At least it's not a sleeve

This weekend, the knitting in prospect consisted of two purple (second) sleeves. I have been making fairly remarkable progress on St Brigid since I learned cabling without a cable needle from Gwen at the Weird Knitting Class - I didn't think it would make that much difference - but it does!

This is despite having to be quite obsessive about keeping my place in the increases while reading 3 cable charts...

And this is purple sleeve #2, from Primrose Path. This is great train and bus knitting - there's a bit of pattern at the bottom of the sleeve and then just 3x2 ribbing for the rest...

So anyway; it was all sleeves, all purple, all the time; so I thought I'd like another project on the go, and I haven't knitted much lace since Christmas - one shoulder-shawl, to be precise. And I love the Aeolian shawl from this time's Knitty (despite it containing my personal nemesis, the nupp). So I dug out the yarn I thought I'd use, and some beads I'd toddled up to Covent Garden to get; and took them out in the garden to photograph; and only at that point did I realise what colour I was intending to use.

Yeah.

(The yarn, by the way, is 2-ply laceweight dyed by Wibbo in a colour she called High Priestess, and was a Christmas present...)

So I stared thoughtfully at my shoes, wondering whether knitting three purple objects simultaneously was insane...

I guess that's my answer then. I'll be casting on later. So I'll be knitting a purple Primrose Path, a Purple St B in a colour called Pagan, and a purple Priestess shawl... the alliteration just kills me.

An FO, and a WIP

I have been knitting - but for some reason I seem to be making garments this year rather than smaller things, and they're not as exciting to photograph.


But my Dad had a birthday on Saturday, and he's appreciative of handknit socks;



These are the Primavera pattern by Natalja - the pattern is in the sidebar of her blog. I saw them on Franklin's blog and thought they looked interesting without being lacy. The yarn is Panda Wool from Crystal Palace, bought from Woolly Workshop at Textiles in Focus. The colour's called Menswear, appropriately enough. I got the socks out of 2 balls with very little to spare, but Dad has size 8.5 feet - if you're making them for someone larger, you'd probably need a third ball...




And here's the current WIP - photographed at The Sanctuary in Hove. Since then I've finished the body and started a sleeve. The yarn is Debbie Bliss Prima, an 80% bamboo, 20% merino mix. Unlike the Panda Wool, which had a tendency to be a little bit splitty, this is very smooth stuff but not quite as hard on the hands as cotton. The pattern is Primrose Path from the latest Twist Collective edition...

I have a day off today; I was intending to go somewhere, maybe to Norwich or Kings Lynn, to do a spot of shopping and walk around in the sun; but after the prettiness of the last few days, it's cold and miserable here this morning, although it's showing signs of brightening up. I think it might be a day for knitting and watching DVDs, and maybe some lugging of boxes up to the loft.

Back to my knitting...

Oddly enough, I'd never heard the phrase "getting back to my/our/their knitting" before this current financial crisis. Then I heard it on David Reidy's wonderful Sticks and String podcast in one of the essays, used in one sense; and if I've heard one banker/building-society manager/finance expert use it in the sense of "retrenching to what we used to be good at", I've heard a dozen...

It seems to mean getting conservative again, going (cringe) "back to basics". And while I think that's a great idea in the banking sense, given the current general balls-up, I don't think that's what knitters mean. Certainly not the seven knitters gathered in the I Knit basement on a glorious sunny Saturday for Gwen's Weird Techniques class anyway. Being a bad, bad blogger, I had my camera but was both too busy and too timid to suggest taking photos. As it turned out, I was sitting next to Joy from The Knitting Goddess Yarns who also had a camera with her but I don't think she took photos either... I learned to knit and purl backwards; and that although I'd been doing the Magic Loop technique correctly, I still didn't enjoy it. And that I really, really need to practice the long-tail cast-on, despite my complete failure at it in the class, because there are some seriously fun things you can do with it... And cabling without a cable needle finally made sense - I'll try it on the second sleeve of St Brigid and see whether things go faster... It was a whirlwind of new techniques, tips, ideas, shared experience; totally recommended when it comes round again... And my first ever formal knitting class (as a student!)...

I have also been knitting. I made the Seachange sweater [Ravelry link] from Gerard's book Knits to Share and Care. It's a lovely thing to make and only took a couple of weeks of train journeys and knit nights... Here it is on the line:

And here it is on. Yes, strange photo. I don't have a full-length mirror at home, so I stand on a chair and take a picture in the living-room mirror...

It's the most sensuous thing to wear - incredibly soft wool and silk. It may pill - I think it's already started - but I really don't care because I feel fantastic wearing it...

The thing I really couldn't get was how the underarm gussets went in. Here they are from one side:

and from the other:

Because it's not knitted in the round, you have to sew up the sweater. If you're tempted to do this gansey (and it's a really nice, quick knit), here's a construction diagram for the underarm gussets. Click to embiggen in Flickr.

