Finished!

Should've chosen a smaller coat-hanger perhaps. This one provides 1980's pointy-shoulder-reinforcements as you may have noticed...it's quite a stretchy cardi, so it does fit after all. Which comes as a relief, as I spent hours on it. You know, the kind of hours where you're enjoying knitting and it's going well, but at the back of your mind there's a tiny niggling little knitting voice going 'it won't fit you...it's tooooo small! bwahahah" and rubbing its hands gleefully. If a voice can rub its hands. (Well, if knitting having a voice, then it really can rub its hands...in fact it can make itself a sandwich and get a beer for me too while it's out there) Yep, that knitting voice. The one you ignore and Carry On Knitting (starring: Kenneth Williams, Jim Dale, Barbara Windsor, Sid James and Hattie Jacques) despite overwhelming evidence mounting in front of you...

Well, knitting, this is a poke in the eye for you! it fits! And I'm pleased with it. Maybe I'll wear it to Knit in Public Day. So I can be knitting in public while wearing 'knitteds' in public also!

Woman, 35, in knitted pants horror

I'm knitting a shawl. A perfectly pretty shawl. It's Lehmus and you'll notice it looks beautiful on the designer's blog. But mine looks like this so far.

 

It looks like a pair of frilly knickers. Well, I mean, probably not the sort you would have in your underwear drawer of course. But a pair of BIG, LACY PANTS nevertheless. Got to love lace knitting, haven't you? For the pain, frustration and utter helplessness you feel in its holey little hands. Dear Lace, please stop torturing me and turn into something beautiful. Now. Before I lose the will to knit...

Hmm, okay. A bit more like that and I might consider picking up the needles again. Lace. It's not for the terminally lazy. I like a garment that I can knit, iron (yes, IRON) to the right proportions and then wear. Lovely lace. It likes a lot of hard work. Spraying and blocking, with special fancy-schmancy pins and a spray bottle (last seen in this house when the steam iron stopped steaming). Lace, O, demanding lace. Lace whose intricacies I only just learnt to keep track of by using stitch markers:

(thanks for the tip, Rosee, it's saved me a lot of headaches). O Lace! I curse thy holey knitted face of horror! ahem. Cup of tea, anyone?

The dog finds the whole thing very uninteresting.

He was more interested in what he'd spotted.

A teeny-tiny toad in the garden. A baby I suppose. A toadlet! Look how small he is. And I don't have gigantic hands, in case you were wondering.

Toads, lace knitting...and here are some pretty forget-me-nots and a dandelion for your viewing pleasure. I love my forget-me-nots as you know. I like how my patch of them looks like a fieldful...

Hey, who said "weeds" at the back?!!

In other news: YARN! I've dyed up a few skeins which will go into the shop this week, with more dyeing planned next week. I'm also busy making some bags - they're sold out at the moment, so I'd better stop gallivanting around in the forget-me-nots and get back to the Singer! I hope you are all having a lovely bank holiday weekend :-)

Tiredknits.

I've rustled up this sign, and it's now going to stand 3ft high, on steel legs, in front of the television. Because without it, I'm doomed to spend more hours fixing my mistakes than actual knitting. (Or can I claim Un-knitting as a new craft? Because I do it to really very high standards)

It's the purple cardigan you see. I'm getting there, really I am. This is my most favourite purple cardigan in a long and distinguished line of attempts to knit purple cardigans. I only have the sleeves to knit now, so I'm not giving up.

It's got lacy bits in. Not complicated, mind-bending lacy bits, just evil, slippery lacy bits which lull you into a false sense of "hey! I can knit lace" and then turn around and spit in your eye as you forget one row of crucial yarn overs eight rows down and have absolutely no way of fixing it without ripping the whole lot back. gentle, manageable lacy bits which are a bit of a challenge but really quite simple.

 

Simple, see - I mean, 30% of this cardigan is made of holes and therefore, air! Easy! Except when I'm tired. Because it's at that point my Inner Knitter fails to remember to k2tog or SKPO or YO and instead, Inner Knitter thinks 'ooh I am now knitting a sock!' and makes hands carry on knitting every stitch. And Inner Knitter doesn't remember to check if I've done every row correctly until it's too late and poor, tired, brain has to make hands go back and try to unravel and put stitches back on needles without twisting, and then make hands re-knit with exactly the same mistakes in, but four rows up! I think I am in need of a nap...

