FO: Shwook

Back in October when I visited the Knitting in Stitching Show at Ally Pally, I mostly behaved myself as far as purchase power was concerned and walked away only burdened by a few small skeins of Jamiesons Shetland in tow.  It seemed serendipitous: having just returned to civilization after a very long walk through Scotland (but nowhere near the Shetland Isles) and I felt the need for an after-the-trip souvenir, since the only thing that I bought in Scotland ended up being cold meds to ease miserable flu symptoms on the train ride home.   Backpacking makes you weary of every extra ounce you are schlepping.

But I love to work with Shetland, and I do love colorwork in small doses (a pullover this colorful and picky would be my personal hell).  I picked a hat pattern to go with and resolved that these five green skeins would not be sitting around in my stash for years.

Speaking of backpacking, I did want a really warm hat that would cover my ears completely.  This one fit the bill nicely: a generous slouch, with the strands of colorwork carried in back to make it extra wind-resistant.

It's cheerful in shades of chartreuse and sage, willow and ivy and eucalyptus greens.  My only complaint?  I should have done the brim doubled: folded over with a picot edge to give it extra warmth and a polished finished edge.  Just having ribbing on such a complex colorwork pattern is about as fitting as putting a Honda Civic medallion on a Rolls Royce.  

The nifty thing is that this used up very little yarn.  Meaning, if I juggle the colors a bit, I have plenty of yarn leftover for another similar hat.  

But, sigh.  My resolve of walking through the winter has somewhat failed me.  The vanity of having new boots (NEW BOOTS!) that I'm unwilling to walk through bog with yet, coupled with the tiresome gray skies and drizzle cold means I've been quite the homebody in my free time, but whipping up some fantastic things in the kitchen and furiously scheming the next few bank holiday weekends.  Meanwhile, I grow comfortingly fat on dry Manhattans and thick, hearty Lebanese lentil stews, waiting with a mixture of excitement and dread the day a large hill rears up directly in my path.

The pattern is called Shwook- it's a free pattern to celebrate Shetland Wool Week 2014, and it's still available on the website.

FO: Scrollwork Hat

After my last blog post, I totally shamed myself into finishing this hat:

The Scrollwork, a classy little number from Wool People Vol 4. It sat crammed on a shelf (a former CD tower, now useful as a place to put all the odds and ends of life when you live in a 1 bedroom flat- flashlights, stationary, pens, pocketknives, sunglasses, a button jar, scissors, and odd balls of yarn and anything you want off the table when you sit down for dinner) with just the brim done for more than a month, waiting for me to just put a couple of hours in to turn it into something more useful.

And finally:

The color is much more accurate in the first photo: a lovely, dusty pink with bits of tweed (as it is still permanently nighttime here, it's hard to get knitwear photos during good light, especially if one might be a desk jockey for pay all day).  The yarn is Classic Elite Portland Tweed, now discontinued.  Why?  Because it's weird, most likely.  It's a blend of 50% wool, 25% alpaca and 25% rayon, which is just...odd.   While I didn't curse it and hate it, it was not my favorite to work with- very little give and spring and life to it.  It's not terribly soft, and the alpaca/rayon makes it drape really nice, but I was warned up and down the internet that it would grow terribly huge and lose shape right away.  Also:  it is labeled aran weight, and it is nowhere near that chunky- it knit up DK.  So I knit it down 3 needle sizes for a very tight fabric, and the moment the heat from my head warmed it up during my victory lap (I always don whatever knitwear I just finish, at least for a couple hours when I finish) it started to relax and grow slouchy and loose and start to creep down my forehead and splay out where it hit the back of my neck, threatening to eventually suffocate me and perhaps even eat my brains.  

What to do?  I washed it and threw it in the dryer, tightening it up quite a lot, and with these puny Euro energy efficient driers, it was nowhere near enough heat or agitation to felt the fabric into a stuff, unyielding mass .  It's better now.  I would never normally do that- knitwear gets washed by hand in a bucket and dried flat in world.  I just recently started using the spin cycle on the dryer to wring it out to expedite the drying.  

But looksie, it fits perfect!  At least my head, which it is not intended for.  

