Believe it or not...

... some knitting has actually been going on around here (apart from the Lady Sweater which now has one arm which is long enough!); finally got round to taking some photos.

But first, the Eye all redded up for Valentines...

They had the Now Voyager quote "Don't let's ask for the moon, we have the stars" across one set of wall panels, which you can just about seen in the photo above; and another quote "You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how" across the other set. I was pleased when I got home and looked it up that I'd correctly identified it. Anyone want to hazard a guess? (Answer at the end of this post...)

OK: the knitting. Two Helter-Skelter Scarves (my own pattern, which I'm looking at putting up on Ravelry after Textiles in Focus is over...)

Although if you know about short-rowing, the photos above and below will tell you exactly what I did without need for a pattern...

And one which looks even better photographed against my kitchen floor...

The yarn for both of these is Lang's Mille Colori - lovely stuff for decent lengths of colour. The only stockist I've used for this is RKM - colours 0057 and 0068 respectively (although my colour balance and RKM's are very different - there is some burgundy in the balance, which doesn't come out in my photo, but perhaps not quite as much as in RKM's sample...

I also made a little blue cowl. The variegated stuff in this one is Araucaria's Quellon; the solid is Regia silk sock yarn (4-ply weight). It's lovely and soft and for the first attempt at a cowl, I think it's come out very nicely. It's just feather-and-fan, 6 18-stitch repeats, random number of rows, random rows of knit and purl...

Some dyeing also happened last weekend; a kilo or so of aranweight wool, now reskeined... I need to price this up for Textiles in Focus; but I think I'm reasonably well set-up for this year's show. Next, finalising the instructions and samples for the classes I'm teaching on Friday and Saturday (there are places left, particularly on the Friday!)

And the answer to the mystery, or not-so-mystery, quote? Rhett Butler, in Gone with the Wind. The full quote goes "No, I don't think I will kiss you, although you need kissing, badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how." (Although possibly not by someone with that moustache...)

Thankyou, America...

... for living up to the ideals of possibility and progress many of us in Europe admire you for, and had almost forgotten in the events of the last several years ... *


And the speech was wonderful. I fell asleep at 1:30 with the radio on when everything was in the balance, and woke at the roar before the acceptance speech sometime before 5 - I had to go back this morning and look at the language again to see whether I'd been dreaming or not.


But this is a knitting blog and there's been hardly any knitting here for a while... So, on the first day of the New Era, I went to buy beads. And forgot to take my camera. Which was a shame, because Trafalgar Square had a huge group of very tired and emotional American youth who were still wearing their Obama gear and presumably had been up all night at one of the many bars and pubs which were hosting election night parties; and there were men on ladders cleaning pigeon poo off the Cenotaph in preparation for this weekend's wreath-laying; and one of the horses at Horseguards Parade was way less happy than usual about having its picture taken with flash and was getting a little fractious (there are now health and safety notices about horses being big kicky bitey things on occasion, right next to the horses, which must annoy them no end...); so it was all quite amusing. I walked up to Covent Garden to the Bead Shop (getting out with only £2.23 of damage for 100g of #6 beads...), and back, and had lunch, all in my designated hour - and bumped into an old college friend on the way back along Whitehall...



Oh yes; knitting. Anyway, the beads are here - with the yarn - and completely fail to illustrate the total perfection of the colour match. Yes, the beads look way too blue here - but they are right, honestly.

This is destined to be a shawl for my mother who has requested one - which is great. While it's a time-consuming thing (laceweight silk/cashmere and a reasonable size for keeping out draughts) it's also a much more pleasant use of time than wandering forlornly around shops hoping to spot the Perfect Thing... I'm still looking for a pattern, but she suggested the beads and the yarn colour. I spent an hour or so of my fretting-at-the-radio time last night in dyeing the yarn and I'm pleased with the way it turned out - it's a proper grey rather than being overly pinky or bluey or whatever. To my eyes, anyway.

(And to finish up, you have to admire a cat who muscles her way into a photo purely to look affronted; naming her Amelia Peabody was possibly a mistake.)

