Some of my old knitting projects

This is my first shawl made form home made hand-spun. The yarn is natrally coloured blue faced leicester - and it changes colour 2/3 the way down as I ran out and the new top must have come from a slightly differently coloured sheep.

The shawl is 5/8ths of an Octagon (ie halfway round plus an extra 8th). I designed it this way so it would drape over my shoulders and stay put. Its a good heavy snuggly warm shawl.


The next project I have pictures for was knitted for an open University buddy's baby. This is knit using comercial 4 ply baby yarn - as the family has a lot of allergies.






Then back to handspun to make a much finer shawl. This shawl is made from a yarn which aproximates 2-3 ply and is the finest I have spun. One ply is a merino silk blend with streaks of deep pink, the other is plain merino.



I seem to have a habit of making octagons for shawls (or parts of octagons) so maybe next time I should try to make a different shape. This shawl is supposed to be a regular octagon it was calculated so that the base square in the centre had sides of the right legth to yeild and octagon which would have s sufficient wingspan for a shawl. I think the maths took longer than the shawl.

Devon county show

On Saturday we went to Devon County show http://www.devoncountyshow.co.uk/home.asp . Last year Devon got summer 3 month early and in May we were in the middle of a very hot dry spring. This year we were back to cold and wet again.




Typical grey day - view from the Ferris wheel. The view is about half the showground.









We always go visit the sheep - our favourite part. Last year we heard a massive great ram *say* "Baa", this year they were all mahahah-ing again.

Anyway Lizzie found one that wagged its tail if you rubbed its head.


This year as I have been having a lot of trouble from what may or may not be ME/CFS or even MS (We will find out eventually), I hired a mobility scooter from shopmobility. It made the day completely enjoyable - I even raced Lizzie to the strawberry stand. The only difficulty came when we tried to watch a 'robot' who was being wheeled around by a man in a "Men-in-black" outfit (black suit, black tie, dark glasses). I couldn't get a good look. But then the Robot abruptly got off his Trolly and charged into the audience - since I forgot how to reverse I got to be front of audience view for the next few minutes.



He serenaded ladies in the audience by miming to song clips - and did the whole of wonderful world by lois armstrong.















Lizzie found a great bouncy slide and managed to get at least 10 goes for her £1:50 - when she was supposed to have 5!, in this picture she'd just done a complete flip.