One school ended for the Easter break yesterday, the other tomorrow. So I’m taking this as a sign that I need to batten down the hatches, fill the cupboards with food and hope my eardrums don’t burst.

It also means I’ll be away from blogging for a couple of weeks. I’ll be back mid-April if not refreshed and invigorated after my holiday, at least with some finished projects to share.

After finding this book mentioned on Ravelry and seeing as I’m on a bit of a Starmore-fest at the moment, I figured it would be a nice change to read something that didn’t involve lifting flaps or squeaking for a change.

Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously by Adrienne Martini covers the year in her life when she decided to tackle one of Alice Starmore’s harder patterns (“hard” is probably subjective when it comes to our Alice), Mary Tudor. Add in the fact that the pattern is in the out-of-print Tudor Roses and the original yarns are no longer available and it’s a task that many of us would just not even attempt and go and cast on a garter stitch scarf instead.

Adrienne Martini starts the book with a brief explanation of the difference in intarsia and fair isle knitting for the uninitiated, her trials in learning to knit with the yarn in her left hand and includes a potted geography lesson, after solemnly assuring her readers that “there is an actual Fair Isle”. (I appreciate this is for readers who probably aren’t in the UK and don’t know every single tiny island in the British Isles, but it tickled me.)

However, she makes up for it with a nicely condensed explanation of why Alice Starmore is known in some parts as the Litigious Scottish Designer – more of which can be found in thegirlfromauntie’s Alice Chronicles (can only find part one at the moment) which I read myself a while back and if it’s all you ever knew of a person, might make you just look over your shoulder for daring to type her name.

So as she has neither book nor yarn for her Mary Tudor, she then has to take a deep breath and part with silly money on an eBay auction for the book and then hunt down substitute yarn for the pattern. The geek in me liked seeing her table of yarn colours in AS’s old yarn, the new colours she had to buy and the amounts needed, given that the yarns had different yardages. I also liked reading about the efforts to find one particular colour and I really wanted more minute detail like this because it’s the sort of thing I love. But then I’m the sort of person who collects shade cards.

She does also give us a little history lesson about the Tudors and berates the BBC for The Tudors drama series not being historically accurate (which in my mind is a bit like complaining that Star Trek doesn’t accurately represent alien life forms) but it’s all good fun.

What really bothers me is that it ends up not so much a book about the trials of knitting a difficult pattern – that ends up becoming pretty much a sub plot – and concentrates more on her travelling around Canada and North America to meet the great and good of the online knitting community. She attempts to tie this to the sweater by asking everyone the same question about whether they feel her sweater is an actual Starmore, being as she isn’t using AS’s yarn. But more time is spent talking about the people she meets, finding out their “how I started knitting” stories and visiting yarn shops and detailing the different yarns she buys. Occasionally she mentions how far she has progressed, but it’s mentioned as an aside, and only when she is cutting the sleeve steeks does the sweater get centre stage again.

I suspect what I expected/wanted was a book version of a knitting blog. There are times, when she talks about casting on 300+ stitches for example, that you know on a knit blog there would be a photo of the cast-on row. Or when she cuts the sleeve steeks, there would be a triumphant photo of her wielding the scissors with a hole in her knitting. But THERE ARE NO PHOTOS, save for one black-and-white author photo in the inside of the back cover which shows the sweater to bust-height. And this is a tragedy. I don’t need to see her standing smiling with Amy from Knitty or Stephanie Pearl McPhee or any other knitblogger she has met. I DO need sweater porn. I need stripy steeks and neckbands and close-ups of the stitch pattern. She describes how the colours in her swatch blend together so apparently effortlessly apart from the one dud colour (which is replaced). Why can’t I see this?

I won’t say how the book ends, though you may easily guess. But it left me feeling it had been rushed in order to meet her publishing deadline and though it was an entertaining and quick read, I felt unsatisfied, as if something key was missing from the story. I can’t help but think that the perfect ending would have been for Adrienne to put her question about whether the sweater was an actual Starmore to the woman herself.

This is Rose today. Note her clothes:

This afternoon, enter one very nice but clearly unobservant cat-sitter (we’re going away for a few days over the Easter Break).

Rose: *makes cute faces*
Cat-sitter: Oooh, who do we have here? What’s his name?
Me: *through gritted teeth* Rose.
Cat-sitter: Oh, it’s a girl, is it?
Me: Hmmmphurrgh.

I think I need this holiday.

I present one man-sized short-row heel. It took a little longer than I’d hoped as I messed up the second half, where you work back along the yarnovers, and had to frog the whole heel back. But second time worked like a charm and even after frogging still probably took less time than knitting a flap.

