Update - for what it's worth

The knitting on the mittens is continuing.

I have finished one mitten and started the second and a third (the winter pair, made of sock yarn and alpaca). Since starting the winter pair, I have realised that I now need a couple more sets of 2mm and 2.75mm double pointed needles - it's kind of difficult to finish off a mitten (do the ribbing) when you're using that set to start another mitten with.

In lesser notes, I've done a couple squares this month, worked a little on the brown-themed, colour-striped clapotis and did a few rows of the brown wool prayer shawl.

I've come into receipt of some lovely rich procion dyes and next month, I'll get the rest needed to dye the cotton chenille yarn needed to finally finish off the prayer shawl project first started in August 2005. *grin*. . . I guess taking 30 months to complete a knitting project isn't too bad. . .for me.

The silk kimono-style sweater is going to be the main project to work on (no, I'm not going to be so confident and foolish as to think I'll finish it this month) for the month of May. It's about time. It's only been sitting around for a year-and-a-half. At least I've finished the fronts for it. I'm crossing fingers I'll finish the back and maybe I'll be able to start on the sleeves.

The crochet amber-chip necklace is to be finished in August - well, I want to finish it and that seems like a good month - I want a project to take with me to summer school in Durham and it's portable.

Ok, that's enough. I'm sure I have forgotten something, but that's just too bad.

Until next time.

Learning a new knitting technique

I know, the majority of posts seem to be about knitting. Well, that's because I'm trying to get projects finished.

My problem is that I seem to be starting more new projects than finishing old/present ones.

But it's not too bad. It's been bitterly cold this winter - especially hard on my hands this year, and I wanted to find something to make that would help me out. Stop my wrists and knuckles aching so much. I knew I wanted half mittens since I needed freedom of movement. (I had already tried fingerless gloves and found them too restricting.)

So, trawling through some knitting journals, I looked at Eunny Jang's journal, and she'd just put up a pattern for "Endpaper mitts" - fingerless mittens that used stranded colourwork.

They were lovely. Really. I was a bit put off though, as I wasn't really wanting to learn how to do stranded colourwork and the instructions seemed a bit fiddly.

But the cold weather was persisting and my hands were paying the price, so I gathered up all the materials needed (also requiring me buying some more double-pointed kntting needles *darn, shucks*) and started.
Here's what I accomplished by the second day:



Ok, the image of the mitten is a little small, so I'll add a better one.

















The colour balance is actually perfect. With my eyes, though, looking at it, the purple is a bit pinker and the blue is a bit greener.

But here, the colour looks so flat.

Never mind. I'm still feeling chuffed that it looks so good for a first attempt.






I'm now on the 4th day after starting, doing the penultimate stage - the thumb ribbing. After that comes weaving in all the ends.
I should have it finished tomorrow and by the end of the day, I'll be through the wrist ribbing on the second mitten.

I'll post pictures of them both once they've been washed and dried. That should be fun as I'm making the second mitten in the reverse colourway - blue ribbing and the diamond colours the other way around.

I bet I'll get a lot of questions when I wear them.
*grin*

Bye for now.

Whew!

Well, I'm still knitting squares - sort of, as I'm presently in the grip of square lethargy- and I'll stop them at the end of the month so I can get enthused about them again.
I don't think I'll get to 80 as I wanted to, but that's ok. I'll definitely get over half of them finished and that will make me happy.

An old project was restarted in the last week during an emergency trip to Lichfield. I was trying to travel light.
I re-started a leaf lace scarf on 2.75mm needles in sock wool, colourway parrot. I forget the company, but it's a german one and the yarn might be regia.

Hey, I know it's a bit sketchy, but I'm hurrying as I shouldn't really be doing this entry. I'm procrastinating about starting some homework (so what's new. *grin*).

Ok, I'm off. I should be furiously typing elsewhere......
*insincere grumble*.

Later.

Squares, knitting and more squares

Been doing what the title said for the last month an a bit. Knitting squares. Lots of them, it seems like. I've also, to relieve the sometime extreme boredom, done work on a couple other knitting projects (not much, just the odd row or two).