Rite of Spring

Like most of you I am looking forward to the end of winter and the proper beginning of spring. In fact, looking forward so much I may a) fall over on my face or b) my eyes are going to pop out from looking forward with such enthusiasm. I was out with the dog today trudging through the mud and drizzle, but noticed the birds are already singing and there are small hopeful changes afoot...

There are buds on the trees...(this one, I think, some kind of maple)

Flowers on the winter jasmine in the (considerable) undergrowth in our garden (Monty Don, get your arse round here, there's stuff to be done);

Catkins on the Filbert (sing this to the tune of 'Tiptoe through the Tulips' and you can pass hours of otherwise idle time in musical joyfulness!);

Snail-eaten primroses...(our garden would make Kew's head gardener blush).

So - spring. Big deal. Stuff's growing. Well, it also means this.

Time to spring-clean the horror that is my craft room floor. And of course, most exciting of all, soon it will be warm enough to wear my (shock!) finished Liesl:

 I'm getting frighteningly good at actually finishing things. Hmm...with the possible exception of cleaning up rooms and knitting purple cardigans :-)
 

Something for the weekend

I am such a fickle knitter. I have the attention span of a caffeine-fuelled flea so have to have two or three projects on the go (purple cardigan, socks, some crochet and now this...). Here's what I'll be working on this weekend.

It's Liesl, by Ysolda Teague. I was looking at it longingly on the website the other day, and after a few checks on yardage and whatnot, realised I had enough wool in my stash for it! Ah, the benefits of needlessly and endlessly buying and stashing wool...I'm using the Cascade 220 that I originally bought for this hat - a lovely hat which my tiny mind couldn't figure out how to make! But wait, I seem to be knitting lace of all things...how can this be??

Nope, I don't know either...it's like knitting magic though. And there are enough rows of straightforward knit and purl without pesky counting, so it seems that this knitter of little brain can actually do something more complicated than stocking stitch after all.
Apart from knitting, I'm going to try to work on what's inside these tins...

Berries Beads!! They're Czech glass, so they're a bit on the heavy side, so what better thing to string them together than:

Barbour's Shamrock Linen CARPET THREAD!! I was rummaging around trying to find something that wouldn't leave me embarrassed in public by a snapping into a shower of beads, and this old thread I found in a biscuit tin (well, what do you keep in your old biscuit tins? This is a much loved tin full of stuff I inherited from Mr Yaffle's Aunt. Nearly all of the stuff has come in useful, I'm amazed at how handy it's been), will probably do the trick. Why waste it on the carpet, I say!

Rip it up and start again

I have one thing to say on the subject of purple cardigans, and that is AAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH. I've started two, and neither are making me happy. So it is with pain and humiliation (steady on woman! God knows what Google search will bring you to this blog) that I am doing this.

Unravelling. Both of them. There's no-one to blame but myself, either. I couldn't face another vast tract of stocking stitch in the first cardigan, and for the second one, I just couldn't make the wool from my stash work with the pattern. Ho hum. So here I am, unravelling (in more ways than one, hahaha).

I'm unravelling it onto a niddy-noddy so I can make it into a nice skein. The sodding stuff is then going to get a good wetting, followed by a severe heating on a radiator, then I'm going to wind it all back into a big purple ball, ready for the next cardigan. But I'm not bitter *grinds molars*. I've chosen this as my next disaster pattern - Lacy Ribbon-tie Cardigan by Erika Knight (I can't find a non-ravelry link! Sorry!). It's from the 'Baby Bloom' book, but don't panic - I'm not even remotely 'blooming' - I just liked the pattern :-) It has lacy bits in it, so it has to be more interesting than stocking stitch! Oh, and I refuse to unravel next time. It's going in the loft if it doesn't work, the yarn must be cursed!

 

I'm back!

What a neglectful blogger I've been...in my defence, I have been busy banging my head against all kinds of virtual brick walls in an attempt to get the shop up and running online. Payment gateways, SSL certificates...merchant accounts, FTP sites...but hopefully soon you'll be able to buy some of this lovely stuff:

Hmm. Sock yarn. Lovely. Doesn't try to confound me with gibberish. Hasn't got a payment gateway to get up and running. Doesn't understand HTML. Lovely, lovely yarn! Yarn is my friend!

