cheating…

I cast on for a new project a few days ago, and it wasn’t a sock!

I do feel like I’m cheating on Socktoberfest, but I’ve been wanting a new not-too-slouchy hat for a while, and when I saw the new Cloudy Apples pattern collection, the Puffin Apple hat by the lovely Jen Arnall-Culliford seemed perfect. The name alone is too adorable to pass up!

So I went behind my socks’ back, dug up some cream aran in my stash, dyed it up and cast on. Working with tiny needles and skinny yarn so much, I often forget how quickly thicker yarns knit up. This is a super quick and satisfying knit, and I’m completely in love with the gorgeous texture and cable pattern!

I’m sure the socks will get over it.

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notes from the weekend.

I sat in the garden in the morning sun with some knitting and a book,

I cast on for new sock,

and I cooked a roast dinner and baked some yummy pumpkin muffins.

These things are seriously good I enjoyed one this morning for breakfast, along with a mug of apple cinnamon tea. Oh how I love autumn.

The only thing I changed from the recipe was reduce the sugar slightly (I used 1/2 a cup rather than 3/4), but the next time I make them I think they’d be lovely with a handful of chopped nuts or some chocolate chips. It’s a testament to how yummy they are that 21 muffins came out of the oven yesterday afternoon, and only 14 remain today….

Back to the socks, I really can’t decide how I feel about them. I cast them on wanting something plain, and although I like the subtle variegation part of me feels like it’s missing a bit of texture. I’m half tempted to rip back to the cuff and start again with Hermione’s Everyday Socks, but I’m almost at the heel and I’d hate for all of my weekend to have to go to waste!

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back to business

Well hello there, I seem to have unintentionally taken my annual summer hiatus from the blog! The last few months have been a bit of a rollercoaster. Not long after my last blog post I was called back in to my ex-workplace to help out with a project that was close to deadline for a few weeks. And then I got some incredibly tragic news about a friend which just pushed everything out of focus while friends and family tried to wrap our heads around it.

Things are starting to get back on track though, and I’m kicking off my return with a sock for Socktoberfest!

Pattern: plain top down vanilla socks with a short row heel (notes on Ravelry)

Yarn: Rico Design Superba Poems and Regia Stretch Color for contrasting cuffs, heels and toes

Ravelled here.

These socks were an emergency cast on as the Boy was dragging me to the cinema to see Looper (great film, by the way. I thought it was going to be one of those stressful, difficult to watch films but it was brilliant and I enjoyed it so much more than I was expecting to!) and I had… *shock horror*…. no vanilla socks to take with me! I kept the cuffs short so that I wouldn’t be knitting ribbing when the film started. I’ve been caught out with that one before; I always get so engrossed in the film that I lose track of what I’m doing, can’t remember if I’m supposed to be knitting or purling and end up with a couple of mistaken yarn overs and a mess of rib. Not good.

Once I got started, these socks zoomed by and were off the needles in a little over a week. I even don’t mind the fact that they’re not matchy matchy. I initially thought I was going to get a little twitchy about not being able to match the gradients because I forgot to make a note of where I joined the colour on the first sock, but then I decided to embrace the idea of fraternal gradient socks. If these were striped or patterned I would definitely be getting a little bit of twitchy rage at them not being identical, but I quite like it in the gradient, there’s something softer about the mismatch that almost works.

This yarn seems to provoke quite a vitriolic response in the Ravelry comments, but I quite honestly can’t see what the fuss is about. I actually quite like it. It has an almost handspun look when it’s knit up that to my mind translates to something cosy and comforting, and until I get around to spinning my own sock yarn these will do quite nicely. I did want to offer my counter to a lot of the negative comments I’ve seen surrounding this yarn though, so here goes:

• It is on the hairy side for sock yarn, but it’s not scratchy or itchy.

• It’s not soft either so personally I think it’s best for socks, but unless you have particularly sensitive skin it would be fine for a shawl or a scarf.

