Tag: knitting

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!

Pseudo Sunday

Italian Eucalyptus Honey

Today is one of those days when I’m extremely grateful to be able to work part time. The fibromyalgia and the endometriosis have got together, and invited some germs round to play. As a result I’m sitting on the sofa wrapped in a quilt, scoffing painkillers, doing a bit of very simple knitting, and falling asleep every five minutes. Not an ideal state of being for welcoming visitors to a museum.

To make the germs a little less welcome, I’m drinking Earl Grey tea sweetened with this incredible bright green honey! A friend brought it back from a trip to Italy, and the colour is from eucalyptus. That means it soothes and eases congestion in one go, and the flavour works amazingly well with the already-fragrant Earl Grey.

During the brief moments I’m awake, I’m plotting a knitting pattern for a new pair of mittens. Tight fitting cuffs, quite long, to keep the wrists warm. A row of holes for a pretty ribbon. I need to knit a test pair, during which I can make up the rest of the details as I go along – and then try and make a second one to match. Now the weather’s decided that it’s autumn, I’m definitely going to need some new gloves for those early mornings at the bus stop.

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!

Knitting Update…

Owl Wrist Warmers

The run-up to Christmas is always the same for me. Deciding far too late that I want to knit something far too ambitious, and then wrapping it up in such a hurry that I forget all about taking photographs. This year I did remember to take pictures of a couple of things, so here they are!

These are the Owl Wrist Warmers from issue 21 of Mollie Makes. I’m not a regular reader of Mollie Makes, but I saw this pattern on the front and knew it would make a lovely Christmas present, so I snapped it up. They’re made from one ball of Sirdar Click, and the only alteration I made was to mirror the cables on each cuff. (I’m fussy like that.) The hardest part (apart from wrestling double-pointed needles, which I still dislike) was sewing on the little buttons so that the owls didn’t look too cross-eyed!

Childry Shawl

This is Childry, from Issue 100 of Simply Knitting – well, from the booklet of extra patterns that came with it. The recommended yarn is Fyberspates Scrumptious 4-ply, which I didn’t have, so I went for 2 balls of Regia sock yarn in one of the Kaffe Fassett colourways. You can wear it either way round – with the point at the front it’s ideal for filling in the annoying little gap at the top of a coat.

Childry Shawl

This way round, it’s held together with a sparkly little hairclip from Accessorize. I must admit that I thought I was going to die of boredom while I was knitting this. Because it all garter stitch all the time, it’s wonderfully easy and the self-striping yarn does all the work of making it look pretty. But the row where you start with 250 stitches and then work k1, yo, k1 into every stitch, leaving you with a count of 750… that ruffle took some getting through. And then, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to do a picot cast off! Which looks lovely, and I’m very pleased with it, but it took three evenings to get the shawl cast off and finished.

And of course, being a sucker for punishment, I immediately cast on to make another one for myself. Mine will be made from some Mystery Colinette that I’ve tried to knit a bunch of times without success, but which I think will be perfect for this.

7/07/2012

I also finished knitting these socks…

Stripy Sock

and these socks…

Noro Kureyon

but not these socks. I’m about half way through the second one, and they’ll hopefully be a birthday gift if I can get them finished in the next ten days.

Currently on the needles are:

  • The Noro socks above
  • The aforementioned Mystery Colinette Childry shawl
  • A black and silver sparkly cardigan
  • A complicated lace jumper that I can only knit when alone in the house
  • Two horrible peach shawls that I’m probably going to unravel soon

That should keep me busy for a while… until I decide I’m bored of them all and cast on something else!

Knitting catch-up

Luxury Tweed Scarf

Look, I have been doing some knitting, and I’ve finally finished a few things! This is Paul’s scarf, which I started when we got back from Waltz on the Wye. The yarn is Debbie Bliss Donegal Luxury Tweed, and it sort-of-almost matches Paul’s Felted Tweed hat and fingerless gloves that I knitted a few winters ago.

Luxury Tweed Scarf

The pattern is Yarn Harlot’s one-row handspun scarf, and it took two skeins of yarn to make it roughly waist length. I wanted a pattern that was reversible (because it bothers me when you can see the back of a scarf), and one that was very easy to remember so I could just keep knitting without having to think too much. Sadly I didn’t manage to get it finished before Paul went to Canada, but it turns out that Ottowa’s warmer than Reading, so it didn’t really matter.

