May round up

Books read: even though my book of choice for May was teen fiction, I didn't finish it. I was just too busy. I was rarely in bed early enough to allow for reading time and when I got into bed I was mostly too tired to be able to read anything. Bad times. Still - I'm about three-quarters done so it should be an easy win for June. 

Metres knitted: about 600m. I have been working on Madison (Rav link), a 4-ply sweater with some Cat and Sparrow yarn I bought back in February. It was surprisingly quick when I had the time to work on it - over the weekend I finished the front, all of the back, the neckband and picked up for the sleeves. Predictably this is not going to require 1450m of yarn, as the pattern suggests - I think I would have got it out of three skeins but the fourth looked a bit different so I have started that one for the sleeves, rather than work through the half skein I have left from the body and then end up with mismatched sleeves. 

I have wicked startitis and keep looking at my queue, making plans, for the time I don't have. 

Pounds lost: I think 4. Yey me! I am x stone 1 lb now. That's a stone off since last summer. 

Sleep: not great although the slower start every few mornings has helped. It also means I can car pool with a colleague who drops her daughter off at 7.30am - another excellent reason to not get up so early. Next term I am going to start setting my alarm for 7am instead of 6.20. I might also try to get a hot yoga class in before school from time to time, which would involve a 5.30am start. Just mixing it up a bit. Sadly my preferred bikram studio was a victim of the pandemic so I have to start somewhere new, but it always helped with the sleeping so probably worth the initial discomfort. 

Blogging: no. There has been enough time at the computer this past month. I'm finding it harder and harder to ignore the people bleating on about how exam boards are doing nothing this year, because I have been really flipping busy for this 'nothing'. 

April round up

Books read: I finished Empireland - the first non-fiction I have read in its entirety for a long time. It was fantastically well-researched (he seems to have written a lot of it during the pandemic so, no surprises there) and extremely readable. I'm chasing it with a teen fiction a student recommended to me that is going down very quickly. 

Metres knitted: The baby jumper was about 400m. I started a 4-ply jumper and managed to knit one skein of yarn into it by the end of the month - another 400m. Then a skein of Lion & Lamb into hexagons - 187m. I basically made it! All I needed was two weeks off work haha

Pounds lost: Yeah, none. Still maintaining my pre-covid weight though. Not too bad. 

Sleep: I am hitting 7 hours more often than not these days. I'm starting to adjust my work schedule a little. I've been aiming to get to school for around 7.15 for well over a decade now, since I had to do it during an inspection and realised that traffic is better and I'm way more productive. When I was getting the bus to school, it was a necessity because I was so anxious about being late. 

Then, when we returned to school after Easter, I had a really spacey Monday so on Tuesday I lay in a bit and went to my favourite bakery on the way to school for a breaktime pastry. I got in by 7.45 and found I was a lot more purposeful in my work before school. 

It makes sense to get in very early when my lessons aren't planned. I can usually get together all my lessons for the day in that hour. But more and more, at this end of the school year, there's just not that much to plan. The bulk of my teaching is GCSE and A-level and I've been teaching those lessons now for five years. So, instead of using the morning time for useful things like marking, I faff around with emails (this week I got my inbox down to 16 emails, satisfying but utterly meaningless) and tidying my desk, ultimately pointless tasks of that ilk. And I could be asleep, instead. 

So, over the next few weeks I am going to make a concerted effort to go in half an hour later at least a couple of times in a week, see how it affects my workrate and sleep patterns. 

Blogging: An improvement. 

Weekend FO

 Presto Chango!

This is my attempt at the Spurs logo, which I charted myself. It is hard to be precise in aran weight over 16 stitches but I don't think I did a terrible job. 

Pattern: Presto Chango, a freebie pattern

Yarn: Rico Essentials Aran, a soft, superwash 100% merino

Needle: a satisfyingly chunky 5mm

Mods: I finished the sleeves with a 3NBO by picking up the cast on stitches to bind off with the live stitches, once the sleeve was finished. I think I did the seam on the wrong row on the second sleeve because the seam looked different, but still very neat, so, meh.

I took the opportunity to try out the bunny cable pattern I've wanted to try for a while now and I am thrilled with how it turned out. I probably prefer it without the colour change as the stitches have a slightly strained look around the edges, but the bunny tail was a particular win. 

The baby's name is Indiana.

