Skippeting over to the Dark Side

This time round, I gave up entirely on attempting to board a plane with knitting needles; it's all just been too disappointing in the past. I actually think they'd have been fine on Aer Lingus, but I finally got round to asking for that remedial crochet lesson from Wibbo, and she obliged...

I've been "crocheting" for a while but it didn't bear any resemblance to actual crochet technique, and hurt my hands (and mystified crocheting friends who couldn't work out how you could possibly end up with a blister on the end of your left index finger)... So an hour or two watching Jan's hands and attempting it over the bank holiday weekend, and the loan of a crochet hook, and various trains and flights later... Voilà. Started just before Royston on the train to London on Thursday morning, finished just after Royston on the train back from London on Sunday evening...

The colours are actually better on the finished article - green rather than turquoise. But I don't really care - it's an Actual Bit of Crochet, done in something that approaches an orthodox technique... and although it could be made out of chain-mail from the general texture, that'll work given that it's a potholder!

Thanks, Jan!! (And just to let you know, I am tutting a lot less now so I think my fellow commuters are less likely to want to defenestrate me...)

A bit of Vienna in Hove...

Blimey, I was so busy catching up on other people's posts that I almost forgot about blogging today!

I was going to blog stash from the weekend; but this image caught me. This is Jan with her latest glorious hexagonal throw - and don't you think she looks like Emilie Floge? OK - she's saying 'oh, if you must, for God's sake get on with it... ' but blimey, isn't that gorgeous...

Going over to the dark side...

Not my phrase - one of Jan's...

Look - crochet!!



The pattern's one of Jan's too, from her Encyclopedia of Crochet - the lace scarf has always fascinated me, and I managed to order Shepherd's Sport rather than Shepherd's Sock in an Internet order, so this seemed like the opportunity. I'm not sure the yarn's right for the lacy pattern, but it's gorgeous to work with, and I'm almost incomprehensibly actually having the right number of stitches in the rows so far...

I have various other things to show, but am completely shattered at the moment - something to do with this cold, grey weather probably, along with a weekend away - so I'll catch up at the weekend. After the Peterborough beer festival on Saturday, anyway...

Giving and receiving

Receiving first - I'll put up photos of yarn and stuff tomorrow but I received two Finished Objects this Christmas and it was so exciting!

In order of receipt - my friend Sue (who is blogless, sadly) stitched me this cat ornament (from this year's Just Cross Stitch Ornament Issue) - this was absolutely my favourite from the magazine, and evidently I managed to convey this sometime-or-other!



And then on Friday Jan and I got together, and she gave me this!

(The throw, not the cat or the chair. I had them already. Took 13 minutes for Tilda to discover the throw, which was less time than it took me to hunt down the spare batteries for the camera). Isn't it beautiful? The flash has made the colours look a bit harsher than they are - here's another pic which gives a better idea of the colours in lamplight but is blurry

And here's a picture of the stitch detail. I don't know whether instructions for it will be in this book, but I'm hoping so...


Giving, next. Now that the final piece of Christmas knitting has headed to its recipient, I can put up some photos.

First, some socks

From left to right, these were for friends Jan, Stewart, Pete and Helen. They're all in Opal - Jan's pair is in Magic, Stewart's in Rainforest (Chameleon), Pete's in Lollipop and Helen's in Brazil.

Now some scarves. As well as these ones (for my aunt and mam) and this one (for my Dad), and this one for the lady at the cattery who both collected and delivered this Christmas, there was also a purple curly-wurly which can just be seen in this photo, and there were also these two

for my in-laws, who keep in touch (the left one is from the free Cloud pattern from Get Knitted in Cherry Tree Hill merino laceweight, and the right is the DNA scarf in Phildar Chiné, which is now discontinued). And yeah, for anyone with eagle eyes, that is a spreadsheet for tracking the progress of Christmas presents on the top left. I can be freakishly organised that way.

And there's also the bunny:

for my cousin Kevin. The yarn for this bunny is handspun angora; if that wasn't special enough, it was spun in the late 1980s by Chilean dissidents in internal exile (I'm actually not making this up; the dissidents in question were university friends of my French penfriend's parents, and a relative used to go over a couple of times a year and smuggle yarn back in for sale in France to keep them going). Last year I realised I was never going to wear the boxy 1980s sweater I knitted with it, so with much tribulation I unravelled it, and it's not suffered too much. I still have most of the yarn and will make something else with it...

Curlywhirlism

I'm not a crocheter. I'm a left-hander who learnt to knit, use scissors, etc. right-handed, and this has never posed me a problem in everyday life (I don't count school art classes as everyday life; they were some sort of weird training in ritual humiliation) except with two implements: a carving knife and a crochet hook; which hand to use is a perennial puzzle. At least my travails with a carving knife result in something which is still vaguely useable; I can't say that about most of the crochet, although the smaller cat approves of the wobbly superchunky doormat I made earlier this year.


But all this talk of curlywhirly scarves on UKHK, and the acquisition of a couple of balls of gorgeous DK/aran yarn at Ally Pally, and a friend's impending birthday (the birthday is past; the gift-giving is impending), and a present of a stunning set of crochet hooks from friends in Texas, and the I'm-not-going-to-push-you-but one of-these-days-you'll-fall-and-happen-to-grab-a-crochet-hook-on-the-way-down attitude of a friend, and finally Pixeldiva's photos got me started. So, ta-da

a pile of crochet. And because I have no human model to show it on and haven't managed to get a proper photo of myself wearing it, here's Tilda; I may also post this pic to My Cat Hates You...


I hope Suzanne likes it more than Tilda does; because otherwise I'll have to wrest it from her and take it home again. The yarn is Limbo Color (colour 2539) by Schoeller and Stahl from Web of Wool and it took nearly 2 balls. And I'm a right-handed crocheter. I think...

It's generally been a crappy week, so a finished object to round it off is wonderful...