Bella's Scarf

I haven't much to blog about today as I'm currently awaiting my new o2 money card before I can continue to make my Bella Mitten/scarf/hat set. I am not sure if you will have seen them advertised but they are exclusively for o2 customers and are a pre-pay chip and pin visa card, I figure this is much safer for use online (I don't have a credit card) as you only put the amount your going to spend on it, then if someone steals the details there wont be anything to spend and it can't go over that amount! When that arrives I will finally be able to order the yarn I want and possibly a pair of circular needles I've been lusting after in a size that I can use.

I paid a trip to my local yarn shop Tricot yesterday to see if they had the yarn I needed but it was a slightly different colour and she wasn't planning on ordering any unless I wanted the full 10 ball pack, which is about 6 balls too many, and the OH would tell me off.

Bella's scarf has progressed a lot since last posting, i have done 105 rows which is nearly 50cm and the pattern works out great :) As you can see though, there isn't much yarn left, so I am stuck waiting.

I absolutely LOVE working on my swallow needles, for a reason I shall explain in a mo I started using a pair of 9mm Addi turbo's yesterday and even though all the good reviews are ringing in my head I hate them. They are far too slippery.

The problem really lies in how I knit, no matter how hard i try and how many people show me I cannot for the life of me still hold onto the right needle when I pass the yarn over to make the stitch. This causes problems because obviously if your using slippery needles when you let go the stitches tend to slide off :(

I have a problem with wood needles though in that they are a bit too grippy, so i love my nice casein ones which are sort of in the middle, grippy enough but still slippery enough to be able to knit quickly. Swallow don't make circular needles yet from what i have seen, so until they do i am going to try out a pair of Susan Bates crystallite circular needles. When i was in Loop last week i asked the lovely lady about them and she instructed me to order online, as its near impossible to get them in this country. I was disheartened at the idea of waiting for them to come from the US and then i found this website called Rainbow Silks and i am going to order some when i get the o2 card. I might email Swallow and ask them to consider making circular needles too, i know they do DPN's though I've not seen any in this country.

Anyways, the reason I started using the Addi needles is because I have taken over making my sister's scarf, she decided she didn't want to work to a pattern yet, just wanted to play around with some yarn to get the feel of things so I gave her some green that I had no plans for and I have started doing her scarf. I ripped it back because she had made a few mistakes and somehow managed to make 5 stitches, and started on the larger needles to give it a bit of a looser feel then mine. My scarf is quite tight and is going to need to be blocked but so far hers feels all light and soft and I don't think it will need it, though I may go ahead and do it anyways.

So here it is so far:

I don't think this picture really shows off how well the pattern is coming but I like it so far. As you can see I have done the rib in one shade and then changed for the main body of the scarf, this is because after my visit to Tricot yesterday I decided that trying to match a yarn closely enough would be too difficult, and you can always tell when the item is knitted up that it isn't quite the same (this has happened on my pink version but I'm letting it slide) so I chose some of this:

The colour is a lovely plum shade, and i think it is going well so far, I will need some more soon though, I got two balls, and will use them both I think and then use the darker purple for the rib again, and then I am going to duplicate this in the mittens and hat.

Speaking of the mittens, I have almost finished a final draft of the altered pattern for Bella's Mittens. My moss version is almost all figured out, after several sheets of paper and several diagrams I am going to knit a swatch to the pattern and see if it works. It will mean I will have an odd mitten where there isn't the little bits of random ribbing, but I don't mind so much when it's for me.

I shall update when i have done some more on these and when i have ordered the yarn.

Now a new post for something special :)