pimp my ride

I've been a bit quiet lately, partly because someone borrowed our camera to take on holiday and I'm not an interesting enough writer to make a blog worthwhile without pikshers, and partly because my time has been diverted to essential but fairly unexciting projects such as this. I thought I'd mention it though, because it's one of those crazy half baked ideas that seemed to work against all the odds, and other brassic mothers might appreciate knowing it is feasible.

The car seat in the picture had been not-so-gently used by seven of my nieces and nephews before it made it down the handmedown chain to rubbishknitterjunior. The amount of bouncing around had taken its toll on the upholstery as you see. The day I acquired it, Mr. Rubbishknitter was throwing out a perfectly good shirt with a slightly worn collar. These were the ingredients that combined with one sewing machine, some thread and a lack of general sewing expertise to form the half baked idea.

I drew the pieces of the original seat cover onto tracing paper to make a sort of pattern, then arranged them onto the shirt, adding seam allowances before I cut the pieces out. I sewed them all together to make a new template - there was just enough shirt to cover the really knackered areas. The really big holes I covered with iron on interfacing, then I sewed the new cover over the worn parts of the old one. This was much easier than making a whole new one as I didn't have to worry about any of the velcro or elastic fastenings. I then attempted to quilt the thing together, although my original draft of a pattern wasn't really accurate enough and there are all sorts of wibbly baggy bits of surplus fabric.

But all in all, I'm quite pleased because it looks like it will now withstand a machine wash, which was my only aim really. And I have saved a Large Amount of coin. Car seats these days seem to cost possibly more than my car is worth. So clearly I was now able to treat myself to something else instead! What could that thing be? You are probably wondering.

MOAR SEWINGZ!11! I've been stalking the clothkits site forever, fondly stroking the rather too expensive kits without buying anything. Then they had a sale in which one of the skirt kits was half price. Win! And the top thing in the picture is a purse and pencil case kit. Yes, I got a little carried away. I've always felt that you could make these things for a fraction of the price by just buying the fabric and notions yourself. And this is almost certainly true, but I need my hand holding a bit with sewing, and i've heard these kits have nice clear instructions, so hopefully this will be a good learning experience. And anyway look at that parcel! Black crepe paper! And some of it is wrapped in a measuring-tape ribbon!11!1 It's been a long time since the postman brought anything that exciting!

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yo ho ho and a bottle of milk

Literally everyone I know is pregnant at the moment, it's like the Midwich Cuckoos. So I have a lot of baby gift knitting to do. And in a remarkable stroke of fortune at knitting group the other week, a lady walked in with a massive pile of yarn she wanted to get rid of. We spread it all out on the table, it immediately disappeared behind a blur of limbs and a sort of feeding frenzy ensued, after which I emerged with a cone of mysterious black 4plyish acrylic. Paired with a neverending ball of cream coloured baby type acrylic, that has been in my cupboard for about 2 years and incorporated in tiny quantities into about 50 projects, it was ideal for this hat.


It's We Call Them Pirates, sort of. I had to make it smaller, obv, and I wasn't about to buy thinner yarn or wreck my wrists wrestling with tiny needles, so I missed out the vertical stripes. I just chopped off the right hand 4 stitches of the chart, so I cast on 112 stitches instead of 128. I also got a bit bored knitting the lining, so mine is only about an inch long - more of a knitted hem. It's stranded anyway so it's going to be pretty warm, the baby isn't planning on any arctic expeditions AFAIK. I've not done this sort of finish before - it used a provisional cast on to knit up the lining after finishing the main bit of hat. It sounds a bit faffy but I must say I do like the result - it has a nice sturdy feel to it, and it really didn't take that long. The skull and crossbones bit was loads of fun. I can sense more of these hats in my future. Modelled by rubbishknitterjunior with a bit of negative ease - he is one now, it should be about right for a normal head sized 6 month old.

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1up

Important to keep the chill off your electrical goods I feel. If anyone is wondering what happened to the recycled bit of green embroidery thread I was wittering on about in the previous post, here it is! On a sock for my niece's ipod. I ummed and ahhed about music based motifs for a while, but couldn't think of anything really suitable. You could maybe embroider a big treble clef on or something but then it would look like a bad 80s nightclub. And there's not enough space on it to do anything too fancy. Whereas a 16x16 pixel image from the world of retro gaming fits perfectly. Anyway, you can play games on ipods can't you, and my niece likes Mario Kart. So a 1up mushroom it is.

