Rolling Thunder and Puréed Clown

Various good things happened last week, including a Tuesday lunchtime spent with EJ and Baby M., who has discovered Feet and Their Tastiness;

a KTog meeting at the Cambridge Blue on Tuesday night including some new people; a very pleasing dye-batch knocked up on Wednesday night when I needed to rinse out my made-up-dye-pots in preparation for SkipNorth, and had just discovered the bag of laceweight silk I thought I'd lost - this was from a women's co-operative in Peru and this part of the consignment was a gift from a kind friend in Texas several years ago. There's about 700m...

[Amelia has decided that if I plonk a ball of yarn on the kitchen counter and attempt to photograph it, this is where she needs to be. It is also the only time she feels the need to get onto the kitchen counter.]

.. and a relatively unexpected visit down to London to see Jan and knit at Stash yesterday (making the most of not spending the day teaching). I was Good - I bought my allowance of 200g of sock yarn, the new Interweave Knits, a pattern for a top-down sweater from Knitting Pure and Simple (the one from the homepage, in fact), and an Addi needle to replace the 3 mm one I bought last month and which I had lost. Of course the first thing I found while clearing up this morning was the Other One. But having two will be handy when I want to try on the garment in question (Thermal, from this time's Knitty)...

Jan gave me some beautiful yarn she'd hand-dyed with food colouring, which is amazing and makes me wish for a cheap microwave to try some out... Look at this!

I'm thinking about a pair of Rolling Thunder socks - unearthed some beads in the right shade of lilac in the clearup this afternoon...

While I was at Stash I cast on a scarf using the incredibly bright Colinette Firecracker I bought at Textiles in Focus and some of the leftover cotton/viscose from last year's Olympic shawl.

I'd been thinking it looked like a parrot; Nathalie picked up the ball and said 'you know, this looks like.... puréed clown...' And a Scarf was Born.

It's scribble lace on a 12mm Addi needle (which looks sort of surgical...). Here's a detail, but actually, it's quite a bit brighter than that. Quite frighteningly bright, in fact. And growing very fast. SkipNorthers, get the sunglasses ready.

Peaceful weekend...

The day-course I was due to be teaching next weekend was cancelled due to lack of sign-ups; I was looking forward to doing it, but was very glad I wasn't going to be doing it next weekend! So instead of spending the time confecting more samples, I'm doing this:

Tea and the Hanging Garden Stole - 4 repeats done now of the 14. It's a 48-row repeat and I keep doing daft things. Have to get one of those lifelines in at the end of the next row which is the first of the repeat...! Haven't used them before, but this one's been pulled off the needles once, and I've gone wrong twice in the last repeat - pulling back to a thread would have been far more fun than running repairs...

Am also tidying up - once that's done I'll get the stash from last weekend out and take proper pictures...

This morning, got the competition entries and prizes from Textiles in Focus into the post, and picked up a packet from the Post Office - I was expecting my lopi tote from Gill - made it last year from two skeins of Fiesta Watermark, which I had from a very generous friend in Texas, but Gill now stocks, so she had it as a sample on her stand, and in the scramble to pack at the end I'd forgotten to collect it... I didn't however expect it to come with toys:

Lovely bits of English wools to play with... Gill suggests, generously, that the cats might like to play with them (they were very taken with her last weekend). Not a chance. None.

And a photo of an FO - I know I've shown this one before, but Dad took a photo of Mam in her Icarus shawl at a wedding last weekend, and the colours look so good (and so much better than they do in my Christmas pics)... Yarn is Angel Hair from HandMaiden in colour Vintage. I am now panicking - this is some of the nicest fine mohair I've ever used, and HandMaiden don't have it on their site at the moment!

Ahoy, SkipNorthers!

As promised, here are the skeining photos for the Friday afternoon workshop at SkipNorth. Apologies if I'm teaching any grandmothers to suck eggs here; if you've skeined yarn before, you'll know what you're doing and just do whatever you'd do normally - but I've always taught dyeing to embroiderers before and they don't, necessarily...

You can wind your skein round whatever you like. A pair of doorknobs, a couple of fenceposts... really doesn't matter. In this example, I've wound a skein round a couple of chairbacks.



