Merry Christmas from the seaside!

Here are the ingredients gathered together to make a gorgeous cranberry and chestnut stuffing roll to go with the Christmas dinner tomorrow.

I was amazed to find them all in nearby little Perranporth - even fresh cranberries and fresh chestnuts!

Here's something else we found at Perranporth - a christmas tree with working lights on the rock!

I don't think it'll last long, and goodness knows how they got the lights to work out there, but it looked great when we saw it.

That rock is actually huge; when the tide is on its way out you can climb up to the top. Usually the Perran flag flies on a pole where the tree currently is.


And here's our own little christmas tree, as decorated by my DDs.

Merry Christmas to all!

Happy Birthday DD!

My first-born daughter is 9 years old today - how the years have flown. Here she is way back in 1998, just a few minutes old - my beautiful little eskimo baby!


We are so proud of her - both of her achievements and more importantly of her kind, nurturing, and loving character. Happy Birthday sweetheart!

Domestic bliss..

..is ensured with the arrival of a new oven. Am I sad? Maybe.. but I don't care.

Just look at how shiny it is! I really don't want to get it dirty - but then it is so lovely to use. The grill was christened with sausages this morning, and the main oven is shown here being christened with cottage pie.

Perhaps I should crochet some new hot pads in honour of it. ;-)

BTW, thanks for all your encouraging comments about my cable frogging madness. It makes me feel a little more sane.

Excuse me, did you say progress..?

The crazy cable sleeve is finished, and it has 13,006 stitches (including cast-on and cast-off). It looks amazing and feels wonderful.

And I'm going to frog it.

I used 86 grams of the merino for the sleeve so I do have enough for the whole sweater, but I've changed my mind about a few minor details. Only little things... like the gauge... the design... the size... :-)

I clipped the sleeve together and tried it on - a very illuminating thing to do.

Whilst it fitted, it was too snug for what I had envisaged. I like a good fit, but I don't want it to feel like a second skin. I had stretched the swatch slightly to measure the gauge, but obviously I couldn't tell what that would feel like in the finished garment - until now.

And that twisted rib; it looked great but when stretched taught it reminded me too much of the plastic-feel-acrylic throttlingly tight poloneck handknit sweaters I was encased in when I was a child. It had to go.

So I've changed both the pattern gauge and the design. I've taken away the twisted ribbing and replaced it with a minimal garter stitch edging. I've replaced the funnel neck with a v-neck. I've added more ease to the whole garment.

I've also swatched another stitch pattern. Whilst those all-over cables were gorgeous, the final look was rather too intense over a large piece of knitting.

DH questioned my sanity when I modelled the sleeve and announced that it was headed for the frog pond. He asked how long it had taken me to knit it (I don't get much knitting time atm) - and I suggested that it would be silly continuing to knit a garment that I knew wasn't what I wanted...

So here's version 2. There are some plain columns between the cables, no rib, and the fit is looser.

It's quite different to what I had initially imagined, and it may still change again. But that's the joy of designing your own garment isn't it?!