I dug out some ancient 4ply sock yarn, knitted a 40-stitch stocking stitch tube, and cross stitched the mushroom over the top. I used to make loads of this sort of thing but haven't done it for a while - it's great fun! Only took a couple of days, so she may even get it in time for her birthday. The finished sock is modelled on a chocolate bar which is going in the post with it. (Yes, i did spend ages in the shop, looking at all the chocolate bars from various angles like a stoner, trying to find one which was the same dimensions as an ipod. This one was closest!)
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crafty nostalgia

I have a small messy pile of embroidery thread at the back of a drawer, that has been with me since my teenage years and moved house with me many times. Some of it is many, many years old, and was probably stolen from my mother's sewing basket. I rarely delve into it, but today I was looking for some green when I found this at the bottom of the pile. Blimey. Remember friendship bracelets?!

I had forgotten they ever existed, but stumbling across this, it all came flooding back. You put the Frank and Walters or something on the stereo and safety pin the top to your jeans. Make criss crossing knotty patterns, swap them with your mates (or, secretly make a load for yourself and pretend you're reeeeally popular) and bob's your uncle - you've amassed an armful of atrocious amateur art! I seem to remember having loads at one point, but they all must have fallen apart long ago. I don't know what happened with this embryonic one, it must be about 15 years old. Maybe I had a row with its intended recipient or maybe I just got bored of the whole thing. Glad I found it though, it has a good long bit of green in and frankly I didn't fancy going out in that rain just to buy embroidery thread. Gonna need to sharpen my nails to unpick those knots though!

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relaxation

I had a small amount of leftover aran weight cotton, so I started knitting this dishcloth before last Christmas, thinking it would go in my sister's stocking. (It's a bit of a lame family running joke, that we give each other washing up related gifts, to ease the pain of post-meal clearup.) Anyway, I failed to finish it in time. How I'm not quite sure, it's really a one-evening in front of the telly sort of a task. After that it got buried under a pile of yarn and forgotten about until a few days ago when I stumbled across it. So I finished it off, but something weird seems to have happened to my gauge. Can you see? It's a dish trapezoid!!1! I can only attribute this to a more relaxed, summery state of mind, compared with the stress of the pre-Christmas build up. Ah well. I'm too relaxed now, evidently, to worry about it. The pattern is Ball Band Dishcloth, very quick and easy, I can recommend it to anyone else insane enough to want to knit a dishcloth. (Lordy - 5460 other people on ravelry appaz)

I also had to make a slightly bigger pair of unpulloffable baby socks, and there was a wee bit of fiery hand dyed yarn left, so I made these. It's become a bit of an arms race between me and the baby to stop him indulging in his favourite game of pull-my-socks-off-and-eat-them. He is a veritable sock Houdini these days. After my last pair of socks with ties, the little blighter has learned to undo a bow. With these socks I have been forced to deploy my fiercest weapon - the double bow. Bwah hah hah haaaaah! It's working pretty well so far. This pattern is made up by me - I should maybe have a quick go at writing it up, it's a very useful one. Dead quick - takes a couple of hours, uses up the little bits of sock yarn you always have left over after making a pair for yourself, they're nice and cosy and they stay on a lot better than shop bought baby socks. Although there are myriads of other similar patterns out there and they're really not rocket science - I just winged my own because I was on holiday without internets access the first time I made them.

Now the wee fella is standing up and about to start walking, I am contemplating some sort of sticky sole solution for indoor adventures - I have a lot of slippery bare floorboards in the house, which make an alarming noise when his head connects with them. Maybe puffy paint or sew on soles will help - we will see.
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pacman dungarees

So I finished my first evah sewing pattern!!1!1 How exciting. It is Burda 9652, picked because it claimed to be Very Easy. I wouldn't quite go that far, as I don't really have much experience of this sort of thing, but I seem to have got through it ok. There were some sentences I had to read several times, particularly during late night beer assisted sewing sessions, but generally it was pretty straightforward.

