A bit of the other

So, I’ve knitted a jacket and done some spinning, but what else have I been up to? Well, for a start I attended the annual Yarn Yard gathering, which they very conveniently hold at the Bar Convent, here in York, so I just need to hop on a bus each morning to join them. Sadly I had to work on the Friday (we had an Away Day, which slightly bizarrely was held at a Buddhist Centre, so I had the odd experience of spending the day at two different religious centres without any religion being involved) but I joined up with them at five o’clock, so I didn’t miss too much.

I somehow didn’t manage to take any photos at all of the actual event, but much fun was had – apart from the Saturday afternoon event there’s nothing actually organised, just lots of sitting around and knitting and/or spinning, with chat that becomes more risqué in direct proportion to the lateness of the hour and the amount of alcohol consumed. We decided that the Marine in the Radio Times photo definitely wasn’t showing us his finger!

Food played a big part in the weekend as usual, there were fish and chips (with scraps for those who can’t get them in less civilised parts of the country), and Indian food with giant naan breads on Saturday night. It was good to meet up with old friends and make new ones – I particularly enjoyed meeting the Glasgow contingent, who were great fun!

As mentioned, the main event of the weekend is the Saturday afternoon yarn swap/gathering. Everyone brings something to swap, it’s all piled on tables, people wander round and eyeball things they like the look of until they’ve decided on a favourite, then at the signal try and grab it. It was more civilised than it sounds! I wasn’t going to get much, nothing really grabbed me, but somehow I ended up with a bag full after all…

This was my haul – mostly fibre, with some yarn and a couple of books.

My first choice was a set of batts from FeltStudio – unfortunately they had a lot of very tinsel-like sparkle in them, but it comes off quite easily, the ones at the top have been desparkled, and look much better!

In knitting news, I felt the need for something simple after the traumas of the moss stitch jacket, so I cast on for the only pattern that grabbed me from the Nature’s Wrapture book I got from the yarn swap – Raspberries.

I found six balls of Rowan Scottish Tweed Aran in my stash (part of the great Kemps haul from a couple of years ago) and cast on. The body is simple – it’s done top down, with raglan increases, but you don’t split for the arms, just keep knitting straight. Unfortunately I think I tried to cram too many stitches on my KnitPro cables, and I managed to break two of them – the cables came out of the metal holders. Now I need to find some glue to mend them. I thought of superglue, but I think it might set before I could get the cables properly in, they take a bit of twisting to get in. I’ll ask at our local DIY shop unless anyone has any bright ideas – do let me know if you do!

So anyway, the body was nice and quick, but then I hit the edging, which is in a variation of trinity stitch, on the right side rows you have to do a k1,ktbl,k1 all into the same stitch, then on the wrong side row you’ve got a p3tog to get the stitch count down again, which doesn’t make for speedy knitting! It’s taking well over half an hour to do two rows, and using about 10g per two rows – I think it might be just as well I’ve got an extra ball of yarn! There’s still the front bands and the collar to do.

It’s not very easy to photograph the purple yarn, but the stitch makes little bobbly bumps. There’s a tiny red fleck in the yarn which is pretty.

I missed the end of the Yarn Yard weekend due to general exhaustion, but I gathered from Twitter that there had been talk of bargain sock yarn from Kemps, and eventually I gave in and had a look – they’ve got Regia College yarn for £4 per 150g ball, it’s a DK weight yarn, so knits up quickly. Somehow seven balls have found their way to my house. I can’t think how it happened.

Oh, and it snowed. The cats were nearly as fed up as I was about this.

It does look pretty, but my drive is long and steep, and if I want to have even a chance of getting the car back up it, I have to clear it every time it snows. The novelty soon wears off! Thank goodness it seems to have warmed up now.

Right, I think that’s me more or less caught up. Phew!

Read Full Post »

2011 – that was the year that was

Inspired by Jane Brocket, I’ve looked through my photos from this year and chosen one from every month (mine are rather less glamorous than hers though!) I’ve not used any particular criteria, just picked one that seemed to stand out from that month’s photos, either as a memory of a good day, or as a pleasing image.

January – a day out in Whitby with Lucy. The sun shone, but it was bitterly cold!

February – I gathered together all my handspun, with a view to trying to knit with some of it. I think I’ve used one skein from that lot. I have spun more though. Hmmm, not sure that worked.

March – knitting in the garden, in the unseasonably warm sunshine. Mollie helped me photograph these cosy socks.

April – my socks got their spring wash before putting them away for the summer.

