i write this to you from my sick bed, this time i've been struck down with tonsillitis for what must be the third time this year (i suppose it's my own fault really, when you make the decision to spend your life caring for sick people you're bound to get sick every so often and so lose the right to complain about being ill) the short version of which is that it currently looks like i have a golf ball wedged at the back of my throat. anyway that's pretty much why i've been quiet over the past couple of weeks.

i've been just as busy as usual if not more so on placement recently, which has left me with very little time to do any knitting but somehow i've managed to finish the replacement for the felted scarf and start a not quite straight scarf for lsb in a very lovely purple (yet more handpaintedyarn, colonia140 translates as amethyst) which is very nice, and makes a change from blue, but purple's my thing! anyway, in between bemoaning my partner's choice of scarf colour and being taught how to run a ward i've been spending lots of time wrapping hannukah presents ready for tomorrow night (so happy hannukah to my jewish readers) so i intend to eat my latkes, play lots of dreidel and just generally have a good time.

the lsb very kindly took me to visit my adopted alpaca marco yesterday (you can see him in the photo below, he's the brown one on the left with his head in the ear of another alpaca) i had a really great time and the journey to the farm and back yesterday gave me the chance to get the majority of my scarf finished which came off needles after lunch today.

anyway back to the alpacas, lsb and i got to walk a head collar trained alpaca before getting to meet marco who we adopted, who is a very strong creature made of pure muscle it seems given the amount of sheer force it took to catch him so we could stroke him etc. i'd say it was worth it though as he was so beautifully soft - being a suri alpaca he has fleece that grows in long ringlets that look almost like dreadlocks (which give him a very hippy like appearance) that are the softest thing i've ever felt.

i'm so tired right now it really is unbelievable, and i'm only in uni three days a week now. i am so tired/busy/bogged down with work believe it or not that i have done hardly any knitting for about a week, so to make up for it here are some pictures.

the first few rows of another maya scarf, i love the wool, i just didn't want to repeat this pattern again but no pattern i could find seemed to suit the wool, colours either pooled or else they hid a pretty stitch pattern so i gave up and went back to this pattern instead. (and plus it sort of but not quite replaces the scarf i felted last week)

and a couple of pictures of my forest canopy shawl, i'm surprised by how quickly this has grown over the hours and the pattern's quite easy to remember or follow after a few repeats.

had my first exam today, so that's a little bit off pressure off. won't hear about results for a few days yet so i'm crossing my fingers. in between biting my nails and fretting over correct handwashing techniques among other things i managed to finish another scarf today (shade 7 in debbie bliss soho, picture to come at some point once i have 5 minutes to get the camera out) and the mitten gloves are coming along ok to say i don't really have the time to get a quality few hours of knitting in now and then, the only thing is they're masively too big for my odd shaped hands. i should point out that i'm something of an amazon woman, in fact clothes shopping is next to impossible for me. last week for example i went to buy a new spring jacket and ended up having to buy a size maybe 2 larger than i would normally wear as the sleeves on the smaller size came to halfway up my arm, shop bought socks (ladies anyway) just aren't big enough to accomodate my long but slim feet, and while i have hands the same length as my boyfriend who's very much a grown man they resemble very long thin almost alien hands meaning that it's tough to find gloves to fit comfortably, and don't even get me started on the trouble of trying to buy a new pair of trousers or a skirt. i honestly believe i've picked the right hobby in knitting as off the hanger garments are never right. anyway i think this first pair of gloves will end up going to the long suffering boyfriend as a reward for putting up with my snapping and sheer horribleness over the past few days (exam stress and i do not a pretty couple make) and i shall just have to tweak things slightly on the next pair to make them a little better suited to my preportions.

just one last note, for those people who've contacted me lately about fawne, the pattern came from rowan #36.

i finished twinkletoes a couple of days ago and am just waiting for the slipper bottoms so i can sew them on and finish off properly. like the blurb on the pattern says they knit up very quickly and would make a great last minute gift. the only thing i didn't like was the yarn, calmer's lovely to touch and wear but it's a pain to knit with. because it's a yarn made up of two separate lengths it has a tendancy to unravel while you work which i found a pain especially when doing the cable cast on for the ties as i'd try and make a stitch and find only half my yarn coming out the other side. looking at the picture they look so tiny! like slightly overgrown baby booties. all the time i was knitting them i kept worrying about them not stretching far enough to accomodate my somewhat lengthy feet so i was surprised and very relieved to find that they fit very comfortably on my feet.

and as promised a picture of my latest scarf, apologies for the weird looking photo. the light just wasn't right when i took it. i promise you though the colours are a lot nicer than they look on there. i'll try again next time the camera comes out.