Drunk on the excitement of actually finding the pattern comprehensible, and possibly the aforementioned beer, I may have got sliiiightly carried away with the applique there.
Pacman is being chased by Inky on the back. On the front are some bonus cherries. (I originally fancied an apple or a strawberry, but they would have been trickier, and Mr. Rubbishknitter didn't believe me that you ever got these as bonuses. Obviously because he wasn't as awesome a player as I was). It seemed important at the time for my son to fully appreciate the marvels of the 8 bit era of computer gaming. I started by copying the original pacman sprites onto graph paper. Being incredibly anal I like representations of classic video games to be pixel perfect, and I even toyed with the idea of cutting the characters out with blocky edges, but I doubt I would have been able to get it neat enough, so I rounded out the edges of each original sprite for a slightly cuddlier effect. There are much more suitable ways of representing pixels accurately in the world of textiles - cross stitch, crochet, knitting - so I thought it might work better just to do something simpler.

I made the appliques using bits of scrap fabric. Using a double thickness of each, I drew round my graph paper templates and machine stitched them together nearly all the way round. I trimmed the edges, turned them inside out and hand-slipstitched them onto the pocket pieces. I know this is probably a weird way to do applique. But the scraps of fabric were cheap and flimsy, and after some earlier flirtations I'm now getting a bit bored of zigzag stitch. My previous rubbish attempts at applique have been a bit fally-aparty after a couple of washes. Crapplique, if you will. As this garment is for a child who likes to drag himself around the floor all day, pausing occasionally to dribble chewed up biscuit or throw up on himself, it was imperative that they withstand a few machine washes. So for the teeny tiny details, like Inky's eyes and the cherry stalks, I hand embroidered them on. Yes, it took a while, but it was damn good fun, and each pocket made a pleasingly portable project for sitting in the sun with.

I put buttons at the top instead of poppers because I thought they might hold up to a bit more bouncing around. The other major modification I did was to put poppers along the inside leg seams for ease of nappy changing. I bought a pair of baby dungarees recently from a high street shop, marvelling at the cheapness, then was horrified to realise i had to wrestle the child all the way out of and back into them every time he relieved himself. So this time, poppers it had to be. In the past, I have always used those ones that you have to hand sew on, and the way I attach them they generally fall off quite regularly, causing the air around me to turn blue. This time, this time I would conquer the art of the reclosable seam. I was highly enthused by the idea of popper tape, but could only find it available in white, which would have looked a bit weird on such dark fabric. Dying it could have been an answer but I spotted some dark brown bias binding in the exact right shade in my local fabric shop so opted for making my own using this and a pack of hammerable innable poppers. This turned out to be quite a learning experience. I learnt the following things, which may be useful to others:

• At all costs, avoid wielding the hammer too close to your fingers. shudder


• You should, however, avoid concentrating on finger avoidance so hard that you fail to notice you have hammered in 4 poppers in a row upside down.


• Do not hammer on a pine table. You will leave little popper-shaped impressions. Also when you hammer the table, the loose poppers that are lying around on it are liable to jump off in fear.


• Avoid making popper tape out of a single thickness of bias binding or other flimsy fabric. You need to put some heavy duty interfacing behind it before putting the poppers in. Otherwise, your first attempt to open your nice new popper tape will be greeted with a rrrRRRIP! noise that may make you cry.


• I tried a couple of types but the Prym ones were the best - sturdier, more difficult to accidentally hammer in upside down if you are being a bit stupid, and, crucially, slightly shinier.


• Maybe not a good idea to try and machine sew over poppers.

So after several popperfails, I am pleased to report the end result is sturdy and easily openable. Phew!

To verify the general sturdiness, here's a few action shots of the dungarees, as modelled by rubbishknitterjunior. I think he likes them.


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yarn avoidance fail

Well, I knew it was the John Lewis sale this week... and I needed some buttons for the dungarees. So off I went, reciting in my head the mantra 'you only need buttons'. I went for these rather simple buttons in the end - they go nicely with the colour scheme, and there is some rather hectic applique going on elsewhere so I thought attention seeking buttons might be a bit over the top. Quite pleased with these ones - cheap and simple but pleasing.


What I definitely didn't go to John Lewis for, was any of this. But somehow it seems to have happened anyway. Debbie Bliss Pure Silk half price, in decent colours? It was literally impossible to walk past the bargain bin. I'm sure it will get used... I have about 50 bazillion pregnant friends at the moment, and a new copy of Woolly Wormhead's baby hat book, so small amounts of luxury yarn are handy.

