Category Archives: WIPs

Oh, I am so fed up with the crapness of this camera! I nearly just didn’t bother with this post today as all I could get were grainy photos which don’t do the pattern justice. Hopefully this will be the last time I have to use it. *stalks postie*

Anyway, though it is hard to tell, this is the enigmatically-titled Stansfield 16 from More Sensational Knitted Socks. What I love about this book is that I can browse all the stitch patterns and find one that is going to be a doddle to memorise (but not too boring) and then knit mindlessly until the socks are done.

The yarn is from the stash again: The Natural Dye Studio Chi Sock (discontinued) in a suitably manly blue. Using up my stash is probably the one resolution that is going really well!

And an update to yesterday’s post: Lauriel is done! Unfortunately, a couple of the (plastic) snap fasteners aren’t staying snapped together, so I’ve had to quickly order some metal ones and will change them over as soon as I get them. But it fits beautifully and I can’t wait to take lots of photos to show it off.

I realised that there’s less than a week until my birthday, so I’d better get cracking on finishing off Lauriel if I’m to wear it on the big day!

I’ve never done this ribbon facing on the back of the button bands lark before. It’s not hard, although I’m not a fan of sewing by hand. Having twenty four separate popper bits to sew on is going to be the most trying part. Two down..!

I’ve been feeling a bit rough for the past few days, which hasn’t helped with my progress, although (touch wood) I am feeling better today and won’t have to go back to my doctor and force him to actually do his job and examine me. In better news, my camera has been repaired and is on its way home. Which means I can start taking decent photos again just in time for a FO photo shoot.

Apologies again for the rubbish photo. But Lauriel is blocking! I decided to wait until afterwards to add the ribbon on the back of the button bands, but I did sew on the buttons. Still don’t know whether to add more or whether it will be button overload. I can always add extra snap fasteners, anyway.

You can now properly see how much extra fabric there is at the front from the bust darts. There are a couple of plastic bags in the relevant place to pad out the front and help it dry evenly. I’m hoping it won’t take too long to dry, but even after jumping up and down on the cardigan while it was wrapped in towels, it still felt soaked. The yarn also bled an awful lot and turned the water a lovely pea green.

Of course I now have to decide what to knit next. Something small, probably, but there a still a lot of sweaters in the queue..!

Well, I’d probably be on the second sleeve by now if I hadn’t suddenly gone down with an evil virus. I felt fine on Monday morning and then slowly got worse over the course of the day. Yesterday I woke up feeling as if a thousand tiny people with hammers were inside my head. Rose went down with it too, so we’ve both been lying on the sofa feeling miserable. We’re both a million times better this morning, although my tastebuds seem to have gone on holiday and now Henry seems to have caught it as well.

One bright point yesterday was that my buttons arrived – great service from Textile Garden – and they are perfect. Except than they’re smaller than I imagined (I looked at 11mm on the tape measure and it seemed bigger, somehow!), so I will buy some more and have ten or twelve down the front.

I did shorter ribbing for the waist because it’s going to sit at the top of my hips and doesn’t need to be tight.

Anyway, I have 24 rounds of ribbing left to do on the sleeve and then it’s on to the second one. I am using two circular needles for this, because a) I didn’t have a long enough circular needle for Magic Loop, b) there aren’t enough stitches for a short circular and c) my dpns are Brittany Birch and the yarn just stuck to them and progress was ridiculously slow. It’s not my favourite method of knitting in the round, but it could be worse!

Don’t know if I’ll get much done today, but will try to get a few rounds in. I really want to wear this on my birthday and I only have two-and-a-half weeks to not only finish the knitting, but block it and sew on the buttons/poppers/ribbon! Not panicking yet..!

I have so much to write about today that there’s no time for standing on ceremony, so sit yourselves down and get comfortable. There’s tea and coffee in the kitchen.

Lauriel has grown.

Once I had got my head around the alterations, they were of course very simple. I find that reading lines and lines of text and figures makes no sense, but if I have the knitting in my hands I can see what to do much more easily. After the yoke is knitted, the back, sleeves and fronts are worked downwards, but with short-row shaping. This makes the back neck higher than the front and also reduces the number of stitches across the fronts by decreasing rather than wrapping and turning. However, to get a wider front than back, which is what I wanted, I did wrap and turn to gain an extra 12 stitches per side.

