(Please excuse the fuzz and pilling, these are OLD)

Ok these are definitely not the most "impressive" cabling project I've done, but they are by far the most special to me so I'm going with them for cables month! A few reasons I love them so:

• I won this yarn in a knitting group on Google+ (RIP), about a month after I'd started knitting in 2013. It was my first ever fancy yarn and I was so incredibly excited!
• Because I was such a new knitter, these gloves were my first ever cables, and also my first time using DPNs. Felt like too many extra hands, I still don't like DPNs to this day!
• And because I like to jump in at the deep end, when one of them went wrong I decided to drop stitches down and figure out how to rebuild the cables as I picked the stitches back up. Worked pretty flawlessly and I was SO proud of myself!
• Last but not least, they always remind me of a friend who sadly passed away a year or so later. She helped me a lot with my first few projects, shoutout to

Started a shawl in late January, and it needs to be finished by July. Which, for most people I'm sure that's nothing but I am a very slow knitter, really!

The pattern is lacy and complicated and mistakes will be really visible, so it's no good to work on while watching TV or doing anything else and I'd just not been putting time aside to properly concentrate on it.

The solution: A spreadsheet to keep track of how far behind I am, and a graph so I can watch myself (hopefully) catch up.

There are very few problems in life that can't at least be a bit improved with a spreadsheet, and I reckon that applies to knitting just the same 🤓

Ok I missed WIP Wednesday but honestly my week is just an absolute mess of days running into each other so that's no surprise.

Here's my main WIP for this week, as you can see I'm somewhat leaning into the recent pixel-art-style design urge. I'm also leaning into my preference for doing half stitches first and then completing them later, even though it's kind of ugly in the progress photos.

It'll just make the final piece seem prettier by comparison! At least, that's one theory.

(It's going to be a smol garden scene)

Try it before you dismiss it, that's all I'm saying!

Edit: I have found my people.

Like the stitch says, NO RULES! 🇫🇮

Finished my mysterious little project, as teased last week.

Congrats to @[email protected], @[email protected] and @[email protected] for correctly identifying what would soon become a pair of cutoff shorts, but alas the full context was too niche even for Lemmy nerds to get right.

It is, of course, an homage to this year's fabulous Eurovision entry from Finland, which you can watch here if you have three minutes free and want your life to change forever.

I've also made it a free pattern on the off-chance any other cross stitching Finland nerds are about, although I admit that's unlikely 😄

https://ko-fi.com/s/64fafb4849

Now I just need to figure out which of the multiple Eurovision communities is the right one to crosspost this to...

It’s somehow been three months since @[email protected] and I agreed to take over moderation of this community, and we’ve not really had to do anything other than keep an eye out for reports. It’s not exactly been a taxing job, so firstly thank you stitchers for being so undramatic!

But that all happened while I was still super ill and to be honest most of November and December is like a weird fever dream. So I kind of did not do the one thing I said I’d do at the time: post some prospective community rules.

Basically what I’m thinking is we want to have something written down that we can point to just on the off-chance of misbehaviour, but at the same time we don’t need anything draconian or super specific while we’re so small.

Since I’ve already been through this process with [email protected] and there are even quite a lot of people here who are in there too, **I think it makes sense to maybe start off with simi

I was on such a sock knitting THING last year and have really lost my mojo lately.

This second sock, I posted it two weeks ago maybe and since then all that's happened is I made a mess of the gusset. Not enough to bother frogging it but definitely enough to be grumpy about it.

Anyway hopefully showing off my woeful level of progress will humiliate me into getting a wriggle on, because I really do love this yarn and it deserves to be a cool pair of socks!

I'm going with no. No you can't.

But it's going to be a very quick stitch so watch this space for my next stupid niche FO 😅

Finished this one up last week, it's actually designed by myself as I've been trying to learn a bit more about pixel art and specifically working in isometric. It definitely could've done with being darker under the bench but whatever! Proud of it anyway.

Husband is obsessed with pixel art as a medium and he thinks this is just about the coolest project ever, so it can go on display in his office where I don't have to look at that glaring lack of bench shadow 😄

Ok it's not the most exciting stitchy mail in the world, but I don't get to afford things in bulk very often and that's quite a big wallop of plain white aida that'll probably last me at least a year!

Since I needed to order this anyway, I also took the chance to grab the last few colours needed for Errol. Just have to get them on floss drops and I'll be all set! But this brings me to my question...

Our local craft shop sells their skeins for £1.40 ($1.77 per single skein for the US folks). It really really adds up.

I used to buy all my floss online from https://www.enchanted-needle.co.uk which for a long time sold them at £0.69 (nice) and that obviously made a huge difference.

Unfortunately nowadays their pricing has gone up to £0.99 in line with the other big online options, which is still a lot better than £1.40, but when you take postage into account it's no longer really saving much if anything on small orders.

So, after all that rambling, my question is where are other UK

If you will insist on all making separate threads for your projects, at least get weird with it 😄

For once I actually got some stitching time this weekend! Treated myself to some of the missing floss for Errol as a reward for making it through multiple dentist trips, and so this looks pretty much the same as last time I posted him here but in reality there's about 300 stitches of filled-in gaps that were dotted around his torso and tail!

