Month: November 2009

Mmmmm, boots.

It’s a good job I’m not a goth any more. Nor a costumer, nor simply a collector of amazing shoes.

Otherwise I’d have to buy these:

Probably in the black velvet.

(Available here, for £60. They’re by Pleaser.)

Seeing these has put me straight into the mood for wearing the most enormous skirt, and a tailored jacket or frock coat.

Sometimes I miss dressing up.

Clearly I need to get myself invited to an incredibly lavish costume party, for which I can concoct an outfit made entirely from fabrics that I already have in my stash. Then I might be able to justify buying the boots to go with it!

Walking in the Dark Hat

Light-up hat

This is my latest project – my Walking in the Dark Hat.

I’ve had a reel of very narrow light-reflective tape for years, but I could never think of what to do with it. Since I started clog dancing, I’ve been walking down to the rehearsals. When I’m on my bike I wear a high-visibility jacket, so I thought that I should probably be slightly more visible when I was walking too.

The wool is Wendy Zena, in a grey colourway with a silver thread running through it. I thought that would help to disguise the reflective tape when it wasn’t dark.

Unfortunately the reflective tape presents a couple of difficulties. Firstly, it’s only reflective on one side. As the tape twists when you knit, quite a lot of the reflective surface is lost to the inside of the hat. Secondly, it’s rather crunchy! I’m not sure that “crunchy” is a quality that I’d look for in a hat, so I may end up having to line it once it’s done.

The pattern is Heads Are Round (from the top down), by Crazy Monkey Creations. It’s the second time I’ve used this pattern, and the second time I’ve got into a mess with the stitch count after the first few rows. I’ve just discovered that there’s been a correction to the pattern in the fifth row, which should hopefully put me right.

O W L hugs…

Sirdar Hug

I popped into town the other day, and while I was waiting for a bus I decided to nip into Jacksons. I’m glad I did, because they just happened to have a great big basket of Sirdar Hug for just £1.20 a ball! This means that for just £14.40, I now have enough wool to knit a whole jumper, and I’m thinking of O W L S.

So, I went and looked at the pattern on Ravelry, and looked at all the different O W L S that other people have knitted and, having coveted the pattern ever since I first saw it, I came to a difficult conclusion.

I do want owls, but I don’t want O W L S.

I’d like my jumper to be longer, but I don’t know how far the yarn will go, so I’d like to knit something from the top down rather than from the bottom up. I don’t really like knitting in the round – the constant knitting without the variation of the purl rows makes my wrists ache. I think that big jumpers need seams to give them a certain amount of structural integrity, especially at the shoulders, to stop them from stretching and twisting all over the place. (I don’t know whether that’s actually true, or whether I just think that way because I’m a dressmaker, where everything has seams.) Also, I might need to do a bit of swatching. The yarn band recommends using 8mm needles, but it looks much better for 6½s to me.

If a swatch on 6½mm needles comes out with a nice fabric that isn’t too stiff, I might take the easy option and replicate my favourite pirate jumper, (here’s a non-Ravelry link) only with owls instead of skulls.

I’ll knit the front and back from the armscye to the neck from the bottom up, incorporating a purl ridge for the row of owls to sit on. Then, once I’ve knitted the sleeves, I can divide the remaining yarn into two, pick up the stitches, and knit downwards until the jumper is as long as the yarn will allow. The purl ridge will neatly disguise the join. I might even add a bit of a chunky leaf lace motif to the sleeves and hem, inspired by Teva Durham’s Lace Leaf Pullover. Although I sold the book with that pattern in it because I didn’t get on with wrangling such heavily process-driven knitting. Still, I’m sure I can make something up.

Hang on… didn’t I just say somewhere that this would be the “easy” option?

Hmm.

Square Format

Frog

This is the big fat frog that hopped out from underneath the broken fence as we were pulling it down. He didn’t seem too keen to get out of our way – Paul had to rather unceremoniously pick him up and plop him down in next door’s plant pot!

This morning, whilst wandering around on Flickr, I joined a group for square format photographs. I tend to crop my nature photos into squares, so it seemed like an interesting place to look around and see what other people were doing.

In one of the discussion threads there was a conversation about square format digital cameras. That’s where I found out about the Rollieflex MiniDigi. It’s styled exactly like the original Rollei twin lens reflex camera, but it’s teeny-tiny! (Smaller than this frog, in fact.) Unfortunately it costs over £350, and the resolution’s only 3 megapixels, but it does look as though it would be fun to use. Also, cute!

(Not that “cute” is my primary criterion for choosing things. Of course not. “Does it come in pink?” is much more important. Obviously.)

Honeymoon photos!

Juvenile Siberian Eagle Owl
These are the photos from Centre Parcs – mostly of owls.
I’m quite pleased with these, although I missed a lot of great shots of the owls by being much too slow!

London Zoo
These are the photos from London – mostly of the aquarium and the zoo.
Sadly a lot of these are either out of focus, or focussed in slightly the wrong place. I’m going to blame the poor light conditions, the fact that most of them were taken through glass, water or mesh, and the fact that I’ve never really worked out how to make the most of the 200mm lens.

Mr & Mrs Smith Go On Honeymoon
These are the honeymoon photos of a certain Mr & Mrs Smith – who travelled with us wherever we went.
My Mum knitted these little figures for us, and we thought they deserved a little holiday of their own!

I realise that I haven’t shown you any photos of the wedding yet. We haven’t had the pictures back from the official photographer, and we’re waiting for those before we compile an online album. There are quite a few pictures starting to show up on Facebook, and I do have photos of everything that Paul and I made ourselves, so we should have something to show you very soon.

Just keep swimming…

Aquarium

We came back from our honeymoon to discover that a big chunk of the garden fence had blown down in the storms, most of my photos from London are out of focus, and I have several hundred emails to wade through. Also the house is a mess, there’s a ton of laundry to do, and the Shed is impossible to work in because it’s full of all the mess that we relocated to make more space in the house.

Welcome home, Mr and Mrs Smith!

Much as I’m glad to be home (and I am very glad to be home, despite all the chores that need to be done), it’s always a bit of a culture shock to come home from a holiday and suddenly be plunged back into Real Life again.

I have a whole mess of ideas brewing in terms of future plans and trying to earn a bit of money somehow. But for now I need to sort out the mess that’s in the house and in the Shed before I can get to work on anything at all.

Encounter With Owls…

Eagle Owl

I’m just dropping in for a flying visit to upload the photos from the first part of our honeymoon – you can see them all here.

Yesterday we had a Falconry session in the morning, and an Encounter With Owls in the afternoon. This enormous chap was featured in both. His name’s Woolly, and he’s an Eagle Owl.

We also met a Merlin called Angel, a Gyr/Peregrine Falcon called Romeo, a Harris Hawk called Miller, and lots and lots of owls.

I have to confess that I am a huge fan of birds in general, and birds of prey in particular, so getting to spend a couple of hours getting to feed them and fly them to the glove was absolutely amazing.

You can tell how much I enjoyed it by my enormous grin – that’s Woolly on my arm. I’m leaning slightly away from him because I’d already learnt the hard way that his wings were long enough to hit me in the face!

I don’t know of anywhere local that rescues or rehabilitates birds, but I might have to do a bit of research when I get home. It would be brilliant to be able to have contact with birds like this more often.