*Although, California, what do you think you're doing with Prop 8?

Dyeing in Suffolk

There's only so many times that you can take almost-identical pictures of stoles/wraps which are becoming fractionally longer every day... (but they're on track. A night knitting at I Knit tomorrow night should get me within distant sight of the finishing line for the Hypoteneuse, and the Mystic Meadows is 11/16ths finished (and there's one chart in the last 5 which is only about a third the size of the others. This is just as well as, fiendishly, there's an every-row-patterned element coming through in the next chart which usually defeats me completely if some of the patterning is on the reverse, which in this case, being a stole, it is...)

... and I realised I'd completely forgotten to post pictures of the Natural Dye Studio's open weekend at the end of July (Heather [sparkleduck] and Michael were going and very kindly gave me a lift and found a lovely pub for lunch - they're the two somewhat ghostly figures on the left of this picture). Here's Amanda telling us about the vats - she dyes a kilo of yarn at a time, and does one colour and leaves it to dry before dipping it in another. Really, really interesting; and the amount of care it takes to get the vats right is amazing; but she also balances that with a certain jaunty élan when actually dipping the stuff...

Jeni from Fyberspates then gave us a bit of a talk on her methods, too, and then a demo - again, fascinating. I've been buying sponge-brushes for years, and Jeni just uses paintbrushes and it works just as well - I'll be down at Wilko's as soon as enough of my spongey ones fall apart... It was good to see someone who uses the same type of dye doing things in a different way and it looking fabulous.

It was a lovely afternoon; highly recommended...

Dyeing day

I had various KToggers and Ravelry people round to do some dyeing. Which necessitated quite a lot of rushing round and cleaning, but some nice yarns were painted; which as ever I entirely failed to capture on photograph... Here are Clare (tigerchilli) and Heather (cybil) painting yarn, anyway! Clare very kindly brought me some mohair laceweight yarn and beads, which may well be put to use quite soon - I dyed the mohair and it's drying outside.

Mother of invention...

So having planned out today (trip to Peter Jones, morning meeting, productive rest of day) I then spent the first half of the night throwing up... No work for me today... Gah!

Which also meant no emergency yarn trip to Peter Jones - I work earlier on Tuesdays so I can get to one of the KTogs a month, and have a lunchtime meeting...

Once I'd woken up again around lunchtime, I had a rummage and found two-thirds of a ball of 4-ply Matchmaker in a leaf green which, while still Clearly Wrong in colour,

didn't look as if it was going to be impossible to tweak to being a right colour. Into the dyepan with a smidge of dark brown it went; then into the tumble-dryer after its rinse (wrapped in tulle and tied several times... Et voilà. I was quite pleased...

Being around and still feeling generally crappy meant I got quite a lot of knitting done. I'll have to pull out about 3" on the sleeve I've done most on because of the way the self-patterning yarn was wound - if I'd realised I'd be using a solid colour for the tops of the sleeves, I'd have waited until the front and back were both done - but it's getting there. And I have lots of odds and ends for the neckband...

While I was winding this yarn and yarn for an Etsy order (thanks, Heather!) I thought I might as well see how much cashmere was left on the cone of denim blue "heavy laceweight" I used for my Hanging Garden stole. Turns out there was about 540m before washing - so that went into the dyepot too. I think it's going to be a Flutter - but I'll be adding some matte raku beads to it too as I bought two tubes for another project which didn't in the end need them...

Finally, some knitting... Christmas, part I!

I've done quite a lot since Christmas, but it's been really busy; a lot of it in a good way, but the last two Wednesday nights' commutes have been nightmarish (last night it took 4h 35mins to get home, the week before just under 4 hours...) and the last couple of weekends have been nice and busy too. This weekend seems to be shaping up to be pretty well-occupied, but I've been editing pictures by dribs and drabs and there's something to show now...

This year's Christmas knitting was neither as time-consuming nor as intricate as previous years - the two baby shawls this year, particularly the cobweb-weight one, nearly killed me! Most people got something, though. On the basis that it's more blessed to give than receive, I'll start with the gifts given. And I think I'll go by approximate order of age, so babies first...