I had similar problems with the short-row bust darts which add an extra two inches in length to the front to get the fabric over the boobage without pulling the entire front pulling upwards and losing the whole point of having the sweater fitted under the bust. I spent ages searching the internet for a tutorial on short row bust shaping for cardigans knitted top-down and couldn’t find anything with step-by-step diagrams, which is what I really needed. Eventually, I just drew my own diagram so I could see what it was that I was trying to do and then twigged that I was supposed to knit right to the the end of the front opening edge and back each time, getting closer to the underarm side each time and picking up the wrap from the previous row each time – you don’t want to know what on earth I was doing before then! *blushes* You can see on the photo above that there is a lot more fabric at the fronts and it will never look right lying on a flat surface, but when it’s all done and on me, it’ll look perfect.

After I had decreased for the underbust shaping, I had a lot fewer stitches but the modifications weren’t over with yet. I am currently adding side increases all the way down to the bottom ribbing to allow for the fact that, while my underbust is 35 inches, the top of my hips – where I want the cardigan to sit – measures a much more generous 42 inches. It’ll still be a fitted cardigan, but it will fit ME and my weird shape. All I can say is that I am looking forward to knitting the sleeves which will be mod-free, unless I need to lengthen them for my orang-utan arms – which will then start me worrying about running out of yarn.

Because speaking of which, it seems that Rowan Calmer is being discontinued. I am miserable about this, because I have just discovered the yarn and it is gorgeous to knit with, soft, squishy and just brilliant. There is a petition here to save it, started by Amy Singer of Knitty, which already has nearly 1,700 signatures. So if you’ve ever used Calmer, want to use Calmer, or would just like me to be happy , please consider adding your vote!

I am about halfway through the chart for the leaf motif on the body of the cardigan, so not more than 30 rows away from finishing the entire body. I hope the sleeves progress as quickly, because I want this cardigan done to wear on my birthday on the 26th! The sticking point will be the buttons. They are purely decorative: the fronts fasten with poppers and the buttons are sewn on top, but I don’t have a clue what sort to use. My usual choices of wood or metal don’t really appeal, but I don’t think I want a green button that matches exactly, because they’ll look a bit dull. If any of you lovely people have any button suggestions, with links to said buttons for bonus points, I will be eternally grateful!

Louie finished? Check.

Holden Shawlette finished? Check – but still needs blocking.

So guess what I got up to yesterday?

I finally cast on Lauriel, that’s what! I am getting slightly scared now because I think that the yoke is going to be the easiest part. I thought that making adjustments to the 40″ size to fit 44″ boobage would be simple enough. The book even has a section on adjusting a pattern that uses Lauriel as an example and so it should be easy to follow using my own numbers, but I read it through yesterday and it made my brain hurt. So in my usual fashion, I am merrily knitting away until I have to actually think about what to do and then will panic.

Knitting with Calmer took a bit of getting used to, but once my swatch was done, I had got the hang of it. It has an incredible amount of stretch, so the trick is not to pull it when wrapping it around the needle. It’s really soft, too, and I’d probably have got further on the yoke if I wasn’t stopping to pet my knitting every five minutes!

Readers, I am on the way to knitting something totally for myself and it feels brilliant.

First up is my knitted widget for a Valentine’s swap on Ravelry where we have to knit something Valentine’s related either by colour or pattern name or yarn or whatever and I went with Louie the Lovebot, who I had wanted to knit for ages. Now, the pattern is only available from Knit Picks who, of course don’t ship to the UK – even for pattern downloads which are sent directly by email to your inbox. You still need to have a US/Canada shipping address when checking out on the website. However, if you type in Knit Picks’ own address as the delivery address, it works?! I half-wondered why I should give them my money because I don’t think there’s any other website that makes paying customers jump through hoops just to get a pdf, but I really wanted the pattern so I’d only be cutting off my nose to spite my face.

