Needles, Needles Everywhere

The first lot of knitting needles arrived on Saturday. And then the second lot arrived today. They took respectively four weeks and six days to arrive, posted on 28 January and 19 February, both posted by First Class International Airmail. Oh well.

That's the first lot in the photo. They've been washed and artistically arranged; the second lot are lying around in a plastic bag. I'll get to them.

I've even tried knitting with a pair from the first lot, and have cast on for the Habu Kusha Kusha scarf. The combination of superfine merino yarn and stainless-steel-and-silk yarn isn't bad to knit with at all, but I still don't feel I've got the right needles; these are short enough, but I think they're too heavy. I can't believe I'm making so much fuss about this. Maybe I just need new glasses, but I have to get a new tooth first so the glasses will have to wait.

I knitted one ball of the Mavis scarf while I was away on Friday night, between the train journey and sitting on the sofa. I expect it to grow quite a lot when blocked, and I have some bits and pieces left over, so one more ball should be enough. I need to block the sweater pieces first, and do the small rolled collar, but I can't block the pieces meanwhile.

I have been kept from my knitting and my blogging lately by a series of domestic disasters, the most pressing of which were a busted lock on the street door and a puddle of sudsy water which kept appearing and disappearing on the bedroom floor. The busted lock meant that we could hear the buzzer on the entryphone, and speak on the intercom, but I had to keep dashing downstairs to let people in. The sudsy puddle meant endless confabulations with my upstairs and downstairs neighbours to try and trace its origin. My upstairs neighbour was somewhat distracted because her bank had just informed her that someone had used her credit card to book a £650 hotel room in Dubai, amongst other things, and my downstairs neighbour had a dose of flu. Do you think there might have been a small black cloud hovering over our property?

The sudsy puddle and subsequent investigations have meant that I am moving the bedroom furniture around rather frequently, and I just can't face trying to block sweater pieces on the bed at the same time. They will have to wait until I am feeling slightly more serene. The source of the water ingress has now been found, which caused only minor devastation, but it appears that there is a blockage lower down so we are waiting to establish the extent of that. The plumber will be back at sparrowfart tomorrow.

While I was away, I was able to check that one of my youngest relations is putting to good use the items that I knit for her. I would say that she is. Do you think I should have made it a little smaller?

Not Knitting

This week I have been mostly Not Knitting. By this I don't mean that I have been too busy having an exciting and fulfilling life and have not had time to knit; I mean that I have been actually refraining from knitting. I thought that this was because I was feeling guilty about starting something else, and yet also didn't actually know what else I wanted to start, but I finally worked out that it was because I was actively Not Knitting Mavis. I had finished the too narrow back and almost finished the too wide front when I put it down and told myself I had to think about it. This coincided with having another look at the measurements my friend had sent me. After Not Knitting for three days, I finally acknowledged what would have been obvious immediately to a child of six, had I had one handy: I needed to rip it back. So today I sat on the sofa and watched a documentary about tigers and ripped it back; I ripped it back all the way to the chevron stitch because I have decided to lengthen that part of it. Amongst the measurements and notes my friend scribbled down the side of the pattern (see, it isn't all my fault) I suddenly noticed she had said she wants it a bit longer.
So, this time I am going to count the number of stitches, and then I am going to count them again to check and I am going to write them down; I am going to write down my friend's measurements; I am going to write down how many stitches should be on the front and the back; and I am going to do this as if I were awake and not just skating along on automatic. I think I said some of this before, but this time I am going to do it.

On Wednesday the Habu kit arrived from The Knitting Hutch. In spite of my protestations above, this resulted in some frenzied swatching (teeny tiny swatches don't count) at 3 o'clock on Thursday morning (which definitely deosn't count). I went to visit my friend blogless Lindsay during the day and relieved her of a small part of her very impressive knitting needle collection, in the form of a pair of pale gold Boyes, size 5, and a pair of red plastic Susan Bates, size 10. (Here I must tell you that the Habu knitting pattern gives the needle sizes in US, UK and Japanese sizes, but not millimetres. Sigh.) I think the metal Boyes may be the answer to my Kidsilk Haze question; they're much lighter than the other aluminium needles I have (Blogger doesn't like how I spell millimetres or aluminium, silly old Blogger) and being shorter they are more easily managed. Anyway, I did three little swatches on the pale gold needles, one of stainless steel and superfine merino as supplied in the kit (the little pointy one at top left), and two of stainless steel and KSH because I wanted to see how that went. I meant to measure them before I felted them, but I forgot. This is them after felting, or at least after plunging into hand-hot water and scrunching a bit.

