Monthly Archives: August 2010

Still bogging along, with the Baby Bog Jacket now looking rather like a knitted superhero cape. The interesting cream stripes are from the thumb trick, which many of us will have most likely come across before when knitting a pair of Fetchings. You knit across the stitches with a length of scrap yarn, slip them back to the left-hand needle and knit across them again with the working yarn. When the scrap yarn is removed at the end of the knitting, you’re left with two rows of live stitches. In this case, for grafting together the fronts and sleeves of the jacket.

Reaching this point is a relief as there were times I did wonder what on earth I was doing knitting row upon row of garter stitch. Mindless knitting changed to “hmmm, this is beginning to get a bit tedious” at around ridge 18. By ridge 28 I was speculating that the reason there are relatively few Baby Bogs on Ravelry is that many knitters expired of boredom before they finished the wretched thing. But then hurrah for Sense and Sensibility on DVD on Saturday night, the boys entertaining their sister while I admired bonnets and me knitting a good 30 rows uninterrupted.

Yesterday I reached the wonderful decreasing row and now have only 100 stitches to contend with, plus the interest of the shaping for the armhole. The sleeves are all knitted as part of this garment, but there are directions for adding slipped stitches to mimic a seam and some increasing and decreasing to help with the fit. I think I may actually get this finished and not have KILLED BY GARTER STITCH BOREDOM on my gravestone after all.

Although the little Offset Wraplan has stalled somewhat – I need to re-knit the one sleeve I’ve done because I think my picking up around the armhole is shoddy and it will bother me if I don’t fix it – I’m looking ahead to when it’s all done and I get to play with animal shapes for the appliqué.

I ordered some wool felt from Blooming Felt in Orange Sherbet and Banana Popsicle. I want to keep this garment as neutral and unisex as possible, and had in mind that a peachy/apricot sort of colour would work well with the green. However, I think the yellow actually looks better. And of course it’s now crying out to be decorated with a little duckling!

I’ve never embroidered anything in my entire life so am a but anxious about how it’ll turn out. I may need some virtual hand holding.

As I said earlier in the week, my small celebration of Elizabeth Zimmermann’s centenary was to re-read Knitting Around. In the book, her designs are interspersed with her “digressions” which in this case form her autobiography and it’s fascinating reading.

An evening of reading got to me the Bog Jacket, which reminded me that I had the Baby Bog queued last year but for some reason didn’t actually knit it. Perhaps because I’d already knitted a lot of garter stitch while making the Tomten, or I didn’t have the right yarn to hand. But it was deleted from my queue and I never made one.

So with some DK yarn to hand, I figured it was about time I made one, if only as a celebration of EZ’s centenary. The yarn is Jarol Heritage DK which is my favourite new discovery. It’s a wool/acrylic blend with 55% wool and is wondrously soft. Interestingly, Debbie Bliss Cashmerino DK is also just 55% wool. And something like four times the price.

The baby bog pattern has a tension of 6 stitches per inch, which translates to a 16 inch chest. My tension is roughly 4½ to 5 spi, which should give a finished chest of 20 to 22 inches. And the beauty of the pattern is that the length will increase proportionately as it’s the number of ridges of garter stitch that matters, not how many inches you knit. Unfortunately, I have approximately another 60 rows of 160 stitches for the pouffy skirt to go before I can decrease down. But it’s wondrously mindless knitting and the construction is fascinating. More about that when I have progressed further.

So although my plan for the Willie cardigan was to buy some lovely chunky yarn from Texere, when Mr B brought home the splendid bag of American yarn and it contained two plain-coloured skeins of Lamb’s Pride Bulky, I decided to see if it would work. I am getting stitch tension perfectly, but too few rows to the inch which isn’t that much of a problem. However, I still have to buy some brown and another contrasting colour, so it’s swings and roundabouts. It’ll cost almost as much to buy two more skeins of Lamb’s Pride as it would to buy all the Texere yarn. And I did sort of have my heart set on the turquoise. I think I’ll leave this one to ferment for a while until I’ve made up my mind.

But before I could even start a swatch and have a Willie colour crisis, I needed to buy needles, which is rare enough that it warrants a blog post. I have a ridiculous number of circular needles in various lengths, but nothing between 4.5mm and 6mm. I just don’t knit with needles that size as I rarely use any yarn above DK weight and as a loose knitter, I generally need smaller needles anyway.

So I had to bite the bullet and buy some needles in a couple of sizes because I had no idea what my tension would be. I would have probably bought some Inox/Prym metal circs as they’re my favourite cheap and cheerful needle. Until I found these on eBay:

Bamboo circs for £1.99 a set. Now initially I was pretty sceptical that they’d be any good, but the miser in me won the day and I ordered a couple of sizes. And you know, they’re not bad at all. The join between the needle and cord is smooth and the needles don’t have any rough bits. Will be interesting to see how they fare over time compared to the Addi bamboo circs I have. I will keep you updated. In the meantime, purple or turquoise Willie?

