Fixing things

Well, first of all, I made a mistake in my last post. I said that our last vacation had been our honeymoon in Cozumel, which was not true. Somehow I had managed to forget about the trip to Australia that my husband and I took the year after we got married! (Probably because it was winter there when we went, which makes it seem less like a "vacation" in my head; also, my father's family is all over there, which makes it seem more like a "visit" than a "holiday".)

But still, nine years is a long time between vacations. Unless you count Pennsic, which we also haven't been to in ages. (And which I have been experiencing regret about recently as my friends have started making their way down there.)

I've been working almost exclusively on my sample piece (still going along well, I'm close to finishing using up ball #2), but yesterday I got really tired of it and switched to something else to break the tedium.

I made a decision on what to do about the Brambles beret project I'm working on as a gift for whomever my backup midwife ends up being. (You may recall that I ran out of yarn about 1200 stitches short of finishing.) I decided not to gain more yardage by sizing it down or getting more yarn. Instead, I turned to a skein of Briggs & Little Regal that I had left over from a scarf project for my dad. There was more than enough there, and the colour was extremely similar (and very nice). I usually have serious problems photographing red things, but happily, this shot worked out very very well:

As you can see, I still need to weave in ends and I really, REALLY need to block it.

This was a super-quick knit. As in, I cast on last night slightly before supper, worked on it last night, and did the last round this morning. The only criticism I have is with the yarn - I don't think I've ever had to pick so much vegetable matter out of a yarn before! But, as you can see, it certainly did its job. I suspect I wouldn't use it again, though. In addition to being VM-filled, it's also more scratchy than I like.

So that's two midwife gifts all knitted (albeit not blocked) and one to go. Which is a bit of a relief. Would that my house was more ready for the birth than my midwife gift projects...