Baby A got the ubiquitous Baby Surprise Jacket - but I loved the way that the self-striping Regia DK/6-fädig (present from Jan before she moved!) behaved when knitted with the "wrong" number of stitches. It's quite a lightweight DK, so even if he's not big enough for it until the summer, there will probably still be chilly evenings when he can wear it... I think it's Joseph's-coat-ish!

Baby O had a sweater - from a lovely book I got at John Lewis just after they re-opened. The variegated yarn is one of mine; the dark blue some Emu Superwash from Sew Creative's bargain bin a year or three ago... The buttons "go" better than they appear to in this photo...

Fiona (L), and Lorna (R) now. F's sweater was my first attempt at a top-down raglan (she's tall and slim so being able to rip back the cuffs and knit them a bit longer is a distinct advantage); and I used mainly Stylecraft Apache (now discontinuted and another Sew Creative bargain) with stripes of anything-washable-I-had-handy-in-about-the-same-colours. Some of the stripes are furry, some just bright!

L got a bag - she usually gets a sweater, but her mum very sensibly reminded me she'd had one for her birthday and usually got the hand-me-downs, so why didn't I make something smaller? This is felted (some Rowan Magpie from the stash), and then embroidered with chain-stitch and buttons. It reminded me a little bit of a Kandinsky when it was finished.

On to adults. First, a Halfdome variant for a friend. I'm saying "variant" only because I didn't follow the colour-scheme - there are random numbers of rows of each colour - otherwise it's the small size from the pattern stitches-wise, and the middle size length-wise. I was convinced it was going to be too big, then too small, and in the end it turned out to be just right. This is half Rowan Felted Tweed and half Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport (colour "Motherlode").

Some of the Christmas projects have already been blogged - Sue got a pair of the Serpentine Mitts, and my aunt Barb got the well-documented Monkeys.

Friend Chai in Canada got some Socks of Doom - and these were victims of the camera loss just before Christmas. They were knitted in a fantastic hurry before last-posting-date came along, and photographed the same week - and two days later there was the camera débâcle... At one stage I thought I didn't even have a photo of the hand-dyed yarn - but here it is...

Dad had a scarf - I made him a brown one in Felted Tweed a couple of years ago which he'd commented on several times; so I thought a grey one in the same yarn might go down well. This is a reversible cables pattern - I was slightly embarrassed to buy the pattern from here because I thought it was the sort of thing I could do for myself, and in the end I changed the number of stitches, repeats, etc.; but I'm really glad I did because it was a fun uncomplicated knit of a very nicely written pattern and I got it done well before Christmas... Unfortunately, I only seem to have a picture of it at its very beginnings - but imagine that you can see both sides and the cables are perfect both ways round; because they are...

Mam got a Nantasket Basket for holding her stocking-fillers - and I completely forgot to take a photo of that either. So here's one of a similar one I made for EJ's birthday in August.

Mam's was actually in this colour combination:

which is a swatch for the cushion I made for Jan, which she has documented elsewhere! (Another I forgot to photograph; thank God for friends with digital cameras!)

And I think that's it! Next time: beautiful yarny things received! After which normal service, whatever that is, will be resumed...

Every home should have one...

Not a cat (although I think every home should have one of those too); she's come back from her holidays and sloped off to the bedroom to pretend to sulk. Actually, she's come back smelling of grooming powder and stuffed with biscuits, but she does like to have a moan for form's sake...

After a day's hard tidying up, the dining-room table was finally Ready for the Assemblage of the Big Christmas Present. It arrived in November, but I didn't want to make it up before Christmas...


What can it be? It's certainly in a big enough box! (The people at the post office were worried about how far I'd have to carry it... then they looked at the address and realised that 'about 50 yards' was the answer...)


And it came with a Christmas card...


I opened it when it first arrived just to make sure Customs hadn't done Bad Things to it on the way in, but all the little bits and bobbins were securely contained in a sealed bag, so I took out the card and left the rest alone...