• It is not plied, it is a single. Because of this I’m not sure how hardwearing it’ll be as a sock yarn, but I’ve used my favourite workhorse Regia yarn for the heels and toes so hopefully it won’t fare too badly. We’ll see…

• It is a little splitty, but not too bad. I’ve knit with a lot worse before. I managed to knit this in the dark at the cinema and worked quite a few inches without working any split stitches, so it can’t be that bad :)

The needles have not been idle this past few months so I have quite a few things to share with you, but I’m going to ease back into things. I know I promised a couple of recipes in my last post, and I will get round to doing them! The pictures are all done, so I just need to sit down and write them up. In the mean time, I’ve got a lot of blog feeds to be catching up on….

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ennui

Sorry for the extended absence this past month, but I have been suffering from some major ennui lately. I think it was possibly sparked off by how crazy things got towards the end of May when my godson decided to put in a very sudden and unexpected appearance a whole two weeks early! This was immediately followed by the Queen’s Jubilee, I had to go on a course for some volunteer work I’m doing, and then there’s my new found motivation to get fit and finally lose the pounds that I’ve been packing on over the past six years, and amongst all that the needles have been strangely silent. Even my reading slowed down; I’m still on the fifth Game of Thrones book!

I’m slowly finding my feet again though. I started a new pair of vanilla socks for some cinema knitting, and after an agonising yarn stash deliberation I settled on a predictable grey but thought I’d spice it up with some bright yellow heels and toes. Of course I didn’t have quite the right shade of yellow, so out came the dyes…

… and whilst I was at it, why not stick some roving in as well?!

And this is what I pulled out of the dyepot in the first picture. I love it so much that I’m dyeing up some more to stick in the shop, as it’s looking shamefully bare in there at the moment.

I’ve got a couple of recipe posts lined up, but here’s a little sneak peek for now!

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inconceivable!

I found myself without any active WIPs on the go yesterday. Since I found the idea of not having any socks on the needles inconceivable (anyone out there who can say that word without thinking of the Princess Bride needs to go and watch that film NOW!) so I cast on for these Cheery Littlebottom socks. It’s the April/May mystery KAL pattern for the SolidSocks group, and I thought of this Regia yarn from my stash as soon as I saw it. I’ve been meaning to cast on since halfway through April but never quite got around to it so I’m glad to finally have it on the needles at last. I think it’s safe to say that I’m not going to get these finished by the end of May!

My Baby Surprise Jacket has been off the needles for well over a week, but it’s still lingering as a WIP since I still have all the ends to weave in and all the buttons to attach. I better get a move on though, the baby is due in a couple of weeks and I still have soakers to knit and onesies to embroider!

I used an applied i-cord to bind off, and I love how it turned out. I always thought that i-cord borders involved knitting yards of i-cord, followed by painstakingly sewing on said i-cord, which sounds like an incredibly tedious thing to do. Not so with an applied i-cord! You’re knitting an i-cord, attaching it, and binding off in one fell swoop, and it gives a lovely polished edge. I’m a definite convert.

There was also a bit of spinning action that went on this weekend. I hand-dyed this fibre a few months ago, and perhaps it’s a touch of Jubilee fever but I thought it looked a tad patriotic (if you squint, and imagine that the purple is actually blue….).

It was a quick spin, started on the Saturday night as a Champions League football avoidance measure, and finished on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t have an exact picture of how I thought the colours would look spun up, but I suppose I thought there would more prominent sections of the undyed white so I was initially a little surprised by the levels of pink. Of course, if I’d bothered to apply any common sense at all I might possibly have realised that white and red obviously blend to make pink, which is why the finished skein has such an overwhelming pinkish hue!

It’s about a 4ply weight, and I was quite pleased that I managed to keep my singles fairly consistent, especially since I was balancing my kindle on one knee and reading at the same time! What can I say, I just can’t put down the whole Game of Thrones saga. I’m not typically a fan of this sort of epic fantasy genre, but this stuff is engrossing! I read the first book out of sheer curiosity from all the hype, and I was completely hooked. I’ve been devouring them all in quick succession and I’m now on the fifth book of the series. Not looking forward to finishing it and having to wait such a long time for the last two books to be published!

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Sunday Best

I’ve just realised that I never really got around to blogging about my Coopknits mystery socks! They got a little glimpse in my Colour Lovers post, but I think they deserve a little more attention because I LOVE them!