The important thing is to tie it regularly, so you don't end up with an irretrievable mess of yarn. In this case, the skein is just under 2 metres (80")round, and I've tied it four times (every 50cm or 20"). If you're dealing with something really slippy like viscose ribbon, tie it more times than that (maybe every 30 cm or 12"). You can see on the photo above that I've made one tie with the main yarn (on the right), and then three extras with a contrast; this is an acrylic, because acrylic generally doesn't dye so you can find your ties easily.

The other thing to make sure of is not making the ties too tight. If you do that, you won't be able to get the dye under the ties and you'll end up with white patches. (If that's what you want, though, tie away, and you can do it deliberately!) This second pic shows you how I generally tie mine.



Edited to add - I obviously failed to follow my own advice when dyeing some sari silk on Monday night. I added a couple of extra ties for security, but didn't check what the original ties on the skein looked like! So here's a classic example of what happens if you tie it too tight...



Gah. Back to the dyepot!

Mardi Gras

Tilda; Colinette Firecracker; Mardi Gras colourway; from Winifred Cottage over the weekend. Happy Shrove Tuesday...

The weekend that was...

It was a good weekend. Completely knackering enough that I ended up taking today as emergency holiday when I couldn't lever myself out of bed; but worth doing. Here's the college bedecked in posters - I know modesty's all part of Growing Up and Being British - but every time I saw the poster I wanted to scream "Look, look; I did that"!



This is the view from my seat during the weekend. Gill had so much gorgeous stuff that I was very glad I'd made this weekend one of my Occasions for Sin. The CTH Alpine Baby, not something I'd been sold on by photos, is the most unbelievably luscious stuff when you get to fondle it...



This nylon is one of my hand-dyes; all but one skein was rehomed...



Most of this bouclé has gone to pastures new too...



And Jackie took some of this DK home for the baby kimono from the Mason Dixon book. Sorry, Jackie; the photo I took of you with your Woolly Workshop purchases was pretty awful...

A word from our sponsors...

A bit of an advert - Textiles in Focus next weekend at Cottenham Village College, High Street, Cottenham, Cambridge, CB24 8AU. 16th-18th February (Friday-Sunday) 10 am-5 pm (4:30 on Sunday). Traders, exhibitions, demonstrations, refreshments and light lunches - and there are a few workshop places left. Admission is £4 for adults, £1 under 16s, free for under 5s. I'm there teaching (embroidery), and selling some knitted items and hand-dyed yarns. I'm also unreasonably smug that this poster is all over the place locally because the background's a piece of my stitching! I'm also really looking forward to catching up with Gill from Woolly Workshop...

One bag full...

I often feel guilty about packaging. However, buying from Wingham is great. You get the card through from the post office; you get to explain to Sue-at-the-post-office what's coming this time (because she orders from them too); you bring it home and attempt to find a sharp implement...

Then you snip the cable-tie and get out the contents; in this case a lovely clean white ball of pure merino for felting...

I've been dyeing more stuff for Textiles in Focus. How the people who dye things all year round survive, I have no idea, my back's killing me... But I've made some of last year's SkipNorth stash (pale yellow nylon) into pretty things...

and at work today I got an unexpected little treat - we've had a load of stuff cleared out of the cupboards, and in the 'take this if you'd like it' things was an old streeetmap of Washington D.C., which for a West Wing nut like me was lovely.

And to add to the joy, it's a Rand McNally map, which I only actually know from Seamus Heaney's stunning poem Westering (first read at the age of 14)... From that poem on, Rand McNally's had a mythical quality... I'm sort of sad they've got fuel-requirement-calculations on the back of the map...

Poetry for St Brigid's II

This is the one I wanted to post: with permission of the author...

Forsythia

Desperate with darkness, forsythia flames out.
Madness, this: frail leaves of light, whipped wild with wind,
thrust themselves into unwilling skies,
force themselves on days that do not want to give up winter.
Only the need to be known cuts deeper,
the hunger not to be invisible.

Love is like that sometimes, and living always.

