easter woolliness

I bet nobody else in the UK thought of taking this Easter daffodils-in-snow shot... pretty original hey?!


Well, as you can see, where I was this weekend it was pretty damn parky. Brrrr. Good job then that I had just finished the butterfly
cardigan Seaming Procrastination Project - a nice warm stripy scarf for my fella.


I love wearing scarves, but I've always had a bit of a phobia of making them - I just find the endless linearity a little tiresome. But this was the perfect antidote to all that finger-chafing white 4 ply acrylic in the butterfly cardigan - a big soft colourful lapwarming thing of lovely posh yarn, and I didn't get bored at all making it.

It's made of 4 balls of grey Sublime Cashmere Merino Silk Aran that Santa was kind enough to bring me, striped with the obligatory Noro Silk Garden - 2 balls worth. Just a plain 1x1 rib, 35 stitches, with a slip stitch edge to cunningly hide the yarn being carried up the side. Idea stolen from here. I also discovered the delights of spit-splicing with these yarns - a bit minging, but no ends to weave in - hurrah! Definitely a good thing for a scarf, where there is no wrong side to hide my woeful weaving efforts.





I also made a small pilgrimage on Friday to the Wensleydale Longwool Sheepshop. What an awesome place... so many nice things to stroke! Piles of soft lustrous curly fleeces! I obviously couldn't leave without a small haul of some lovely wensleydale aran. 2 balls of natural undyed (from a black sheep), which is already a rubbishknitter hatmaking favourite from christmas present time. And some of a nice calming grey-green-blue colour ('fennel').
It was snowing outside, how could I not?! I'm afraid in a rather unknitterly moment, I also succumbed to a pair of woolly lined baby booties. But I defy anyone else not to, having stuck a finger inside on a cold day. If only my feet were about 5cm long! (Although actually, this might make me look a bit silly, and make walking somewhat problematic. If any genies are listening - scratch that wish please - cheers)

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seamfest 2k8: the good, the bad and the ugly

Is now over! *small fanfare*

So I tackled this fairly uninspiring looking baby cardie as a kind of learn-how-to-seam project. I've always been the top down raglan type up till now, but I thought a small seamed project might help me lose some of my trepidation in this area.

In the interests of experimentation I did each seam in a different way. Look, this is for a newborn baby, it's not going to be too bothered about consistency of finishing techniques is it?!. And if it is... well, it's going to be a few years before it can sue me. So here is my appraisal of various seaming techniques, each executed with my customary mixture of brute force and ignorance. Hopefully I and other blog readers can apply these lessons learned to other garments. More important ones, like ones for ourselves :)


So first of all, here is The Bad. The button bands were, rather weirdly, knitted at the same time as the front pieces. Then there was a stepped cast-off at the shoulder, then you are supposed to keep knitting the button band on its own until it is long enough to go halfway round the back. When you've done the other side, and seamed the shoulders, these two halves of the button band should meet magically exactly in the centre, where you somehow invisibly join them.

Mine didn't. One side was longer than the other, and I had a slight surplus of fabric where they overlapped. I thought I'd cunningly sew this down flat but it didn't work terribly well. Hmm. Should probably have frogged back a bit, but I was nervous about stretching the ends of the neckband across a gap and distorting the way the back hung. I think I prefer picking up stitches for button bands...


The Ugly... Well I attempted to crochet the seam at the shoulder, just for a bit of a laugh. And because it looked pretty awesome when Yan Tan Tethera did it. I think this would have worked fine if it weren't for the stepped edging. There was just enough of a verrrry gentle slope to make this shoulder kind of unseamable really. There was a good article in the Spring issue of Interweave Knits about finishing that suggests that stepped cast offs should be generally avoided like the plague for this reason. It suggests doing short rows and a three needle cast off instead. Maybe I'll try that next time. Ho hum!


On a more positive note, I think the other slanty seams on the sleeves, where I went for a good old fashioned backstitch, worked a bit better. This was a bit of an easier angle to attempt I think. I did a slip stitch edge and backstitching under this was pretty easy and possibly the swiftest line of attack.

And to end on a more upbeat note, to leave you with a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside, The Good: I think possible candidates are the backstitched seam where the sleeve meets the body, and the mattress-stitched side edge.