May – I went to Norfolk. These lobster pots were at Wells-Next-the-Sea.

June – seems to have been a month of sewing. I made my first quilt, with matching cushions and a bag.

July – in London again, for Knit Nation this time. This is St Pancras station.

August – weaving in the garden. This is probably my favourite of all the things I’ve made so far, my handspun, handwoven stole.

September – in Northumberland with Lucy, this is Lindisfarne Priory.

October – apples in the garden. The same ones which are now on the lawn feeding the blackbirds over the winter.

November – Knaresborough. This was a post that never happened, perhaps I’ll get round to it yet.

December – sheep heid!

Happy New Year everyone, and thanks for reading this year, stay with me for more of the same next year :)

Read Full Post »

A Useful Thing

My lightweight shawls and scarves spent several years crammed into a drawer, with only the ones at the top being worn because it made too much mess to go down lower, but all that changed after my last trip to Ikea, where I bought a Komplement Multi-Use Hanger, and found a great use for it…

It’s a simple idea, 28 rings, crocheted together, with a hanger on the top, and it’s great for my scarves. I was a bit amazed that I managed to fill it instantly though!

Ta-da! It hangs on a over-door hanger on my bedroom door most of the time, so I see it and smile every time I go past, but there was no light to photograph it there, so I moved it into the spare room with its handy hanging rail. I tried to colour coordinate the scarves as best I could, but I’ve found out that over half of them are shades of pink or purple, with some blues thrown in, and just a couple of oranges and a green for variation. Perhaps I need to expand my colour palette a little!

Read Full Post »

Herdy heads for the hills

I’m getting on with my various projects – one quilt is done, and the other would be getting there if I hadn’t run out of thread. Sadly we don’t have a local sewing shop any more, so I’ll have to wait till I’m in town tomorrow to pick up some more. I’ve plied one bobbin of the red yarn, and done a bit more of the second sock – photos soon, but in the meantime a friend just sent me a link to this video, do have a look, it’s very cute :)

 

Read Full Post »

Box of Tricks

I’d be the first to admit that I usually live in a state of chaos. I do try to keep my living room tidy, but as fast as I put things away, I get other things out, usually connected with making things (funny that…)

This, combined with the fact that most of my smaller knitting notions (stitch markers, safety pins, blocking pins etc) were kept in a variety of small packets and tins, meant that inevitably I couldn’t find the ones I wanted to use.

Stitch markers seemed to be the worst culprits, and just before I went away I had the bright idea of buying a small divided box to keep them in. Off to ebay I went, and found what looked like the perfect box (item number 270691454869). Sadly I only looked at the photos and didn’t actually read the dimensions, and the box that was waiting for me when I got home was about twice as big as I’d anticipated.

I contemplated looking for a smaller box, but then it occurred to me that whilst I didn’t often loose the tin I kept all my odd bits and bobs in, I did have trouble getting the smaller things out of the bottom of it, so I decided to combine the whole lot.

This is the result, and it’s making me unreasonably happy. It’s big enough that I won’t be able to lose it without a considerable effort on my part, and everything’s in it. The only problem will come on the inevitable day when I fall over it on the floor and strew the contents all over the floor. Which will obviously be on a day when the carpet needs hoovering and has a good covering of cat hair…

In other news, I can’t believe that I forgot to take a photo of this brilliant mug I found whilst I was on holiday. It has pride of place on the bookcase in the conservatory.

Read Full Post »

Still here

Oh dear, the sun came out and my brain disconnected from the internet – I’m massively behind on my blog reading, I haven’t been on Twitter for weeks, and my poor blog’s very neglected :(

I haven’t been completely idle though, things have been happening. Mostly involving knitting, but also involving this –

I had a windfall, courtesy of my lovely parents, so I’ve bought myself a new car. A Hyundai i20 Style, and no, I hadn’t heard of it before I bought it either, but Dad recommended it, and he usually knows about these things. I’m only interested in bells and whistles, and it has them in abundance – a bluetooth phone connection with steering wheel controls and voice dialling (no wires!), a lead for my ipod/iphone, climate control, mp3/wma playback on the cd player, and lots more I need to read the instruction book to find out about. It also tells me when to change gear, which is possibly going a tad too far. But it’s very shiny! My only regret is that I didn’t get the lime green version, but Dad was horrified at the thought, and apparently they’re harder to resell, so I settled for boring silver.

Oh, and that’s my parents’ drive, mine isn’t nearly so well kept!

