I’ve had fun with my little Yarnosophy shop, but with the upcoming surgery I’m going to be offline for a while, and my life priorities will have to shift a little for the foreseeable future. So, I’m closing down the shop on 30 November.
To clear stock, there’s 15% off stitchmarkers and the 2 skeins of yarn still left.
So, hop in before it’s too late!
I seem to be managing to cross a few things off my to do list lately – not huge things, but some little ones that nevertheless make me feel good! And those I haven’t yet crossed off, I’m making good progress on.
Since I’ll be in hospital for Christmas and won’t be able to visit my parents, I thought I’d knit another lace doily, this time in colours to match the blue and white linen my mother often uses on the table for Christmas dinner. I rummaged around in the stash and found a cone of pale blue cotton I’ve had for years, and cast on for the a second one of the Little Flower Doily (Rav link) from Bad Cat Designs. It took me a little over 24 hours to knit, and here she is blocking this morning:
So, I can be at Christmas dinner in spirit – or under a nice glass plate of Mum’s fruit mince tarts 🙂
The Christmas knitting – the small amount I am doing – seems reasonably under control. The Binary Cable Hat I started knitting for my nephew before his birthday in August didn’t get finished, as I confused myself with how to set the binary code for his name into the cables, and therefore stuffed it up. However, this morning I finally frogged most of what I’d done, back to the first inch, and have restarted again, getting it right this time! So, it’s now progressing well, and I hope to have it finished if not today, then tomorrow. I have another gift for him, but this will get popped in with it when it’s done:
There’s another gift I’ve half-finished, but since the recipient sometimes read this blog, I won’t mention it 🙂 (But dear recipient, don’t get TOO excited. It’s just something I have owed you for …ahem ….a while. This year you might actually get it. Fingers crossed. But I have something else for you, as well!)
When those two things are done, then the next project will be finishing my All-Lace Brangian shawl, which is about half-done. I realised this morning that if I want to actually finish the Ravelry 10 Shawls in 2010 challenge, then I’m going to have to finish that shawl (my 1oth for the year) in the next week or so, in order to get it blocked, photographed, and uploaded to the group before I leave for hospital on the 10th Dec. It’s only a small shawl, so that should be doable.
And in pattern news, I have updated the Brangian Progressive Yarn Usage table, and added one for the All-Lace Brangian version, which has slightly different row counts and therefore yarn usage. They can both be downloaded as .pdf files from this page.
Another pair of socks is off the needles – this one a Christmas gift for my brother-in-law, who likes hand-knit socks for chilly Canberra winter mornings. Last year I also gave him a pair of socks – but I hadn’t quite finished knitting them before our early family Christmas, so he had a good laugh when he opened his parcel and found 1 finished sock, and 1 still on the needles. I calmly took the half-finished one back from him, and continued knitting 🙂 I finished it a day or two later and gave it back to him.
This year, his socks are done well ahead of time. I love knitting socks in 8ply (DK) yarn – they’re so quick, and also warm and cosy!
I’ve used the waffle-rib stitch pattern from the Harris Tweed Socks pattern, but adapted it for thicker yarn, and used my own standard heel and toe patterns. (Ravelry project page.) The yarn is 8 ply Luxury from Bendigo Woollen Mills.
So that’s the socks part of this post! Now for the ‘stuff’…
I’ve (finally!) added instructions and photos to my Blocking Shawls page. I hope the instructions are clear and that the images are helpful in demonstrating the process.
I’ve also added a free pattern preview for the Christmas Lights Shawl – a downloadable, .pdf file with the first two pages of the pattern, which have the yarn and bead requirements and approximate measurements for each size. I hope that will be helpful for people who are considering knitting the pattern but want to check yarn requirements etc before purchasing it.
My table is currently covered with an assortment of ‘stuff’ – there’s socks still to darn (I have done one pair!), a fingerless lace mitten in progress, an ex-biscuit (cookie for my US readers) tin in which I’ve put an assortment of needles and bits and bobs that I like to keep handy, and the experimental beginning of what might, at some stage, be a new shawl design. I’ve still got a little Christmas knitting to do, but I’m not stressing about it – I have a gift for everyone already, so the rest is nice but non-essential extras. My major focus at the moment has to be writing, as it’s now less than 3 weeks before I head in to hospital for major surgery, and I want to get as much done of the current book as possible before I go. The lace mitten is not the best writing knitting, as the lace pattern is a little distracting – I keep wanting to finish a round/pattern repeat before putting it down to write. So I may have to cast on some simple socks that I can easily pick up and put down, and where the simple repetition aids the writing.