I hope it’s not just me that has issues with clinging to the familiar when it comes to knitting (it isn’t, is it?!). I learnt to knit socks from a very simple, top-down, heel-flap pattern (time for gratuitous first sock photo):

and it stuck with me. I suspect if my first sock had been a toe-up sock with a short-row heel I’d have avoided top-down socks. It’s good to get away from a comfort zone for knitting and try something else out. After all, it’s only yarn – it can be frogged.

So I had my new skein of sock yarn and decided to wind it in a ball so that it was ready for when I wanted to knit with it, and then decided to just knit a few rounds to see how it knitted up and then before I knew it, I’d gone and got myself half a sock:

In my defence, I can now assure anyone that has the same yarn that it doesn’t pool. I love the fine stripes of gold and navy and little patches of olive green and hopefully Mr B won’t consider them to be a bit on the overly-cheerful side.

However, this sock is not going to be just my usual standard, heel flap patten that I do for every plain sock I ever knit. For one thing I’m pretty bored with knitting every mansize sock in exactly the same way and I am also fed up with having to keep a tally of the heel flap rows because I can’t trust myself to count the rows correctly, and live in fear of having socks with lopsided heels. So I decided that I would try a SHORT-ROW HEEL instead.

I have only worked short-row heels once before, on Rose’s tiny Better Than Booties socks. That pattern uses Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’ short-row heel method which I found worked really well and didn’t leave any unsightly holes: something which has often put me off the idea of short-row heels in the past. Her Priscilla’s Dream Socks pattern uses the same heel (and toe) and is available in Favorite Socks which I have (as well as Interweave Knits Fall 2000, which I don’t) and it’s this pattern that I will be following. Once the leg is a little longer, that is.

…that is, the end of me being able to put a certain person down in one place and know they’ll still be there five seconds later.

Not two weeks ago, Rose cried if I tried to put her on her tummy and has never spent more than five seconds lying flat because she protested against it. Somehow she ended up on her front again yesterday and immediately started doing push ups and trying to shuffle forward. She is clearly a girl that will only do something when it suits her.

As I spend most of my “free time” knitting, I don’t get much time to sit down and just read these days, so when Rose has a nap it’s a nice treat for me to have a cuppa and a read of something knitting-related.

I have been buying Interweave Knits since the beginning of 2005 when I finally discovered it existed. It was very much a source of inspiration for me when I was less confident and more scared of anything that involved strange techniques like stranded knitting or even circular needles. Nowadays I buy it in the hope that one day I will again be motivated enough to knit myself a sweater.

So when I got an email from Interweave dangling a 15% discount in front of me, I decided to treat myself to some of the issues I don’t have, and started with 2004. It took 3 weeks to arrive after it was shipped, which made me a bit fidgety as I thought it might have gone the same way as my sock yarn, but it did get here, and I eagerly unwrapped it and put it into the PC.

Unfortunately, it’s not really the same, “ooh! new Interweave!”, experience when those magazines are on CD. When I bought the digital version of The Knitter, I wasn’t bothered about what else was in the magazine as I had my sights focussed on Alice Starmore goodies, but with Interweave I do like to read it cover-to-cover. Now the magazines are in pdf format, with a contents page at the side and the patterns are easy to print, but it’s not really the same as sitting on the sofa with a snoozing baby and something to read. But I have patterns aplenty now, with the Flower Basket Shawl being the first I printed off.

I think, for me, that digital magazines will only be an option for me if I’ve missed a must-have pattern and I will always prefer the feel and smell of a shiny new magazine, in much the same way that I eschew the idea of ebook readers. I suspect this is is a sign of me getting old.

Pattern: Wasabi The Gregarious Pug by Rebecca Danger
Yarn: 2 x 50g Rowan Classic Extra Fine Merino DK in colour: 880 Camel from Lana Pura, 1 x 50g Tess Dawson DK in colour: Brown from stash
Needles: 4.5mm circs and dpns

My sister loves pugs, the real live, barking, squishy-faced sort. As she doesn’t have the room for a real one, I thought I’d make one for her instead. And this one has the advantage of needing no food and being fully housetrained to boot.

I confess don’t like knitting toys particularly. I like the idea of them more than the actual knitting of tiny pieces and stuffing and trying to get the face right, so the fact I finished this and enjoyed it is down to the brilliant pattern. It’s written in a very simple way with lots of photographs to show the placement of all appendages and I actually really enjoyed making him. Which is a good thing as I have two or three more of Rebecca’s patterns now as well. I think Rose needs a mum and baby monster duo, no?

