Two new patterns out this month.
The first was Lace Anemone, a slouchy beret using fingering weight yarn in a pretty eyelet pattern. It knits up really quickly for a treat for yourself or a gift for a friend. Look out for a matching cowl pattern coming soon too.

The second pattern this month was Serpent's Head socks. The name for this one comes from the chart of the stitch pattern. I'd found the pattern in a book of written stitch patterns and charted it myself and as I saw the design taking shape before me I was struck by how much it reminded me of the shape of a snake's head. The socks are worked toe-up with a gusset and short-row heel. The gusset adds the extra room at the instep that short-row heels often lack.

Click through either the text links or the photographs to go to my Ravelry pattern store. Happy knitting!

I finished two pairs of socks at the weekend and appear to have gone mad casting on stuff. Yesterday I cast on both a shawl and a hat.

This is going to be a big one, another of my favourite three-triangle shawls, using Wollmeise Lace in Patina in a Nobody is Perfect skein. The colour is very very streaky (hence the NiP designation). Green isn't usually my shade but when I saw this skein in the shop last summer I thought it was beautiful. I had the idea for the pattern a few weeks ago. It's various leaf lace patterns together and the charts have been drawn out and lined up with one another for a little while, waiting for me to get around to casting on.

No sooner had I got the shawl underway that I felt I had to cast on a hat as well. I've had two balls of Valley Northfield sitting in my stash, leftovers from a jumper I made myself at the beginning of this year, and no idea what to do with them until suddenly at the end of last week they told me (as yarn does sometimes!) that they had to become a man's hat. This will probably be for my father in law, but I might give my husband first refusal on it.

My third current project is, so far, these three partial balls of sock yarn and a very colourful chart. So far I have resisted the urge to cast this one on as well but I suspect it won't be long!

There's also going to be a fourth one using this...

...but honestly three WIPs at a time is enough for me. Watch this space!

That sweater I've been working so hard to complete? This weekend saw the event it was made for - a trip with friends to Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm in Bavaria to visit the Wollmeise shop!
It has to be said it was a flying visit. Due to work and family commitments I only had the Saturday and Sunday available so I took the early flight to Munich on Saturday morning (4.20am alarm call anyone?!) and the evening flight back on Sunday, but it was worth it to enjoy a knitting weekend with friends.
The journey there was very smooth. The only slight hitch was my sat nav trying to take me to my pre-booked car parking via some sort of service area of the airport that I'm pretty sure I shouldn't really have been in, so what should have been a five minute drive from the airport hotel turned into fifteen minutes of "no, this can't be right, but I got the postcode from the car park website, aargh, I've run out of signs, I'm going back to the main road and just following signs to the airport" which solved the problem. Otherwise the flight was uneventful, I was through the airport at the other side with no bother, on to the S-bahn (via the ticket desk where my high school German got me a ticket to the right place!) to Munich Central where I met up with a friend. We travelled together to Pfaffenhofen, an easy half-hour train ride.
We were very lucky with the weather, warm and sunny, so the ten minute walk from the station to the shop was very pleasant too.
Saturday afternoon was spent chatting, shopping, lunching at a cafe in the town square (never expected to be eating outdoors in mid-October!), chatting some more, shopping some more...

Pfaffenhofen itself is a pretty town, and very Bavarian in character. We all ate together on Saturday evening in a local restaurant, which was an experience in itself as I was the only German-speaker among our group and I think my limited German was better than the waitress' English. However, between me, her and Google Translate we were all adequately fed and watered! We also took a stroll around the town centre before heading back to the hotel for an evening of knitting together and showing one another our purchases from earlier in the day.

Speaking of purchases, I bought just the right amount for me. I think I was the most restrained shopper of the group, but I intended to buy just about this much and was travelling with hand baggage only on the plane so had to carry everything I bought anyway. The main thing is I'm really pleased with what I got, and here they are....

