Double trouble continental style!!!

Or why all my fingers feel like thumbs.

I want to make my BIL an Uncle Argyle Scarf for Christmas which uses a technique called double knitting, where two sides of fabric are knitted at the same time. Trouble is I don't own Stitch and Bitch Nation and as the scarf is the only thing I'd knit from it I'm not forking out £11 for one pattern. Using the magic of the interweb I found a couple of tutorials for Double Knitting. It's a great video but the continental knitting style looks much easier for double knitting. I sort of got the hand of knitting continental when I tried my hand at fairisle but I had one hand doing the familiar english style so I only had to concentrate on one hand. With this I'm trying to do something unfamiliar with both hands and two stands of yarn. Following the example pattern I've sketched out a smaller pattern for a small facecloth which can be a stocking filler if it turns out OK.

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Lashing and lashings...

As well as talk of Clementine Cake on twitter there has been talk of brewing Ginger Beer. Ginger beer is my drink of choice and I'm always in search of a good one. I find many commercial ones too sweet. Once on holiday in Brasil I had a ginger beer made with freshly squeezed ginger which is the gold standard at the moment and a tough act to live up to. @eskimimi (who has a lovely blog ) linked to this River Cottage recipe last week . I had to hunt around for brewers yeast as the brewer's yeast you can buy in chemists and health food shops is deactivated so won't work for brewing, despite the name. (trade descriptions act anyone?). I ended up buying my yeast online after consulting my brewing guru Bioniclaura . As well as knitting Laura brews her own beer, which I got sample when I stayed with her and her lovely dog and husband in Dublin when I went over at the end of October. More on that later. I couldn't wait to get started but had to wait til we returned from Hasti

We have a winner...

Check out my pea seedling, how intact and un-nibbled it is. My mysterious object, as correctly guessed by Madmurdock and Montyknits, is a gastropod guard. It seems to be working. I'd heard that slugs and snails don't like slithering over hair. I tried using hair clippings a few years ago as a barrier. It worked for a few days, til I found chewed, leafless stems and on further inspection a guilty slug covered in ginger hair. Hopefully the fleecy barrier will stay in place and mean I get a good late crop of peas. Congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone who took part.

Ceilings

Over Easter we went to Istanbul. It's one of those cities that's been lurking in the corners of my mind, from tales of Roman Constantinople, to bordering Europe and Asia with its dreaming mosque minarets. So I booked a bargain of a city break two days before we left, chucked some clothes in a bag, picked up a guidebook and off we went. There are more blog posts and photos on the way, as we had an excellent time there, but as you can see I was quite taken with ceilings and spent most of our four days there looking up.

Ginger Knits UK

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