M. A. Kurtz

Poetry for St Brigid's

I heard about this idea from Mary deB, who got it from Creating Text(iles) (a blog I shall be adding to my regular reading; anyone who can be that hilarious about Margery Kempe can't be A Bad Thing...); and as it's St Brigid, and Candlemas, and the midway point between the Solstice and the Equinox, so hope of spring isn't far away, it seemed like a lovely idea.

WHAT: A Bloggers' (Silent) Poetry Reading
WHEN: Anytime February 2, 2007
WHERE: Your blog
WHY: To celebrate the Feast of Bridgid, aka Groundhog Day
HOW: Select a poem you like - by a favorite poet or one of your own - to post February 2nd.
RSVP: If you plan to publish, feel free to leave a comment and link on this post. Last year Reya put out the call and there was more poetry in cyberspace than she could keep track of. So, link to whomever you hear about this from and a mighty web of poetry will be spun.

I've read a couple of pieces of excellent new poetry this year, but haven't asked either author for permission; so will fall back on this; it's impossibly romantic, and very well-known, but I feel as if I'm always trying to create these...

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven: W. B. Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Snug as a Bug...

It wasn't long after Amelia arrived in the house before she got the name 'Bug' - Amelia - Melia - Melie - Mealy-Bug - Bug... Sometimes it's very appropriate.

Snug as a bug on a pile of yarn...

Smug as a bug next to the wound yarn...

And what passes for an arty photo round here.

So far, so good...

It's been quiet round here for a while (well, work has been a bit mental, but that's Off Topic) - my cousin-in-law Kate came over at the weekend and we ate and watched Children of Men and a Firefly episode and generally wittered which was lovely... here's the cassoulet in preparation...

It snowed last Wednesday, but not very much; looked pretty, though...

That night I taught people to start making temari, and they brought ones they had made, or had been given - aren't they beautiful? The two at the front, and the crysanthemum one in the middle, are real Japanese ones made by a friend of one of the ladies in the group. The crysanthemum has a lovely heavy core made of rice.

I dyed some more yarn: this is some bouclé which is old enough that I bought it at the closing-down sale at Creativity in New Oxford Street

and this is some Velvet Touch from the bargain bin at the LYS last year, still in its clingfilm in the steamer...

I also had a stunningly unsuccessful nuno felting session yesterday at Fibrefusion- gave up and will start again once new merino arrives from Wingham Woolwork... They demonstrated their usual efficiency and lack of regard for normal working hours - I ordered at 6:30pm last night and they acknowledged the order, sent an invoice, took payment and acknowledged the payment over the next hour and a half or so... The next attempt will involve a length of cotton fabric made on the knitting machine last night and some merino I'll hand-dye...

So; the 'so far, so good...' - the tally for Knit from Your Stash for January:

Weight of yarn knitted from stash: 1,430 grammes

Weight of yarn purchased: 0 grammes

Weight of sock yarn knitted up (aka Sock Credit): 100 grammes

And I have one of my Sanctioned Occasions for Sin in February - Textiles in Focus, and Woolly Workshop's stand...

Weekend yarn

A knitty weekend. On Saturday Cambridge KTog had its monthly afternoon meeting at Grads Café - there were 18 of us in all, the highest number I've seen! We more or less took the place over... Various people there including Becky, Lyndsey-Jane, EJ and Jo; EJ, Jo and I dropped in to see KTog founder and organiser Rosie (who was working) on our way to a wine-bar afterwards; returning from a 2pm knitting meeting at 7:30 felt pleasantly decadent... And it's always good to know that Little Sainsbury's on a Saturday night is as hellish as it ever was, Sunday opening or not.

On Sunday I spent most of the day dyeing yarn - more pics this evening, once I've wound things off into skeins again; the one above is a skein of nylon ribbon which came out duller than expected but very nicely... the struggle with ribbon is always how to stop it turning into a mouse's nest.

And speaking of which: every night I stretch out the nice soft crocheted doormat; and every morning it's turned into a Nest. If I made another one of these and put it somewhere which was actually comfortable, i.e. not right in front of the back door, what are the odds that Amelia would use it as a bed?

..."all woven bangles and ethnicity"

Ah; spoken by Brian Aldridge; bless his bigoted, adulterous little heart... hope Adam and Ian bring him something seriously naff from their honeymoon...

