Catching up

Oh dear, this has been a very neglected blog of late. I’ve not been feeling brilliant, and I find that whenever I feel a bit down, my words are the first thing to go – I try and write, but it all just comes out very stilted and I give up. I’m still not quite right, but I’m feeling a bit better, and I managed to take some photos today which don’t make me look dreadful (as most of the last lot did), so I’ll start trying to catch up on what I’ve been knitting.

Starting with the most recent and working back (because that’s the most logical way to work, obviously), here’s a little shawl in the beautiful Kidsilk Stripe from Rowan.

I’ve been lusting after this colourway (twilight) for ages, and I finally cracked and treated myself to a ball a couple of months ago. This very simple pattern – mostly stocking stitch with an easy lace edging – seemed perfect for showing off the amazing colours in the yarn (the colours haven’t come out brilliantly in the photos, the stripe above the lime green is actually a beautiful purple, and the stipe which looks purple is more muted. But you get the idea).

The Kidsilk Stripe seems expensive at £18 per ball, but it’s a 50g ball (compared to 25g for regular Kidsilk Haze), and this shawl only took one ball. So pricy but not extortionate. Unfortunately I have a yearning to make a cardigan or jumper out of this colourway, which is going to take at least three balls. Hmm, better start saving up!

Next up is a huuuuugggge shawl, in a merino/possum mix yarn, and Noro Silk Garden. I bought the possum a few years ago, from the Knittery in Australia when they were closing down, and I’ve been waiting for the perfect project for it ever since. Similarly three balls of Silk Garden in a long discontinued colourway have been sitting in my stash, and this was the perfect opportunity to put them together.

The pattern is Sonia’s Shawl, and it calls for equal amounts of yarn. I had 640m (in four skeins) of one, and 300m of the other, so I used the first skein of the possum at the top of the shawl, then striped the silk garden with the next two skeins, and used the last skein and a bit to do a garter stitch border.

To say I’m happy with this would be something of an understatement – it’s one of my favourite things of everything I’ve knitted. It’s going to live on my sofa in the winter, and keep either my shoulders or my legs warm, and if it gets really cold it’ll go over my coat as a lovely snuggly furry layer :)

And it’s why I love Noro so much – you can do an incredibly simple pattern and the wonderful colours make it look absolutely stunning.

(Pause for a slight interruption – this is another reason it’s sometimes hard to blog –

Someone thinks that the space between the laptop and my face is her space. Thankfully she never stays very long!)

And back to the knitting. Continuing the shawl theme, when I saw the Leftie pattern I couldn’t resist starting one pretty much straight away.

The pattern’s written to use up leftovers, using a different yarn for each leaf (hence the name Leftie), but the thought of all those ends to sew in had me running away screaming, so I had to come up with a plan b. Which was to use handspun yarn, and it worked perfectly! This was a skein I’d spun a couple of years ago, and then gone off as all the colours seemed to merge together in the skein. Thankfully when I started knitting they sorted themselves out again – and because the leaves are done with short rows all at once, you’re only using a short length of the yarn and the colours came out fairly clear. If that makes sense!

This is the whole thing once it was done – you start at the small end and the rows get longer, then you stop once you lose the will to live. Which was after 30 leaves in my case. The pattern’s written for fingering weight, but I used DK, largely because I bought a huge amount of cheap wool/alpaca mix from Kemps a while ago, and wanted to use it up. Well, make a start, anyway.

And this is the shawl in action – it’s very cosy!

Last up on today’s photo session was a shawl I finished a while ago, but failed to photograph in any sort of flattering fashion. I had better luck today, thankfully!

The knitting world went mad last year when Kate Middleton was photographed just after her wedding wearing a shawl with a frilled edge.

There are now lots of patterns for similar shawls on Ravelry, but none of them seemed quite what I wanted until I saw Atlantic Storm. It’s a very plain shawl – Kate’s was patterned in the body, but I thought that would be too much with this DK weight yarn, so I wanted to stick to stocking stitch.

