I have been knitting! Honest!

Well, I have no good reason for such a long absence from my blog. I could claim I've been too busy, but really I think laziness does factor in there somewhere. To be fair, the end of the summer term at school was pretty manic and I didn't really have time to even do much knitting. Now I'm on holiday I have all the time in the world to knit!

My current wips are The Hemlock Ring Blanket, which I finished the other night and is now waiting to be blocked. I really hope it's going to block well because at the moment it just looks like a crumpled mess! I'm halfway through knitting Butterfly from Rowan 37. I've wanted to knit this for years, but I've always been put off because I thought it'd be difficult. Now I'm actually doing it I'm rather underwhelmed by the pattern. I hope as well that it doesn't stretch too much because otherwise it's going to turn out huge even though I'm knitting a size smaller. The last thing I'm working on is a second version of this cardigan. I've had so many people ask me for a pattern on Ravelry, but there are quite a few things I wasn't happy about with the first one. So I'm knitting it again and trying to work out a pattern as I go along.

I've decided that writing patterns is a lot like writing songs. When I was in a band, we were constantly re-working songs, and even though a song would be officially "finished" you were always changing little bits here and there. Another similarity is that for me, when designing songs I have to have an idea before I can find a yarn. When I write songs, for me the music has to come first and then the words. I could never do it the other way around. And for ages I felt that I wasn't a proper songwriter because I felt it was so hard to write a song for my lyrics. But I've learnt that however you want to create is ok. This makes me feel slightly better about my ever-expanding stash and the fact that my poor boyfriend does not understand when I have to buy more to fulfil a design because nothing in my stash will do.

So here's to lots more creativity this summer before I sign my life away to my PGCE course in September!