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: Live Oak Shawlette

Hey, would ya look at this:



Wow.  There was a whole grove of these trees blossoming in Regent's Park.  It was lovely.  It's February, I'm still in my winter coat, but it's warm enough here for some confused trees to flash some obscene shade of pink.





For serious, guys.  It's pretty much springtime if you squint.

I'm getting my life together here and meeting some fab people.  Meanwhile, I've finally got a new-ish laptop to work with and I'm getting caught up on the backlog of pictures I've taken over the past six months or so.  So, I present to you this lacy little number that I made last fall, took pictures of on the banks of the Seine one sunny day, gifted and forgot all about.





It's the Live Oak Shawlette by Romi Hill.  It's a gorgeous half-circle shawl.

My only real regret was not to be able to block it out properly.  You'd need about 740 pins, but it would make it oh-so lovely.  I only had about 8 pins and some scrap yarn, so the edge isn't as lovely as it possibly could be.




I did get a bit cocky with my yardage and did another lace repeat, and had to find a contrasting color to finish it off.  I actually kind of like it with the contrasting stripe.  The yarn is Madelinetosh Merino Light in "Thoreau" and the contrast is "Rosewood".



It's totally wearable and sweet, and I gifted it to a chic newly-minted Parisian friend.

FO: Some Knitwear Catch Up

Baby, it's cold outside!  As we use our semi-frozen fingers to fumble with awkward buttons and zippers and walk through toxic clouds of other people's coughs, try to remember the joys of winter.  The sledding and the hot chocolates and what not.  If you don't have someone making you lots of knitwear right now, you need to start making more friends who are crafty.  There is nothing sadder to me than someone under-dressed in winter.  Almost everything I knit now gets gifted, as I am literally drowning in it.  I don't need another scarf, another pair of socks, another mitten, another hat.  I have.  So.  many.  Sweaters, I will still make and make and make for myself as I tend to get bored with my wardrobe easily.  Everything else, bah.  Go, I send you to the four corners of the earth to keep someone else warm.

I figured I would finally get around to blogging about some knits I've finished in the past, oh, five months or so.  Most of them were gifts and kind of secret, but the fits of gift-giving is well behind us now and I can safely reveal things in a public forum.  Also, as I was boxing up and packing and moving out of Paris, everything that hadn't been gifted got donated to the big charity bin down the road, which later I saw not-homeless people ingeniously fishing clothes out of using hooks and wedges.  Sigh.

First up:  the Xenocryst



This went to a warm-climate heritage friend in a cold land.  He appreciates.  It's got this really interesting textured wee cables, and a picot edging that I didn't find too emasculating.


Another ultra-cute owlet hat was crocheted for a new baby:



Good old Cascade 220 and all the scraps it makes.

This was one of my favorite sweaters to make:



It's the Armas.  It's a really brilliant, fun masculine design.  I really thought I could rock it as well, perhaps with a slightly more feminine color so I don't look like I'm a viking warrior out to pillage.





The cables were just so organic and fun to make.  I did fix the collar since I took these pictures though.  I modified it from the original and it didn't quite lay the way I wanted it to as a shawl collar, so it is now a crewneck.

The yarn is Queensland Kathmandu Aran, a tweedy blend of Merino, silk and cashmere.  It's very soft, but a rustically spun 2-ply that I was picking bits of hay stems out of the whole sweater.



This was an easy garter stitch project called the Pinch Hat from Knitscene.  You make a tapered rectangle, then seam it together and pull your stitches tight to pucker the fabric.  I ended up putting a line of tiny rose-bud buttons down the seam, and I gave this to a friend whom it suited perfectly.



The yarn is Madeline Tosh Merino Chunky, a lovely squishy yarn to fall in love with, so I kept on going with it:



A bandana cowl from Purl Soho, which is really simple and it made for a great gift.  I really fell in love with cowls this year, especially since I did so much backpacking.  Having a pack, a coat, and a cross-body bag meant that if I was wearing a scarf, I was usually tangled in something and it made for awkward moments of choking myself while getting on and off trains and planes and ferrys and trying to sit down for a bit to eat.  Cowls are useful in these situations.  Using short rows, you make a big bib like triangle, which fits as a stopgap down the front of most coats.

