Play day

Tags

fair isle, FO, Happy go Knitty, Knitsch, Knitting, New Zealand yarn, socks, WIP

Today, for the first time in ages, I woke up without the weight of a deadline hanging over my head.  It felt so good.

I decided that with some free time on a rainy day, this would be a good opportunity to make further investigations into some projects that I’ve been eyeing recently.

But first, let me show you this!

They are done!  I love them so much.  They’re at once very “Alice in Wonderland” and “Wicked Witch of the West” don’t you think? I’m looking forward to refreshing my stocks of Happy-go-knitty next Saturday at the Wellington Underground annual “Wonders of Wool” market.  More, pretty stripy socks coming my way!  Funny how we knitters talk about yarn in terms of a finished project.

Also, another happiness-making thing happened yesterday:

Seven glorious hanks of Knitsch Milky Way, for the knitting of the Southern Companion were ready for my pick-up!

At Holland Road Yarn Company, Tash was busy making final preparations for her stall at this weekend’s Creative Fibre Festival.  Oh my.  Such hanks of gloriousness I saw, to set the heart aflutter!  I hope there’s still some left when I turn up…

Now to what I did today.  This is what one’s living room ends up looking like in the middle of a creative frenzy:

What was this all about you ask?  I’ve been eyeing the below interesting cardigan all week:

It’s called Conifer  (designed by Rosee Woodland), and it’s in Issue 54 of The Knitter.

Several features attracted me to it:  the knitted-on fingerless gloves (very handy to keep those winds out of one’s sleeves) and the fact that it’s knitted in reverse stocking stitch.  The certain someone I’m knitting it for likes to wear her sweaters inside out because she prefers the smooth feeling of the stocking stitch instead of the purl bumps.  This would be perfect!  The final feature I liked was the unusual reverse fair isle.  I’ve been thinking about using reverse fair isle in a pattern, and this looked like a good opportunity to try it out.

I also had in mind a certain person’s comment about knits in the English town she lives in “Oh, fair isle is so common, everyone wears it, it’s not special to me any more.”  Perhaps an unusual take on fair isle might be good?

I thought that Knitsch would make a perfect medium for it, given it’s meant to be for a certain girl who dislikes itch.  So, diving into my precious hoard of Knitsch, I did a bit of a stocktake of possibilities:

Something colourful for the yoke perhaps?

However, as I was winding the balls, it occurred to me that while all those colours looked oh-so-pretty together, they might seem cartoonish all in one garment.

I pared it down to pretty purple shades with a touch of gold:

I’m not sure about that gold, but the purples looked good.  The only downside was that when I measured the swatch, the gauge was far too small.  Bother and horrors.  That swatch was a real brain-teaser to knit too!  Reverse fair isle is tricky until you figure out that you can’t knit it like normal fair isle!!

I sat there feeling annoyed.  Knitsch was very much what I wanted to use.  I didn’t really fancy knitting more swatches until I found a yarn that matched.  Besides, I don’t have any other yarn in my stash with that colour range.  Why didn’t it match?  They were both 4 ply after all!?  They felt the same thickness in the hand.  I decided that I would see how many wraps per inch the J&S was… 15 per inch.  Then I wrapped the Knitsch, I found that it’s more like 20 wraps per inch!  Ah.  It made sense now.  I should probably have done that first.  Doh.

I wondered how Zealana Kiwi Fingering would work out.  She likes that yarn too.  I wrapped it, and found that it is exactly 15 wraps per inch!  I was surprised, because Kiwi feels a lot thicker.  (J&S is springier and lighter, but the width of the strand is the same).  So… although I don’t have a large colour range in that yarn, I decided to do one more swatch to see if really was the right match:

I am pleased to say that it gives the exact gauge that I need for this pattern.

My concentration petered out in the final row and I messed up the swatch.  The young boy got bored and started to watch a video.  And with the invasion of irritating noise into the ears came the advent of a headache and the loss of all ability to concentrate.  I need a nice, quiet, cosy little cabin at the end of the garden in which to knit, far from loud, concentration-shattering noises…

So now I need to go shopping for colours. But I guess I should consult with a certain girl first to see what she’d like?  :-)

Dream come true

Tags

BFL, Happy go Knitty, Knitting, sock yarn, socks

Do you remember a while ago I told you about a dream I had?

