Eleven Shades of Red...

Another hat from Hats completed! I've skipped past the Tam at the moment, because I have to do some final touches to that before it's ready. Instead I moved on to a chunky knit hat; the reason being, a long time ago now I bought a couple of boxes of 'job lot wool' from eBay, thinking it a bargain at £40. The pictures showed many cones of machine-knit wool. Many, many cones.  The description was a little vague, but I took a punt anyway. Two huge boxes arrived - good stuff. Except that it wasn't exactly good stuff; it was 1ply and 2ply wool that looked like it had been stored in a shed for years. Nevertheless, it was workable, just thin. Very, very thin. Useless on my knitting machine and a pain to knit with. I tried out lace knitting without much success (or patience), and then I started to combine cones to make 3ply and 4ply yarn. That seemed to work a bit better. I have an unfinished pink top I'll show at some point from my first combining experiment.

Now, however, I'm a bit sick of having two huge crates of wool in my bedroom and really want to get rid of the stuff! So a couple of nights ago I had the brainwave of joining up every possible cone of the same or similar colour together to make a chunkier yarn - and it worked! It's fiddly and impractical, but it worked. I combined all the different shades of red into an interesting, not too bright tone and I now have a 'Ribbons and Bow' hat to add to the ever-growing collection... :)

Only fifty more shades to use up!

Hats all...

I never really got around to telling about some of my Christmas gifts from last year, but as I've been using one of them this weekend, now seems like a good time to correct that.

My mother bought me an unexpected book: Hats (Cozy) by GMC Editors. I hadn't asked for it, but after a flick through I thought it looked alright. I like hats; their relatively quick to knit. In fact, there are some really nice hats in this book, and now that I've branched a little into crochet, none of them are totally off limits. 30 hat patterns, to be precise. I had thought I might try and knit a hat a month. That hasn't happened, unsurprisingly. But, shortly after Christmas, I began my attempts, starting with a beaded blue one called 'Nocturne', which is basically a dark blue beanie with knitted bobbles and bead work. I didn't have quite the same amount of pretty beads as the original suggests (despite thoroughly raiding my old, broken jewellery stash), so I stuck to a few simple silver-ish beads from a broken costume necklace. It just about works:













I also tried, with my limited crochet knowledge, the 'Fur Fun' hat, which, after several attempts at working out exactly what was going on, I've had to abandon for two reasons: (1) ran out of suitable wool; (2) it just looks like a shower cap! Where would I go that I would want to wear a shower cap outside the bathroom?? However, I do intend to retry the pattern another time in a different colour, as I suspect it's the pale blue which really doesn't help its general appearance.

I am, however, particularly proud of my attempt at the 'Trilby', even if I have chosen to make it in dark pink, rather than the more acceptable grey. It's made with chunky wool and super warm, which is great for these British summers!!

I definitely recommend the book if you're a hat or quick knits fan - and it's fairly cheap too, if bought from the right places. I'm now on to the 'Fair Isle tam', although I'm cheating a lot by ignoring the Fair Isle aspect. I'll show you what I mean when it's done...

Jaeger Monster

It's been a miserable June half term holiday - may as well be October at the moment! Since the Jubilee events ended, I haven't really felt inspired to do anything. But, as it has been on my to-do list for... ever, I did pick up my knitting commission again, to give it another try. I had put it down after I dropped a stitch in the middle of one part of the base pattern, in an impossible position to just pick it back up again. So I diligently unpicked to the amber border and started all over again (version 3.5). It's a monster, this knit, and no matter how far I manage to get with it (still only on the first sleeve!!), I never feel anything but disappointed at the quality. If I were only knitting this for me, I'd feel satisfied enough that I was making progress at least, but I really don't think this is good enough to give to someone else. But the aim is to finish the sleeve and show it to the lady at work to let her decide if it's really ever possible to complete this kit...

2012

Knitting continues even while blogging doesn't... It's been so long, Blogger has changed its whole set-up, completely confusing me, and I am having to work out what I haven't blogged about...

Christmas 2011:

I had a lot of fun making all my Christmas tree baubles, and I did finish off the Star Wars scarf for my brother-in-law, although I can't currently find where I saved the pictures of that, so I'll have to add those another time.