I've completed over 80 squares during February, and hopefully, during March, I'll complete another 80, which will put me well over the half-way mark. *strained cheering*

I've also gotten (and am getting) the componants of 7 other projects ready to start in the month of April - three pairs of half-mittens (free pattern), 2 pairs of socks, a lace sweater and a shopping bag (though this depends upon getting the yarns I want in March).

Ok, I can't type anymore as my fingers are freezing.

G'night.

New - sort of - project

Well, when I finished the first clapotis, I had a bunch of yarn leftover. So, I went through a number of possibilities to see what I could make with the yarn.

But, I always came back to the same thing - another clapotis. It's a nice, non-fussy, moderatly adaptable pattern that takes a minimum of thought.

So, after knitting lots of swatches and finally deciding on a colour pattern - I started it.
I originally wanted a simple scarf, and planned on only 4 increase sections, but, after adding on the sixth repeat of the increase rows, and looking over the pattern, I noticed that if I did one more set of the increase section, I'd be following the original pattern exactly - something I didn't do on the first clapotis.

I'm taking a break from it at the moment (since I've got 6 other knitting projects that are all clamouring for my attention) but when I did, I'd just started on the third section (the length repeats).

The picture is what it looked like just after I made the choice to add the final set of increases and the odd striping is the colours (Fushia, Green, Aqua, Royal blue and Pale blue) done in a fibonacci striping pattern.
Hopefully I'll take a better photo of it when it's longer.

Until later.

Trying to post pictures and. . .

Well, I set up a post that needed a picture. Again, I'm having trouble with putting in the picture. Luckily, I saved the post as a draft, so I'll try again tomorrow.

But, in other news, I've been working on the purple wrap, my prayer shawl, an knitted kitty (nore news on that in few days) and a scarf for a dog. Not that a dog needs a scarf, but his owner says he uses her scarf (the one I knitted her and that she'd like to wear) as a toy. I had some eyelash yarn (ugly varigated colours) leftover from the scarf I knitted her (the colours looked nice as an accent), so I'm using up the yarn by knitting it into a scarf for the dog.

The things I do for a friend. *sigh*

Until tomorrow (cross fingers)

Back Home and posting at LAST!

Well, been in Lichfield again - I actually got home on the 29th of December. This time it was mainly for Christmas, but Christmas was sort of a damp squib.
The kids got lots of presents, but for us adults, it was great when the clock hit midnight on that particular day and the children were finally asleep.

Craft-wise, I worked on a prayer shawl and did quite a few squares for the blanket.

But no photos are available yet, since I'm at the tail-end of a miserable cold I got from my god-daughter.
*sigh*

New Year's Eve was wonderfully free of any drama.
I watched some TV and went to bed early. SO good.

I'm off to bed to see if the last of the dreaded lurgy will go.

Night.

And another new project. . .

Well, I've started a new knitting project.
There's an odd reason I started it. Well, ok, not so odd for me.

You see, I realised the wool stash was getting a bit out of hand and so, while at IKEA, I purchased some storage boxes.
So, I got home and assembled and moth-proofed the storage boxes (including putting some lavender and lavender essential oil in the boxes) and started re-housing the wool and yarn.

There I was, happily transferring from boxes and bags to the nice new boxes and I suddenly came across these two cones of 4-ply herdwick wool I'd bought from Texere yarn mill on a whim - it's made specifically for outdoor garments and is also a bit hairy, though a pleasant gray marl colour. I remembered about a month ago, just a couple days after I bought it, I'd seen a moth crawling across one of the cones. I was quick and killed the evil little critter. But, remembering that moth made me pause and think "what if it managed to lay a couple eggs?".

So I pulled out both the cones and started thinking on what I could make. Luckily I'd used my brain and weighed the wool when I got it home, and the written calculations (rough ones, since I didn't know how much the cardboard cones themselves weighed) indicated that there was about 1450 metres per cone. I knew that was enough to make at least a sweater per cone.
But, I decided I wanted to combine/double the wool and maybe add something else so I'd get a winter-weight yarn (at least an aran weight) and be able to make something for winter.
I was lucky, and remembered I'd gotten 14 balls of deep purple Debbie Bliss DK merino in a sale (£1.50 per 50g ball - a fantastic deal).

