Ahh summer. The time of year that a monkey’s thoughts turn to fudge and crazy golf (eight different courses so far this year. Beat that suckers!).

It’s not easy being a three inch monkey in a six foot world, so this year the Professor booked a surprised holibag in a special town for midgets! We flew in to the local airport, but we’re still not sure where our luggage went.

Our hotel was but a short train ride away. The local export is speciality meat. Please do not be disturbed by the graphic scenes of a locomotive nature. We all have our livings to make, and it’s not for us enlightened types to judge the primitives and their barbaric ways.

It didn’t take us long to get settled in our hotel, though there was a strange smell of rendered pterodactyl meat on the air.

You may rest assured that though the cake shop was monkey sized…

…the portions were as they should be.

The locals threw us a welcome concert that evening. It’s not often they get such modest, glossy and heroic monkeys as me visiting their squalid little town, so it’s right and proper that they showed their appreciation.

You may rest assured that I have many holibag adventures to share with you, including a SHOCKING time at the donkey sanctuary.

But those are tales for another day.

This is the Moonlight Sonata shawl in Posh Yarn lace club blue stuff from many moons ago.

It lives with the holibag bunny sitter now. The Professor was all for wiping her brain and dumping her listless body out on the moors lest she divulge the secrets of his lab to the world, but I thought that might come off as a little ungrateful.

Besides, if we did anything to her just after we got back it might look suspicious. Better to wait and kill her in the autumn see how the situation develops.

300g Knitwitches silk + 12 days knitting = another spidery shawl. This time the full hexagon spider’s web from VLT.

If you’re making this one, be warned. The yardage printed is a gross underestimate. I had more yarn than the pattern called for and still had to stop early and forgo the crochet cast off.

I haven’t blocked it. It’s huge. See that futon it’s on? That’s where I block. It’s already the width of a double bed so I’m buggered if I know where I can pin it out undisturbed for a couple of days. I need a frame I think. Or a spatial distortion device. It’s only really the outer cobwebby bit that needs a spritz and a stretch, the middle is mostly ok apart from the odd iffy stitch.

It’s very hard to get a decent photo of it as it’s so very large and I’m only three inches tall.

Still, at least it should catch a fair few flies.

And now I am returned to that twilight world of Between Projects.

I remembered how to knit!

No one is more surprised by this than me. There was a lot of chocolate for a little monkey to get through and I must confess I was a bit overwhelmed there for a while.

But I’m back and I brought socks.

I think the green galaxy is a little more convincing that the red galaxy but not convincing enough to convince me that I’m convinced. I don’t think I’ll buy anymore. If I want my feet to look like a galaxy I’ll just smear them in chocolate.

This is the imaginatively named Large rectangle in spider net from VLT. As you can see, it’s a large rectangle of spider net lace.

It was tricky to get a decent photo on account of I really couldn’t be arsed. The yarn is a deeper red than that photo up there, but it’s pretty close.

It’s Mama Ocllo Baby Alpaca laceweight from Knit n Caboodle in Merlot. Very light, but still pretty warm. It’s also two quid off at the moment on the website. This is coming on holibags with me in case I have to look posh in the hotel restaurant.  The holes will add extra drag compared to my usual cape, but that’s the price you pay for elephants elegance.

Move along please.

It’s that time of year when knitting must be forsaken in order to do important works in the garden.  By which I mean, falling asleep in a deck chair.  I surely can’t be alone in not wanting to sit with a pile of alpaca on my lap when the mercury starts rising?

The good thing about the sun coming out is it encourages me to stop eating wintery stodge and get back to healthy eating.

What?  It’s banana chocolate.  That’s a sort of fruit.

NOM NOMS!

Of course, the tricky part is matching things up with the invoice. And with the Professor being vegetarian and the ingredients lists being all squigalicious I’m afraid I’ll have to eat it all myself. It’s a real burden.

The pickles are entirely vegetarian as far as I’m aware, but I don’t care. He’s not getting any. I like my pickles.

The bright colours is how you know they’re good for you.

Do my feet look like Jupiter to you?

I’m not sure I’m convinced.

This one’s not much to look at, I know, but it’s the first of the New Pathways socks I’ve knitted, and it only bloody fits. There’s some strange mojo going on in that book, I tell thee. This one’s the Sky Architecture and I figured I’d try it out on the Professor first. No point in wasting my precious sock yarn if it all went horribly wrong. But it worked! No one was more surprised than me.

You work all the increases at end of the leg, turn the heel and then decrease all the stitches away again on the sole. No flap, no picking up stitches. Then, just as you’re weaving in the ends, a portal to hell opens up and steals your very soul.

My monkey mum’s mobius is all finished and ready for the off. I might just live to see another year.

I’m not much of a one for sewing, so I started with a provisional cast on and then put the other end on some waste yarn rather than cast off. I left a wee ball of yarn attached to the end and grafted the two ends together after I’d blocked it. Took ages, but far neater than if I’d sewn it.

I’ve use Jaggerspun Zephyr in charcoal, and it’s blocked up snuggly yet light. Should be the perfect scarf for a chilly spring evening and keep me in the will.

The Miski and the Cotanani were used up within a week, and so never counted as stash. I’ve bought New Pathways for Sock Knitters, so the Regia all now counts as experimental materials. I’m golden.

The gloomy grey about to snow sky means that my photos are mostly rubbage.

The Cotanani is now a Koolhaas to keep my ears warm during spring, and probably summer. And the Miski has magically transformed into Snuggles fingerless gloves, which are also getting a lot of use.

The yarn was so lovely that I bought the two Mirasol books as an excuse to buy some more. I’m gonna make me a Copacabana (she lost her youth and she lost her Tony but she’s got a lovely jumper) and a Malkini, which needs a zip. Bugger. The patterns from book two are a bit too summery for me to contemplate at the moment.

Copacabana

Malki

My Rowan membershit gift (and no, that’s not a typo) has been turned into a fat bottomed bag and it hasn’t turned out too terrible. I’ll prolly palm it off on make a generous gift of it to my mum for her birthday next month.

And just so I don’t get disowned, I have a Mobius Scarf on the go, pattern from Arctic lace. Not much to look at until it’s blocked, but it’ll be perdy when I’m done. Honest.

My camel is now named Helo, on account of it sounds like helium and that chap in Battlestar had a touch of the radiation sickness and probably would have ended up looking a lot like him if he hadn’t got off the planet when he did. Well, it makes sense to me.

And now the Professor is just about to disappear off for the weekend and I have a lot of chocolate and booze to get through before he gets home again. Mwahahahahahaha!

Super Monkey: Ooh. I can get 10% off at Woolly Workshop.

The Professor: Ooh.

Two days later…

Git.

I’ve only just finished knitting up his previous pile of sock yarn and was making a goodly dent in my stash.

Screw it. I went to Inter Knit Cafe to fight fire with fire.

If you’re ever in the area you HAVE to visit. It’s just how yarn shops should be. All friendly and yarny. It’s my new happy place.

Later that same day…

He was the last one in the shop and he looked really poorly with his two teeth and his tuft of hair. I felt sorry for him. The women in the shop gave me a funny look, but he’s safe now and that’s what’s important. Buggering hard to take a photo of a camel on a spring. Who’d a thunk it? Dunno what his name is yet. He’s going to live above where I sit on the sofa with a string around his ankle so I can tug on it when I get excited.

When I was a nipper my mum told me that when I grew up and had a house of my own I wouldn’t want it to be full of toys and crap and I’d keep it tidy and clean. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

If you go down to the woods today you’re in for a big surprise!

You should also be on the look out for saggy ball bags.