Category Archives: lace

Feeling fruity

Posted on Wednesday 21st February 2007 | 9 Comments

Pattern: Pomegranate, by ME! (Available in a future issue of Yarn Forward magazine)
Yarn: cashmere/wool blend laceweight, approximately 60g

I feel like there should be a fanfare or drumroll, or cancan dancers high kicking their way across the screen. The shawl is FINISHED! It really wasn’t a hard project. No, honestly! Just a 24-row repeat, no increasing or decreasing or nubbin. I think there lies the problem. To create a decently sized shawl, I needed to do a lot of pattern repeats and they got a little – dare I say it? – tedious.

The yarn was fine to knit with, though the colour ran a lot during soaking (and I only ever use a smidgen of Ecover) and I’m probably paranoid, but I swear it looks almost white in some areas. But it didn’t shrink, which I was also worried about, and it’s a nice width. And in fact, the whole pattern is so simple to adapt to a narrow scarf or even wider shawl. I fancy using it to knit a scarf in 4ply or sportweight yarn!

But it will be nice now to sit back and do some fairly pressure-free knitting for a while. I have socks, socks and more socks on the agenda for the time being!

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Posted in finished projects, lace

Almost there…

Posted on Wednesday 21st February 2007 | 4 Comments

Shawl am blocking!

Finally I get to use my splendid new blocking wires. I won’t go into a long explanation of how to use them, as there are many guides out there on the net if you Google, which are more comprehensive and better photographed than I could manage. But suffice to say I am happy with them and apart from having to thread the metal through a wet shawl, it was better than using my previous method.

Part of the problem previously was that I had trouble getting the thread to stay taught. The wires, however, won’t bend and with a few pins, stay where they are put. And the wires stay in a straight line, so I know my points will be the same.

I actually blocked the shawl last night, so it’s dry at the time of writing this. However, I’m leaving it to lie in state for the moment, and will take photos later.

And as no YPW Wednesday would be complete without some pr0n, I give you my newest WIP:

A very jauntily coloured Trekking XXL (shade #166, if you need to know) sock for a small person. Nothing beats knitting a small person’s sock for the instant gratification factor!

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Posted in lace, yarn pr0n

Return of the shawl

Posted on Thursday 15th February 2007 | 5 Comments

Tis almost done. It looks like a huge pile of knitted scribble, but having “finger blocked” it, I can’t wait to see what it looks like after being washed and blocked properly. Especially as I bought some blocking wires from Heirloom Knitting just after Christmas and haven’t had any reason to use them until now.

For a long time, I used the Yarn Harlot’s method of blocking, which does work well. But wires seem to be simpler to use and I’m essentially a lazy gypsy. I will post photos as I block, anyway, and hopefully be able give a positive answer at the end of it…

And don’t I have lovely weather today? Can’t believe that this time last week we had a couple of inches of snow!

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Posted in lace

Second verse, not quite the same as the first

Posted on Tuesday 6th February 2007 | 5 Comments

Thank you all for the lovely comments about my Cairi socks. They were really enjoyable to design and knit. I think it was just one of those occasions where the combination of a gorgeous yarn, a cute stitch pattern and a rare flash of inspiration come together perfectly. (According to my site stats, the pattern has been downloaded over 1,000 times. This might be bad news for even my new and improved bandwidth..!)

And so my sock kick continues! Click on the link to read about it.

Continue reading →

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Posted in lace, socks

Cairi’s Sweetheart

Posted on Friday 2nd February 2007 | 6 Comments

Because who needs flowers and chocolates when you can have handknitted socks?

Pattern: Cairi’s Sweetheart, my own, available HERE
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock, “Valentine” colourway, two skeins. There was a lot of yarn left over! If you did one less pattern repeat on each leg, or have small feets, you could easily get away with using one skein.

When Cairi gave me two skeins of lovely Lorna’s Laces yarn for Christmas in a colourway called Valentine, it was crying out to be made into splendidly clichÃ©d socks!

I haven’t managed to learn toe-up socks as yet, so I needed to find a pattern that could be knit “upside down”. Enter the Harmony Guides! I do whinge repeatedly about their lack of charts and tiny swatch photos, but they had the perfect pattern: “Inverted Hearts”. The original pattern had stocking stitch hearts with reverse-stocking stitch diamonds inbetween. I changed this to all stocking stitch and therefore all knit – no point doing purl stitches when you don’t have to! – and had “fun” rearranging the pattern to work in the round.

The rest of the sock is a very basic top-down sock. The heel is my new favourite one from last year and the toe is the bog standard wide toe that I’ve been doing for the past two years.