When you get it out of the box, here are all the bits... The envelope in the foreground says "Assembly instructions. *Read first!!!*" (If only everything in life came in a flatpack, with instructions.... no, don't go there...) Look at all that oaky goodness, on my ash dining table...




Making it up was a doddle. I got out my box of 51 screwdrivers (I haven't actually counted them in and out, some of them are socket-set-type-things, but that's what it says on the label) despite only needing one #2 Philips; and it took only a short time to assemble the windmilly bit on the front (seen here sitting on top of the base with its rotation-counter)

wonder very briefly about which way round the main post went into the the base - before, you know, actually looking at it: this guy leaves nothing to chance:

sort out the bits which needed to go onto the main spindle [ditto]

and finally, wind a skein!

I had the idea of a 'can you guess what it is yet' series of photos, but I got carried away with the precision of the thing, and how it all made up so perfectly, and forgot to take photos of most of the assembly. But it's a skein winder from Ball and Skein, and it works brilliantly. Thanks to Mam and Dad for going with my somewhat strange idea of what I'd like for Christmas, and to Judy and Chris for the help with shipping info, different woods, etc.!

Dyeing day tomorrow, I think - better check the vinegar situation...

Clarification... and some AP extras

Was listening to the podcast by Lixie earlier - not just because she said she was going to mention the blog and the shop, you understand, but that did get me listening to it when it came out this afternoon, rather than sometime in the following week as I usually do! I liked her comments on the Garnstudio/DROPS people particularly (they were absolutely besieged when I got there, and although I could see they had lovely stuff and the prices looked good, I just registered that and moved on, so a review was great... Have bookmarked their website not just for the free patterns...) but it was interesting to hear someone else's impressions of the same show on the same day, particularly when it's someone you've bought yarn with....

One clarification: a couple of people (including Lixie but she wasn't the first) have said there was a lot more stitching than knitting... And I realise that every time I go to Ally Pally, I'm comparing it with the first few times I went (I think the first time was 1996 or 1997, the year before I started City and Guilds Embroidery). As a new stitcher and inveterate knitter, I had genuinely thought that something called a Knitting and Stitching Show would have some, you know, knitting in it. I believe there were about FIVE, or possibly SEVEN suppliers that year - Colinette, the Wensleydale people (from whom I scored my first pair of Brittany needles and felt very guilty about spending £5.50 on a pair of needles), 21st Century Yarns (when they were still 20th Century Yarns; oh dear... I bought yarn, and also 125g of embroidery silk from them which I'm still using...), Black Sheep, and Uppingham Yarns. Shilasdair may also have been there, I'm not entirely sure. Elizabeth Gash was selling her beautiful knitwear and there were one or two places doing quite exciting machine-knitted garments. Texere were there, but catering exclusively to embroiderers. And there was the Handweavers' Studio (notably MIA this year), but as a strictly knit-from-the-pattern-and-shut-up sort of girl at that point, I was a bit intimidated by their off-piste-ness... At the time I was actually grateful for the lack of knitting, as well as fazed by it - the list of supplies needed for the C&G was so extensive and consisted mainly of non-fibre-related articles like sketchpads, paints, brushes and so on, that Art Van Go got most of my cash that year, with a sideline for Oliver Twists (sadly and incomprehensibly still without a website) and Stef Francis (someone in their wisdom put those two stands opposite each other this year! Your two major independent, long-established, family-run, British hand-dyers for embroiderers and you put them head to head? what on earth? Surely you need to give people time for creative justification and amnesia between stands?). OK, that's the folksingerish bit where I go on about the old times; but it's a kind of Show of Hands folksingerish thing where I can also acknowledge that the olden days had their entirely crap elements, and certainly the total absence of acknowledgement of knitting through most of the 1990s was one of those...

So I was just completely stunned by what was available this year. There was qiviut (once fondled, never forgotten! and you have to love a yarn which doesn't put a u after a q); there was yak (from a supplier who'd run out of cards...); there was a lovely bamboo/wool/cotton blend from Teo's handspun... I did miss Pavi Yarns, but I don't know whether I'm thinking about the Harrogate show, having been to that the last several years as well; they may never have done Ally Pally... The two suppliers which were completely new to me were Knit n Caboodle, who were very good fun to talk to (as described in previous post); and Socktopus. Both the people on the stand were talking on their mobiles while I was there, so I can't comment on their general friendliness otherwise, but they had several of the sock yarns you see regularly on Knitty or Ravelry. None of them felt quite as nice to me as the sock yarns I already had in my bag, so I passed, but took a card anyway for future reference...