This was the original lace panel that came with the pattern. I knitted this one first, to give me a feel for buttonhole placement and number of rows. 

Lovely and quick! 400m out, too. 

Hexagons update

I just realised that I hadn't posted about the hexagons in a while, so here are some updates.

This year I have so far knitted up two skeins of Devon:

This one is all blues but in a strange twist, they're not quite as bright and vibrant as my phone has made them appear here. The variegation is also not quite as subtle as pictured.

Before that, I put to bed two skeins of Beverly:

Lots of green in this one that gave me a real Caribbean feel. I started knitting this yarn up in August whilst on holiday in the Lake District, where I think I managed a paltry half a pinwheel. 

Also last year, I knitted up two skeins of A River Runs Through It:

This looks pretty washed out in the pictures, but is a nice blues-and-beiges mix, like a sunny day in an arid land. 

So, that's 27 pinwheels in the past year, 6 skeins of yarn out, 67 pinwheels in total. I didn't realise my pinwheel hiatus had been so long - these are the first I had knitted since 2017. I am determined to add at least 18 more to the pile by the end of the year, which would mean I'd doubled my pinwheel stash in the space of two years. 

Some baby knits

Nephew Z's girlfriend gave birth to what I guess is Great-nephew Z (I'm so old) a while back now, 4 weeks early. She apparently went into hospital with terribly itchy skin and came out with a baby. He was a big'un, as is the way of the Zs (all boys, all huge - I think Mr Z was a 10 pounder and Mother Z gave birth to him at home 😲 ) and weighed 7lb 10oz on birth, a month early, so I knitted my favourite garter stitch jumper pattern in age 3-6 months so that he will get some good wear out of it. 

It's knitted in Rowan All Seasons Cotton, a nice variegated blue that I picked up from someone in a swap years and years ago - whoever I swapped with left me this behind the counter at Get Knitted. I've got two balls left and keep stalking other people's stashes of the lemon yellow colourway, thinking they would look good striped together, but equally I have some red Smoothie that would work not quite as well and I should probably use that up instead. 

This is my fifth whirl with this pattern by Debbie Bliss but I do note that it has been a long time (9 years) since I last wheeled it out. I was musing on the fact that this must mean that all my friends are done with the baby-making and I'm now on to knitting for the next generation....

...BUT THEN (it's hard to be dramatic in print)

My very old (as in, we've been friends for nearly 30 years, not that he has massively old) friend Richard popped up on Facebook last week, tagged in a post that announced the birth of his daughter. Richard doesn't really do social media and we haven't seen each other in about 2 years so this was a complete surprise to me. I immediately jumped at the chance to get knitting a Presto Chango, an insanely cute little baby cardigan with a buttoned-on bib front that is interchangeable. 

I knitted this in about 3 days, it was so easy. I've gone with the lace front for my first try and have, since this picture was taken this afternoon, finished the second panel with a navy capital I on it for her name. I'm adding a panel with a bunny cable on it, which I am going to attempt to knit in navy with a white tail (no projects on Ravelry have done this as a colourwork cable so wish me luck) and then finally one with the Spurs logo picked out in navy. Richard is a gigantic Spurs fan so that's really why I picked this pattern, so I can do a Spurs logo attempt and if it is awful then I still have a jumper to show for it. 

It's all worked in Rico Essentials Soft Merino Aran which is lovely to knit with. I had a bit of it stashed for a knit for Lara that I haven't done yet but naturally not enough, and no navy, so had to order more. I think it will be a handy thing to have in stash though, and I think I might still have a ball of red leftover from a previous project: a red, white and navy striped jumper might be just the thing for my next little knit. 

I do also have a 4 ply jumper on the needles but when a good friend has a baby, what can you do?

March round up

And yet here we are, almost halfway through April! I was so exhausted by the end of term that I spent much of last week sleeping - many hours in bed at night, long naps during the day. I don't know how people with children manage. Even when I wasn't asleep, I was basically in a daze. 

March was quite a successful month though, goals wise.

Books read: I finished Caught in the Light by Robert Goddard, which was a real page turner. Then I picked up and finished very quickly Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. This was not at all what I expected: I find I now assume all novels set in mid-20th century southern USA are going to be about race, whereas this was more about class. I stayed up much too late reading it, just to get to the end. What a yarn!