Of course in the interim, Christmas has been and gone, and I hope yours was a lovely one. Mr Yaffle and I spent some of ours in Glossop, just outside the Peak District National Park.

This amazing view was just outside the flat we stayed in. It would've been positively churlish not to go and see what was at the top, so we did. Now, my idea of walking is as follows. 1. get into the car with dog and wellies. 2. drive somewhere pretty, and flat. 3. get out of car with dog and wellies, and walk for a bit. 4. drive home, unexhausted, dry, and not aching. So this was a departure. We climbed a bit, and found a 'clough' (no, not that kind of clough) which I think is a kind of ravine:

and right at the top we found lots of these!

We told him about the sock yarn and everything, but he didn't look too impressed.

Main surprise of the festive season was that I did. NO. KNITTING. whatsoever! Unprecedented. I spent Christmas watching this, this and a bit of this. And then I got incredibly twitchy and yesterday couldn't resist casting on a new hat, and trying to start the sleeves of the Big Purple Endless Cardigan of Dullness. So that'll see me to the New Year and beyond...!

Watching skeins dry

The inclement weather at the weekend forced my skein-drying activities indoors, so the radiators were festooned with colourful hanks of wool (makes a change from smalls, eh?)

 

I've been experimenting with some paler shades although from the pictures you'd think I was my normal, neon self! It's hard to get the proportion of dye just right for pastel shades but some have turned out quite well.

After watching all that yarn dry, it was time to do something more interesting, such as knitting the Cardigan of Staggering Complexity^TM. You know, the purple one with the inconceivably complicated pattern of (gasp) knit one row, purl one row. It's reached the limp, curly waistcoat stage, so I'd better carry on and knit the sleeves. Before I do that, I'm mucking about with the idea of adding a different colour:

 

No, not greensleeves (how we laughed) - it's for the edging when it's finished! I've been crocheting up a sample to see what it would look like.

Turns out it looks like a frilly purple anti-macassar. If you're short of one for your settee, do let me know!

To stripe or not to stripe

There aren't enough pairs of DPNs in my house to accommodate all the 'sock' swatches I'm knitting! (I say 'socks' - I dispensed with ribbing pretty early on in the show and now I'm just knitting truncated tubes. Handy for all those occasions when you just can't do without a truncated tube!) It looks like a nasty bout of startitis, I know. But I'm testing out some of the skeins I've dyed (honest), just to see how they knit up.

It's really surprising and exciting to see how they turn out (did I mention that I don't get out much? And anyway, it's a welcome relief  form of procrastination change from the mono-colour cardigan).  I think these are my favourites so far.

I experimented with stripes, too. First I tried making a really long skein, like in this tutorial, only I got into a terrible tangle. I had to tie one end to the back of a 376 bus in order to wind the impossibly long skein, for starters (I'm assured that this is how Opal have done it for years. What's that bus doing, Granny? Well, dearie, it's winding yarn into special stripes!) On its return, I eventually managed to hoik the hank off the bus, down the lane, and straight into the bin, cutting out the middle-step of dyeing it altogether! Clever, eh? Hmm. Maybe self-striping yarn isn't the way forward... I stuck to the smaller skeins and tried to get some semblance of stripe into the yarn that way, instead:

(Do not adjust your set...)

Would you knit with this yarn? I mean, if it was in a different colourway, more to your tastes, would single stripes be something you could live with? They start to overlap a bit at the back (the pink and blue go purple and it zig-zags a bit) which is the nature of most hand-dyed yarns. But if that wasn't a problem for you would you knit it into socks? Here's your chance to vote one of the members of Yaffle Yarn out of the Yaffle House...

Online Surveys & Market Research

Yarn Yawn

Whoever coined the phrase "I'll be glad to see the back of that!" clearly never knitted a cardigan.

It's the one thing I'm never glad to see the back of, because knitting the back of a grown-up sized cardigan is an activity so unremittingly tedious it's a wonder I ever go on to finish the rest. And this explains why there are so many WIPs in my stash. And crazy cardigans made of frightening, self-striping (but so very interesting!) yarn in my wardrobe.

