tanked

In a feat of spectacular timing, I went camping this week, just after the sunshine ended and the thunderstorms began. There was a lot of sitting in the tent, listening to the rain and doing this sort of thing. Thank the knitting gods for headtorches!

Obviously the sun came out again once I was back home. But at least I emerged blinking into the daylight with a finished tank top.

I basically made this up as I went along then pinched the neckline from High Street, a pattern with the same stitch count which I stumbled upon serendipitously after casting on. My neckline is slightly different; I used 2ply jumperweight, rather than the sportweight in the High Street pattern. Mine's a finer gauge, so I needed to add a bit of extra straight stocking stitch in at the shoulders to keep the depth of the neckline in the same sort of place. This changes the neckline to more of a U-shape than a V-shape, which I think is no bad thing.

There's no waist shaping or anything, just straight up and down, knitted in the round bottom up to the armholes. It was unbelievably easy to make. If you're feeling chilly, it's almost less hassle to knit one of these than getting up off the sofa and going upstairs to get a jumper from the wardrobe. The most laborious bit was the knitted hem, but this only took one game of Scrabble to complete. And I like the sturdy edge it gives.

Also a good stashbuster for small amounts of nice yarn. The finished top weighs about 140g, and the blue stripe is just under one 25g ball of Shetland Spindrift, so ideal if you are a fair isle enthusiast with lots of leftover bits. The brown bit is gorgeous handspun from Wild Fire Fibres. It's spun so neatly you can hardly even tell it apart from the mechanically spun yarn in the white and blue stripes! I like this fact a lot, it's like a little secret that a casual observer would never spot.

It's quite a lot shorter than the tops I usually make, but I modelled the shape exactly on a favourite tank top which I wear all the time, so I guess it doesn't bother me so much for a tank top. I have a couple of longer shirts that I wear under it so I should avoid any alarming midriff exposure. The fit is nice and snug, after my third attempt at casting on! I put a bit of experimental zigzaggy stranded colourwork in, and it's still stretchy enough to put on comfortably. Its shetlandy embrace feels bloody lovely on.

Now then, if you'll excuse me I feel like I need to go and apply for a job as a librarian or a geography teacher or something...

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small colourful things

Where I live in Manchester there are a couple of nice yarn shops in the suburbs, but until now, in the city centre there has only been Abakhans. This is an amazing shop for fabric and haberdashery, just up the road from where I work, so at lunchtimes I am often to be found gawping at buttons. There's a little yarn section at the back. On the plus side they sell James Brett merino and the staff are extremely helpful, having once tracked down an extra ball of wool for me long after it had been discontinued and I had given up all hope of finishing the jumper. However, pastel coloured acrylic features heavily in their rather limited selection. So it is with some excitement that I heard about the soon-to-open Purl City Yarns in central Manchester. This is going to be run by a lovely lady called Charlie, I have met her once at a local knitting group and she bought me a pint so I like her. And judging by the list on that website she is going sell lots of really awesome yarn.


So basically I'm trying to save my pennies and not buy any more yarn before the opening of the shop, hopefully any day now. This has coincided with the birth of lots of babies amongst my friends and family. Halp! Fortunately I have a drawerful of yarn already, and newborn babies are small, so I've been able to make a couple of newborn slipstitch hats and a Hunter mini tank top. These are both my own patterns, so I've not been very adventurous. But I do enjoy knitting them, and I know exactly how little yarn I can get away with in each case.



I actually really like this sort of thrifty knitting. Choosing colour combinations from lots of little balls of yarn is great fun. I have become mildly addicted to ColourLovers for this sort of thing. (If you haven't been, you definitely should, but be warned, you will spend ages on there - it's like Ravelry for stoners).

I find it very satisfying to use up oddments of yarn, and I like the way it's a little reminder of past efforts. The first hat shown is knitted from Dale Baby Ull left over from the baby norgi. This little tank top was made with some of the original yarn from the version I made from Bobbins Magazine, I dunno what it is but it feels like cotton. I treated myself to a new silly button though, it was only 8p from the aforementioned Abakhans :D

The second hat is more of the same white and blue Dale Baby Ull but with a teeny tiny bit of really lovely handspun alpaca (the brown stripe), leftover from this hat, one of my most worn headcoverings for its lightness and warmth. It was a treat to knit with this again.

So the new babies are warm, and oh look! I have made a little bit of space in the drawer... bwahahaaaaa! *plots*

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how deep is your v?

I almost finished this Deep V Argyle tank top in the summer, but didn't get round to sewing down the steeks on the inside. Having worn it a few times now anyway, I think I can now say with some confidence that this job has fallen off the bottom of my to-do list, onto the to-hell-with-it-don't-do-because-life-is-too-short list. I have ceased to care if the inside is a little untidy, frankly it is too cold to worry about such matters. So, tadaaaa! here it is in its finishedish state.

The pattern is awesome, I would deffo recommend it. Great fun and I love the fit. There was a lot of waist and bust shaping which required a bit of concentration at the time but I think was worth it - it's a pretty thick jumper with the double stranded layer of DK yarn, so a bit of shaping makes it more flattering. The main change I made was to make the V less deep. Hard to believe, looking at those photos because it still looks pretty ruddy bloody deep to me, but I moved it up about one diamondsworth. I am all for a flattering neckline, but IMHO if a jumper doesn't keep at least some part of your bewbs warm it is a fairly pointless artifact. And thankfully it's a blissfully easy pattern to modify, because each size is actually charted out for you in full, so you can just print it out and go crazy with a red pen. Yay!