boyfriend very kindly took me to a llama and alpaca farm this morning and that's obviously where the pictures came from. luckily there's one about an hour or so's drive from us on a working farm near sheffield. llamas have always been one of my favourite animals and i really enjoyed being able to see them up close today, even though most of the animals were being a little shy (this may have had something to do with the herd of rather vicious looking and sounding geese that seemed to want to claim the perimiter of the paddock as their own and honk if anyone dared to get too close to the fence, visitors and residents included). and being the big kid i am i came away from the farm with a cuddly toy llama (i'm sure this had nothing to do with the fact i've promised to marry the man who buys me a llama, but anyway as the actual animals themselves weren't for sale i had to make do with the stuffed fluffy variety). i was also quite impressed to see that some of the alpaca's wool had been spun and was for sale in the gift shop, somehow though i managed to resist making a purchase this time around, or at least until i can find something to do with it and so justify my purchase (i'm still very much of the mentality that stash purchases need to be justifed, i can cope with having numerous balls of yarn hanging round the house when i know what i'm doing with them. i can't quite get away with numerous balls of yarn with no set purpose. partially because i still feel the need to rationalise my knitting addiction to my other half) ok so i'm not quite a stash fiend just yet but give it time and i'm sure i'll be up there with the best of them.

i also managed to finish another scarf in the car on the way home (picture to follow later when i feel like getting the camera out again), that brings my total of finished objects to three in the past week, which i don't think is too bad for me, the girl who had a sweater on needles for over a year and a half (and it's not even truly finished now, still waiting for the inclination to block and sew it all together) oh how i do procrastinate! but i digress, three finished objects in a week is very good for me, and serves as a good distraction from having to do any actual work. it's been wonderful actually, it seems i can get out of gardening duties not just because my hay fever's playing up, but by simply picking up needles and wool. i tell you, the art of knitting gets more and more useful each day. made an attempt to teach my boyfriend how to knit as well seen as he's been expressing a genuine interest in the craft, the only problem is he's a lefty. now being of the ambidextrous persuasion myself teaching a left handed person to knit shouldn't be such a problem. except all the other knitters in my family are right handers and so i've only ever been shown how to knit in a right handed manner and i find it impossible to learn to knit from a book, the diagrams always seem to confuse me, i think like most people i learn better when sat with someone and observing what they do. my only option i think may be to show him my way to knit, or pack him off to someone able to demonstrate a left handed method. i like this business of imparting knowledge, it makes me feel useful.

i decided to spend at least some of my easter monday getting on with the dratted scarf. i'm just under halfway through now but not without a struggle. i made the mistake of getting too confident again (either that or it was something to do with me getting distracted shouting at the tv and its lack of punk bands on a supposed a to z of punk) i think i actually had to unpick more of the scarf than i've even knitted today as i somehow managed to lose two stitches and on tinking my way back to where the mistake had happened found myself losing another. even i'm not sure what i'd done, or even how i'd done it which i suppose for me is nothing new. when i first started to knit like many beginners i made mistakes left right and centre, the only difference was and i suppose still is that my mistakes are so unusual that my mother who's been knitting since long before i was born doesn't have a clue what i've managed to do and at times i'm sure she's flung my projects accross the room in frustration.

i managed to finish another maya scarf, this time for my boyfriend, a picture of him modelling it will follow just as soon as i've got his permission to post it. i'm quite pleased with the results and decided to start a third one in purple for me this time. got as far as casting on and starting the first row before the end of my needle flew off and the stitches followed. it serves me right for knitting on horrid plastic needles i suppose, glued it back together as a temporary measure and hunted around online for some 8mm needles, in wood this time. the idea at first was to treat myself to some peace fleece needles but as i couldn't find anywhere in the uk selling them i ended up settling for some plain bamboo ones instead. if anyone can point me in the direction of somewhere in the uk selling peace fleece needles i'd be very grateful.

knitting, and camping.

