Having a go at weaving.

Today Paul and I went to our local Fun Day, organised by the Lions Club. We go every year, primarily to see the ferrets. The Hants and Berks Ferret Club bring lots of ferrets with them, and they have races, which are hilarious! The ferrets run through an obstacle course of pipes and bridges and seesaws. Last year we managed to place a bet on the slowest ferret of all – he stopped half way through the race to have a nice long drink from the water obstacle! Today I got to cuddle a ferret called Zorro. He was adorable, although extremely wriggly. Thankfully he (and his owner) didn’t seem to mind when he squirmed right out of my arms and landed on the floor!

We have a pet rabbit, so there’s no way we could keep a ferret at the same time. It just wouldn’t be fair to the rabbit to bring a predator into his home. In the meantime though, we’re quite happy to visit the Hants and Berks Ferret Club when they’re in our area.

After playing with the ferrets I headed straight for the crafts tent, where there was a weaving display set up. I was immediately overcome by the wool fumes, and as soon as I’d picked up a little skein of wool for a squish, I was encouraged to have a go on the makeshift looms.

Lower Earley Fun Day - weaving

Here I am, a couple of rows in. I believe I was doing weft-faced weaving, as the warp threads would have been completely hidden if we’d been packing the rows together tightly enough.

Look at the little boy opposite me, in the football shirt. He has the most intense look of concentration about him, and he was weaving away for ages!

Lower Earley Fun Day - weaving

Here’s my finished bit of weaving!

I really enjoyed doing it, and am very tempted by the idea of buying a little table loom of some kind. When my hands won’t allow me to knit any more, I think a little light weaving would be an interesting way to carry on having fun with yarn.

Paul took the photos on his new iPhone, and he was checking his email as I was weaving away. Something of a technology clash going on there! It worked to everyone’s benefit though, as one of the ladies in charge of the weaving demonstration has asked us to email the photos to her, “to demonstrate that anyone can do weaving”.

We chatted a little as I played with a piece of lovely soft roving which matched my hair. As soon as I picked it up, it seemed totally natural to twist it between my fingers. I think perhaps I should back away slowly from the idea of weaving, before I find my house filled with roving and a drop-spindle.

Never mind ferrets – please can I have a sheep?

Silk socks and a passionflower.

I have a confession to make.

I am in love with my new socks. And they’re not even socks yet!

I honestly thought I’d be bored by the monotony of knitting every single row, but the self-striping yarn is absolutely fascinating to watch. How wide will my stripes be? Which colour’s coming next? I also thought I’d get cross with faffing about half way through every row, but I’m so relieved not to be wrestling with a set of double-pointed needles that Magic Loop is wondrous by comparison! The yarn is beautiful, the little needles don’t hurt my hands, and I believe I may have found my new vocation. Sock knitting is brilliant.

 Silk sock in a passionflower...

My knitting friends are turning out to be such a bad influence. Who’d have thought it?

We’ve been talking about socks, and hyperbolic crochet, and lace patterns knitted in aran weight wool, and teasing one another with links to the most beautiful yarns you’ve ever seen.

I have a comparatively small yarn stash, thanks to a comparatively small yarn budget, but I am now fighting a desperate urge to buy ALL THE SOCK YARN. You know, in case there’s a shortage, or something.

And, of course, you don’t have to use sock yarn just for knitting socks! I went to have a look through the pattern archives at Knitty, and stumbled across this amazingly beautiful pattern that I hadn’t spotted before.  Reversible lacy cables. Knitted in sock yarn. Wow.

I might need some help to decipher the chart, but that one’s definitely going in my Ravelry queue.

I knitted on my sock yesterday while I was waiting at the hospital to have some scans and x-rays done. When I sat down I realised that I’d forgotten my cable needle, and my next row was full of cables! Being a resourceful type of person, I pulled out the toothpick from my Swiss Army Card, and cabled with that.

In the course of two waiting rooms I overheard at least six older ladies talking about how on earth I was knitting a sock on such a peculiar needle, yet not one person came over to ask me about it. Usually people are keen to chat about knitting, especially when they see a strange woman with pink hair doing it. Perhaps it was the look of intense concentration and the toothpick that put them off…

A tiny piece of history.

Inspired by Ruth Singer, I’ve spent this afternoon making a wall hanging organiser for all my reels of thread.

(Possibly not the cleverest thing to do when suffering with a bad wrist and a splitting headache, but hey.)

