Yet Another Knitting Update

I'm still knitting like crazy at the moment. Last week Mr Click was trying to convince me to do something I wasn't keen on, so he went right to my weak spot and promised to buy me wool. Of course I was sold. He'd promised me one ball of wool but as I couldn't make up my mind as to which colour to go for he agreed to buy me three.

In the end I settled on the light blue and dark blue combo, the bright mix (aptly named 'Paintbox') and then the multi-coloured pastel mix seen below.


One of the elephants I've been knitting is using a beautiful variegated wool. I used it for a little lap blanket a couple of years back and it knits up into a beautifully soft fabric, but it's a bit like cheese-wire on your hands when you're knitting it. It goes from a really deep purpley-blue to a really bright magenta pink so I can't wait to see what that elephant looks like when it's done.

Knitting with the variegated wool gave me some ideas for other patterns as well. I'm wanting to knit a flock of sheep with variegated fleeces in all different colours, as well as some zebras with multi-coloured stripes. So when Mr Click offered to buy me wool I knew straight away that I wanted to buy wools with all different colour mixes and I can't wait to get started with these ones.

I'm also suffering a bit with my knitting at the moment and that's slowed down the elephant knitting progress somewhat. One of the elephants is being knit with an acrylic/wool blend and it's resulted in a bunch of horrible itchy bumps on both my hands. I'm allergic to lanolin (which I discovered several years ago when I was given a lanolin-based steroid cream for a patch of eczema which got infected). It caused a bit of a reaction when working with damp sheep on the farm I visited during lambing time but aside from that I've not given it too much thought.

I think the recent hot weather is largely to blame because my hands get sweaty and that seems to make it worse. Luckily Mr Click visited the chemist for me and got some hefty packs of Piriton which helped to relieve the itchiness immensely but also have the uncomfortable side-effect of making me sleepy as hell. Last Saturday I barely knitted a whole leg for my elephants because after taking one pill in the morning and one at lunch time I pretty much just wanted to dose off for the rest of the day!

I've just been focusing on getting the elephant pieces knitted up and then I'll put them together at the end, rather than as I go along, which I'll probably come to regret because there's nothing as boring as sewing up a project at the end. But hopefully that means they'll take shape nice and quickly and I'll have three squishy elephants to show off fairly soon!