saturday market bags.

...catching up on my summer production...
I started my Saturday market bags in July and finished both in early August just before my summer holiday to Alghero, Sardinia.

The blue one: Rowan: all seasons cotton: jazz
The pink one: Rowan: cotton rope: cyclamen

The bags were really useful over my holiday, both serving well as beach towel bags. I found the cotton rope was much more robust than the all seasons, thus the pink bag kept it's shape much better than the blue. I used the pink bag more often, especially in the evening to carry my camera, purse, sunglasses etc with me - which was great as the lovely cyclamen colourway matched my holiday birki flip-flops, the shell embroidery on my new beach towel and my campari and soda ;-)






PLEASE NOTE ALTERATIONS TO MARKET BAG PATTERN

I used exactly 3 balls of cotton rope - but I did make a couple of minor
alterations to the pattern...

- I knit the shoulder straps to 23 cm which was much shorter than than
the pattern - so in total my strap is 46cm in length.   This was just
right to sit on my shoulder and hang at waist height - but you can't
sling it over your body (if you do make the same alterations as me but
want a longer strap you will probably end up using 4 balls)

-  my straps are 8 stitches wide rather than 6

-  I repeated a couple of extra rows of k, p at the top of the bag making
the band slightly wider

jess hutch flickr pool

In August Craftapalooza contacted me via Flickr inviting me to add my Jess Hutch photos to a Jess Hutch flickr group she had created. So if you need a Jess Hutch fix take a look... there are loads of gorgeous squareys in the pool and I would stay at home to knit one tomorrow, if that is I could get my hands on the pattern. Unfortuantley Jess is right out of patterns and from what I hear isn't planning to reprint either. HELP!!! I need squarey in my life.

Here is a picture of my little niece with my last Jess Hutch critter, Kev.

pressie for my sister

It's been a busy summer and I have a lot of blogging to catch up on... I will start with showing off one of my most recent projects, an evening scarf for my sister, completed this week.



The yarn is Wendy Melody, knit on 10mm circular needles. I cast on 16 stitches, knitting 8 rows to begin with, then knitting a row of decorative elongated stitches, winding the yarn around my needle 3 times. Then I knit a repeat pattern of 5 knit rows followed by a row of elongated stitches. To be honest I knit the scarf by eye rather than counting rows, so it was pretty easy. It's the first time I have knit with this type of yarn, I think it is called ladder yarn (?), it was a bit tricky to start with as I had to make sure I did't knit through the the strands. The scarf's weight allows it to be draped quite nicely across your shoulders, which is good as the yarn is a bit itchy to be worn against a bare neck. I have a green colourway of this yarn in my stash, and will embark on a similar design for me.