It’s a shallow triangle, increasing at the ends of three rows out of every four, then stitches are picked up along the top and then a couple of rows of increases worked until there were – wait for it – over 1800 stitches for the edging. Which is all in 1×1 rib. Thankfully I was watching tennis at the time, so I needed mindless knitting. I just slogged away at it until I’d done 19 rows, then thought about casting off. I knew I didn’t want to do a standard cast off, which always looks odd on rib to me, and the only other one I could find in most places was a sewn tubular one. Which is fine for the edges of garments where you have under 100 stitches, but the thought of doing 1800 stitches filled me with dread, not to mention how many ends I’d have to sew in.

So I did some more searching on Ravelry forums, and came up with a link to Techknitter’s fake tubular bind off. Which is a bit more fiddly than a regular one, but gives a lovely edge.

It’s not a stretchy cast off, so I’m not sure how useful it’d be for garments, but it was perfect for this. The section in the middle of the photo above is actually the right side, but I decided that I liked the reverse better, so I cast off the other way round the circle. And about five hours (!) later I was finally done.

The yarn’s Rowan Cashcotton DK, which is lovely and soft. The 18% angora content does mean that it will spend the next five years shedding over everything it comes in contact with, but hey, soft!

Why do cats always stand on knitting the minute you put it on the floor?

And I think that’s enough for tonight! There is more to come, but I think that’s plenty for one post. I’ll try not to leave the next one so long, honest…

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Quick weekend shawl

One of my work colleagues is a keen knitter who is trying to get to grips with lace knitting. She’s done a Forest Canopy shawl, and has been trying to branch out by doing an Annis shawl, but she’s been struggling, and I’ve been trying to help and advise her (mostly by telling her to use stitch markers between every repeat and count a lot…) So I’ve been looking at the pattern a lot, and last Saturday I, being in need of a restful couple of days, sat myself down in the conservatory in the sunshine and cast on 363 stitches.

The shawl’s knitted from the bottom up, you do the 18 rows of the lace pattern, decreasing on rows 15 and 17, then start the short row stocking stitch section – so you go from very long rows, to slightly shorter ones, to very short ones, then they get longer again, which is a novel way of knitting a shawl, but it makes a lovely crescent shape!

By Sunday night I was a fair way through the stocking stitch section, and a session in front of the TV on Monday evening finished it off, leaving me with this messy looking object. But the magic of blocking worked again.

I didn’t pin the top edge at all, I just let it settle into a curve as I blocked out the points. It’s not easy blocking a crescent, and it’s not completely even, but you can’t tell when it’s on!

And the finished result! It’s very ethereal – the yarn is KnitPicks Alpaca Cloud laceweight, which is 100% baby alpaca, and I only used about 30g of the 50g skein, or about 240m, using 5mm needles. It didn’t block as wide as the pattern said, but it’s big enough.

The nupps in the lace were something of a challenge – I though about replacing them with beads, but I’ve done nupps before, on my seasilk Swallowtail, and they were fine then, so I stuck with them. But they were harder in the alpaca! I did them as loose as I could on the knit row, but the p7tog wasn’t exactly fun. I tried slipping the first six loops, purling the last one and passing the other six over, but it looked a bit messy, so I struggled on. I may have to investigate the crochet method next time.

This gives a better idea of the colour, it’s a petroly blue shade.

Modelled at Knit Night by my lovely friend Nadine.

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Morgain shawl

The weather’s been a grey and damp here the last couple of days, so I’ve hunkered down on the sofa catching up on TV and finishing off my Morgain shawl. The pattern was tricky to get the hang of in the early stages, but as it grey it became more predictable and I could see what I was doing. It just took a while as the rows got longer… It did all squash onto a 60cm needle though!

The pattern says that you can cast off after any row, which is technically true of just about any shawl, but to get nice points at the edge, you need to cast off at one of the points where the pattern changes direction (the author does say this), so when I was halfway through chart 3 I did quite a lot of maths and measuring of yarn, and decided that I’d have to stop there (I had about 600m of yarn, the full six charts take about 1200m). I did an extra pattern row to take the decreases right up to the leaf spines, then did a two step cast off, doing a knit row with yarn overs but no decreases to increase the stitch count, then doing a k2, ssk cast off for stretchiness.

I blocked it using wires on the straight edges and pins for the points.