 

Mile after dull, purple mile of stocking stitch. With no prospect of an exciting colour change on the next row. In fact the only. Relief. From the tedium. Of the back of this. Cardigan. Is the occasional

 

Dog hair. Debbie Bliss Cathay. 50% cotton, 35% Viscose Microfibre, 14% Silk, 1% Dog Hair.

PS. The camera also thought this cardigan was dull so it is displaying it in three different shades for your viewing pleasure!

Season of socks and mellow knitfulness

My yarn dyeing turned all autumnal and dropped off a tree this week. I dyed up a red and green combination after glancing over the wall and seeing Mrs Virginia Creeper in a back garden.

She gets into a lot of back gardens round here. We had to get an injunction out on her to stop her getting into our shed through the roof felt. Anyway. I dyed this.

Still life with apples, yarn and more stuff off the ground! The apples are Red Devils from our local farm shop (the best farm shop in the world because it has a fibreglass cow coming out of the building).They're pink inside too, which because I am pleased by small things, pleases me immensely...

And now for something completely different.

That's Terry Gilliam's autumnal animation from The Meaning of Life. (any opportunity to crowbar in a bit of Gilliam. Apologies). Moving swiftly back to knitting:

I think the Foliage 'n' Fruit combination's a winner. Watch this space for colourways inspired by: Spotted Laurel and Banana; Filbert and Pineapple Chunks (on a bed of wilted Daphne); Mugwort and Cling Peaches...or maybe you have your own favourite fruit'n'foliage medley (don't we all, folks?) you'd like to see expressed via the medium of knitting? Answers on a tin of fruit cocktail to the usual address...

The joy of socks

I'd love to say to you that I was inspired by the townscapes of Egon Schiele, or that a beautiful crocus flower leapt up and spat at me 'Dye! Dye! Dye!' and that such things propelled me into a frenzy of creativity in which I came up with this:

But it's actually the fact that I couldn't find any orange and purple sock yarn. Anywhere. Ever. In the universe. At least not one that could be posted to me without it being stopped at customs and questioned by officials. So I dyed this skein. And it knits up like this.

I love orange and purple together. Although knitting this as a passenger in the car yesterday did make me feel sick. I like to think that it was knitting in a car per se, not the colours that did it.

Having dyed this, I found a use for at least one of the pieces of junk in my house:

*sigh*. The beginning of a beautiful friendship. Sock, meet book. Book, this is sock. You look like a great couple. (have I read this? have I heck as like. Sorry Mr Lawrence, it's not your writing. Shamefully, I bought it for the cover. Hands up who hasn't done that? Book as desirable object in itself regardless of writing contained therein, discuss and hand in your essays later. I'll be setting a test on Tuesday.) This could be the start of a whole new website full of socks that match my dusty old books...imagine the possibilities...The Richard and Judy Sock Club. Socks and Lovers. Lady Chatterley's Socks. Miss Pettisock lives for her Endpapers!

Note to self: introduce Iron to Tablecloth before taking next batch of pictures. And hide books as far away from socks as possible.

The Swatch that Stood up by Itself

...and Other Stories.

Tired of your handknit garments fitting well and being full of pesky drape? Fed up of your knitwear eliciting compliments from people every time you wear it? Does sporting the same hand-knit cardigan week in week out just because you love the way it hangs and the fact that you made it really get to you after a while? Well, ladies and gentlemen, try knitting with:

Frankenyarn! This is the yarn I spun in yesterday's post  knitted up into a swatch. Which, as you can see, has a life of its own. Knit with this and all your garments will be alive, I tell you, alive! This swatch walked off the needles and into the garden all by itself where I found it sobbing quietly and muttering 'I didn't ask you to create me'. Good lord, what have I done?

I know what the problem is. I plied it too tightly. A "beginner's mistake", apparently. Pah! Anyway, here's my attempt at plying more loosely, or Navajo plying.

I daren't even knit that up for fear of creating a sibling for the Living Swatch.

I cheered myself up with the prospect of knitting Ysolda's Gretel hat with this yarn, which looks even greener than bits of our garden (ha, not difficult):

Not shown in picture above: the bit where beautiful yarn gets covered in mud after dropping off the leaves. Yarn: Cascade 220 in shade 7814. Mud, model's own. Model: Montebretia at Percy Thrower models.

Seconds later, but without yarn, this fella visited:

Which more than makes up for the Frankenswatch, don't you think?