My next set of professional exams starts in less than five weeks so I’m getting stuck into the traditional period of pre-exam procrastination. I’m frequently amazed by the things that I’ll find myself desperate to do instead of studying. As of today, I am banned from painting walls, tiling walls and re-arranging furniture (on a moving everything from one room to another and vice versa scale). This is on top of the usual bans on video games and Distributed Proofreaders. Fortunately for Steven, knitting is not banned and it turns out that I would rather sew jumper seams than study (which, considering my earlier post, shows you the lengths I will go to to avoid studying). Hence, all the seams have now been sewn on his argyll jumper and even some of the duplicate stitch started — I did try to convince him that he didn’t really need the raker lines but it didn’t work.

If he’s really lucky, I’ll even manage to get it finished before the exams start and the desperate urge to do anything other than study fades away.

It’s taken a little longer to get this post written than I thought but better late than never!

The Class

I had signed up for Anne Hanson‘s Advanced Lace Knitting class and, despite a horrible cold, I really enjoyed it. I didn’t learn as much as I had hoped I would — mainly because I’ve already done a reasonable amount of lace knitting involving the techniques which were covered. Anne’s overview of different types of lace knitting and knitted lace, and the chance to look at some of her extensive collections of swatches were very interesting. I also picked up some tips about knitted-on borders which are already proving useful.

I was right about the yarn I selected for the class sampler project though; it was very hairy. By the end of the class, my black jeans looked like I had had a cat sitting on my lap for hours. I don’t intend to finish the sampler since I really don’t have any use for a doll-sized shawl but I’m not really sure what else I would use the yarn for. I think it will go back in the basket till I can come up with a project where I won’t mind it “shedding”.

The Yarn

I wasn’t looking for anything in particular at the Knit Nation marketplace but thought I might grab some laceweight or fingering yarn for future shawl-knitting. I ended up with the following:

Wollmeise Lacegarn in brilliant blues — partly to see what all the hype is about and partly because they were giving away free Gummi Bears (Steven pointed out that there are cheaper ways to acquire Gummi Bears, which I can’t really argue with but which isn’t really the point.) I’m thinking about using this for a Victorian Lace Today project because the yardage is so good. I’m not even sure I suit blue but I just can’t stop admiring the colours in this.

Old Maiden Aunt — This is an alpaca/merino/silk blend laceweight. No idea what I’ll use it for but the colours are gorgeous and it’s so, so soft. 1,300 yards per 100g is also pretty good yardage.

Fyberspates Thick Nef Lace — an alpaca/silk/cashmere laceweight this time. I’m thinking about something elegant for wearing to work. Not that I need to be particularly elegant at work but something about this yarn just conjures up images of high-powered female New York lawyers. (Don’t ask me why, sometimes it’s better not to investigate the inner workings of my brain too much!)

… that struck fear into my heart recently:

“Join right shoulder seam.”

I know that my fear of seaming is completely irrational — it’s not that difficult, rarely takes as long as I think it will and usually ends well — but for some reason, it’s still the number one reason why it takes me so long to finish any project that needs it.

Feeling a little guilty about the amount of knitting that I’ve been doing for me whilst Steven’s argyle jumper has been languishing unfinished, I decided this week that I was just going to have to be brave and get on with it. I got out my trusty Vogue Knitting, followed their instructions for an “invisible horizontal” seam and tah-dah!

I know it doesn’t exactly look “invisible” but trust me, that’s a really neat seam.

Having successfully conquered the seam, I ploughed on and knitted the neckband.

Next up are the armbands and then:

Join left shoulder seam and neckband seam.

Join side seams with mattress stitch.

It’s taken 3½ weeks to get past “Join right shoulder seam”, any bets on how long it will take me to build up the courage to attempt that little section?

If my actuarial homework looked like this, maybe more of it would get done:

I’m attending Knit Nation this Saturday and this is my homework for the Advanced Lace Knitting class I’m taking in the afternoon. I’m really looking forward to the class, although I’m hoping that the summer cold I’ve developed over the past day or two doesn’t get any worse or I’m not sure I’ll be capable of processing any information.

The tutor is Anne Hanson of Knitspot whose designs I love, even though I haven’t actually knitted any of them yet. Her Honeybee Stole was a definite contender for my wedding shawl and only narrowly lost out to the Myrtle Leaf Shawl from Victorian Lace Today.

It was a bit of a  last minute decision to go to Knit Nation meaning that I’ve ended up in my usual position of nearly running out of time to get my homework finished even though all it consisted of was a simple swatch! It didn’t help that I didn’t actually have any yarn of the appropriate weight for either the homework or for the class itself.  Thanks to the usual excellent service from Get Knitted, I managed to order a skein of the now-discontinued Darling sock yarn from Natural Dye Studio in colourway Isabella.  It arrived in perfect time to be wound and swatched and yet somehow it’s Friday evening and I still haven’t finished!

Although I love the colours in this yarn, I’m not sure how I feel about it in general. There is more alpaca in it than I tend to like, which seems to be giving it a quite “hairy” appearance. I’ll report back next week on both the yarn and the class!