The worrying thing is that I need some more poppers* too (I hammered in some of the first lot a bit overenthusiastically). So I have to go back. Do I have the willpower to resist the bargain bin a second time?! I hope so...

*as in snap fasteners obv, not the intoxicating substance which makes you turn purple

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flaming socks of fire

In this weather these feel like an appropriate knit. It got so hot, my socks caught fire!1!1 They're Charades (sorry, the non-ravelry link seems to have died) and the yarn was a Christmas present for me hand-dyed by Cat. Isn't is lovely? Don't think I've ever made anything out of hand-dyed yarn before so it was a new and exciting experience.

I'm a big fan of this pattern too, would definitely recommend it for hand dyed yarn. (You can still get it as a free ravelry download fortunately.) The slip stitch pattern breaks up the pooling / flashing / whatever you call it, and adds to the general chaotic effect. I think I messed up the heel a bit - it's the first time i've attempted a top down sock on two circulars and the pattern's written quite specifically for dpns. I stubbornly continued with the two circulars anyway and somehow seemed to end up with eight extra stitches after turning the heel. Oops. So the heel gusset is pretty big, but this is actually a really nice feature - the socks are super easy to put on and take off. And fortunately whatever I did wrong on the first sock, I did wrong in the same way on the second, so they are the same shape. Now I just need a bit of slightly cooler weather so I can wear them!

In other news, I am an extremely minor internet celebrity this week. I was interviewed by Girl and Dean at UK Ravelry Day, and some of it made its way into the video below. You can't see me but you can hear some of my inane witterings. Always weird hearing yourself, I sound like a bloke. Quite a funny little film though anyway.



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in soviet russia, fabric sews you

I've been a bit slack with knitting since UK Ravelry Day, for many reasons. Partly heat-induced torpor, which makes a good face-down sprawl on the lawn look incredibly appealing. *Picks ants out of eyebrows*. I've also been down the allotment a lot when I can muster up the energy. (Anyone in the Manchester area want any raspberries?! you have to pick them yourself though :) )

The rest of my spare time, I have mostly been very slowly working on this. My First Evah Sewing Pattern! I finally plucked up the courage to go to my local fabric store, flick through the pattern booklets and pick something. It purports to be Very Easy, so we'll see. It's a sort of dungarees / romper suit type thing for a baby. I'm not used to this topsy turvy world of sewing, where the pattern costs 3 quid and the fabric is only 2.50. So the small bit of tissue papery stuff is more expensive than the big bit of corduroy? I come from Knitting Land where most patterns are free and the raw materials are sometimes pricey, so this fabric shop is a bit like looking glass world to me - I half expected the Red Queen to take my money. So far I haven't found anything too unintelligible in the pattern, but I haven't got very far as it took me ages to cut everything out. As the pattern has lots of different sizes, I felt that it might be nice to reuse it when the wee man has grown a bit, so I decided to be a masochist and not actually cut the pattern pieces. Instead I laboriously traced the pattern, cut out templates, and eventually just gave up and drew roughly on the fabric with chalk where the lines were supposed to be. I can't see this being a particularly accurate garment but it's a learning experience I guess. Hey, I have already learned that for the sake of saving three quid, it would have been an awful lot easier just to cut the damn thing! Oh well. At least I can progress on to the hopefully slightly more fun bit where I actually sew stuff together now... although, the sun has come out now, and there is a comfy looking patch of grass over there...

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trousered

So on UK Ravelry Day I had a bit of a knitting binge on my Charade socks. This was partly due to the excitement of having a whole day out of the house, and partly due to the highly compelling sock yarn I am using. I've never used handpainted yarn before but I can see why people get into it... it's like reading a book, you never quite know what's going to happen next, and you can't wait to see. Anyway it was such a pageturner of a sock I knitted the first one in two days. Then I was slightly worried that my socky overindulgence might make my arms fall off if I continued at that pace, so thought I'd maybe better try something less knitty for a while.


