Closing ceremonies...

Pics of Mystic Meadow blocking - this is the whole thing - sort of upside down, in that the cast-off is nearest the camera...

An idea of the openness of the top part, which is mainly yarnovers...

And the more densely-stitched bottom section - looks like grasses...

This is near the cast-off edge. It's bizarre - the chart looks extremely geometric, but the final result is very fluid...

So, the details:

Pattern: Mystic Meadows Stole by Anna Dalvi
Yarn: Enchanté by Kaalund in Lavender
Needles: 3.5mm (US4) Addi lace circular
Finished size: 50cm (20") by 180cm (72").

I did finish the Hypoteneuse shawl (casting it off while the closing ceremonies were going on) which is now also blocked - photos of that tomorrow...

Have spent most of today battling something disgusting and sinusy, probably a result of the cold I had last week, and moving furniture - my CD and DVD storage had become somewhat disastrous and precarious as both had completely run out of space - so I've ordered another bookcase for upstairs, moved the upstairs bookcase downstairs and filled it with CDs, thrown away the existing DVD storage, moved the DVDs into the CD bookcase... Not sure I want all the CDs in the dining room in perpetuity, but it'll certainly do for the moment and there's a little bit of space for expansion, particularly in the DVD storage...

I also remembered that a very small relative has a 1st birthday this week so another bit of speed knitting to one of my favourite patterns is under way. No photos yet...

One down...

The Mystic Meadows stole is cast off. As ever with lace, it looks like a big old heap of nowt at the moment;

but I have hopes of its transformation into a thing of beauty in the blocking tomorrow. (I was strict as regards Olympic knitting - finished means not only cast on but blocked. I know myself... remember last week's posts of the things which had lain around for a couple of months after cast-off? So I'll be posting to the "podium" thread on Ravelry once the last pin goes in...)

This really was an Olympic challenge (as you might have gathered from my maunderings and whingeings over the last couple of weeks). I didn’t realise when I started that the design called not only for cables but also for bobbles, wrapping, and every-row-lace, all of which I usually avoid like the plague. It's a beautifully-written pattern, and I signed up for the KAL earlier in the year which meant the pattern was also presented in a large-print format over 32 pages (2 taped-together pages a day) which was extremely clear... The gorgeous but slippery silk yarn didn't help - any dropped stitch went down several rows...

Minor frogging was done all over the place - I managed to avoid major frogging by some surgery to the middle section halfway through - and I really wouldn’t have carried on with it if the small, insanely competitive fragment of my brain hadn’t been engaged by the Olympian ideal…

[I am, however, sure that when athletes refer to 'hitting the wall' they're not referring to flinging quarter of a mile of knitted silk and a perfectly good Addi lace needle across the kitchen while yelling expletives]. In the end the finishing was quite peaceful though...

Onwards with the second project, then. I have 4 repeats (96 rows), I have series 2 of Boston Legal on DVD, I have chili... how long can it take?

Home straight...

Didn't post last night because I was out seeing West Side Story at Sadler's Wells - which was absolutely tremendous. The energy of the thing was just unbelievable and the guy singing Tony that evening (there are two Tonys and two Marias listed), Ryan Silverman, has the most fabulous voice...

Today Sue came and visited work; we had lunch and then I gave her a tour round the place, dodging in between parties taking tours as part of the Summer Opening. We then went for Sue's debut visit to I Knit, and to the National Theatre where Shirley Williams and June Purvis discussed the legacy of the women's suffrage campaigners before heading home...

Now I'm going to be knitting until further notice - have just over 2 charts (0f 16) of the Mystic Meadows to go, and 4 repeats on the Hypoteneuse stole. More news and pictures tomorrow...

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...

Past the halfway point...

Despite the last post, my Olympics projects are going ahead and are both more than half complete. I had a really good bash at the Mystic Meadows stole today and did two and a half charts, so that's 9 of the 16 done. Here's a bit of the detail:

and here's what there is of the stole stretched out on the table...

Hypoteneuse is also going really nicely - 10.5 repeats down...

And a recent FO I haven't posted before, but have just wrapped up to pass on to my boss, who's off on maternity leave in the next week or two; this is a Shetland shawl, worked edging-first, and then stitches picked up all round and worked into the centre, with the centre square worked last, lacing up stitches from the sides as it goes and finishing with a three-needle bind-off. I used all sorts of small balls of sock yarn in the border and it was delightful to knit. I need to work up another pile of odds and ends and make one for me - maybe with black where the beige is on this one... This attracted so many favourable comments on the train because of the colours!

Gah

I should know by now that knitting lace while surrounded by KToggers is a Bad Idea. Picked it up this morning and realised that 8 rows back I'd ignored the Randomness introduced by the designer, and carried on in the established pattern.

Drastic remedies are called for....


There's probably some sort of Paula Radcliffe analogy here, but I'll let someone else think of it while I go back and catch these stitches up one by one. Where's my 2.5mm crochet hook...

What miserable weather for August! Managed not to get completely soaked at any point, but it as a close thing a couple of times... So here's a picture of what it *ought* to look like at this time of year. I noticed yesterday that it's exactly three years since I got my first small-enough-to-carry-round digital camera, and this was one of the first photos I took with it...

I've also been immensely cheered up by Joshilyn Jackson's blog Faster than Kudzu, by the realisation that it's only 7 days until I get a week's holiday, and by having finished the first quarter of the Mystic Meadows stole (which looks very little different to the last photo). I was slightly disconcerted to realise that despite the easiness of the Hypoteneuse stole, I'd still managed to make a complete mess of one pattern repeat yesterday evening (wine and good company, death to knitting of all sorts!) and hadn't noticed until nearly the end of the next one ("Boston Legal" on DVD is also fairly distracting) so a-frogging I went, and have nearly caught up again...

Progress of a sort, and comments!

Thanks for the comments - it's been so long since I blogged anything interesting that I'd forgotten what that was like!


Here's tonight's progress, after a madly busy, very loud, extremely good fun KTog. Hypoteneuse (top) is doing nicely - about a third of the way through; the Mystic Meadows one got a bit stalled this evening once I realised the designer was eschewing the repeating pattern to get lots of random leafy things set up... I need to get back to it and do the last 5 rows of tonight's repeats. I'm worried about how small it is - don't mind about the width but I like a long scarf and I'm not sure that's what I'm going to get - but I think it's going to be beautiful. Has to be said though, if this wasn't an Olympic thing, I'd have given up by now...



And for all those commenting on the Addi-dyeing - I believe Addi cords are nylon and therefore will dye like any nylon fibre, buttons, bag handles etc. - I've seen no sign of them bleeding onto projects I've knitted afterwards, although I might cast on a row and dunk in water-and rub them on my hands for a while if I were going to propose to knit a baby shawl with them... You do, of course, lose the what-needle-size, but I've found that with the ordinary Addi cord that wears off pretty quickly anyway... Haven't tried Addi lace needles with this method, but with my degree of (im)patience, it's only a matter of time...

Casting on...

I meant to blog every day during the Ravelympics. But things got away from me on Friday and again yesterday. I am, however, using the great Blogger way-back machine to fake posts for those two days!

Friday, the casting-on event at the Cambridge Blue. Photos are on the KnitCambridge blog - there were around a dozen of us there and it was a nice evening, despite my frogging my second Olympic project after the first hour and a half!!

I'm making the Mystic Meadows Stole as my Team Cambridge group knitting project, and the Hypoteneuse Shawl as my Team I Knit London project. The London half of the biathlon is working a lot better. Photos as things go on.