Needles on the Move

At a certain point, when I had a sizeable ball of yarn left over, I put in a lifeline and started on the last pattern repeat before the edging. There was loads of yarn left and I had a little ball in reserve as well which I wasn’t including in my (eye-balled) calculations, and I felt very safe.

As I worked through the final rounds of pattern I started to feel a little concern at the rate the yarn was being used up, I knitted a couple more rows, then measured out some arm-lengths of yarn to see how much I was using. 7 arm-lengths equalled one row at that point, I had enough to finish as long as I left out two rows of edging. I decided that nobody would notice two missing rows of edging (which were exactly the same as the ones either side of them) and that would be better than ripping back all the way to my lifeline and knitting one less repeat.

Until I got to here:

A lace cast off, on a 408 stitch row, eats a HUGE amount of yarn. Ugh. Luckily I had this:

Which I desperately hoped would produce enough yarn to finish the cast-off. I’m pretty sure my blood pressure was well up as I spun up the teeny amount of fibre, worried that it wouldn’t be enough, even more worried because I was certain that I would screw up some of the spinning and still be three inches short.

I was a desperate for a glass of wine by the time I finished, but had a pretty clear idea of the effect it would have on my plying skills. I andean-wrapped, and used a spindle for more control as I have a pretty accurate sense of how good I am at messing up andean-plying on the wheel.

Phew.

It was enough, I cast off, and then settled my nerves with half a bottle of Cotes du Rhone. I’m going to block it today, more exciting photos to come!

This will be last post I promise - I bet everyone’s really tired of all us Londoners going gaga over a little fall :-D It bears remembering though, that this is only the second time in my life that I have seen this much snow. The first was 12 years ago when I spent a winter in Germany.

I did make a snowman - my first ever (apart from the sleet-and-slush-man that I built with my brother once when we were little). And learned a little bit about packing snow (it’s harder than you think to get it even) and freezing fingers. I tried a snowball later on with mittens on and the snow stuck to my mittens in a big way - what’s the secret??

Windowsill-snow-dude wanted to go out and play with the other snowmen, but I wouldn’t let him because he was too little and only had a scrappy yarn scarf to keep him warm. So he got cross at me and melted in the kitchen :-(

I ventured out on Tuesday and learned that a) gritted snow is safe, and very satisfyingly crunchy to walk on, b) slush is slippery and icky, c) hard-packed footpath snow with no grit is to be avoided at all costs, even if it means walking in the foot-deep roadside drifts and d) wearing gloves with mittens over the top is the only way to survive!

I took this picture sometime on Monday I think - the snow was absolutely chucking it down - hard to capture on camera as it was moving so fast, but I think you can tell. You can see how thick the snow is where it’s been scraped off the top of the car. Incidentally, during this particular flurry, our immigrant was out meeting real estate agents and looking at flats. Ugh! He did admit that, in general, he preferred -2 degrees to 40 degrees if it came to a choice.

Today it’s raining and the snow is almost a thing of the past. They were forecasting more for the weekend but I think they’ve changed their minds - it’s not cold enough any more. So no more snow days, and the trains are (mostly) running again!

The buses aren’t running, most of the tube is closed, and I don’t have appropriate footwear anyway! According to the BBC, this is the most snow London has had in six years and the forecast predicts possibly as much again over the next 24 hours - Yay!

I’m feeling an irresistable urge to go build a snowman. Maybe on the windwsill so I don’t have to go outside - there’s plenty of windowsill snow:

I can see that this could get kind of annoying if it dragged on and on, but it’s great fun for the first day anyway :-D

And by ‘cool’ I do mean awesome, but also the other thing.

Sorry about the bodgy colour, I was trying to get a photo of the foxes running past (!) and didn’t fiddle with the settings enough, just cranked up the iso.

It snowed on and off all day today, with sunshine in between. But it didn’t start sticking until after dark. I’ll take another photo in the morning - although this is already the most snow I’ve seen on the ground in London since we moved here!

Sorry there was no Spin-In today, having house guests has disrupted things slightly around here. We’ll be back next week!

Good news though - Stash Yarns in Putney is starting a spinning group Tuesday mornings :-D It will be weekly, starting at 10am and you will catch me there with the rest of the crowd from this week - yay!