Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Success!

We signed the contract with the builder today to start work on our new house! Eeep, scary!!

Monday, April 27, 2009

Winter of hats


I have twelve hats in my ravelry favourites! So I'm thinking of making this the winter of hats :)

First off the rank is two (!) Thorpes. I quite enjoyed this, it was really quick, quite easy and looks pretty good too. In fact I enjoyed it so much that I started a second one within 5 minutes of finishing the first :)



Next up is Matilda which was in a Frankie issue last year. The crown is constructed in a very similar way to Thorpe so the start has been easy. No progress shots yet.

And after that, I'm not sure, perhaps Felicity? But I might have to take a break from my hats to make a capelet (poncho?) like this one, which I LOVE! The girl who made it figured it out from a picture from somewhere. See it on Ravelry here.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Music and and actual FO

I hope you all had a great Easter break. We went to Mansfield again and lazed about in the lovely weather.

So last post I said I was going to see Tony Joe White that night, which I did. His support act was Abbie Cardwell who I hadn't heard before, she was great, there's a couple of her songs on youtube if you're interested. And Tony was fabulous, such an awesome voice :)

Like a few other people I had a go at making hot cross buns over the break. They looked great but didn't have enough spice and sultanas in them for my taste, I'll try again next year :)

But the big news is that I finally finished my cable shawl, it was a lot of knitting (for me anyway). I'm really happy with how it turned out.

Stats:
Size: 156cm x 37cm
Yarn: 6.5 balls of Rowan Felted Tweed in shade #147
Needles: 4mm
Mods: Substituted a finer yarn which meant I had to do 24 pattern repeats instead of the 18 called for. I also made the ribbing on the side only 8.5cm instead of 10cm.

The scarf is constructed by knitting the centre panel lengthways then (on each side) picking up stitches along the length (on a really long circular needle) and knitting ribbing. There were 481 stitches to pick up! That wasn't fun.

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Tony Joe White

Going to see Tony Joe White tonight at the Toff in Town. Can't wait!

Monday, April 06, 2009

How to print double-sided

I don't know if you already do this but I thought I'd share how I print out my PDFs double-sided on my bubble-jet printer. It's worth figuring out how to do this as it saves a lot of paper (and you know there's a million reasons to do that) and it also means you have less pages to file/carry around/post/whatever you're going to do with them.

So firstly you need to print out all the odd pages. To do this select "Odd pages only" on the print dialog as shown below.




Then you take out the pages you just printed and put them back into the paper tray. For my printer I have to put them printed side up with the top of the page in first. Note that you might need to do it differently to me if your printer works differently.

Then you need to print all the even pages, in reverse order. To do this select "Even pages only" from the print dialog and check the "Reverse pages" checkbox, as shown below.




That's it, pretty easy no?

And because I seem to forget how to do this if I haven't done it for a while, I wrote down the instructions and stuck them to my printer :)

(If you can't read that it says, Print odd pages, Put back in w top end in first + printed side up, Print even pages reversed)




In case you're wondering, I'm printing out the pattern for Thorpe, inspired by Pea Soup.