Blithe Dance

Log Jam

This kaleidoscope of stripes is almost finished - but I've run out of the last colour on the final stripe.  I ran out of the dark blue on the penultimate stripe too, but managed to find an oddment in stash of a different yarn to cast it off. But I'm five rows short of the icy blue, so I'm casting around for oddments as I write.

Shame on me!

Last time I posted that I'd received an Innocent bottle hat kit for Age Concern as a freebie, but thought I'd use the wool for something else and send a cheque to Age Concern.  After seeing Amelia's last post though, I felt I'd been rather too grumpy and should get into the spirit of the thing.  I then discovered that each hat only takes about 10 minutes to make, but that the closing date was meant to be last Monday.  Some hasty knitting on Tuesday and Wednesday yielded a dozen bobbled covers, beautifully styled here by some young friends. I've never knowingly purchased or drunk an Innocent smoothie, so we had to use some eggs instead.

By the end I was getting quite proficient at making the tiny pompoms.

I've started a scarf as a Christmas present to my sister-in-law, using my 21st Century yarns DK from Alexandra Palace.  How can there be so many scarf patterns out there, and none that quite seem to fit the bill? In the end, I've taken inspiration from a scarf in the Boden catalogue, with help from this pattern of Pagebypage of Maui.  The writer sums it up perfectly: "Berry stitch is great for scarves.  Both sides are beautiful. The stitch can be found in Barbara Walker's "A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns," on page 221".  They are indeed beautiful, and the scarf lays flat too which is important to me.  I'd love to have taken it directly from Barbara Walker but I'm unlikely to be lucky enough to ever own these books and the local library service have mysteriously "lost" all their copies.

It's very pretty, but reminding me why I don't often knit scarves, due to getting bored after the first couple of feet!

Revealed

2007 photo album updated with pictures of my competition entry - I'll find out how I've done at the Knitting show in London on Saturday week.  In the mean time, here's a young friend modelling it (not one of my own, it was too big for them)

Waving goodbye to the prettiest socks in the world

The Waving Lace socks are finished, packed, and on their way to London for the Rowanette Seasons exchange.

I don't have any sock blocking templates but a hastily-bent coathanger did suffice.  I think the pinks and mauves here are so very pretty, I do hope I've read my recipient's colour tastes correctly.  They will certainly be warm!

They look rather nice on feet as well, (Is it cheeky to try on socks meant for a gift, even for modelling?)

Last year in the Rowanette Exchange, I knitted a cushion and received a cushion too  .  This year, I have knitted socks and also received a pair of socks. And a scarf.  And biscuits.  And toys.  And sprinkles.  THANK YOU KARIN - I LOVE THEM ALL!!

They came on Monday, when my neighbour brought round Saturday's parcels.  This also included my first-day Harry Potter which I was cussing Amazon about all through Saturday, to the point where the husband went and bought me another copy. But, the parcel from Karin...

She wrote that the scarf was for spring and the socks for autumn.  I love them and they look great on. The biscuits didn't last long.  The little wooden animals were made by her dad - the boys love them especially the crocodile.

The socks are a feather-and-fan pattern, light and lacy (like I thought mine would be!) and here's a close-up:

It's been a week of many parcels, because I've also received Patons Fairytale Colour to knit my competition entry.  One of the colours was not the one I specified, but they are sorting that, you know how I have to have the perfect shade!  The yarn is good though, very like the old Rowan Designer DK but seems a little thicker.  I think it will make a stable rather than drapey fabric, which is what I like for children.  In fact, I'm quite excited about the swing back from blends and trends to pure merino double knitting in lots of colours from Rowan, Patons, Sublime etc. Good Ol' Proper Knitting Wool.

P.S.  Barely had I uploaded this posting, when I received an email to say that the Jaeger range is being discontinued, including all the Matchmaker Merino, Baby Merino and Extra Fine lines.  So much for that!  Perhaps I should amend the last comment to say thank goodness that Good Ol' Proper Knitting Wool is not dying out completely despite severe attacks.  Oh, I'm gutted. Jaeger! I have Jaeger yarn that's older than I am in my stash. Sorry, what's that? On sale? OK, where's the credit card...

good news, bad news

I have to blog this - there is no one at home but me and the babies and I have to tell someone! The post has just arrived! Time for a quick post while the children are having their Weetabix.

