The winner is me!

Rose Red, a craft blogger and fellow Sydney-sider, had a "Blogthday" competition earlier this month and I won! I was incredibly amazed, as I always am, at the generosity of the craft blog community out there. It's not the first time that I've won a give-away, but I'm still astonished when it happens.

The lovely parcel arrived yesterday and I tore it open with excitement (and help from little fingers). Hmm... lovely Fleece Artist sea wool sock yarn (Blackberry, 1 x 100g skein) and fair-trade dark chocolate from the Oxfam shop (I know this because I bought a block of it the other day for the new parents and almost didn't let it go because it looked so delicious. Karma looked down on me and brought the chocolate back to me). Yummo!


I couldn't wait to get stuck into it (the wool) so on my day off from work today (from paid work, I should say) I undid the skein, draped it over the back of a kitchen chair and started winding. It went swimmingly. I got half of it done in no time at all. The kids were busy playing, interested but not hazardous (or so I thought).

Until disaster struck:

In the blink of an eye a little blur came past and yanked the wool off the chair. That's all she did. One swift movement. Ack! It took my mother and I the rest of the afternoon to get that ball wound. A good four hours at least. Blargh.

Ah, but it's done now and I've started knitting a cover for my iPod which I've been contemplating since the moment we got it (and even before it was mine). Luckily enough, the most wonderful aforementioned Rose Red did exactly the same thing and wrote up her pattern. I've started it three times now, trying to get the right size, but I think I'm right with 44 stitches (I used the "Magic cast-on" on circular needles to knit it in one piece with no seams to sew up (which I hate doing)).