Done and Posted

I parcelled Mavis up today and sent her off. I had another look at the neckline in bright light and still couldn't find the end, so I decided that this was a sign that I shouldn't do any more to it. Thank you very much, Zippiknits, for your encouraging comment too. It was just what I needed. The yarn softened up even more in the blocking and I began to wonder how much wear Silk Garden stands up to - should I knit elbow pads?

I had to buy an extra ball to finish off the scarf (having started it in order to finish up left-over yarn, ho hum), which I got from Jannette as usual, and I noticed that she has this - black and grey Kauni. How cool is that? You could knit words in it. If you drew up the charts.

And here is a prettier picture of the Scaruffle, as promised. It's very dainty, and I keep picking it up to play with it. For those who are new to the party, it's the Scaruffle from The Knitter's Book of Yarn, and it must be the easiest thing ever, if you can just master knitting with air (Kidsilk Haze) and barrage balloons (8.5mm needles). One of my uncles did Highland dancing when he was in the Army (he was a bandsman), and they were taught to dance in their Army boots so that when they put on dancing shoes they simply flew into the air. I think a similar effect takes place here. Knitting with matchsticks would be easy afterwards.

I've started Chrissy in the Organic (that's the colour, not the method of production) All Seasons Cotton but it's not really worth photographing. Imagine some string on an Addi circ and you've got it. I had the usual dither about what size to knit: the largest size is to fit a 40" bust, but it measures 60 inches. I don't think I actually want it too oversized, although I want it quite oversized, which is no help at all. The other ASC sweater I knitted grew with washing but it grew sideways - one expects cotton to stretch lengthwise but this has 40% microfibre so it grows sideways instead. I'm doing the ribbing at the moment, which has some curious pickup-stitch -between-needles, slip-stitch sort of tomfoolery at the ends, so I'm curious to see what that's in aid of.

Chrissy is intended to be totally thoughtless knitting, so I will need something a little more challenging to do as well. I got a an email at the weekend telling me about this sale and decided that it would be too great a shame to pass up the duck egg blue cashmere at this extraordinary price. I didn't really buy it; I just put it on my credit card and that doesn't count, does it? Not another bleeding scarf, I hear you say - I can hear you smiting you forehead too - but this one is going to be for me. You wouldn't deny me a duck egg blue cashmere scarf, would you? My very favourite colour? If all else fails, it will just be a single rib, but I'm secretly hoping I might manage to do a Drifting Pleats - be still, my beating heart.

Knitting with Kittens

Mavis is finished. Unless I decide to undo the neck cast-off and knit a bit more. What do you think? It's quite low, isn't it? I'm working on the matching scarf, also in chevron stitch, but have stopped on that in case I need the last bit of yarn to finish off the neck.
I don't think the sleeves are really as long as they look here: once there are shoulders inside, the sleeves will come up a bit. The Silk Garden softened up even more with blocking. I think it will continue to mellow with further washing. The yarn snapped a couple of times when I was seaming it - well, not so much snapped as fell apart with a soft sigh. It's funny to think it's the same content as Kidsilk Haze, which can take your finger off if you try to break it in the wrong place.

The Victorian Lace Today scarf has reached 58 inches, so maybe it's time to think about casting off on that. I ripped the border because it wasn't possible to line the two patterns up in a way that looked right to me: the big gaps in the faggotting wouldn't align with the close garter stitch on the border. I will have another look at borders.

I cast on for a Scaruffle, from The Knitter's Book of Yarn. This is for the same friend as the VLT scarf; as previously established, you can't have too many scarves. This gave me an opportunity to try the Addi Lace Needles, which are bliss. The pattern starts off on 3.75mm needles, for which I substituted the 4mms I'd just bought, and after a few rows requires a change to 8mm, which is what's happening in the photo. It's Kidsilk Haze in shade 581, Meadow. Knitting this yarn on these lace needles is even more bliss, like knitting with kittens.
While Mavising, I have decided to rip the Kauni snails. They would be fun to knit on mittens, but on something this size (can't remember exactly, but over 240 stitches) they're a bit of a bore. And, they're not a real Fair Isle pattern, by which I mean that they don't have rhythm or symmetry, so the purist in me disapproves. I'm looking again for a 'real' pattern. Someone on eBay is selling the Damask pattern which looks so wonderful in Kauni yarn, but I expect it will go for a lot and I still don't think it's what I want anyway. The Yarn Nest is doing a very nice pattern by Eunny Jang - I like the idea of something which looks curved. The hunt continues.