And I think there was something else I was going to mention, but now I can’t remember what it is. (Yes, I know, I should blog more often…)
I finished the doily this afternoon – it’s nice to have a pretty, finished object so quickly! Here she is blocking:
(Finished just before dinner time, so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to have my cup of tea!)
Yes, I have a book to write. Yes, I have some Christmas knitting to do. And yes, I was even working on some yesterday, until the combination of post-migraine head, dark blue yarn, and fading light got too much for me. Tinking multiple cabled rows in dark blue yarn is not the easiest task.
Did I mention the post-migraine head? Which couldn’t come up with much in the way of words, let alone coherent, effective story-telling ones?
Procrastination got to me. Much easier to look at pretty things on Raverly than to strain my brain. Earlier in the year, one of my lace goals was to work a shawl in the round. Nope, haven’t done that yet. But I have been noticing round-lace patterns for a while, and feeling tempted by many. Some of the prettiest started their lives as patterns for doilies or tablecloths. They’ve always reminded me of the many hand-made things from my mother’s generation, and generations before that, that decorated our family home, and those of my aunts and uncles. Afternoon tea was served in floral teacups on tables or trays adorned with beautiful lace work or embroidery. Ever since the grandson of my eldest aunt (she passed away many years ago) visited us in July, I’ve hankered after some of those pretty things – the teacup sets, the lovely table linens.
I was also thinking and reading yesterday about the Slow Cloth idea, and the principles behind it, as well as my own approaches to textile crafts – beauty and purpose, enlivening simple everyday life with beauty and joy. One of the things I always felt, sitting down as a girl to those afternoon teas, sharing food and drink and talk with these lovely items around us, was that we mattered.
So I cast on a doily 🙂
The pattern is the Little Flower Doily (Ravelry link), a free pattern from Bad Cat Designs. I’m regarding this simply as an experiment for myself, a test piece, so I just grabbed some mauve 4ply cotton that was sitting on the table.
It took me about 4 goes to get the cast-on and the 1st couple of rows (mostly) right; it worked better when I dug out the shorter (10cm) dpns that I bought a little while I go. I graduated after a few rounds to 15cm dpns, and now, on round 23 of 37, I’ve moved up to 20cm long dpns.
It’s coming along nicely, and I may be finished today. If so, I guess (in the absence of fine china tea sets) I’ll have to have a celebratory cup of tea in the lovely, hand-painted mug a friend made for me many years ago:
I’ve finally finished the second of my shaped-toe socks – and even remembered to mirror the toe shaping so I didn’t have to wear both socks on the one foot!
They look fine (at least from a distance) and I love the yarn and the colours. I’m very happy with the toe-shaping – it definitely makes more room for my strong healthy big toe 🙂 However, perhaps due to all the distractions my poor brain has been coping with lately, the socks are far from perfect. Somehow, when knitting the first one, I worked on the wrong needles for the heel, and hence the leg shaping now goes down the inside of my leg, rather than the centre back. That’s oops! number one. Oops! number two is that despite taking some notes as I went, and copying the decreasing for the leg from the first sock, I somehow ended up with 60 stitches at the ankle instead of 64. Figuring it wouldn’t make much difference, I knitted on, working the rest of the sock over 60 stitches instead of 64. The sock does fit – but it is a bit tight around the ankle, the rib pattern pulling in more so than stocking stitch. Oh, well, I’m going to be losing weight soon, aren’t I? And no-one is really going to be looking that closely at my legs to notice the fudges 🙂
Q. What do the hand-knitted socks in this pile have in common?
A. One or both of each pair suffers from this:
I have been knitting socks for some years, and have been using s standard wedge toe shape, which feels nice and comfy and is easy to do. But I have a prominent big toe, and lovely healthy strong toe nails. Hence many of my socks ending up with a hole in the toe 🙁 They then sit there in the darning pile, waiting for me to organise myself to find yarn, and needle, and time and patience to fix them. I’m perfectly capable of darning them… but it would be so much better f I didn’t have to, right?
