Tag: ravelry

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!

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.

Louisa Harding Ginerva

Louisa Harding Ginerva

Issue 34 of The Knitter dropped though my letterbox a couple of days ago, and I was immediately smitten by this lacy dress pattern. It’s Ginerva by Louise Harding, and it’s so new that there are currently only 2 projects for it on Ravelry. (One of them’s mine!)

I decided straight away that I didn’t want to make a dress version, but a shorter jumper would be perfect. A few sums and a day later, I found myself in John Lewis buying two balls of Kidsilk Haze Stripe. This is the Forest colourway.

I’ve started with the sleeves. That way I can see how much yarn they take up, and then hopefully figure out how long I can make the body afterwards. I tried to pick two balls of yarn that looked as though they’d been wound the same way, in the hope that the stripes won’t be too all over the place on the finished jumper.

So far I’ve managed the set-up rows and one repeat of the edging. The pattern says to repeat the twelve row lace pattern until the work measures a certain length (depending on your size), and then you get into the tricky business of trying to work shaping at the same time as keeping track of which pattern row you’re on. I know from experience that I’m very bad at following more than one set of instructions at once, so it seemed like a good idea to make myself a chart. That way I can simply tick off each row as I work it, without having to scribble incomprehensibly all over the magazine.

I thought it would be nice to share it, so you can have it as an Excel file, or a PDF.

Please note that this is NOT THE ENTIRE PATTERN. That’s obviously copyrighted to Louisa Harding and The Knitter. This is just a way of keeping track of the lace motif and the shaping, for both the body and the sleeves. You’ll need a proper copy of the pattern for the rest.

Also, these are only the instructions for a size 14. If you need a different size, I recommend downloading the Excel file and using the original pattern to update the stitch counts for each row. (The central lace motif stays the same for each size.) If you’re already making a size 14, you can just download the PDF.

I’m rapidly discovering that this is the most complicated thing I’ve ever knitted, mostly because the lace motif is worked from both sides. This is definitely going to be slow going because of all the counting and tracking required. Not one to sit and knit in front of the telly, or to take out and about with me. Thankfully I’ve cast on another sock for that!

Peachy Shawls

Tulips Shawlette

Now that these shawls are finally finished and have reached their recipients, I can safely show them to you all!

The Tulips Shawlette, above, is by Anniken Allis, and the pattern’s in Issue 36 of The Knitter. The moment I saw it, I reached for the first 4-ply yarn I could find in my stash, and started knitting. It was quite a while before I realised that I had no earthly use for a peach lace shawl, but I was enjoying knitting it so much that I didn’t really care. Eventually it occurred to me that it would look lovely on Paul’s grandmother, and it became her Christmas gift.

The yarn is Rowan Cashcotton 4-ply, now discontinued. I usually prefer not to work with cotton because it hurts my hands, but this is soft and lovely. Unfortunately the angora does shed – working with this on my lap made me wonder whether Bond villains need shares in lint rollers, to get rid of all the fluffy white hairs.

Tulips Shawlette

I hadn’t knitted any lace quite as complicated as this before, feather & fan being about my limit. But the two designs fitted together really well (being an 8-row and a 16-row repeat) and the pattern was written out as well as charted. I followed the written instructions for the most part, because I find a row of text easier to keep in my head than a row of symbols. I used a lot of sticky notes to mark my place, and it took me a long time to really understand how the pattern worked.

Tulips Shawlette

I did use the charts for the edging pattern, mostly because I couldn’t seem to get the written instructions to repeat properly. I’m not terribly keen on the edging, it doesn’t seem very definite, somehow. But I do like the shawl as a whole, and I feel a bit braver about working from charts now.

Peach Wall of Shawl

Because the Tulips pattern required a lot of concentration, I wanted another project to work on that was much simpler. I also wanted something that could also work as a lap blanket. This one is Wall of Shawl, by Martina Patricia Munroe. I think this design looks much more interesting in a handspun or multi-coloured yarn, but I thought it would be nice to make a “matching” gift for each of Paul’s grandmothers, and I was really enjoying working with the Cashcotton.

In fact, I was enjoying it right up until I came to knit the edging. That yo row (the decorative holes near the bottom) doubles the stitch count, at which point I thought my head might explode with boredom. I didn’t count the stitches on the final row, because I didn’t want to know!

The only thing I don’t like about this shawl is the way that the edge curls up. It’s a natural feature of stocking stitch, so there’s not much I could have done to prevent it. The pattern suggests knitting the ruffle about 3” long, which probably helps, but I was running out of time and patience. I could also have cast off on the wrong side, which would have turned the edging inwards, rather than out. But the shawl itself is a lovely size, and the fabric drapes beautifully.

I still don’t have any real need for a peach lace shawl, but I have quite a lot of this yarn left, and The Knitter seems to be going through a phase of showing me lots of lovely patterns that I really must knit as soon as I possibly can! I’m resisting the urge at the moment though, while I knit my fifth Clapotis – a nice simple one in Rowan Silky Tweed. After that, perhaps I’ll cast on for something a little bit more complicated.

Lazy Day

Lazy day winding yarn

Working weekends is a peculiar beast. I only work in the afternoons, but that leads to rather polarised mornings – either rushing around like a mad thing, or staying in bed for as long as possible. And then I don’t take time off during the week, because I feel guilty spending time on myself when I have so much to do.