The Butcher of Sheepy things

Like I said in a previous post, I somewhat lost my knitting mojo after then holidays.  Once I got all the gifties sent out to the four corners of the globe, I sat down and looked around and just couldn't find the inspiration to do diddly.

I dislike unfinished projects in general, which is why I was disgusted with myself for having a hat brim sitting on the shelf for more than a month.

A long stretch of simple knitting in the round was abandoned in favor of just not wanting to deal with it for 14 inches.  

I did chip away at a crochet blanket for a while:

The Babette, the best way I could think of to use up all the scraps of sock yarn that I've accumulated the past few years.  A memory of socks and shawls and sweaters, slowly being pieced together in a colorful spread of clown barf.  However...I now need to create more scraps as I'm running out of yarn for it.  

Part of this big stall was the fault of this jumper:

An incredibly warm men's Icelandic lopi sweater called Riddari, knit in the natural colors of sheep of the Birtish Isles: Black Wesh, moorit Shetland, white BFL, and steel gray Suffolk.  It was lovely to knit- the wool was rustic and had a lovely sheepy smell, and it was comforting and joyful to make.

Once I was done and blocked, I decided I didn't want it to be a pullover- a zipper install to let it be worn open would be a good idea since it was extraordinarily warm. So I crocheted steeks, slicked it from nave to throat, and basted in a lovely vintage brass zipper.

Hours later, I was in a mass of ripped seems and bits of thread.

No matter how carefully I install a zipper, no matter how many tutorials I read and follow step-by step, I can not get the stupid giant bulge out.

 Really?

I'm at a loss as to what to do- after picking it out and re-sewing it, trying to keep the fabric loose and the tension even, the bulges would not go away.

Should I try again, send it off to a pro to pic, or try to sew it back up and call it a pullover?

FO: More hats! A shawl! And another thing!

Three hats, in fact.

Even though I don't celebrate Xmas, I feel swept up in the spirit of the cold dank weather and whip out gifts to my non-knitter friends.  My stack of hats is slowly diminishing as I send them to the four corners of the earth in time for the Winter Solstice.  Which is still a month away!  I don't even know how the days are going to get any shorter, but apparently they will.  This is the furthest north I've spent a winter.  I feel like I'm atoning for enjoying summertime so much.  I'm actually having a really hard time waking up in the mornings, and one recent weekend, I managed to sleep until 10:30.  Seriously!  That's half my day, gone.  It just wasn't light enough outside for my body to convince itself that it was indeed morning, and nearly afternoon.

I made a Whale Watch Hat from New England Knits.

It's all scraps- mostly Knit Picks Pallet.  For the price, it's a really nice yarn, similar to Jaimison's spindrift in weight and hand.  I was thinking of making the Whales a bit darker, but I kind of like them in the lighter shade of blue- they look kind of abstract, and probably more acceptable that a grown-ass adult might pull this off.

Speaking of which...the trend of grown-ass people wearing spirit-animal hats...why?  Kitten ears and giant false eyes are cute on toddlers, a bit weird on adults who aren't on their way to support a sports team.  Enlighten me.

Last fall when I was in Dublin, I visited a cute knitting shop and nabbed a couple skeins of Studio Donegal Tweed merino.  They knit up perfectly into a set of hats- kind of a his-and-hers affair.  The same, but different enough to not nauseate casual observers if they happen to leave the house together wearing them:

A masculine cable hat called One Bourbon, whose recipient has a smaller head size than my beau:

The brim will actually fold up when it fits properly.

And a lovely lace hat called Magnolia:

Oh!  And here's a shawl:

I usually do a better job of photographing these beastly shawls, but it's been raining like crazy every morning this week, and I needed to get this in the mail.  So you get to see my interior windows.

It's the Cladonia Shawl by Kristen Kapur.  It's written to have stripes and a looped bind-off, which looks fantastic, but I thought it gave it a much different appearance to make it plain and solid.  The yarn I used is Brooklyn Tweed Loft, and it used every last inch of yarn.  In fact, I ran out the very last bit- I needed about 10 inches more.  Panic!  Freak out!  I tinked back a few more stitches and then, gasp, SPLIT THE PLIES.  So there's one edge that has slightly thinner yarn in the bind off, and it survived blocking like a champion.  Honestly though, I couldn't think of anything else to do in that situation.  