Wasabi has pipe cleaners in his tail and ears so that he as a tiny curled pug tail like so:

and ears that can baroo? like a real dog’s, if he’s so inclined:

The pipecleaners, nose and eyes all came from Craftbits who have great service and I recommend them for all your pug-making requirements.

Both yarns were held double throughout to make a large-ish pug on biggish needles. I had the brown yarn in my stash, and splashed out on the extra fine merino because it was the perfect colour to match and has a nice sheen to it, a bit like a short and silky dog coat. If it was a baby toy, then I’d have just bought acrylic which can cope with drool. Though my sister may drool on Wasabi, I guess, if teh cuteness overtakes her.

19th September 2009:

19th March 2010:

Happy six monthiversary, little flower.

Take one last look at the green and leafy shawl as it currently looks and wave goodbye:

It’s not working. I think my idea would work if it was a larger shawl and I had more yarn to play with and room to manoeuvre, but this is a wee shawlette. So it’s being ripped back to the leaves and put in the corner while I think what to do with it.

Meanwhile, I have switched to tiny needles and fine yarn:

The Dream in Color Baby in “Pansy Golightly” won the Battle Of The Laceweight. I’m using 2.5mm needles which is the smallest I’ve ever used for laceweight yarn, but so far it’s working. And it’s not a really lacy lace yarn, IYSWIM. It has 700 yards per 100g, which puts it in the “light fingering” category – to me, anyway. (Does light fingering sound vaguely rude? ) The pattern is one I’ve had charted out for a while and was never sure if it was worth knitting up as it is pretty plain. So I’m hoping a variegated yarn will make it special.

Following on from yesterday’s post about Aran Knitting being reprinted, and more evidence of how having a baby means I appear to have been living under a rock for the past six months, today I have made a further Starmore-related discovery.

As I said before, I don’t buy many knitting magazines and none of the UK ones, and around September last year I really wasn’t interested in them, anyway. So I missed issue 10 of The Knitter:

Had I not been living under the rock, I’d have known that it contained one of the Starmore patterns I really want to knit, Elizabeth I from Tudor Roses. That issue of magazine is OOP now, but is available as a digital download so within ten minutes of my discovery, I had the pattern in my hot little hands. (Would have been even quicker if the site took Maestro cards; it’s not as if I’m trying to pay with magic beans, people!)

Now once I’ve chosen the yarn colour, I just need to lose the ginormoboobs so that I can actually fit into it.

I have always resisted joining a yarn club of any sort. I felt that I wanted to choose the colours of the yarn I bought and didn’t want a surprise which resulted in me having yarn I didn’t want to use. Plus, it was usually an big investment of money all in one go for said surprise and I just didn’t feel a huge desire to join in. So I sat in my non-sock yarn club corner and played with my skeins of purple sock yarn.

And then a couple of things happened. There was Rose’s Infamous January Growth Spurt which coincided with reading on Lindsey’s blog that she was opening sign-ups for the Waterloo Wools sock yarn club and payments were monthly. I considered it for a brief moment and figured that a) I was in need of some serious cheering up and b) a person can have too much purple sock yarn – and joined.

However, thanks to the crappy postal service, the February instalment has yet to arrive, if it hasn’t already been pilfered by a sock knitting postie, so my first yarn is the March colourway, which arrived this morning.

This colourway is called “Paris Nights” and is inspired by a photo of the Eiffel Tower at dusk, and is just lovely. Completely not what I would ever choose off my own back, but I still really like it and the yarn itself is wonderfully sproingy. And as it’s a 20% nylon sock yarn, it’s already earmarked as being a pair of making-up-for-felting-the-other-socks-socks for Mr B.

* * * * *

I also realise how much I am off the radar when only today I discover that Alice Starmore’s Aran Knitting is being republished this year. This is momentous news: even Mr B understands the great importance of this event as he helped me try to find a library copy of this book last year to no avail – apparently there are three or four copies in libraries throughout the country but they can’t be inter-library loaned, probably because they have to be kept under lock and key for fear of obsessive knitters pilfering them. Me, I just wanted to knit St Brigid. But now it’ll be an early Christmas present and there was happy dancing aplenty. Here’s to Tudor Roses for 2011.

These days I don’t often get the chance to pull out my yarn stash and have a fondle, so it lives pretty much undisturbed in the cupboard under the stairs, a bit like a woolly Harry Potter. This causes problems when the gas meter needs reading, however, and today I had to pull the whole lot out so that the meter could be read and I took the opportunity to look at my lace stash.

