact that I was nearly done with my Saucy socks. I even had a false couple of starts with the tea cosy. First I was going to use Twilley’s Freedom Spirit, but quickly realised it wouldn’t be a quick knit because the yarn isn’t heavy (and I didn’t have a second ball in the same colour to double it up) and I was going about it the wrong way (making a long, narrow band vs a short, wide one). I grabbed the other Twilley’s I have, Freedom wool, and cast on. A few rows into it I realised that despite changing my technique to short and wide, I didn’t adjust my stitch counts. Oops. Good thing chunky yarn knits up quickly, eh?

So it actually took me the whole night of knitting (including making dinner, doing dishes) to do the damn thing. I made it up on the fly. I hadn’t actually ever felted Twilley’s before, but I knew it would easily felt and figured I’d lose about a third of the size so after a few rows, I began increasing every other row to get the largest circumference and then decreasing the same. Because my tea pot is rather small, I knew it would be too fiddley to try to have a buttonable flap like some of the examples I found. My solution was to seam up 1.5-2″ on either side, felt and see how it fits. Well, it shrunk more than I expected so I had to cut one of the seams completely (no big woop) and stretch it all out so it would easily slip on and off the tea pot. I ended up having to put it on upside down from how I wanted, but it’s fine - the multi-coloured stripe doesn’t look as heavy as it did prior to being felted (I’d wanted it to be at the bottom because of how heavy it looked).

Don’t ask me about dimensions before and after because I was so anxious to felt that I completely forgot to measure.

Does it work? I don’t know, I haven’t had any tea yet. Well I haven’t had need to make an entire pot of tea.

And my Saucy socks. They came really close to being done on Saturday and then I tried them on and either my toes have gone anorexic without talking to me about it or something went wrong with my gauge. Poop. The toe was so baggy I ripped it out. It’s still a bit baggier than I would like, but I realised that on the whole second sock my gauge went funny. I don’t know if this is down to using different needles (the first was knit with Brittany Birch 2.5mm and the second with Lantern Moon Sox Stix 2.5mm) which are ever so slightly different in size (seriously like 2 atoms different - I have super SEM vision, I can see things like atoms) or I just decided to knit loosely. In many ways it’s okay because the first sock is a bit tight (it leaves indentations when I wear it - yes I have sat around in one sock, don’t lie and say you haven’t) and the second one isn’t so terribly loose that it can’t be worn.

God I am so sorry I can never shut up. I really am not so verbose in person.

I’ll add full details re: the tea cosy to my finished objects a bit later.

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