Speaking of eBay, I bought a few balls of All Seasons Cotton in Iceberg this week. When I was looking through my stash for something else last week, I found ten balls of Iceberg which I had no memory whatsoever of buying, although I now think I got them in Jenner's half-price sale which they had when they were closing down the old, fairly nice yarn department in order to open the new, devastatingly dull yarn department. Ten balls of ASC isn't much use to me, so I snapped up these four and am now looking for a project. I hope to get a few balls of ASC in Organic too, to make a usable amount for the ten balls I have of that. Organic is the warm, natural shade, not to be confused with Bleached, which is the bright white, or Cookie, which is dark beige, or Jersey, which is light beige. Iceberg is a marvellously watery pale blueish greyish green, or greenish greyish blue, depending on the time of day and prevailing weather conditions. I think my mother would have called it Eau de Nil, although nowadays that name seems to be used for a darker shade. I've found a pattern in Rowan mag 31, which I might use for the Organic. Watch this space.

I have had my eye on the Forest Canopy Shawl for a while; I bought the pattern, and even swatched a bit once. I have a horror of shawls which get wider and wider as they go on - that ever-increasing row makes me feel quite overwhelmed, even claustrophobic - but perhaps I should use this pattern as a way of getting past that. Everyone who knits it raves about it. Spinning Fishwife has just started one, and Passing Down Crazy has just finished. Hmmm.

This is nothing to do with knitting, but quite a lot of people have been posting this link - I think I most recently found it at Mason-Dixon Knitting - and it makes me laugh every time. If your setup allows you to watch your pc on your television, it's even better. Also nothing to do with knitting, the Guardian has posted a list of the world's 50 most powerful blogs. I didn't check their definition of 'powerful', but if you can read this without adding any blogs to your list, you're a better knitter than I am. Well, that's probably true anyway, but you know what I mean.

There's a new jigsaw, of the Scaruffle. I've had to add it at the top of the jigsaws, below the LOLCAT, as I can no longer squeeze them in at the foot. I thought it would be a difficult one because of all the wood and all the wool, but there are more visual clues than there appear to be at first.

Dis 'n' Dat

Well, that was a long silence, wasn't it? There hasn't been a huge amount to say, as I have been busy knitting Mavis and then ripping it out and then knitting it again and then ripping another bit out.
I seem to have been more than usually dopey, and have managed to get more stitches on the front half than on the back half, although you can see in the photo that they're evenly matched at the hem. The obvious answer is that I decreased too much on the back but a close examination doesn't support this.
And every time I measure it, it's a different size. The chevron stitch section is impossible to measure anyway because it stretches in every direction, and the rest of it grows quite often. I think this yarn will relax a bit when it's soaked and dried anyway (I'm not going to pin it out rigorously so I am avoiding using the b-word) so at the moment I do seriously believe (as opposed to wildly hoping) that it will be the right size. There's a jigsaw of the chevrons in the sidebar.

The Kidsilk Sampler Scarf is inching along. The olive yarn did indeed turn out to be olive in the morning light, although at the curry end of the olive spectrum. I have now changed to a deep dark chocolate shade and intend to introduce that extravagantly bright green that Rowan calls Jelly next. Many thanks for all the comments about needles. Knitpicks don't ship to the UK, Gretchen, but Get Knitted import some of them and I want to try them out. I keep getting side-tracked by the multi-coloured wooden ones, of course - oh look, pretty. The facts that this yarn is much easier to knit in daylight (for me, anyway) and that fine-pointed metal needles are required, are sort of pushing this project and its companion further into the year.

What companion project, you ask? I ordered a copy of this from Amazon and it arrived yesterday. For those of you in too much of a hurry to click on the link, it is Clara Parkes' Knitter's Book of Yarn. It has a pattern for a Scaruffle, a sort of ruffly, frothy scarf which can be knitted with Kidsilk Haze and which I think would suit stripes very well. My impression of the book so far is that the content is very good, although I think she has been let down a bit by the photography and design. The photographs are pretty, but they don't always yield the information which a potential knitter needs and wants. Like a lot of knitting books nowadays, its appearance suggests that it is aimed at beginners, although the content will be of interest to advanced knitters too. One thing that really baffles me is that scattered throughout the book there are sumptuous, whole-page photos of a single skein or an artful ball of exotic fiber, with no caption to indicate what the h*ll it is. Or am I missing something? Is there a list somewhere at the back? I can't find one.

This obviously isn't a reason for refraining from buying the book: it contains a lot of well-organized information and some lovely patterns by named designers, from small and simple to a Norah Gaughan cardigan. It's a book which you will read when you first get it and continue to refer to frequently afterwards. I think it could reasonably be called a treasure trove.

I went to HK Handknit's closing down sale this week, with my friend Jean. I bought a book of Louisa Harding's patterns for children; I like her patterns but they aren't usually the sort of thing I would wear so it was nice to find her patterns for little girls. If they had had any blue Auricania I would have bought it, but they didn't so I couldn't. As Jean said, it's not as if either of us needed any more yarn.

