Egg Based Dilema

After making a recipe last night I now have one lonely little egg white sitting in my fridge. Now egg whites are good for many yummy things - most of which will not be good for my waistline but I don't count egg white omlettes as food! Anyway I digress - all my yummy egg white based recipes (meringues, macarrons, coconut macarrons...) seem to require 2 eggs whites but I just have the one. Now of course I could just halve a recipe but somehow I never do that which leaves me with one egg white until of course I make some macaroons at which point I'll have a lonely egg yolk so maybe I'll have to make biscuits as well...

Probably just as well I went for a run this morning!

Busy Weekend

So much for getting started on some more knitting this weekend!  Somehow it's Sunday evening and I've not got anywhere.  Had a lot of fun though - a friend's boys (4&6) came for a sleepover last night which was great fun but I hadn't realised just how energetic boys that age are!  The weekend wasn't entirely craft free though as yeterday evening saw us making and decorating biscuits - I think we just about managed to get more icing on the biscuits than the on or in the boys although some of the bsicuits were definitely more decoration than biscuit when we finished!  This morning our little guests slept until 6.50am (which I'm told is quite a lie in!) but that still left us with rather more time to fill than I'd anticipated!  Fortunately Mum used to help out at our local playgroup so I remembered a few of her last minute time filler crafts - finger puppet making proved a success with a tiger and two dogs sucessfully created before 9.30.  Children have now been returned to their parents clean, unharmed and on time - mission successfully acomplished!

Learning (and re-learning) how to knit

First time round my Nana taught me to knit as a very little girl (I can't have been more than 5 or 6 when she got me started).  Unfortunately for both of us I wasn't the type of child that was really very good at sitting still! With persistence - and a good deal of fun - Nana did manage to get me going on the basics and all my teddies had fantastic scarves!  When my aunt was expecting her first baby I decide to knit the new baby some mittens - nothing too complicated and nice and small so shouldn't take too long to knit - or so I thought!  By the time the baby (who's now 23) was too big for the mittens I'd only managed to finish one. Fortunately a second baby followed a couple of years later and I just about managed to get the second mitten finished in time for her to wear them a couple of times.

After that I largely gave up on knitting until recently when I was helping Mum to clear out some stuff and found all Nana's knitting needles. Having now reached my 30s I'm getting better at staying in one place for more than a few minutes so I figured the time had come to give knitting another go.  Sadly Nana's no longer here to give me any help and advice so I've had to work on this myself (Mum's also a keen knitter but I never seem to have time when I'm with her for that with so many other things we love to do together).  After some very happy browsing in Waterstones I've found myself a brilliant book - Purls of Wisdom by Jenny Lord and have started to work my way through it.

Given my previous slow progress I thought I'd be best of starting with something small so the iPhone sock seemed perfect. I'm not exactly a careful person so my phone is already a little battered and a sock to keep it at least a little bit safer seemed like a good plan.  Turned out very well too (even if I do say so myself!) Mine's the pink one - knitted in recycled cotton (Sidar simply recycled DK). My other half made the mistake of admiring it a little to enthusiastically so Project number 2 became the alternative pattern in green for him!  He still managed to be enthusistic about that (although he'd much rather I was still in my baking phase!) and even uses it quiet often.

Project 3 was a pair of wrist warmers - a new venture in knitting the the round but I found a set of double pointed kneedles in my stash so thought I'd give it a go!  Not too bad a first effort, but I probably should have paid more attention to the bit of Jenny's book about tension squares before I started as they're a bit small really.  Not a complete disaster as I can get them on and they don't actually cut off my circulation - besides I keep hoping it might be summer soon in which case such things can wait until Autumn when maybe I'll have a go at another (slightly larger!) pair.

Welcome!

It seems to me the best way to start my blog is by welcoming anyone who might happen upon it!  As you might have guessed from my title this blog is mainly going to be about my attempts at knitting. No doubt some of the rest of my life will creep in too (especially along the craft and cooking line) but I'll try to keep to the point as much as possible!

I'm not sure how often I'll be updating you on my progress but I'd love to hear any suggestions for great places to buy wool or find more patterns (best keep it simple for now as I'm not very good yet!).