Mine looks nothing like the pattern of course. It looked a bit boring to make with all that plain stocking stitch and purl ridges, so I went for a basic butterfly stitch lace pattern. The baby is due in July so it only needs lightweight clothes. Also I don't like the mawkish cutesieness of a lot of baby knits, so the hearts on that bottom cardie made me feel a bit queasy. I'm glad I don't have to look at them any more!





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valentines card chart / surprise yarn

Ok, so I finally got round to putting up the chart for the Valentines day card I made. Possibly a little late if anyone else wants to use it! Oops. Well, er... there's always next year! Or perhaps sooner, if you love someone enough to express it in a highly labour-intensive way at a non Hallmark-sanctioned time of year.

In other news I got some lovely surprise yarn from a mate who just got back from a trip round South America. What an ace unexpected present - look at that soft alpaca-y goodness! I'm pondering what to make out of it... it's very soft and loosely plied, so i'm thinking maybe a scarf would be quite nice, if i can rocket-propel my needles and get one made before springtime...

It's really nice yarn to feel... i just wound it into a ball with minimal hand chafing. (Actually less of a ball, more of an oblate spheroid, pleasingly like the shape of the earth, with my half-arsed back of chair ball-winding technique).




Close up of glossy camelid-sourced goodness.

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no gorillas allowed

*sings*

love is in the air... everywhere i look around...

This is my valentines day effort, just finished. I think I'm fairly safe to post it here as I doubt the intended recipient will be perusing the knitting blogosphere any time soon. It's based on the end of level scene in Donkey Kong - when Mario climbs up onto the top girder you get this tender little moment. Purists will note that the Lady isn't wearing high heels in my version - I wanted the figures to be roughly the same size, and I'm more of a trainers girl myself.

I'm no cross-stitch expert but it seemed the best way of compressing a small pixellated scene from the 8 bit era into a card-sized space, so this is the medium I have opted for.


It was inspired by recently watching King of Kong, a documentary about the mad competitiveness of people trying to get the high score in Donkey Kong. Really far, far better than it sounds... it made me go on a small retro games bender. Equally pleasing, and even funnier was the South Park pisstake of it, which was on last night as I was stitching the Lady's skirt. Best not to go into details of that one in case anyone is eating or drinking as they read this, but suffice it to say that it was utter genius, in a fairly stomach-churningly unpleasant sort of way.



The inside of the card. You probably have to have seen the end of level scene in Donkey Kong to fully appreciate this. If you haven't, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that the the titular gorilla has something of an irritating habit of repeatedly spoiling Mario and the Lady's romantic liaisons.

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rroOOAArr

Pretty scary isn't he! Pattern is norberta from knitty. At one point he was actually starting to look a bit frightening, so in the interests of not giving its owner nightmares, I left off the fangs and added a comedy felt tongue instead. The intended recipient hasn't actually been born yet so the eyes are embroidered on to improve batterability. This was the trickiest bit... I am no expert at embroidery and made a test swatch of eyes before attempting them on the actual toy. (I then left this around the lounge in unexpected places to scare people). From this swatch I learned that it's really worth spending 20p on a couple of skeins of proper embroidery thread rather than attempting to embroider with leftover scraps of sock yarn; it just stands out better against a woolly background.

Many would be put off this pattern by the amount of sewing up involved, but I didn't really mind that. It's nice to see the thing slowly taking shape. Although I would say that this was made unnecessarily tricky by my choice of boucle yarn.




It's made with two strands of yarn held throughout, and two different boucle yarns for the green bits. I thought this would make it look a bit more scaly but in retrospect just turning it purl side out, as suggested in the pattern, would have done the job with a lot less hassle.

Some things that I have learned are well-nigh impossible with boucle yarn:

• Frogging


• Seaming


• Shaping


• Pretty much making anything that isn't a garter stitch scarf

It's all my sister's fault for describing Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Astrakhan as ideal cuddly dragon yarn. It does feel nice and soft though so I can kind of see her point. The rest is all leftover bits and bobs of yarn from the cupboard though, so it was a nice cheap project. And thanks to Catr for the loan of felt for the tongue!

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finished monkey business

These monkey socks have been quietly festering on the needles for some time. They got harshly deprioritised in the run up to Christmas, and now I'm finally able to work on stuff to keep myself warm again. Hooray!