The yarn is not my favorite.  The stitch definition is a bit muddled, which can be used to nice effect here with just the small bit of lace.  The one thing that does irk me is that if you tink back at all, the yarn will sometimes just un-spin itself and you are left with a broken strand.  It's lofty and loosely spun, making it great for warmth and texture, but it doesn't hold up to multiple mistakes.  Not that I ever make them.

Finally:

One of my favorite blends to spin and knit would be Blue Face Leicester sheep wool blended with silk.  The BFL is a long, silky soft wool that has beautiful drape and lustre.  Add some silk with that and, oh, I become enraptured.  It begs you to hold it close.

While I loved the colors in this skein of Codex- gold and near-black- they pooled up terribly.  I tried and I tried to do anything with this- spirals, garter stitch, lace, broken rib- and I just couldn't get it to stop with the ugly pooling.  Disappointed, I was.  

Ah, wait.  I know how to crochet.  A quick search and I found something well within my abilities- the Chi-town Cowl.

That's not so bad, is it?

I made a moebius cowl.  Easy as pie, it used up almost the entire skein and only took a few hours.  It's soft and silky and if you have a small-ish head, you can loop it around twice comfortably.

 Now, to bring back the sun...I understand why the 21st December is such a celebratory affair.

FO: Plethora of Hats

A cold chill has swept the land.  After a bit of petered-out hurricane Gonzalo blew through England, it went from balmy and windy, to rainy and windy, to cold and windy in a 24 hour period.   Sweater weather!  Cuddly hats and snugly scarfs and indulging in all sorts of edibles that you've been turning your nose up all summer.  Sweet potatoes and soups and sweet potato soup, squash and crispy sweet apples and I've not turned down any offers of hot chocolate.

I've been plugging away on hats.  It's become a bit of a joke in my knit circle: another week, another hat.  And it's true, I've been knocking out about one a week.  These aren't difficult patterns, and most of them are worsted-weight, so it only takes me a few hours a piece.  

As always, fantastic gifts.  All of these are being flung to the four corners of the earth.

First up: 

The Botanic Hat, a clever little Stephen West Beanie.  It's completely reversible, and looks remarkably different when you give it a flip.

See?  The best thing about this is that when I finished, I weighed the leftover skeins and realized I had enough for a mirror-image:

The pair of hats used exactly two skeins of Rowan Lima, an alpaca yarn that makes me rethink alpaca yarn.  It's velevety.  Instead of being twisted into plies, it is chained, so it makes for less drapey structure-less fabric as it seems to behave much more like wool.  It's not bad at all..

Another creating- the Windsor Hat.  It's a free pattern on the Rowan site and I loved how feminine and girly it was (and I'm not a girly girl by any means).  The pattern was a huge pain in the ass though- it was written Rowan-style to be knitted flat, which is as complicated as you could possibly get.  Still- it is slouchy and warm and after a glance at the pattern, I was able to improvise and knit it in the round, and all was right in the world once again.

The yarn was an odd skein of Creative Worsted, a wool/mohair blend, and the pink was leftovers of Swans Island worsted Merino from my Wayfarer scarf.  

This bad boy is going to a friend of mine who just moved from a balmy climate to a cold one:

It's the Greenery hat.  I made an extra-thick brim so it can be worn as a big slouch or doubled over the ears (which hides the cabling a bit, eh?).  The yarn?  Ah, the yarn.  A few skeins of wool yarn I picked up at Monoprix in Paris out of pure curiosity.  While I miss Monoprix badly (like Target in the US, they had great chic clothes) this yarn was not the best.  It was really dense- this hat is heavy!- and had a weird acrylic-like squeak even though it was pure wool.  It's not terribly scratchy though, and I think it will keep a head very warm.

Finally:

I used all the scraps that haunt the flat from the ghosts of hats past and made a Kex hat, another  reversible beanie from Stephen West.  I've been making a ton of his patterns lately...I just find they are brilliantly unisex and uniquely constructed.  

I have some more projects to flaunt, but some are gifts and need to be gifted first, but I'm enjoying this sudden drop of temperature to inspire me to cover everyone I know in wool.  

