Category: knitting

Ups and downs

"My face hurts" First drawing with Sketches on the ipad, 17/02/14

So, last Friday was Valentine’s Day. In our continued tradition of unequal gift-giving, I gave my husband a card, and he gave me an iPad! Admittedly he was going to give me the iPad anyway – he’s just upgraded to a new one, and I’ve inherited his old one with a nice new case. But he certainly gained a great deal of brownie points by wrapping it up in lovely paper!

I’ve been downloading lots of exciting new apps, mostly ones for drawing and sketching with. I’ve chosen a few free ones that I can try out, before I decide which ones I like best and want to pay for. The drawing above was done with an app called Sketches, and it mirrors the theme of this past week. It’s titled “My Face Hurts”.

Fibromyalgia + toothache = unhappy face.

Also on Valentine’s Day, I had to go to the dentist. Luckily we didn’t have a romantic meal planned for the evening, because I ended up having a tooth taken out! Four days later it’s still really painful, and the fibromyalgia doesn’t like it at all. Much to my frustration my face now acts as a warning beacon when I’m in a lot of pain, and this is how I came home from work today. Lovely! Given that I have a public-facing job, and it’s half term this week, I can only hope that I’m not scaring too many children away from the museum!

Green Cardigan

This rather different picture of me, from all the way back in 2008, is the cover photo for the first knitting pattern I designed. After a comment left on the blog by someone trying to track down a copy, I was prompted to open my own Ravelry store, and this is currently the only pattern in it.

I do have three existing patterns that I can add (also available in the Tutorials section to the right there), but I need to work out how to do that without duplicating the original patterns, as I seem to have done with this cardigan. I also have two completely new patterns ready and waiting, but they’re both waiting for photographs. All of my test knits were given away as Christmas presents, so I need to sit down and knit some new ones so that I can have a photo shoot. The temptation to dye my hair pink for the occasion is now extremely high!

What I Did At The Weekend

Paul's Birthday Cupcakes

I know it’s Wednesday already, but I had a few days off work at the end of last week and the beginning of this one, so it all blurred into one lovely long weekend where I basically did nothing. Well, I was ill for a couple of days, which is what really prompted me to think that Doing Nothing for a while would be a really good idea. And it was.

During these days off, Paul had a birthday. While he was out I thought I’d try a little experiment, and I baked a batch of cupcakes! To be perfectly honest, they didn’t turn out that well. They didn’t really rise, and the chocolate didn’t really melt, so they looked a bit funny, and they weren’t light and fluffy so much as dense and a bit strange. But, they tasted nice, and several people have eaten them without complaining of a stomach ache, so perhaps they weren’t as bad as all that! Still, I think I’ll stick to sewing.

Poole Twintone Dinner Service

After a lovely birthday lunch with Paul’s parents, we brought back with us several boxes of crockery which used to belong to Paul’s Nan. She couldn’t take all of this with her when she moved into residential care, so we are now the very excited owners (well, let’s be honest, I’m a lot more excited than Paul is!) of a Poole Twintone dinner service! We must be missing a box though, as none of the coffee pots have their lids, and we have one rectangular lid with nothing to sit on. The set is so extensive because it was added to over many years, received as gifts, and picked up at antique shops and car boot sales. That explains the seventeen (seventeen!) tea cups…

yarma

While all of this nothing was going on, I managed to make myself a Very Bright hat. The picture above is from Yarma, a $0.99 app that allows you to upload photos to Ravelry straight from your phone. It does have filters built into it, but the hat really is that bright!

yarma

The yarns are all hand dyed. The pink background is a cochineal-dyed cashmere from Elisabeth Beverley at Plant Dyed Wool, and the stripes are hand-spun Blue-faced Leicester mini-skeins by The Outside. (I wrote about them over here.)

The hat was going really well, until I reached the very last decrease row. Somehow I managed to pull one of the circular needles out of the stitches, and because the row below was also full of decreases I couldn’t figure out how to get all of the stitches back onto the needles again in the right order. (Hence the mess you can see in the Yarma photo above.) Thankfully the stripes gave me an excellent place to rip back to, so I very carefully picked up the last row of orange stitches and worked the decrease section again. Phew! The pattern is Wurm, which I’ve knitted I think three times now.

I still don’t quite know how I ended up with a hat though. I’ve been spending weeks walking to the bus stop in the cold thinking, “I must knit myself a pair of gloves or mittens, these fingerless ones are too cold”. I had every intention of working up a pair of lovely rainbow-striped gloves that would keep my fingers warm on the way to the bus stop. But then I would have needed to divide all of the little skeins in half… and work out how many rows to knit in each colour, so that all the stripes were the same size… and the next thing I knew, there was a nice, simple hat flying off the needles.