I enjoyed these very much as a nice portable background type project. Once the mild trauma of the tubular cast-on was over, they were fun to make, if not terribly original (3602 other people on ravelry making these at the moment - yikes). I very much like this yarn as well. It's Stroud SuperSock in Semisolid Chestnut. Semisolid sock yarns are quite possibly the new variegated yarns, for me. Oh yes. Good for lacy patterns anyway.

Nice and muted too. Having made lots of headache-inducing bright socks in the past, I wanted a pair that were a bit more wearable in the winter months. These can safely protrude from under a pair of trousers without confusing hibernating animals in the vicinity into thinking it's spring already. Don't do it yet bees / dormice / tortoises / hedgehogs - there's snow on the way! Stay warm in that pile of leaves for a bit longer! And my feet can also continue to hibernate happily in these socks. Under a nice warm blanket on the sofa. Everyone's a winner.

Here's a super-duper-close-up if you are one of the remaining 3 knitters on the planet who hasn't already seen the stitch pattern for monkey socks.


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slightly belated christmas present round-up

I made a load of Christmas presents for people last year. It has taken me some time to get off the sofa and post them, because a) it is freezing in the computer room and b) Santa brought me a cornucopia of Nintendo games which have been taking up much of my time. However I do need to stop playing elite beat agents now as every time I blink I see a dizzying succession of decreasing concentric circles, and if I can make these go away before bedtime I feel it would be a bonus.

So here is a quick parade of the stuff I made in December 2K7:

Snowflake hat 1

Made out of King Cole Merino blend DK, with some contrasting scraps of white from the bottom of the cupboard. I just did a plain beanie with a stranded snowflake pattern.

Snowflake hat 2

Yes, I am snowflake obsessed. This is another plain beanie that I embroidered a small snowflake motif onto. I got a bit carried away and put beads on the embroidered bit at strategic points. First time I've really attempted this and I did a pretty rubbish job. It probably took me as long to embroider the motif as it did to make the whole hat. Made out of lovely undyed Wensleydale longwool (from a black sheep, obv). The wool was left over from making:

Boring ribbed hat

For my brother so I toned down the motif-related tomfoolery and went for a more sober item of headgear. It's lovely and soft and warm though. This one is from a pattern - cashmere ribbed hat (or, not cashmere if you're a cheapskate like me).
And finally...

Crocodile mitts

I was quite pleased with these. I made them up completely - started them a while ago. Redid the fingertip bit from the original post to give them a more rounded end for a less sharp-fingered wearer. They are lovely and warm, made of Twilley's Freedom Spirit 100% wool in , er, crocodile colour. I did write down the details after the first mitt, to make the second one the same, so if anyone has a burning desire to make their own crocodiles I could probably attempt to put up some kind of pattern.


Snowflake close up..


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competition crazy

So I recently won a banner compo for ravelry british knitters group... and I had almost forgotten about it when this little treat plopped through my door! How exciting! (Thanks esmerelda!)

Apparently it's Posh Yarns Lucia. I'm quite excited by this as I am not usually inclined to buy any yarn with 'posh' in the title (i'd be more attracted if the word 'cheapskate' was in the title). So it's a real treat for me! It's 30% cashmere, 70% merino... a lot more of a luxury blend than i'm accustomed to, so I don't know how long a pair of socks in these will last... maybe to be on the safe side i'll make gloves, or save the socks for when i've got my feet up on the sofa. Haven't quite decided yet. I'm looking forward to knitting with this though! The colours are gorgeous and it's reeeeaally soft.

And as if that wasn't enough competition-related jamminess for one day, I've also somehow managed to get into the final of the mochimochiland photo comp with my rainycloud! The competition is very stiff, and i'm not sure what the prize is but it's all very exciting.
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lookylikeys (again)

A mitten i just made	Aaargh it's a crocodile!!1!!1

In a frenzy of Christmas knitting at the moment. So I randomly picked up some Twilley's Freedom Spirit the other day and thought it was time for some mittens. I think the best thing with this sort of crazy variegated yarn is to keep it really simple, but at the same I felt it needed a little bit of something going on to stop me from losing interest in the whole process. So I made up this mini-cabled mitten, and it worked pretty well. The beauty of 1-stitch cables is that you can do a dodgy manoeuvre involving some seat-of-your-pants style mid-air stitch swapping, which helps if you are too lazy to reach down and pick up a cable needle. So I've done one mitt, although I may yet unpick the fingertip bit to make it a bit less pointy. I know it looks a bit like a crocodile, but there's no need to be too scared.