Not the most satisfying progress but it's all gotta be done sometime.

Letting myself work on his lil claws now as a hopefully quick win. I'm maybe 40% of the way through the actual stitching (his head is massive) and already starting to dread all the backstitch 😅

Full disclosure before I say anything else, I’m asking this out of personal curiosity and a desire to help friends out but also because I plan on making a video about it so yes it’s kind of a research question too.

Ok. So personally I use Pattern Keeper, and it’s been great. But I find myself wondering what other apps have popped up in the couple of years since I first discovered PK. The other day someone tagged me in a Mastodon question about alternatives, and then a similar convo coincidentally broke out on Discord too, so clearly other people are asking the same question.

Now, I know about a few apps already. Markup R-XP has a devoted following. CrossStitchSaga I apparently need to try because I hear it supports backstitch. And resident app developer @[email protected] posts here regularly wi

It was 24 Hours of Cross Stitch again this weekend and one of my 2024 craft goals was to take part in more stuff like that. So I cleared the calendar and went for it!

We ended up with a few people in my Discord doing it, and a few people on Mastodon threatening to but not quite getting there. Still, maybe next time lol.

Normally I regret joining this challenge by the Friday night but honestly this time it flew by. Possibly because I had to stay up until 4am Sunday morning anyway to watch the Packers get knocked out of the playoffs, so there was a lot of extra stitching time!

Really happy with progress here especially since Errol was the real victim of me getting so sick for the last bit of 2023. This is more like it!

p.s. @[email protected] for reference this is 2 over 2 on 36ct.

p.p.s 19-21st April next, for anyone thinking of giving it a whirl ;)

Not even a knockoff or anything, an actual Lowery! Like the real fancy stitchers have! 😮

Pretty sure you're not supposed to clamp things in at an angle like this, but on the other hand I can't use it sideways until I save up for the extension bar (or more likely fashion something that makes the whole thing a lot less fancy all of a sudden). But for now, this works fine 😁

Will do a proper review at some point, right now I'm mostly just still excited to own one lol.

(This post shamelessly duplicated from Mastodon because cross-posting is temporarily broken)

Everything about this is wrong in every way.

Shame on you, Sainsbury's.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/17097990

Behold the socks that created my obsession! These were actually the third pair I knitted but the first ones that made me understand why knitted socks are so great.

The pattern is the classic Hermione's Everyday Socks, and the yarn is a special blend of all kinds of things including silk and bamboo, bought as a souvenir from a shop called Yarnia in Portland during a big US road trip we took in 2015. You can sort of see the different strands in it in this pic here.

These are my lucky socks. I wore them to job interviews, I wore them the day I got accepted into uni, and I wore them for confidence whenever I was doing something scary.

Alas, after years of heavy use, one of them has a hole in the ball of the foot and I expect the other one won't be far behind.

![finger poking t

I was missing about 19 colours for Errol, and that's far too spicy an all-at-once purchase at UK prices.

So instead every time I'm down in town for something unrelated I just nip into the craft shop and pick up a few, thus hardly spending anything at all!

It totally saves money and I will not be taking criticism at this time.

I'm thinking of starting a blog to document a new project, having not blogged at all in probably about ten years at this point.

Was hoping someone who has already researched this stuff might be able to save me some time and give a tldr of the Fediverse-friendly platform options and their various pros and cons?

I know obviously WordPress has ActivityPub now, but am not sure exactly how well it works or how integrated it really is. Then there's something called WriteFreely? Any others? Which do you prefer and why?

Really appreciate any pointers on this, and if this thread doesn't turn up anything useful I promise to come back and do my own writeup after finding out the answers by myself.

Cheers!

I run PK on my phone, which recently got hit by the Android 14 media storage bug (if you've not heard of this you probably don't need to panic, it only affected people with multiple accounts on the phone).

As a result, I couldn't save any new media or access any old saved media files either. Which meant, among other things, no exporting PK progress.

And the last time I exported and backed up progress on my big full coverage project? I'm sorry to say, dear reader, it was at least 10,000 stitches ago (probably quite a lot more but I was too scared to check).

Now, my story ended well. I had the milder form of the bug, and Google pushed out an emergency update that seems to have fixed it for me. But lots of people weren't so lucky and are left with a factory reset as their only option. If that was me, I'd have lost so much PK stuff!

So yeah, PSA. Take regular backups. Make sure they're somewhere safe. It's worth the peace of mind!

We're at the end of our rope with Asda. Everything is being substituted, and we're fine with that when it's just another brand of the same thing but like they're sending entirely different vegetables to the ones we need, they're substituting meat-free ordered items with actual meatballs, etc etc. It's got the point where the delivery guy just apologises sadly every week.

It's possible to set "do not substitute" on everything but it's a ballache, and then we'd still have to go shopping anyway since half our order would still be missing.

So. Which supermarkets actually deliver most of what you order? Or at the very least, have a sane policy of substitutions?

Thanks!

Edit: Added a cute dog pic for a bit of extra casualness.