I submitted two designs to the Knitting mag. competition.  I worked late into the night and this was what the kitchen looked like when I'd finished!

Into one of them I poured all my ideas and inspiration, fair isle, knitting in the round, shading colours, clever design details.  But it was not quite a tradtional knitting pattern for children, so on my husband's advice I quickly cobbled together a second design with some intarsia motifs and stripes, that's more the usual thing you see in childrens books. I have a horror of picture sweaters, you see, I like my intarsia geometric and subtly coloured. 

You can guess which one is through to the final! Yes, not my darling creation, but the last-minute one. ?Ha! Serves me right, that.  Really I am very chuffed to have got into the last six, and of course have another knitting deadline, but can I have some knitterly commiserations for my suffering design muse in my hour of need?

They are going to have to remain shrouded in mystery though. I'm going to work the Fair Isle one up in Rowan Pure Wool and try it for submission to Knitty - might even introduce a steek.  But it would need to be an original design, not blogged about.

Rowan Exchange - one sock finished, one two inches in.  Looking good, progressing slowly. T'was ever so.

Added later

I've realised that I might have come across as rather ungracious about being a finalist! I'm thrilled to bits, really I am.  I think I should give Coats the credit for knowing what their target knitting public want to see. And can't wait to get knitting, either.  Note to self: never blog before having a cup of tea in the morning.

On a mission

I haven't gone away again

but..

I can't blog about what I'm knitting!  I'm entering the competition in June/July Knitting magazine, to design a child's garment.  Since I don't like to do things by halves, I'm entering two designs and am currently in the final stages of colouring/photographing/swatching. 

I hope you understand I don't really want to blog my ideas at the moment, particularly if they get through to the next round, you will have to go to Ally Pally to vote on them at the Knitting and Stitching Show.  If I don't, I'll reveal all in a couple of weeks, which is a lot more likely.

Worst of all, the competition deadline is just a couple of days before the Rowanette  Exchange next week, and I'm still on my first sock!  I can show you a picture of that one:

The colours in this Natural Dye Studio sock yarn are lovely.  I thought the sock was coming out to be quite thick, but I think that's characteristic of any sock with texture.

It's been lovely to read people's accounts of Woolfest.  I did hope to go this year, and started planning, but all kinds of family events took it over in the end.  Maybe next time...

Stretching it

I'm greatly encouraged by having knitted two sweaters in two weeks, so what to do next but another rush job?  A little friend's first birthday party next weekend, a little cardigan on the needles and still it's all from stash.

I've had extra balls of the Debbie Bliss wool/cotton since knitting the rosebud baby blanket from her very first book, four years ago.  Now I know this yarn substitutes for Baby Cashmerino, so I was hoping that three balls would make this little cardigan:

Now the 12-18 months size calls for three balls, but so do the two smaller sizes so it will probably use most of them up.  I had three balls with bands in dusky pink (600), but can't remember whether any of them has been started.  The wool/cotton yarn also has 10m less length per ball than Baby Cashmerino.  All this is adding up to an impending yarn crisis in a week's time, I fear.  For the contrast colour, I've some of the same in plum, probably not enough of that either! I've also a ball of bright red so I've given the edgings a red border to provide a bit of zing.

Knitting from stash is not without problems, is it?  I wouldn't even have these leftovers if the baby blanket had not taken five balls rather than eight as given in the pattern!  But I'm unlikely to use up pink yarn in the foreseeable future.

Here's the back, very nearly finished as of tonight.

I'm adding some yarn from an unravelled swatch as I've already finished the first of my three balls.  I'm going to look in the yarn chest now for any overlooked oddments!  I have a contingency plan - knit the sleeves last, simultaneously, until I run out.  If they are a little short, at least they won't drag in the baby's fromage frais so badly.

I've also received details this week of my Rowanette Exchange partner: I think my project this year will be socks, and I look forward to choosing some handpaint yarn in a suitable colourway for my recipient's preference.

Happy New Year

Well, we are still in the first week of January (or we were when I started writing this post).