I bought these books a little while ago but having been putting off reviewing them and this week I realised why — I just don’t like them. I’ve been waiting for them to magically improve so that I can say nice things about them and it is now time to accept that this isn’t going to happen.

My first and biggest complaint is that there doesn’t appear to have been any sort of logic applied to the arrangement of stitch patterns within the books. Some sort of logical arrangement might have helped the editor spot the patterns that are repeated under different names. Not just similar patterns with a slight offset or a slightly different description of the stitches — the exact same pattern with exactly the same wording (and photograph!) just different names.

Similarly, there’s no way to find patterns by number of stitches or number of rows. This might not be such an issue with the cable and aran stitches but it makes the lace book very difficult to use other than to flick through for general inspiration.

The photographs are another issue or rather the swatches are. I know how hard it can be to take a good photograph of a swatch but some of the yarn choices and particularly colours of the swatches make it impossible to appreciate the patterns. I’ve knitted a swatch for at least one pattern so far just to try and see what it looked like which defeats the purpose of them including photographs in the first place.

The lace book also has no charts, despite one of the ‘useful’ hints scattered throughout being “Take the time to learn how to read knitting charts; it’ll make your knitting that much easier”.

To end on a somewhat positive note, I will admit that there are stitch patterns in the books that aren’t in any of the other books I own, I have used some of the stitch patterns and I’ve yet to find any errors in the patterns themselves. Not exactly a glowing recommendation but I’m afraid it’s the best I can do.

Remember this?

which turned into this:

Well, it’s back and now it looks like this:

Not without a lot more ripping back and re-doing along the way but the front and back are now finished and will match brilliantly after a little blocking. Even better than that, the argyle worked out perfectly and the top of the top brown diamond is exactly where it’s supposed to be (and not three rows earlier, for instance).

Next step is to sew one of the shoulder seams so that I can start knitting the neckband. Given that the temperature in London is currently far too high to have an entire jumper sitting on your lap, that might not be for some time. Fortunately, if it’s too hot to sew it, it is also too hot for Steven to want to wear it!

I bought two new craft toys tools last week; can you work out what they are from the picture? (Hint: it’s not the towels or the metre stick.)

I’ll admit it’s not the best of pictures so how about something a little clearer:

I’ve been knitting (and wearing) so many shawls that I thought it was about time I bought some blocking wires in an attempt to make blocking easier. I should say that I love the effect that blocking has, the seemingly magical difference that it makes to knitted lace changing it from scrumpled blob to beautiful shawl; I just hate the crawling about my knees while working with dozens of pins. (I also hate the waiting for things to dry but I knew even blocking wires couldn’t speed that bit up!)

So, I ordered a blocking kit from I Knit, finished (yet another) shawl and set to blocking. Initially, it seemed that the wires weren’t going to make things much quicker; feeding them into the edges of the shawl seemed to take quite a while. What was much quicker was adjusting the shawl to the size and shape that I wanted. In the past, I would pin most of the shawl out and then adjusting anything would mean moving lots of pins. Being able to just tug the wires out slightly and replace two or three pins was so much easier. It also took far less time to get the edges suitably straight, something I always struggled with before.

In short, I think I like them. I’m sure that the inserting of the wires will get easier with experience and the easier adjustment should mean that I get better results as I’m less likely to settle for “straight enough”.

The second new toy was a bit harder to work out from the picture above since it was taking the picture rather than appearing in it! Have a bad web-cam picture instead:

My trusty digital point and shoot camera died some time ago and, while we have a great digital SLR, I always felt like using it was too much effort for simple things like blog pictures and updating Ravelry. Having the SLR also meant that I didn’t feel like I should buy a new point and shoot because, well, we already had a camera. As well as that, I’m very fussy about my cameras which roughly translates to “it’s nearly impossible to find one that meets my arbitrary and sometimes contradictory criteria”. I do love Canon cameras though so when I spotted this one being sold “ex-display” in the John Lewis sale, it only took a couple of hours of pondering to actually decide to buy it. I’m glad I did though because I love it. It’s small and neat and easy to carry around with me but is also surprisingly powerful and has the functionality that I was looking for.

Expect to see the output of both the camera and the blocking wires in future!

I mentioned recently that I had a couple of lace shawl designs in progress and I thought I would share a preview of one of them.

This shawl was inspired by the Japanese pattern sourcebook that I reviewed in April. The green version of the pattern is as it originally appears in the book (and on the accompanying CD).

I changed the green to red in an image editor to get a better idea of how the pattern might look in the colour of yarn that I wanted to use.

I found a flower motif in my Vogue Ultimate Knitting Guide that seemed perfect and proceeded to sketch and chart and swatch and then sketch and chart and swatch some more. I originally tried cables for the undulating lines but they weren’t showing up well in the laceweight yarn that I was using so I changed to eyelets instead and this is the final result:

The yarn is the Plymouth Yarn Baby Alpaca Lace that I brought back from honeymoon and it’s beautifully light and soft.