It's my second steeked garment, the first being the baby norgi, and I am happy to report that this time my blood pressure remained low throughout the process. I have a slight preference for the way the steeks were worked with this tank, by casting off a few stitches the row before the steek started. This made it much easier to do the actual cutting bit without worrying about snipping too far. I didn't, however, follow Eunny's advice and reinforce the steeks with crochet - I did them with the sewing machine. Partly because I did it this way last time and it has held up brilliantly, partly because it was quicker, and partly because I was under the impression at the time that I was using machine washable yarn, so I wanted to go for something megastrong. (Rowan Cashsoft DK, despite claiming to be machine washable on the ballband, has a tendency to randomly felt after about three low temperature washes. Fortunately I found this out before putting this top in the machine.)

So now I have a nerdy new look, sort of woolly cybergolfer / warm librarian...

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on the needles

It struck me that I have been a very lazy blogger and for ages have just been putting up pictures of finished objects. For all you people know, I could have bought them all in Primark and passed them off as mine. I could be the sort of person who invites people round for tea, orders a takeaway, dishes it out and hides all the evidence, pretending to have slaved in the kitchen all afternoon. (I don't, but I do enjoy a nice greasy takeout curry. Mmmm).

So here's some evidence for you all, of what I've been up to...

I've being getting on quite well with the Deep V Argyle tank top. This is great fun so far, I love stranded knitting. Seems to fit ok as well up to this point, I have been trying it on slightly overzealously, like every row or so. I know a lot of people have had fit problems with the top half, but that is steeked so I'll just have to see how it goes. Some have complained of wide shoulders but I currently look a bit like Mickey Rourke in the Wrestler after carrying a fat baby around all the time, so I'm not too worried about that. I've moved the V neck up about 10 rows on the chart though - I just felt it was a little draughty looking as originally designed. (I must be getting old.)

Now my sock needles are free again, I have been able to cast on some socks with the lovely hand-dyed yarn that Cat gave me. I was originally going to make the Herringbone Rib Socks out of the Winter 2008 Interweave Knits, and made two egregious attempts at starting these yesterday. For some reason, I kept ballsing up the stitch pattern, and found it incredibly difficult to tink backwards and fix errors. Normally I can do this no problem, even in lacey things, but I couldn't seem to sort it out yesterday and it was annoying me. I think the socks are beautiful in this sort of yarn but after the second frog, when I read on ravelry that someone with the same size feet as me had found them too tight, and with very little stretch, I gave up. So I'm making charades instead now, which look like an easier version of the same sort of stitch. A nice simple project to take on the train to UK Ravelry Day tomorrow!

I'm also pleased to report that the made-up-on-holiday baby socks have remained on rubbishknitterjunior's feet all morning, which is nothing short of miraculous. It's definitely a good idea to put eyelets and a tie onto a baby sock. They're pretty simple but I may even write up a pattern for these if I get a minute. (Yes, yes, I know they have pink stripes and he is male. So I have freed myself from the cultural hegemony of Prescribed Baby Colours. He's too small to be embarrassed yet. And it was all the yarn I had with me on holiday ok?!)

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crafty balls up of the day

Heaven forbid you may, one day, find yourself in a situation where the last few projects you have done have all had Tension Issues. This sorry state of affairs may lead you to rethink your devil-may-care knitting attitude and actually, like, do a proper swatch for something.

Should this unfortunate set of circumstances ever arise, you might decide that you really are going to do what you're told this time, and wash and block the swatch.

If you do go to all this effort, it would be somewhat foolish to render it all useless by not actually bothering to wait till the swatch is dry before you measure it. This will lead you to panic, wonder why your gauge is so loose, and cast on a couple of sizes too small. It's only a day later while a stroke of incredible good fortune leads you to casually repurpose your swatch as a beer holder, that you may notice it has shrunk considerably. Wet things are bigger than dry things.

Ah well, back to the original size that I was going to cast on for anyway before I had this foolhardy swatching idea....

I suppose this whole sorry misadventure has at least given me this attractive beerholder though.

It may, or may not ever evolve into Eunny Jang's Deep V Argyle Vest. Maybe with a slightly shallower V. Having breastfed a baby for nearly a year now, I'm looking forward to putting my boobs away for a bit. Under some nice Rowan RYC Cashsoft DK.
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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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lookylikeys

The top I'm currently making	A peacock, yesterday

On a small holiday on the south coast at the moment. Sometimes the sun shines down here! When I spotted this handsome beast yesterday, it made me think vaguely of my current knitting project (the drop stitch lace tank top from Fitted Knits).



Modifications made so far:
- knitted in the round. Cast on 136 stitches after a couple of abortive attempts to get a suitable size.

- using Debbie Bliss Cathay

- knitting the stitches next to the yo through the back of the loops, to give more stitch definition around the lacey bits

- did a couple more pattern repeats at the bottom, to shift up the ribbing towards the waist area. Don't really know why. Just can't resist a little pattern-tinkering.

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