Was listening to Brian's moral indignation/dishonesty combo while "resetting" (Applespeak for wiping/reformatting) my iPod Shuffle using this nifty little utility; it's worked so far! First track out - Bruce Springsteen's "Leap of Faith". Pretty accurate...

Thanks to all who sent nupping advice in the comments - that stage is over, and am in the cast-off phase at the moment. And to the Sean Bean Fanclub (Stash Sub-branch)...



Some knitting. Battleship grey International Socks of Doom for a friend whose colour palette in socks is... limited...

And a link: one for Woolly Wormhead's archives - the Telephonic Ovines... these are fantastic. Not least because they get the awkward stroppiness of sheep perfectly.

Nupping madness

The last couple of nights, I've been knitting nupps. And it's been hell. There are only 22 rows of them in the project, but that's quite a lot of nupps... I'm really glad I'm Not the Only One who Has Difficulty with these...Although Fleegle makes them look easy in thick yarn... I suspect they're like bullion knots in embroidery; you love them or you develop some pathologic avoidance-thing...

But I watched Troy this evening while knitting. It's a long film - 156 minutes. I'm not overly keen on the pretty, so Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom leave me cold (although it was excellent to see the truly decorative Sean Bean in a role which didn't have 'Dead Best Friend/Dead Big Brother' written all over it from moment one, and the supporting cast like Peter O'Toole and John Shrapnel were brilliant); I'm also not a great fan of the 'thick-of-battle-people-being-beheaded-by-archers/boiling-oil-on-sticks/cannon-fire/orcs/whatever' scenes, so this should have been a good knitting film... (And thinking of massed battle scenes, this, seen first on nhw's livejournal, proves what a relatively sane activity knitting is... Although not if you're a yarn company owner with a sock club. Obviously).

That was without the nupps, though. 7 rows, I did. 7 rows in two and a half hours... I'll be thinking very hard before I go a-nupping again. More successful than last night though, when my West Wing episode (I'm working at one-a-week speed and have just got to Season 7) had me yelling at the screen so often I ended up switching to plain stocking-stitch...

Can't blog the project in question for a while, so in the meantime, here's a completely gratuitous photo of Amelia on some newly-dyed yarn... I'll shut up now...

Things that make you wonder...

They're changing our postcodes round here - Cambridge, like Paris, has a postcode system which mainly goes out in spokes from a point in the middle (the old main sorting office, now Petersfield Mansions); but unlike Paris (and I really don't want to start detailing the ways Cambridge is unlike Paris) has no outer circle. So my postcode at work is only one subdivision away from my postcode at home; and my work postcode is in the same subdivision as a village about 8 miles distant... Now that we appear to be the Building Capital of the South-East, the Post Office is in imminent danger of running out of postcodes, so the outer circle has been designated as '20-land' - CB21-25 ...

And to that end the kind people at the Royal Mail, in conjunction with the Able-Label people who evidently have nooooo interest in postcode changes, none at all (hey, maybe I can send them back the 500 labels they did for me two weeks before the change was announced...), have sent out some sticky labels with the new postcode on it, and a leaflet.

In a resealable envelope. Which has then been heat-sealed to ensure it is no longer resealable... WTF?

New Year knitting

So, this week's been a strange one - yet another minor re-organisation at work, gales which always keep me awake wondering how much of my rather elderly roof will still be there in the morning, and finally some sort of stomach bug in the early hours - have spent the day knitting, re-reading Gaudy Night after an e-mail conversation about a quote I can't find yet, and doing a bit of dyeing as a modicum of energy returned...

I'm doing a stand at Textiles in Focus again this year, so have started knitting for it - I've been stashbusting with a combination of chunky and novelty yarns:

So the photos above are three scarves - unsurprisingly, a lot of my stash is purple - knitted lengthwise on size 11 Denises - takes about one and a half feature films per scarf. The top one was To Kill a Mockingbird, which is a long film; the middle one was Presumed Innocent (carrying on with the Pakula-fest) and a West Wing episode (because three of the WW cast turned up in PI, as if I ever need an excuse); and this one was more West Wing and A Few Good Men (because they're both Sorkin)... I think the next logical move would be to re-watch The American President and then I can veer off to Apocalypse Now because of the Martin Sheen connection; but actually, I've got Troy out of the library to watch this weekend...

