So – another round-up of what I’ve been up to since my last communication….I actually started writing this nearly 2 weeks ago, around the time of my eldest daughter’s birthday and the kick off for Hat Attack but then someone came and asked me to switch the tv on/tell their sister to stop it/get them a drink please (choose any one of these or a combination), the post got kicked into draft and has remained there.

So first, Bratz. Now, anyone out there who does not have children (or more specifically girls) may not be aware of these evil voodoo dolls (think Barbie with a serious Paris Hilton fixation) but my eldest thinks they are the best thing since sliced bread so we have them everywhere….I find them and their “accessories” under the sofa, in the kitchen, on the bathroom floor…so when her birthday was approaching and we asked what sort of party she wanted the answer was inevitably “Bratz!”

After a few days of thinking she came back to amend this to “a Bratz makeover party” – oooookkaaaay……..after questioning a few other parents and toying (very briefly) with the idea of painting nails and applying lip gloss to a group of 8 year olds myself I found a wonderful beauty therapist who organises such parties for little girls. All I had to do was provide them with some food, put up some decorations …. oh yes, and bake a cake.

My eldest has coeliac disease so no chance of just walking into Tesco and buying a Bratz cake – oh no – mum has to make a gluten free sponge then ice and decorate it. So for a week this is what I was doing –

here is the cake fresh from the oven

and here is Yasmin (her favourite Bratz) in construction

This was all cut from regal ice in various colours (after a trial run with the kids play-doh!!!). I then covered the cake with white regal ice and decorated it with spray-on food colouring in blue, purple and gold lustre to get this –

– I was quite pleased with the overall effect and the party and the cake were a big hit!

Right in the middle of this week of Bratz Baking, blowing up balloons, wrapping presents etc etc Hat Attack kicked off. Having done no swaps/competitions/kal’s in about a year I was doing a very rare spot of browsing around on the net a month or so ago and came across Hat Attack….a bit like Sock Wars except your weapon of choice in this particular battle is a hat…so in a moment of madness I signed up….to then discover the pattern was coming out a couple of days before the Big Party…oh well, I thought, at least I’ll get a nice hat.

I actually managed to get a fair bit of knitting in that week and found the pattern fairly easy so got the hat completed in about 3 days and it was posted off by the weekend.

One kill in at least I thought. I then waited for either a WIP from my target or a bullet through the head from my assassin….both of which arrived on the same day. Which is probably why I realised there was something a bit off about the weapon fired at me.

This is the two hats together, bear in mind that all the way through the game, and for several weeks before, the organisers have been banging on and on about gauge and how important it is and how we are only allowed to be off by, at most, an inch either way in size….

The smaller one was the WIP (yes, I know it’s a finished hat – it was agreed to be a misfire on account of one row of pattern being missing) the larger is the hat destined for me….a little large? Well, this is me wearing it and I didn’t pull it down hard or anything

and this is my hubby wearing it….

now, he’s 6′4″ and has a notoriously large head. We never find hats that fit him. His head is so large that when he was born the doctors thought he had encephalitis and told his mum that he might not live, they performed tests for a week – including a spinal tap – before his granny came to see him and just mentioned to one of the nurses “Of course I had the same problem when his dad was born, his head was really big, we couldn’t get baby hats to fit him” at which point they decided there was nothing wrong with him….apart from the freakishly large head of course. Actually, this fact is the one thing that I console myself with when thinking about not being able to give birth to my own children…at least by adopting I avoided having those large headed babies……ouuuchhh!

So, to get back to Hat Attack – the powers that be agreed it was a misfire so it ricochets right back to my assassin and I live some more. I unpicked and reworked the other hat and sent that off last weekend. Kill no 2 done.

I am now awaiting the arrival of hat no 3 which should be here tomorrow however I know that my new assassin is working on my hat as we speak….I don’t know what stage it is at but I do know the hat I’m getting is already at the decreases near the top so has only a few rows left to do. I then discovered that my new assassin (Ravelry name purps) goes to the same knitting group in Birmingham as RooKnits so if you see her there could you just accidentally unravel the hat or stab her in the hand with your needles or something? Ta!!!

I have an apprentice and pleased as Yoda am I…..

One of the things I have always imagined when I looked to the future of myself with children was sitting teaching them to knit and this afternoon that dream was realised. My eldest , who is about 2 weeks away from being 8, was watching me sew name labels into her younger sisters school uniform and asked if she could help “I’d really like to do some sewing…..or knitting…yeah, that’s what I realy, REALLY want to do…..”

So, I found some suitably sized needles, large size so they are easy to hold and knit up quickly but fairly short so they are not unmanageable – I finally dug out some old wooden needles that were my grandmas (she used to call them her “string vest” needles) they are 10mm needles but only about 11″ long and being wooden they are nice to the touch. Then I dug out some wool – I decided on Twilleys Freedom. It’s 100% wool and very soft to the touch, it’s fairly chunky so the knitting grows pretty quick and the couple of balls I dug out were in a variegated blue so the fabric would knit up a little more interesting than a plain yarn.

I cast on 15 stitches for her and showed her how to make a knit stitch and she was off…

with very little input from me aside from the odd screamed “Help, mum…it’s all gone wrong” as the stitches slipped off the needles or she wrapped the yarn the wrong way! She sat working away happily shouting out excitedly every time she finished another row and, after about an hour of knitting she had produced this –

It may only be 6 rows of garter stitch but to her it’s a real achievement and (so okay, I may just be a proud mum) I think that’s pretty good for a not-quite-8-year-old who has never knit a stitch before! She has informed me it is going to be the longest scarf in the world, EVER! and that she is going to knit every day.

My husband walked in as she was knitting and said, “oh no – a convert. What have you started?” I prefer to think of her as an apprentice and I’m rather proud of myself as well as I’ve never taught anyone to knit before.

As promised, some knitting! This is a hooded sweater I’ve just finished for my youngest – the cheeky monkey in question.

I knew exactly what I wanted to knit but after exhaustive searching online and through all my pattern books I couldn’t find it. Now, I’ve knit hundreds of sweaters over the years and I’ve often tweaked or adapted patterns so – why couldn’t I design something myself?

I found some bright DK yarn (Sirdar Salsa in orange and yellow) in my stash, worked up a few tension squares to decide on needle size and work out how many stitches I needed then I cast on….. basically I just started knitting and made up the parts I wanted as I went.

I’m pretty happy with the results – as is my cheeky monkey. The neck shaping probably needs a little tweaking, and I think I picked up a few too many stitches around the hood but as my first design I’m quite proud.

If you want it the pattern can be found under my free pattern pages and it’s called Cheeky Monkey (link over there in the side bar). If you do decide to knit it I would appreciate feedback as I’ve never written a pattern for someone else to follow so I don’t know if it makes sense.