Mollie pointed out that it wasn’t really symmetrical, but I decided that it would be fine once I unpinned it. And it was :)

I used my new shawl pin to fasten it – it’s very clever, just a spiral which you thread through both layers, but it won’t come undone by itself.

It came from Spinning Forth, and was very reasonably priced, with very cheap postage (from France). She does them in copper or brass, I bought one of each. And it came with a very nice little note :)

This photo shows the striping of the yarn a bit better.

The details – the pattern is Morgain, by Stefanie Bold. The yarn is my own handspun, from beautiful merino, cashmere and silk fibre from Picperfic. I used about 104g/550m, and 4.5mm needles. It’s lovely and soft!

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Knitting, ripping and sewing

I’ve had a busy weekend, crafting-wise. Yesterday I spent a good portion of the day catching up on the week’s TV and knitting my two handspun projects – the first is the shawl I started a few weeks ago, which is growing slowly, although the rows are getting long now.

It’s not much to look at yet, but I’m sure it’ll be lovely when it’s done and blocked, the yarn is feeling beautifully soft :)

Second is a scarf I’ve started with the yarn I spun from last weekend’s batt. It wasn’t until I’d done a fair chunk of it that I realised that the ripple pattern went perfectly with the name I gave the yarn – raspberry ripple!

I’m loving the way it’s knitting up, it’s very random, but the pattern is showing the short stripes off perfectly. Some sections are pinker than others…

I’m still not quite happy with the falkland bits, although they do look a lot better knitted up – it’s amazing what knitting will do for dodgy handspun! – but I’m pleasantly surprised by the bamboo bits, which are absolutely fine, despite feeling a bit odd when I was spinning it.

I’ve also been ripping out knitting – this cardigan was an early effort of mine, it was the second I’d made from the pattern, and in a classic example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, I decided that I knew better than the pattern writer, and put my new-found skills of grafting to use on the shoulders (um, that seam’s there for a reason!) and compounded the problem by knitting on the back neck band to live stitches instead of casting off and sewing the band on. Predictably as soon as I put it on the whole top of the back stretched like mad (the fronts were about three inches apart when I laid it out!) and it fell off my shoulders all the time. I did persevere with it a bit, but then it ended up at the back of the cupboard, where I found it when sorting out last week. The yarn’s Silk Garden, so too nice to give away, and yesterday I steeled myself to unpick the seams (not as easy as it sounds!) and reclaim the yarn. There was also a matching beanie which I quite liked but never wore, so I pulled that out too.

And now I have 420g of lovely Noro looking for a project. Yum.

Today I decided to do a bit of sewing, so I fished out my various Clothkits projects-in-waiting, and made a start.

Watched by Mollie, obviously.

First up was a hat for my nearly-two-year-old niece. The pattern pieces were all nicely printed on the fabric, and were easy to cut out, but for the lining you have to pin them to the unprinted fabric and cut round them, which they don’t tell you on the website. Sewing the six hat panels together (times two, including the lining) was a bit fiddly, and I was a bit bemused to find that they didn’t mention snipping the seam allowance before ironing the curved seams. The brims went on surprisingly easily, and then I sewed the lining to the hat. And stopped and had a look at it. There are three sizes, done by using a different seam allowance, and I’d done somewhere between the two largest ones (the largest is supposed to fit a 54cm head). But when I tried it on it fitted me just fine, and the circumference is more like 60cm. Hey ho, it’ll fit her one day.

The lining was also a bit big for the hat, so I topstitched round both edges of the brim, so that the extra fabric is at least inside the hat.

It is cute though! I love the birdies.

And lastly I started making a skirt for myself. But I’ve only got the outside done, so I’ll do the lining and finishing tomorrow, hopefully before it goes dark so I can get some photos. I hate these dark evenings, I so wish they’d stop muttering about permanent summer time and do something about it. And if Scotland don’t like it, let them stick with GMT, countries in Europe cope with different time zones, why can’t we? Bah. Right, now to hunker down with my ripply scarf and wait for the Strictly results. I so hope Nancy goes this week.