I was going to describe this in the last post but ran out of time - here IS my Colinette adventure.  I bought the yarn at the Knitting and Stitching show (September 2005!), after trying on a sample garment of "Metis" from the Muse book, using Lasso yarn:

 

I'm using the "Forest" colourway.  Between Muse/Metis/Lasso/Forest it's been quite hard to remember which word belongs to the yarn or the design or the colour!

I have not found it easy to knit with Lasso - maybe that's why it's taken so long.  I could not get the right tension - very unusual for me, but had to go up a needle size.  It's a polyamide chain-type yarn with a lovely texture, but very little elasticity, so I was also worried about the garment "growing".  Finally settled on the 34-inch bust size which will fit fairly closely if it keeps to size, and hopefully won't get too baggy after a wash!  You can see the lovely green colours with flashes of blue and cherry red here:   

But oh! such a badly behaved yarn.  It sticks and snags on everything. I'd have never wound it off the hank without my swift, and it dropped off my hand-wound balls in huge bunches and then tangled around itself.  To control the pooling, I'm knitting 2 row "stripes" of two balls, so they could tangle and collapse on each other too.  I have really rough "housework" hands these days, so lashings of hand cream are needed before I can pick up the knitting.

Well I missed numerous "I'm gonna wear it" deadlines (November party, Christmas drinks, Knit'n'chat, Christmas Day), but just when I thought this might be fired into the UFO black hole - dear Santa brought me a ball winder!  I promptly rewound the working balls (tightly) into properly crossed-over cakes and have been tangle free through this last sleeve, so far.

How did I live without a ball winder for so long?

I've now finished the back, front and one sleeve and knitted nearly half the second sleeve, so it looks as if i may get it done this week.  I'm a bit reluctant to measure it but a tacked-together try-on was encouraging.  Problem is it's me, not the knitting, that did the growing over Christmas.

And here we are at the moment, on that bell-bottomed sleeve.  The next picture will be FINISHED!

I must be having  a Colinette phase at the moment, because the next project on the needles is a cardigan in Skye, which is gorgeous to knit with, like a dyed Magpie Aran.  It's Debbie Bliss's much-knitted Easy Jacket, and is flying off the needles.  Just look at these colours: Summer Berries, dyed to order:

I just knitted enough for a break from the Lasso:

I hope it knits as quickly as the last time I tackled this pattern, as it's for a friend who's shortly to move to a house with poor heating.  I'm counting on it being a design that suits almost anyone.

Finally, a few resolutions for 2007:

- Knit more regularly

- Blog much more regularly

- Knit up some of the lovely projects in stash (Wendy's Knit from Stash looked such a good idea)

- Be more interactive with other bloggers - exchanges/SP#/memes etc.

- Go to bed early. Oh dear.

Colinette Adventure

  I didn't get round to saying that I went to the inaugural Knitting and Stitching show at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham in September with three knitting/quilting friends.  This is the calm, spacious, uncrowded entrance after we had just stopped for a cappucino in the foyer...

AND THESE ARE THE SPOILS!

Handpainted blue/green pure wool merino: baby garment of some kind, maybe a nappy soaker.

Handmaiden Lace Silk and Lorna's Laces sock yarn:

Colinette "Muse" book and Lasso in Forest - to make the sweater shown on the back of the booklet.  I've done the front and back of this and am working on the sleeve - so at least I'm managing to knit up what I've bought before the next show comes around.

I hope they do a show at the NEC again - it did feel like a first time, with some exhibitors absent and noiticeably less busy than London.  It's so easy to get to for me though (30 minute drive) it's hard to justify going elsewhere. I hope it gets a bit of momentum. 

More Colinette pictures next time!

Half of the Hearth and Home Exchange

(Indigestibly large post follows.  Feast or Famine at Blithe Dance these days.)

OK, some catching up to do!   I finished the cushion, and what a pleasant knit it turned out to be.  I never use such bright and vibrant colours myself, so it was quite refreshing.  I'm really pleased with the final result and fortunately my recipient liked it too.

The colours are magenta and red, with peacock blue buttons. The brief was: bright, jewel-like and shades of IKEA and Debbie Bliss.  It's certainly very inviting on a chair - I had to haul the cat off during the photo session.  I covered the cushion pad with some red taffeta to confine the feathers and stop the white grinning through.  Since I like my knitting to behave, I also tacked the cover shut along the foldline to stop the buttonholes pulling.

