Weekend yarn

A knitty weekend. On Saturday Cambridge KTog had its monthly afternoon meeting at Grads Café - there were 18 of us in all, the highest number I've seen! We more or less took the place over... Various people there including Becky, Lyndsey-Jane, EJ and Jo; EJ, Jo and I dropped in to see KTog founder and organiser Rosie (who was working) on our way to a wine-bar afterwards; returning from a 2pm knitting meeting at 7:30 felt pleasantly decadent... And it's always good to know that Little Sainsbury's on a Saturday night is as hellish as it ever was, Sunday opening or not.

On Sunday I spent most of the day dyeing yarn - more pics this evening, once I've wound things off into skeins again; the one above is a skein of nylon ribbon which came out duller than expected but very nicely... the struggle with ribbon is always how to stop it turning into a mouse's nest.

And speaking of which: every night I stretch out the nice soft crocheted doormat; and every morning it's turned into a Nest. If I made another one of these and put it somewhere which was actually comfortable, i.e. not right in front of the back door, what are the odds that Amelia would use it as a bed?

..."all woven bangles and ethnicity"

Ah; spoken by Brian Aldridge; bless his bigoted, adulterous little heart... hope Adam and Ian bring him something seriously naff from their honeymoon...

Was listening to Brian's moral indignation/dishonesty combo while "resetting" (Applespeak for wiping/reformatting) my iPod Shuffle using this nifty little utility; it's worked so far! First track out - Bruce Springsteen's "Leap of Faith". Pretty accurate...

Thanks to all who sent nupping advice in the comments - that stage is over, and am in the cast-off phase at the moment. And to the Sean Bean Fanclub (Stash Sub-branch)...



Some knitting. Battleship grey International Socks of Doom for a friend whose colour palette in socks is... limited...

And a link: one for Woolly Wormhead's archives - the Telephonic Ovines... these are fantastic. Not least because they get the awkward stroppiness of sheep perfectly.

Nupping madness

The last couple of nights, I've been knitting nupps. And it's been hell. There are only 22 rows of them in the project, but that's quite a lot of nupps... I'm really glad I'm Not the Only One who Has Difficulty with these...Although Fleegle makes them look easy in thick yarn... I suspect they're like bullion knots in embroidery; you love them or you develop some pathologic avoidance-thing...

But I watched Troy this evening while knitting. It's a long film - 156 minutes. I'm not overly keen on the pretty, so Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom leave me cold (although it was excellent to see the truly decorative Sean Bean in a role which didn't have 'Dead Best Friend/Dead Big Brother' written all over it from moment one, and the supporting cast like Peter O'Toole and John Shrapnel were brilliant); I'm also not a great fan of the 'thick-of-battle-people-being-beheaded-by-archers/boiling-oil-on-sticks/cannon-fire/orcs/whatever' scenes, so this should have been a good knitting film... (And thinking of massed battle scenes, this, seen first on nhw's livejournal, proves what a relatively sane activity knitting is... Although not if you're a yarn company owner with a sock club. Obviously).

That was without the nupps, though. 7 rows, I did. 7 rows in two and a half hours... I'll be thinking very hard before I go a-nupping again. More successful than last night though, when my West Wing episode (I'm working at one-a-week speed and have just got to Season 7) had me yelling at the screen so often I ended up switching to plain stocking-stitch...

Can't blog the project in question for a while, so in the meantime, here's a completely gratuitous photo of Amelia on some newly-dyed yarn... I'll shut up now...

Things that make you wonder...

They're changing our postcodes round here - Cambridge, like Paris, has a postcode system which mainly goes out in spokes from a point in the middle (the old main sorting office, now Petersfield Mansions); but unlike Paris (and I really don't want to start detailing the ways Cambridge is unlike Paris) has no outer circle. So my postcode at work is only one subdivision away from my postcode at home; and my work postcode is in the same subdivision as a village about 8 miles distant... Now that we appear to be the Building Capital of the South-East, the Post Office is in imminent danger of running out of postcodes, so the outer circle has been designated as '20-land' - CB21-25 ...

And to that end the kind people at the Royal Mail, in conjunction with the Able-Label people who evidently have nooooo interest in postcode changes, none at all (hey, maybe I can send them back the 500 labels they did for me two weeks before the change was announced...), have sent out some sticky labels with the new postcode on it, and a leaflet.

In a resealable envelope. Which has then been heat-sealed to ensure it is no longer resealable... WTF?

New Year knitting

So, this week's been a strange one - yet another minor re-organisation at work, gales which always keep me awake wondering how much of my rather elderly roof will still be there in the morning, and finally some sort of stomach bug in the early hours - have spent the day knitting, re-reading Gaudy Night after an e-mail conversation about a quote I can't find yet, and doing a bit of dyeing as a modicum of energy returned...