Here's another chunky cowl that I would make again:



The Burberry-inspired cowl. It's got these big, lovely cables that make it very warm.  Mine is a bit small as I only had the one skein, but this would work nicely a bit bigger, or really huge as an infinity scarf, which I am seeing everywhere now.

Another manly sweater using Kathmandu Aran:



This one was for my grandfather, whom I had never made a sweater for (!?).  It's the Shawl collared sweater by Martin Storey, and it's easy as 3.14.  It's from a book Rowan published that I've had for years, but I was always hesitant to make anything from it again since Rowan puts a whopping 8 inches of ease in their men's sweaters, which just seems like too much to me.  This worked out- I made the smallest size, and I knit it in the round so I took away 8 stitches total from the body to make up for the fact that I didn't need a seam allowance.

Yet another hat, for a friend:



The Quantoid.  It's very warm, double-thick with an interesting rib pattern that you strand.  Cascade 220 FOREVER!



I crocheted this lovely scarf last summer:



The Boteh.  It's lovely, lacy leafy and the best shade or red, "Tart" in Tosh Merino light.  I need to get better pictures of it eventually.  Oh, and PS, I can crochet now.  It took me ages to get around to learning, and then I'd forget as soon as I taught myself, but I found this project and decided to teach myself to make it because I thought it was pretty, and that was the way to go.  It's easy, and if you find something you like, between you tube videos and ravelry, you can probably figure most things out.

A pair of rather awesome socks:



The aptly-named Porthos socks.  It's a fairly mindless rib pattern and it makes for a good guy-sock.  Or a bad-guy sock, if you must.  The yarn is tres vibrant- Sanguine Gryphon bugga in "Cuban Cockroach".

A twinned pair of Merino Chunky hats for a his-and-her gift:





Above is the "Giftie Slouchie Beanie" for her, and the "Chunkieanie" for him.  They are both the same color purple, but the more masculine of the two is much more saturated with dye and appears to be purple-black at times (it photographed a bit lighter than it is in real life).  I thought that was a nice touch.

A pair of Pyroclastic Socks from knitty.com:



I kind of screwed up the lace pattern, but it ended up working for me, so they look different from the originals.  I loved the unusual arch and gusset shaping, although it took me a while to figure out what exactly was going on in the pattern once the heel was turned.  These went to a friend with perpetual cold feet and a drafty old Parisian apartment.  The yarn is Plucky Knitter superwash fingering merino.

A pattern I chose to show off some really amazing yarn:



The Garden Grove hat in the Verdant Gryphon Codex in the "Beowolf"  colorway.  The yarn is silk and BFL wool, and it has a lovely sheen to it that just shows color so nicely.  I kept this hat.  I loved it so.

I actually have a few more things lying around needing to be photographed, and right now I'm putting a sweater in time-out after I realized that I made two left fronts to the cardigan.  Sigh.  But I'm busy doing all sorts of other good stuff that I will get around to telling you about very soon.   Cheers!

FO: Honey Cowl

Meow.

Ages ago, I fell in love with a skein of yarn. It's called "Kitten" from Tess Designer Yarns up in Portland. Cashmere Silk blends are easy to fall in love with. Ethereally soft, shiny and slinky with a gentle bloom, with lovely hand-dyed colors. I couldn't justify a splurge and I had to walk away just after petting until "friends" stepped in and dragged me away with my heels firmly digging up furrows of mud behind me.

So when a friend sent me a special care package with a skein of Kitten, I somehow managed to swoon and squeal with delight at the exact same moment. Epic.

What to do with this 325 yards of pure love and joy and happiness?

A honey cowl!

I felt that with yarn this special needs to be kept close, with no risk of it sliding off your neck to be tromped upon on the Metro, or forgotten draped across the back of a seat at the movie theater. A cowl with a simple stitch pattern was called for: it won't go anywhere.

I cast on 220 stitches and knit till the yarn was gone. It's lovely. It reminds me of said friend everywhere and anywhere I take it. It can be worn as one giant loop, or doubled up when it's particularly dreary out for a bit more warmth.

I will wear it always.