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Small(er) Hypernova

And another one done! This is the smaller version of the Hypernova Shawl (the pattern calls it a shawlette, but I have an irrational hatred of that word…) by Arlene’s World of Lace. I started it just before Knit Nation, and knitted on it whilst I was there, finishing it off last Saturday, so it took about two and a half weeks. Once you get past the set up rows it’s pretty much mindless knitting though, so it was a nice relaxing knit.

Constant readers may remember that I’ve made this pattern before, that was the bigger version, in laceweight, and was more of a three-quarter circle. This one’s a half circle, but is actually nearly the same size to wear, it just stretches more.

It was about 20” in diameter pre-blocking, and is now 27” – my big version is between 28” and 30” in diameter, so not actually that much bigger. I did do one repeat less than the pattern for the big one though, and one more on this one, so that could explain things.

I actually sailed pretty close to the wind though when adding the extra repeat – my skein was 162g instead of 150g, and I did some weighing and working out before starting the extra repeat. Unfortunately my maths was a bit wonky, and I decided that if 20 stitches took 30cm of yarn, it was taking 0.67cm per stitch. You wouldn’t think my degree was mostly in maths, now would you? I did a bit more frantic working out and measuring when I saw how little yarn I had left after the extra repeat, knitted *very* fast on the cast off row, and managed it with just over a metre of yarn to spare. Well, being an honorary Yorkshirewoman I wouldn’t like to have wasted any…

The pattern is perfect for showing off the wonderful colours of the Wollmeise yarn without the pattern disappearing into the variegation. This photo is probably the most accurate for the colours.

And this is the slightly-more-tricky centre section, which is very effective – it looks like a spider’s web.

The details – the pattern is Hypernova, by Arlene’s World of Lace, and the yarn is Wollmeise 100% merino, in the colourway Miss May. I used 3.75mm needles, and cast off on 4.5mm ones. I did one extra repeat (ten more rows) and it’s 27” in diameter.

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Biased

And another FO! But this one’s a resounding success, I love it :) Which is a relief, as I wasn’t sure that I would – it’s an unusual construction, a cross between a shawl and a stole, with two wings leading off a triangular back.

This was started by my lovely friend Rachel, who did one half and the beginning of the second before getting fed up with the combination of a repetitive pattern and Kidsilk Haze and giving it to me to finish off, so it’s something of a joint effort. I can see why she gave up, the pattern is very dull, but I did a few rows here and there and finally it was done. One side is slightly shorter than the other, probably due to the difference in our tensions, but you can’t tell when it’s worn!

Up to the point I took it off the blocking boards I wasn’t completely sure about it, but the minute I wrapped it round me it just felt right – cosy and warm and light as a feather.

The two halves are grafted together, it wasn’t easy to keep this even and it’s a bit tight in places – normally I’d pull the yarn to even it up, but I didn’t even try in KSH – it can just stay that way!

The details – the pattern is On the Bias, by Dutch Knitting Design, and the yarn is Rowan Kidsilk Haze in colour 595, it took two balls.

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Mmmm, cashmere….

…pity about the pattern :(

It looked so pretty on the stall at Knit Nation, but really it’s just not big enough. It just about wraps round my shoulders with a pin to hold it at the front, but without the pin it just falls off. Irritatingly, I only used 72g of 110g, so I probably could have done the next size up, but even if I could be bothered ripping it back, the pink garter stitch stripes have been cut, and would have to be spliced.

It was extremely alarming when I cast off and found that it was this big – for reference, the boards are each 24” square.

I blocked it as hard as I could, but even so it’s barely 46” across the top. And the construction is strange – the bottom patterned section is done straight, with a decrease in the top band, then in the top stocking stitch section you do a double decrease at each end of the right side rows, then some very rapid decreasing and a garter stitch section knitted on for the last bit. This does sort of work, but I can’t help thinking that short rows would have been better – it has a tendency to stick out at the back. Or even pi-type decreases, with decreases spaced evenly across the row every few rows, a la Citron.

It looks pretty worn like this, but to be honest, I’ll probably wear it tied round my neck like a scarf.

Or else back to front.

It is beautifully soft, and I love the colours (although the blue did come off in alarming quantities on my hands as I knit – I was a bit scared of washing it in case the pink went blue, but I gave it a very quick dip in lukewarm water and all was well).

