Mad Hair Day

My kids are finally well again. For this, I am glad.

My own personal virus decided to claim squatter rights and has taken up residence in the cartilage of my ribcage. Costochondritis (for that is what is it, according to the ultrasounds, blood tests and excruciating prodding of a series of doctors) is not nearly as much fun as it sounds. If you ever want to scare the living shit out of your spouse I can recommend clasping your front, turning an eerie shade of green and gasping that you have a pain in your chest.

I now know what he’s going to look like when he’s sixty.

I’ll be back soon, once it no longer hurts to knit, type or breathe.

256 stitches,

5 rows,

2 skeins,

1 twist.

Bugger.

The vomitiness continues, pretty much unabated. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since Saturday. Old Cloth Ears (formerly known as Big Hairy Man) also has the bug which has rendered him deaf to wailing pukey children in the wee small hours of the night. Anyone surprised? Nope, me neither.

This morning the girls woke up, their temperatures were normal and they were wildly excited about going back to nursery and playing with their friends. They managed four hours but I’ve just had The Phonecall to tell me that their temperatures have gone up again so it looks like this particular virus is coming back for an encore. Quite frankly right now I’d like to crawl into the airing cupboard and nail the door shut from the inside. I love my kids but would like to see the back of them for more than an hour or two at a time, especially as I am suffering with the  shivering, feverish head-spinning and  coughing. But don’t waste your sympathy on me. Him Indoors would like to point out that, despite identical symptoms, he has it Much Worse Than Anyone.

In between scraping up the chunky bits, I’ve been working on my design for Thing 2. I’ve decided to add a ruffle at the bottom as requested although I vetoed the whole ‘pink sparkly’ theme she had in mind. We have an awful lot of pink sparkly stuff, occasionally interspersed with purple sparkly stuff and a bit of blue will make a nice change.

So far I have cast on 256 stitches, counted them 12 times and, thanks to the constant interruptions and ‘assistance’ of Thing 3, managed to get a different total each time. The hem of the jumper will be 128 stitches and I’ll be k2tog before doing some complicated jiggerypokery to make the join look nice. More on that later once I’ve worked it out, which I am going to do once I’ve caught up with some sleep and dug myself out of the paperwork avalanche.

In the meantime, I’m going to warn the Snot Monster that if he doesn’t get better quick then I shall consider euthanasia as the kindest choice to put him out of my misery.

What do you do when it is piddling with rain, everyone indoors has a stinking head cold and tempers are getting frayed?

What if half the family has been up all night practising their Olympic standard vomiting and the other half has been clearing it up?

What do you do when you find the larder is empty, it is a public holiday so the nearest shops are shut and everyone wants to nibble but not to actually eat a meal?

What if only sweet things will do but your pantry has more dustbunnies than ingredients and you’v eaten all the eggs?

You make it up as you go along, of course.

Sore Throat Chocolate Chip Cookies

In a big mixing bowl (or food processor) blend together:

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup caster sugar (you could use all one or the other but I only had a bit of each. Quite frankly, ANY sugar is fine.)

1/4 cup margarine (you could use butter but I didn’t have any)

1/4 cup peanut butter (smooth, crunchy, whatever rings your bell)

trickle of vanilla essence or some cinnamon perhaps (if you have any. I didn’t but think it would be nice if I had)

Mix till smooth then toss in:

2 cups self-raising flour

1/4 cup milk (whole, skimmed, non-fat, soy, whatever. If it isn’t lumpy then toss it in!)

250g (a whole bag) chocolate chips.

Mix all together, adding more milk if necessary so that it looks like thick cake mixture.

Put dollops on baking paper and bake for 15 minutes in a 180 degree oven – once they are golden brown then take them out and cool. Makes about 30.

They are almost cake-y when hot – I have no idea what they are like when they are cold as we scoffed the lot.

For snuffly, sneezy and feverish children of all ages, they perfect for sore throats, I’m told:

“It’s not scratchy in my neck, Mummy!”

I’ve been swatching (which, as we all know, guarantees that my project will turn out perfectly) and, because I’ve knit with this yarn before, I remembered to wash the swatch.