What I haven’t decided yet is whether or not I will add a border. I have a couple of borders in mind but haven’t done any swatching or calculation to see which, if any, I could make fit. I’ve knitted the entire shawl (and worn it!) with just a narrow garter stitch border for now. It does curl slightly at the sides but I’m worried that adding a border will make it too fussy.

The other advantage of not adding a border is that it will make getting the pattern ready for publication much quicker! The chart is ready to go; written instructions are nearly done and I’m just waiting to be able to take some better photographs so that I can put the whole lot together.

The only other thing missing is a name! I’m still waiting for inspiration to strike so if you have any ideas, leave a comment or send me an email. If I use your suggestion, I’ll send you a free copy of the pattern when it’s published.

It’s getting harder to find decent second-hand bookshops in central London these days so we recently took a trip to Hay-on-Wye to satisfy our cravings.  I spent a fair amount of time rummaging through any craft books I could find and managed to pick up a few interesting additions to my library. I plan on writing fuller reviews once I’ve had the chance to read them more carefully and try some projects but here’s a quick look in the meantime.

Alabama Stitch Book, by Natalie Chanin with Stacie Stukin:

A collection of sewing projects for recycling and embellishing old t-shirts. I first heard of this book when the House on Hill Road blog reviewed the follow-up book Alabama Studio Style. Having now seen this book and the review of the second one at House on Hill Road, I think the projects in the second book are probably more to my taste but there are a couple of projects in here, including a skirt and corset top, that I do really want to try. All I need now are some t-shirts!

Designing Knitwear, Deborah Newton:

I’ve been getting more ambitious with my designing (I currently have a couple of lace shawls in progress) and my eventual ambition is to learn how to design clothing. I had seen this book recommended as a good guide to knitting design and, at a first glance, it certainly seems to cover everything you could want to know. In fact, at first glance, the sheer quantity of text and detail in this book is a little overwhelming. I think this is going to be a book that I sit down and read through rather than dipping in and out of. I’ll let you know how that goes later.

520 Quick and Easy Patchwork Designs, Kei Kobayashi:

The concept behind this book is simple: using folded origami squares as the basis for quilt designs. Take your square of paper, fold your shape, unfold the paper and use the geometric pattern of crease lines as the basis for your quilt block. My quilting has yet to progress beyond simple patchwork blocks but there’s a wealth of inspiration in here for anyone from the absolute beginner to the expert looking for something new. There is a large section on traditional American quilt block patterns, as well as variations on geometric patterns and some Art Deco and computer graphic suggestions as well. It is a design book rather than a how-to-quilt book so if you’re looking for detailed guidance on quilting, piecing and finishing quilts, this isn’t the book for you but if you’re looking for inspiration, there’s plenty of it here.

Steven discovered recently that two of the smart (shop-bought) jumpers he owns have holes in the elbows.We didn’t spot them until they were well past my darning abilities and I was loth to darn them anyway because both jumpers have a hole in exactly the same place, meaning that any repair would probably wear through again quite quickly.

Steven wasn’t particularly keen on my idea of sewing suede patches on, explaining that even when he was a physicist working at a university he didn’t wear jumpers with elbow patches, but did suggest that I could unravel the jumpers and re-use the yarn. As can be seen from the label in the picture below, this was a very appealing idea.

The first step to recycling a jumper to reclaim the yarn is to check the seams. Machine-made jumpers can be manufactured in two different ways. The first is the same as hand-knitting; the pieces are knitted to the appropriate size and shape, and then sewn together — this is ideal for unraveling as you will end up with a single, continuous length of yarn. The second is known as “cut-and-sew”. The fabric is knitted in a single large piece and then the pieces are cut out and sewn together. Unraveling a jumper made this way will result in a lot of short, individual pieces of yarn, which aren’t much good for anything. (Depending on the fibre, you could still recycling these jumpers by felting.)

The picture below is my attempt to show you what a “good” seam for unraveling looks like; it might be better to take a close look at some hand-knitted garments to get the idea.

The next step is to unpick the seams; a sharp seam-ripper is useful but be careful not to accidentally cut the knitted fabric. The pictures below show the under-arm section of the body and the sleeve with the hole after it had been removed.

After unraveling, I washed and dried the yarn to get the kinks out. I had wound the into balls as I was unraveling but wound these into hanks for washing and drying. I hung the hanks to dry and hung weights from the bottom to stretch them slightly to straighten the yarn.

It occurred to me after I had removed the sleeves (and fortunately before I had unraveled anything else) that the rest of the  jumper was still in great condition and that it could work well as a tank top, if I knitted some bands around the armholes. Now that I had a large quantity of matching yarn, I experimented a little with needle sizes and stitches, picked up a lot of stitches round the armhole and started knitting.

I’m really pleased with the results; but K1P1 rib takes a very long time with such fine yarn on 2mm needles. Hopefully it will be finished by the autumn since it’s too warm to wear it just now anyway.

The best bit is that, even when the armbands on this jumper are knitted, I still have another jumper to unravel (it has a round neck so can’t be turned into a tank top) plus nearly 100g of yarn from the sleeves on this one. That’s enough laceweight cashmere to keep anyone happy for quite a while!