Making Monday. Maybe reading the pattern *before* might be a good idea?

Katie and I went on a quick escape at the weekend.  We'd missed Saltaire crafts fair by a week since M *had* to go climbing last weekend but now that K has been well and truly taken in by knitting, we could add a trip to BaaRamEwe in Headingly to our usual haunts.

I've wanted to go and see it for a while now so was glad of an excuse. The shop was a lot smaller than I thought it would be but was full of lovely woolly goodies including Natural Dye Studio yarn as well as the yarns that are quite often in shops so that was nice to see and the staff were lovely and really helpful when I needed a bit of help looking for some self-striping machine washable dk....not asking for much there.... I ended up getting King Cole Riot Dk. Bit boring and I'm not impressed to be honest but more on that in a mo.

As soon as I got home, I wanted to cast-on this with my new yarn but it would seem that the monster who eats socks also eats my cables for my knit pros and since the pattern called for a circular needle I had to give up....not without spending two hours looking through the cupboard of doom in my bedroom....so called because it is *that* full of fabric, books, yarn and stuff. I actually threw enough stuff out to half fill our wheelie bin and a charity shop bag and the cupboard looks no better. Anyway, no knitting.

Sunday morning I went shopping and reluctantly bought a cheap circular needle in Boyes. I got home, cast-on then decided that the cable was too long so got M to butcher the new needle. He did, stuck it all together and told me to leave it for 2 days. Yeah right!  A couple of hours later, I had a go with the needle and the glue hadn't stuck.

At 3am this morning Lou woke me up because her foot hurt. When I got back in bed I couldn't sleep and realised that even though the pattern called for a circular needle, I didn't actually *need* one because I was knitting a cardigan so I would just be knitting backwards and forward on the needle anyway.  After an hour or so of not sleeping, I decided to get up and have a proper look at the pattern.  Sure enough, the circular wasn't actually needed so I made a cup of tea and started knitting. Clearly I would have done something useful but I didn't want to wake anyone up with my sewing machine ;)

As I said earlier, I don't really like the yarn. It is really splitty and in places unspun. Add to that, the fact that it is quite fluffy when knitted, it doesn't give the cardigan the crisp look I wanted.I'm going to be good and finish it because I do really like the pattern but I might end up giving it to Lou for her teddy and looking for another yarn instead.

For more Making Monday posts, hop on over to Natalie's blog.