Pretty Yarn makes Pretty Harebells

Well - what a fantastically productive knitting weekend. The weather today was (as forecast) totally pish, and so I haven't even left the house! I really should do some tai chi practice: I am feeling the effects of mostly sitting and lying around. Maybe tomorrow morning if the rain has stopped.

It has been quite social though- a work colleague came round for the afternoon and we baked cakes in honour of his birthday. The nutella cake from Nigella's domestic goddess (how can any combination of nutella, nuts, chocolate, butter and eggs go wrong) and a carrot cake. He really enjoyed it and so did I. It was lovely to bake with a novice who was enjoying himself and was fascinated by all the funny things about baking that I take for granted. He was transfixed by adding eggs to oil and sugar - the mixture emulsifies and thickens quite drastically. And making ganache was fun too. After the cake making bit we drank plenty of tea while they cooked and cooled, and I didn't even have to do the washing up. I did remember to make little cupcakes of each so that we could have a sneaky try of them both though. We get to eat the big ones at work tomorrow.

And plenty of phone calls. I wonder if I normally get so many calls but we are just always out?

There was plenty of knitting action though.....

The harebell lace experiment has got about 1.5 repeats done. Somewhere the inner mathematician has let me down - I calculated that I would have enough stitches for 5 rows of harebells, but somehow when it came to starting the pattern there were exactly the right number for 4. Ho hum, it was obviously meant to be!

The pattern is working out really nicely. I discovered that the printer doesnt work, so I have had to be looking at the screen while knitting, but I will take advantage of work facilities to fix that tomorrow. I am really glad that the harebells fit together so well though, this is the first time I have attempted to totally change a pattern so I wasn't that sure of it working out.

I am knitting on addi turbo lace needles - 3.75mm. This gives a lovely stitch definition to the stockinette sections, but still nice yo's. The needles totally rock, all the others I swatched with were ditched after a couple of rows, so I was glad that this size worked. I only have these and a 4mm pair in the collection, but that might change sometime soon.

And Meagaidh is also doing well. I have slogged through acres of plain knitting, ripped and reknitted the armhole shapings, done (and redone) some short row shaping at the top and picked up what feels like 1000 stitches for the button band. I am reckoning on completion tomorrow if I can find some appropriate buttons. I am quite taken by the idea of nice wooden ones, but have no idea if I will be able to get them in town. The craft shopping potential in Inverness is slightly limited (one craft shop that sells some random mostly acrylic wool, crappy needles and a few novelty buttons and one haberdashery that is fine for sewing supplies, but the wool is cheap and mostly not what I want to knit with) but I want to wear this in 2 weeks so I will have to put up with what I can find.