The baby has an irritating habit of growing out of his clothes, so I thought I'd make him some more out of some leftover bits of fabric. Sensible trousers are the order of the day here. I think it's the post-teddy bear suit backlash, I seem to be having a phase of dressing him like an old man. First attempt was the Baby Bloomers out of Sew Hip magazine. Well sort of - I cut out the pattern pieces and was unable to get them to fit together, so in the end I simplified it by just joining 4 pieces of fabric cut from the back pattern piece, instead of having a different back and front. This made them stupidly baggy. I'm not too sure about the result tbh. He wore them yesterday but they have a slightly Tudor look which is a little further along the old man scale than I had anticipated. The elasticated ankles ride up in use so they're round his thighs. Not all that useful as he's started crawling and I would have liked something to protect his knees from getting battered around too much. I may take the elastic out and see if that helps.


They were a super quick easy project anyway, so I thought i'd have a go at making another pair. Enter the Pockety trousers. These are pretty similar in construction, except I redrew the pattern pieces again to get a bit of a better fit. Longer legs and a slightly less comedy arse. I also left out the ankle elastic for less of a Henry VIII look. I like the way in this staid grey fabric (megacheap scrap fabric from a bargain bin, don't ask what it was) they look like the baby equivalent of an old man trouser that you might get in the back of a sunday supplement. But really, it's all about the pocket with these. I've always been amused by the concept of pockets on baby clothes, and while this one is clearly pretty useless it does sort of serve a function. I have a recurring issue with some handmade clothes that I can never tell the back from the front. In the rush to get dressed in the morning, I can often be found swearing and examining jumpers to try and find waist shaping / a couple of extra stitches at the neckline. This isn't what you want, particularly when trying to wrestle clothes onto a baby who is trying to hurl himself off the top of the dresser and is systematically removing each article of clothing you put on. So at least with these you can tell which way round they are at a glance.

And I had so much fun doing the pocket. I got the idea out of the Readers Digest Guide to Sewing which has a nice detailed how to for patch pockets. I put in an inverted pleat and machine sewed a buttonhole. Totally awesome. I want to put pockets and buttons on everything now. Or perhaps I should make a teeny tiny baby wallet and mobile phone to put in the pocket. (Or perhaps I should get out more.)

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UK Ravelry day

So if you didn't already know yesterday was UK Ravelry day, a knitting themed event in Coventry. I was ridiculously excited to be relieved from childcare duties for the day so that I was able to go!

Fortunately for knitters, the weather turned freezing for the day, so everyone was able to showcase their favourite handmade woolly creations. It was great fun to play spot the pattern / spot the yarn.

It was chucking it down a bit too much to stroke the poor alpacas, but there was a nice indoor area to shelter from the rain, with tea and cake, where literally everyone was knitting as they sat and chatted or stood in queues for workshops. Which is just an awesome sight. I loved just sitting round soaking up the atmosphere - everyone was so friendly, it was almost impossible not to get into a conversation if you reached into your bag and pulled out a piece of knitting or ball of yarn.
The range of stalls selling so much British yarn proved impossible to resist, so I didn't even try. (Mr. Rubbishknitter texted me as I was on my way home: Do you need me to bring the van down to the station to bring back all your new yarn? I replied: No need, I've managed to cram it all into the saddle bags of our new pet alpaca. He went quiet for a while after that.)

Jamieson and Smiths had a stupidly tempting pile of big bags of 2 ply jumper yarn for a tenner each. Drool. I am a sucker for that burnt orange colour. So despite having carefully written down yardages for a few potential queued items, I did what I had promised myself I wouldn't, and impulse bought a big pile'o'yarn. Ahem. Well, I'm sure I will find a use for yarn that lovely. I might go for a proper fair isle project, which is what the yarn is designed for really, or failing that possibly brooklyntweed's Druid mittens, which I've had my eye on for a while. I bought some undyed balls too in case I decide to go the fair isle route... you have to keep all avenues open!

Also, rather sillily in terms of efficiency of carting stuff around I bought some stuff off my Mancunian mates. Who could resist this handspun though? It's alpaca from Six Swans and it's the softest thing I've ever felt. I adore the caramel colour of the undyed yarn. I think this is destined to become something simple for the baby - either a hat or maybe I could stretch it out into a jumper if I found something suitable to stripe it with.



It was also impossible not to buy this little zip up pouch in 'crafty pirates' fabric from Green Eyed Monsters. Look, it has scissors and skulls! What more can you possibly want?