I do have a little bit of yarn left over though, in all eight colours. Just enough to knit yet another pair of fingerless mittens, knowing my luck!

Cowls and snoods

Gold silk feather & fan snood

According to my definition (I don’t know whether it’s the same as anybody else’s), a cowl and a snood are both a tube of fabric that sits around your neck. The difference between them is that a cowl stays there, whereas a snood is long enough that it can be pulled up and over the top of your head. The snood above is one that I knitted for a Christmas present, and I have to admit I was quite sad to give it away. Thankfully there’s enough yarn left over (Fyberspates Scrumptious Laceweight) that I might one day get around to knitting another one for myself.

Grey & black snood

This one I made today, from a remnant of soft cotton/viscose blend jersey, and half an old t-shirt of Paul’s. It needs to be a smidge longer, so that it can cover the head without creating a chilly gap at the back of the neck, but its size was determined by the materials available. Next time I’ll start with yardage, and make it a little bit longer. I quite fancy a fleecy version of this as well, as long as it doesn’t bunch up too much under the chin.

Black & floral cowl

The main endeavour of the day has been drafting a pattern and making up a few cowls, which are now listed in the Etsy shop. I’ve been wondering for ages what on earth I could make from the remnants of jersey fabrics in the stash, and sitting with a very cold neck at work the other day prompted these cosy little neck warmers! They just pull on over the head, and you can either drape them in an artistic and casual fashion, or fold them down neatly like a turtleneck. The floral one is the same on both sides, and the spotty & stripy one is reversible. I’ve listed two of those on Etsy, though I’m extremely tempted to keep one for myself. (I’m keeping the stripy snood though, so perhaps two grey neck-warming things is a bit much.)

Grey & black spotty & stripy cowl

One of the things I really need to improve this year is the photos for my Etsy listings. Despite my endless wittering on Facebook, the vast majority of the visitors to my little shop are coming from within Etsy itself, so I need to upgrade my listings to attract as many views as I can. I like the white face with the white wig – I think it gives a context to the photos whilst keeping the emphasis firmly on the product. However, I am aware that the polystyrene lady looks a little… well… cheap. Sadly, having spent all my money on hat blocks, I can’t afford to upgrade her for a classier model any time soon, so I’ve been thinking about how I could get rid of the polystyrene texture. Papier maché, perhaps, with a layer of white paint over the top? I also need to improve my listing photos generally. They look fine on my Mac at home, but on any other computer they seem very grey and dull, which isn’t quite the look I want to go for! Perhaps a little re-calibration is in order.

I’m aware that everything I’ve posted here lately has been “Look, I made a thing!”. This must be especially dull if you’re already following The Eternal Magpie page on Facebook, as I tend to post all my Things over there as I go along. There is other stuff rumbling along in the background (I broke a tooth, my job is changing, the new house keeps throwing challenges our way, my health is still a mess), I’m just not quite sure what to say about it all just yet. I have a few days off work at the end of this week and the beginning of next, so I’m hoping to take some time to have a bit of a think. (Probably enforced by dental anaesthetic, yuck.) I’m really enjoying all of the Things I’m making at the moment though, and I hope you are too.

Progress on the pattern, and a sock cheat-sheet!

Re-writing the pattern

Well, the knitting pattern’s still in progress. I finished knitting the first test-mitten in the larger size yesterday, and when Paul came home and tried it on for me, it was revealed to be ENORMOUS. So, after consultation with regard to how exactly Paul likes his mittens (apart from Not At All, which he doesn’t really get a choice about, being married to a knitter), I have now re-written the instructions for the larger size. I could have unravelled the Very Large Mitten, but I spent ages working out how to make a cable pattern fit on the back of the hand, and it seems a shame to let all that work go to waste. So I’m knitting the matching one anyway.

I’ve now printed out several copies of the pattern, so I can keep notes about each pair of mittens and any alterations I might continue to make. I have two test-knitters ready to go, but if anyone else would like to give the pattern a try, please let me know! I can email you a pdf file of the latest draft, but you’ll need to supply your own needles and yarn.

Judy's Magic Cast On

This is a sock toe, my first knitted using Judy’s Magic Cast On. At first I couldn’t get the hang of it, but now I’ve got the crossing-over part figured out, it really is like magic! Next I need to figure out how to cast on two socks at once using this method. That would really knock Second Sock Syndrome (where you absolutely can’t face knitting the second one) on the head. And make sure they both come out the same. (Harder than you might think.)