Now, you may have have noticed that my Louie doesn’t have a heart on his chest. Unlike all the other Rebecca Danger patterns, which are very much hand-holdingly simple, the only direction for doing the heart is to knit it in the round using the two colours. No clue is given to how she did it. I looked at the other finished Louies and found that people had used various solutions – duplicate stitch, sewing on a felted heart and intarsia in the round. I Googled this and discovered about half a dozen or so different techniques which I tried over about two days at the end of last week. None of them worked. Or, rather, they worked, but there was puckering or yarn showed through and I didn’t feel it looked good enough for something I was giving as a gift. I also could have just divided the stitches in two, knitted a front and back flat and then seamed, but I felt this would ruin the shape of the body. In the end I decided to go for the felt heart option and am just waiting for some felt which I will cut and glue to the chest in the same way that I’ve added monster teeth. I may do a little running stitch around the edge for decoration, or I might not.

So while Louie is on hiatus, I started the third and final swap knit. This is for a sock yarn shawl swap which uses stash yarn (woo hoo!). After finding something in the stash which suited my partner’s colour preferences (Cherry Tree Hill Sockittome (discontinued) in “Misty Moor”), it was hard to find a pattern that wasn’t getting lost in the colours. Eventually, it was a toss up between Multnomah and Holden and Holden won for the entirely superficial reason that I don’t like the wide centre bit on Multnomah.

It’s perfect for the yarn because even on the stocking stitch section, the colours are beautiful but very variegated and any stitch pattern is just going to get lost. The wavy lace on the edge will be fine, though. It’s a very simple shawl, so I’m hoping to make good progress over the next couple of days.

It’s probably a good thing that I don’t have the yarn for Lauriel yet, because I have a couple of other projects to work on first. At the end of last year I signed up for a couple of swaps on Ravelry, including a birthday swap where you exchange a package with someone that has a birthday in the same month as you. Had I thought about this more thoroughly beforehand, I’d have twigged that it would mean having something ready for February (d’oh).

So on getting my partner’s details this week, I had a browse on Ravelry for patterns that fitted with her preferences and cast on for a pair of Lusekofte-sque Mitts.

After the stranded socks, this pattern is a breeze! The pattern is well written and by this morning I have just the thumb of the first mitt to complete before I start the second one. Not bad considering I only started them on Monday afternoon. The trickiest part was the provisional cast on and then grafting said cast on with the live stitches which was very fiddlesome when the circumference is so small – and I’ve got to do it all over again..!

I’m using more stash yarn for these: some Wendy Guernsey 5ply which has probably been in my stash for six years, because I intended to knit the Chalet Socks from Folk Socks with it. According to Amazon, I bought my copy on 2nd January 2006! The cream yarn is the last of the New Lanark DK leftover from my Deep V Argyle Vest. (It’s three years since I knitted that, too.) I originally started off using some Rowan Classic Cashsoft 4ply for the contrast colour, but it didn’t work with the Wendy yarn – too slippy – and the New Lanark is much better.

This is the sort of almost-instant gratification knitting that I like best. These’ll be done and blocking by the weekend, by which time I might even have some sweater yarn to swatch with.

The first one for 2012! Everything feels almost back to normal today. The boys are back at school and Mr B is glued to his laptop. Last night we took down all the decorations, so it’s all a bit bare and dull this morning but it does mean that knitting gets more priority at last.

I started on Mr B’s birthday socks just before Christmas, which basically meant casting on and knitting a couple of rounds of ribbing before they were put away and forgotten about. The past few days have been more knitting-friendly, and I finished the toe on the first sock this morning:

Yep, stranded socks. He is bloody spoilt, my other half. The pattern is from the engagingly-titled Four-Stitch Reticulated Patterns section of Sensational Knitted Socks. (I’m getting my money’s worth from that book at last. ) More stash-busting with the yarn, as I’m using a combination of Cygnet Wool Rich 4ply and Patons Diploma Gold 4ply, both of which have been in my stash for a very long time!

I’m knitting the socks over 80 stitches on 2.5mm needles so I’m hoping they will have enough stretch. I can get the finished sock on my foot pre-blocking, which is a good sign. I’m also really concentrating on getting these done so that I can look to finally being selfish. So I’m off to knit!