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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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big sock little sock

Advice to Knitters: When going on holiday, make sure you pack enough yarn.


Otherwise you will finish the socks you are making, then have to improvise reeeeally smaaaall socks for the baby from the teeny tiny leftover bits, then sit twiddling your thumbs, idly wondering if some sort of fibre could be made from grass. Ah well. The baby socks turned out ok, although I didn't really have enough yarn to do very much after turning the heel. I put an eyelet row in just before the top and a crochet tie through in an attempt to stop him pulling them off and eating them (his favourite sock based game). I love my new socks and like the length of them - maybe not very summery but I do wear boots a lot of the time for dogwalking and allotment digging purposes so I suspect they will be very useful. Pattern was winged a bit, based on my usual toe-up measurements from knitty's universal sock pattern, but with a k3 p2 garter rib, which is sufficiently mindless for inebriated holiday crafts. I spent ages agonising over what sock pattern would be engaging to knit without being too hectic for the stripes, and I think in the end this struck a good balance. Yarn is the very lovely Kaffe Fassett for Regia Landscape Celebration. I used every last millimetre of 2 balls.
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ode to Noro

Oh, your twig content is high
And your knots are many
Buggering up many a carefully planned stripe sequence
Some say you are scratchy
Although my peasanty skin doesn't mind
You have hidden unexpected colours
Which jump out alarmingly from the middle of the ball
In short, i have some issues with you
But will keep buying you
(As an occasional treat,
because you cost a bomb and I am brassic)
Basically I can't resist you
Because your colours are Soooooo Preeeeetty.

The End.


This is Turn a Square from brooklyntweed, a present for a friend of mine who enjoys a woolly hat. Noro Silk Garden colour 236, striped with Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran in Anthracite. Nice quick easy knit, but not at all boring with those pretty colour changes going on... sometimes we all need a bit of Noroey goodness.

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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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wobbly but finished

The lace scarf is done. No, it doesn't look like the picture in the magazine. Where others have successfully crocheted a border, I seem to have accidentally attached a hyperbolic plane to the outside of the scarf. The border was supposed to be straight, but mine ended up slightly ridiculously frilly. I think partly because I chose to use more laceweight to edge it, rather than 4 ply as the pattern suggested. A thicker yarn here may have provided more structural integrity. (I was too short on time to go shopping, and that was the best co-ordinating colour I could find in the yarn cupboard!). Also, fairly obviously, I put in far too many crochet stitches round the long sides of the scarf. Gah. I love crochet edgings but feel like I am standing at the bottom of a precipitous Learning Cliff, which I am inching up one crumbling fingerhold at a time.

Still, I don't really have time to redo it, so it'll have to remain in its current state of non-Euclidean geometry. I totally enjoyed doing this project - it was at all times engaging and absorbing and the lace pattern is lovely. With it being a fairly narrow scarf, it grows pretty quickly too. I even had time to make mine slightly longer than the pattern suggested, by about 10 cm. This makes it a nice wearable length I think, it's possible to wear it doubled and looped through with the crochet end bits showing. I may even make another one some time as I have enough of this laceweight left to knit a cosy for my house...

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speed lace

I think five days before a wedding is an ideal time to start a handknitted gift for the bride.

There's nothing particularly impetuous or foolish about casting on a project from a magazine the day it arrives in the post, before you've even finished reading it. (Lace Scarf from the Summer Interweave Knits, if you're wondering)

Not if you have the perfect yarn, that's been sitting in the cupboard for ages, a big cone of lovely laceweight alpaca that you got from a dodgy back street Peruvian yarn shop. And it's alright, look! Someone on ravelry has made it in two days, so it's totally doable. I bet she also had a small grumpy baby to look after. And it was probably also her first attempt at a proper lace thing. She probably paused to blog about it in those two days too. So it's all perfectly reasonable. No need to panic, or wonder why on earth you have such a lack of forward planning ability, leaving you with such crazy self-imposed deadlines...

Er.. might just put down this brew and get back to that knitting then...
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Trotting to Avalon

Hooray for rain. Sun, begone! Because the recent chilly murky windy weather makes it ok to wear my new hoodie. All the time. Indoors. With the hood up. I seriously may never take this off.


