How many do I need?

My Book Depository order showed up today.

Forget mojo, I'm trying voodoo.

I've lost my knitting mojo. Has anyone seen it?

I've lost it. It's gone, completely. I have no tv knitting, no audio book knitting, no stuck in a queue knitting, and - most shockingly - no desire to start a new project.

I checked down the back of the couch and my mojo wasn't there. Nor was the remote control, nor Jesus.

Please note that this mojo extends to crochet and sewing. I don't want to work on anything. I love blocking lace, it's the best part of knitting lace! I have a finished doily just begging to be blocked.

Nope.

I am at a loss. Even pretty pictures of yarn aren't helping.

I got nothing.

It's time to relax

We've as a long weekend here in Melbourne, and every day was full to the brim. Saturday was the wedding of the year, with Joex and Cameron gettin' hitched in a beautiful ceremony that their smallest flowergirl took no part in, as she is a crazy little poppet.

Dot decided to sit out the entire thing, except when she spotted the table with the paper and pens and wanted to draw a picture. As it was the signing table and the paper was the wedding certificate Dot was moved along quick smart. But it really was a lovely day!

Sunday was my family reunion and I decided to leave the rest of the family at home while I went off to Maryborough in country Victoria. About 100 relatives makes it a lovely day, and - most importantly - my side of the family won the cricket match, by four runs. I wasn't playing, mind. Sunlight and sport? Yuck! The best part is the 4 hour drive that I could knit the whole way through, finishing up the main part of my Egeblad doily.

Yesterday was the public holiday and Dot and I went off to visit my sister Fiona, who has a terrible sinus infection, which comes from a dry socket when she had her tooth pulled. I've had two cesareans and a sinus infection, and believe me: the sinus infection hurt a LOT more. By the time we got home I needed a nap. Which lasted a few hours. Which was odd. I got up feeling rubbish; chills, headache, sore ears and a sore throat. So I had a lovely hot bath and crawled into bed to sweat it out. Three hours later I was soaked, still sick and giving up. I think my brain told my body that I didn't have any more extreme knitting/crochet projects so it could just relax now, which means being sick.

Today I have Felix home to help with the kids, plus he's not feeling too good himself,  but apparently I'm sicker. If you need me, I'll be here on the couch casting off my Egeblad with a crochet hook.

Autumn Ills

The change between summer and autumn has had a rather bad effect on Marcus, as he's currently snuggling up to me on the couch with a rather vicious head cold.

Poor little mannikins has a blanket, an apple and "Frozen" on the tv, which he is constantly flipping back and forth in.

I'm taking the chance to catch up on his crochet blanket. It's keeping me warm and getting bigger. With only two squares left to go, I'm feeling pretty good. Mind you...

...there's still a lot of ends to sew in before I start the border.

Throwback Thursday

It's been a while since I trawled through my ancient/vintage/horribly 80's patterns for you all, and with our recent cold snap here in Melbourne I thought I'd show you a highly useful pattern book.

It's my Paton's Knitting Book No. 232, which isn't even on Ravelry - can it be possible? I looked it up by both the title number and the title pattern name "Erica" and nothing came up. (Sidebar: look up "Erica" in the category of "gloves" on Ravelry. You won't regret it, but your knitting queue may grow a bit.) I do like these gloves, they're so very "calling on" gloves, aren't they? I think they'd look wonderful in a pale spring green.

"Harebell", while beautiful with the little repeats and sensible cuffs, would probably catch on everything. "Heath" look like a more sensible option, if not a tad plain. With the right yarn though...maybe something with a silver thread?

Next up are "Hyacinth" and "Holly", some very nice fair isle gloves and mittens. You know how I feel about fair isle by now, so I shan't go into extreme rhapsodies as usual.

"Primrose", despite such a prissy name, are the thermal underwear of glove patterns. Just look at the sensibleness of them: long cuffs, reverse stocking stitch, fabulous lines. If you made these in a gorgeous charcoal grey you could easily give them to a knitting-worthy man. Not Felix, though. He has Tardis mittens.

Can't have glove patterns without some plain ones. Here are "Ivy" and "Honeysuckle", the plainest of plain gloves, zhuzed up with some embroidery (is that how one spells "zhuzed"?) and "Hawthorn", the equally plain/embellished mittens.

More examples of "Ivy" and the "Hickory" hat to throw on top. I like this hat, it's fairly easy and Nordic-y.

It's even more Nordic-y on the back cover. It's also in fair isle (yay!) and once you throw in a fluffy blonde you're practically living in the fjords. No more pining.

The reason I love the old pattern books so much are the illustrations and instructions. They're usually perfectly done and the ads - oh the ads! Great fun.

Let me know if I should scan this and add it as a download - enjoy!

Organising what's next

I sat down last week to work out what I wanted to knit/finish up/start once I'd crocheted enough hearts (I still don't think I have crocheted enough. I wanted to do 1000.) for the forthcoming nuptials. So I had a look in all of my containers for what I'd started, what needed finishing, what was nowhere near finished and made a spreadsheet.

Oh, how I love spreadsheets! They make me feel so organised, even though I'm not quite there yet. (Don't look in the top drawer of my dressing table, or in the back room of the bungalow. Let me keep my delusions.) This one has only 20 projects on it, of which three are knitting. That's when I got suspicious. So I looked at my Ravelry projects page, and took a good hard look at my "In progress" section. It has 7 projects in it, only two of which are on my list. The rest are actually finished, but I've never mentioned them here as finished either.

Oops.

I said I wasn't quite there yet, alright?!

True weirdness

I'm sitting on the couch with Felix, just vegeing out. I have nothing in my hands,  nothing in a work bag, nothing on the floor next to me. It's odd to not be crocheting, but it's great that the hearts have been passed along to the bride-to-be. 120 hearts in each of the four colours.

This is what 480 hearts look like all packed in together. My right hand needs a bit of break,  I think.

Too...much...to...do...

Have you ever had so much stuff to do that your brain has just shut down and given up? This is currently going on here in my life, and I let my insanity take over.

My cane chair is now monogrammed.

It's MY chair.

Oh, seriously?

I'm slowly clawing back my sanity, via craft, and what happens? First I run out of yarn with one square left to make. One.

True, this does mean Morris run, but for a full ball to make a square? *sigh*

Secondly, Miss Dot has a tooth-related earache. The squealing......

That's very pinteresting

My name is Andrea and I'm addicted to Pinterest.

Phew! Glad I put that out there. Now I can stop with all the terrible lies. "Oh, I found this recipe on.... the page of a cookbook." "I saw this brilliant idea for gardening on.... "Gardening Australia" last week." "I read the most amazing article about organising paperwork on...... I mean in the "Herald-Sun".

(Just kidding. I'd Oedipus my own eyes before voluntarily reading the Herald-Sun.)

Chantal and I started up a group board last year called "Future Knitting Projects". As you can see, we seem to like anything cowl/shawl-like. Also, cardigans. And lace. Loooooooooads of lace.

We started the board after a conversation about the Miette Knit-A-Long that we both wanted to join in on. Now, by the time our yarn arrived from the US (no, Chantal won't let me pay for it. She never does!) the knit-a-long was over, sort of, so we decided to start picking more things to knit together. Last time we did that we both managed was our BFF's, which went REALLY well. But what next?

Do we knit the Miette that we already have the yarn for, just waiting to be started?

Or a smaller cardigan, like the Miss Lemon, all lace and short sleeves?

Do we accept that winter approaches (pffffft!) and knit the Vite Cowl?

Or the Snow Gloves?

Maybe we just accept our fate and knit the Netherfield Evening Bag while watching "Pride and Prejudice", the BBC version which Chantal has never seen. *ahem*

So, please, everyone else: pick us a project?

I'd just like to say thank you everyone for all of your lovely comments and emails about my last post. I'm only as strong as the people surrounding me, so with all of you helping me I will most likely be invincible!

Our interesting life

My life has taken a few turns over the last week. Last Friday I went to a terribly heart-breaking funeral, and it made me sink into a little patch of the blues. I didn't have much time to wallow in sadness as Marcus started kindergarten on Monday.

 My little mannikins did beautifully. He was playing with other children, not just next to them, and we were all confident that soon I wouldn't have to attend kinder along with him.

Wednesday was even better. I went home 15 minutes after I arrived, and left him there with his aide. It was unbelievable. I thought my week couldn't get any better.