My feet feel loved at last!

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Posted in finished projects, lace, socks

Tease!

Posted on Thursday 1st February 2007 | 1 Comment

Hmmm…

What have I been doing?

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Posted in lace

New blog, new project…

Posted on Sunday 7th January 2007 | 6 Comments

Sorry it’s still a bit of a mess here. A bit like when you’ve been decorating and the walls are painted, but the furniture is still covered with dustsheets and you keep finding bits of old wallpaper stuck to your feet. Or maybe that’s just when I’ve been decorating…

Anyway, it’s almost all sorted out. I’ve got to set up a place on the site for the patterns yet. Well – just the one pattern right now, obviously, but it’s a start! – and apparently WordPress has some splendid features for creating different pages where I can list finished projects and other gubbins, but I have to play around with that yet.Â But isn’t it shiny and new?!

*boring stuff*

According to the WordPress site, it would be as easy as buying yarn to move all my Blogger posts over to this new blog. Except Blogger Beta doesn’t want to play along nicely, like original Blogger did. I think I spent about two hours on and off trying out different things and searching for solutions. I eventually found a program to get over the problem and it worked first time! I’ve lost all my categories but that’s a small price to pay, compared to the idea of having to manually copy over every single post!

*end of boring stuff*

If you’ve got this far, then click on the link to read the actual knitting content of this post!

Continue reading →

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Posted in lace

Books! Books! Books!

Posted on Wednesday 3rd January 2007 | 5 Comments

Well, what’s a knitter to do when Santa doesn’t bring her anything from her Amazon wishlist for Christmas?!*

I’ve been coveting Victorian Lace Today ever since I saw the photos on Grumperina’s blog. There are so many lovely patterns in the book, and I could rave about them all and be very boring, but right now the wide-bordered scarves really appeal to me, especially this one:

as it uses just 450 yards of yarn and would be a perfect quick and inexpensive Christmas present. Not that I’m planning 12 months in advance or anything…

That’s the first really useful aspect of the book. Rather than specifying the yarn used for each pattern, it says what weight yarn and the yardage (you’ll need to whip out a calculator if you’ve gone metric!) required.

Also If you’re a new lace knitter (and even if you’re not) it has lots of really useful information in the back explaining different cast on techniques, shawl construction and blocking of different shaped shawls. And I haven’t even mentioned the history of Victorian knitting. Or the alternate borders. Or the way the construction of each pattern is explained in a diagram, so you know which direction you’re knitting in. It’s possibly even knocked A Gathering of Lace from the position of “My Favourite Lace Book”.

And I should have bought Sensational Knitted Socks a year ago. That’s all I want to say. I now have the secret of the splendid heels and I am unstoppable! Bwahahahaha!

*the answer is, of course, to order books from The Book Depository!

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Posted in lace, socks

Needles on fire!

Posted on Tuesday 28th November 2006 | 6 Comments

Yet another finished Christmas knit!

Pattern: Bertie!
Yarn: Artesano Alpaca Inca Cloud, Steel Blue, 2 x 50g (Which is really hard to photograph accurately. The actual colour is somewhere between the two photos.)
Modifications: I used an i-cord border, taken from the Backyard Leaves scarf in Scarf Style instead of the original garter stitch edging, and omitted the garter stitch rows at the beginning and end of the scarf.

So can I finally knit something for me? Not quite. Just got some socks for my sister to finish:

Observe the gorgeousness of the gusset:

Those wise monkeys know what they’re talking about.

And then it’s time for Endpaper Mitts!

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Posted in finished projects, lace

My favourite flavour of Pi

Posted on Friday 24th November 2006 | 11 Comments

It’s gloomy as anything outside today, but I can’t wait to photograph it any longer:

Pattern: Pi Shawl from Knitter’s Almanac
Yarn: Fyberspates hand dyed laceweight – 90% wool, 10% nylon
Modifications: Apart from knitting less rounds in the final section than the original pattern specifies, none! The stitch patterns in each section and the edging are all taken from Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls by Martha Waterman, which I really recommend as a source of a good selection of stitch patterns that fit easily into the shawl without having to alter stitch counts!

This is possibly the most beautiful thing I’ve ever knitted. It was so worth the hours spent knitting the edging which I thought would never be done. EZ invented a fantastic recipe for a shawl that could be as difficult or as easy as you want it to be. Me, I chose easy! But the delicate yarn helped to make it a bit special, and the pointy edge – my first ever “proper” edging – is divine. Did I say that the yarn was splendid? It didn’t split or do anything nasty and blocked beautifully.

Some more closeups: