Where are my Priorities?!

Okay, I’ll admit it…I’ve added about 3 rows to my scarf in about as many weeks. What kind of world are we living in where such woolly pursuits are put to the bottom of the ‘to do’ list? How have I let this happen?!

Several things have taken priority over knitting delights (and more importantly, writing about knitting delights) so far this past week.

My evenings have been cruelly snatched by the following:

1. Trying to make a child-trashed flat look presentable enough for someone to want to buy it. Tricky, as can only be done whilst the munchkins are asleep, and yet hard work all unravelled once they are awake. A futile pursuit.

One must work very quickly and with purpose so that the de-cluttering and painting is done faster than the munchkins can un-do it.

So far, walls have been freshly painted. So far, walls have been ruined by the paint coming off a blue toy as said toy was carefully smashed up against my freshly painted wall – up an entire flight of stairs. Grrrrr.

De-cluttering is more of a success. The plan is to re-home so much stuff that we can save on a removals van. I plan for all of our my husband’s possessions to be stacked in the wheely bin outside our house taken to charity.

2. The over-night stay of Mr LouBug. It was both wrong and unfeasible to start knitting whilst Mr LouBug was perched in my sitting room. Wrong, because I felt he deserved a break from the yarn-crazy world of living with my sister. Unfeasible, because I had a large glass of wine in my hand. Thanks for the bottle of vino, Mr LouBug.

3. School disco. Yes, you read correctly. I was at a school disco one evening. Not like a school reunion, but an actual infant school disco. Yes, it was as bad as it sounds.

The sensory overload I was subjected to with over a hundred hyped-up under 10s, thumping disco music and rancid wine can only be un-done with about a week in one of those isolation tanks. Perhaps with someone gently stroking my hand, administering soothing, milky drinks.

4. Dragon Boat Racing. No I haven’t made that one up. I did actually spend (part of) a day racing in a boat, a bit like a giant canoe, with a dragon head and tail.

Excellent fun, and excellent for raising charitable funds, but not very helpful on the old knitting-up-a-storm-and-blogging-about-it front.

The conclusion to all of this, is that even if there doesn’t appear to be much time, it is still worth just pottering along with one row here and there. They all add up in the end. Just ask LouBug. She’s managed to knit whole pairs of socks in her few spare lunch hour minutes.

KnitWit

Little bit of Lace

Summer is a funny time for knitters. Christmas knits are starting to happen, but the will and want for summer knits is still burning bright. Those cool cottons, non-sweaty silks and light linens call more to me than the heat packing acrylic and animal fibres on my to-do list. I am a great believer in being a selfish knitter (not necessarily by not knitting for others but knitting only on my own terms) and so my eye has turned to my stash and my books.

First up there – progress on the bath mitt front.

I personally like the duck one, but concede that the picture is hard to see (any thoughts, oh great hive mind?). The heart one is fun, and the rectangle is a better shape but I’m not sure I like the 4ply as it is not as soft on the body. Next plan is a simpler zig-zag pattern and it really has to be this orange!

Inspired by KnitWit’s lace scarf, and unearthing some lovely yarn while stash diving, I have decided to dust off my much browsed, yet to be used, copy of Victorian Lace Today.

I love that book. It is full of ridiculously beautiful lace projects (the ones that casually ask for 1700 yards of sewing thread fine yarn) with lovely photos and tempting instructions (chart led for those who are curious). I have owned this book for years, even started a few patterns, but never had the nudge to start.

Sisterly competitiveness aside (Mr LouBug accused me a starting my lace scarf just to flex my knitting mojo at KnitWit), this was the nudge I needed.

It is made from some Kid Silk Haze, which has the distinction of being both the most expensive yarn beginner me ever bought and the most frogged. Seriously, frogging anything with mohair type hair should be a punishment only for the truly naughty. It was originally bought about seven years ago when I was trying to make a cardigan from a magazine and not really understanding how to substitute yarns.

The crucial difference between a cotton/wool based aran and a microfibre/cotton based DK was a lesson learnt the hard way (I tried to match the gauge and really didn’t understand why it mocked me from afar). Luckily I hesitated before buying the trim yarn, which was seven balls of Kid Silk Haze (which was actually the named yarn) and hedged my bets with buying only 3. The cardigan taught me that I do not like modular clothes (the back didn’t match the front and could have fit a hunchback elephant) and caused me to learn how to use circulars to knit flat (as the flexible cable means you can try it on as you go).

