I’m ill, Steven’s ill and we’re almost out of coffee.
At least there’s yarn!
Month: June 2011
And so we mourn the passing of another laptop
There has been absolutely no crafting around here this week due to the death of my laptop. You wouldn’t necessarily think that you’d need a laptop to knit or sew but apparently I’m incapable of doing either without one!
Fortunately, a new laptop has arrived and since the old one died of over-heating power-related problems and not a catastrophic disk failure (which is how my laptops usually go) I spent yesterday like this:
disassembling the old laptop to get the disk drive out so that I could transfer all my data to the new one. Before anyone suggests it, I do backup to an external disk but it turns out that my backup software wasn’t being entirely honest about which files it had backed up so there was quite a lot missing.
By way of consolation, the new laptop is much better than the old one in just about every way so everything is running significantly faster. I think I’ve managed to get all the software that I use re-installed and all the data that I need copied over so everything should now be back to normal and I can get on with the crafting!
Sweet with a hint of Vamp…
… isn’t a bad thing for a girl to grow up to be but was also the colour scheme (according to the yarn company names for the yarn) for the latest baby jumper I knitted. The yarn is Rowan RYC Cashsoft DK, which is my go-to yarn for baby clothes. It’s soft, snuggly, machine-washable, reasonably-priced and holds up well to washing.
The pattern is the Seamless Kimono Sweater. The pattern for the 3-6 month size is available for free or you can buy the pattern for newborn up to 6 years. I made a few changes to this pattern. I worked a few rows of garter stitch at the neckline, and worked this and the cuffs and bottom edge in a contrasting colour; I braided yarn for a tie instead of i-cord and I worked paired leaning increases for the raglan for a nicer (in my opinion) line than the kfb in the pattern.
The irony here is that this kimono-style jumper was knitted in the UK for a baby girl in Japan. It was only after I had finished it that it occurred to me that this was possibly a “coals to Newcastle” type situation and I should maybe have knitted something else. I’ve just received a lovely thank-you card and note though so it seems it was appreciated anyway.
I have mixed feelings about this pattern (which seems to be a theme around here at the moment). Again, I wasn’t terribly keen on the way the pattern was written. For example, the list of materials doesn’t explicitly say that you need 4 ply yarn for the embellishments and cord, which left me thoroughly confused when I started making i-cord with DK-weight yarn that clearly wasn’t going to fit through the eyelets. (I ended up braiding three strands of DK yarn instead.) The designer’s note in one section about how the instructions had “caused some people significant angst” also rubbed me up the wrong way. The instructions are not complicated but they’re also not intuitive so I can understand why people were nervous about just following them without being able to “see” what was going to happen.
Having said all that, there is no denying that the finished jumper is absolutely adorable and I can see myself making many, many more of these.
Diamonds are a girl’s best friend…
…or not as the case may be.
I had big plans for last weekend – three days of sewing, knitting, painting (doors, not art!), and the photography and final edits for my shawl pattern.
Instead, I ended up with some sort of stomach bug or possible food poisoning and spent three days on the sofa watching DVDs. I did get some knitting done:
This is the progress so far on my Diamond Serape Shawl, which I’m knitting in the Wollmeise that I bought at Knit Nation last year.
This is definitely going to be a project where the enjoyment comes from the product and not the process. Even after several repeats, I haven’t really gotten into the rhythm of this design and I keep making mistakes. So far, they’ve been easy to spot and fix so I haven’t been discouraged from keeping going. The pattern itself is full of spelling errors and typos, which annoy me in a pattern that I’ve paid for (particularly when there are so few words in it). The chart is correct though, which is all I really need now that I’ve started.
It doesn’t help that I’m undecided on my opinion of the yarn as well. Opinions on Wollmeise seem to vary between “I love it because the colours are so beautiful that I don’t care about anything else” and “I hate it because it’s so string-like that I don’t care how beautiful the colours are”. At the moment, I fall pretty squarely in the middle. I absolutely love the richness of the blue (which the photograph above doesn’t really do justice to) but it does feel a lot like knitting with string. The texture doesn’t seem to matter so much when it is knitted up and I’m hoping that it will soften a little with washing. Also, I’m knitting it into a shawl so I don’t need it to be particularly soft and would rather it was more string-like if that means it will be less likely to pill and wear.
In other words, the jury is still out on this one and I’ll let you know when the final verdict comes in.