Category: craft

Wow! The vast majority of the yarn that I ordered earlier this week arrived this morning. (Note to self: ordering things on Thursday to arrive on Saturday morning when you might actually be in is a good idea.) A couple of the colours that I chose for Double Vision are out of stock but I’m still impressed that everything else was available. I took the obligatory pictures, introduced Steven to the idea of making a really cool throw based on mathematical principles and then showed him the yarn. Now all I have to do is find somewhere to put it before he realises just how much there is of it.

I can’t wait to cast on and get started. I think I’ll start with the Tubey since I’ve had the shrug hiding in the wardrobe for over a year now without ever wearing it. Also, I need to think about how I want to arrange the colours for the Double Vision and I can’t really do that until they’re all here.

The Internet is evil and must be stopped. I haven’t done this in a while but today I succumbed and went shopping online in a spare 5 minutes at work. I really ought to know better by now.

To add insult to injury, I discovered that there was money sitting in my PayPal account that I hadn’t realised was there. It was, of course, impossible for me to use their simple option to transfer it directly into my bank account. No, I had to find somewhere to spend it.

Fortunately, there are a vast range of places on the internet which accept PayPal as payment and some of them even sell yarn.

I started with a PDF pattern from Woolly Thoughts (more about which in a post to come) and followed that up with yarn from Cucumber Patch to make said pattern. Except that I discovered that Cucumber Patch also had some discontinued Jaeger yarns at prices that I couldn’t resist.

I have a shrug that I knitted in Jaeger yarn some time ago and have never worn because shrugs just don’t suit me (not that that stops me knitting them!). There isn’t enough yarn in it for it to be worth frogging it and re-using the yarn but I discovered a pattern in Knitty that adds a stretchy body tube to the shrug to create an entire top and have been meaning to do this for ages. In the meantime, however, Jaeger discontinued their yarns so I had basically given up hope of getting the same yarn in co-ordinating colours for this project. I was over the moon today then to discover that not only did Cucumber Patch have the yarn that I wanted, in colours that would look good, they also had it in sufficient quantities!

The only fly in the ointment is that this, together with the yarn for the throw from Woolly Thoughts, adds up to a lot of yarn and I’m due to move house in about five weeks. True, I’m only moving two doors down and two flights up but I think the yarn is going to need a box or suitcase all of its own.

Oh well, at least the money isn’t sitting doing nothing in my PayPal account any more.

I finally got around to uploading the picture of my Mum’s Christmas neckwarmer so here it is.

I’m really lucky that my family always appreciates handmade things and this and my Dad’s Henry scarf were really popular at Christmas. I completely forgot to get any pictures of Dad’s finished scarf, which, considering the time and effort that went into it, is very frustrating. I think I’ll need to get him to take some pictures and send me them!

In the end, I really liked the way the So Called Scarf pattern came out, even though I’d used solid colour and not variegated yarn like everyone else seems to. Fortunately, my Mum spotted straightaway that it was supposed to be a neckwarmer and not a full scarf and didn’t need it explained.

I don’t like the jumper I’m knitting. There. I’ve said it.

I still love the look of the finished jumper in the pattern pictures and I really like the fabric that’s coming off the needles but I can’t stand the pattern. It uses complicated increases and decreases that I don’t think I’m doing properly so I’m not getting the look that they’re supposed to achieve. Also, they’re so complicated that I’m having to stop and read the instructions carefully every time I come across one, which is currently four times a row.

I’ve been trying to work out why I’ve barely knitted since Christmas and it wasn’t until I spent some time on Ravelry this afternoon looking at patterns and projects and starting to get enthusiastic about the idea of knitting again that I realised that it’s not that I don’t want to knit, it’s that I don’t want to knit this jumper. And, since it’s the only project I have on the go at the moment, that translated to me not wanting to knit.

So, I’m going to frog it, reclaim the yarn and start on something else. I’ll put the pattern back on the shelf and come back to it another day, making sure I take the time to properly work out and learn the increases and decreases so I get the result that I want.

Of course, this means that poor Steven who has had a respite from me knitting for the past three weeks (which he needed after the stress of my Christmas knitting) is going to have to put up with it again.

Usually, when following a knitting pattern, I use the exact yarn recommended as I’m always worried that it somehow won’t ‘work’ without it. However, having decided to knit my Mum a scarf for Christmas at the last minute and not having time to spend tracking down particular yarns, I thought it was time to be brave and try yarn substitution.

So, I picked my pattern and looked up the details of the recommended yarn on www.yarndex.com so that I could at least attempt to find something similar (a slightly fuzzy aran weight). So far so good. There was a small doubt in the back of my mind though. The photos of the scarf accompanying the pattern didn’t look like it had been knitted with aran weight yarn and definitely not with fuzzy yarn.

Undeterred, I bought two balls of the Wensleydale Longwool aran yarn, which I’ve mentioned before, and cast on.

The yarn was beautiful, the pattern pretty, the combination of the two …. bleugh!