My new thread organiser

Take one enormous cork board, a hundred and eighteen panel pins, and a big hammer…

Grandma Rose's old sewing threads

I particularly like “Turkey Red Shade” and “Dk. Shrimp”. Giving all of the colours numbers instead of names just isn’t as much fun.

Vintage threads

I think these are my favourites. “Barbour’s Linen Thread” is perfect for sewing together my little shoes – I only wish I could buy some more!

The Glacé threads are very fine, but strong enough for sewing shoes, books and bags. The 40 weight is also good for quilting, apparently.

Less than forty of the threads on that board are mine – the rest came from my Grandma Rose and my Aunty Sue. My Grandma’s 87 now (I think), and I haven’t known her to do much sewing during the past 34 years, so some of those threads must be pretty old. I don’t know that I’d want to use some of the oldest cottons for sewing seams, but they’d be lovely for decorative work.

I’m extremely amused to notice that, with very few exceptions, these reels of thread represent three generations of loyalty to the same brand. Sylko, Drima and Coats have all become merged over the years, into the thread division of Coats Crafts.

Shame the packaging isn’t as beautiful as it used to be.

Summer jumper

I’m in the process of knitting a variation on Colinette’s Madelene pattern. It’s in the Parisienne book, but I’m knitting it with Banyan instead. I succumbed to a bargain lot of Banyan on Ebay, and I quite fancied a loosely-knitted cotton jumper for the summer. The colourway is Neptune.

 Colinette Banyan Madelene jumperColinette Banyan Madelene jumper

This is the back, and it feels as though it’s taken forever to knit. It’s actually worked up quite quickly, as every fourth row is knitted on a 10mm needle, but it’s garter stitch so it’s incredibly boring to work on. It’s also hurting my hands quite a bit, so I’m not spending as much time on it as I’d like to.

I don’t know why this particular project should be hurting my hands so much. Perhaps because the yarn doesn’t stretch and give. Perhaps because it’s heavy. Perhaps using the different sized needles is awkward – that certainly makes for slower knitting. Perhaps it’s because all I’m doing is knit, knit, knit, without the variation for my hands of purling every alternate row.

It’s a shame, as I really like the way this fabric is knitting up, and I’m really looking forward to wearing the jumper. I had been thinking of making some more, perhaps in some of the Cadenza colourways, but I don’t think that’s going to be a very clever idea.

Perhaps I’ll go back to my 1980s Patons “Odpins” book. All of the patterns in there are knitted with various combinations of large and small needles. I must be able to work out something similar which isn’t going to be so hard on my hands.

Preparing the badges…

The Reveal Showcase exhibition starts next weekend, and just for once I’m prepared well in advance!

I’ve spent today preparing all the badges for display. I’ve used mini cards and postcards from Moo for my packaging. I’m a big fan of Moo, and the mini cards are just the perfect size:

REVEAL Showcase preparation

I have forty individual badges, and twenty sets of four. I have no idea whether this is far too many, or nowhere near enough. I guess I’ll find out as the week of the exhibition goes on. I have plenty more materials, so I can always put together some more if I need to. (Or sell them at the next Art Market, if I end up bringing them all home again…)

My only concern now is how to display all of the postcards and mini cards at the exhibition itself. I don’t really want to spend money on a fancy stand that I’ll never use again, and I don’t really want to spend all of next week making something wonky out of cardboard.

What I really need is a pretty letter rack, or maybe a vintage toast rack of some kind…

Get Knitted!

I would like to take a moment to sing the praises of Get Knitted. I ordered some yarn and needles from them on Friday, and they’ve arrived today. (Tuesday.) Their postage rates were extremely reasonable, and they threw in a free pen and a sweetie!

I ordered from Get knitted because they’re a UK supplier of Addi Turbo knitting needles, something impossible to find in any of my local yarn shops. I needed a 2.5mm needle with a 100cm cable, and Addi are the only brand I’m aware of who make this size. I needed the needle to knit a pair of socks.

Regia silk and Addi needle

Yes, that’s the yarn for the socks!
The toes and heels are cabled in the plain red, and the rest is self-striping in the bright colours.

The pattern is in the current issue of Simply Knitting magazine (Issue 43), and thanks to the generosity of a friend I am actually using the exact yarn specified in the pattern. This is something of a rarity for me, as I usually like to make things up as I go along.