Pattern: UK Sock Knitters March Mystery by Rachel Coopey

Yarn: elephantjuice Super Sock 4ply

Ravelled here.

Coopknits is a sock genius. I’ve admired her gorgeous patterns for a while but this is the first one I’ve knit, and now I just want to cast on for all of her designs. I just can’t get enough of those crisp textures and twisted stitches!

I will admit that when I first saw the charts for these socks I was a little overwhelmed, but the actual knitting of it is very simple, and once I figured out what was going on it became very intuitive. Although there were a more than a few little lapses where I didn’t pay enough attention, or became too engrossed in my book and to do a little bit of tinking!

The only change I made to the pattern was to the toe, where I carried out my usual practice of decreasing every other row until about half the stitches remain, and then switching to decreasing every row before grafting the remaining stitches. It just gives me a toe which is ever so slightly more rounded than a standard “decrease every other row” toe.

On the whole, I really couldn’t be happier with how these came out. I’m so pleased with the yarn too. It was a bit of an experiment so I had no idea how it was going to knit up, and was really curious about how the little splashes of orange would look in a finished knit. It turned out nicer than I could have hoped, and the orange adds a bit of lively interest to the grey.

For a long time while during the knitting of the first sock I worried that I was going to run out of yarn. I was using a slightly underweight skein that I’d decided to keep for myself, so I was keeping a very close eye on the scales to check whether I’d hit the halfway mark before the end of Sock 1. I panicked in a moment of weakness and dyed a backup skein, but I needn’t have bothered because I ended up with a fairly healthy 10g leftover. The practical side of my is telling me to pop it into my pile of scraps for future darnings, but I’m very tempted to use it for a little hexipuff!

I’m not entirely sure that these socks will ever need darning though, because I’m being strangely precious with them! I’m usually so eager to pull on a pair of freshly knit socks and go trampling about outdoors in them, because there’s something so undeniably cosy about feet wrapped in all those little handmade stitches. But for some reason I’m shying away from wearing these lovelies inside of any shoes or boots, and instead am quite content to pad about the house in them, and admire them sitting on the radiator. I’m sure the novelty will wear off soon, but for now they’re my Sunday Best.

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so near and yet so far

I feel like I haven’t been making much knitting progress lately. I started a little swatch a couple of weeks ago, but it hasn’t progressed beyond a rectangle because I need my 4mm needles, and they’re currently still occupied by…

… my Stripe Study shawl, which is still slogging along. I’ve knit all twelve contrast stripes and I’m now about two thirds of the way through the border, but even though I am so close to finishing, I can’t seem to bring myself to knit more than a few rows at a time. I still love this shawl, but my current feelings towards it are echoed exactly in Pinkundine’s recent post. At the risk of repeating what she has already written, the rows are just so long now, and there is none of the excitement of short rows or stripe segments left to break things up. It’s just become a bit of a slog, and if it wasn’t for my current rush to free up these needles it would probably linger on for quite a while!

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Your Knitting Or Crochet Hero :: 3KCBWDAY3 ::

Your Knitting Or Crochet Hero
Blog about someone in the fibre crafts who truly inspires you. There are not too many guidelines for this, it's really about introducing your readers to someone who they might not know who is an inspiration to you. It might be a family member or friend, a specific designer or writer, indie dyer or another blogger. If you are writing about a knitting designer and you have knitted some of their designs, don't forget to show them off. Remember to get permission from the owner if you wish to use another person's pictures.

In truth I’m inspired and influenced by many talented people, but I think the mother of them all, cliched as it may be, has to be Elizabeth Zimmerman.

I come from a very DIY-inspired family. My Dad was a marine engineer and was DIY personified. Although his talents didn’t stretch to actually building our house, a huge proportion of the things in our family home had his mark upon them. He installed and varnished our hardwood flooring and skirting boards, turned our attic into a usable space with plumbing, refit our bathrooms, built our garden sheds… The list is endless. My 16th birthday present from my parents was a complete bedroom refit, and my Dad did every bit of it himself, from the flooring, to the fitted wardrobe, to the walls. B&Q was his second home (or perhaps that was the golf course), and I always felt like his handiness had no bounds. If he didn’t know how to fix or build something, he’d sit down, plan it out, and figure things out until he could.