Then the Head of English leant me The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov and, although I read a couple of pages, I put it down again almost immediately because it is quite long (I read Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog during lockdown 1 which was very brief) and also because the Head of English is not a spine cracker and I am, and I was afraid to read it sleepy. So I picked up some non-fiction, Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera, which has been going down a treat. I was wary of going back to non-fiction as I notoriously never finish any of them, but I am nearly done with it. 

A good reading year, so far.

Metres knitted: I finished Garnered though it still isn't blocked and I counted that yarn last month anyway. I knitted a baby jumper for my new great-nephew, born a month early, out of some All Seasons Cotton I've had hanging around for about a decade. 360m. I knitted up two skeins of Lion and Lamb into blanket hexagons - 375m but the second skein was in April, so only 187m for March, really. Let's call it 550m, not so good but oh well. 

I soberingly went through my whole stash in March, too, and came across approximately 2800m of yarn that was not listed in my Ravelry stash. And then I went online to browse for yarn I can use to sew up my hexagons, and ended up buying two skeins in a blues colourway I didn't already have. So with the yarn in from Flock last month, that it about 7200m in, 2100m out. Egads. 

Luckily I have already made a start on a nice 4-ply jumper with some of the new stuff from last month, and I have a plan for a huge, crocheted blanket in some of the chunky I found in my clear out, so perhaps I will manage to come out at a net reduction for the year. 

Pounds lost: I think, 3? I am 4lbs off getting back to my pre-40 weight. Happy with that. I managed the whole of Lent off sugar but had to put up with a few snide comments when I started eating it again the day after Palm Sunday. 

The day of Palm Sunday itself was probably the most testing time of all: I made chocolate nests with shredded wheat, and Simnel cakes. The chocolate nest mixture was not combining so I got in there by hand and ended up with chocolate almost up to my elbows. Hardest thing I have ever done, not licking my hands. 

Sleep: Clearly still variable. I think I'm getting into better timing habits but probably spending too long reading. 

Blogging: A pathetic failure. Being back in school meant that more things were happening but I was too tired and busy to write about them. Still. Onwards and upwards. 

February round up

Books read: Two halves. I finished Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and I started Caught in the Light by Robert Goddard, which Mother Hand gave me years ago as it is one of her favourite books, but I've never got round to reading it. Concentrating on fiction is a helpful way of getting myself to read, though I have picked up a bit of non-fiction now and again in between, this past month.

Metres knitted: I reckon it's about 850. I have almost finished the Garnered pullover: just 4 inches of roll neck ribbing to go. It hasn't taken anywhere near the yarn amount expected and I should have about half a ball leftover at the end, annoyingly, but that will still be basically 1000 out of stash, as I won't count the final half ball as part of stash anymore. I really hoped to get it finished today but 1x1 ribbing is really dull and I've had quite a lot of work to catch up on.

I did introduce nearly 4000m into my stash this month, thanks to a virtual Flock event that showcased some gorgeous yarn, but let's not dwell on that. 

Pounds lost: Much like the knitting, this is a tale of two halves. I have lost the required 2lbs. But I gained 3lbs at the start of the month. So not too much celebrating allowed. I have stopped eating sugar (not being a purist about it: mainly no cake, chocolate, sweets etc) for Lent and this has arrested the increase. I'm hoping that things will continue going the other way. It's disturbing how distracted I have been by the desire to eat sugar. I am pleased to say that I have good willpower - I've never been one of these people who can't have anything sweet in the house if they're trying to cut back - but it has been interesting to observe how wheedly my brain has been with myself. 'Give yourself Sundays off!' 'Oh, it doesn't matter, it's only Lent.' 'You'll have to give up when you get back to school and everyone is bringing in cakes, anyway.' 

Sleep: Variable. I've been good about bedtimes but have had some sleeplessness this month. I have been quite sad about not being skiing and it has been difficult to drop off some nights. Nothing too severe, but I am really hoping to get some holidays booked soon.

Blogging: As you see....a barren desert of blog posts. But again - what is there to say? Once a week I go to school. Once a week I go out to exercise. I might occasionally go to the supermarket. I had a Skype and a catch up with my friend Helen in half term. A couple of projects are finally coming to an end and I have been nominated for a thing (it's all on the DL at the moment but it is quite a nice thing), so there are some plus points. But otherwise it's just the same old, same old. Maybe in a cleaner house these days, due to my weird cleaning obsession.