Tag: simply knitting

Little Big Planet

Sackboy!

Last weekend, during a thrilling bout of insomnia, I finished off the Sackboy that I’ve been knitting over the past month. To be fair, about three weeks of that was spent avoiding sewing all the fiddly little bits together. I could easily have finished him in a weekend if I’d been more enthusiastic.

The pattern is from Simply Knitting Issue 49 (January 2009), and is designed by Alan Dart. The character is Sackboy, from the Playstation game Little Big Planet. I played the demo of the game with my sister when I went over to see her last month, and thought it would be funny to knit a Sackboy of her very own.

What you can’t see is that he has a little plaited donkey tail attached to his bottom! In the game, there’s a part where you have to pin a tail on a rocking horse, and you can also stick things on each other’s characters. My sister’s Sackboy ended up with a dozen donkey tails all over him at one point! (Maybe you had to be there to see the funny side. We were practically crying with laughter at the time. There may have been wine.)

Sackboy was fiddly to make, fiddly to sew up, and fiddly to finish. Knitting chunky yarn on 4mm needles was really painful on my hands. But oh my goodness, look at him! He’s so cute! I’m thrilled to bits with how he’s come out.

I’m fairly certain that Sackboy will be pretty much destroyed by Chestnut the cat, within moments of his arrival at my sister’s house. I just wish I could be there to see the look on her face when she opens the box.

Socks again…

Yes, I know I wasn’t talking about socks. But the second stripy silk sock is being re-knit at a pleasantly fast rate, so I feel a bit more friendly towards them now.

And then, this morning, Issue 47 of Simply Knitting dropped through the letterbox. Not only does it contain a free calendar which features a sock pattern for every month, but there’s also a thirteenth sock pattern inside the magazine itself!

I’m sure this must be terribly dull for anyone who doesn’t have the slightest interest in socks, but I couldn’t be more pleased.

Rugged Rambler socks

“Rugged Rambler” are cabled socks, knitted in DK yarn, on two needles. Excellent! I had sort of sworn that I would never have anything to do with cabled socks ever again, but in DK they should work up twice as quickly, and I think these will be lovely and snug inside a pair of warm winter boots.

Skull socks!

But oh! Look at these spooky beauties!

The fairisle pattern’s almost the same as the one I used on my skull jumper:

Skull & crossbones jumper

Now I can’t possibly resist knitting socks to match!

I don’t think I’ll have them ready in time for Hallowe’en, but I’ll definitely be knitting a pair of these for myself this winter.

Socks? Don’t talk to me about socks.

A sock and an ex-sock.

These are the silk socks from Simply Knitting Issue 43. Yes, they’re still going!

The first sock, now completed, has two mistakes in it. Well, okay, three if you count the fact that it’s at least two inches longer than my foot.

The second sock… well. Let’s just say that this little heap of curly unravelled silk is in a much better state now than it was as a knitted sock!

I made my first mistake on the cuff – I wasn’t paying attention, and two of the cables ended up twisting the wrong way. (This is the danger of knitting whilst watching tv. Sometimes the telly wins.)

I made the executive decision to ignore the cable error, and knitted all the way down the leg to the heel, where I made my second mistake. Or, more accurately, I knitted the heel exactly as per the pattern, and then discovered that the mistake was actually in the first sock. Oops.

I put the whole thing down for about a fortnight while I started work on a giant cardigan. I kept thinking that maybe the sock would be okay. Is it really so important for socks to be an identical pair? Would anybody care once they were hidden underneath a pair of shoes and trouser legs? The answer turned out to be, yes, I care, so I bit the bullet yesterday afternoon and unravelled the dratted thing.

Now I just need to remember the mistakes that I made in the first sock, and knit the second one to match it without making any more. Which is what I thought I was doing the first time!

Ah well. At least the miniature ball of unravelled wool is keeping me amused. Isn’t it cute?

Regia Silk

I can’t keep up!

This morning, Issue 46 of Simply Knitting magazine dropped through my letterbox. I was a bit distressed to begin with, as I have so much wool and such an enormous backlog of knitting magazines to read that I almost didn’t want to see anything else that I might want to knit!

Thankfully this feeling soon passed, and just as well. There are two fabulous jumpers in this issue that I can’t wait to get my needles round.

Simply Knitting 46 - Fine Romance

I never thought I’d be getting excited about a 4-ply Fairisle jumper, but this one’s such a pretty shape! The pastel colours aren’t really to my liking, so I looked up the yarn online and discovered that it comes in a lovely set of darker shades as well.

The yarn is Debbie Bliss Rialto, and the colours from left to right are black, red, pink, deep purple, purple and teal. There are also a couple of lovely blues, a dark green and a rusty sort of shade. I think I’d like to see the colours in person before I splash out on buying it. I’d need to be sure that I had the right amount of contrast to make the pattern changes stand out, but enough tonal similarity for the hues to work together.

Simply Knitting 46 - Classy Cables

This design was pretty much guaranteed to make me fall in love with it at first sight! In Colinette One Zero, it’s a big chunky jumper with a deep v-neck and cables. What’s not to like?

