The exams are over. My desk has been turned from this:
into this:
(I haven’t started sewing anything yet, which is why it’s still reasonably tidy!)
I have crafting and blogging plans aplenty. Expect to see posts with finished projects (which have been accumulating at an alarming rate), book reviews (buying craft books seems to be one of my main methods of dealing with stress) and even (maybe) a new design or two!
I said I wasn’t going to post again until after my exams but I wanted to show off the packages that arrived this morning. I indulged in a little retail therapy while I was ill and everything arrived at once.
First up, some brilliant fabric from Voodo Rabbit. Steven showed me a post about their cushions on Boing Boing and, when I saw they had fat quarters of the fabric available in the their Etsy store, I just couldn’t resist. I bought a fat quarter each of “Gingham Invaded” in white on black and black on white.
I have no idea yet what I’ll do with this. Steven is talking about getting some for himself to make another dice bag. I’m somewhat tempted to order lots and lots of it from Spoonflower and make my own cushion covers or a quilt!
On a far less geeky note, I also bought a shawl pin from South4th on Etsy. I keep seeing their Ravelry ads and had been trying to resist but being ill lowered my resistance and I succumbed.
I’ve wanted a new shawl pin for a long time but was looking for something small and reasonably plain, whilst still being pretty. The myrtlewood pin fits the bill perfectly. It’s beautifully light, the oiled finish is gorgeous and it looks great with my shawls. Unfortunately, all the shawl pictures I took were out of focus so you will need to wait for better pictures of that.
Now, back to the books!
This is going to be my last post for a couple of weeks. I realised this morning that, since I’ve been ill, somehow it’s gone from being three weeks to the exams (which is scary but manageable) to two weeks to the exams (which is frankly panic-inducing) without me managing any revision at all in that time. I am finally starting to feel better so revision has re-started but there’s lots left to do!
What I have managed to achieve in the past week is a new pair of socks. They’re soft, squishy, warm and terribly unflattering but will make wonderful bedsocks when winter rolls around again.
In my last sock-related post, I mentioned that I was sure I was going to run out of yarn and, as can be seen from the photo below, I did—just as I was starting the toe of the second sock.
I found a swatch for another project that I had used this yarn for and unravelled that … and still didn’t have enough yarn. I ended up unravelling one pattern repeat from the top of each sock, which gave me enough yarn to finish the toe and cast off the unravelled stitches on one sock … but not the other. I unravelled another couple of rows from the top of the second sock to make sure I had enough yarn to work a stretchy enough cast-off … and this is how much yarn I had left after casting off the unravelled top edge of the second sock:
It seems I like to live dangerously.
Lessons I should learn from this (but probably won’t):
I’ll see you on the other side of the exams!
I would love to be able to say that Wordsworth’s poem had inspired this shawl but, to be completely honest, I had never heard of the poem until I was on the point of publishing the shawl and needed to find a name for it! It’s pure coincidence that it suits the shawl so well.
The actual inspiration for the shawl is a bit more complicated. Some time ago, a yarn company put out a call for submissions on the theme of fairy tales. I was immediately inspired and came up with a sideways-knitted shawl with a lace edging involving toads. Further reflection led to the realisation that the market for toad-related knitting patterns, while I’m sure one exists, is probably quite small. The toad pattern was shelved but I did keep the extensive notes I had made when experimenting with sideways-knitted shawls.
Soon after this, I decided that my Japanese-inspired shawl really needed a border and, since I couldn’t find an existing one that worked, I designed one from scratch. (I am still planning to release the pattern for this shawl; it’s just proving extremely difficult to write!)
Eventually, it occurred to me that the border could look quite pretty as an edging on a much plainer shawl and, after some swatching and some knitting, Celandine was the result.
I had originally planned to call the shawl “Buttercup” but, not very surprisingly, Buttercup is a remarkably common name for knitting patterns (including at least one other small yellow shawl). A Google search for “buttercup” led me to the Wikipedia entry for Ranunculus, which in turn led me to the entry for Lesser Celandine, and the name was set. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, Ranunculus is Latin for “little frog”, so I’ve ended up right back where I started—with amphibians!
Celandine is now available from Yellow Ginger Designs and Ravelry.
Tomorrow was not better (but I went to work anyway). The two days after that were even worse and were mostly spent napping on the couch. When I wasn’t asleep, I was mostly watching Harry Potter films and knitting my bed socks.
The idea of knitting bed socks while actually ill is extremely amusing to me today; I blame the almost complete lack of human contact over the past couple of days. They are still delightfully soft and squishy and I’m absolutely certain that I’m going to run out of yarn before I finish the second one but I’m keeping knitting anyway.
Today, I’m finally starting to feel human* again. I made it out to the shops to buy food, I put on some laundry and even managed to summon up enough brain power to put the finishing touches on my newest shawl pattern, Celandine, and publish it.
There are more details and photographs on the Ravelry page (which should now be visible to non-Ravelry members). I promise to post lots more details about the shawl soon but, if you will excuse me, I really need to go for a nap now.
* Where human is defined as “able to achieve some small tasks and, only then, collapsing onto the couch”.
Warning — a certain amount of self-pity follows:
I was supposed to be studying today. Instead my day looked like this:
Lemsip for the awful cold that has reached the horrible hacking cough stage;
Dentinox for the unspeakable toothache that kept me up half the night but is still “non-localised pain” and so the dentist can’t do anything about it;
Soft, squishy knitting because sometimes that is just what you need.
Tomorrow will be better, right?
The knitting is the Bed Sock in Lemon Pattern Fancy Knit Stripe from Knitting Vintage Socks in Natural Dye Studio Darling sock yarn.