I trawled the computer and found a pattern I'd downloaded for a serape-type wrap off the Berroco yarn Website (www.berroco.com). It was a plain pattern, actually developed for one of their fluffy synthetic yarns, but the swatch I did with the combined wools worked out to perfectly match the gauge of the yarn.
I decided to add a border pattern and I also thought it would be a perfect time to try out cabling, since I'd wanted to for a while. So, I added a simple cable, but I did three repeats of it so it would be a wide band. I pulled out a 5.5mm circular knitting needle (42" length), cast on 190 stitches and started knitting. I was VERY lucky and everything worked out fine.
I've just started the third ball of the purple wool and completed 9 1/2" in length - I've only got another 49 1/2" to go. *grin*

The picture above is primarily of the border pattern (a knit-purl weave effect) and the cable. Other than the border and the cable, the wrap is knitted in stocking stitch. It's slow going, but I'm having fun - and knitting cabling is a lot easier than I thought it would be.

One last thing - the picture isn't a photo. It's a scan. I could not, for the life of me, manage to photgraph the knitting. It's strangely reflective and the detail does not come out at ALL. So in desperation I popped the knitting into the scanner and it worked beautifully - the cable was nice and crisp and the colour only needed a tiny bit of adjustment. It's just a shame that the border pattern isn't clearer. Ah well, you can't have everything.

Until the next entry.

Well, nuts.

5 minutes into waking this morning, I realised with a shock that I'd made a mistake on the final measurements of the clapotis yesterday - I said they were 16 1/2" by 32".

I don't think a 2 1/2 foot scarf would work at all if it was meant to be a wrap, would it?

No.
So.
The clapotis measurements are actually 16 1/2" by 76".

Sheesh.

Until the next entry.

The finished Clapotis - finally.

Well, I'm back from Lichfield a week later than I originally planned for. I'm not going into details of what happened - it all went by in a bit of a blur to be honest and I don't want to tell it all again - once to my Father was enough.

So. This is a photo of the finished Clapotis, a bit worse for flash bleaching - but the draping looks nice. The clapotis has been roughly folded in half before draping over the chair and the excess folded (from the back)over the top of the chair again. The chevron effect of the dropped stitches is not intentional, but the right side sort of merges with the wrong side. Ok, that doesn't make sense, but I'm tired (it's 1am here in the UK).
This is a close-up photo (one of the VERY few I did manage to take of it) of the knit side of the clapotis in the early stages. It's here to give a comparison to the next photo.
This is a sort of close-up of the knit side of the finished clapotis. Though it isn't really possible to see, it did shrink a bit after washing. Yes, the colours did fade a bit as well - but not quite as much as it appears. The photo above was taken without the flash, while this one had flash.


The finished clapotis is 16 1/4" wide and 32" long. It's a bit too skinny, but surprisingly enough, it's perfect on the length. I say "surprisingly" because I had the sinking feeling as I was washing it that it was going to shrink more than it did.
Nice yarns.




Oh, one final note. It's not as slinky as I thought it would be, but it is nicely warm and the colours remind me of the surface of the ocean during a high tide.

Ok, got to go - the bed is calling.

Night.

Clapotis update

Well, it's finished. It's been washed (took three washes to get all the oil out of it) - the water for the first two washes was very cloudy and a light aqua. Had a bit of a fishy taint as well.

It's now drying, but tomorrow I'm off to Lichfield for a bit, so I'll take and post photos of it when I get back.
I was going to post a photo of the knit side of it early in the knitting so you could see the colour difference pre-washing, but I changed my mind - I'll include it with the post-washing photo's.

See you when I get back.

A couple of the photos that I said I'd post. . .

Well, finally. It took 6 tries to get these photos on here. I had to ditch the back views. Oh well.

This first one is the right side of my new MP3 holder.
The thread is two skeins of DMC "craft thread" (that's what was on the band of the skeins) in 10 different shades of variegated thread.
The stitch is linen stitch - according to The Readers Digest Complete Guide to needlework.

I think it's very nice and fun.
But . . .






This is the inside out view of the front.