2012: After the apparent success of my first ever knitting commission (me vs the moths), I was asked by another woman at work to attempt a knitting kit which she'd been unable to complete for many years. I can safely say I may have been a little too cocky in saying yes.
I'm currently struggling no end with this one. It's a Jaeger cardigan with a fruits and flowers pattern around the base of the back, front and sleeves. The problem is not necessarily the pattern - I can follow charts without too many issues - it's the fact that, not only am I dealing with more than a dozen different coloured yarns, but they're also different plys! Some of the colours are only supplied in small amounts, so although, now on my third attempt of knitting this up (the pictures are of my second attempt!), I am doubling the yarn over to try and make the knit more even, I'm concerned I may end up running out of yarn long before the cardigan is finished! Luckily, the lovely woman who asked me to complete this is completely empathetic of the problems - she gave up because she found it too difficult to concentrate on the pattern, so she doesn't mind if I give up; she actually asked around some professional knitters, none of whom would touch it! My current attempt is a backward knit - I'm starting at the top of a sleeve at the moment, in order to work down to the more complicated pattern at the base, just to try and make myself feel a little more successful! I was doing really well until I dropped a stitch in the middle of a pattern and had to put it away before I cried... I am determined though, I have to at least finish the one sleeve to see if I can do it. I've had it since the start of the year though, so I'm still not wholly convinced...


A couple of things I have been able to complete just recently though are linked to some recent family news: at my birthday meal, my sister told me she is going to have a baby - I'm going to be an Aunty! A perfect excuse to use up all those odd balls of wall and 2ply mistakes I've acquired over the past few years! So far, I've knitted a hat and booties set in pale blue (it's a bit difficult to knit too much yet, as we don't know the sex), and a baby pouch, which I'm particularly proud of and am just waiting for some buttons to arrive in order to complete it... :)

Moth holes and Christmas balls...

Having discovered I was a knitter, one of my colleagues asked me to help restore a jumper of him, with particular sentimental value. He told me it had very large moth holes. I assumed he was exaggerating a bit and that it would be easy enough to repair...


That's just a part of the holes...

Anyway, I set to, back patching behind the larger, wider holes as it was the only way I could reconnect the tatters. Unfortunately, I didn't have an exact colour match, and my trip to the local wool shops wasn't anymore successful. Whether by design or wear and tear, the colour was most definitely a faded version of itself. So I combined a grey DK with a royal blue 2 ply to get the closest match I could. My first successful attempt at combining colours to create a new one (I got the idea from the Tanya Alpert book). Unfortunately, one hole fell in the middle of a colour strip that I couldn't match with anything, so I had to re-knit an entire strip and sew it over two areas to hide this.

My colleague repeatedly insisted that he was not worried about the final outcome and, although I'm happier with it than I expected it to be, I'm still not sure this is a good enough patch job. But I'm going to show it to him tomorrow to see what he thinks...


This weekend, I have mostly been infusing my old, battered Christmas baubles with new life by knitting each of them a kitsch 'Christmas jumper' to use up some of my scrap yarn...

To do list: update blog...

It isn't that I haven't been knitting since July. It's purely that I haven't kept up with the blogging. Until there's an 'app for that', I probably won't either...

Still, while I'm here, a few items that have been made recently:

When my Nan recently fell ill, I decided to make her a scarf out of the remaining bright pink wool she'd given me (see jumper below) to cheer her up. And I used my newly-learned skill of double crochet! If I could just start to understand the crochet patterns I like, I might be able to use this skill for more than straight lines one day... I used a pattern for a ruffle scarf from Lion Brand, which came out rather well. So well, in fact, that my mum asked for one too, so I've made her exactly the same thing for her birthday.

My friend Sandy is having a birthday party at a pretty expensive restaurant in London, so I have to confess, what with the thought of all the money I'm going to have to spend and the fact that I'm not really sure what she might want as a gift, I decided to make her something. Sandy's a photographer, and one of her most popular photos is of a sea turtle, hence the obvious choice:


Mind you, he's so cute, I'm tempted to keep him... No surprises there...!!

I had a job finding an actual sea turtle pattern, but I eventually used this one and adapted the colouring.

I'm sitting on about six unfinished projects, which I won't bore you with, and I've finished the first side of my brother-in-law's Christmas scarf (well, it was supposed to be his birthday present in October, but it's still in need of a 'back' to cover up all the loose threads...). I will try and update again soon... :)

Finally, I can tick this off the To-Do list...!

Puce it all up

This one has taken absolutely ages. Admittedly, I had other more interesting events happening in the meantime, like chatting up Strange men and finishing college for the year. And also the fact that I could not make head nor tail - or rather sleeve nor neckline - of the god-awful knitting instructions. When I finally almost worked it out, it then took more than 30 minutes to do a RS-WS round. I've watched a lot of episodes of Waiting for God on YouTube of late - in fact, after 20 of these rounds, I'm now up to Series 5 (including 2 Christmas specials!)! But I suppose, in the end, at least there is an end to it:



And, on the plus side, it does fit. Although I do resent having to knit the larger size with considerably more stitches these days. I think I finally understand why the fashion industry really uses stick women for models - not because they look tall and elegant in anything, but because they use up far less material and are therefore quicker to dress!!

So, after just over two months, I've used up most of the pink wool my Nan gave me for my birthday. I visited her this week. She gave me some peach wool... I know. Try finding something you can knit in peach...