Eight things.

1) I finished The Rainbow Speckled Olearia last night. I love this pattern and it was pretty easy the second time around until I got to the second sleeve. At that stage I should have been on the home stretch but I made a big mistake and pulled it apart a bit roughly and ended up somehow pulling apart some of the body stitches too. I almost gave up, but after lying on my bed for a while and deep breathing, I came back and somehow managed to stitch it all back together again. Raveled here.

2) My Mum has a story in this issue of Notebook magazine. You should totally read it. Its so beautiful and sad and she's my Mum and I'm so proud. Yay!

3) The patchwork dress I made last week is on its way to a little girl who lost her home in the New Zealand earthquake via Deb. Are you are a patch worker? If so, Deb is collecting blocks to sew into quilts for some more families that lost their homes, you could make one too.

4) We are on school holidays. Indi is in Melbourne at her cousins' house and I am taking the little girls to Plaster Fun House in Ballarat. They love it. Me, I have nightmares sometimes about being locked in there with the magazines from the eighties, the fluoro lighting and the soft rock radio blaring. I'm hoping to get some knitting done.

5) I still haven't officially unpacked from our holiday but the bags are slowly emptying as we take out clothes to wear every day. If I leave it long enough, maybe I wont need to unpack.

6) The next thing I am knitting is a beanie for a birthday I missed last January. Woops.

7) Pepper is on some kind of banana diet. I have no idea what its all about but that's all she wants to eat. She loves them.

8) I am absolutely obsessed with dying yarn although I haven't dyed any yet. I think Mr Google is getting well and truly sick of me asking him the same questions about fixers and organic dyes and naked yarns.

Ok, I feel better now that's all out.

How about you? What's going on in your life?

I hope you are happy. XX

The unravelling.

One of the handy things about having a blog for me, is that I get to document the projects that didn't work. The projects that for whatever reason wont be completed. The projects that will be cut up and used for scraps or unravelled later to become something else.

Those failures have their place in my archives. They were begun with a burst of inspiration, their materials carefully gathered and the pattern worked out or studied. They were drawn or cut or cast on or sewn or knit or hooked.

There was so much promise.

And then there wasn't.

For whatever reason it stopped working. It stopped being enjoyable. There were too many mistakes. The wrong size was chosen. It was done and undone and redone so many times that it became messy. It became a chore.

But I think its an important part of the journey to let these projects go. To acknowledge them. To accept that you probably learnt a thing or two along the way. To realise that you aren't a failure, just that the project wasn't a success.

I cast on an Eden for Jazzy the day I finished Pepper's. I was excited and it was going to be a great dress for wearing over jeans and a top in winter and by itself in summer.

But somewhere along the line I realised I was over it. I had pulled bits apart and reknit them so many times that the stitch count was all wrong and the knitting was a mess.

To make my final decision I got her to try on what I had so far. She didn't like it at all and said she'd never wear it. She thought the arm holes were far too big and it looked stretched in places and she wasn't mad on the colour. At one stage she spun around and pulled half the stitches off the needles.

And then I realised I wanted the size four circs it was using to start the Olearia.

So I pulled it apart and cast on this.

And I'm happy that I have a blog to document it and remember it.

Are you ok with your failures? Do you blog them?

I hope your weekend is a happy one. We are trying on clothes to see what fits and what doesn't, playing Monopoly and singing along to Abba. XX