February 2009 Archives

School term is well and truly underway - I haven't managed to finish sorting out the blog banner and commenting system. It may well have to wait until the Easter break now. I finished the first wave of marking this morning - the next wave starts from Tuesday. Then there's Year 8 camp, followed by a third wave of marking from the first round of assessments for the year that will probably see me marking through the break... Still, things are less stressed than they were last year, so far.

I completed two more chemo caps for my work colleague. I was part way through this second cap when I heard that the first one (the Shedir one) was now in full-time use. The photo below is of the second cap (Odessa - Ravelry link) last weekend when it was finished but still had a few lifelines (the blue yarn) in it in case it was the wrong length, and I hadn't yet tied the end off. It was tried on and found to be fine then the lines were removed and the end cut and woven in on the spot. So I don't have a final finished picture.



The third cap was the speediest knit. It was the Lace-Edge Woman's Hat from Headhuggers. The brown one is Rowan Calmer in "Coffee Bean" and this one is "Plum".



Charlotte's pinwheel sweater is moving slowly in between other things. Last weekend I bought some Bella Baby Layette from Spotlight, that is essentially a cheap version of the Sirdar Snuggly Bamboo I'm using in the pinwheel sweater. It does not come in as good a range of colours. I had been put off buying some and dyeing it since it is 80% bamboo and 20% wool - a mix of cellulose and protein fibres - and my usual dyes work only on one type each. However, I was inspired by Emily's Jaali in the same yarn dyed with Dylon Multipurpose Dye. So yesterday eight skeins of BBL went in the dyepot with two tins of Dylon Multipurpose in the Bordeaux colour. I heated the big pot for as long as I dared while stirring constantly in fear that the bamboo might melt (I'm not sure what its melting point is, but I didn't want to find out either...). Anyway, plenty of dye seems to have taken to both the bamboo and wool. Sydney's inclement weather means the skeins are still drying. And the stirring meant they got more tangled than I'd have liked, so they will need some TLC when I wind them back into balls.



I'm loving the colour.

If you were really quick (or use the feed), you might know that I started an update of the blog software yesterday. That post (didn't at the time of this post, but does now) exist anymore. Basically, I broke the blog. It's okay - I restored the database and started over - and even made some progress forward (in that I actually have templates now). I need to rewrite the templates to massage the blog back into something resembling what I want it to look like. Until then, I apologise for the mess (I still need to manually reset some templates, hence the mashed look of some pages), the broken links and anything else it does while I sort it out.

And thank you, Movable Type, for making this such an easy process... Ahem.

Sorry about the mess... I'm in the process of upgrading the blog software - it's long overdue. It will take a few days or so to fix the templates (I'm having to start over) and anything else that has broken.