The weather here in Melbourne, Australia, has been revolting. At least, that’s my opinion. I used to have a neighbour who would sit outside in the sun, a look of bliss on his face, whenever it got this hot who would disagree with me.

I come from a long line of women who can’t stand the heat. We serve salad and cold meat at Christmas if there was the slightest chance the temp might approach 30. We hibernate in summer. On the weekend it hit 38 celcius. That’s 101 fahrenheit. And the humidity. Oh, the humidity. Left me feeling like I’d been attacked with cans of spray adhesive and cooking oil.

Our poor little aircon wasn’t meant for extremes like this, so to give it the best chance we closed all the blinds, shut off as much of the house as possible and put both fans on. This meant knitting in very dim light, or in a narrow shaft of light from the small gap in the blinds if I dared to open them.

Humidity leads to sticky, stiff knitting, but that’s never stopped me before. You just have to choose your projects carefully.

I made a start on High Verocity’s collar before the heatwave, but haven’t touched it since. Having the whole body of a jumper in your lap while manipulating thick wool yarn is not a pleasant situation in weather like this. Instead I’ve made good inroads into the Kimono Top, finishing one sleeve and starting another. I also started another crochet sunhat.

This one is for me. I have to say, the yarn – the Cotone from the stash post – is full of knots. Knots seem to be my curse lately. First there was the Vero yarn knot problems, then this happened:

Knitting away on the second Manly Mega Sock, I noticed that the colour had changed rather suddenly. Here’s the problem:

Not a knot, but a join nonetheless. Unfortunately, several rows of the colour graduation were missing, and it was very obvious.

I have no problems getting Mega Boots Stretch socks to match. My method is a bit laborious, but not too much if you have a ball winder. I literally unwind the ball, letting the yarn gather in ‘puddles’ for each colour repeat, onto a flat and pale surface – in good light. Usually there’s a midpoint between the repeats. In this case it was the purple bit. I found there were two colour repeats:

1) Purple to red to purple
2) Purple to red to orange to red to purple

I got a puddle of 1 first, then a puddle of 2. That was enough to knit one sock. But the next repeat was a 2, and the next, so I had to go hunting for another 1 + 2 to knit the next sock with. It just happened that there was a 1 + 2 + 1/4 of a repeat at the end of the ball, so I cut the yarn at the beginning of the 1 and wound the end part up on the ball winder. The rest was wound up and set aside as leftovers.

Fixing a badly matched yarn break was a new challenge. First I’d need to know how much yarn knit up into a round. I marked the yarn on the needles with a knot, frogged a round, then marked it again. I cut a length of white yarn to be my measure.

Then I frogged to the point where the join was and cut it. I unravelled more yarn from the ball until there was a discernable colour change, then used my measure to work out how many rows it would take to get there. I noted where that change happened on my finished sock and marked it, then counted back the number of rows and marked that place, too

Now I knew where I’d have to rejoin the yarn. All I had to do next was find a bit of yarn to fill the gap. Fortunately the 1/4 repeat at the end of the ball was the right part of the graduation to use for the ‘patch’. I started where the colour looked like it matched and knit until I’d reached where the marker was on the finished sock, and returned to the original yarn.

Problem fixed.

The three safety pins mark where the problem started, where to return to the original ball, and where I’d found a discernable colour change to work back from.

All this problem solving happened in sweltering heat, so I’m amazed it worked at all. But to help me keep cool I had these:

Berry Combo icy poles. Take 1 can of berry combo (berries in syrup). Spoon fruit into icy pole moulds. Top up with remaining syrup. Freeze.

They taste really good on a 38/101 degree day.