Similarly my Mum has a totally resourceful, “can do” approach to everything. The number of times I experienced utter exasperation as a child whenever I expressed a longing for something, only to be told “that’s very easy to make, we can do it ourselves!” As exasperated as those words made me as a child, they’ve stood me in good stead, and to this day I’m always keen to have a go at doing things myself. Well, almost, sometimes it’s nice to take a shortcut.

But I think it’s also why Elizabeth Zimmerman’s writing appeals to me so much. She has a very no nonsense, “can do” approach to knitting. It’s empowering. She advocates “unventing”, experimenting, having a go, experimenting some more, and not being afraid of your knitting. If it doesn’t work, rip it back, but don’t be afraid to try. I think out of all crafts, knitting (and crochet) have the most flexibility in terms of experimentation. Most yarns can stand being reknit dozens of times if things don’t quite go to plan. Some yarns can even be re-joined once the ends have been broken, but the same can’t be said of fabric once it’s been cut for sewing, or paper once folded for origami. Other crafts have their perks, but there is a finality about them that is absent from knitting and crochet.

So I look up to Elizabeth Zimmerman for opening my eyes to the woolly possibilities,

but it seems that I also have my parents to thank for giving me an outlook that embraces craftiness so well.

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Photography Challenge Day :: 3KCBWDAY2 ::

Photography Challenge Day!
Today challenges you to be creative with your photography, and get yourself in with the chance to win the photography prize. Taking interesting photographs in this instance isn't about flashy cameras or a great deal of technical know-how, it's about setting up a story or scene in a photograph and capturing something imaginative. Your photograph(s) should feature something related to your craft, so that might be either a knitted or crocheted item, yarn, or one of your craft tools. One example of setting a scene would be to photograph a girl in a knitted red cape walking through the woodlands with a basket of goodies, as in the Red Riding Hood tale, or you might photograph a knitted gnome hiding among the flowers in your garden. Photo editing is permitted for competition photos. Here are a few examples of my own photographs to illustrate an imaginative use of photography, but you can do much better than these...

Oh how I struggled with this topic! I racked my brains all day yesterday, but by the time I got the vaguest semblance of an idea there wasn’t enough light to take any photographs. The light today hasn’t been much better (thanks, rain!) but I did manage a few snaps so I’m putting this up today and hoping that no rules are being broken or bent. Judging by the quality of the entries I’ve seen, this is certainly no prize contender, but I thought a little yarn-evolution picture could be fun. So here it is, from fluff to yarn to ball to needles.

I couldn’t resist another picture, because hand wound balls of handspun yarn are just the prettiest things!

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Colour Lovers ::3KCBWDAY1::

So it’s here at last! Knitting & Crochet Blog Week, Year 3. I love the concept of this event, and every year I start with the best intentions to plan out my posts in advance and schedule everything so that it all pops up on time, and it’s never once happened. Surprise surprise, it still hasn’t happened this year, but let’s see if I do any better than my previous efforts!

Colour Lovers
Colour is one of our greatest expressions of ourselves when we choose to knit or crochet, so how do you choose what colours you buy and crochet or knit with. Have a look through your stash and see if there is a predominance of one colour. Do the same with your finished projects - do they match? Do you love a rainbow of bright hues, or more subdued tones. How much attention do you pay to the original colour that a garment is knit in when you see a pattern? Tell readers about your love or confusion over colour.

I love colour. I love creating it, playing with it, exploring it. The rich, vivid hues of freshly dyed mawata silk hankies drying on the line make my heart sing.

And out of all colours, I’ve always had a weakness for blue.

I just can’t resist those deep, jewel tones and bright, fresh hues, and a glance at my stash definitely reveals my bias towards this end of the colour spectrum.

But as much as I love intense, vivid colours, a lot of the time I seem to gravitate towards neutrals for my knitting. Greys, browns and creams have such a natural, classic beauty to them.