I like it much better, hence the "in use" photo. That's the cord of the headphones sticking out.







Maybe I'll have better luck with posting photos in the next entry. *sigh*.

Until then. . .

Procrastination alert. . .

I shouldn't be doing this, as I'm working on the last half of my final piece of coursework, which is due to be mailed off Monday, but I'm nothing if not bored stiff.

I have, in the last two weeks,
completed the first half of the clapotis. It's nice, but getting boring,
and
knitted, in linen stitch, a cover for my MP3-zen touch player. It's cute and reversable.
There will be photos of both of these next week.

Back to the grinding of brain cells. *g*.

Until the next post

Ok, lets try this again . . .

I'm just a posting maniac, aren't I?

Ok, so I've been busy-ish. I've had to re-start a crocheted bracelet as I discovered that as I went to sew it closed, the crocheting was off, meaning that it was never going to be finished properly. So It's sitting in front of me, with the main body frogged and wrapped around a suitable container (I used a VERY clean prescription container to wrap it around) and the re-started bit is waiting patiently next to it.
I've only crocheted about 1/2 an inch so far, but it's a start. At least this one seems to be starting correctly.
The other thing was that I have completely finished the blue scarf.
There it is, all clean and fluffy. I didn't bother blocking it as it's 100% polyester.
Anyway. I hope she likes it and it gets as much use as the matching hat I sent her last year(I did mean to send the scarf much sooner . . . but. . .

The other thing is that I've started a clapotis. Darn you, knitty.com and all those other happy people on the forums dedicated to making this apparently wonderful item.
Ok, I liked the look of it as well. *sigh*.
So, I'm not using the same yarn asked for in the pattern, but instead, I'm using this:



5 cones (4 - 200g, one unknown weight) of single ply silk/cotton & silk/wool mixes (min. 50% silk) via Texere Yarn Mill. (4 cones of Garden Flowers, 1 cone of Enigma). They cost me a grand total of £14. I got what I could afford. I bought a couple more cones than this and I made a swatch - like you do.

Working with the yarn is "sticky" and slightly smelly, but this is due to the silk in both types being oil-spun. Luckily for me, it washes out easily, as when the swatch was washed, it turned out lovely. The feel is very soft and with a slight fuzz. But it shrunk a little in length - this isn't a disadvantage. It causes the knitting to tighten up just right. The stickiness makes the knitting, post-washing, quite loose.

But the shrinkage (which isn't much) caused me to re-think the pattern slightly, adding a repeat in both the length and width.



So, I started on the clapotis itsself and I'm plugging along slowly (no photos of that as yet) and it's looking good. I'll update with photographs now and then.

Until the next post.

Aborted post

Ok, I just spent 1/2 an hour trying to write up a post with photos.
Trying to.

I'm not very happy now, since I had to scrap it. *sigh*.

I'll try again this weekend. I need sleep.
Yeah.
Sleep.
That sounds VERY good.

Later.

Oh my goodness. I'm writing an entry this soon. *gasp*.
Something must have happened.

Well, yes, it did. I learned how to properly knit lace a couple months ago, so yesterday, I took a look at the first lace project I started (a feather lace scarf), and found it wanting.
Ok, not simply wanting, but cr*p. Pure and simple.
I frogged it, and the needles and yarn have been put away.

Ah well. I know I'll overcome the humiliation and go back to it. After all, I did like the yarn and the pattern - the way it was supposed to look and not the mess I knitted - so I've decided that October will be the month to re-start the leaf lace scarf in Regia sock wool, colourway Parrot.
This does mean that there are no photgraphs of the lace abomination, as I didn't want reminders of it.

On a lighter note, I found a pattern for a tricorn pirate's hat - to felt.
http://knitlikeapirate.com was the wonderful website.
It's a fledgling website, but it's charming.

Until the next post.

A blanket square update - kind of. . .

Well, I finally took a photo of a few of the squares.
It is a very small selection, as there are now 320 of them, but it shows, within reason, what I'm doing.
No square is bigger than 6cm by 7cm.