RaaaAAAAAarrr! Actually you can hardly see the pattern here, when it's not stretched out on the hand. I quite like that. It's like the croc is hiding in the shadows, waiting to eat you!!! (don't have nightmares, kids)

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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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italian tubular cast on for monkeys

For no apparent reason, I felt a faint sense of guilt about the cast-on I used for my endpaper mitts. The pattern suggests you use Italian tubular cast on, as it gives a neater edge for 1x1 ribbing. However, when I came to start the mitts I was on a ferry to Ireland, and didn't have access to any nice friendly internet resources which might entice me to try this (such as this page). Faced with either sitting watching the waves for several hours, or starting the mitts with my standard long-tail cast on, I decided to sack off the fancy cast-on and start mittening. So when I started these monkeys I felt I should really cast-on in the Italian tubular style as a sort of apology to the now completed mittens. Was this a good idea? Well, i heard that it wasn't recommended to do this for socks, because 'it gets fiddly'. This to me sounded like a challenge! One which the socks very nearly won. Illustrated is a few evenings worth of knitting... what the picture doesn't show is the swearing and frogging that was involved in getting thus far. In the end, I did 2 rows of slipping alternate stitches then pulled out the guide yarn. Then breathed a sigh of great relief as i was finally able to actually start the sock. The cast on looks quite neat but if I could rewind a few days and start again, I would probably use that time to read War and Peace and do long tail cast on instead. The yarn is Stroud Supersock semi-solid in a soothing autumnal chestnut shade. I think my retinas needed something a bit less eye-searingly bright after the aforementioned mitts.



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yarny bargain up for grabs

Fancy your hand at the elizabeth bennet cardie? Put off by the price of the recommended yarn? Now's your chance to snap up a bargain... I have just ebayed my remaining 10 balls of cascade cloud 9 (I only used 9 balls, so this should be more than enough to make another one). Go on, treat yourself!!



Look, look at the luvverly yarny goodness!


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glovely

I finished these endpaper mitts about 3 weeks ago, but it's incredibly difficult to take a picture of your own hands wearing gloves. So after a couple of fruitless afternoons trying to train the dog to be a photographer, I got someone else to take a photo. And here it is! These mitts are made of 4 ply cotton, which sounds like some kind of insanity. And they aren't particularly warm. But for the purposes of cycling around, they are pretty good - they stop my fingers freezing onto the brakes in the morning, and they cushion my hands from the continual bouncing around over loose stones/potholes/squirrels. So I kind of like them. The yarn was on spesh (jaeger discontinued, again) so the pair cost less than three quid. I really enjoyed making them - stranded knitting is great fun, and I need a lot of practise to get to the stage where the work done by each hand looks vaguely even. Rather than randomly creating hotspots of slackness, where i came back from the pub and attacked the knitting with drunken bravado.



There's also one stitch which is in the wrong colour, that I left in because I couldn't be bothered to rip back. You can see it in this photo. One pint of beer* will be awarded to the person who can tell me where it is. I actually thought it would annoy me more than it does in the completed object. A positive feature of these mitts is that they are symmetrical, so you can wear them upside down and never see the stitchy maverick.

*
Terms and Conditions
Prize to be redeemed at any drinking establishment in Manchester, England.
Spot it in under 5 seconds, and I might consider throwing a packet of salt and vinegar crisps into the bargain.

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peacocky drop-stitch-lace tank top

It's finished! It should have been a fun, fairly quick and easy thing to make, but I was starting to seriously wonder if it ever would make it to a wearable state, as the progress of this top has been plagued by a series of unfortunate events. The main problem being that about halfway through this pattern, in a fit of incredible stupidity, I lost the book I was making it from. This was shortly after a conversation with a friend, who is into sewing, about how great knitting is because you can take it anywhere. She was jealous that she couldn't whip a sewing machine out at a picnic and knock off a couple of tops whilst idling on a hillside. I grinned smugly as my needles whirred. So it serves me right really, that my inability to even go to the corner shop for a pint of milk without my knitting has eventually had disastrous consequences. I just hope that someone else on the train journey from London to Manchester is now enjoying my copy of Fitted Knits.