This box is all yarn that I have earmarked for lace knitting, either because it is actual lace yarn or because it’s too nice for socks. It’s grown over the years because, unlike socks, a proper laceweight shawl takes a long time and much concentration to knit and I always seem to find the temptation of a quick project stopping me, whereas buying the yarn is relatively quick and painless. Plus I have accumulated some as gifts, which wasn’t my fault (and I’m not complaining).

Even now, I’m knitting lace with DK weight yarn because the whole thing will take a matter of a week or so to finish (if I can work out the maths, but that’s another post!) and will still be lacy and lovely. But the fine yarn beckons. Maybe the cotton/cashmere from Colourmart that has about 3,000 metres to 150g or even the 2ply alpaca that comes from a named mother and daughter pair of alpacas (they’re called Magic and Lara, because I know someone will want to know!). Or the squidgy Dream in Color Baby which will need a fairly simple pattern because it’s variegated, but will be like wearing a cloud. Maybe I just need to do some more fondling to help me to decide.

Last week we had glorious blue skies and fluffy white clouds. Today we’ve had hail and rain and gloom. But there are green leaves on my needles, so there’s still a little bit of spring somewhere.

Still no eyes: the ones I bought are too small, but there are still other bits to sew on while I wait. Can you tell what it is yet?

One of the many things I love about the huge number of knitting blogs I read is that there is always new yarn to discover. And when I’m in the market for the perfect yarn for a design, my radar is going beep-beep-beep at the merest sniff of something fibre-related.

It was because of this that when Rubbishknitter linked to Skeins I was off ogling yarn like a madwoman. I’d been looking for a while for a yarn I’d had in my head. Something DK weight in a leafy sort of green. And voila!

This is their DK Shetland in Moss Cottage, which is soft and squishy and I can’t wait to start knitting with it.

Almost two years ago, I got an email asking for submissions for a new sock pattern book so I duly submitted a design, was thrilled to be accepted and then had the loooong wait until the book was published. And then, just as I was about to reveal my socks to the world, I went and had a baby four weeks early. So the book has now been out ages and some people have even knitted my socks which is brilliant, but I’ve never actually blogged about the design.

The book is called The Joy of Sox and these are my socks as they appear in the book:

The brief for the book was that it was a slightly risqué play on a book with a similar title and the patterns and book style is slightly tongue in cheek, but not rude so I can still show it to my grandmother. My socks are cute rather than sexy, and more in mind for wearing on a cool evening, curled up on the sofa with a loved one watching DVDs, which is what I tend to do a lot anyway.

Thanks for the comments on the last post’s mysterious knitted thing. It is indeed a toy, but what it is can’t be revealed just yet, in part because I am awaiting eyes and a nose, so it currently has no expression and looks rather pathetic (if something without a face can have any expression, that is).

So instead of creating interesting knitted widgets over the weekend, I pulled out my old design notebooks which had been gathering dust over the past year while I was growing a baby. I’ve been mulling over a few ideas of late and intended to make a start after Christmas, but I’ve mentioned before how a certain person had other ideas about me having any free time. Now all that’s stopping me are the normal baby interruptions, apparently they’re most likely to occur just when I’ve just had an eureka moment and need to get it on paper IMMEDIATELY before it falls out of my brain never to return.

I always knew there was a reason why I kept all the little oddments of yarn from old projects, even the tiniest bits. I used to design using the project yearn, but when it’s been frogged in disgust several times, it ends up looking very tired and sorry for itself. So using random yarn in the right weight to work out the technical part of a pattern is very clever and is a good reason to have bags of tiny balls of yarn. Now the project yarn is saved for “best” and only ripped out if it doesn’t suit the pattern or – and this is quite common – I make a cock up mistake.

Currently my designing is making me wish I’d paid more attention in maths and not spent my time doodling all over my workbook. But it’s lovely to play with yarn again and setting myself another challenge after my Olympic knitting.

Only another million little pieces to go..!

Pattern: Whirligig Shrug by Stefanie Japel
Yarn: Rowan Pure Wool DK, 1½ x 50g in colour: #028 Raspberry
Needles: 3.75mm circs and dpns

After the high concentration needed for my last project, I felt like knitting something quick that didn’t involve anything too complicated.:-) I’ve been planning to knit this shrug for a while. I saw the previews for the Interweave Weekend magazine and just fell in love with it. It’s possibly one of the girliest things I’ve knitted for Rose so far!

The pattern is very simple, just a top-down raglan with no front, just the back and sleeves. The little cable detail is cute and very easy to do without a cable needle and I actually managed to get the whole back done in one evening and then spent days finishing the sleeves and edging.