Rather than spend ages cutting up bits of paper for the draw, I went to random.org and used a random number generator to pick the winners. I temporarily removed all comments that were duplicates or ineligible comments about cakes (promise I’ll get back to you about that, Marji!) and was left with 20 comments, the first being the oldest and the last being the most recent.

Then I just clicked the Generate! button and found the winners.

First was Linz, who has selected the Eyelets and Lace Harmony Guide.

Second was Snoopydog who will shortly be receiving two balls of Artesano Inca Cloud in Dusky Burgundy.

Third was rubbishknitter who chose the brilliant Knitter’s Almanac.

And finally, fourth was LizzieK8 who’ll be getting the Susan Bates sock needle set!

Enjoy your prizes!

Today marks the centenary of Elizabeth Zimmermann’s birth. This evening I will be re-reading Knitting Around in my own small celebration of this wonderful woman. Anyone who doesn’t have a knitting grandmother should adopt her as their guide to all that is woolly. And even if you do, there’s always room for one more.

Thank you all for your entries into my blogiversary competition. Comments are now closed and I have emailed the winners, so check your inboxes! If I wanted a way to give me a swollen head, this competition was it. I loved reading the comments and knowing that my erratic and bumbling blog is something that many people actually like to read. Next time I feel like deleting it all and going off and being aloof, I will just read them all again.

This weekend I have mainly been knitting a baby cardigan,

starting a new pair of socks for Mr B, possibly his Christmas socks if they take as long as the last pair,

and deciding what to knit next. I think it might be time to get my Willie out.

Until a few years ago, I only ever cast on and off using the same methods I’d used since I learnt to knit. It never occurred to me that there were other, better, ways to do either. When I first tried long-tail cast on, it was almost as if I’d discovered the key to the meaning of life.

I’ve found new ways to cast off as well, like the wonderfully stretchy way to cast off for the edges of shawls. But I’d always wanted to find a neater way to cast off for ribbing. Montse Stanley states that tubular is the best and though I wouldn’t argue with her (she scares me too much), I just couldn’t get my head around how it worked from the confusing drawings in her book.

So today I tried Googling to see what I found, and stumbled across savannahchik‘s blog. And then I had the wonderful lightbulb moment. It’s GRAFTING and I am an idiot. Armed with this knowledge, I did what Montse suggests for stupid people like me and separated the knit stitches and purl stitches – the knits all on the front needle and the purls on the back – so it was just as if I was about to graft a sock toe, and began casting off in a tubular fashion. I fear it’s a bit bumpy, but hope it blocks out neatly because I think it’ll be a winner. No obvious line of stitches for the cast off and it’s very stretchy.

BTW, the ribbing is the bottom edge of the body of an Offset Wraplan which I am knitting as a baby gift for one of my sister’s schoolfriends. As she isn’t a knitter, I don’t suppose she’ll even notice the type of cast off, but at least I’m getting to try new techniques.

Today my blog is five years old. That’s half a decade of wittering on insightful posts about knitting, yarn and whatever else I decide to write about. When I started this blog I was a pretty basic knitter. I’d just discovered sock knitting, but still had the delights of stranded knitting, lace, steeking and other new skills to come. And who knows what I’ll have achieved by the time the sixth blogiversary comes around?

To celebrate, I’m holding a little competition. The prizes I’ve chosen are things that I love and have some significance to me and my knitting career so far. There’s a choice of:

Two skeins of Artesano Alpaca Inca Cloud in a colour of your choice. This was the first alpaca yarn I ever used and got me addicted to knitting with the stuff, dammit.

A copy of Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitters Almanac. I’ve already made it clear how much I love this book and think everyone should have a copy. So I’m encouraging this by having one as a prize.

A set of Susan Bates Sock Needles. Four sets of five in sizes 1.5mm, 1.75mm, 2.0mm and 2.25mm. My absolute favourite dpns. Slippery, lightweight and each set is a different colour so they look pretty are easy to tell apart.

A copy of one of the updated Harmony Guides. I have a set of the old ones from the 1980s that I bought second hand and they’re just brilliant and have served me well. As they’ve now been revamped, I’ll leave the choice of book to the winner.

To win one of these prizes, just post a comment below saying what you think of my blog or to describe it in just five words. I reserve the right to delete any obscene posts. Choice of prizes will go to the first person drawn from the hat, then the second and so on. Closing date is Sunday, 8th August around teatime, so plenty of time to enter!