Thursday Marcus went off to my parents, as he always does on Thursdays, and had a fairly lazy time, as you can see.

Friday went terribly. Marcus was hyper-crazy as soon as he woke up and didn't improve at all. The moment we pulled into the kindergarten carpark he started crying. It took a few minutes to coax him into the classroom and then Claire (Marcus' aide) and I spent the next hour trying to calm him down, which was almost impossible at times. Eventually he ran off to the water table and I bolted for it.

It looks like it's going to take a while for Marcus to settle down there and I can be patient. Knitting is something I do because I have almost no patience, and hate just waiting. Knitting is something I can do while I'm in a queue, or watching a movie at home, or just when I need to turn my brain off. I needed it quite badly on Friday as it was an anniversary of sorts.

Last year, on Valentines Day, Marcus was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Two weeks later we found out that he is severely autistic. The first part wasn't a total surprise to us (although for a while there denial was my default position) but the second was, as I didn't think he could be that bad. I was also genuinely shocked by the amount of governmental support you receive in Australia when raising an autistic child. Holy heckmonkeys, it's an eye opener. I'm also quite glad that no-one has been stupid enough to suggest that vaccination led to this because an assault charge would be in my future.

It's been a hard year. There's been a lot of crying, buckets in fact. We've been so very fortunate to have such amazing support from our family and friends, and every idea and suggestion and offer of help is deeply appreciated and usually needed! Marcus spent most of last year in speech therapy, which has helped a lot, and this year is gonna be a doozy with speech therapy, occupational therapy, more respite care (thank you Knox City Council!) and Felix and I undertaking ABA (Applied Behaviour Analysis) training to help Marcus, and Dot too. Turns out she's also on the spectrum, but slightly less seriously than her brother. Mind you, this still has her pretty high up on the spectrum, which is a whole 'nother can of worms. I think this year will go a lot better than last year, and next year will be better and so on. It can be difficult but we'll cope. It's what we do.

But the one thing we never forget is this: our little boy is perfect. Just the way he is, and anyone who says otherwise is just plain wrong.

Stamen alive, stamen aliiiiiiiiiiiiiive!

A nursery rhyme for you all:

Ring-a-ring-a-rosy
It's Joex's wedding posy!

It's finished! It's finished!

....can I fall down?

Chaos & Destruction

Nothing like a crashing wardrobe to make you clean up your life. It's all coming down tonight,  because when we make changes to anything we have to do it in such a way the kidlets can't object.

This is one Felix who isn't gonna Fix-It.

Lazy hours

Two episodes of "Grimm", interspersed with ironing and knitted stamen.

I like lazy days, but I like productive ones even more.

Throwback Thursday

Oooo, have I got a doozy for you all today. Not only am I a junkie, but I'm a hooker as well*, so I've reached into the folder for a vintage crochet pattern book today.

Crochet Book No. 1 by Villawool. Granny square cardigan front cover. I love granny squares desperately, hence the purchase.

I want the blue skirt. I think if I made it in graduating colours it'd look really really cool. But not all one colour, and definitely not a suit.

"I am shocked, genuinely shocked at this photoshoot."

These are almost nice. I like the white one. I think it's be great for summer nights. But all this yellow...

"I'm just a sweet transvestite....From transexual Transylvaniaaaaaaaaa-haha!"

The bun holder to match the dress. Spiffy, I tells ya.

Back cover? The duster. With snood. Add massive sunglasses. Classy.

Same as usual: let me know if you want a pdf and it shall be done!

* Junkie = knitter (we both use needles), hooker = crocheter. Mind out of the gutters, people.

New or old?

While I was sorting through my yarn I also took a look at my future projects. I have bags with balls of yarn and the pattern to go with it, all ready and waiting for me to knit it.

But what if I don't want to? What happens when you sound like a whining infant crying "But I don't want to knit that! I want to knit that other thing!"? Do I listen to my inner brat and feed her chocolate-style knitting until she pukes everywhere or do I tell her "No, you get what you're given" and start knitting the projects I've put aside?


* Chocolate Cupcake Tea Cosy designed by Audrey Wilson, who is a bloody genius. I love it.

Life's little speed humps

I love it when I'm motoring along, getting my life in order. You know the sort of thing: housework done by 10am, planned projects coming together, debts paid off and good times to be had. Life goes well.