I' ve just remembered I thought one of the buttons was out of line and forgot to adjust it!  Too late now...

I was housebound with the children (potty training) when I finished, but I did want to add a little gift or two to the package. It is not the weather for posting chocolate, so  continuing with the cushion theme, I thought I would put in a catnip mouse and a lavender sachet using last summer's garden harvest.

I like the Wendyknits catnip mouse pattern, even though I always get the decreases wrong when I make it.  By now I didn't have any bright or jewel like wool in my stash, so it had to be dark green Magpie aran.  I'm struck by the similarity between the knitted piece and the Vulcan B2 bombers that used to thunder over my childhood home in Lincolnshire.  Somehow the shape just rang a far-off bell.  My father is a former RAF radar technician, so he was always keen to point out passing aircraft to his pre-school daughter, which is probably why she ended up as an engineer!

 

(More pictures of the aircraft at this most excellent website.)

The cat did not care about that when it was finished! I sewed a little internal sachet to keep the catnip confined.  I just gave it to her for a second, to check it was catnippy enough - no worries on that score.

When I made one of these for home, I used some brown Kid Classic yarn.  The problem is the mouse is far too realistic and can give you quite a shock when the cats bat it across the floor of an evening!

After months of very low-key knitting, I was emboldened to try something more challenging.  For a lavender sachet, of course, you only need to knit a square.  I can't even attempt this without a pattern though, so after googling I could only find this pattern from Interweave that I liked the look of.  Further emboldened to discover that Polly had knitted one too. As luck would have it, my only Koigu KPPPM in stash is a lavender shade.

Here are the progress photos, including my Very First Ever Mitred Square.  Good thing I'm shortsighted is all I can say - it was two evenings of cross-eyed squinting on 2.25mm needles.

(Pattern neglects to say you don't need "a" stitch holder, but at least eight, which dangle about like hairpins as you work).

But the final effect is lovely, really lovely.  I like the way the squares get fractionally smaller towards the top, and the detail of knitting the edge stitches to get a good selvage for picking up.  (I've always been a plain knit-and-purl-to-the-end-of-the-row girl.)

The recipient (not a blogger) sent me a lovely picture of her cat wrapped around the mousie, but I've had an unfortunate deleting episode and lost it.  Looking forward to meeting her soon in person though, at a local wool shop of course!

What next?  I've set myself the difficult (emotionally) task of knitting a hat for a friend with a recurring breast cancer.  It is might hot here, so I didn't think a bulky hat would be appropriate.  I have some blue yarn for Knitty's beautiful Shedir, but she does love bright colours and the Calmer palette is a bit restricted.  I've found a 4-ply hat pattern in an old Rowan book, converted it to top-down and in-the-round, and got going with some Koigu KPPPM, my new favourite yarn.  It's sure bright, and apart from a characteristic band, I've got away without too much pooling.  Hope she likes it.  And that I have enough yarn.  Oh dear. Wish I didn't have to make one though.

Sorry, I am shamelessly knitting on one Addi, one Aero and have a cheapo plastic stitch marker.  This is the tacky seafront of knitblogging, isn't it?

Finally, some very positive knit-futures.  This is the kind of email you WANT to receive from your mum - I think she deserves one of those sachets for this.  She went to a closing-down Rowan stockist (Needle'n'craft in Lincoln, sadly) for me and after much consultation via mobile phones...

Hi sam

List of what I managed to get for you - they had obviously sold a lot of the rowan yarn.

            Handknit cotton (greenish) shade 318 lot 1578196  8 balls

            Handknit cotton (beige) shad no 205 lot 1630850 9 balls

            All seasons cotton  Lt green shade 193 lot 22K4 9 balls

She charged me £1.91 a ball thoug the All seasons was more expensive - so that is 30% to 50% off.

Marvellous! 

And my Mason-Dixon Knitting dropped though the door from Amazon, causing Mummy to set a Very Bad Example by reading it at the breakfast table, as far away as possible from the flying Weetabix splats.   And the new Rowan book is coming any day too.  And the holidays are coming where the children will be IN CRECHE.  Looks very good indeed!