They are simple and timeless. And of course, they go with everything! Which is a great thing when I’m bleary eyed in the morning, and running out of the door with the first scarf that I had to hand…

And out of all the neutrals, grey is my firm favourite.

But a pop of colour is always welcome.

 

I just wanted to give a little shout out before I go. I haven’t been online much for the past week or two because I broke my glasses and the lens coating on my other pair is all scuffed, and going through life with one perma-blurry eye is not fun! I’ve been getting some wicked headaches and eye strain so I’ve been trying not to stare at screens too much, but this week seems as good as any to jump back into things.

During my absence I’ve been lucky enough to have been awarded the Versatile Blogger award again, not once but twice! The first was from Michelle over at Will Knit for Food, whose blog is one that I discovered only recently but is already a firm favourite. She has the most beautiful photographs and her blog is filled with wonderful sewing and knitting projects. I am in so much awe of her sewing skills! The second was from Laura of Sudden Expressions, whose blog I’ve been following for a while. She’s so sweet and friendly, has such a fantastic variety of knitting projects, and she dyes absolutely beautiful yarn! Check out these lovelies! So a huge thank you to those ladies, I’m very flattered and grateful. As I already did a Versatile Blogger post last month I won’t bore you all with another one, but feel free to check it out if you want to.

And also check out all the other Colour Lover blog posts by searching 3KCBWDAY1. Enjoy!

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a prize in the post

Remember the SolidSocks Ravelry group with the bi-monthly KALs that I’m always banging on about? Well, one of the great things about that group is that each of the KALs is sponsored, and if you finish your socks within the two months and post your pic to the group you get entered into a prize draw to win something from the lovely sponsors. Now, I can count the number of times I’ve ever won anything on one hand. The first prize I can ever remember winning was a beautiful doll in a sapphire blue velvet dress that I won after having the closest guess at the number of Smarties in a jar at a school fete when my age was still in single digits. My second prize was a set of paints I won during a colouring in contest one summer in Singapore when I was still of a single digit age. To be honest, I don’t even remember entering, all I remember is sitting at the kitchen table as my Mum placed a set of Bebe branded paints in front of me and told me I’d won them in a colouring in contest. In retrospect, that could well have been one of those parental white lies told to keep me happy and quiet in the midst of a very long summer, but I’ve always believed that I won them so it stands as my prize number two. And last weekend when I logged onto Ravelry, I discovered that my Galileo socks had won me prize number three.

To say I was giddy with glee would be an understatement. If you don’t believe me, the Boy can attest to my bouncing round the kitchen and squealing with joy as I cooked dinner. After calming down (just a tad) and getting in touch with Karen, the sponsor, she graciously told me to visit her shop, choose whichever project bag I liked, and she would pop it in the post for me. I am not decisive at the best of times, and she has sooo many lovelies that it took me quite a while to choose one! For a while I was really torn between this floral print and these really fun, bright birds, but the panda bag just reeled me in the end. The print was just too cute to resist! The bag arrived from the US to the UK in less than a week, and it is so beautifully made and I am so much in love with it that I just had to share it with you!

I’m not much of a seamstress, but I can tell that there has been so much care and attention put into the making of this bag. The seams are flawless and it arrived beautifully pressed and packaged. There’s a clear plastic pocket stitched into one side of the inner lining which would be perfect for holding a pattern or some notes and a few notions. The bag’s a pretty good size too, large enough to comfortably hold the two cones of Colourmart yarn that I’m currently using for my Stripe Study shawl, plus needles and knitting with room to spare, but the fabric is soft enough that a smaller project like a pair of socks would be equally at home inside.

There’s even a cute little stitch marker attached to the tag! I love little details like that, and I love the fact that even though this was a free prize I was still made to feel like a valued customer. As soon as my bank balance isn’t looking quite so pitiful I would love to head straight back to BlueTulips and stock up on a few more of these lovelies. There are some great zippered pouches that look like they might make a good home for my dpns, which are currently amassed in a rather unattractive pile on my floor.

So a huge thank you goes out from me to Karen at BlueTulips and all the other lovely sponsors, and the SolidSocks team for putting these KALs together. I might still only be able to count my wins on one hand, but at least my projects have a pretty bag to live in now!

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