It’s now 23 days and 1 hour till the start of my next set of exams. This means that I have to stop reassuring myself that there is plenty of time (since there isn’t!) and get properly stuck in to my remaining revision.
This also means that I need something to knit that is challenging enough to distract my brain from thinking about exam-related stuff while also not being so difficult that my tired, stressed brain can’t cope.
So, far the Lesia loop by Robin Ulrich is proving ideal. It’s a straightforward lace pattern which needs just the right amount of attention to allow my brain to relax without getting bored.
I’m knitting it in Rowan Kidsilk Haze which is working up beautifully light and airy. The yarn is black but looks lighter in the photographs due to the amazing amount of sunshine that London is getting today.
The pattern, when finished, can be worn as a scarf, wrap, cowl or hood and I’m planning to wear it in the office over the summer when the air conditioning gets too cold.
Time for some lunch and a walk in the sunshine before I dive back into the books!
I have worked on two unbelievably geeky projects recently.
First up was a Riemann surface neck-warmer. I’m not going to attempt to explain the mathematical properties of a Riemann surface (not least because I’m not sure that I really understand them anymore), check out Wikipedia if you’re really interested. The point is that they’re really quite pretty and very geeky. There was a discussion on the Ravelry Geekcraft group about how you might knit one and then Behavioural Geek came up with a pattern. This coincided almost exactly with me thinking that I could do with a new scarf, neck-warmer type thing and that I still had rather a lot of the Noro Cash Iroha that might work nicely. The result — a lovely, soft, warm, exceedingly geeky neck-warmer. I modified the pattern slightly (details on my Ravelry page) but I’m not very happy with the way that I grafted this so I’m thinking about re-knitting this so that I’ll be happier wearing it.
Second project — a dice bag:
This one wasn’t for me, in fact, this one wasn’t even all my work. Steven bought some new dice at a role-playing convention recently and mentioned that he could do with a new dice bag. Since he had also expressed an interest in maybe learning to use my sewing machine at some point, I got him to do all the machine-stitching while I did the hand-stitching.
We used a tutorial that I found, although our bag is much smaller and doesn’t have a little heart appliquéd on it since, for some reason, Steven wasn’t very interested in having a little heart on his dice bag. I also use two cord loops rather than one to make it easier to close the bag.
The fabric is “Stripes” and is one of the limited edition prints from the Quilts: 1700-2010 exhibition that was at the V&A last year. It is actually the first piece that I’ve used from the pack that I bought after I had been to see the exhibition last year. This particular print is based on a fabric used in a patchwork quilt from the late 18th century. (Don’t shoot the messenger but the fabrics associated with the exhibition are currently on offer in the V&A shop!)
Steven and I did some rearranging recently so that the room that was my study is now our bedroom and what was our bedroom is now my study. There are still some problems to work out, but the biggest was the fact that all of our bed linen clashes really horribly with the colour of the walls. The plan is to change the colour of the walls at some point but, as I’m just six weeks away from my next set of professional exams, that is not going to happen for a couple of months at least.
Enter Bright Idea #1: “We could get a bedspread that matches the walls.” So, we looked for a bedspread and they were too big or too small or the wrong colour or the wrong texture and, almost always, really expensive.
Enter Bright Idea #2: “I could just make one.” Usually, those words are a sign that I’m going to spend a lot of money on supplies, start the project, find it takes more time than I expected and end up with a half-finished project somewhere that makes me feel guilty every time I stumble across it. <Looks across room at three dining chairs with cushion pads and one without.>
But not this time:
This time, I bought the fabric (a lightweight herringbone twill), went straight home and sewed until it was done.
I didn’t do anything fancy, just stitched two lengths together so that it was wide enough and then hemmed all the way around. I didn’t bother backing it since the twill is two-sided but I did take my pinking shears and tidy up all the hems. Since I used approximate measurements from the sizes of bedspreads that we had seen for sale plus a margin for safety because I wanted the bedspread to go all the way to the floor, it is actually a bit big. It is however finished and does exactly what we wanted it to do and I love it!
It seems that the more I knit and sew, the less I blog. Or, is it that the less I blog, the more I knit and sew? Whichever way round it is, there has been very little blogging but a lot of crafting going on.
In the month since I last blogged, I knitted a baby cardigan, finished my Simmer Dim shawl (although it still needs blocked), designed and knitted a hat and matching fingerless gloves, finished a neck-warmer, and sewed a log cabin quilted cushion cover.
I also made quite a bit of progress on the border of another shawl, started another hat, and started sewing a bedspread.
Having written all that down, I’m starting to wonder when I had time to work, sleep and study!
Lots more details to come on all of these but the only one I have pictures of at the moment is the baby cardigan.
This is the Kira cardigan from Harumidori designs and it is absolutely adorable. I wasn’t a great fan of the layout of the pattern document, which was very cluttered and difficult to read, and there were a few typos in the text although I didn’t spot any actual errors in the numbers. I love the finished cardigan though. I knitted in Rowan Pure Wool Aran, which was really soft after washing and blocking but I’m a little worried that some of the red dye ran during washing.
It’s a bit big for the baby that it was given to since he was only 10 days old when we saw him but I had knitted the 6-12 month size. However, he was wearing the baby hat that I had knitted for his older brother about 2½ years ago, which is apparently still going strong and is still his mum’s favourite baby hat. This was the beanie hat from Natural Knits for Babies and Moms by Louisa Harding. The RYC Cashsoft DK has held up really well with washing, is still really soft and apparently the sizing and fit are just perfect for newborns.
It’s very satisfying to knit gifts for people who really appreciate them!