The other fairly obvious problem is that is it too small. This is because nearly everyone I have seen make this top has complained that it was too big. So I went the other way, overcompensating ridiculously, with quite hideously unflattering results. It's made of debbie bliss cathay though which is 50% cotton so I'm holding out some hope that it will have a bit of give in it, and hopefully if i wear it for a bit, it will eventually get baggy enough that passers-by don't have to be subjected to a relief map of my internal organs. It is pretty stretchy anyway, cos its mostly ribbing, and on a more positive note it's actually incredibly comfortable and quite warm. So it's currently a dogwalking top. Maybe if I can stay off the pies for a bit* it will become a wardrobe staple.

So, for the benefit of other knitters, my modifications to the pattern were:
- cast on 136 stitches (i think i have to spend some time coming to terms with the concept of ease)
- knitted in the round, as I am too lazy to seam
- knitted through the back of the loops for the stitches around the yarn-over, to give better stitch definition
- made up the whole top half, based on vague memories of the book, and other pictures of this top on the internet :)
- failed to add buttons. This was due more to indecision than design - i may yet do this if i find some suitable.

* highly unlikely, as a really nice bar serving lovely pies has just recently opened near me



The dog was unimpressed by the top. He had found a bone and was enjoying that, in a stereotyped way. Apologies for the dodgy photos, they were taken on my rubbish camera in the murky mancunian twilight. In this one I also look as if I have been auditioning for a part in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

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Seven Odd Things About You

I got tagged by Yan Tan Tethera. I'm usually too curmudgeonly to do these kinds of things, but I am quite bored tonight so I'll play. I'm not passing this on to anyone in particular, but you can join in if you want :) It feels wrong posting without a picture so here's a nice autumnal view from my kitchen window.

1. I love autumn and winter. I think I have inverse SAD.



2. A couple of weeks ago, when I opened my front door on Saturday morning, I was rather surprised to find a polecat on my doorstep. It was trying to get into a milk bottle. They are indigenous here but very rare - I have no idea where it came from. I live in the middle of a city, and have never seen one before.



3. Instead of going to a sunsoaked mediterranean destination every summer, I like to throw the dog, the husband and some beers in a camper van and head to the lake district, snowdonia or scotland, where I can often be found trudging up mountains in the bitter cold and horizontal rain.



4. I'm a bit of a tomboy. I've never read a Bridget Jones book. I like climbing trees and my favourite films are mostly horror or sci-fi.



5. I can raise and lower each eyebrow independently. All my siblings can too. I've never met anyone else who can.



6. I have an allotment where I spent much of last week digging up spuds.



7. I once met Tony Blair at a party. I was helping to DJ. We accidentally played 'War - what is it good for'.

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balticness

There's a bitter chill creeping into the early mornings these days. As I'm cycling into work, I am rather exposed to the elements and can notice this as my fingers one by one cease functioning. Usually starting at the outside with the little finger and working inwards towards the thumb. But I kind of still need to use them, principally to make v signs at motorists who cut me up, so I felt a solution of sorts might be these endpaper mitts. I had two balls of jaeger siena in the cupboard which i'd got for about a quid each in the john lewis sale bin. It's 100% cotton and may or may not actually confer any warmth at all, but I liked the colours and couldn't think of anything better to do with this yarn. I may yet need to make another more heavy duty pair of wool-based gloves for the really bitter mornings. Like these maybe. Still, these are quite comfy and stretchy enough to go on easily. One particularly nice thing about this pattern is that you can keep trying the mitt on as it grows without needing to take it off the needles.

After an extremely disorganised week last week, I also failed to either a) find a smaller size of needles for the ribbing or b) learn how to do italian tubular cast on. So I just did the usual long tail cast on - sorry Eunny. I just had time to grab my usual 2.5mm needles, yarn and shadily print out the pattern on the work printer before leaving for a trip to Ireland last weekend. Approximately 8 hours on the ferry and in the car gave me plenty of time to get started, for the parts when i wasn't driving, feeling seasick or playing dance dance revolution in the ferry games room (in fact it occurs to me that possibly these last two activities could be related).

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