Ok, now to repeat myself for those just arrived, or those not really wanting to go back into the archives:
The amount of fibre/yarn (actually cotton embroidery 6-stranded floss) I'm working with per square, is 8 metres. It's double thickness (two skeins) in order to get the right feel of fabric, as using it single thickness would make a blanket not much use other than ornament, and I want this for general use when it's finally completed (which will probably be in about 5 years, considering my project finishing rate).
And although the majority of the squares will be knitted with cotton, a very, VERY few, known as the "other" squares, are knitted with triple thickness madeira metallic embroidery thread/floss or of microfibre yarn (DK thickness). This is only because I want a tiny amount of variation in fibre types, and I liked the feel of the microfibre (no squares of which are in either picture). So sue me.


















Here's a closer photo, to show a bit more detail in some of the squares.
I'm actually proud of the consistency of the knitting. It's not fantastic, but it is very good considering I've only been knitting for 18 months.

I have multiple categories of square -
plain stocking stitch,
plain reverse stocking stitch,
diagonal squares,
horizontal squares,
lace squares,
patterned squares (no lace patterns in this category, of course),
striped squares
and then the "other" squares.
Of the main categories, I've worked out that I must knit 120 of each, with only 44 squares in the "other" category.
It is a teeny bit screwy, but it is my blanket. I figure that this will be my first and only afghan, so
I'm going to make it the way I want it. (Well, I say only. . .but time will tell.)

And finally. . .the blanket will (should) end up being 2 metres by 2 metres, if I've done the mathematics correctly, which I sincerely hope I have. I'm going to be really miffed if I end up with squares left over.

On a ever-so slightly different note to finish this post with, I've finished the knitting and cast off on both the blue eyelash scarf and the prayer shawl. I still have the ends to weave in and the fringe to attach to the prayer shawl (a short one), but at least I've done them. *happy sigh*.

Bye for now.

This post is/was to test the hello program that was giving me problems.
It half-worked. *grin* So I'll edit the post and finish it off as I wanted it to look. . .


















This picture is a close-up of my crocheted amber necklace mentioned in the previous post. The pin is 1" high, and the grey "stick" coming out the right is a 4mm double pointed knitting needle used for a core to crochet around. The necklace is a little floppy to be crocheted without the internal support.



This photo is just to show a) the flexibility of the necklace and b)what I've finished so far.

Behind the necklace (and wound with the rest of the "beads") is a cone of beige bonded nylon thread that I've strung the amber "beads" onto.

Until the next post.

Selective Update

Well. I had a shock today. I went to measure that prayer shawl/wrap I'm working on and discovered that I'm 8" away from being finished. So instead of being on the final ball like I thought I was, I'm on the penultimate ball. Which IS true - I can't have anymore than one more ball after this, because that's all I've got in stock - and I'm not buying anymore of the particular wool I'm using on this.

On the bad side, it means I'm about a week further away from starting a new project on the needles I'm now using. *sigh*.

Oh well.

But I've resumed work on a cross stitch project - "Goddess of Mercy" from Myth and Magic patterns book on 14 count blue-gray aida - I've completed over 1/3rd and it's good to be working on it again. Oddly enough, I've really missed working on it. The plan is for it to be hung over the door into the living room (once it's been framed, of course).

The amber crocheted rope necklace is about 1/2 finished - I think - because I've forgotten exactly how much amber beads I'd strung to begin with (no, it's not a truly incorrect usage of the word "much" - I just strung beads until I ran out and they were bought by weight, not length.) *shrug*. I don't mind really - I can see an end in sight, and I just like the fact it can't get any futher away like the shawl project ending happened to do.

And before I totally forget, I've cast off the blue eyelash scarf. It only took 9 months to knit.*sigh*. Just got all the ends to sew in now. . .

Until the next entry - with photos.

And the project I'm concentrating on this month is. . .

Well, for August, I think it'll be two projects - a blue eyelash yarn scarf I should have finished 6 months ago and a prayer shawl that likewise should have been finished 6 months ago.

Of the blanket squares - well, as of the 31st of July, there are 270 squares completed and washed. There are another 2 pre-washed and blocked, and I'll continue to work on them very erratically until I decide to have another month dedicated to that project.

Until later.