finished my first attempt at the maya scarf last night. i don't seem to be doing too badly at the moment for finished objects, though the number of unfinished objects never really seems to decrease. it's the first official day of my easter break from university today, a time that i really wanted to spend knitting. unfortunately though with exams creeping up increasingly quickly it looks like most of my fortnight's going to be spent with my head stuck in a book. i did manage to take some time out yesterday from both knitting and cramming like mad to put a tent up. i should probably explain at this point that well over a year ago my boyfriend got it into his head that it would be a good idea to buy a tent when he passed by a camping supply shop one day. a week later the tent was bought and has been sat at the top of the stairs and various other places round the house since then just waiting to be erected. finally yesterday seeing that the weather was at last decent enough to venture outside i was reluctantly dragged away from my needles to assist with trying to put the tent up, in the back garden of all places. a back garden which i might add is actually about as wide as this tent, which also happened to be side facing so once the thing was semi erected the two of us clambered in to check out our handy work. i don't know if anyone else has ever tried this but trying to enter a tent through a flower bed that happens to have a big pointy branched bush thing right in front of the door is no easy feat, especially when you consider that neither myself or my boyfriend are short people. eventually though we were in and after sitting down inside for a well deserved five minutes rest and a ribena break we thought we'd better take the tent down again before the neighbours thought the two of us had gone completely mad. unfortunately taking it down turned out to be the hard part, well not so much the taking down part more the managing to squeeze this rather enormous tent back into the teeny weeny little bag it came from and the wind deciding to start whipping everything all over the lawn. i'm sure it made for something of a comical sight to anyone looking out of the window. and after much persuasion the tent finally found itself packed away and i retreated back indoors to finish off a red maya scarf to cast on for the blue one the boyfriend's been pestering for for the past week or two.

stash, stash, mountains of stash

i hit up country today, and boy oh boy did i hit it hard. went in for the wool to make another maya scarf and came out with the wool for three, oops! still at least it'll keep me busy for a while. also managed to make a start on the silk socks i've been promising boyfriend for the past week or so, and seen as i finished fawne off yesterday i felt a new portable project was needed. especially seen as i have to spend a large number of hours per week on public transport and after a while a copy of the metro just doesn't cut it as in flight entertainment.

today's seen some more knitting on the dratted scarf (progressing well so far, fingers crossed), a lot of fighting with the nhs student grants people, the progression of my last university assignment of the year and the rediscovery of an almost forgotten scarf project.

as a student nurse money is always tight (but it's always funny how even if there's no money for food the yarn still gets bought), as anyone in the same situation or with family members training to become nurses will tell you. and as such i'm trying to apply for help with healthcare costs which involves getting in touch with student grants to try and get an awards notice to show the amount of bursary i currently get. this is the award notice they were supposed to send out last september but forgot. after much hassle they finally agreed to send something out to me over a week ago with the promise it should be here by the weekend at the latest, so i waited, and i waited. then today i got fed up with waiting and got in touch again to find them reluctant to send another notice out to me, and then when they did i found out the cause of all the trouble. they were sending it to the wrong address. well ok, the correct address really, but the actually only had my house number and street and the name of the city i live in. completely missing out the name of the village and post code. now the city i'm from isn't a big city by any means, but by missing off half my address anything coming to me is going to be very very delayed. so eventually after rectifying this i went back to my knitting.

with having the house to myself dratted scarf's progressing very well indeed (i will not be defeated!) i've probably got something like half a metre or more done now, and for a knitter new to lace i wouldn't say that was too bad. although of course once my brother got home from school any chance of peace and quiet to concentrate on that went out of the window and i had to hunt round for something else to occupy my time with. and after much pleading from my boyfriend i said i'd look for some more yarn to knit him another pair of socks as i think he's started to love the ones i gave him a couple of weeks ago more than anything else, i almost had to prise them off him on the sunday night to get them in the wash. his demands were clear, something fairly plain in colour so he can wear them to work and to his bowling matches without feeling too embarrassed if anyone looks at his ankles. so after much searching through the stash i settled on some of the regia silk in a navy blue, quite conservative but at the same time a little bit special. while on the hunt for some sock wool though i came accross an almost long forgotten scarf project of my mother's that she started over two years ago for me, when i was but a very very novice knitter hardly able to do much beyond cast on, stocking stitch and rib, of course i was no good at casting off, sewing up or doing increases the "right way". thankfully i'm somewhat more confident and the idea of slipping stitches and knitting into the back or front of this stitch or that one seems a lot less daunting. so i decided to help her out on this one seen as the scarf's mine anyway, and if left to her own devices my mother will never, ever finish it. the problem is she has a project for every occaison and like me it's easy to lose interest part way through or when some shiny new yarn arrives on the site or shelf of your favourite yarn store. thankfully though i love knitting with debbie bliss maya (now called soho i think, i'm sure someone will correct me if this isn't right), i love the thick and thin texture it gives and all the shades of red this particular variation has that i'm just itching to get stuck in and make it up (pictures to come once it's finished). of course i've recently also been distracted by all the fabulous wares on the numerous knitting sites i've been introduced to, i'm particularly in love with all the gorgeous stuff my mum found for me on pearlescence. i think the leopard print needles are a must have, or would be if i didn't need to be sensible and go book a driving lesson or two over the next few weeks.