If I’d bothered to read other people’s notes on Ravelry, I’d have seen that the yarn quantities for the pattern are highly over-estimated. I bought three balls of Rowan Pure Wool DK (from Lana Pura, who always give great service and free delivery which isn’t to be sniffed at) and used barely half of the second. I wonder if this is a cunning ploy to get me to increase my stash. But the leftovers will make a lovely hat next winter, so I’m not too grumpy.

Now this is done, the world is my oyster again and I just need to decide what on earth to knit first!

I found out about Bobbins magazine through reading rubbishknitter’s blog. It’s a (currently) one-off craft magazine and is really rather brilliant. I bought a copy the other week and read it in the bath during some precious baby-free time.

I don’t read many UK magazines, partly because the patterns don’t appeal to me but also because many of them are overly commercial or have a faux-chummy style which grates somewhat after a while. Bobbins is just a really good read. It doesn’t have the commercial edge, doesn’t claim to be your bestest friend and everything in the magazine is there because it is tasty or pretty or interesting.

The book reviews, for example are honest and a decent length; not just a paragraph about how great every new craft book is and you must buy them all and have no money left to buy the yarn to knit the items in them. I was actually put off buying one book after reading the review that I might otherwise have bought at some point. This is A Good Thing for a person who has bought many books over the years that she has never knitted from, purely because of a review.

My favourite pattern in the magazine is (are?) the Two Hoots socks. I really want to knit these for my handknitted sock- and owl-loving Grandma’s birthday.

My only complaint is the magazine hasn’t even more in it, and that it is only a one-off at present. Actually, that’s two complaints, isn’t it? But it’s rare that I sit down and read anything from cover to cover these days, and I’m just greedy.

Yes, sock. Not socks, which ironically would be better, but one shrunken sock. You see, I’d been scrupulously ensuring that I washed Mr B’s Mini Mochi socks on a 30 degree wool cycle because I was concerned about them shrinking. It’s not the most convenient thing to do as I usually favour the “bung everything in and wash at 40″ method and only bother to separate white and dark colours. But I started having a once or twice weekly wool wash for all Mr B’s socks and Rose’s knitted clothes so it wasn’t too bad. Until the weekend and when I was rushing to bundle a dark washload together, a sock managed to sneak its way into the pile. Possibly hidden up a trouser leg. And this was the result:

It’s like cardboard. If it was any stiffer, I could use it as a sock blocker itself. The other sock which escaped the machine is fine, but unless Mr B suddenly develops a rare, foot-shrinking illness, or only ever has one cold foot, he has a pair of unwearable socks. Socks knitted from a not inexpensive yarn which I was on a waiting list to buy. Socks which took forever to knit while I was perma-feeding a tiny baby. There may have been swearing.

So it’s back to Trekking, Regia and Opal 75% wool sock yarns for this household. I will never again be swayed by pretty colours, no matter how much they taunt me. I am immune.

Pattern: Baby’s First Fair Isle Sweater by Susan Gutpearl
Yarn: Opal Uni 4ply, two-thirds of 100g in colour: #1999 Magenta and Zitron Trekking XXL, two-thirds of 100g in colour: #76 maroon-mauve
Needles: 2.5mm circs and dpns

Hand me that gold medal right now – I am a winner. Finished neatening the steeks on Saturday evening and then left it to block on Sunday. The photos had to wait til this morning due to the model needing her beauty sleep.

I am really thrilled with the end result. It has been a bit of a slog. Pre-baby I could have finished this in a week, easily, but having a small person interrupting at random times makes everything so much harder and at the beginning I honestly did think that I’d be posting today with half a sleeve done and a vague promise to finish it off before stuffing the whole sweater into a Tesco bag and hiding it at the back of my wardrobe.

This is the first fair isle sweater I have ever knitted. To date, the biggest project has been the Deep V Argyle Vest, but that at least didn’t have sleeves to bother me. All the other stranded projects I’ve done were mitts or hats, so it was even more of a challenge.

I like the pattern and I’ve said before that there were a couple of problems which I queried and worked out. I didn’t swatch because of time constraints. I wanted a slightly bigger sweater than the small, so I just used the stated needle size and ended up with a chest width of 25cm which gives lots of wriggle room.

The sock yarns aren’t great for steeking as they don’t stick together, but they make for a lovely soft sweater. The colours of the Trekking change ever so subtly throughout so it looks as if I’ve done clever shading with a million different colours, a la Kaffe Fassett. It also means I can put the sweater in the washing machine without fear of it shrinking as they’re my two favourite workhorse sock yarns.

All in all, I am a very happy knitter today.