A weekend of two halves...

Last weekend I went up to County Durham to visit my parents; on the Sunday we went to Newcastle, to look at the Sage and the Baltic, neither of which I'd visited...


The Sage is amazing - you can only really get a decent picture of the whole thing from the Newcastle side of the river, but I love the way the curve at one end echoes the Tyne Bridge, and at the other end the Millennium Bridge. Inside it's very clean and minimalist, but in a way that makes the Quayside buildings over the river one of the focal points...

One of the halls was open for viewing while some lighting testing was going on...

The Baltic, a former flour mill, was also really interesting - but they had 'no photography' labels all over the place... Highlights of the current exhibitions for me were the portraits by Vik Muniz, (made in all sorts of materials - magazines clipped with a hole-punch, chocolate, ink, tiny plastic toys, spaghetti - and then photographed. The wide-open spaces of the Baltic meant you could get a good distance from them, which was important to see some of them properly!) and a moving display of tiffin tins from Subodh Gupta (scroll down a couple of pictures) - these were on one of the slow-moving tracks you'd see in a sushi restaurant so the alignment of the towers changed all the time - it was really mesmeric, and the tins themselves were gorgeous...

On the Monday we went to Alnwick (photos to follow), and in the evening my cousin and his wife came over and we went out to see the marvellous Bob Fox playing at the extremely friendly and welcoming Brecon Folk Club. After seeing the splendours of the new Quayside, it seemed a fitting contrast to hear songs about the industrial glories of the old one...

WiP amnesia

At the weekend I decided that rather than cast on yet another sweater in my lovely new Kureyon, I really had to get my jacket-version of Ragna out and finish her - she's been hanging around on the needles all winter, and I only had one front and the neckband and the Dreaded Zip to do. And she's hogging all the 5mm needles...

The front is almost finished - a couple more repeats of the pattern and then the front neck shaping - so I thought I'd assemble the other shoulder and one sleeve; I've been undecided about how to complete the shoulders because they're heavily cabled, and have been wondering about grafting them...

So I got all the bits out, and laid them together... and noticed something.

I seem to have stopped two entire repeats short of completion on the back... two whole repeats... 32 rows of 160 stitches, with cabling in every right-side row, and I'd forgotten all about it! Gah!

So, back to the front, and then back to the back... don't think this is going to be finished for the weekend, as planned! Oh well, puts off attempting to overdye a zip for another few days...

Another couple of WiPs then - another square for the SkipNorth charity afghan, waffle-stitch pattern from Jan's blocks book

and Ilga Leja's Brickwork scarf, in Trekking 108 from Stash, which has demonstrated to me that I am unable to count accurately to 8... but I love this scarf. The stitch pattern is really clever, the yarn is much nicer to knit on larger needles - I found it a bit splitty when making socks - and I did a crochet cast-on which unzipped very obediently, which was heartening! And I love the colourway - it's slightly bizarre that you get colours in the knitting which you can't actually see on the ball!

More SkipNorth: Haworth

While everyone was at Wingham on the Sunday, Rosie and I decided to bunk off and see a bit of Haworth. We walked down the hill from the hostel past the Brontë Balti (sadly, it was too early in the morning to see Bramwell propping up the counter waiting for his takeaway),

and back up the hill past the Brontë Weaving Shed

(it was Sunday morning so presumably the family were in church, or beavering away in the back room putting together all those presentation tins of Scottish shortbread). We did like the name of the antique shop...

Last year, we came from Keighley to Haworth on the KWVR, but this year it wasn't half-term, so the steam trains weren't running on the Friday; we remedied this by going on the Sunday instead...

Here's Oakworth station, made famous by The Railway Children, viewed through a gin-and-tonic from the buffet. Very civilised.

In a spin

Thanks to advice from Isabella, Sue and Ruth at SkipNorth last weekend, I've got my Louët wheel out of the corner this week. I've gone in to work later and spent a few minutes each morning while vaguely awake messing around with the tension and trying to spin. And at the end of the week, I have a lumpy chunky alternately over-and-underspun 93g of yarn; which beats last year's production, anyway! And I think I spun (span? someone help me?) one bobbin clockwise and one anticlockwise, which really didn't help with the plying...

The yarn is pictured on top of my new 'Ningbo Future' electronic scale for yarn-weighing. 'Ningbo' allegedly means 'Serene Waves'. Let's hope...

The colours are pretty. And I shall persevere.

The Haul

So; here are the fruits of the weekend. I've sorted them out into type... First, the dyeables. Top left, 1100g of pure wool Aran from Coldspring; top right, 505g of pure wool DK from Coldspring; bottom, 5 cones of Sunbeam Elysée from the Skep...

Next; the Noro.