And this scarf, which I love, in 3 balls of Lang Mille Colori - short-rows, learned from Rosie, but worked several times in the same direction before turning... This one's going to be difficult to put on the stand...!

Other knitting is going on - some of it unbloggable, some of it just more-of-the-same - nobody wants to see a picture of St Brigid with 24 more rows done, including me...

Stylish socks...

I realised at Christmas I hadn't taken a photo of Dad's socks, either in the making or in the wearing... He's just sent me a fabulous one...


Socks: Regia Stretch, colourway 'Skater'. Pattern, 'Baby Cable Rib' from "Sensational Knitted Socks", by Charlene Schurch (aka Charlotte Church, aka Caroline Scrunch). Phonograph and "table": Dad's own...

Christmas 4

The last of the Christmas posts - just as well as, contrary to the date on the top of this post, which is when I started it, it's Twelfth Night!


Between Christmas and New Year I went down to London to meet Jan at the BL - not for literary purposes, but because their café is a great place to hang around for ages and exchange gifts; decent-sized tables, some of them hidden round the corner, reasonable food and hot drinks; and weirdly they don't look twice at people dragging wheely suitcases in and out of a library. Which always seems slightly odd to me; but very convenient!


Jan's blogged her gifts from me, but here's a pic of her in her new scarf:




And here's Tilda modelling the wonderful shawl Jan gave me - there's a Bad picture of me in it on her blog - I'll let you go there yourselves...



Strangely, we were both knitting Forest Canopy Shoulder Shawls at the same time. I mean, what were the odds... This one is in Hand Maiden Sea Silk, probably from Stash, and it's absolutely gorgeous. People have raved to me about the Sea Silk but I've only seen it in the skein and it didn't sing to me - now I can see why... Incidentally, this is the same colourway (Vintage) I used for Mam's Icarus shawl - so I dug out the spare yarn from that to illustrate how different the colours are on different yarns:

I love that about dyeing... Get Knitted had the yarns arranged by colour on their stand at the NEC in September and it was fascinating seeing how differently the yarns took the colours. Here are some more knitty gifts from Jan...

The books are fabulous - most of the actual patterns are for table linens, but the charts are wonderful and a pattern from the first book was used for the Yarn Harlot's wedding shawl (entry for October 24). The yarn is Colinette Jitterbug (in Fruit Coulis), the snowman is a row-counter, and the blue object on the right is a compact case for circulars. On top of that are some stitch-markers from MLQ: here's a close-up of those...

Pretty, eh?

And last, a photo of one of the remaining pieces of Christmas knitting, finally delivered to its recipient last night: International Socks of Doom in Socka Limbo. There was also a pair of broken rib socks in Regia Tibet, but I seem not to have photographed those!

... and of Kate's Clapotis, (delicately accessorised with an old tea-towel, I note) in Rowan Tapestry in the Rainbow shade handed over on Boxing Day but somehow never blogged... Only took 4 balls which I thought was pretty good...

Christmas 3

On the basis that Christmas goes on until Epiphany... some pretty gifts from family:

These are little perfume bottles which just looked good in the shell on the bathroom windowsill...

... and these earrings have citrines, amethysts and peridots in them - probably my favourite stones (the tray/beaker came from Venice earlier in the year...)

And some yarny gifts - a heap of assorted eyelash etc. in purple, some of which has already been knitted up into scarves (pics later)... and a tape measure. I loved these tape measures - bought two for friends and so nearly didn't hand the second one over - and then my brother and SIL got me one!

The other knitting-type gift was a set of blocking wires from Heirloom Knitting - here they are in action blocking my Christmas present to myself (yes, the dark shape on the mattress is a cat...)

This is the Forest Canopy shoulder shawl , in Cherry Tree Hill Glitter Alpaca from Woolly Workshop - if I'd just followed the pattern completely, I'd have got it out of one skein, but I had two so carried on for several more repeats. In the end, I cut it a little fine for comfort...