This is definitely my favourite thing that I've made so far for comfort value. The yarn, Sublime Extra Fine Merino, feels really, really nice next to the skin - light and soft like cotton, but warm like wool. When I die I want to fall into a big pile of this yarn, maybe with some puppies mixed in.

The pattern is Riding to Avalon, although for me it was accomplished at something of a trotting pace. I set off on the journey last autumn and dismounted several times along the way. On some occasions the horse went backwards and it only really managed to break into a gentle canter in the last couple of weeks. This final burst of speed only happened really because it was getting quite embarrassing pulling out the same jumper again and again at knitting group - the hood had only grown by about an inch during the time it took a friend to make an entire wrap cardigan out of 4 ply. So essentially the hood is knitted from Shame and sewn up with Rubbishness. And it shows! The hood is a bit wonky. Unfortunately I think this happened at the point where I picked up stitches around the neckband - I must have picked up more on one side than the other, because the centre line is a little off-kilter. So to fix it I would need to unravel a good couple of months worth of telly knitting, and now Mad Men has finished I'm not sure I have the inclination to redo it. So for now, it will remain wonky. It doesn't bother me that much - if I have to have the hood up, I'm probably out in extreme weather conditions, in which case I am not too worried about my appearance. Or doing a drive-by, and I wouldn't be too worried about it then either.

Cock-eyed hood aside, the most remarkable thing about the making of this jumper for me has been the incredible series of strokes of luck when making it. It's almost impossible to even believe the first thing. I accidentally knitted the sleeve cap the wrong way round on the first sleeve, making the buttons on the outside cuff instead of on the inside as the pattern dictated. This is not a particularly obvious mistake, and happened because I mixed up the start-of-row and middle-of-row stitch markers. I looked at it and thought about frogging but then, on reflection, decided that I actually preferred the buttons there. Later when I looked at the pattern page on Ravelry, I noticed with horror that there was an errata. (Erratum?!). But in a stroke of unbelievably good fortune, the errata suggests doing exactly what I had accidentally done. Unfreakingbelievable! And I hadn't seen the errata before so I couldn't have subliminally absorbed and processed this information. I think the gods of knitting were smiling upon me.

As if that wasn't enough, another mindbogglingly fortuitous event occurred. When I got to the hood, I was on my last ball of wool, and starting to panic. There clearly wasn't enough left to finish the thing, and I had bought a load on spesh that was probably cheap because it was discontinued or something. I was too scared to even think about what I was going to do. I mentioned the problem to, like, one person - my friend Britt, who said, Oh I happen to have a couple of spare balls of that exact yarn in that exact shade that I don't need for anything and you are welcome to have. I mean, really... how awesome is that?!? I couldn't actually bring myself to believe it was true until I had seen the evidence with my own eyes... and it was *exactly* the amount I needed to finish the jumper. Britt, you are a superstar... thankyou very very much!

The only thing that I modified (intentionally!) about the jumper was the button loops. The pattern suggested crocheting 16 button loops separately and then attaching them. The idea of this was a bit hair-raising, so I was relieved to discover this method for crocheted button loops (about halfway down the page). I basically slipstitched along the edge, at intervals doing a short chain, slipstitching it down and double crocheting back along. I really like this finish: as well as being much easier to do, it neatens off the slightly raggedy edge and gives a bit of extra sturdiness. My loops are a little twisty as I think I may have been crocheting into the wrong bit of the chain. Yes, I really am that much of a crochet numpty. But I did them all wrong in the same way so at least it's consistent! I quite like the overall effect.

Also probably worth mentioning for anyone else who attempts this is that there was a bit of a roll at the bottom of the jumper despite the few rows of garter stitch - I don't think there were quite enough there to weight down the natural curl of the stocking stitch section. Following Katie's wise advice I gave it a stern blocking and it obediently lay down. I dunno though, if I end up having to do this every time I wash it, it may end up being quicker to add a crochet edging. I am crochet edging queen now! I'm going to edge everything in the world with crochet! Really.

The fit is a little baggy. I don't know whether this is because of my inability to swatch properly, or because I measured myself for this quite soon after giving birth, or more probably a little bit of both. I don't mind though, I think with a casual jumper of this nature you need a bit of positive ease. Well, a lot in my case. *Puts trayful of pies in oven gleefully*.

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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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