The details – the pattern is Lenora, by Paulina Popiolek. I bought it in a booklet from Skein Queen at Knit Nation, but now I find that it’s available on its own, which is also irritating, as I only wanted that pattern. And the booklet’s been printed with some very strange ink, it absolutely stinks. The yarn is Opulent, from Skein Queen, in the Regency Blue and Heathered Pink colourways, and is lovely.

Another niggle, but probably just a personal one, is that the charts were written so that the same symbol is always the same stitch – I much prefer them when they’re written so you can see the pattern in the chart, with symbols meaning the opposite on right side and wrong side rows. Plus there’s a mistake on line 29, with an extra knit stitch, which would have been easy to spot if it had been written the other way. Hey ho, it passed a weekend, and it’ll be warm and snuggly in the winter. Now of course I want to buy lots more cashmere and make a cosy cardigan. One day…

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Rock Island Shawl

 

As promised, a post about my latest shawl, Rock Island from Jared Flood, aka Brooklyn Tweed. I spotted this new pattern a couple of weeks ago, and when the lovely Fiona at Grace and Jacob in York gave me a skein of her hand-dyed new alpaca/silk/cashmere 800m laceweight to play with, it seemed like the perfect time to start.

The shawl’s an interesting construction, you start with the edging –

which is an eight row repeat, between 12 and 16 stitches wide, and is repeated 71 times. Which did get a little tedious (all that turning!) but I got there in the end. It was about 2.3m long when I’d done. There’s lace on every row, so it does require some concentration, and I’d highly recommend colour-coding the chart, as k2togs and ssks are different on each side, which confused my little brain.

There’s a yarn-over/k2tog combination at the beginning of every other row, making a nice line of loops down one side –

which you use to pick up stitches for the body of the shawl. At this point I got completely into the knitting and didn’t take any photos until it was nearly done, but basically you do ten rows or so of garter stitch, then 24 rows of lace (again on both sides, but pretty simple, just a two row repeat really), then the rest of the shawl is garter stitch, with the rows getting shorter by four stitches every right side row (just like a normal top down shawl but in reverse).

This is about two thirds of the way through the last garter stitch section.

It’s one of those lace patterns that looks like nothing on earth before it’s blocked, but afterwards it’s beautiful.

This gives an idea of the size of it – the boards are 24” square, and it goes right to the corners. I threaded wires along the top edge, then through the line of yarn over holes to stretch the main section to size, then carefully threaded more wires through the points – this was a bit tricky, as it’s not immediately obvious where they are, but I managed it in the end. Having the other set of wires in definitely helped.

The garter stitch section did go a bit funky in places, with some stitches seeming to disappear, but I think that was down to knitting fine yarn on big (4.5mm) needles. I like the effect it gives though, so all good.

And it’s huge! It was 21” x 46” before blocking, afterwards it’s 31” x 64”, quite a difference…

I love the lightness of the lace pattern now it’s blocked.

And decreasing up the centre means you don’t get that obvious line that you get when increasing with yarn overs either side of a central stitch.

I used about 60g of yarn, so about 480m, which is about 70m less than the recommended amount. I went up a needle size to compensate for me being a tight knitter, and my shawl is more or less the same size as the pattern says, so it seems like it might be over-estimated. The yarn was lovely to work with, and has blocked beautifully – it’s as light as air, and very soft.

It was a reasonably straight-forward knit, but the lace does require concentration – it’s definitely not an in-front-of-the-television knit for those parts, but I did manage to listen to audiobooks whilst knitting it (Ngaio Marsh’s Overture to Death, and Agatha Christie’s Mystery on the Blue Train).

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Silky Shetland Triangle

For someone who’s trying to get through her WIPs, I do seem to be starting a lot of small projects lately! On the plus side, this is another one using handspun yarn, and using some of that was another recent ambition, so perhaps I have a small excuse…

This started out last August as 100g of gorgeous merino tencel fibre from Artist’s Palette, one of my very favourite blends.

And spun up to about 360m of fingering weight yarn, with a lovely soft sheen.