When I first learned how to knit socks, I made myself a cheat sheet. I use the slip-stitch heel pattern from Wendy D. Johnson’s book, Socks from the Toe Up. I very heartily recommend this book – it has lots of different options for casting on, three different types of heel, and lots of patterns to plug into your socks once you’ve got the basics figured out.

But, I don’t want to carry the entire book around in my sock-knitting bag, which is where the cheat sheet comes in. I know how to knit socks now, but I need reminders of how and when to turn the heel, and how to do a stretchy cast off, and how many rows I knitted on the first sock, so I can make the second one the same. Hence the cheat sheet.

Because I find it so useful I thought it would be nice to share it, so I’ve uploaded it to a tutorial page. I should say that the original pattern obviously remains © Wendy D. Johnson, and you really do need her book for the full instructions! The sheet isn’t a full sock pattern in its own right, it’s just some helpful reminders for when you haven’t got the book in front of you.

Meanwhile, I’ll be knitting yet another test mitten, and hoping that this one turns out to be a normal human hand size!

Mitten pattern…

Mitten pattern

So, the weekend’s knitting was derailed a little bit, when I decided it would be a good idea to invent a pair of mittens, knit them, and write up the pattern for publication. As you do.

I’ve knitted the first pair of mittens, in the smaller size, and have written up the pattern. (Easier said than done, maths has never been my strong point!) I like tickyboxes in my knitting patterns, so I can easily scribble all over them and keep track of what I’m doing. I’m currently knitting the mittens in the larger size, so I can make sure it’s definitely possible to get two mittens out of one ball of wool.

The design is extremely simple, and the pattern’s hopefully written in such a way that a beginner can understand it. Because the mittens are so plain, I think the back of the hand would make an excellent place to practice simple lace motifs or cable patterns. If I can figure out how to write up some modifications without making the pattern a dozen pages long, I might give that a try too. Meanwhile… back to knitting these cuffs!

Weekend Knitting

Feather & Fan

This weekend so far has been mostly about the knitting. Paul and I are both in the grip of a minor lurgy, and there isn’t a great deal we can do to hurry the house move along, so it seemed like the perfect time to have a quiet day curled up on the sofa.

The picture above is a lovely laceweight cowl, which I thought I’d almost finished… but now I think I might only be halfway through. Because the silk & merino yarn is so fine, it folds down to almost nothing when you wear it. So I’m going to double the length, which will allow it to be pulled up over the head and worn as a snood as well as just a cowl.

I’m really enjoying knitting this, it’s very therapeutic. Only one row in six is patterned, so just as you start to think you might get a bit bored of nothing but plain knitting, a simple patterned row comes along to make you concentrate for a minute or two. Even though I’m quite a slow knitter, this one seems to be coming along quite quickly.Hopefully it’ll carry on that way, because I’ve got quite a lot more knitting to do between now and Christmas!

Raspberry Muffin

Raspberry Muffin Childry

Not the cakey kind, more’s the pity, but a shawl I’ve been knitting since I bought the yarn in May.

The pattern is Childry, from the Simply Knitting Handknit Christmas supplement 2012. I knitted one for my sister last year, and liked it so much that I wanted one for myself. This one’s a bit smaller than I would have liked, but the yarn’s a bit thicker, so there wasn’t quite as much yardage (just over 300 metres, rather than 460)  in the 100 grams.

The yarn is Jillybean‘s “Knot Another Granny Yarn”, in the Raspberry Muffin colourway. It’s handspun from Dorset Poll, Hebridean and Suffolk Mix, and then hand dyed, resulting in a totally unique skein of yarn each time. It’s a teensy bit itchy for my liking, so this will definitely be a scarf for wearing over the top of a jumper rather than next to the skin. It’s really warm though, so it’ll be perfect for keeping out the chill in winter.

I’d have liked the ruffle to be a bit longer, but even the little one here took up a third of the yarn. Knitting the row that triples the number of stitches is soul-destroying, so knowing that I still had, say half, of the shawl to knit from that point on… urgh. My hands hurt just thinking about it. A third was quite enough.

As it turned out, I could probably have squeezed just one more row onto the ruffle (making ooh, a whole 3mm difference!), but having run out of yarn whilst casting off my sister’s, I decided to err on the side of caution this time. When I tried the shawl on it was clear that it needed a fastening of some description, so I knitted a bit of icord with all of the remaining yarn. I thought it might look a bit twee with a little bow in front, but actually I quite like it. If it does look twee, please don’t tell me. I prefer to remain blissfully ignorant about these things!