Well, I decided to make a ‘pretty please’ request to the lovely Helene Dehmer of Happy-go-knitty, and look what I got in the mail this week…

Self-striping purple and green yarn.  It’s exactly the colour of the Agapanthus flower!  And pretty much the exact colour of my dream!!!

Of course, I couldn’t wait to try out my (literally) dream yarn:

It difficult to see in this photo, but the hand-dyed colouring gives the yarn an almost “coloured-in” look, as if one had taken a colouring pencil to paper and coloured in a picture of yarn, and then it magically came off the paper and became real yarn in your hands!  It adds even more to the unreal sensation of holding my dream in my hands..

Thank you so much Helene!  It’s kind of surreal to hold a dream… it will be even more amazing to wear it!

I heart Autumn

Tags

Autumn, inspiration, Knitting, nature, New Zealand, seasons

It’s not officially Autumn yet.  But Mother Nature has already declared it. 

We went for a drive in the country yesterday.  We noticed that the leaves on the trees are already beginning to yellow.

The sun is not quite as harsh as it has been, although it’s still very warm.  Don’t these Calendula look so much like miniature story book suns?  I see pretty sock yarn personally…

The roses are fading, and the days are becoming less long, the light just that little bit less intense.

It’s still a few weeks away before the crisp mornings that I so love.
In the meantime, the cicadas are lustily singing Summer’s swan song, leaving me looking forward to happy sweater wearing time and frosty mornings bright!

I sense a change, and that makes me feel happy.

I thought I’d share a few photos from the last week or so.

Hope you are having a good week.

The best gift ever

Tags

inspiration, Knitting, vintage

This Christmas, I received a surprise, and treasured gift from my aunt.  She’s been doing some sorting out of her stuff, and came across some knitting books.  As she no longer knits (I wish she did), she decided to gift them to me.

What a treasure!  Patricia Roberts was at the forefront of the knitting revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The early Patricia Roberts books inspired many of the UK hand-knitters of the early 1980s to take up their needles – including Kaffe Fassett it seems!  This book was printed in 1983.

If you’d like to know more about Patricia, I came across an interesting, short interview with her here and another more recent one here.  My aunt made the comment that she loved how her work was so textural, and indeed, she’s known as the pioneer of 3D knitting, using bobbles and other amazing shapes that stand out in relief to the knitting.

I’m amazed at the detail in her patterns.  Intarsia, cables, various stitch patterns, slipped stitches and bobbles, often all in the same design… have a look at this:

How about this one:

I feel a little woozy just looking at it… how long would it take you to knit that!?

Last one:

Although her designs take my breath away and make my head spin, I’m not quite sure I’d actually want to knit any of it.  I’m obviously a boring knitter.  There’s definitely a sense of adventure in her knitting that we don’t see much of these days.  I think the world has become a sadder place after the horrific acts of terrorism and the unhealthy economic conditions that we’re still experiencing, and to me, this is being reflected in our clothing and lifestyle choices.

On a lighter note, look up Patricia Roberts on Ravelry, and see what some very talented knitters have done with her designs.  There are some very beautiful examples, and it’s made me decide that I’ve perhaps been too hasty in deciding not to knit one of her patterns.

The second book that my aunt gifted me is an earlier book (1972) and of a more practical nature.

I definitely want to knit some of these:

If you take away the middle slit of the first design, and replace it with a cable down the middle, I think it would look very modern.  The second design is classic.

I’m desperate to knit this one:

All I need to do is make it long-sleeved and length the torso, and it will be perfect!  Once I get through with the design for the cowl (nearly done on the 3rd sample, so it won’t be long now), this will be my reward knit.

It’s quite interesting what people crocheted back then.

The two below are also classic designs.  I think the ribbed polo neck (with less polo) will be the design I knit with that very nice black and white marled alpaca.

Many thanks to my generous aunt for these beautiful books.  They’ve been giving me many hours of happy reading and dreaming as I rifle through my stash looking for suitable yarns to match to these designs!