This then resulted in me both knitting and designing my first cardigan and leaving me with 3 balls of Kid Silk Haze. This yarn has quietly guilted me. Too nice to knit something plain, but any mistakes in lace with it are punished swiftly and with malice. After failing to knit a complex leaf pattern (which would only have been properly visible after blocking) I saved what I could and buried it deep in the stash.

Until today. Since that wine soothing, chocolate healing frogging hell I have mastered many skills. For one I can read a chart without losing which line I am on! So here I go again, but this time with a much simpler, much more haze yarn friendly pattern (that leaf pattern would work better with a silk based yarn).

LouBug

Phew, I beat the mother to the finish

I may have done the Race for Life this weekend, but I have also recently been chasing a Race for Birth. Knitting for newborns is always tricky on the timings. Ok, so you usually have at least 6 months’ notice, but the final deadline is vague at best. Delicate questions about the likely due date can seem a little weird (especially as you seem as nervous as the father when you hear about unexpected hospital checks).

I have a good range of books I use for any clothes, booties or hats. Wacky Baby Knits: 20 Knitted Designs for the Fashion-Conscious Toddler is a good one for the more fun silly hats/boots.

Cute Knits for Baby Feet: 30 Simple Projects from Newborn to 4 Years (The Craft Library) is a good one (unsurprisingly) for booties.

Baby Knits For Beginners and Simple Knits for Cherished Babies are a great, simple, but beautiful range of the basic baby essentials.

Knitting for co-workers’ new sprogs is always a bit political (I take the view that the more I like you, the more time I will spend on you – shop bought takes no making time afterall), and it is always a minefield of choices.

Booties or hats? Blanket or teddy? Do you gender it (pink or blue)? Do you go for pastels or bold colours? Do you risk a theme (Addams Family stripes? Animals?) or go plain? Do you knock out a solid safe pattern or try to make something unique? Decisions, decisions.

At this stage there are two schools of thought: Ask the soon-to-be parents and go in, questionnaire style. Or make what you want, figuring that most things can be used.

It might surprise you, especially after my Christmas knit advice, that I tend to wing it on birthing presents. Experience has taught me that soon-to-be parents don’t really know what they want. They will try to please you by guessing what you want them to ask for. Very sweet of them, but not very helpful!

Time (and loveliness) allowing, I am a fan of the cot blanket. Clothes are very dependent on size (and you have no idea if the sprog is going to be tiny or huge). Newborns grow so fast you can practically see it happening, making clothes a short-lived present.

Blankets are reasonably future-proof and can start as a cot blanket and end as a playmat. I tend to make things that are modular so if time escapes me I can always quit early and still have something ready to handed in.

So here is my latest effort (shhhh if you know them).

I have managed to beat the birth (so no frantic sewing up – yay!). I have chosen an 80s colour-scheme, as the parents are not really the pastel and bunnies type of people. On a side note, it was a bit of a win for me as the squares are mostly made up from those odd 15g balls of freebie magazine yarn, which both allowed me to stash dive for this project and allowed me to use a wide colour pallet (I didn’t know the gender when I started).

Keen eyes might spot that it is basically the drop shadow blanket, but only using black as the edge colour.

So there is now nothing to do but wrap it, write up a care label and wait to hear the happy news!

LouBug

Is it a bird, is it a plane?

No! It’s a…er, I don’t really know. Coaster?

My first attempt at t-shirt knitting has created this square of…something. This effort is the opposite of my previous lace scarf effort. From amazing to average in one foul swoop. Oh well, it was worth a go. I suspect my mis-shaped coaster would have been more use left as a shirt and put in a charity bin…

KnitWit

One Row Lace Scarf – Complete!

This scarf, this item of great beauty, is by far the best, most difficult yet amazing things I have knitted so far. The pattern was so simple, yet looks like only a knitting master could manage it. The pattern is One Row Lace Scarf by Turvid.

