Olympian

My only chance ever for Olympian Gold having been the Next-to-Last-Kid-to-be-Picked all the way through school.... It's not blocked, but I cast it off on Friday night at the completely wonderful SkipNorth in the presence of a dozen or so other knitters, and here's Ellen, wearing a white T-shirt which shows off the pattern, modelling it ...



So there. Really didn't think I had enough time to finish. Then I thought I had, and got complacent. And then I encountered the edging pattern, which was completely and utterly un-memorisable. I repeated it 54 times, and had to look at the pattern each and every single time. The separate edging pattern for the point was worked in Sainsbury's Cafe in Keighley, while Rosie was getting her chocolate-and-booze stash and before I did...

The rest of SkipNorth, and the visit to Gill's, will be blogged in a bit... It was wonderful though.

Some progress

Didn't get anything knitted on the Olympic shawl on Sunday, but managed several rows at work at lunchtime on Monday - here she is at the moment.



The straight needles are doing fine so far but will have to get some boiling water onto the circs which were writhing around like baby snakes on Friday night. Theoretically, I'm halfway there (4 pattern repeats). Using the shawl calculator (this link downloads an Excel file...), I'm 25% there; which is better than I thought... But I've only used 30g of the 225g of yarn, so I'll have to keep an eye on that and maybe I can get a couple more repeats than the photo I'm working from shows...

Dye adventure

Spent yesterday dyeing, once I'd gone to the post office and picked up my long-overdue parcel of dyes - it was a good afternoon for drying skeins in the garden. Very glad I did it yesterday - woke up this morning to the sounds of cars splashing through puddles and realised it was pouring down. Just for once, my timing was right. Today I'll do some cotton, and dry it over the radiator, but yesterday I dyed this:

The stuff at the back is Rowan R2 paper tape which came in vile yucky colours - I bought three balls of pale grey, three of white and six of pale pink in the £1 bin at Sew Creative sometime last year, on the grounds that it was 100% nylon and would acid-dye. The stuff in the basket at the front is merino; here's a close-up

I had 2 balls of four-ply which will make a great pair of socks... and 6 of DK. There's also one ball of 2-ply laceweight in there...

With all that, not much progress on the Olympic knitting - I did 10 or so rows which isn't that great at this stage of the game when the rows are short. To speed things up I moved it back onto straight needles - really dislike circulars though they'll have their uses when there are too many stitches for the straights. Makes the shawl look like a big exotic moth...

And we're off (or at least, cast on)...

The Knitting Olympics has started! We met at the Fort St George in England last night - Mary's husband took photos - thanks!


That's me on the left, next to Bekki and Anne. At that point I was still trying to find the start point on my yarn, the end having buried itself thorougly inside the centrepull ball...





And then here on the right are Scarlet and Mary.
Rosie was here too but ducked out of shot for the photos as she's cheerleading the team and wasn't mad enough to put her name down. We watched some of the frankly extraordinary opening ceremony (was reminded fondly of Italian TV) and attempted to get started. Reading charts in a pub while being distracted by other people's fab projects was somewhat of a challenge, but I got this much done by the end of the train-ride home

and think it's going to look rather wonderful when done... Tonight, the Charts Marked B; that's the A charts dealt with...

Today I'm dyeing yarn for Textiles in Focus next weekend - final batch of wool for now is in the steamer (22 skeins dyed today in all) but I've just remembered some Monoprix bargain yarn in nondescript grey I bought several years ago which could do with cheering up. I'll post pics when it's out and drying...

Team Cambridge

I made a button, and a couple of fellow Cambridge Olympians thought it was OK; so here it is.

Please use as you'd like. If you want to link to something, I've put up a skeleton Olympics blog at http://knitcambridge.blogspot.com, which will develop a few more bits and pieces over the next couple of days! Mail me at liz [at] lizmarley [dot] co [dot] uk or leave a comment if you'd like to be able to post to the KnitCambridge blog.

Am off to do an inventory of the stuff for Textiles in Focus (after a disastrous evening with a hat - managed to knit 17cm of the hat on a 40cm circular before realising it was a very short Moebius-type strip (and too small to pretend it's some sort of fancy cowl... ack....) - and sulk that my dye hasn't been delivered yet...

Knitting tonight at the Eagle - 7pm - yay!

All-purpose festival day

Today is an interesting one in the calendar. I've always known it as Candlemas; it's also Imbolc and Groundhog Day. It's the official halfway point between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox; and Rosie pointed out in e-mail earlier on this evening that it's also St Brigid's day (if you follow the Imbolc link there's a load more information).

So I dragged out my St Brigid sweater (from Alice Starmore's 'Aran Knitting' book) and had a look at her, and she's still beautiful even if she only has half the back finished so far. A couple of pictures:

This is the best one in terms of colour;

and this one shows the three-dimensionality of her (and current lack-of-progress, shown by positions of needles) but looks like a completely different yarn. I'm using Jamieson's Soft Shetland in a colour coincidentally called Pagan...

Wish I could link to any of the really beautiful photos in the book, but they've been removed from the sites I know about, apparently under threat of legal action. Fell in love with this sweater about 10 years ago because of images on the Internet, and found the book the first week our local Borders opened 4 or so years ago, just before it became unobtainable.

If I hadn't been going to SkipNorth for the final bit of the Knitting Olympics, I'd have put finishing this one as my goal; but she's just too big to carry around (1kg of yarn or so by the end)...

Knitting Olympics

It's insane, but I've signed up for this, despite it starting a week before Textiles in Focus which swallows up the week around it, and being at SkipNorth for the second weekend. I'm going to do the Triangles within Triangles shawlette in this:



Cloud 9 from Heritage Yarns. It almost looks too pretty in the ball to knit.