fruity

Recently I've been quietly plodding through the brown jumper, and I'm nearly there... just the hood to finish! But it seems rather unspringlike all of a sudden. I felt the need for a quick gratification brightly coloured project, and a friend is having a baby shower next weekend, so I raided the yarn cupboard. Finding two rather nice balls of Rowan Handknit Cotton sitting there sadly alone in the corner, I decided this strawberry hat was the best option for the cheerfully springy colours. Probably because I have a mild to moderate obsession with fruit, which I think derives from playing too much pac-man as a child.

Unfortunately the pattern doesn't seem to be online any more - it was once on the Lion Brand website, but there appears to be a lot of similar fruit-related whimsical headgear around for babies. Great fun to make and pretty easy, do-able in a couple of days. Probably less if you don't have to spend much of your days playing peek-a-boo.

If anyone's wondering if I managed to make something in time for Amy's birthday, who gave me the wall hanging, the answer is Very Nearly. It's finished now but I can't post photos because I've got a plan to write up the pattern and send it into Knitty. I know, it's a bold move! Am I mad? Or just skint and fearless? Or possibly all three?! Anyway you're not allowed to blog about anything you submit to them. So I'll put up photos in a couple of weeks once I get the rejection email :) I say a couple of weeks, but actually it takes quite a while to write up patterns in a non-halfarsed way, I'm discovering, so it might just about get submitted in time for the Spring 2020 issue... but now I've announced it to the internets so I have to do it!! *kicks self*
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crafty balls-up of the day

The supremely well sewn on popper fell off and needed reattaching. So, er... can you see what I did there?

Ta-da! It's a moebius bib!1!1

Truly, I am a tool of the highest order. I can't even be bothered to fix it right now - its only raison d'etre is to be puked on, it doesn't deserve this amount of my attention... I think my need for caffeinated beverages is more pressing!
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grizzly man

There's almost nothing you can add to a picture as ridiculous as this. The pattern is Teddy Bear All-in-one with Mittens by Sirdar - one of those old fashioned leaflets they used to have before the internets. My sister bought it and sent it to me a couple of months ago. I feel such philanthropic behaviour needs to be encouraged, so I immediately cast on.

The yarn is Sirdar Snowflake Chunky, and is the perfect example of yarn that a non-knitter thinks is a good idea. It is like knitting with cheese wire dipped in prittstick then rolled in cotton wool. Now I don't usually complain about yarn discomfort - I am happy to knit with the skinniest toughest 4 ply, but this left a deep groove in my finger that you could have rolled a marble down. The outer fluffy stuff is soft but has a tendency to come off in clumps if you accidentally tug in the wrong place. It also does a superbly efficient job of masking what you're doing, so you can't actually see stitches at all. This is frustrating at first - I was too cross to even attempt to work out my gauge before starting (and consequently have a slightly chubby bear suit) but to be fair it does have its advantages too. The sewing up was really easy (I am not a masochist, so used some smooth cotton in the same colour left over from the blanket of many browns) because, well, it didn't really need to be that neat. There were loads of seams but I got that bit all done in about a day. Possibly a little too quickly if we're honest - I completely forgot about the convention of baby clothes to put poppers on the inside leg for easy nappy changing - but I guess the button down front means it's not really that much more effort.

Speaking of buttons, these rather awesome ones were a gift from catr a while ago - so I don't know where they came from but they are very lovely and, pleasingly, the perfect size for this project. There are various dinosaurs, birds and a rabbit - I tried to arrange them in approximate evolutionary order but stopped short of googling to determine whether diplodocus preceded stegosaurus on the geological time line. I think from time to time I get a little overabsorbed in projects, and should go outside and get some fresh air. Which young rubbishknitterjunior can enjoy a bit more in his new comedy outfit - for all its failings, this yarn is nice and snug when knitted up, a bit like a fleecy jumper. And brrr, that air is still pretty damn fresh out there! Wrap up warm, knitterfriends....


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desk

This site made me laugh today, despite being a bit under the weather at the moment... pictures of people's desks... go and send yours! People with a keen eye for knitting-related internets timewastery will note that I am viewing the ravelry messageboards here. (Click the picture for the full explanation of this somewhat uncomfortable setup on desked).
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merry christmas

and a very Happy New Year to both all my blog readers!

Well, I finished the Christmas jumper, at last. No weaving in ends on Christmas Eve - phew. And what a nice festively fun project this was. You can almost hear those sleighbells jingling as you knit. I'd thoroughly recommend it, although anyone attempting it might benefit from reading the list below.