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.

Fancy a Shag?

I cast on for another Shag scarf almost as soon as I'd finished Aria, as I needed some unconscious knitting to do while I was away from home. It's funny, the first time I tried this pattern, I had to concentrate like it was the trickiest bit of lace, but now I can do it while I'm catching trains and listening to the iPod and talking. I had a ball of Noro Silk Garden in earthy naturals, number 47, and I had been pining to do this pattern in a graduated yarn ever since I saw Wendi's . I originally bought the Noro to use with a creamy coloured yarn in another scarf, but it never worked properly. This time it was perfect. I had to buy another ball and I've ended up with a really interesting bit of rusty colour at the centre back, but this scarf looks good wrapped from front to back too, so that's OK.

I bought more Silk Garden today to do another Shag, but I also got some lavender Rowan Scottish Tweed to do Meandering Stripes or Stacked Wedges. My aunt wears those sharp lilac and pinks (sky blue pink) and I think she'll love one of these for Christmas. I don't mind making all these for other people becauses I feel I am working towards deciding which one I want for myself, and I'm quite happy spending some time making Absolutely Sure.

In between, I cast on my friend's Mavis again and I've finished the first ball. It's stretched bit further this time, because I cast on fewer stitches. I'm putting this aside now until after Christmas, not least because this is yarn to work on in daylight. If you knit this in the winter, you miss half the pleasure.

Speaking of which, have you seen these Raven yarns? Although they're from the Socks that Rock people, they're available in other weights, like silk and mohair laceweight, or even a bulky 2-stitches-to-the-inch wool from Uruguay. I've managed to stop myself buying any immediately, because I am simply not going to knit shades of black in a northern winter but come the spring I think I shall be unable to resist. The Knitting Linguist has made the most beautiful stole.

Noro Rip Out

You know that thing I said yesterday about making sure the yarn wasn't twisted when I was doing the first row of Mavis? Well, I had another look at it after I finished that post and I noticed that it was actually twisted. I don't know how I'd managed to do that. So I ripped it.
Once I took it off the needles I was able to measure it properly and discovered that it was a bit too big too, so I'm not too bothered about the ripping. I think I learnt enough on the first cast on to be able to do a better job this time, and I won't have to worry about that mistakette that I was trying to ignore. So everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

These rosewood needles are the ones I get from Scottish Fibres, a German brand called Susanne's. They are available in ebony too and the wood is the left overs from the manufacture of musical instruments, a cheering thought and as close as I am likely to get to playing one. I have tried the ebony needles but the ebony didn't seem to become as polished through use, but I love the rosewood, especially the dpns. Classic Elite distribute them in the U.S.

There's a new jigsaw in the sidebar, showing Lorna's Laces in Bittersweet again.

Noro Cast On

I started my friend's Mavis on Saturday night. I cast on and did part of the first row. On Sunday I finished the first row and got a few rounds done. The first row was excruciating, because of trying to do YOs and K2togs while counting and making sure the yarn wasn't twisted, and allowing for the thick-and-thinness of the Silk Garden. The first row so often is excruciating and it must really put off new knitters because they think the whole thing is going to be like that and don't realize that the rest will be so much easier.

On Saturday and Sunday I was working on it in artificial light and it was only when I saw it today that I realized how lovely the colours are. It's shade 226 and it's not as bright in person.

I didn't really think what I was doing about knitting it in the round and I ended up with a slight mistakette, but I think I've resolved it. I've done a few more rows since the photo and am nearly at the end of the first ball of yarn, which seems a bit fast. I think I'll leave it for a while now, because I want to do some more Christmas knitting, and I just wanted to get this started so that I could be sure of how the stitch worked (a very simple chevron) and to see what the colours looked like. And so that I could tell my friend I've started in case she begins to panic.

I'm on the sixth and last ball of yarn for the Aria scarf so that should be done soon.

I forgot to show you this. It's the third Daisy Hat I've knitted from Itty Bitty Hats and the fourth hat for this baby. She turned out to be a girl and she's called Ellie.

It's made from Rowan Handknit Cotton in Sugar. I gave it to Ellie's aunt and uncle to take to the U.S., where Ellie lives, because they were going for Thanksgiving. I'm hoping to meet her at Christmas when she may be over here making an exchange visit.

I am missing my Kauni very much. I want so much to pick it up and see how the next colour change in the pattern works, but I must do some more other-people-knitting first. I just hope they appreciate it. But meanwhile, do go and have a look at this Kauni Christmas stocking pattern. It's the cutest thing, and there are a couple of other Kauni patterns too.