From top to bottom: DK in Himmelblau, DK in Blue Curaçao, Pure in Rubin, Twin in Tiefer See Spiralen NiP, Twin in Mitternacht NiP, Twin in 29 Cu NiP, Twin in Vergißmeinnicht NiP, Twin in Rosenrot NiP and Twin in Pfefferminz Prinz NiP.
NiP stands for Nobody is Perfect, and I was particularly looking for such skeins. Some of them are there because they have knots in them (regular fingering weight Wollmeise skeins are one long continuous length of yarn, so any with joins become NiP, or seconds); others are there because the colours aren't "right" for the intended colourway, some by a little, some by a lot, and yet others have issues with dye bleeding or the twist of the yarn. I especially like the F NiPs, the ones with a colourway issue because you can get some real beauties from from dye-pot accidents.

The two DK skeins are to be combined with the remaining yarn from my previous sweater to make a three-coloured sweater for me. The Pure Rubin is for a hat design I have in mind (and, I suspect mitts and/or a cowl to match it).
The Twin skeins are all for socks, some for gifts, some for design work and some for me.

On Sunday I had a lovely lie-in (a rare treat when you've got two small boys at home), then another walk in the sunshine, before joining two friends to take the train to the airport. Finally it was time to go our separate ways and catch our respective flights back home. Unfortunately the weather luck ran out on the approach to Gatwick, but this was one final glimpse of the sun as we descended through the clouds.

I've had a lovely weekend, and while this was my second visit to Pfaffenhofen I don't believe it will be my last.

This has to be a record for me! One me-sized sweater finished in just over two weeks! Even with the extra length in the body, it used less than two skeins of Wollmeise DK and is ready to be worn for my trip to the Wollmeise shop later this month. Please excuse the rather grainy photograph. I was so excited at having finished and blocked it that I wanted to get a picture RIGHT NOW rather than wait until morning for some daylight. The photo had to be lightened up and cropped and it's blurred it a little but you definitely get the idea here. 
I enjoyed knitting this patterrn. I haven't done top-down set-in sleeves before but the construction is interesting and the pattern is really easy to follow. In fact the only criticism I have of the entire pattern is that the charts for the lace panel and the sleeve decoration are in a different PDF file from the rest of the pattern document. I tend not to print patterns out but rather read them using the Kindle app on the iPad, and that meant I had to keep closing one file and opening the other to go back and forth between the lace chart and the written instructions for the rest of the directions. In the end I just printed the one page (with the chart on it) and used the paper version of that alongside the electronic version of the rest of the pattern.

Well, the Pfaffenhofen sweater is making good progress. This was where I was up to as of Wednesday..

...and I'm now beyond that and on to the first sleeve. I am seriously impressed with the yardage of the WM DK. That first skein got me almost down to the ribbing at the lower edge, and that was with a couple of inches of bust darts and an additional 18 rounds added to the body of the garment. 
Winding the second skein was an experience I could have done without, though. I was trundling along quite happily until the skein decided to go rogue and leapt off my swift (I have an Amish-style one that sits on the floor) and I ended up with a tangle that took four HOURS to undo!
My winder is an old faithful though. It's a little plastic one that my mother used to use for winding wool off cones for machine knitting. I have many childhood memories of it being attached to the edge of a coffee table or the kitchen table and her winding little cakes of wool on it. I think everyone has sounds that take them back and the whirring of that little ball winder going round and round is definitely one of mine. I have a bigger one for winding really large skeins (there's no way this one would cope with the mile of yarn that is a WM lace skein) but if I can use this one, I do.

As long as I'm careful with it, it copes brilliantly with even a full 200g of WM DK and with a full skein of Pure which has over 500 yards of yarn. The only thing I need to watch is that when the ball gets big enough, the little silver guide isn't quite high enough up to stop the yarn scooting underneath the white lip and getting stuck in the gears, but that's what you get for using more yarn than the winder is supposed to accommodate. Holding my hand higher on the yarn and watching it closely so I can stop winding straight away minimises the problem.

Now onwards and downwards towards the ends of the sleeves!