I think the KSH works brilliantly with the stainless steel. I won't use it this time as I want to stick to the pattern this time round, but I hope to use it in the future. Here is the teeniest swatch, of palest ivory KSH with the steel.

I will cast on for this just as soon as I have established just which size of needles, and then which needles, I shall use. This could take some time.

Gretchen has suggested, on the strength of the films listed to the right, that I might like L.A. Confidential. Well, I do, sort of. It's one of those films that if it's on, I'll watch it for a while, bit it's not one I watch transfixed from start to finish. I think I find it a little too stagey. James Ellroy's books are so very, very bleak, and I think I find the film just too colourful. It has some wonderful moments though: I think I was as surprised as Kevin Spacey when he - oh, haven't you seen it? I'd better not spoil it then.

Knittingwoman would like a jigsaw of the washcloth, so there is one over there in the sidebar now. I thought it would be easy because of the grid but it isn't. Not at all.

Not a Roundup

Christmas was lovely - laughter, tears and all the other drama of a family Christmas. I'm finding life back at home rather quiet by comparison. I had some success with the scarves I knitted as Christmas presents - you can see a full report at the Knitting New Scarves KAL.

I have been flogging round and round Mavis and am on the third ball of Silk Garden now. I will have to make a real effort to find the pattern soon as I can't remember how much of these chevrons I'm supposed to do. I know roughly where it is but it's a folded-up photocopy so it's easy to lose. It isn't an illicit photocopy: the friend I am knitting this for has bought a copy of Naturally Noro but she obviously realizes that if she sends it to me she stands very little chance of ever seeing it again, so she sent me a photocopy of the Mavis Pattern.

I have been thinking about what to start next. I'm not someone who makes New Year Resolutions: I either do something or I don't, at any time of year. And I'm not given to looking back on my knitting in an annual cycle. I do look back at the year and think of the worst and the best that has happened, but that's in terms of major losses and compensations in the larger scheme of things. But coming to the end, for the moment, of that great burst of all-consuming scarf-knitting has left me in a place where I am having to think a bit about what I want to do alongside Mavis... and the Stacked Wedges in silvery grey Malabrigo that I intend to start just as soon as I get a pair of needles organized. This may involve waiting for me to buy a set of 6mm rosewood dpns as I am in my customary state of post-Christmas skintness and not even I can persuade myself that rosewood dpns are an essential - not this week, anyway.

I sold some odds and ends on eBay (not yarn) and had some credit, so I got some lovely plain grey Jaeger Matchmaker Aran called Flannel from Jannette, one of my favourite sources of yarn. I want to make something very simple and classic from it and have been toying with this pattern, Montparnasse from Berroco. The yarn is a good match. I love asymmetrical things, and deconstructed things. The back starts with a single stitch.

I also seriously think it's time I started doing something with the huge skein of Habu Shosenshi linen paper yarn which I bought a while ago, ahem. I got it at K1 Yarns in Glasgow, a heavenly shop. The Shosenshi is grey too. They also have Habu's stainless steel yarn, which I have been coveting ever since I first began to see it on blogs. I wonder if one could substitute Rowan Kidsilk Haze for the Superfine Merino in this scarf? I'm not usually terribly into felting as I have difficulty with the idea of taking the time to knit something large only to end up with something small, but I might be prepared to make an exception. I have some striped-in-shades-of-grey Kidsilk Spray and I like the idea of using it with stainless steel. Maybe this is going to be a grey year?

I have Setsuko Torii's book, Hand-Knit Works, which I bought from Amazon Japan. I still get emails from them which I assume say, 'People who bought Hand-Knit Works also bought this,' but I can't be absolutely sure. It has pictures like this, which make me swoonand this, which is nice,
and this, which makes me hyperventilate, but in a good way.
There are lots of guides on the Interwebberies to understanding Japanese knitting patterns so I'm willing to give it a go, but I would probably start with something easy, and not a stainless steel cardigan. I have my own little swoony photo, which I took when I first got the Shosenshi. Katherine Walker, who owns K1 Yarns, told me that she soaks the yarn and leaves it to dry before she starts to knit with it, so I did three little swatches. Unfortunately, the one I liked best was the one that didn't get wetted and was never washed. I ended up in a complete state of indecision anyway. Katherine also gave me a worked-out-in-English pattern for a jacket so I could do that if my struggles with the book end in tears.

I treated myself to Victorian Lace Today with some of my Christmas Cash. I'm not in a great hurry to knit anything else from it (I did a very simple scarf already) but I want to have it for the historical content. However, having raved on here for hours about grey wool and deconstructed Japonaiserie, I will probably spend the year knitting fluffy pink shawls. I hope you will be kind enough not to point this out to me.