New Noro

My friend finally managed to choose a shade of Noro Silk Garden. It's 226, and I collected it from the sorting office yesterday. I went out briefly on Saturday so they seized the opportunity to deliver a postcard saying they'd tried to deliver a parcel. Sometimes, I'd swear they're watching the house.As usual, it looks like some of the balls are from a different shade, let alone a different dye lot, but I'm sure it'll all work out in the end.

My friend hasn't sent the pattern yet, so I can't cast on, but that gives me time to finish this:

I had a stash hunt last night, to see if I had another ball of the yarn, and I thought I'd found one but it turned out to be the greeny blue shade of Yorkshire Tweed, while the original is the bluey green.

The flash has heightened the difference and in fact, they work very well together. I could have stopped and the scarf would have looked fine - well, better than fine, although I say it myself - but I really want to make this long and skinny, so I'm going with the colour change. And if I run out of this shade too soon, I found a ruffle scarf I knitted with it when I was addicted to ruffle scarves and I can rip that.

On closer examination, I think this might be the DK, not the aran weight.

Noro Lara

I allowed myself to buy another couple of balls of Silk Garden and have done a bit more of my second Lara. I love the colours and the stripes are intensifying now that I'm past the sleeves and am on the sides: it is done in one piece, so I'm at the bit which goes from to hem over the shoulder. The straight needle which is rammed up the side isn't anything to do with the construction; I just put it in for the photo so that you can see more stripes. I've made the increases in the sides straighter this time, so that it's less fitting.

In theory, this should be last-resort knitting and I should be doing other things first, but I've had a spell of needing something mindless because I had subtitles to read, so this has come to the front. I have two more l-o-n-g Chinese films to watch (Film Four had a season), so knitting which requires counting or looking will slip to the back of the queue again.

A friend asked me to knit her something for last Christmas after she saw some Noro yarn, and I agreed. She settled on a pattern quite soon, Mavis from 'Naturally Noro', but has been quite incapable of choosing a shade, a problem that any of us can sympathise with. And unless one is enormously fortunate, it's difficult to find a shop which has a very wide range of colours; even if they stock Noro, they'll probably only have a few shades of each yarn, so a lot of her failing-to-choose has been done online. We ended up sitting at our computers last night, a few hundred miles apart, wrangling over the possibilities in Jannette's Silk Garden selection. I have had to warn her that if she doesn't choose soon, I may be tired of the project before I've started, something which has happened to me before when I've taken ages poring over a pattern and possible yarns. I hope this doesn't sound too mean, but I don't want to hate the project while I'm knitting it, or even worse, not knitting it and feeling guilty because I should be knitting it. I hope I will receive a parcel of Silk Garden soon. I'll let you know what colour she finally settles on.

More stripes

I'm very naughty. I've started another Noro Lara, which means another sleeve-to-sleeve stripy cardigan and I haven't even done the finishing on the stripy Mably.

Lara is from Debbie Bliss's Alpaca Silk collection and the largest size is a little bit small for me, so I made it first in Noro Kureyon, which just sized it up nicely. I made this last year. It's shade 150.



The colours have a lovely misty Hebridean look, and the stripes remind me of the endless horizons you see up there. The turquoise is the sea, and the grey and lavender are the mists and mountains. I took up knitting in my twenties, having not been a great success with it at school, after a holiday in South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. I was living in London at the time, a city which seemed no have no horizons at all, and when I went back there I was obsessed with reproducing those watery horizontals, shading endlessly between blue and green and grey and brown.

Since I can't draw or paint, it occurred to me that one way of achieving the effect I was after, was with the lines of knitting. I got some wool from somewhere and started knitting a Hebridean landscape which turned into, I think, a cushion; when I got to the top, I couldn't remember how to cast off and had to look it up in a book. Then I made a bag, and then a sweater, all with sea and sand and sheep and little white cottages. I did them all in a mixture of colour stranding techniques which I made up as I went along. I think I must have started looking at patterns while I was making the sweater, but only for the shaping. If I had been able to buy shade 150 of Noro Kureyon at that time, I maybe wouldn't have learnt how to do all of that.

This year's Lara is in Silk Garden, shade 8. I bought a couple of balls to make a curly scarf for a friend, and I was lost. With the leftovers I cast on at one cuff, and the next time I was in my LYS, I bought another ball. I have this idea that if I buy the yarn one or two balls at a time, the cost will be more bearable, rather than facing up to the cost of a dozen balls of Silk Garden, eek.



This is more like a Caribbean landscape. The colours are quite dull here because I took the photo on Sunday morning before I had opened the blinds; in reality they sing and dazzle. The first green is a little harsh. I'm toying with the idea of taking it out in the rest of the cardi, but I don't really believe in messing about with the colours in variegated yarn and perhaps the blues need it. It will have to stay like this until next pay day when I can get the next instalment.

Meanwhile I shall return to the Kauni and some baby hats that I haven't told you about.