I'm including this because it took me forever to work this out. I think it's a spatial awareness thing, maybe; but I had to do it at I Knit where they had the model in the shop, and I only finally worked it out when Laura took the sweater off the tailor's dummy and laid it across my lap; thanks, Laura!

I've also finally fallen in thrall to those Mason-Dixon ladies and made a couple of ballband dishcloths. Here's the first one - the second one is in the wash at the moment... Cool, simple. quick and practical...

FLS again, and some advertising...

Thanks everyone for the lovely comments on the FLS. I am going to make the sleeves longer, because I get really old-fashioned about having a cardigan with shorter sleeves than the top I'm wearing underneath it - it seems like having your slip showing would be for an older generation (or exposing your bra-straps, for mine, but that ship sailed a long time ago). Totally personal opinion... Most of the cardigans I'd be able to buy in the shops in my size would also be three-quarter-length sleeves, which is why I don't buy them... (I'll just have to remember not to wash up in this one - but as I generally get changed when I come home from work, I'm hoping that won't be too much of a problem). Jayne, the buttons came from Peter Jones. I gather they have them in other colours at John Lewis in Cambridge...


In other news, I've been dyeing up a storm for Textiles in Focus. Blatant plug here. I shall be sharing stand-space (as Knitstuff) with two other local Ravelers and one not-so-local. It's a really nice smaller textiles event - about as much knitting-to-everything-else balance as there is at the Knitting and Stitching show (i.e. about 10% knitting, but when that means Woolly Workshop and 21st Century Yarns, it's good company to be in!), but they're all proper stands - you don't get all the papercrafts-and-miracle-cleaning-products stuff - the exhibitions are always very good, and there are probably workshop places left! The details:

Textiles in Focus

Cottenham Village College, High Street, Cottenham, Cambridgeshire

20-22 February 2009

10am-5pm (Friday/Saturday), 10am-4:30pm (Sunday).

£4 entry fee on the door

I hope to make a post with Actual Pictures soon!

First in a while...

Posts (apart from last night's John Martyn one, anyway), and finished garments. I think that actually it might be about 4 years since I last finished a sweater for me. I knitted most of a sweater in this yarn in October 2007 - in fact, I knitted all of it, but it looked utterly catastrophic when worn... I like to think this one's better.

February Lady Sweater by Pamela Wynne. Yarn: Debbie Bliss Rialto DK (12 balls so far, probably 13 eventually - see below). Needles: 5mm. Cast on January 9, cast off January 29 - the quickest sweater I've knitted for a couple of decades...

I am probably, however, going to lengthen the sleeves - the "just above the wrist" measurement I thought I had when I tried it on (repeatedly) has retrenched to the dreaded fat-lady-three-quarter-sleeves in wear, now it's been washed and blocked... Thankfully as they're top down this is easy peasy. And let's have a closer luck at these buttons...

Yumm... Bloody expensive, but exactly The Right Thing.

And while I'm typing this, the news is on and another of the Good Guys has departed. Bearded Wonder, seriously funny man, cricket geek and statistician extraordinaire, Bill Frindall, you'll be missed...

Phew, and gah, and ooh....

Phew...

The baby sweater is done. And is very pretty.

The dyed yarn for the sleeves works pretty well, and there was just enough to make the neckband and seam up... I've attached the sleeves using my favourite waste-yarn finish (like a machine knit finish), and found some buttons which were just right, from an old dress of my mam's... so I'm enjoying the famous-knitwear-designer-meets-make-do-and-mend combination...

Here's another picture of the pretty that is Mr F's colour combination:

I love the way he works with such unlikely combinations....

Gah...

I was hoping to cast on my Flutter scarf in the pub at the KTog this evening - unfortunately my formerly delightful 3.25mm Brittany needles had a bit of an accident on the way home, and one of them snapped about 3" from the top... They were already the short size - I'll probably try chopping them off and doing a thing with a pencil sharpener and some sandpaper at the weekend, but they were very beautiful...

Ooh...

There were lots of new people at knitting this evening, and some welcome returners, and it was all very lovely. The experience was enhanced still further by the Blue's adoption of Gwatkin's Foxwhelp as their dry cider of choice (no URL, can't find it on draught anywhere else!) - blimey, that stuff's strong; but very nice... And people were knitting beautiful things...

When I got home, I found my consignment of these had arrived, a calendar week after I ordered them from Texas...

I'd been ordering from Ana's Etsy store, but then found (via Ravelry) that she had a bigger store of her own. I've raved about these before, but there's just something about the combination of the beauty and the completely functional which is incredibly attractive.

See?

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...

Another possibly lunatic project...

