field of dreams

It is a lovely day today. The beauty of the sunshine, however, was slightly lost on me earlier this morning. Waking up to such lovely early morning light, Mr. Rubbishknitter had decided to take some photos of the autumn mist, and during the process had dropped my much treasured macro lens out of his pocket and lost it somewhere in a field. They're not cheap, so it could have been an ignominious end for this blog, and my ongoing attempts at taking nice photographs. In horror, I followed him down to said field and scrabbled around in the damp grass for a while. It was mostly a lot longer than the grass in this picture, and quite good at hiding a camera lens. The exquisite morning light shone most elegantly onto our sad faces. Then in a moment of huge relief, I found it. It was a bit soggy and covered in condensation but, miraculously, seems to have cleaned up ok. The lens lives to blog another day!!!1!1

To celebrate, I took some pictures of knitting with an outrrrrrageously shallow depth of field.

So recently, I've mostly been doing a lot of warm but not very exciting stocking stitch squares for a blanket for Macmillan. A few of us from knitting group thought it would be a nice thing to do a charidee project. The website suggests you organise a Coffee Morning to do the sewing up of the different squares, but we thought it might be more fun to have a Beer Afternoon instead.

In the stuff-for-me category, this is the Trellis and Vines Pullover from the Fall 2009 issue of Interweave Knits. I was possibly a bit rash casting on so quickly after the pattern was released, as sometimes you end up being a bit of a guinea pig, but I couldn't resist. This yarn is Forsell Touch of Silk DK, some ancient long-discontinued line which was mega cheap from Silver Viscount - £4 a cone I think, which is like, nearly as cheap as air, so I bought two. It feels a tiny bit scratchy, but I've heard it softens up after washing. The photos on the website weren't the clearest so I took my chances with the colourway 'Blarney' and bejaysus! It was a pretty tweedy green.

The pattern is great fun so far, nice and quick in a top down raglan stylee. I'm determined to get it done this winter, and break free from my usual pattern of finishing a big pile of warm things in spring when they are no longer necessary.