"The Best Laid Schemes

'o mice an' men gang aft agley" to quote Robbie Burns. The rough translation might be: "You can't always get what you want."

No sooner had I promised to blog more but I was struck down by some sort of fearful illness, causing me to lose the first week of January completely. (I do mean completely - I can remember toasting the New Year with 'im indoors - he had a glass of whiskey, I had a Lemsip, and after that I remember nothing until the 7th of January.) As an illustration of how bad I was, I spent ten days in bed and was not able to knit at all. Not one stitch. I tried a few rows of garter stitch but simply couldn't concentrate.

That wouldn't give a lot to blog about, would it?

Well, just before I was so cruelly felled by Mother Nature, I was playing about with beads and wire.

I made this:



The pattern is by Annie Modesitt and appeared in "Interweave Knits" a few years ago. Naturally enough, I didn't have the right gauge wire (mine was a bit too thick) and I had to use a bit of Kimono Ribbon instead of the yarn she suggests but I think it looks quite pretty.

Here's a close up of the beads:



What can I say? They're beads.

As I gradually returned to reality, I thought of something to make with the angora that Lixie sent me.

These dinky little wrist-warmers, which used just the right amount of yarn.



The pattern is from Knit Pixie and can be found here. Of course, the tension is nowhere near the same, so in order to save myself the angst of doing the sums, I knitted one wrist warmer in a yarn with the correct tension and used that as a template against which to measure the "real" wrist warmers.

Since I am almost back to normal, there has been other knitting, too. It's been a "feast of finishing", but more about that another day.

I leave you with the Saturday Back Field (on Saturday, for a change.)