New records set and new targets needed

Following a relaxed Easter weekend during which knitting, hot cross buns and coffee were combined Chez Harrow, your two-wheeled knitter extraordinaire has eclipsed her previous mammoth target for cycling. Easter Monday saw a dash to Bertram to ensure my Mum had recovered from her disgusting between seasons cold. When I say dash, it took over two hours to ride from Maylands (Chez Harrow) to Betram, a distance my Cateye tells me was some 44.45km.

After freshening up, we dined at a boardwalk cafe for lunch and had a celebratory ice cream desert as today was my brother's birthday. He wasn't there you understand - he was travelling from one place to another (in this case Kalgoorlie to Australind preparatory to travelling from Australind to Townsville tomorrow - whatever!)

The initial plan was to catch the wonderful Mandurah train back to civilisation however the adventuress in me took over. My total on the Cateye approached the magical 2,000km mark and I was sitting on 1979 (an interesting year however to close to the target to leave alone!) New plan - ride to Cockburn Central and catch train then ride from Perth Central to home thereby clicking over the ****2000**** mark. Anyone who has ridden this stretch of Perth's cycleways will tell you that boring does not cut it on the stretch down to Rockingham. The only break in the monotony is to count the change in the number of new roof tops.

We achieved Cockburn Central however the Cateye twinkled at me - less than 10km to go. Don't give up now. New plan - Bullcreek or boredom but which would come first. Neither it seems and I ended up in a sorry state nearly 48km later at Harrow Street again. Dinner and a shower didn't fix the issues and I am retiring - not yet defeated - but with 2028.9km on the Cateye.

The sad news in all this is that I was far too knackered to go to KnB @ Exomod this Easter Monday. I have however not abandoned the knitting boat this weekend entirely. I completed my assigned animal - the Boobook Owl - from the Australian book researched by Kita and I also sewed together and completed my Noro Cuthbert jacket. Both look pretty good I can tell you.

Unfortunately to balance these achievements, I have frogged Mum's jacket sleeves but reknitted them using bigger needles. I discovered by trawling around Ravelry a bit this weekend that the yarn I should have used was a 10 ply and the yarn I did use is an 8 ply. Gone up two needle sizes and the completed fabric is still fairly dense and most suitable but a little better in size than before - I was almost on guage before but not quite you see. This only became apparent as the length of sleeve grew but there you go. A 10 by 10cm tension swatch would have given me a similar result except that I would have had a tension swatch saying guage was right when in fact over distance, it was wrong! Thus my case for the sleeve as a swatch - QED!