Things I learned from the festive jumper knitfest

• Dalegarn Baby Ull is the stickiest woolliest yarn ever. It's kind of like knitting with goosegrass. This is of course a very reassuring thing if you are planning on steeking anything. Not so great for sewing up / frogging though.


• Never attempt to spit-splice white yarn late at night whilst drinking red wine.


• Similarly, if you have recently cut your finger, do not continue to knit whilst it is still bleeding. (Seriously - what is wrong with me? Why can't I ever just put the needles down?!)





• Following on from the previous two points, Dalegarn Baby Ull machine washes nicely at 30 degrees.



• Steeking is actually quite good fun, if you have the cojones for it. Well, it's probably more fun better than attempting to stranded-purl on the wrong side.


• Although lots of people on ravelry ummed and ahhed about whether the jumper would fit over a baby's head, i found there to actually be tons of room. My gauge swatch was about half a stitch looser on the width. I thought with 4 ply, this would be close enough. And indeed the sleeves seem to fit pretty well, but the jumper is a little wide in the body and neck. There was no need to make the neck opening 10 stitches wider, as I did. If you do, you may discover such hilarious unintended consequences as those depicted here.


Have a great festive season everybody!

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literary meme

I couldn't resist this one.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (love the David Lean film version)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (some of!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - not sure why this is in again after the Chronicles of Narnia!
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (I read the Magic Faraway Tree)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (I had the picture book of the film when I was wee, it was ace)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (again, when I was very small!)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Some great books in here I thought. I seem to have italicised rather a lot. I think I am a bit of a bookslut. And I don't appear to have read many books written in the last century. I tend to favour the Hardy / Dickens style of bleak tales of poverty throughout the ages. Or scifi. I don't like happy endings really. Or romantic fiction, although Wuthering Heights has enough death and bleakness in there for me to like it. There are a couple of modern books in there that I have read just to be polite, but generally I run a mile when someone tries to lend me any kind of glossy paperback that they have just really enjoyed. I am basically a misanthrope who hides in the dusty classics section of the library.
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joy division oven glove

With apologies to Half Man Half Biscuit. We moved house recently and my trusty oven gloves went walkabout somewhere between residences. Consequently I now have an array of angry looking burns on my thumb. (I took a photo of these too, but decided it was a bit too minging to post). As I also had a set of fat eighths from the Stitch and Creative Crafts show last weekend and some polyester wadding lurking in the cupboard, I decided enough was enough, and a home-stitched solution to my pain and suffering was needed. Then the titular HMHB song came on the radio, making me laugh rather a lot. So I couldn't resist making this. Now while cooking, I will smile instead of screaming in flesh-searing agony. Or setting fire to another tea towel.


I used this tutorial to make the oven glove. Not too hard for a novice seamstress. The writing is reverse applique, done rather terribly on the machine. I ran out of the burgundy thread after doing this bit and couldn't be bothered going out in the rain to get some more, so finished off the seaming in green. I know! I've literally ripped up the sewing rulebook with my devil-may-care attitude!! The best bit was the quilting on the palm, I am rather proud of its neatness. The rest of the seaming is a bit higgledy piggledy but it appears to do the job of holding stuff together.

It used up 3 fat eighths of fabric. Probably could have had a bit left over of the flowery stuff if I hadn't accidentally cut out the palm piece the wrong way round first time. I very nearly had to do all my baking left handed. Even now, as Mr. Rubbishknitter kindly pointed out, the writing is upside down if you are wearing the glove and holding your hand vertically. Ah well, it was an entertaining learning experience that has resulted in a useful thing. Right, off to bake some scones... :)

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nimbostratus

Oh noes - what is this strange meteorological phenomenon looming on the horizon!? Sheep, you'd better run and take cover!

*whistles* Let the stormy clouds chase everyone from the place, come on with the rain, I've a smiiiiile on my face......

It's a Christmas present for my niece. The pattern is from mochimochiland. I made it from Jaeger matchmaker DK and some leftover scraps of blue wool that were lurking in the bottom of the cupboard. I can now confirm, after extensive tests, that the Jaeger yarn is machine washable and really doesn't felt. Even after battering the bejaysus out of it and putting it through a hot wash with a few pairs of trainers, it just looked slightly well-loved, so in the end i gave up. The raindrops felted nicely though after shaking them around in a large screw top jar with a bit of boiling water.

I gave it a smile because it looked a bit threatening without one.


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