Not a single mistake, not one moment of cursing and no rows ripped back. I think it is worth blocking, to show its full glory, and then I shall be parading about in it for all to wonder at.

Drumroll please – behold…THE SCARF:

KnitWit

Busy Bunny

One nice thing about my free-fall approach to knitting is that my random acts of casting on are often mirrored by pockets of things being finished. Pictured above is a manly pair of socks for Mr LouBug (the yarn is by Regia). They came about when I was choosing sock yarn last year for Mr KnitWit’s Christmas socks and asked for a man-based approval on colour.

I had whittled it down to likely contenders and personally thought the grey stripes a winner. Mr LouBug immediately rejected it and when pressed he had to admit it was only because he wanted it for himself! Hard to argue with that kind of logic, so Mr KnitWit gained a different manly-coloured pair and Mr LouBug got his stripy socks. After all there has to be some consolations to sharing his home with my stash.

Also finished this week are my “Come on spring, I dare you!” mittens (shown with cuff folded and cuff down). These are the mitres mittens from Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitter’s Almanac: The Commemorative Edition (Dover Knitting, Crochet, Tatting, Lace) with a variation on the cuff.

These were made from the left-over Jitterbug (a minor weakness of mine) and rumours that I have worn them around the house while dancing a happy dance are greatly exaggerated. Still, they should make winter easier to look forward to.

Work on the “Hearts and Diamonds” shrug continues. Annoyingly I had to rip back 12 rows as my brain did the wrong double decrease – *sigh* – but the linen blend should be fantastic when finished. And yes, my stitch markers are the world’s cutest fimo apples!

Christmas is Coming!

Birds are tweeting, the vino is on ice and there is a pleasant sound of lawn mowers in the distance. So naturally most knitters start to think of Christmas. The universe is now immediately divided into two camps, the ones who are boggling at me even mentioning the Big C in May, and the ones whose blood-pressure just jumped.

The internet is littered with tales of knitters not realising that Christmas comes on the same date each year, and that there are still only 24 hours in the day. For some people it seems to be a genuine surprise that their plan to knit a pair of socks each day for a full week does not actually happen. There are knitters out there who have tried to knit a colourwork adult jumper in an evening. There are also ones who are then heartbroken that the recipients are either dismissive (or downright rude) on receiving these hard-won gifts.

So far, I have been lucky (or scary) enough not to have received the dreaded “but I wanted it in purple” response. But I freely admit to acts of knitterly delusion over time per stitch ratio. I have scorched in my brain the memory of sitting up at 4am frantically knitting the last part of a pair of socks for Mr LouBug. I also remember frantically knitting KnitWit’s Boy#1 a pair of little devil trousers on Christmas morning praying that traffic would delay them by a vital half an hour.

So, here is my hard won 5 point plan for surviving Christmas knitting.

1. Start early! I allow one month per gift, that usually both caps the number of knits and allows a generous margin for knitting other things.

2. Keep it small. Hats, mittens, small toys (the reindeer pictured above is from Val Pierce’s 20 to make Christmas crochet) will give the same joy as big ticket items. Knitting a bed spread or adult jumper goes above the call of duty (and sanity). Remember our earlier plan of one month per gift, if you think it will take more than a month then consider carefully when you plan to eat and sleep

3. Do not knit something for everyone in your life. Have an informal rota (if possible involve other knitters in the family) and play favourites, some people get something every year just because they are lovely. Remember that it is easier to knit for a select few than get pulled into knitting for everyone, or suddenly every in-law and co-worker looks like they have been left out on purpose.

4. Make sure it is not easy to destroy. There are some lovely acrylics out there, there are some fantastic machine washable wools and there are plenty of people who have never considered washing anything by hand in their life. Save your good yarn for fellow fibre fans and save yourself a heartbreak when you discover it has been felted.

5. Talk to the person you are knitting for. Surprises are great when all it has cost you is money and a trip to the shops, but don’t find out the hard way that the person hates hats, has an aversion to yellow or only wears that one scarf that they love deeply. “What do you want?” is an invite to biting off more than you want, “What colour would you like your mittens?” is much safer.

And don’t forget, there are wonderful things called shops! Just because you can knit, does not mean you have to.

Any other tips for surviving the great Christmas knit?

LouBug