(I want my camera back!)

So one thing I haven’t mentioned so far about the pregnancy is that for the first three months I COULD NOT KNIT.

Let me pause for dramatic effect.

Ready?

I. could. not. knit.

At all.

At all at all.

Everytime I thought about knitting I felt so incredibly sick. PLUS my brain felt so foggy that patterns that would have previously been a piece of cake suddenly felt impossible and unmanageable.

Of course the extra fun thing was that we weren’t telling anyone, and so i would turn up to knitting week after week with my garter knit washcloth, do a few rows then rip them all out when I got home.

And as someone who will cram at least an hour of knitting a day (even if it’s in tiny snatched five minute segments), not to knit at all was horrible, because it’s what i do, and suddenly what i did was making me feel incredibly ill.

So yeah, I REALLY wanted to blog about it then. But I couldn’t.

But luckily it’s better now.

Which brings me back to bees.

I have been knitting for my female relatives for the last couple of years. My mother-in-law got a kiri, as did my grandma, and my other grandma – nannan – got a faroe shawl. And my poor mum is last on the list.

(There is a good reason for this – both my grandmothers are OLD and i wanted to make sure they got something knit by me, and frankly I wasn’t willing to risk waiting a year for another birthday.)

So this year is my mother’s year! Only then I couldn’t knit for months.

However, her birthday is in three weeks time, and is going to be totally overshadowed by her mother’s 90th birthday which is two days before. But she will get her knitted stole.

(Given that my mother is going to be a grandma for the first time this year she does not need a triangular shawl. Plus this is a woman who has had both her knees replaced and has just taken up aqua-running. She needs a stole!)

But I’m picky about my stoles, and – right now – extra picky about my knitting. I needed something that was complicated (but not too complicated), something i could complete in a month, and that would give my mum something to show off to her friends.

So eventually I picked the Bee Stole from Knitspot, which I’d been eyeing as a good knit for a while. Only I wanted to make it smaller, and with 4ply. So I took the pattern apart, did a little maths and realised I could remove a couple of repeats in the width, and come out with something both do-able and the right size.

SCORE!

I have four balls of Jaeger baby merino in cream, and I’m onto my second ball, and nearly at the end of the second chart, and – as long as i keep plugging away (I’m re-watching/listening to my skateboarding dvds), I’ll have it done in no time.

I hope. 😉

As my birthday present this year, Will and I went to Lacock for a few days, and on the last day, before heading back home, we went for a bit of a wander around the shops. Lacock, as a village, is owned by the National Trust, so there is a decent sized National Trust shop. When I went inside this caught my eye:

Good Old-Fashioned Puddings by Sara Paston-Williams

When we were kids, sunday was always a roast, and mum would almost always also cook a sponge of some sort. My favourite was a treacle sponge with custard. Heaven!

Anyway, flipping through the book I got an idea. Though I do bake (I made a banana cake just yesterday), we probably eat more  bought cakes and pasteries and cookies, than home made ones. And while these days I buy fair trade sugar, and chocolate, and free-range eggs, i’m pretty sure that most ingredients in processed baking would not live up to that sort of standard.

Plus my pudding repertoire of hot puddings consists of baked apples and crumbles. And while these are great, why not learn more?

So sunday is new pudding day, as I slowly work my way through the book. (I’m planning to do one recipe from each chapter, from the first to the last, and then back to the first again, and so on and so on, so that we don’t end up with a glut off three months of icecream! or whatever.)

This week’s recipe: Apple-Marmalade Charlotte

(again with the camera phone)

It’s basically bread, and apples, and marmalade. (The marmalade was some we made back in january. 🙂

…with custard.

Conclusion: Wonderful. Didn’t take very long to do (if you ignore that it’s not always easy to find enough stale white bread in our house), and both W and I have munched through it happily over the last couple of dinner.  Will cook again.

More next week.

(Yes, still with the bad camera-phone shots)

Having been itching to knit a Baby Surprise Jacket for ages now, so it’s no real surprise that it became the first FO I’ve knit for bump. And yes, it’s as lovely a knit as everyone says it is. 😀

The yarn is some of the C21Yarns merino/lambs wool I used to knit Tatami, and given that it’s 4ply, the jacket is pretty small, so i’m guessing it’s not going to get a huge amount of wear.

Though, that’s not really the point it is?

PS. In my attempt not to drown in spam, i managed to make it impossible to comment at all. *clever me!* This is – I believe – now fixed, so feel free to comment away. 🙂