Top left, 400g Kureyon; top right, 705g of a different colour of Kureyon; bottom, 275g of Blossom, all from Coldspring... There's enough of this one

to make Rosedale for myself; this one

will probably make scarves, etc... And the Blossom may make this...

Next; this is 4-ply

One 360g skein of purple (Coldspring); and 500g of red/blue/purple variegated (The Skep)...

Next, the balled yarns; clockwise from top left, 3 balls of variegated Aran; two balls of James Brett Marble in reds to go with the rest in the stash; and at the bottom, 6 balls of Twilley's Freedom Spirit, probably for two more Helter-Skelter scarves; all from the Skep apart from the Marble, from Coldspring).

And then from the Yarn Mountain at KCG: five balls of black 4ply King Cole Anti-Tickle Merino; one of pink and three of cream in DK; three balls of Phildar Rubane (dyeable); and a stray ball of Frizzante.

And my Find of the Weekend. The camera can't cope with the sheer beauty of this...

It says 4-ply - but actually it's nearer 3ply. And one cone had this little swatch in it. There's 700g of 70% lambswool/20% angora/10% nylon yarn here... And I got it for £6... No idea how much yardage there is here, but it's A Lot... I'm going to have a happy afternoon sometime working out what to make with this lot, and what colour it'll be when I do it!

SkippedSouth

Home again - neither of the cats left home while I was away... It was a lovely weekend - lots of enthusiastic, knowledgeable knitters; learned a bit of crochet; got some advice on Louët wheel management; taught some people to dye; and generally had a very good time. Photos to come although as ever I was a Shy Blogger and don't have many of people! I'm hoping some of my fellow SkipNorthers were better - I'll be watching the blogs.

Have unpacked enough to remove damp towels and run the washer, but I'm leaving the Real Unpacking until tomorrow... In the meantime here's a sneak preview.

SkippingNorth

The clothes (note, this is not a large suitcase)...

Tilda's opinion on what I should be packing...

And the suitcase more or less packed. Just a couple more skeins of yarn to wind and I think I'm done... Amazing how compactly one can pack dyeing supplies and samples for 30 people when pushed... Nic and Lixie have got the salt and soda up there already...

Rare sighting - a Finished Object!

The Puréed Clown scarf is done... subtle, isn't it? (No, don't answer that).



The nice thing about having the odd day working from home is that I can not only finish something during the lunch-break, but photograph and blog it too! Now, back to my specification. Don't usually mix work with this blog, but it does still occasionally amaze me that I can sit here with the catalogues of three major libraries, two online style guides and work e-mail, all on my desktop...

Rolling Thunder and Puréed Clown

Various good things happened last week, including a Tuesday lunchtime spent with EJ and Baby M., who has discovered Feet and Their Tastiness;

a KTog meeting at the Cambridge Blue on Tuesday night including some new people; a very pleasing dye-batch knocked up on Wednesday night when I needed to rinse out my made-up-dye-pots in preparation for SkipNorth, and had just discovered the bag of laceweight silk I thought I'd lost - this was from a women's co-operative in Peru and this part of the consignment was a gift from a kind friend in Texas several years ago. There's about 700m...

[Amelia has decided that if I plonk a ball of yarn on the kitchen counter and attempt to photograph it, this is where she needs to be. It is also the only time she feels the need to get onto the kitchen counter.]

.. and a relatively unexpected visit down to London to see Jan and knit at Stash yesterday (making the most of not spending the day teaching). I was Good - I bought my allowance of 200g of sock yarn, the new Interweave Knits, a pattern for a top-down sweater from Knitting Pure and Simple (the one from the homepage, in fact), and an Addi needle to replace the 3 mm one I bought last month and which I had lost. Of course the first thing I found while clearing up this morning was the Other One. But having two will be handy when I want to try on the garment in question (Thermal, from this time's Knitty)...

Jan gave me some beautiful yarn she'd hand-dyed with food colouring, which is amazing and makes me wish for a cheap microwave to try some out... Look at this!

I'm thinking about a pair of Rolling Thunder socks - unearthed some beads in the right shade of lilac in the clearup this afternoon...

While I was at Stash I cast on a scarf using the incredibly bright Colinette Firecracker I bought at Textiles in Focus and some of the leftover cotton/viscose from last year's Olympic shawl.

I'd been thinking it looked like a parrot; Nathalie picked up the ball and said 'you know, this looks like.... puréed clown...' And a Scarf was Born.

It's scribble lace on a 12mm Addi needle (which looks sort of surgical...). Here's a detail, but actually, it's quite a bit brighter than that. Quite frighteningly bright, in fact. And growing very fast. SkipNorthers, get the sunglasses ready.