The photo at the top of the post is completely gratuitous (except that it's the colour Lixie mentions on the podcast, see link above). Not only can I not blog what I'm knitting at the moment, but I've spent four hours on it today and have knitted up 8g of yarn. That's EIGHT GRAMMES, or a smidgeon under a quarter of an ounce... I'm a reasonably speedy knitter, and I've sat down, at a table, with a decent light and a good audiobook, and I've knitted up about half of the grammes in yarn that I've consumed in sugar in my tea while knitting, which, given the name of the pattern, is ironic. Anyone on Ravelry, you'll be able to guess easily which of the WIPs this is (I'm greensideknits over there, the blog name doesn't fit into their name criteria)...

I suppose the overwhelming thing about all these shows is that great reassurance that You Are Not Alone. For the first several years I went to them, I was a member of RCTN (rec.crafts.textiles.needlework, for the young) but most of the members there were from the US; it was so immensely reassuring to realise that there are All These People Here Who Do Stuff. And in the wake of the recent Yarnstorming, it still is...

Back to my knitting...

... which is all pretty baby-centric at the moment. Mainly because I still don't have this year's measurements for the older children I knit for!



This is (a bad photo of) an Elizabeth Zimmerman two-needle-nearly-seamless-baby-sweater - except that this one is totally seamless because I bunged the arms onto DPNs to do the sleeves, which was really nice to do... I never quite get the cuff seams to match up, so being able to knit the thing in the round was much more satisfying. I'm not quite sure which baby this is for, but it's so much fun to knit that I think I'll be casting straight on for the next one... The yarn is Click DK with wool - only 30% wool, but it's really reminiscent of the Phildar yarns I used to knit with all the time; soft, but it keeps its shape and the stitch definition is nice. And it's pretty economical; and machine-washable, of course... (And why don't Sirdar have any information on yarns on their site?! weird...)



And here's some yarn eye-candy - need to list this for the shop tonight... I'm toying with this being called Rainbow in the Dark, which shows my heavy-metal roots...


No sign of the purse yet... but the guy at the bus company said it was possible the driver hadn't got back to the bus depot (which is miles away from the bus station...) yet. I live in hope.

The kindness of (relative) strangers

So, I taught a course last week, and in the main it went very well... If I'd had the energy over the weekend to unpack my bags, I'd have some samples to show you; another time... Here - look - pretty cat!

I had to advertise for lifts to and from the college at short notice, but thankfully I'm a member of CamLETS; and Judith and Anna stepped up and were wonderful about not only driving me around but also helping with boxes and bags... And my neighbour Ian was on a drawing course and gave me a lift back on the Thursday; and completely beyond the call of duty, drove me there on the Friday despite his course having finished...

Meanwhile Sue has good news on her prospective new flat/house (Sue needs a blog; she's crocheting up a storm these days...) and I went to London and ticked another box in my Unbloggable Non-Knitting Project...

(This is the statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the Houses of Parliament - there's something of the Snape about him...)

And these arrived from Art Van Go

in the usual good time, for this Saturday's second KTog dyeing session.

A second kiln

So I was walking to the station on the way back from buying the steamer, with it perched precariously on my bike basket, when I bumped into an ex-colleague; after the usual pleasantries he asked what was in the box and I said 'oh, I'm doing some dyeing and I need a second steamer'. And suddenly remembered that awful Barclays ad with the woman who took out a loan for her second kiln, and cringed inside...

But it is a very beautiful steamer; made in Thailand, which you can guess from the jaunty angle of its handles... and a double-layered one, to boot... you can get an idea of the size when you realise that's one of the larger Le Creuset kettles, but thankfully it's extremely light. And pretty, did I mention pretty?