I’ve finished the socks I started a couple of weeks ago. They’ve got an afterthought heel, and it’s the first time I’ve done one, but it probably won’t be the last, especially with self striping yarn. There are more photos of the picking up stitches process on Ravelry, here.

I’ve also made a shawl, but that probably deserves a post of its own, so here’s a teaser photo.

The garden has been lovely over the last couple of weeks (apart from the bit where my neighbours had what sounded like their entire extended family to stay for three days over Easter, and spent most of their daylight hours in the garden – can I go and live on an uninhabited island now please?) and the spring flowers are looking beautiful in the sunshine.

Some of my aquilegias, one of my very favourite flowers, there’s lots of them around the garden. It always seems like a miracle when they reappear after the garden has been under a foot of snow.

Apple blossom. It was a nice change to sit out when it was falling – blossom snow is so much better than the real thing!

And my lilac’s just coming out too.

I’ve done a bit of spinning too, turning this lovely BFL/silk fibre from Wildcraft into this –

400m of fingering weight yarn.

Yesterday I had a lovely time watching the Royal Wedding, I thought that Kate looked gorgeous, and so did her sister. Kate’s poise is amazing, she looked completely at ease all the way through. I could have done without the naughty bridesmaid though – whoever thought that having three year olds was a good plan? Poor child. At least she was too young to have known better, unlike Beatrice and Eugenie, who looked like they’d come as the Ugly Sisters to Kate’s Cinderella.

Now I’m about to start yet another shawl, this time it’s Aase’s Shawl, which I’m going to do in the merino/silk/cashmere I spun a few weeks ago. I may be mad, as the body of it’s in seafoam stitch, which I hate doing, but it does look pretty…

Oh, and I’ve just remembered, I’ve booked a holiday. I’m going to Norfolk for a week next Saturday, staying in a self-catering cottage on a farm just outside Blakeney, I can’t wait! Prepare for lots of photos of quirky buildings made of fling and salt marshes.

Read Full Post »

Washing Day

Read Full Post »

My Knitting Time – 2KCBWDAY7

Write about your typical crafting time. When it is that you are likely to craft – alone or in more social environments, when watching TV or whilst taking bus journeys. What items do you like to surround yourself with whilst you twirl your hook like a majorette’s baton or work those needles like a skilled set of samurai swords. Do you always have snacks to hand, or are you a strictly ‘no crumbs near my yarn!’ kind of knitter.

Um, my typical crafting time. That’d be any time I’d sitting still, really. My usual seat is on my sofa, laptop to one side, in front of the TV, watching things my fantastic Virgin V+ box has recorded for me. That box has completely revolutionised my TV watching, I used to forget to watch things live, or record them on video then not get round to watching them and forget which tape they were on – this is just so easy, and it records whole series for me at the touch of a button, I love it.

This is where you’ll find me most evenings I’m in the house, but now I have a different place for sunny afternoons – my lovely new conservatory and Poang chair.

Where I sit and listen to audiobooks on my iphone – currently Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, a perennial favourite of mine.

Other times I’ll knit are in the garden in the summer, on the occasional car journeys I made when I’m not driving, which usually means when I’m out with my parents, on trains or tubes (but not usually buses) and in the pub on knit night. I’ve never really got round to knitting in bed, I tried it once, but it was just uncomfortable.

I don’t often knit without some form of entertainment, unless I’m doing something that requires total concentration, and I don’t tend to listen to music whilst knitting.

I like to have support for my elbows whilst I knit, so I’ll tend to surround myself with cushions unless I happen upon the perfect chair. But I don’t think I have any other particular requirements for things around me – I’ll happily nibble whilst knitting, or quaff a glass or two of wine, but they’re not essential.

Of course the other distraction to knitting is a cat sitting on my chest…

But that’s not really optional ;)

Read Full Post »

Something to aspire to – 2KCBWDAY6

Is there a pattern or skill that you don’t yet feel ready to tackle but which you hope to (or think you can only dream of) tackling in the future, near or distant? Is there a skill or project that makes your mind boggle at the sheer time, dedication and mastery of the craft? Maybe the skill or pattern is one that you don’t even personally want to make but can stand back and admire those that do. Maybe it is something you think you will never be bothered to actually make but can admire the result of those that have.

