Happy Monday everyone, the clocks went forward…urgh! You know that means we lose an hour of knitting time here in the UK! And I've been so busy, I've been robbed of time!

Anyway, last week was a woolly one for me, went shopping, and met up with my lovely friend and gave her the little amigurumi style Westie I showed you in my last update. I’ve also designed a Scottie dog to go with it and am making these up into a knitting pattern for the shop which will be available to purchase as a download very soon.

Now on to the shopping news! Think the people at Aldi must have been reading my recent blog post about knitting on a budget because I discovered (thanks to a tip-off from my facebook knitting group) that their specials at the moment include some big packs of baby DK yarn and large balls of Aran. Perfect because my mind is inventing a two or three colour cable throw and the Aran will do great for it. I picked up some. Here it is...

It’s 100% acrylic but it doesn’t look splitty or feel squeaky or nasty and will be really hard wearing and very washable for the throw I’m intending. £4.99 each for these big 400g balls! Selling fast so if you want some I’d advise getting there soon.

Then I popped into “The Works” budget bookshop and found they have a little crafting section in there now and there were a few knitting books. Worth a look if you have one of these shops near you. These two caught my eye and I snapped them up.

“Knitting Vintage” by Claire Montgomerie. This is a lovely book! It not only has patterns from the 20’s to the 80’s but mood boards for each era and lots of interesting historical facts. This was £4.99 (RRP £16.99). Looking forward to grab a moment to sit down with this and digest it all. I love vintage things.

“Cool Knits for Kids” by Kate Gunn & Robyn MacDonald. Now I am really not big on knitting baby and kid stuff, although I appreciate the lovely work that goes into baby knits I find much of it too sickly and frilly for my taste and not up my street but these designs really are cool. Lots of bright colourwork and interesting things, including a knitted playmat with roads and trees, and a knitted truck for tots to play with. Really nice! This was £2.99 (RRP: US $19.99).

Also in non-budget shopping news I popped into HobbyCraft and got beads to embellish the “fade to grey” lacey scarf I’m working on that I showed you in the last update. Perfect colour for the design, black with that rainbow sheen through them.

I’ve recently developed a bit of a craving for felted beads after reading this article on Knitty and seeing lots of pretty ones on ebay, something I’d like to attempt to make from wool roving in the future but for now I found a pack of felt beads when I was getting the glass beads for the scarf. Here they are, really interesting!

My final shopping tip this week for any knitters in the UK, my local Sainbury’s is now selling yarn! Strange but true, what is it with supermarkets and wool right now?! Several choices of “Red Heart” brand yarn, plain and multicoloured. It’s acrylic and was priced about £2.99 a ball. Red Heart is a US brand I’ve often seen mentioned in patterns so if you have found a pattern that needs it and prefer not to substitute then perhaps check out your local Sainsbury’s. I didn’t buy any as you can see from the above that I’ve already bought more knitting related stuff than I was intending ;-) If you get any do let me know what it's like!