So Anne, Carole, Claire, Debs, Jayne, Rosie and Sue came over in the afternoon, and we dyed; in several phases as there was really only enough space for three to work, but we're all grown-ups


(in theory at least)... If you want to see what Anne has in that bowl, go here...

Here are some skeins drying out (and yes, that is blue sky out there! after a downpour as people were arriving, it all dried out quite nicely)



And here's Jayne posing with her mad laceweight - watch this space for what that might eventually turn into:



I did my usual and mopped up a bit of everything that was left with a skein (of laceweight BFL in this case): here it is hanging on the line in an attempt cunningly to disguise that Garden Design casa Knittingonthegreen is brought to you this year by Tomasi di Lampedusa.


Here it is in Exhibit A mode on the patio table
and lurking in its natural habitat in the honeysuckle/bindweed combo by the washing-line...

After all that, Sue, Rosie, Debs and I went off to Helen's Open Studio, just down the road (my Serene Face pot came from there - here's a pic of it a couple of weeks ago:



We were chatting - and she was talking about her... second kiln... (she is not, I hasten to add, anything like the Dreadful Barclays Woman...)

After that, Sue and I went to the pub for gin and tonic while waiting for our Thai takeaway (thanks, Sue!)

I finished MS3 Clue 2 - but the sheets are washing at the moment - I'll pin it out and admire it later on when they're ready to put back on the bed! I'm probably mad, and wrong, but I'm thinking 'dragon' for the theme at the moment...

The sock has fared less well.

I don't know whether it's knitting lots of lace, or just the 'mediumweightness' of this yarn, but I seem to be knitting socks for the Three Bears at the moment. The first one was at least 12 stitches too big, this one was at least 6 - so I'm now working on 2.5mm needles on 48 stitches, and fully expecting to have something that even Baby Bear couldn't get his foot into... It is, thankfully, not only gorgeous yarn but also very forgiving of repeatedly being ripped out... This time I did at least entertain two yoof at Cambridge station with the frogging...

Socks, steamers and lace addiction

I went down to London on Thursday and needed train knitting for the way back. My visit included an X-ray of my briefcase; the security guy was amused by the sight of a hardly-started toe-up sock in the monitor...

This is the Tequila Phoenix variation of 'Vog on from this time's Knitty. Happily it is actually that variation - I printed out the toe-up version without noticing that I hadn't included the lace pattern, and had to work it out by squinting at the photo (the thought of an 80 minute train journey without knitting being... unappealing), so I'm pleased I got it right! The yarn is Socks that Rock mediumweight in Chapman Springs; previously seen lounging about at the British Library but ripped as I'd managed to make something yeti-sized by accident... This time round it's pooling, but interestingly; I'm hoping that will continue or replicate itself on the other sock, or I may be ripping again!

I'm also finding the second part of Mystery Stole 3 completely addictive - sat down last night to knit 'just a couple of rows' and ended up wrestling myself to bed at the end of row 18 some time later... Whatever it's going to be, it's going to be pretty. And it looks as if there were 6,707 knitters in the group at closing time; huge last-minute surge in membership when the Yarn Harlot and Bonne Marie joined the fun and blogged about it! Sometime in the next day or so I'll get the written instructions for Clue 2 to proofread, but for the moment I'm just really enjoying the knitting... More than the other stole I'm doing, by the same designer, and I'm still trying to work out why...

This morning I'm going out to buy a new steamer (from the Chinese supermarket) and a new supply of latex gloves - members of the Cambridge KTog are coming over to do some dyeing this afternoon!

Bit of a find

I've stuck faithfully to the Knitting from my Stash idea all year, apart from my two Official Occasions for Sin at Textiles in Focus and SkipNorth. But when I was in Bury last week with my brother and SIL, I sneaked into the local Hospice Shop. For some reason, Hospice shops seem to be very good for books; but I was confronted with this :
pack of 10 balls for a fiver; and could not resist - I fell. I'm not a great fan of orange, but it is the most beautiful yarn... so I dyed it; and here it is: 2300m of 3-ply - I'm thinking Big Shawl...