Nothing on the needles today. The birthday socks are done and are having a nice bath before their photo session.

These are clearly not actually going to be birthday socks, but Christmas ones. It’s too tempting to not give Mr B two pairs of socks instead of one! Which leaves me with the dilemma of whether to knit another pair for his birthday. Maybe that’s just spoiling him.

Truthfully, one of these WIPs is actually a FO, but it’s not managed to get onto a WIP-W before now. (Blimey, that last sentence was a bit acronym-tastic!)

I came across Sirdar 3888 on Ravelry when someone was looking for the pattern and just fell in love with it on Rose’s behalf. I managed to get the pattern on eBay for not too much money and intended to knit it in the new year. And then there was a trip to Hobbycraft, ostensibly to buy stuff for Henry to build a WW1 trench for a school project (which is going well, even if it is as big as the dining table and will need two people to carry it…). I naturally needed to visit the yarn section whilst I was there and found some Hayfield Bonus Chunky yarn in a lovely shade of teal, which was so soft and cuddly that it ended up coming home with me.

I of course cast on immediately I got home, but then it was put aside for other stuff. As soon as Eriskay was done last week, it was pulled out of the bag and literally took a few days to complete. Chunky yarn rocks. So I have a preview of the finished cardigan, and a proper FO post will follow:

Now to my actual WIP. I was going to knit some more wee socks for Rose and then I remembered I rashly mentioned knitting Mr B some birthday socks..! Rather than knitting like a fiend mid-January, I figured I might as well start them early and be A Smug Sock Knitter again!

The pattern is the creatively titled 3×3 Cable with Moss Stitch from Sensational Knitted Socks by Charlene Schurch. I actually started knitting this pattern YEARS ago when I first bought this book, using some very unsuitable pure wool yarn. I didn’t finish them, which is probably a good thing as they wouldn’t have lasted five minutes! The yarn I’m using now, Regia 4ply Color, isn’t ideal as the moss stitch panels aren’t really showing up, but the cables are nice and plumptious and it’ll wear much better!

I am just over half-way on the first sock and trying not to think about the possibility of having them as festive socks instead. I definitely don’t need the pressure of deadline knitting when there are only 18 days to go ’til the Big Day!

I think the above photo speaks for itself. I have been utterly faithful to Eriskay for the past week and amazing progress has been made. The front was finished, front and backs joined, collar picked up and knitted, first sleeve knitted and attached and second sleeve about halfway done.

Months ago I mentioned that I was debating whether to knit the sleeves from the top down and there was a comment from Christine about attaching the sleeves using three needle bind-off – leaving the sleeve stitches live, picking up the same number of stitches along the edge of the body and binding them off together. I remembered this and decided to give it a go and it worked brilliantly!

So now there’s a tiny bit of knitting to go, a bit of seaming, some blocking and then finally – six months after it was started – this sweater will be done!

The bathroom is still very much a WIP, but things are slowly getting a little less all-over-the-place around here. Struan is done and blocking; I managed to find the remains of the plastic mesh I used for the previous incarnation of said hat, so all that’s left to do is a FO post!

So in the meantime I have started Rose’s second tiny sock:

I wish Mr B’s feet were this small! This is the result of about an hour or so’s knitting yesterday evening. I could absolutely knit tiny socks forevermore, but it would completely ruin my ability to knit mansize socks; they’re at the cusp of the boredom threshold as it is.

I’m reckoning on this sock being done today, then the remaining hat tomorrow and then I can dig out Eriskay. I have almost decided on definitely frogging the Honeycomb Vest I started for myself. After the festive period is over, I want to start something else for myself, and it’ll just bother me if I have to finish this first. Besides, it’ll mean I’ll have magically acquired two cardigans-worth of yarn for Rose.

Nothing knitted to show you this week. Struan still looks much the same, as I have been a bit distracted with a rather large, un-woolly WIP that is happening here:

Our new bathroom is finally beginning to take shape, which means no more pink bathroom suite, but currently no bath. I can’t wait until it is done, that is all.