Never mind, I had added lots of beautiful scarf patterns to my Ravelry queue earlier in the month when I thought I might eventually get around to knitting something for me again so I went back to the drawing board and started on a new pattern.

The yarn was still beautiful, the new pattern was pretty … and you can see where this is going, can’t you?

Again, despite the pattern claiming that it used aran weight yarn, that’s not what it looked like in the photos so I decided a change of approach was needed and went through my list looking for patterns that looked like they had been knitted with fuzzy aran. At last success with My So-Called Scarf.

Although all the pictures I’ve seen of this scarf have used variegated coloured yarns, the scarf looks beautiful in solid cream as well. It also uses nice big needles so is knitting up very quickly, a definite advantage when there’s less than a week to Christmas and you’re casting on a present for the 5th time!

Fingers crossed that I don’t change my mind again!

I just realised that I forgot to post to say that I finally finished the Henry scarf for my Dad! I don’t have photos yet thanks to almost never being home during daylight hours at the moment but will put some up as soon as I can.

I was beginning to worry that it wasn’t going to be done for Christmas so I’m hugely relieved. It’s come out beautifully and if it hadn’t taken so unbelievably long, I’d definitely make another one. (Sorry, Steven, there’s no way you’re getting one now.)

I made it in Jaeger Matchmaker 4 ply, which was quite nice yarn to work with although it did have a tendency to split at times. If I was going to make another one, I would be tempted to go for something softer (I wonder if Wensleydale Longwool comes in 4 ply?) and I would definitely use a more interesting colour. Charcoal grey is all well and good and my Dad will definitely wear it but it could do with a little more life in it.

Firstly, let me clear up a common misconception: knitting lace is not hard. If you can knit, purl, k2tog and make yarn overs, you can knit lace. A lace pattern might be complicated and difficult to follow but as far as technique is concerned, it’s not hard.

Unless your technique is wrong, as I discovered last night. Apparently, there is a right way and a wrong way to make yarn overs. Now yarn overs are a way of deliberately introducing holes into your knitting. Obviously, holes are very important in lace, so if you’re not making them properly, you’ve got a problem. Having knit several rows of a lace pattern and not getting anything that looked like the pictures accompanying the pattern, I decided to take a closer look at what was supposed to be happening. Clearly, the pattern pictures had holes and, just as clearly, my work didn’t. This suggested a problem with my yarn overs so I thought I’d check that I was making them the way I was supposed to.

Enter Google. The first page I found explained that there is no standard method for yarn overs so if the pattern didn’t explain how to make them, I was probably screwed. Not really what I wanted to hear so I moved right along. The next page said that (and I quote) “the yarn should be wrapped counter-clockwise around the needle looking directly at the point of the right hand needle”. Personally, I’m not terribly keen on the idea of looking directly at the points of my needles even when I’m not knitting with them. Fortunately, I was third time lucky and found a site that explained that I should be bringing the yarn to the front of my work under the needle and then putting it to the back over the needle and not the other way round as I had been doing. This method gets a very loose length of yarn wrapped over the needle (just what you need to introduce a hole) unlike the opposite way which gets you a nice neat stitch and no hole. At last I have holes in my knitting!

The final amusement was the site that explained to me that making a stitch (a yarn over increases the number of stitches by one) in this way was called ‘lace’ when done intentionally and a ‘hole’ otherwise.

I have a new favourite yarn! (I’m not sure I had a favourite before but I certainly do now.) Since Henry is very very nearly finished (just 3 rows and then the cast-off to do), I bought some yarn at I Knit last night to make a scarf/wrap for my Mum’s Christmas. The pattern that I’m making specified a slightly fuzzy aran weight and I ended up buying some Wensleydale Longwool from Wensleydale Longwool Sheepshop. This is wool as wool was meant to be! It’s 100% pure wool from Wensleydale Longwool sheep and is just beautiful. It has a lovely natural subtle sheen to it and it’s fabulously soft, unlike some other 100% wools that I’ve worked with. It’s soft and warm and fluffy and it’s definitely what I’m going to make my own scarf out of, when I get back around to making things for me.

It’s not perfect: it sheds considerably and it’s a little “grabby” so ripping back when you’ve gone wrong is not easy. Someone else at I Knit mentioned having wasted an entire ball’s worth of yarn having to rip back a jumper and the yarn being unusable afterwards. Note that I would expect both of these problems with any yarn of this sort so these are not criticisms as such.

I can’t comment on the colourways available either. I bought two balls in cream since I wanted something neutral that could be word in summer as well as winter. Since choosing yarn was standing between me and a bottle of organic cider from the I Knit fridge, I didn’t spend too long admiring things that I wasn’t going to buy! You can see (and order) other colours online at I Knit.

Of course, all this means that I have a barely-started project that I need to finish in the next 11 days. I’m also not sure that I like the pattern that I’ve chosen worked in this yarn; I think I might like something simpler given how beautiful the yarn itself is. I do have another pattern in mind so I’ll choose between them tonight and try and post some pictures over the weekend when there’s daylight.