This will be the first time I’ve used the Magic Loop technique (although I did spend Friday evening learning it with a spare ball of cheap acrylic and a big needle), and the first time I’ve knitted anything in 4-ply yarn, I think. If I can properly get the hang of Magic Loop and it doesn’t drive me as crazy as DPNs, I’ll be thrilled to bits. Bring on the socks!

I also treated myself to a little something:

Rowan Cashsoft DK

The colours aren’t the greatest in this picture, but the ball of yarn that I’m holding is Rowan Cashsoft DK. 57% merino, 33% microfibre, 10% cashmere. Mmmmmm, soft. What I’m planning to do is unravel these Fetching mittens (also in Cashsoft), and combine these two colours to make something soft and stripey. Probably gloves or arm-warmers of some description, so I’ll probably save that project for a bit later in the year.

Now, do I wait until I’ve finished my Colinette Madelene jumper in Neptune Banyan, or start on the socks straight away…

Ta-Da! (Wearing the Fish Almost-Corset)

Fish Almost-Corset

Ta-Da!
Please excuse my silly grin.

Here are a bunch of photos of my corset mock-up from the pattern that I drafted last week.

Fish Almost-Corset

Looks pretty good from the front – nice and flat, which I am not! I should have posted a “without” photo, so you could see how much difference this is actually making to my shape. I realise it doesn’t look like much!

Fish Almost-Corset

The back – almost completely laced up.
This is because I made a classic newbie drafting error, and whilst I took out a 2″ reduction for my waist, I forgot to take out an extra 2″ to allow for a gap at the back. That’s an amendment I need to make to the pattern straight away!

Fish Almost-Corset

Fish Almost-Corset

Side views – as you can see, there’s a bit of wrinkling around the waist at the back. I’ve posted this to the Livejournal Corsetmakers community, so hopefully I’ll be able to get some advice on getting rid of the wrinkles.

I think that’s pretty damn good for a first attempt though!

Just so’s you know…

All of the entries prior to this one were imported from my two LiveJournals – Design By Claire and Eternal Magpie.

I’m keeping the Eternal Magpie Livejournal, as I’ll be using it to participate in a number of communities there, but I’ll try and keep duplication to a minimum.

I do like the Internet.

Yesterday, Mamfa popped by specifically to leave a comment that she’d seen a pair of Those Shoes in a size 5, in a shop in Leeds.

Mamfa doesn’t know me, she saw my post via the friends list of a community that we both visit. But she had some useful information, and took the time to leave a comment and pass it on. Wasn’t that kind?

Further investigation reveals that the shoes are now back on the Schuh website, and that my local branch apparently has a couple of pairs in stock.

Hopefully Liz and I will have our wedding shoes after all. 🙂

While I’m on the subject of awesome shoes (when am I not?), you could do worse than to check out Em & Sprout’s Etsy store.

Are they not the most adorable shoes you’ve ever seen? So cute!

The Devil’s In the Details.

Earlier this year, Paul and I got engaged. Presumably this means that at some point in the future there will be a wedding. So, of course, I did what any ridiculously addicted freshly engaged woman would do – I went shoe shopping.

I saw a pair of shoes, by Irregular Choice. I saw them on the Schuh website, and I went into my local branch to try them on. Two weeks later, after I’d been paid, I went back to buy the shoes. And they’d gone. No longer for sale in the shop, no longer online.

(I may have said a rude word. A nice man is trying to mail order a pair for me. He’ll let me know.)

This evening I was browsing on Amazon, when I remembered that they sell shoes too! I had a little look, and I found what I thought were the shoes I was coveting. Then I looked a little closer, and realised that whilst they looked a bit like my shoes, they weren’t my shoes at all.


(Click for larger)

The shoes at the top are the ones that I’m coveting. (I couldn’t find pictures of the cream and gold, so I’m showing you the red in both styles, for a more accurate comparison.)

See how the toes are extremely pointy, and the strap is quite low down?
See how the heels are higher, and more shapely, and self-covered?
See how the suede is different?

These are, quite emphatically, not the same shoes.

Yet they’re made by the same company, at the same price, and sold under the same name. How peculiar.

I’m sure that plenty of people will be looking at the picture and wondering what on earth I’m fussing about. Yes, the shoes are very similar. But to me (and I realise this is merely a matter of opinion), the top shoes look glamorous and elegant and sumptuous and lovely. The others look somehow mediocre and cheap.

If I hadn’t seen the top shoes first, would I be coveting the others? It’s impossible to say. But I know that if I can get a pair of the cream and gold ones by mail order, if they’re the same style as the bottom pair, I’m sending them back.