... Feeling liberated from the demands of knitting for a stand at a show, or for samples for a class, I suddenly realised that I'm meeting a friend's 10 month old daughter for the first time on Wednesday evening, and that I was such a bad keeper-in-touch that I didn't know baby K existed until a few weeks ago... So of course, she needs a sweater... I went back to Tadpoles and Tiddlers, because it's great for a good basic sweater pattern... And found a 4-ply pattern which was crying out for Kaffe Fassett sock yarn. (The Landscape one, in Fire)...

So I have been sitting, knitting, reading a couple of superb books - Stuart Maconie's utterly wonderful Cider with Roadies which has had me crying with laughter and recognition, even when he's adulating bands I really couldn't stand at the time, and another I'll blog when I've finished it - and doing way too little of the enormous amount of tidying up around here... And catching up on sleep... Anyway, the back and three-quarters of one sleeve has been done - and I am definitely going to run out of yarn - I was hoping the extra yardage on sock yarn, as opposed to the Rowan 4-ply botany in the original pattern, would help me out, but I'm going to be about 10 grammes short. Despite the size of the Stash, there's nothing machine-washable in 4-ply which will do for the top half of both sleeves - none of these are colours I usually go for, apart from the dark pink, but as ever with Mr Fassett's combinations, together they're fabulous...

I'll be the one standing impatiently on the pavement in front of Peter Jones when they open at 9:30 tomorrow morning then - please keep out of my way - I'll be a woman on a deadline; my first meeting's at 10:15...

And as a PS - I do have one photo of last weekend - Caroline, who runs the really excellent White House Arts, wearing a drop-stitch scarf I was very pleased with; made of Patons Baroque (thanks, Jan!) and Louisa Harding Sari Ribbon. Not a good photo - but the one with flash was far, far worse...

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...

Finished...

I forget that knitting a birthday jumper for a 6-year-old is actually a reasonable-sized undertaking... so I left it way too late, and got sidetracked by an Unbloggable Project, and was still sewing in ends at at 1:30 this morning. But at lunchtime I finished sewing, and made the neckband, and this evening neckband and buttons were sewn on; and if we can co-ordinate, it'll get to the birthday girl on The Day, tomorrow...

I wish I'd had time to wash this - stranded stuff (I wrongly labelled this as intarsia last time, but actually it's more Fair-Isle) usually 'sits' better after a wash. But it's not as if it's going to be worn more than a couple of times before washing, anyway...

It's been a hell of a week at work, so a Nice Bright Finished Object with matching card is a cheery finishing note... full speed into the weekend now!

Drying out...

... briefly, before the next lot of forecast rain ...

About the only advantage of having Tuesdays off (it's a daft day, really) is when there's a Bank Holiday Monday - the extra day always feels very decadent. I've been sitting drinking tea, thinking about all the housework I ought to have been doing, but actually listening to a rather fabulous Georgette Heyer romance on CD, sewing in ends on the front of the sweater

and knitting sleeves (keeping them in step because some of the yarns are in short supply...)

and spinning up some of the Jacob fleece I washed at the beginning of the month.

Not expertly spun, I know, but it was fun to do, and practice makes perfect and all that... this is the first bobbin, and while it does still have some bits of straw and so on in it, a satisfying amount came out during carding and spinning...

But there's no pleasing some - Bug has sat around disconsolately waiting for the rain to stop...

Some spring colour

... in the absence of anything other than green and grey out of the window. It's been chucking it down steadily here for two days, which is traditional for a Bank Holiday but still...


Avant le déluge, I went off to Kings Lynn and had a lovely morning full of bargains; I bought stripy things...

Two towels I couldn't resist; a sheet of fancy paper for making book covers and the like...

I bought flowery things:

My favourite perfume, usually all-but-unobtainable here, in special edition and ridiculously reduced in price, and some more pretty book-cover paper (if only this had been fabric...)

And there's a lot of knitting going on round here but most of it's both secret and unexciting to photograph (pictures of a Slightly Larger Heap of Crumpled Stuff not being guaranteed to rivet the attention). But look, a Pretty Thing!

More flowers, for Lorna (for a change, the colours are pretty accurate here). I took the Marigold chart from the tote-bag recipe in IK Summer 2006 and it's looking very pretty, although it's reminding me of why, although Intarsia sounds like an attractive Mediterranean island, it's not one I'm keen to visit too often. I did some more last night after taking this picture and am over halfway there now... Stripy sleeves to go, which should be fun DVD-watching knitting...

For my next trick...

Lorna has a birthday in a fortnight or so; she's going to be 6, and she's had a knitted thing from me every year since she was born. So there's a Tradition. I'm thinking about Imp from the Rowan Pipsqueaks book... but with more colours and a different front incorporating a big happy flower rather than some snide parent-oriented lettering. Originally I was thinking about pink with a contrasting front, but looking at the colours I have in Cotton Glacé and associated yarns,





I'm now thinking about green with contrasting pink and orange bits... Will let you know.