" title="Knit one, read two"> Knit one, read two

Not content with the huge amount of knitting that has been going on, I’ve been having fun with other crafts as well.

There has been more origami to finish off the centrepieces for the wedding:

And thanks to the wonderful coincidence of a pet shop next to the craft shop, we found the perfect stones for the bottoms of the vases: aquarium gravel!

Also for the wedding, I’ve been working on some beaded jewellery.

The necklace in the above picture is a vintage piece (circa 1920s) that I fell in love with when looking for something to wear with my wedding dress. The earrings are my own work (circa October 2008) since it became clear that it was going to be nigh on impossible to find vintage earrings to match the necklace. (Turns out that the lady who sold me the necklace wasn’t kidding when she said it was an unusual colour for that period.) Since I have absolutely no experience of beading or jewellery-making whatsoever, I’m really pleased with how well these have turned out.

In fact, I was so pleased with how well the earrings worked that I decided to stop trying to find similar jewellery for my bridesmaid (also an impossible task) and make some instead. (Apologies for the slightly blurry photo.)

I’m going to change the earrings to make them smaller and more like mine and I may add more crystals to the necklace but I’m happy with how these are looking so far. I bought very fine chain for the necklace because I thought it would look better and without really thinking about how I was going to work with it. Fortunately, I also bought some smaller pliers at the same time so that I didn’t have to keep using the pair from my toolbox!

While I had my beads and beading stuff out, I decided to treat myself to some new stitch markers at the same time:

I used a really simple idea for these. They are simply a standard head pin threaded through two beads, one tiny, one large and then the end looped back down into the large bead. (The tiny bead is just to stop the head pin sliding straight through the large bead.)

Since I started using these (they show up really nicely against the black of my Sahara jumper) I keep getting asked about them at knit nights. No one seems to believe that they are as easy to make as I say so if I can find a spare 5 minutes during daylight hours, I’ll take some extra pictures and put up a how-to post.

The beads are some left over from the Venezia napkin rings that I made last year (gratuitous picture follows).

Things have been a bit hectic around here recently. Between tying off loose ends for the wedding, starting studying for my next set of exams and my day job being busier than ever, you might be tempted to think that I haven’t had any time left for knitting at all. It turns out though that knitting is great stress relief for me so there has actually been quite a lot going on.

Friends of ours had a baby recently; the news of which coincided wonderfully with a long train journey to Scotland at the end of which I had this to send them:

In theory, there was going to be a pair of bootees to match but since we drove back from Scotland there wasn’t time. The top of the hat is stranded colour-work, i.e. the yarn for the colour that you’re not currently knitting with is ‘floated’ along the wrong side of the knitting. I was nervous about trying this since I was knitting the hat in the round and it can be easy to get the tension of the ‘floats’ wrong but it worked really well.

My Sahara is coming along nicely. The body is finished, except for the neckline and I’ve started on the first sleeve. I haven’t yet decided what length to make the sleeves so I think I’ll pause where I am on that first sleeve, knit the second sleeve to the same spot and then decide if I want to make them longer. I love the construction of this pattern, especially since it results in practically no seaming. I’m absolutely converted to knitting top-down in the round.

I also cast on for a new project: the Vino cardigan (Ravelry link). This is supposed to be a simple, bottom-up stockinette cardigan but given my new-found love of top-down in the round, I’m attempting to convert the pattern as I go along. Turns out that it’s not quite as simple as “just follow the pattern backwards” so I’ll probably post some hints and tips on how to do it once I’m a bit further through.

The yarn is Noro Cash Iroha in the Garnet colourway and it is absolutely gorgeous. It’s a thick-and-thin yarn so the diameter of the yarn can vary quite dramatically through the ball but, although it’s slightly unusual to knit, it is turning into a beautiful fabric.

It’s only taken me about a year but I finally got around to knitting myself some nice winter accessories. And here they are; complete with compulsory hands-hiding-face pose.

These were a really quick knit. I bought the yarn on Saturday and managed to knit three gloves (I frogged one and re-knitted it) in order to have a properly finished pair to wear to work this morning. The pattern is Evangeline and is only available (as far as I know) as a free Ravelry download.

I modified the pattern slightly as suggested by someone on Ravelry so that the ribbing round the fingers continues out from the cable pattern instead of being slightly offset. It’s a really simple modification  (P1 before you start the K2, P2 ribbing in the round) but it makes a big difference in the look of the finished gloves. I didn’t go so far as to reverse the cable pattern so that the gloves are mirror images of each other; that would have required too much brain power for after-work, before-bed knitting.

I still haven’t managed to knit myself a scarf, which was what I was complaining about not having last year but I am going to cast on for a cowl to match the gloves.

I’m sure the weekends used to be longer than they are now. With my exams over, wedding planning is in full swing so weekends are even busier than work-days.

This weekend was spent like this:

These are our gorgeous wedding invitations, as designed by Steven’s sister. Between finding a pen that worked and persuading our inkjet printer to put the addresses in the right place on the envelopes, it took a while but they were all posted this morning.

Now that they’re posted, I can link to our wedding website. I can’t take credit for the design, which I butchered from our invitation design but it was fun doing some proper coding again.

More knitting news to come!