Marian (pink)

This cowl is a direct result of the fact that the yarn (Rowan Biggy Print) wouldn’t fit into my new tidy stash. So I decided to knit it, and move it into the “Someone Else’s Christmas Present” pile instead. Much more satisfying.

The pattern is Marian by Jane Richmond, with a slight modification. My only 15mm circular needle was longer than specified, so I cast on 65 instead of 45 stitches, and kept going until I’d used up three and a bit balls of yarn. You can either wear the cowl as-is, like a great big scarf that can’t fall off, of you can double it over and wear it like a giant neckwarmer.

Marian (thunder)

I liked it so much that I made another one. This got rid of an ill-fated cardigan that I’d knitted but never worn. Much nicer!

(The dress, by the way, is Simplicity 1755, just waiting for its collar and buttons.)

Neat and tidy

Almost tidy stash...

Last month I took a weekend off work, to celebrate my birthday. I’d decided to have a picnic, but in case the weather was bad, we had to be able to move everybody indoors if necessary. This involved tidying the house to within an inch of its life. The main thing making the living room look untidy was my yarn stash, so the next day we bit the bullet and did something about it.

The wooden box is actually a toy chest, from Argos. I’d have liked something larger, a proper blanket box, but this was the biggest piece of furniture that we could fit into the space and still open the door. All of my yarn has now been sealed into freezer bags (to prevent moths) and squished inside. As you can see, not all of it fits, but I’m knitting as fast as I can!

The paper bags at the front house the projects I’m currently working on*, plus some yarn that absolutely wouldn’t fit in the box. The decorated chest on top of the box contains, yes, you’ve guessed it, more yarn. The little bag on top of that is for my current sock-in-progress.

Tidy needles!

I have a long orange plastic box that holds most of my straight knitting needles. I inherited it from my Aunty Val. The ones that are too big for the box are stuffed decoratively into a glass pasta jar. This work of organisational genius however, is the brainchild of Lettice. All of my double-pointed and circular needles are now neatly sorted into DL size plastic wallets, courtesy of WHSmith. These fit sideways inside a CD storage box, alongside my needle sizing gadget. All I need to do now is label the wallets with the sizes of the needles inside. Perfect!

The stripy tin holds all the little gubbins that don’t fit anywhere else – scissors, stitch markers, tape measures, cable needles, that kind of thing.

There is one more box of yarn, a canvas one that zips closed, bought a very long time ago from Muji. That houses knitted things that are waiting to be unravelled, and some extremely chunky wool that I don’t really like to knit with any more but is too nice to get rid of. And then there are the four balls of yarn that Paul brought back from Canada for me, which won’t fit into the toy box or the treasure chest. Or the canvas box. Oops.

Best get knitting then, I suppose!

 

*By “currently working on” I mean “haven’t finished yet”. Including a little cardigan that I started knitting in 2007. I’m hoping that being able to see these projects all the time will encourage me to actually finish knitting the damn things.

My husband went to Canada…

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…and came back with some slightly confusing yarn.

I’d asked Paul not to bring me any chocolate home from his business trip (having recently received a mountain of very fine choccies for my birthday) and suggested that yarn would be an appropriate substitute.

As everybody* knows, souvenir yarn doesn’t count towards your stash, so it’s an excellent gift. But in order to make a good souvenir, it should ideally be something that you can’t just walk into a yarn shop and buy locally. So I sent Paul yarn shopping in Canada, with these criteria in mind, plus a couple of Canadian brand names in case of emergency.

So, you may be wondering why the yarn in the top picture is very clearly labelled “Zealana” and “Kiwi”. Apparently New Zealand’s in Canada now. Perhaps the lady in the Ottowa yarn shop, who sold this to my poor unsuspecting husband after he’d explained that he wanted specifically Canadian yarn, is in need of a little geography lesson.

But, it is a yarn I’ve never seen locally, it’s super-soft, and it has the exciting new-to-me ingredient of possum, so it definitely works as an excellent souvenir!

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Bless him, once Paul had realised that the first yarn was definitely not Canadian, he went yarn shopping again!

This, which is done absolutely no justice by the photo (the purple yarn is much more of an aubergine colour), is the softest yarn on earth. This is by no means an exaggeration, I spent a good half hour last night just stroking it. It’s Illimani Royal 1, and it’s made IN CANADA, from the finest 1% of the fleece from Bolivian alpaca. The colours above are hot pink (of course!) and eggplant.

Softest. Yarn. Ever.