When I came to knit with it, it felt quite like Seasilk, and whilst it’s a bit more loosely plied in places, it’s not far off (Seasilk on the top, mine underneath).

It had a wonderful three-dimensionalness (is that a word?) before blocking – the back looked like an egg box!

But it blocked flat, and I’m really pleased with it. There are subtle stripes in it, but they don’t overpower the pattern, they just give it a bit of depth.

The pattern is Shetland Triangle, by Evelyn Clark, and again I think the download is vastly overpriced, at $8.95 – the main body of the pattern is a ten row repeat, four of the five knit rows are exactly the same, with slight differences at the ends of the rows, and the fifth knit row has no patterning at all. The edging is pretty basic too. The pattern is also in Wrap Style, which is currently about £13.50 on Amazon for a whole book of patterns, and much better value – if I hadn’t had the book I wouldn’t have been making this one!

People say you should pull silky yarns from the outside of the ball, but this one worked perfectly pulled from the centre – they always remind me of gasometers when they get to this stage. This is how much I had left, about 5g, so I used about 330m of yarn. I did two extra straight repeats, and used 4.5mm needles.

I had another little slip last night, when I needed something easy to knit in front of the television, and pulled out a ball of Kaffe Fassett Regia sock yarn. Oops.

But this afternoon I forced myself to confront another WIP, and pulled out the Coraline cardigan I started back in June. I finished the body up to the armholes, but for some reason (probably the weather) it got shoved in a bag. I knew I didn’t want to do the sleeves quite as written, and would need to do a little thinking, so I’ve been putting it off. The pattern says to do an icord, then pick up stitches from it, but that’s fiddly, so I’ve gone for doing a provisional cast on, and I’ll do an icord bind-off later. I’m also doing them flat, I’d rather sew up a seam than mess about magic-looping them, and I always end up with ladder when i do that. So I spent half an hour sorting myself out, and now I’m on the easy straight section, there isn’t even any shaping. I just need to decide how long they’re going to be, I’m leaning towards just below the elbow. We’ll see.

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Progress

I have finally finished my Lily cardigan, which Ravelry helpfully tells me I started back in June 2009. Actually I finished it a couple of weeks ago, but it was waiting for me to make the ties for the front – the pattern says to do them as part of the front edging, by casting on then casting off again, but I thought that icord would be neater.

It’s knitted in Jaeger Trinity, a long discontinued yarn which is like a thinner version of Rowan’s Summer Tweed, and just as nasty to work with, having no elasticity at all. But it does make a nice fabric, I must admit. I read beforehand that it stretches on blocking, so I carefully swatched and blocked my swatch, then worked out my measurements based on that, making the 34” size to come out at 38”. This worked perfectly, sadly what I didn’t take into account was that in the two years between starting and finishing, the weight I’d previously lost would all have come back on again, and whilst it does just about fit, it looks a bit like I’ve mugged a twelve year old and stolen her cardigan. I see lots of salads and healthy stir-fries in my future…

It’s knitted top down, with a picot cast off at the bottom  edge and on the sleeves, which looks pretty but it always tedious to do, and more so in the Trinity yarn.

The increases are worked by doing k1,yo,k1 into the same stitch, which is pretty, but, as I’ve mentioned before, I really don’t like doing top down garments, having the whole thing on my lap whilst doing the sleeves really annoys me, I’d far rather sew it up afterwards.

Anyway, it’s done, and that’s another off my list of WIPs – of the nine I had a few weeks ago, there’s only five left now, and one of those is finished but just needs blocking and a button. There is one more new thing that’s snuck in there though –

A Shetland Shawl in handspun merino/tencel – it’s grown since I took this photo for Ravelry last week, so it should be done in a couple of days.

And I’ve finally finished spinning the gorgeous merino/silk/cashmere fibre from Picperfic which I started a few weeks ago – it’s beautifully soft, but it decided that it wanted to be spun very fine, so it’s taken a while.

There’s about 600m/100g of heavy laceweight.

It’s puffed up a bit on finishing, so it should make a lovely soft shawl or stole, I just need to find the right pattern.

And a gratuitous cat photo to finish off – Minnie, looking like butter wouldn’t melt, with a halo to match.

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