Now that my Christmas Lights Shawls are finished, I’ve picked up again a sock that I started knitting back in May. I need to do some serious writing in the next two months, and socks are great writing knitting – they’re easy, and the rows are short, so it’s a simple matter to drop the sock and type whenever the words come to me. Plus, with all those socks stuck in the darning pile, I need more socks!
As I approached the toe on this sock, I became determined to knit it differently, hoping to avoid the holey toes problem. This morning I flicked through my sock books, but no alternate toe shapes leapt out at me. So off I went (naturally) to Ravelry, and took a look at the Sock Knitters Group – and there was a current discussion about different approaches to toes, and a link to the blog Under Dutch Skies, and a great post about Anatomically correct toes. It was a simple solution to my problem – print some custom graph paper to match your knitting gauge, trace around the top part of your foot, and work out the decreases from that template. Easy!
And here’s the result for my sock – a toe shaped for my feet:
Now I just have to cast on and knit the second sock, with a mirror of that toe, and then I can see how well they wear!
ETA: The yarn is gorgeous, although a little more muted than the photo – it’s Amara sock yarn from Saffron Dyeworks. The rib pattern is from the Charade Socks (Rav link) by Sandra Park.
This afternoon, after checking over the pattern again, I created a pattern page on Ravelry for the Christmas Lights Shawl and made it available for sale. I’ve also updated my pattern section here, and added the pattern into the Yarnosophy shop, but I’m sure Ravelry will be the place that most people go! (Which is fine by me, as Jess & Casey have created such an amazing community there that I like to support them as much as possible.)
Here’s some of Tara’s photos of the sample shawls, taken at our photoshoot yesterday:
So, after months of knitting and calculating and charting and drafting and checking and rechecking and knitting… it’s finally done and out there!
The lovely Tara, her friend Bella and I went out to the pine forest just north of town this afternoon, with the two Christmas Lights shawls I’ve knitted. It was a very simple photoshoot – no crowds of makeup artists, photography assistants, or stylists – just the three of us, and the lovely quiet of the pine forest in the spring, with the birds singing in the trees and the grass green from recent rains.
Isn’t Tara’s jumper great? One of her own knits, featuring her own handspun.
Once Tara’s had a chance to go through her photos, I’ll select which ones to use for the pattern and the associated Ravelry listing. So, we’re getting much, much, closer!
I’d really like to thank Tara and Bella for taking some time out today to help with this at short notice. There are many wonderful people in the world, and they are two of them!
I’m getting much closer to releasing the Christmas Lights Shawl pattern. The fantastic group of test-knitters are making great progress, and have provided some valuable feedback on the pattern. I found a tech-editor n Ravelry who is seeking to build up her experience, and she’s done a great job, going through the pattern in detail, and making some thoughtful and sensible suggestions for improving it – and picking up a missed ‘yo’ in the instructions!
On Sunday, after a long day with much knitting, I finished the medium size version of the shawl, and managed to get it all pinned out on the blocking mats before taking the dog to the vet yesterday morning. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and our sunroom where the shawl was pinned out was toasty cosy – great for drying a shawl! So late afternoon I was able to unpin it, and take a few photos – not that any of them are great! I really need a beautiful garden, and/or some attractive garden furniture, to photograph shawls – our straggly wild bushland just doesn’t have anywhere to drape things photogenically. But here it is, hanging on a wall:
Tomorrow my photographer friend and her model friend and I will head out to the pine forest to take the ‘official’ shawl photos for the pattern. Then I just have to rearrange the layout of the pattern to fit the photos in, do a final check… and then it can be released into the wilds of Ravelry!
Oh, and you might want some project details!
Pattern: Christmas Lights (of course!)
Yarn: Saffron Dyeworks Enya Sock yarn in Lt Lockwood; 2 skeins
Beads: 4.5mm silver-lined aquamarine seed beads from Empire Beads
Ravelry Project Page
Now that I’ve finished knitting Christmas Lights (at least for now), I’ve picked up my all-lace Brangian again. It’s nice easy knitting, in a pretty clematis blue-purple silk/merino. I’m also itching to cast on some more socks 🙂