I even remembered to measure the gauge BEFORE washing it so I can compare the shrinkage! (Usually it entirely skips my mind and I knit the item to the shrunk gauge and then wash it… I bet you can see the impending doom here. Odd that I didn’t, especially considering I’ve done exactly this three times now)

Experience has also taught me to sew a button onto the swatch if I’m knitting a cardigan (I’ve also learnt always to buy a spare button or two when I find a set I like) before the washing – you’d be surprised how many buttons don’t take kindly to a trip through the washing machine. The resulting swatch is not merely a source of information regarding shrinkage, colourfastness and felting, pilling and general abuse-tolerance of your yarn, it also is a source of colour-matched mending-yarn should you need some during the happy years of use you should get from your garment. If you sew a spare button onto it then you will also have a button along with the yarn or thread which matches the original used to sew it on! Clever, yes? And it is much harder to lose a knitted square with a button attached than it is a single loose button rattling around in the bottom of your knitting bag/box/cupboard.

Because I know that the Sirdar chunky acrylic yarn I am going to be using is deemed machine washable – and because I know that I won’t ever bother to handwash it but will just toss it into the machine along with the paint stained jeans, yoghurt daubed t-shirts and muddy coats, that is exactly what I did to my swatch.

I measured it before and after washing (I dried it by throwing it over the airing rack, just as I will do with the completed jumper) – quite frankly, I don’t bother with drying things flat on a net hammock or a bed of clean dry fluffy towels (I have no idea where all our towels are – I bought a dozen big new bath sheets 3 years ago when we emigrated. SO why is it there are only ever two mismatched hand towels in the linen closet when I take a bath?)

Once remeasured, it is taking another trip through the washing machine on a hotter wash (now is the time to find out what happens when you boil-wash acrylic! Better to melt the swatch than the jumper!) and, if it survives that, it will take a trip to the tumble dryer, purely for research purposes. Not at all because I am a sadist who likes to torture her knitting.

I did all this when I knit with this yarn for the ill-fated Enormous Blue Cardigan, but I didn’t keep the notes for it – hence the blogging of all this detail. Also it will make me feel smug that I have done things like a real Knitter and magically protect me from future disaster.

Here is my swatch – (why yes, that is a red stapler and I do want to set fire to the building, thank you) clearly this is the most boring knitting post ever on a blog but I am just so smug and proud of my preparedness. You just know something horrible is going to happen soon, don’t you? Like in those films where the cop is one day away from retirement or the jewel thief is blackmailed into doing one last heist. What I am doing here is the knitting equivalent of declaring I heard a noise out in the woodshed and hey, you guys stay here, I’ll go out into the storm all on my own to have a look and by the way did we ever find out what happened to the chainsaw that mysteriously disappeared…

I knitted using three different sized needles (the joy of designing my own knits turns out to be the escape from trying to match someone else’s gauge!) a US sized 6, 7, and 8. I used my Denise needles (as that is what I’ll be knitting the jumper with, in the round) and in each section of the swatch I purled the appropriate number of stitches to correspond with the needle size (6 stitches when I knitted with a size 6 needle, etc) so I don’t forget which size I used - this means that if this project turns to poo then I can re-use the swatch, assuming that I don’t set fire to the entire thing and dance in the ashes.

I measured the gauge and compared textures of the different sized knits:

The number 6 needle definitely produced a very dense and stiff fabric (as you would expect, it being the thinner needle) compared to the others. If I were making a coat then this might be a good choice. The gauge was 4.5 stitches and 6 rows per inch before and after washing.

The size 7 needle produced 4.5 stitches and 5.5 rows before washing but 4 stitches and 6 rows after washing. The fabric feels firm but soft but lacks drape – as this is to be layered I’d like it to be quite ease-y and flexible (if you know what I mean)

The size 8 needle gave 4 stitches and 5 rows before and after knitting. (I have no idea why only one of the swatches changed gauge – I knitted them in one session, without drinking (which, oddly enough, really affects my gauge!). The feel of this swatch is what I was looking for – soft, thick (it is chunky yarn, after all) and fluid. I think number 8 is a winner! 

What I am planning is a jumper for my 4 year old daughter – A-line shaped to wear over long sleeved tops and jeans, with a notch neck (she hates anything that is tight when pulled over her head) and it should be soft/drapey enough not to restrict her movements. I also want it to be wider at the bottom than at the top and it will have some structure – but the detail will provide that. There will be set-in sleeves (to be knitted last) and the body will be knit from the bottom up in the round until I get to the armholes.

I’ve measured my daughter and drawn up a plan of the basic shape with the intended finished measurements. I will be (obsessively) trying it on for size (well, she will be) and should be able to make adjustments to the pattern as I go along. I’ve also decided on the detailing which I’ll be showing next, once I’ve started the knitting.

Coming up next: The Numbers and The Knitting! Any guesses how many times I’ll knit the hem until I get it right? My money is on four attempts before I run out of patience!

Here is the blueprint (please tell me if you can see anything wrong, won’t you?)