Then there's a speed hump.

It doesn't have to be anything major. A spell of hot weather that keeps us all indoors, or a parking fine that was forgotten, or everything happening at once and no matter how many lists you write out there really aren't 27 hours in a day.

Last weekend was when it all started catching up with me. I had work on Saturday morning, followed by a trip to Wondoflex for yarn, and then the freeway had an accident so I managed to get off on the next ramp but got home later that expected. I got changed and went off to work, only to find I was working until 5:30. I got home, we had dinner, put Marcus to bed and I went off to grab all the ingredients for the Australia Day BBQ. I stayed up until stupid o'clock making an Iced Vovo Tart (never again - far too sweet for me) and painting the Australian flag on my toenails (really) and went off to bed.

Sunday was BUSY. I got up and made cupcakes for the bbq, followed by the traditional pavlova, this time in the shape of Australia. We arrived late (not that late but late enough) and had a lovely time. Well, until Dot cracked it and I had to take her for a drive/sleep. We got back in time for dessert - huzzah! - but we left shortly afterwards. Marcus had an absolute ball being in the middle of the big kid's water fights and his big cousin Connor took fantastic care of him even while attacking everyone else with a supersoaker. Unsurprisingly, the kids went down early, leaving the grown ups with the dishes. I really dislike being the grown up sometimes.

Monday started off brilliantly. We tidied stuff up, planned our day, and I mowed the front and back lawns. We drove to the local tip to get rid of a bunch of cardboard. We came home and Dot went to bed. I did a Masters run and bought us a new printer as well. That's when it all went wrong.

Felix and I were sorting out the printer in the back room when there was a "thunk" followed by a scream, the kind that doesn't stop. I ran into the lounge room and Marcus was screaming with blood pouring out of his head. I freaked out, understandably, and Felix rang an ambulance. It's a nasty cut just next to his right eyebrow, so it bleed terribly. I'm just thanking God a lot that his eye is fine.The lovely LOVELY ambulance officers were wonderful and we all agreed that his daddy could take him to the hospital instead. The screams had woken Dot up, so I stayed at home worrying to death with her. Eventually Felix called and let me know it was all fine and they were coming home and could I make sure there was some ice cream ready?

Our poor little boy. He's a bit confused about the pain in his head but we think he'll be fine. As for our new grey hairs... they are many and hard earned.

Waddle waddle waddle

A while back my lovely sister-in-law Monique sent me a link to a competition for knitting. Automatic ears pricking up, that is. First prize is a trip for two to Phillip Island and visiting penguins and being a park ranger for a day and a $250 Spotlight voucher so I was very interested.

Then I put it aside to work on wedding roses and finding the floor in my bungalow once again.

Today I began knitting a penguin jumper. It shall be snazzy. Well, this one will be. I have a second one planned, too.

Wait a minute....

It's almost 10:30? Wow.

I forgot to knit today.  Didn't even think about it,  not once.

Huh.

Really? Do I look like a freaking hipster?

I was patiently waiting at Aldi in Burwood to buy my coffee pods after a somewhat meh day. As usual, I had my anti-queue knitting with me and was happily needling away when it happened.

The incredibly foolish man behind me: "Knitting at the supermarket? How very hipster."

A knitting hipster* has those huge glasses. A knitting hipster briefly yarn-bombed stuff before everyone else got into it. A knitting hipster only reads knitting zines. A knitting hipster will actually tell you that they were into knitting before it was cool.

I am a knitter. I have used my hair bun as a swift while 8.75 months pregnant. I've won competitions for my work. I've been knitting for 35 years this March. I have double point needle scars on the back of my legs, for &%#@'s sake.

I am going to slaughter this man. I turned around and gave him THE LOOK.

"EXCUSE ME?!?"

The incredibly foolish man manages to look embarrassed and terrified at the same time, even as he takes a step backwards.

"I HAVE TWO SHARP STICKS AND YOU HAVE TWO EYEBALLS" I bellowed as I gave my best Brian Blessed impersonation, turned and paid for my coffee then swept somewhat majestically out of the store.

Incredibly foolish people should just mind their own business.

* The knitter in the picture is Yokoo Gibraan. I have no idea if she actually is a hipster, but the photo is pretty awesome, as are her chain scarves.