Again though, I’d probably go for brighter or darker shades. From left to right, Rio, Blue Saturn, Magenta, Alizarine, Black and Raspberry.

 

I’m still knitting my stripy silk socks from Issue 43, although they need to be finished in a week’s time, for my father-in-law’s birthday. (As seems to be traditional with first socks, I thought I was knitting them for myself, but they turned out much too big!)

After that I need to finish the body of the Point 5 raglan bolero that I’m writing a pattern for, and I’m still trying to decide exactly what to do with my Debbie Bliss Soho and the lovely buttons I bought to go with it.

Oh, and then there’s the Interweave Apres Surf hoodie, for which I have the yarn already. Mind you, that’s a 4-ply lace pattern, so I’m not going to get through that in a hurry! Maybe a big Colinette jumper would be the perfect project to knit alongside it.

I can’t wait for it to be properly Autumn! The weather’s much nicer when it’s cold enough to wear all of these lovely jumpers.

Yarn Overload!

This week I seem to be absolutely drowning in wool. Not that this is any kind of complaint, you understand!

A friend of mine was having a clearout of her yarn stash, and kindly passed on a few goodies that she thought I might like.

Yummy new sock yarns

These are two sock yarns. The purple one is by Opal, and the other is one of the Kaffe Fasset colourways for Regia. These yarns together would make a lovely pair of the Simply Knitting socks that I’m still working on. Alternatively, as I only really wear very short socks, I might even manage to get two pairs of anklets out of 150 grams of yarn. We’ll see – I’ve got plenty of time to think about it while I’m finishing my current sock!

I’ve also come into possession of a complete pack (10 balls) of RYC Cashcotton 4 ply, in a beautiful peachy colour. I don’t quite know what I’m going to do with it yet, although a lacy summer cardigan seems like quite a nice idea.

Macro wool...

Over on the Simply Knitting website they’re running a series of articles about taking photographs of your knitting in new and interesting ways. I thought I’d see what the “super macro” setting on my little camera could do, and this is the result. I like the obvious difference in texture between these two yarns. You can almost imagine how they’ll feel from looking at the picture.

The top ball is the peachy RYC Cashcotton – 35% cotton, 25% polyamide, 18% angora, 13% viscose and 9% cashmere. The lower one is Debbie Bliss Soho – 100% wool.

I’ve been updating my stash details on Ravelry to include these new goodies, and although I don’t have as much yarn tucked away as some people, I think I probably don’t need any more just now.

This is particularly disappointing, as I received an email from Colinette this morning, giving details of several new colourways. I’m also intrigued by their new Creative Project Packs, where you can buy a bag of one yarn type, but in little hanks of different colours. I can feel some interesting scarves and socks coming on…

Knitting time already?

It can’t be, surely? I haven’t finished knitting the socks from last month’s Simply Knitting, and Issue 44 has just dropped through my door!

Actually it didn’t so much drop through the door as fight with the postman to be wrestled through the letterbox, as the free gift this issue was a set of butterfly clips. (The down side of subscribing? You don’t get a choice of gift colour. I’d have chosen the pink ones!) You’re supposed to use them for holding the seams of your knitting together as you sew it up. Of course, the first thing I did was try one out in my hair!

There are two patterns this month which immediately make me want to rush out and buy yarn.

The first is a child’s cardigan, called “Just Peachy”.

Just Peachy

The pattern goes up to age 11-12, but it has quite a lot of design ease (see how the cardigan is quite loose in the picture?), so the age 7-8 years is actually a perfectly snug fit for me! I’m very short-waisted so the back is already the ideal length, and all I’d have to do is lengthen the sleeves by about four inches. A single sparkly button or a silky ribbon at the top, and you’ve got a pretty summer cardi. I wonder whether John Lewis has any Kidsilk Night left in the sale…?

I also fell in love with the cardigan on the cover, and was wondering whether I might have just enough of my poor neglected Debbie Bliss Cathay to make this in light pink.

Zesty Lime

My favourite thing about this pattern? Right there on the picture – “Pattern in sizes 8-32!” The smallest size fits a 32″ chest, and the largest is 54″. I know that a few of the American knitting magazines include larger sizes, but their patterns often look like an enormous woolly sack. It’s so nice to see a pretty knitting pattern in such a wide range of sizes.

Mind you, it isn’t half complicated!

I received a survey last week, regarding a potential new knitting magazine aimed at intermediate or experienced knitters. I enthusiastically answered all of the questions saying, “yes! I would love to knit more complicated and adventurous things!”.

Then I looked at this cardigan, and my brain fell out of my ear.

The front panels are a twelve-row pattern, featuring twisted stitches for which I didn’t even recognise the abbreviations! Thankfully there is a helpful key to explain how you work “tw2, P4, tw2, twF, P1, twF, P5, tw2, P4, tw2”, which is the first row!

 

Perhaps I’ll start with the children’s cardigan. A four-row lace pattern I can probably manage, if I sit down and concentrate on it properly. (Lace is not my strong point.)

Maybe I ought to finish my socks first. Or my summer jumper.

I might even get around to sewing the zip into my green cardigan, taking a photo and actually publishing the pattern for you, one of these days…

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…

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…