Knitting: works in progress

Jillybean shawl

As my sewing things in the Shed are gradually being packed away, my focus is shifting across to knitting. This is a Childry shawl, knitted in Jillybean‘s Knot Another Granny Yarn. I’ve just reached the soul-destroying part, which is the row where you triple the stitch count to make the ruffle. Each row now takes about half an hour to knit… but it does mean that the end of the shawl is in sight!

Colinette shawl

This one is another Childry, in a long-discontinued Colinette yarn. I don’t think this one’s going to be as big as a shawl (it’s only about six inches long at the moment), but I think it’ll make a nice little neckwarmer.

Striped Tank

These colours aren’t quite right – it’s a lovely maroon and dusky pink combination. The pattern is Echinacea, by Rita Taylor. You’ll notice that mine isn’t exactly the same as the one on Ravelry. I utterly loathe doing colour work, so after only a few rows the flowers were unravelled and transformed into stripes. Eventually this will be a lovely square-ish tank top to wear at work.

Forest Scarf

This Kidsilk Haze Stripe was originally bought to make a jumper. After eighteen months I’d only knitted three inches of the first sleeve, because knitting complicated lace in mohair that’s impossible to unravel turned out to be a really bad idea! So now it’s almost turning into the scarf pattern that’s printed on the ball band. I say “almost” because the borders up the sides of the scarf are supposed to be in moss stitch, but I seem to have been knitting them in garter stitch for quite a while. Given that I can’t see where the change happened amidst the fluff of the mohair, I’m going to make the executive decision that it doesn’t matter!

Golden Cowl

This one’s my new favourite. I bought the yarn on Saturday, wound it up into a ball (all one thousand metres of it!), and started designing straight away. It’s eventually going to be a lovely little golden cowl for a Christmas present. In fact, I’m hoping there’s going to be enough yarn to make two, as I already don’t want to give this one away!

The nice thing about having a lot of knitting on the go is that I can pick and choose depending on the state of my hands and the length of my concentration span. The nice thing about a lot of it being very simple knitting is that it frees up my mind to think about other things, while my hands just take care of the stitches. (Mostly. When they’re not knitting garter stitch instead of moss stitch by mistake.) At the moment I’m thinking about cowls and mittens and interchangeable lace patterns, and maybe a little booklet to show them off. We’ll see. For now I just need to make sure that I’ve got enough knitting available to keep me as sane as possible during the house move.

My first handspun yarn!

Plied handspun yarn

Well, it took me long enough, but today I took my singles off the drop spindle, and turned it into yarn! I wound it off onto a plastic bottle which took the place of a nostepinne. I was then able to use both ends of the same yarn, and ply them together with the spindle.

My first handspun!

And here it is – my very first ball of handspun yarn. A whole ten grams of thick-and-thin, funny-coloured, badly spun, badly plied hand made yarn!

Little Mikey's Monstrous Scarf

I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to knit with such a little amount of yarn. (I wasn’t able to spin any more because the spindle needed to be emptied before the spinning workshop that’s running next week.) It turned out that Little Mikey was in need of a scarf, so I thought my monstrous handspun would be the perfect yarn! I used my Simplest Scarf in the World tutorial, with two 5mm needles and one 12mm. It came out just long enough, and I’ve saved the last couple of inches of yarn as a memento.

I have to say that ticking the “my handspun” box on Ravelry was very satisfying. I hope I’m able to make a lot more!

2012 round-up

I’ve been thinking about this post for a week, and I kept putting it off because I felt as though it wasn’t really worth making. Each year I like to look back at everything that I’ve made, but this last year I don’t seem to have made anything very much!

Of course there were the theatre costumes for Neverwhere, which I still haven’t shown in their entirety. They took up most of January. May was dominated by several Steampunk outfits, including a ball gown. From August to December I was working five days a week instead of three, and from October onwards I was also volunteering, so I suppose I didn’t really have as much time as usual to make things. I also haven’t been trying to run a business this year, so I’ve been doing more things just for the sake of trying them out, which means I’ve got a lot of unfinished bits and pieces lying around that didn’t really fit into this collage.

I just can’t help looking at this picture and feeling a bit miserable, as though I’ve done nothing with the past twelve months. I love to make things, and it does make me sad when I don’t have time to do it. I think this year, I need to find a better balance.