FO: Some catchup in the waning afternoon light

Hello again!   Here I am, I'm back in London.  I have a lot to talk about, and sometimes I have a hard time organizing my thoughts, so forgive me if I'm all over the place in the coming weeks.  Life has not been boring, and I foresee it not being dullsvile any time soon.

So, I made a bunch of stuff.  I thought I should post about it, if only to make me feel better about sending them into the ether.

First up was a crazy impulse knit.  I saw a sample knitted up at John Lewis, saw the yarn deeply discounted in a bin next to the sample, and a few days later I had created this:

It's called the Rhea top, and it's too big!  Yargh.  Bulky yarn (Rowan All Seasons Chunky, a cotton/poly blend) and an open-work pattern meant it was really hard to get gauge and guess how much ease I needed.  In the end, it was way too much.  I'm going to frog this back and re-knit it in a smaller size on smaller needles because I think that this could very easily become an oft-worn summer favorite if it fits right.  It's kind of 80's in the styling, and the cable drop stitches and texture, and I just want to wear this while walking the boardwalk.  I will try again.  

See that?  That's the Scottish Highlands right there, and we made it out the other side alive.  Also, a Windschief hat.

Stephen West makes such great unfussy patterns.  He's been my go-to for hat patterns lately- I tend to make a stockpile of them with no one particularly in mind, and then give them lavishly once the right people appear.  This one is a simple slip-stitch pattern that gracefully arcs around a series of decreases and pared increases, giving it an interesting asymmetrical swirl.

I used a skein of Madeline Tosh dk in "Granite".  It's luxuriously soft merino, and although Tosh is known for doing bright, beautiful colors better than anyone, I loved the tones in the greys on this.  It's superwash, so it's been a good hiking hat, with no fading or color bleeding after multiple washes.  


I spent the summer plugging away on this:

It's the Lace Saddle Tee, heavily modified.  The original pattern just had lace on the sleeves, but I went whole-hog and echoed the lace pattern up the side seams.

I love the way it looks, but again: it's too big!  It fits kind of weird- the front looks okay, but there is all this extra fabric in the back.  I really don't even know how to correct that in the knitting process.  It fits my hips and waist just fine, and I did have some shaping thrown in, but somehow I created too much fabric in the back.

I'm still wearing it though.  I used some very precious Rowan Calmer- a cotton/poly blend that behaves more like wool than unyielding cotton, and this continues to be my favorite non-wool yarn to work with.  The sunshiny lemony yellow makes me happy.

This was also my first attempt at saddle shoulders, which were fun to make but hard to explain.  It took a few tries to get it right, but I like the way they fit.

Finally, this.  I made Groot.

I'm not a fan of the huge amount of comic-book movies that come out every summer.  I didn't grow up on comics.  I spent the first half of the "Avengers" movie not knowing that Bruce Banner was the Hulk, and was probably the only one surprised when Bruce got angry and made the transformation.  Pop culture princess I am not.  

However, I did get dragged into Guardians of the Galaxy this summer, and despite being very confused about back story and bad guys, it was a fun show.  There was a tree named Groot who ended up being the hero of the day, and he dances to the Jackson 5 (as we all should), and when I saw someone had written a pattern to make your very own Groot, I nerded out and got to work.  Finally, a use for that super scratchy yarn from Greenland that I bought in Copenhagen that no one would ever be able to touch without cringing and possibly crying from the pain of it all.  He worked up quite fast, and I had to buy safety eyes and pipe cleaners, and then re purposed a pot  from Ikea that had some rosemary in it that didn't quite make it through multiple periods of neglect.  I had opened up a throw pillow and used some of the stuffing in that instead of buying a bag of polyfill, and then sewed the pillow back up and no one is the wiser that it's missing a bit of umph.  Finally, when it came time to plant him, his giant head flopped over drunkenly.  So I went into the kitchen and got a metal BBQ skewer, put the knob end well down into the gravel, and then heartlessly impaled my creation.  He now stands quite upright.  That smile is fixed.  He's dying on the inside.