A bit of new stuff and a bit of old stuff this week. I have started on Henry’s Struan hat, using Lion Brand Cotton-Ease. It’s very much like knitting with Rowan All Seasons Cotton (Rowan have this listed as a spring/summer yarn, which surely belies its name?!). Not the most perfect yarn for working cables as it doesn’t have that much stretch, but the stitch definition is great. You’ll have to take my word for this, though, because the colour isn’t great for photography purposes!

I have been a bit unfaithful to the hat though, with Mr B’s festive socks. I had a very lazy Sunday watching TV and it was the perfect mindless project to keep my hands away from the biscuit tin! I’m about halfway up the leg now so will probably have these done by the weekend and will feel virtuous that my festive knitting is done…

…however, I do have the urge to knit a little something for my little sister’s Christmas stocking. It just depends how I get on with the boys’ hats. Oscar still hasn’t chosen a design he likes and he’s away on a school trip this week so I can’t even pin him down to make a decision. He has his priorities all wrong.

More mitten/glove photos today, I’m afraid. Rose’s waistcoat is all done, so there will be a proper FO post to follow. And although I was planning to finish MrB’s socks after the waistcoat was done, I figured that gloves and hats for the boys would be needed before December, so they’ve queue-jumped.

The second mitten/glove is progressing really quickly:

I am genuinely amazed at how quickly they are working up. I suppose that all my other mitten endeavours have been stranded and that’s given me a less optimistic outlook on how long these things take. But these are just whizzing along. Even the ribbing on the second mitten didn’t take so long. I am on the horrible, finger-picking-up bit now, but then I have the nice mindless flappy top thing to do after that.

I hate the holes that are appearing when I pick up the stitches, though. I have tried to close them by pulling on some of the loose stitches and knitting them together with a regular stitch, but I suspect I will never be totally happy with them because I am anal a perfectionist. In the comments on the last post, Soo mentioned The Rainey Sisters’ Glove Guide which apparently has tips on knitting fingers and such, so maybe if this isn’t going to be my last pair of gloves ever, I will invest in a copy. I do have to say that Magic Loop completely wins over dpns for the fingers any day. Despite being a longer needle, it’s much easier to manipulate the tiny number of stitches on two needles rather than on three or four.

As an aside which is probably of no interest to anyone but me, I seem to be knitting more tightly of late. I hadn’t swatched for anything for a while and then for both Rose’s waistcoat and these gloves, I had to go up a needle size because I had too many stitches, which is very unusual. Said it wasn’t interesting! But I wish I knew why it was happening.

Anyway, I’m hoping to have these done and blocking by the weekend, so that I can start on Henry’s Struan and the hunt for the remains of the plastic mesh from when I made the last one..!

True to my word, I have been totally monogamous this week and worked solely on Rose’s waistcoat. Progress hasn’t been that quick because it’s been a real effort to actually sit down and knit it. The problem is that the pattern isn’t quite mindless enough to knit without looking while watching TV, but also isn’t intricate enough to be interesting and a challenge.

In the end, I had to have stern words and force myself to sit down and knit the right front, which is the end of having to knit the pattern itself.

Now I just have lots and lots of ribbing to complete. The collar was completed in an evening, and I now have the front bands and armhole ribbing to do.

I will probably sew up the side seams and then work the armhole ribbing in the round, rather than knit it flat and then seam. Other than that I am sticking to the pattern, although I may give up trying to pick up enough stitches for the button bands. I find that all these Sirdar patterns require picking up a crazy number of stitches – I posted before about giving up on the collar on Rose’s bobble vine cardigan because I just couldn’t pick up enough stitches and after about the millionth attempt, it was getting a little frustrating.

I am very much looking forward to finishing this now, because a) there are still a lot of other projects to be completed and b) I may have promised to make Henry some gloves as well as a hat…

Um, yes… I am having a bit of trouble concentrating on one project at the moment. I’m not starting anything big, but just lots of small things that never get done. I finished the first Manly Christmas Sock (hurrah!), got cracking on the second and then I saw the adorable wee knitted baby socks on Anna’s blog and got the sudden urge to knit some socks for Rose. The only socks I’ve ever knitted her were the Hugs and Kisses Baby Socks, which are far too small now, obviously. So I dug out the Priscilla’s Dream Socks pattern, worked out how many stitches to cast on thanks to the internet (the sizes are all US shoe sizing, although there’s not much difference really: a UK 6 child is a US 7) and got knitting. Or at least until the first one was done and then I realised that Rose really needed a scarf to go with her winter coat and started knitting the most boring strip of moss stitch known to humankind.