I'm doing a stand at Textiles in Focus again this year, so have started knitting for it - I've been stashbusting with a combination of chunky and novelty yarns:

So the photos above are three scarves - unsurprisingly, a lot of my stash is purple - knitted lengthwise on size 11 Denises - takes about one and a half feature films per scarf. The top one was To Kill a Mockingbird, which is a long film; the middle one was Presumed Innocent (carrying on with the Pakula-fest) and a West Wing episode (because three of the WW cast turned up in PI, as if I ever need an excuse); and this one was more West Wing and A Few Good Men (because they're both Sorkin)... I think the next logical move would be to re-watch The American President and then I can veer off to Apocalypse Now because of the Martin Sheen connection; but actually, I've got Troy out of the library to watch this weekend...

And this scarf, which I love, in 3 balls of Lang Mille Colori - short-rows, learned from Rosie, but worked several times in the same direction before turning... This one's going to be difficult to put on the stand...!

Other knitting is going on - some of it unbloggable, some of it just more-of-the-same - nobody wants to see a picture of St Brigid with 24 more rows done, including me...

Stylish socks...

I realised at Christmas I hadn't taken a photo of Dad's socks, either in the making or in the wearing... He's just sent me a fabulous one...


Socks: Regia Stretch, colourway 'Skater'. Pattern, 'Baby Cable Rib' from "Sensational Knitted Socks", by Charlene Schurch (aka Charlotte Church, aka Caroline Scrunch). Phonograph and "table": Dad's own...

Christmas 4

The last of the Christmas posts - just as well as, contrary to the date on the top of this post, which is when I started it, it's Twelfth Night!


Between Christmas and New Year I went down to London to meet Jan at the BL - not for literary purposes, but because their café is a great place to hang around for ages and exchange gifts; decent-sized tables, some of them hidden round the corner, reasonable food and hot drinks; and weirdly they don't look twice at people dragging wheely suitcases in and out of a library. Which always seems slightly odd to me; but very convenient!


Jan's blogged her gifts from me, but here's a pic of her in her new scarf:




And here's Tilda modelling the wonderful shawl Jan gave me - there's a Bad picture of me in it on her blog - I'll let you go there yourselves...



Strangely, we were both knitting Forest Canopy Shoulder Shawls at the same time. I mean, what were the odds... This one is in Hand Maiden Sea Silk, probably from Stash, and it's absolutely gorgeous. People have raved to me about the Sea Silk but I've only seen it in the skein and it didn't sing to me - now I can see why... Incidentally, this is the same colourway (Vintage) I used for Mam's Icarus shawl - so I dug out the spare yarn from that to illustrate how different the colours are on different yarns:

I love that about dyeing... Get Knitted had the yarns arranged by colour on their stand at the NEC in September and it was fascinating seeing how differently the yarns took the colours. Here are some more knitty gifts from Jan...

The books are fabulous - most of the actual patterns are for table linens, but the charts are wonderful and a pattern from the first book was used for the Yarn Harlot's wedding shawl (entry for October 24). The yarn is Colinette Jitterbug (in Fruit Coulis), the snowman is a row-counter, and the blue object on the right is a compact case for circulars. On top of that are some stitch-markers from MLQ: here's a close-up of those...

Pretty, eh?

And last, a photo of one of the remaining pieces of Christmas knitting, finally delivered to its recipient last night: International Socks of Doom in Socka Limbo. There was also a pair of broken rib socks in Regia Tibet, but I seem not to have photographed those!

... and of Kate's Clapotis, (delicately accessorised with an old tea-towel, I note) in Rowan Tapestry in the Rainbow shade handed over on Boxing Day but somehow never blogged... Only took 4 balls which I thought was pretty good...

Christmas 3

On the basis that Christmas goes on until Epiphany... some pretty gifts from family:

These are little perfume bottles which just looked good in the shell on the bathroom windowsill...

... and these earrings have citrines, amethysts and peridots in them - probably my favourite stones (the tray/beaker came from Venice earlier in the year...)

And some yarny gifts - a heap of assorted eyelash etc. in purple, some of which has already been knitted up into scarves (pics later)... and a tape measure. I loved these tape measures - bought two for friends and so nearly didn't hand the second one over - and then my brother and SIL got me one!

The other knitting-type gift was a set of blocking wires from Heirloom Knitting - here they are in action blocking my Christmas present to myself (yes, the dark shape on the mattress is a cat...)

This is the Forest Canopy shoulder shawl , in Cherry Tree Hill Glitter Alpaca from Woolly Workshop - if I'd just followed the pattern completely, I'd have got it out of one skein, but I had two so carried on for several more repeats. In the end, I cut it a little fine for comfort...