well folks, i'm back and on my feet again just in time for the start of my summer holidays which can mean only one thing... knitting! in fact this morning i've been knuckling down to the second of the long suffering boyfriend's broad street mittens, progress was being made and everything seemed to be tootling along merrily until i came to the last finger and was instructed to pick up the remaining 8 palm stitches, and the last 7 back of the hand stitches, but i've only got 5, what have i done? where have i put them? did the cuddly llama next to me eat them when i wasn't looking? after a few minutes of head scratching and near hair tearing out i calmly went back over the pattern with a calculator to find either my maths is a lot worse then it was at school, or the designer slipped up somewhere because my brain and the calculator both worked out that i should have 13 stitches as appose to 15 if i followed the pattern correctly. which led to me searching through the blogging community to find out if anyone else had found the same thing (and boy oh boy are there a lot of us knitters out there in cyberspace. more than i think i realised for a hobby that doesn't seem that mainstream in many places) unfortunately it looks like it's just me who's either made this particular mistake or noticed it, i did however come across a couple more errors in that particular pattern, namely that the instruction for increasing after the cuff is off, it reads *k3 in1* when it should be 4 stitches between each increase in order to get the target number of 60 stitches rather than 64 anyway most of the errata can be found here

anyway on a lighter note, i've been promising pictures of my woolly wormhead scarf for quite a while now and here it is, as modelled by the lovely loretta llama (who it has now been established does not eat knitting stitches for breakfast) and a close up so you can see the stitches and hopefully appreciate just how lovely the yarn is, it was fabulous to work with, possibly due to it being a blend of wool and silk which made it heavenly to the touch. sadly though with it only being a one off skein (as all ruth's items are) it made for a rather short scarf. long enough to do the job of course but i'm a fan of long scarves that keep the rest of your top half that little bit warmer on cold winter mornings, or good old fashioned english summer mornings for that matter.