From waking up to a good inch of hail (which stayed all day) and no internet connection on Saturday...
... to heavy overnight snow on Sunday...
... we have had a chilly weekend (minus 7C this morning), not something the east side of Ireland is used to. Our central heating had a good work out over the weekend, and I even turned it up higher than my usual frugal setting.
I had been planning to finish the Lila Tueller quilt and I'm almost there. I just need to cut the binding and sew it on, and I'll be done. I'll try to organise my self in to taking a photo of it this afternoon.
I have been working on a couple of other things though - quick baby knits with some leftover Rowan Wool Cotton. A little hat which I found at blueskyalpacas.com (via Ravelry) and comes as a free downloadable pdf.
(I added the little i-corded knot on the top)
You're supposed to knit it on 12" circular needles but I didn't have any so I did it with double ended ones instead. However, I found that you need to rotate the stitches round the needles, otherwise every time you change from one needle to the next, you create a wider gap between the stitches which (if you don't rotate) ends up lookling a bit like you dropped a stitch. So I learnt something new there.
I started a little pair of mittens, also in leftover Wool Cotton...
I'm blocking them because they came out different sizes even though there are the same number of rows. I'll fold each one over and sew it up then add a little crochet edge to put a bit of elastic or some yarn through. These are a bit of an experiment size-wise, I made them up as I went along, but I'm pretty sure they'll be ok on a newborn.
I also (finally) got round to blocking my onesie.
The original pattern is very old so I used Patons Cotton instead of the acrylic called for, and the guage is a bit out so I'm not entirely sure how it will fit on the baby. There doesn't seem to be enough room to get a nappy-ed bottom in to me. I also had to widen the sleeves at the armhole edge, as the armholes turned out bigger than they should have, so all in all a bit of a hodgepodge knitting-wise, but I will reserve final judgement until it has a baby in it!
And remember my idea for a nutella cake? I was going to make a ring version but in the end I made a smaller one in a loaf tin. Turns out the idea is theoretically sound, but doesn't really work in practice.
I put all the cake mixture in the tin, made a kind of valley in the middle, and spooned warmed nutella along it. Then I sprinkled chopped toasted almonds on the top and covered the whole thing over with the excavated cake mix. But as you can see, the nutella sank. It also developed a slightly crispy bottom, although this probably wouldn't have happened if I'd taken the cake out 5 minutes earlier.
It tastes fine enough, but my idea of a central splodge of nutella surrounded by cake didn't pan out at all. You can do this wth jam and it usually works so I suspect that the nutella was probablly too heavy for the cake mix.
Anyway, that was the weekend. I'm off out now to see how many times I can fall over on the way to the bus stop (it's a winter speciality of mine!) and go to what is laughingly known as the monthly visit to the semi-private antenatal consultant.
Happy Monday!