So lots of bits and pieces, lots already on the needles and I am being tempted by even more new patterns. I need a clear plan of action, I think, and to avoid all places where I might see new tempting stuff that will distract me from what I already am working on. So if you spot me queueing anything on Ravelry, feel free to poke me with something sharp and pointy!

It’s time I broached the subject of *pauses* Festive Knitting. There, I said it. In recent years I have scaled down hugely the number of things I knit but yet still I feel slightly panicked that I won’t get it all done in time.

So I started early this year on Mr B’s annual socks. All his knitted socks are now more hole than sock, and I obviously haven’t been keeping up with demand as at one point he had five or six pairs in regular, hole-free, use. I had hoped to knit a few pairs for his Christmas present as I have several skeins of manly sock yarn to be used up in my stash. But so far, I have just about completed one:

The yarn is Waterloo Wools Carleton in “Fisherman’s Bastion”, which was the May 2010 Sock Club yarn. Very manly colours indeed. He will definitely approve. I’m knitting this pair toe-up just for a change, still using my Ultimate Manly Sock pattern, but with the advantage that I can use Judy’s Magic Cast On and not have to do any grafting at the end. But big, UK size 11 (US 11½, I think) socks on 2mm needles – even mindless ones without any pattern – take a long time to knit. One pair will be an achievement in itself!

I have also started another Rose thing, completely ignoring the fact that I have plenty to be getting on with already. I have been doing very well with non-impulsive pattern buying lately, because the number of patterns I have bought over the past year or so doesn’t bear thinking about. A combination of having lots of time where I couldn’t do much but sit and surf, and the instant gratification of pdfs was just too much. So I have sworn off buying patterns until I am ready to knit them. This is proving to be harder than I thought as evidenced by the fact I am now knitting a new pattern…

I was waiting to buy Sirdar 1268 when it was available online from somewhere that didn’t charge a stupid amount of postage for a piece of paper. And then Sirdar 1952 appeared in my friends’ activity on Ravelry, I queued it, Googled it and found it on eBay with free postage and it was mine. I have justified this by telling myself that Rose doesn’t have any waistcoats so it’s filling a gap in her wardrobe.

The yarn is Jarol Heritage DK – the same yarn from my fated Baby Bog Jacket of last year. I never did re-knit it after frogging the over-wide sleeves, so the yarn is being repurposed. Unfortunately, the pattern is proving as tedious as knitting plain socks, so I am changing between the two projects at the moment and probably not achieving much progress either way. Hopefully my motivation will kick in and I’ll be a finishing fiend once again!

It’s somehow fitting that, on my 13th WIP Wednesday, I have a tale of bad luck and bad knitting.

I have spent almost as much time knitting this past week as I have been looking at every beret/tam pattern on Ravelry to find a garter stitch beret knitted in the round. I concluded that, as I couldn’t find one (and now someone is going to link to the one pattern I missed and prove me wrong), there was a good reason for it. It doesn’t work and trying to knit one is a Sisyphean task.

I found a few methods for working garter stitch in the round that apparently avoided the jog. I have tried them all and although I forgot to photograph all of them before I ripped back my hat to the ribbing yet again, I did take a photo of the last effort:

This used this method, which I think possibly works better with Magic Loop and/or a fluffy yarn such as used in the video. I also tried this one, which gave me an interesting spiral running up the hat and definitely wasn’t seamless. It works very well on the Thorpe hat, where there’s a small band of garter stitch, but clearly not on a giant, garter stitch festooned beret. The fact is that none of them did what I was really looking for, which was to make garter stitch look as seamless as reverse stocking stitch would look in the round. And it just isn’t going to happen because circular knitting simply doesn’t work like that. Anyway I think that, if it were at all possible, Elizabeth Zimmermann would have come up with one years ago.

So my next plan was to knit the hat in reverse stocking stitch.

I got quite far before I collapsed on the floor with boredom. It was tedious to knit and it didn’t even look like the hat I wanted in the first place! So that got frogged completely and I decided to just knit something else entirely. And maybe add a pompom on the top.

So behold Mayrose by Woolly Wormhead. I have had this pattern for a couple of years. It was the WW 2009 Mystery Hat pattern and so I conclude that I bought it during a mammoth one-handed surfing session when Rose was tiny and I was far too optimistic about how much I was going to knit. It has purl ridges on it which covered my need for garter stitch and is a very easy pattern to memorise, but isn’t boring. I knitted three pattern repeats while watching the final of The Great British Bake Off last night, and then noticed a unique design feature. Can you see it?

Somehow I managed to knit two consecutive purl rounds on the garter stitch brim. I have NO IDEA how I did this. And I’ll be buggered if I am going to frog it now. So design feature it is.

Over the weekend, when I was in a strop with considering what to do about the garter stitch hat, I may also have cast on another Rose-sized hat. *whistles innocently*

This is Nupkin, again from Bambeanies, and is great fun to knit. The bobbles are added entirely randomly when there is enough of one colour of variegated yarn to do so. I am using up more stash yarn, this time something-or-other from The Natural Dye Studio that I bought circa January 2006, because I remember starting to use it for some socks in Knitting Vintage Socks. (Might be a discontinued merino sock yarn called Nino, but not entirely sure!)

This will definitely be Rose’s last hat for a while, though, because there may have been decisions made in the boy hat department! More about that in another post, though, as this one is already far too long and there’s knitting to do.

This edition is subtitled “Kate Goes Hat Mad”.

As josiekitten pointed out, we’re having a sudden heatwave here, and any plans for snuggling up in knitted goodies are a bit pointless, unless you like sweating a lot. But I am ignoring the sun streaming through the window and the fact that the heating isn’t even coming on first thing in the morning, and I am knitting hats.

I wasn’t intending to divert from my vest knitting, but last weekend I was in H&M and saw these berets. A quick purchase from Get Knitted later, and I had some Sirdar Supersoft Aran in shade #898 – which coordinates perfectly with my Bitterroot – and a vague plan to knit my own version.

This is actually almost a day’s worth of knitting because I am trying – and so far failing – to find a good method for knitting garter stitch in the round without getting the little ridge at the beginning of the round. Next step is to try to watch some YouTube videos, I think!

My weekend was also spent tidying part of my yarn stash. (That sounds pretty, bad, doesn’t it?! It’s the biggest part, honest!) I found I had several odd balls of DK-weight yarn that had been swatched with, frogged, or left over from other projects. So I gathered them together and decided to knit Rose a couple more hats as well. I am still waiting for the boys to decide what sort of hats they want this year. So far all I have from Oscar is “green”…

Currently being blocked is Queenie from Bambeanies which was a super fast knit:

and I am also working on Quatra from the same book:

This pattern was written for sport-weight yarn, so I did some maths and am following the stitch count for a smaller size as I’m using DK yarn. The picot hem used a provisional cast on, which normally I would ignore and just pick up a regular cast on edge. But I decided to do it properly, and the result is much better, so definitely worth fiddling. I have found cute buttons in my button stash, too, so I think this hat might end up being the nicest one I’ve ever knitted.

Bitterroot is done, bar the blocking:

I did have a moment of panic when I was nearing the end of the shawl and the yarn was being used up very quickly, but I made it to the end of the cast off with about 10g left. Phew! I knitted the shawlette version, but using DK-weight yarn means it has ended up ginormous and will probably keep three people warm at once. And it hasn’t even been stretched out yet…

It’s waiting in the blocking queue until I have blocked my swap scarf. I now have some foam squares which will make blocking much easier, if I can tear Rose away from them:

I bought them from eBay – there are heaps of them on there and I think I could have got some even cheaper than I did, but I was a bit overwhelmed after scrolling through about 400 listings. They are huge, too: 60cm x 60cm (24 x 24 inches) and should do for most projects, though I can buy the odd one or two extra if I decide to go mad and knit something by Sharon Miller. I chose white to avoid the outside chance of the colours running and because I thought it would make them less interesting to a small person (I clearly have learnt nothing in the past two years).

The Kollage Riveting cardigan is still waiting for buttons, and I am giving myself a kick up the backside to go and find some this morning.

In other news, I am knitting myself a vest. *pauses for everyone to pick themselves off the floor*. I am completely rubbish at knitting myself anything but a vest is small and shouldn’t take too long and then I’ll actually have knitted something for myself that isn’t a hat or a scarf.

The pattern is Honeycomb from the Spring 2008 issue of Knitty. Apologies for the crappy photo. It’s wet and grey here today, and the yarn is navy blue – not a good combination! The yarn is an impulse buy from my favourite discount shop in town where I get my cleaning stuff and baking tins really cheaply. They had a basket of Robin DK in various colours for only £1.35 a ball, which means the vest will cost a smidgen over 4 quid to knit and if it’s a disaster, then again it’s only 4 quid. So far it’s working well and I’m close to the armhole decreases for the back. Cabling without a cable needle is probably keeping me sane with the twisted stitch rows, too!

And now here’s where I look like a supremely efficient and speedy knitter. Monday was a Good Knitting Day, though, and I got a lot of finishing done. (Tuesdays tend to be a washout because it’s Tumble Tots Day and by the time I’ve got the train, chased Rose around squishy shapes for 45 minutes and travelled back again, I am good for nothing for the rest of the day.)

The Scarf Swap Scarf is done and just needs blocking:

I wanted to make a really long scarf which could be worn folded in half and threaded through, but this meant that by the end, I was running dangerously low on yarn. So my plan for a knitted-on edging all the way round had to change to just an edging at either end. Once it’s blocked and ready for its FO post, I’ll put in all the details about the patterns I used. Right now I just have to think where on earth I am going to block a 60 inch scarf. I might have to get some of those foam squares…

Also ready for and actually being blocked is the cable-and-lace cardigan. Once I’d got the second sleeve done, the neckband and button borders where a breeze and now it just needs buttons and it’s also done!

(The colour is very hard to photograph indoors on a grey day; it’s more blue in real life.)

So while I’m finishing those off, I’m knitting Rose’s bear hat. This is now the third version of the hat because the previous one was still too big. When I did the maths to work out the finished measurements, I didn’t factor in any negative ease so it was still too baggy on Rose’s head, and hats should be snug. If this one is now too small, I might cry. And then just find another beanie pattern and stick some ears on it.

I have nothing of interest this week. You can pretty much take last week’s post and add a few inches on to the length of the scarf and that’s this week’s progress. Partly because that’s all scarves really are – strips of knitting that go on and on and on and then stop, and also because I haven’t been knitting as much as I’d hoped. Because of course it’s that time of year again, when I wince at the cost of a pair of shoes, buy dozens of shirts and trousers, and then spend hours sewing on nametapes.

This time next week the house will be empty, save for me and Rose and the cat, and knitting might actually get a look in once again.

Can’t believe how quickly Wednesdays seem to come around these days! Since last week, I have been working exclusively on my scarf for the swap, so today’s photo is of a long strip of knitting which doesn’t look too exciting so far:

I had originally planned to use a stitch pattern and edging combination from Heirloom Knitting, knitted in garter stitch. However, after swatching, it became apparent that a) the stitch pattern I chose was just too busy for use on a narrow scarf and b) garter stitch lace didn’t work with such a silky yarn (i.e. it looked crap). So then I had a minor crisis and swatched about a dozen other stitch patterns, none of which worked either.

But then I turned to the splendid Victorian Lace Today (which I haven’t used nearly enough since I bought it) and found the Diamonds and Triangles shawl. It had never really caught my attention when browsing the book, probably because it seemed a bit simple compared to some of the other patterns. But it works perfectly on a small scarf and the yarn, and is really easy to memorise (which is a bonus).

Once the scarf is long enough, I will work a narrow, knitted-on border all the way around to finish it off. No idea what I’ll be using, and I might end up making something up that matches the centre pattern. I did swear off knitted-on borders a few years ago, but this scarf is considerably smaller, so surely it won’t be as time-consuming and never-ending?! (Ha!)