Still knitting. . .

Finally, here are a couple pictures.
Sorry about the delay. Just couldn't do it before now. I have got a few pictures of finshed things, but I had no real inclination to wrestle "Hello" to get them into entries.
But, a recent finished project had me a bit more excited than usual, so . . .


The pictures are nothing special. Just a couple photos of green and cream yarn - one, a shot of a nice lace pattern.














But a bit in the future, after I've written it up, I'll explain the thing I'm excited about. The problem is explaining it without letting loose what is knitted. The object is a future Christmas present, so I'd like to keep it a teeny bit of a secret.


By the way, I thought of sharing the results of a non-knitted experiment.
To understand it, you need to know a couple things; one, I don't have a bath - just a shower. - so, I have quite a selection of shower gels to wash with.
The other thing is that usually, in cold weather, or when I've been washing my hands a lot, my hands go dry and I have to put on hand creme (my favourite being Vaseline's Intensive Care - yellow bottle). Now, if I'm washing my hands a lot, putting on hand creme is a bit of a waste. so, the skin on my hands tends to crack and bleed, especially around the knuckles. It takes a few days for that to heal.

Then some time passed. . . So here I was in the bathroom, with this almost empty pump bottle of liquid hand soap, all these shower gel bottles with tiny amounts in them and the idea hit me - why not use shower gel like liquid hand soap? It's concentrated, so you don't need to use a great deal (not a full push on the pump like you would for regular liquid hand soap) some shower gels come in moisturising formulas - which I have some of - and you'd be saving money.
So I tried it.
I decanted all of those little leftover bits of shower gel into the liquid soap container. It made for an interesting smell, but not too bad (I had a small amount of a lemon gel that was a one-off and it made the overall scent slightly weird). There were moisturising elements to some of them, not to mention some of shower gels I had contained essential oils, so there was my anti-bacterial cover.
(most, if not all essential oils have anti-bacterial properties. Especially lavender, patchouli, tea tree, geranium and sandalwood).
I washed my hands with the resulting dark amber-ish goo for about a week.
My skin was lovely. The next week, I had a day where I was washing my hands every 15 minutes. My hands were fine. In the last 6 months of doing this, I've only had to use my hand creme once and that was when I came back from being at a friends for a few days.
My hands are soft and lovely. Scented nicely, too. No cracking skin, my nails are supple, I'm saving money on liquid hand soap and, best of all, I don't have all these mostly empty bottles of shower gel cluttering up my bathroom.
Try it for yourself.

Until then. . .

Another quickie . . .

Frogged the shawl started in the last post and put the yarn and needles for it away for a bit - maybe a week, maybe two - I knitted and re-knitted it and finally realised that I was knitting it wrong.
The corner stitches weren't right, and once I'd fixed those with help of a crochet hook, then other glaring errors came to light. . .

So.

A deep breath and back to my regularly scheduled knitting.

. . .and out.

Quick dash in to drop this off. . .

Well. got some other stuff finished and in progress and started - a bit more than I expected.
Got two more christmas presents done - I figured out a way to photograph them so "some" people don't know what they're looking at, now I just have to do it.

Completed two more blanket squares - since they're VERY small, I'll work on that duing the summer when it's too muggy to do ANYTHING else.

I put the third fingerless mitten on hold. It's safely in the wings, but there's two other things that NEED to be finished before summer is firmly entrenched, complete with stifling humidity and heat. My purple & grey wool wrap (on the penultimate quarter - the left front) and the wool prayer shawl (more than 1/2 finished). I'd put them away until winter comes, but I found a small nest of wool moths in my bedroom carpet and I don't know where they came from - best that I finish the knitting and get them dry cleaned before I find disaster next spring.

Started another project - a shawl I have had in the wings for a while. It's the Spring Blossoms shawl from the Acorn Street Shop seen in some American knitting magazines. VERY pretty (I got the cream version). Not got far into it - just two rows, but even now I'm finding that it's making me sweat. Starting it required learning a tricky technique of casting on (make a loop of yarn and crochet 4 stitches onto it, then pull the short free end to tighten the circle. Put each stitch seperately onto a double point.)

It's also the first time I've used lace-weight wool. It's thin stuff, and I was afraid of breaking it when I pulled it into the circle before seperating the stitches onto double points.

It worked, but. . .*whew*. Fiddly.

Now, I'm off. I want to get back to it in order to get one of the pattern repeats finished before I put it away into brief storage (this one I'm not frightened of since the wool/silk Zephyr yarn never saw the carpet before or after I started it). Yow!

. . .and I'm gone.