I touched on the skill part of this question in Tuesday’s post, and then someone else (sorry, can’t remember who) said in her post on that day’s topic that really knitting is all just knits and purls, just in different orders, which is pretty much my attitude to it, so really I don’t feel intimidated by knitting techniques, I’ll give anything a go. What does put me off projects is the patterns – as I’ve said several times recently, I find it hard to cope with written out patterns where a chart would say things so much more clearly. I’m also not fond of the type of pattern with has simultaneous instructions on different pages, I tend to have to write the whole thing out in some sort of shorthand before I start to keep track of what I should be doing.

Dedication is another matter – there are quite a lot of beautiful patterns out there which I would love to do one day, but the sheer scale of them puts me off. Huge circular lace shawls, intricate cabled jumpers in fingering weight yarn, ganseys, gloves (all those fingers!), colourwork with more than two colours per row – all sound lovely, but there’s a pretty high chance that the WÍP would spend quite a long time in the cupboard…

So – what do I hope to tackle in the near(ish) future? A fairisle cardigan is in the running. I’d like to try and properly get my head round spinning something which wasn’t fingering weight or thinner. Free motion embroidery on my sewing machine, for quilting. Dressmaking, at least fairly simple things, but actually making them fit. Perhaps I will have a go at a complicated lace shawl or stole. Maybe I’ll learn how to weave simple patterns on my rigid heddle loom.

Or I might just carry on making the same sort of things I already do. It’s my hobby after all, I can do just exactly what I want!

Oh, and the photos have nothing to do with anything, I just wanted something to liven the post up, and the photo of Mollie I put up the other day seemed to go down well. Min doesn’t often show up for photos, but I managed to find a couple of her too.

Read Full Post »

Tidy Mind, Tidy Stitches – 2KCBWDAY3

How do you keep your yarn wrangling organised? It seems like an easy to answer question at first, but in fact organisation exists on many levels. Maybe you are truly not organised at all, in which case I am personally daring you to try and photograph your stash in whatever locations you can find the individual skeins. However, if you are organised, blog about an aspect of that organisation process, whether that be a particularly neat and tidy knitting bag, a decorative display of your crochet hooks, your organised stash or your project and stash pages on Ravelry.

Hmm, tidy. It’s not really a concept I’m very good at. I have visions of myself living in a perfectly clean and organised house, but somehow it never happens. When it comes to the crunch, knitting always seems so much more attractive than cleaning and tidying.

But I do have places where my yarn should be, and mostly it stays there, once it gets there (this is not always an immediate process). I live alone in a three bedroomed house, and sad to say, it’s pretty much full – like nature, I abhor a vacuum, and feel the urge to fill every space, and lately that’s been with yarn. And fibre. And now fabric.

My latest attempt at organisation is my conservatory (there’s still a post to come about how lovely the conservatory is now it’s finally done). I bought this unit from Ikea, and it has cleared a lot of the surface mess from my living/dining room.

The cupboards and drawers at the bottom have yarn and fibre in them, nicely out of sight.

At the same time, I was inspired to buy this little unit, to replace the basket and untidy heap of WIPs that had previously lived at the end of the sofa. Although things are appearing on top of it already. Oops.

At the other end of the room is a cupboard with my sock yarn (in the top basket, so full I don’t think I could get another bit in), and lace yarn and some other oddments in the bottom basket. To the left of that is handspun and something else I can’t quite identify at the moment (and I’m too lazy to get up and look).

Next to that is a chest with sewing stuff in, sadly it’s already overflowing. And there’s some new yarn there too, waiting to be photographed for Ravelry. My sewing machine is to the left.

In the hall is yet another cupboard, with a few old videos and a lot more yarn.

Next to that is the hole under the stairs, with the gas meter and yet more yarn.

And on the spare room bed reposes the yarn I got from Kemps in their great Rowan £5 a bag clearance, with some other oddments. This mostly hasn’t even made it to Ravelry, I must get round to that one day.

There’s also three boxes of yarn in the loft, and under my bed are several bags of fibre. And there’s two bags of Wollmeise somewhere, I think I last saw them in the bookroom. I’ve a feeling there’s a bag of something in one of my wardrobes too.

It’s at times like this I’m thankful for Ravelry, especially for the larger quantities – it’s so much easier to look down my stash page than go rooting through boxes and bags. I do seem to have 281 items stashed on there though, that would go over 300 if I got round to putting it all on. I may have a problem…

This very appropriate mug holds my crochet hooks, stitch holders, cable needles and other such bits and bobs.

And this tin holds smaller useful things.

Pretty much the only needles I use these days are my KnitPicks/KnitPro ones, and they’re all in this great organiser, I couldn’t manage without it.

Read Full Post »