Because I don't have much space I have to rotate my winter and summer wardrobe twice a year. This usually ahppens (in the SPring) either at Easter, or, if the weather is still cool, at one of the May long weekends. This year it was going to be in May, so last week's heatwave had me rummaging around for any hot wether clothing that I'd not put away last year. Summer coat, lighter weight trousers, a sleevelss top, the one summer cardigan I had left out (bright orange) and sandals - at 6.00am!
Last weekend I did the Big Swap. Emptied the wardrobe and shelves and drawers of all clothes, sprayed with moth killer spray, vacuum packed winter stuff and got out the smmer stuff. Takes up much less room! I've also started the process of washing winter accessories and woolly cardigans.
This week it's cooler, so I'm relying on summer cardigans to keep warm on the way to and from work...
Which means not much knitting.
But I do have some knitting to report. I've mentioned before that I'm in a cople of yarn clubs, and that I never knit up the yarn! Not any more. I've found an ideal pattern for the gradient mini skeins. It's an old pattern, which I've had in my library for years. Veera Valimaki, Stripe Study Shawl. A garter stitch shawl with short row shaping in the CC, and a wide bottom border in the MC. It's great if you use a gradient as the CC. My first choice of MC was a red/orange vaguely variegated yarn, but on reflection I opted for a colour which didn't contrast as well with some of the gradient, but would make a better (for me) border.
Here's a scrunched up photo taken over the weekend. Unfortunately last night a good bit slid off the too short needles. I unpicked the last few inches of each row at one end, but it looks terrible, I couldn't get the same tension when reknitting (so some rows had too much yarn left over and others didn't have enough), only unpicked the last three inchess or so, and had the loop ends lined up against the last worked stitch, meaning that the inconsistencies in the yarn tension lined up. I'm not grogging back whole rows but will have another go at this unpicking. I'm going to unpick mor stiches and not line them up, so any irregularities at the beginning of where I have to reknit are spread out... we'll see how well that goes!