Cooties!!

Gotta love Garden Slugs, and their crazy googley eyes :)

The kids requested these in specific colors, so I did a little bit of dyeing first. They are fun to make, and the kids have been playing with them ever since. All three of them have been "sleeping" in rolled-down socks :)

Stained glass socks

It's 4am. And in about 3 hours the kids will start to wake up, and it's not my turn to sleep in.

Night shift. It's messing with me again...

Promise, I'll go to bed right after this ;)

Only bought this because I love the BFL/mohair mix for socks. Not a color I would have chosen, if I had more choices.

But I liked the yarn it turned into.

 I didn't think there was enough to make a pair of socks for my big feet, so I striped it with some Sportmate. The squares on the toe end... they are there because I always wear out my socks under the ball of my foot first, and colorwork means double-thickness. There's always a strand of "the other color" at the back.

These went into the Harry Potter game on Ravelry as a 'project inspired by a potions jar' (thus the little jars in the photo). All the colors completely distracted me from my NEWT for a while. But I'm back on track knitting my Stilwell jumper, now, and spinning some interesting yarn for Quidditch.

Ravenclaw came second in the House Cup last term, by the way... forgot to say. Hufflepuff won it for the first time ever (it was the 15th term, I believe), but the margin between first and third (Slytherin) was only 5 points more than the number of points I earned, so it was close!

Slytherin is due for a win again. It's a house tradition to win every second term, I believe; forget sharing :)

And now, to bed...

Lately

In the last week or two I have been dyeing

and spinning

and knitting

It's all working in around work, and I'm throwing in this quick blog around cooking tea. :)

Shiny new

I was very good with my tax return money this year. Most of it went into savings, and of the bit we had to spend each, most of mine went onto a bike. The kids have all gotten little bikes this year, and Byron and Jasmine are spinning around the driveway happily, but they like us to take them to more exotic places ;)

Today we rode the 6km around Victoria Park. They all did well, especially little Zac with his training wheels.

Byron probably would have done it in a third of the time without the other two kids, but it was more fun as a family thing :)

Anyway, now I can feel free to spend the remains on yarn! I got a collection of Madelinetosh Vintage, which is one of my favorites.

Duchess (very dark purple)

Mourning Dove (just in case my other skein ran out while knitting Alchemist... ended up using about 30g of it)

Steamer Trunk (in case I need more before I'm finished Stilwell)

Firewood (really love this color)

Terra (love this mixed with Firewood)

Then I got some fibre from Shadawyn, a fellow player in the HP game (whose birthday is today, August 31). The fibre club one is "Severus Snape" (she does a different Order of the Phoenix member each month), and it was my reward ;) for finishing my Potions OWL on time. Seemed appropriate.

Severus Snape

And since I was paying postage, anyway...

Hebridean Black

And then I apparently rebelled against the greyness of the NEWT and ordered some color from Kathy's Fibres.

Jewel

Dazzle (Jasmine chose this one for a hat)

Opal

And some BFL/silk. I do still love grey after all.