It’s crying out to be some kind of scarf or cowl I think, so I can snuggle my face into it as often as possible. Or I might just leave it sitting on the arm of the sofa, so I can stroke it like a soft little pet. (What? The knitters know what I mean.)

I don’t know yet what I’ll make with the Zealana. I was thinking originally of socks, but the cotton content (organic cotton, no less!) gives it such a nice drape, I’m thinking that maybe a little lacy shawl might be in order.

I do need to catch up with a few knitting photos though, as I have managed to find the time to actually finish a few things lately! This is good, as all the things I’ve finished are intended to be Christmas gifts. This has the added bonus of getting some of the yarn out of my house and into other people’s, which I’m sure Paul will be really pleased about!

 

* By “everybody” I clearly mean “knitters who are looking to acquire more yarn without the attendant guilt of purchasing it for themselves when they already have a cupboard full at home”. By which I mean all of them.

Noro Kureyon Sock

Noro Kureyon

I’ve been knitting rather a lot of socks lately, mostly with Regia yarn, because that’s what’s easiest to get hold of at my local shops.

I’ve been resisting the lure of Noro Kureyon sock yarn for quite a while now, mainly because it’s usually out of my budget. But the colours are just lovely, so as soon as I spotted some in the John Lewis sale I couldn’t resist.

When I was winding the skein into a ball I thought I’d bought the impossible – a ball of Noro without a knot in it! Sadly with a mere five grams to go, the inevitable knot appeared. But at least there was only one, which is a massive improvement on any other ball of Noro I’ve ever bought. It’s still full of bits of twig though, which seems ridiculous. If I’ve spent all this money on a ball of  yarn, I don’t want to be picking bits of vegetation out of it as I knit!

It’s also really oddly spun. Very thick and very thin in places, which makes it impossible to achieve a nice smooth fabric. This is going to be one lumpy sock. So twisty, too. The yarn is full of energy, and absolutely desperate to ply itself as you knit. And then there’s the texture. So rough! Having just worked on one sock with some scrumptiously soft String Theory Colorworks yarn, this Noro feels like horrible scratchy rope.

Everyone who’s seen me knitting this sock has been absolutely entranced by the colours, but immediately disappointed as soon as they’ve touched it. I’m assured that the socks will soften once they’ve been through the wash, and I really hope that’s true! I was going to give them to a friend as a Christmas gift, but I don’t think “I thought you’d like a pair of scratchy, lumpy socks” is quite the message I want to convey!

Sock Addict.

Stripy Sock

I always thought it was a bit silly when people learned to knit socks and promptly gave up knitting anything else. I’ve made a few pairs for other people over the past couple of years, but it wasn’t until I made a stripy pair for myself that the bug really bit. As soon as I’d cast them off, I started the toe of this one straight away.

This is another Regia colourway, and I rather like the pink, red and orange stripes. I couldn’t tell from looking at the ball quite how the pattern was going to develop, but I’m pleased that it’s turning out so regular. I’m using my usual toe-up pattern with a slip stitch heel, and I’ve just reached the stage of increasing for the instep. This means I’ve just realised that the stripe pattern’s going to be disrupted as I keep increasing and when I work the heel. I’ll find out how much that bothers me as I go along. One solution would be to work the toes and heels in another colour. This avoids the pattern disruption to a certain extent (although the stripes will still get thinner as you work the gusset increases), and it also means that the toes and heels can easily be pulled out and re-knit when they start to wear out.

I have plenty of stashed Regia waiting for me, most of it earmarked as Christmas Socks for friends and family. I’ve also thought of a few basic pattern variations, so I don’t go mad from knitting the same socks over and over again.

I’ve also started looking at different sock yarns, although there’s not much available in the shops where I live. Noro sock yarn feels kind of scratchy, and I’m not sure I’d like to knit with it. I’m looking forward to seeing how my Schoppel Wolle Flying Saucer comes out. I’m on the hunt for some extravagantly purple sock yarn for a friend (recommendations welcome!), and I’ve spent a while looking for the perfect green-and-white self-striping yarn. Thanks to the Yarn Harlot I found it this morning, and have now ordered the last ball of Clorophyll from String Theory Colorworks. I also picked up a mini skein of plain white, specifically designed for the toes and heels.

So, I’ve just spent twenty-five pounds on the materials (and international shipping) to make a single pair of socks. For a friend who hasn’t asked for socks, doesn’t know they’re getting socks, and has no idea how long a pair of socks takes to knit. Clearly this isn’t a gift for them, it’s a gift for me.

I’m turning into a sock addict.