Want to make one?  You should, because I'm not going to make another one even though I've gotten dozens of "I want one!" requests.  It's easy; I barely know how to crochet and it only took a few hours.  Here's the instructions on Twinkle Chan's blog.

I've made a few more things, but haven't photographed them yet.  Soon.  I think.

But, cheers to all that.  I find that I miss sitting down to write, and I'm working on getting some post about our hikes and travels up soon enough.  After a cold and dreary August, September was fantastic weather and I took advantage fully.

FO: Habitat hat

Another day, another hat.

This one will be gifted to the aforementioned friend.  He gets a cable hat, but not the orange one.  That one is mine.  He gets this one instead:

It's the Habitat beanie, another elegantly cabled and wearable Brooklyn Tweed pattern.  I think this one is a bit more masculine looking and better suited for a guy anyway.  Not that I want to apply gender stereotypes to knitwear and colors.  This is actually 100% unisex.

Another skein of Juno Fibre Arts gone.  In a panic, I sent an email to the dyer as I can't find any more of the BFL on her website or etsy shop.  This is my new favorite yarn.

FO: Bray cap

I started out with good intentions.  Really, I did.

All of the yarn that I bought at Unwind Brighton was all meant to be knitted up and gifted to friends and family.  I got a lot of guy-colors and neutrals because of it.

I started this hat thinking it would be a gift for a guy friend of ours.  I had made his wife a pair of socks after she did all of the cleaning up after Thanksgiving dinner but haven't made him a thing despite his freshly-shorn head.

I cast on.  I started knitting.

I fell in love.

It's mine now.

Besides, it is far too slouchy for a guy.  Right?  Right?

I try not to be a selfish knitter.  I mean, I have plenty of hats.  I don't need another one.  And yet...there was something about this.  The cables, the lace, the slouch, the soft silky yarn.  I'm not an orange person at all, but suddenly this speaks to me.

The yarn is Juno Fibre Arts Buffy BFL in "Campfire".  I love it.  I want more.  For myself, for everyone I know.  The world needs more things knitted from this yarn.

The pattern is Bray Cap by Jared Flood.  It's not complicated at all, but it is something I had to sit down and concentrate on.  I still love almost all the Brooklyn Tweed patterns, but he designs so damn many I can't keep up.

FO: A couple of hats....

I think I might have expressed this before, but I do love making hats.

They take very little time.  I can usually crank one out in four hours or so, unless it is with very skinny yarn or very complicated.  That's about a week's worth of commuting time, or some idle tv time in the evenings.  Speaking of which, 2007 called and I'm really into the Danish show "The Killing" right now, and it's NOT JUST BECAUSE OF THE AWESOME KNITWEAR.  Why am I watching a dark, wintry, Danish crime drama in high summer?  I can't answer that, but the UK Netflix doesn't get nearly as many films as the US counterpart, and it's mostly loaded with British sitcoms, which, like almost all sitcoms, I find insufferable.    

Anyway, hats make fantastic gifts.  Everyone could use one.  Or eight.  I made these both as gifts.  They also take up odd skeins of yarn- a ball leftover from a sweater, some scraps from your scrap bin, a skein that you impulsively bought with no real project in mind for but you just had to try it.  

First up is the Nantes hat from Interweave Knits Winter 2011.  

It's got the perfect amount of cables and lace, making a lovely cathedral-like pattern.  I loved this pattern and will be making it again in the future.

I made mine slouchy, but you could go down a needle size and make a beanie and it would work as well.  I do love slouchy over-sized hats.  I tend to not wear hats with the brims straight across my forehead, but I rather like to push them back so they cover my ears.

The yarn is Rowan Pure Wool Aran, a soft superwash wool.  It comes in 186 yard balls, and I shortened the pattern by three rows so I would have enough yarn to finish it nicely.

Next up is the Nottingham hat.  I used a skein of Quince and Co Osprey leftover from my Aidez cardigan that I made last winter.  The color is pea-green, which, honestly, is a tough color to pull off this close to your face.

It's slouchy as well.  Almost rasta-like, but I did want to use up every last bit of wool.  The lace pattern makes nice diagonals, it was simple and it looks fantastically hip if you can pull off this color green.

These will both be gifted eventually.  The right person, the right season.  No one I know is allowed to be cold.