This weekend brought the end of Neverwhere, the play I’ve been working on at Progress Theatre. We saw the final performance on Saturday night, and then spent Sunday dismantling the entire set so that the next production can start to build theirs. Oh, and there might have been a little bit of a party in between…

By Monday I was well and truly ready for a bit of a break. I’ve been working on two large knitting projects for several months (both now completed), so I wanted to have a rummage through my yarn stash and make some plans. I couldn’t start knitting anything, mostly because Pony don’t make circular knitting needles with 3.5mm tips, and that’s the only brand of metal needles sold at my local yarn stores. So I contented myself with winding all of my single skeins of yarn into balls, and looking up some patterns to go with them.

The yarn that’s wrapped around my knees and on the ball winder in the photo is Skein Queen‘s Delectable, a gorgeous silk and merino heavy laceweight. It’s earmarked to become Jane Sowerby’s Glimpse Maxi Cowl, if I can ever get hold of some needles in the right size. Diane gave me a gorgeous mystery mini skein in a very similar colourway and a mittens pattern for Christmas so those will match beautifully.

I also wound up two skeins of Noro Blossom, that I’d bought with the intention of making a pair of chameleon-paw Tridactyl mittens. Then I saw them next to my stashed Rowan Big Wool, and they were perfect together. So now I’m about half way through knitting a moss/seed stitch scarf. It’s four feet long already, so it’s going to be a proper Doctor Who style monster, but it’s really pretty. All of the colours in the Noro look gorgeous against the pale pink of the Big Wool, and the bumpy texture of the yarn and the stitch pattern look great. It’s really nice to have an instantly-gratifying project, after having worked on two long-term ones.

I’m going out for a knitting date with friends this evening, so hopefully progress on the scarf will continue quickly. I’ll write up the pattern (if you can call it that!) once it’s finished.

 

Milly’s Monkey Hat

Now that we’re into the New Year, I think it’s safe to reveal some of the things I made as Christmas gifts.

I don’t have photos of all the knitting because I wrapped and posted it as soon as it was finished. But I made a pair of socks and a pair of wristbands and a cowl and a pair of fingerless gloves. And a hat and mittens.

I do have a picture of Milly’s Monkey Hat and Matching Mittens:

Milly's Monkey Hat and Mittens

The pattern was one of Ann Budd’s basic hats, and I made up the ears as I was going along. The mittens are from a Ravelry pattern by Anke Klempner, designed for newborns. The pattern calls for 3.5mm needles, so I used 4mm to make the mittens slightly larger. I managed to get the hat and mittens out of one 50g ball of Sirdar Snuggly, and I used the leftovers to make the mitten string. The cream parts on the monkey’s face and ears are made from fleece, blanket stitched into place, and the eyes, nose and mouth are simply embroidered on.

I made the string for the mittens on my knitting nancy, and I think it’s probably long enough to last Milly until she’s at least eight. I was a bit worried that the hat would be too small, but it seems to be okay:

Milly's Monkey Hat

The ears do make it ridiculously easy for Milly to grab the hat and chuck it across the room, but apparently that happens to all hats at the moment – and she was far more interested in the crinkly wrapping paper anyway!

Quarter Past Ten Scarf

Quarter Past Ten Scarf

I liked the Ten O’Clock scarf, but wanted something a bit wider. So I added an extra column of feather-and-fan up the middle. Then I decided that I didn’t want the edges to curl so much, so I’ve added a couple of garter stitches and a yarn over at each side.

Quarter Past Ten Scarf

Knitted from a single 200g ball of Patons Trentino, it measures almost six feet long. According to Ravelry it’s taken me almost eighteen months to knit.

Quarter Past Ten Scarf

I chose the colours so that I could wear it with almost everything that I own, and I’m really glad that I finally managed to get it finished just as the weather’s decided that it’s definitely autumn now.

So it’s almost the ten o’clock scarf… but with a little bit extra.

New shoes for a new baby

Saartje's Booties

Say hello to Aunty Claire! My little neice, Amelia Rose (Milly, for short) was born last week. So, of course, the first thing I did was knit. And also, of course, it had to be shoes!

Milly’s reaction to the shoes wasn’t quite what I’d been hoping for – it mostly involved kicking furiously until they fell off! Still, maybe four days old was a teensy bit young for me to be inflicting ridiculous shoes on the poor child.

These are Saartje’s Bootees, from a free pattern on Ravelry.

The yarn is a lovely hand-dyed sock yarn (“Skeins” superwash merino bamboo) which is currently being knitted into socks, but I thought I could sacrifice a few metres to make these.

I started knitting on 2.25mm needles, but the shoes came out much too small. 2.75mm needles would have been too big, so I ended up using an odd size of imperial English needles that were bigger than 2.25mm but smaller than 2.5mm. I could only find dpns in this peculiar size, so I had to get a bit creative with a lump of plasticine to stop the stitches from falling off the ends! I made the larger size, and it came out to the correct measurement for the smaller size, which was about 3¼” long. Just right for tiny baby feet!

Strangely, none of my local shops actually carry 2.5mm needles. I think it might be time to go online and order a little pile of circulars in a good length for knitting socks.