So much can happen in a week...

Hey everyone, I've haven't posted for a while because I've been too busy knitting. For once! I've been working and working to get the coathanger covers ready for Mother's Day, and here they are! Ta daaaaa:

and a back view showing the crochet on the blue one:

I'm quite proud of that one, the crochet on it looks pretty good. And the mother in question seemed very happy when I gave them to her!

Speaking of visits to Anthony's Mum and Dad's house, I've now found myself making a cardigan for a 6-year-old boy! An actual garment, to be finished, eventually! Eek! They even have me believing that I can actually do it! It's from an old pattern, on 3mm needles, in yellow acrylic yarn. I've 3/4 finished the left front half already! It may actually be possible. I'll take my camera next time so I can get proof that I actually made it myself.

P.S. I also did quite a bit on my Lacy Scarf v2.0 today before I ran out of yarn.

*rubs hands together*

Here is what I bought at the Lincraft sale today:

Yes, I was quite restrained - I had to leave enough for lunch as well! So what you can see here is some standard cheap-arse acrylic for making coathangers, etc. (I am imagining that variegated one in a pebbly, reverse stocking-stitch) The piece de resistance: two balls of Sky Cloud. Ohhhh.... it's so pretty!! So expensive... I have to make something good out of it... I have to make it go a long way.... I feel so pressured! Actually I've been thinking of reviving my Lacy Scarf and re-doing it with larger needles, cause it's taking for-f@!cking-ever (that's the technical term for it) to finish! And the colour, while really nice, was starting to feel very monochrome (I'm using the term in a derogatory way there!). So I chose something that hopefully in my mind will go with that green cross-fingers, that I can use to make a new Lacy Scarf, based on the old one. The thought of what I'm going to do with the old one, with being half finished and all, makes me want to cry. But for the sake of knitting, one must make sacrifices.

Last gasp of the 80's revival (I hate sewing up!)

What I have started calling "The Glam Band" is finished. No, it's not a reformed Gary Glitter, it's my new headband!:

I started making it last month, and I ended up making it in between gifts and other stuff, but it was quite quick to make (I love big needles!) and I finally decided to rush it through this morning so that I could wear it today.
It's made of 3 strands held together: navy blue pure wool, medium blue pure acrylic, and a purple, slightly fuzzy yarn with sparkly bits in it that my best friend got for me when we went to New Zealand. It's called "Wendy Ice". Dunno why.

I wanted to use Kitchener stitch to sew it up at the back, but not being able to remember how it works, I had to look it up in Stitch N Bitch. Then when I realised that it wouldn't work with the garter stitch border, and having started it off 2cm askew and having to undo it and start again, I did the only sensible thing and just did some straight old whip stitch on its assss. Who would have thought that sewing 2 straight surfaces about 12cm wide would take over 20 minutes?? Only for the Barely Competent Knitter!

Even before I started sewing it up, though, I realised that the damned thing curled up at the edges! I thought that sewing it up would solve this problem. Nope! Here is my attempt to flatten the Band:

Needless to say, it didn't work. Perhaps blocking would. But blocking sucks even more than sewing up. So it can damned well stay like that. It's not that much of a pain in the butt to put on that way.

I did get to wear it today, by the way.

Momentous Mother's Day

Last weekend I had lunch with my boyfriend's parents. She knits. We talked about knitting. She gave me a project to start off for her. Toddler's cardigan in yellow acrylic, 3mm. It was great. Truly exciting. An inter-generational understanding developed. She talked about making me a cardigan. I'm so honoured! So I want to make something back (so to speak). I had a think and I thought, coathanger covers are safe and practical. Everybody needs them, right? And apparently blue is the way to go.

So I started the first one a few days later. I am making it in 'Pinstripe', it's a technique of slipping stitches to create stripes in the knitting. The good thing about it is the strands at the back create a double layer which will make the hanger cover more padded. Sorry no pics of the back right now. I might make them all in variations of this stitch, actually, because of that. Some of the 'plain' ones I've made have been very thin, as well as too tight, so you could see the wood of the coathanger through the holes (see here) [link defunct]. I increased the width from 11 to 15 stitches. Hopefully that will do the trick.

I am hoping to make a set of three.
Will she succeed? Stay tuned!

80's Glamour

I got bored with my boring old head-band, so I decided to make a new one. I wanted something more colourful and less monochrome, and thick and chunky, so I went through my wools until I found some that went together well. It's in a navy-purple colourway (ooh, how posh!) and I experimented with a few pattern combinations until I came up with this one. It's a wide band of stocking stitch, with a garter stitch border 3 stitches wide on each side. After a while I started to think that one of the older styles that I'd pulled apart looked better, and it's too narrow, but I'd already done so much on it, I couldn't be bothered pulling it apart and doing it again.

So here it is, for better or worse:

[the next day]: it's nearly finished now!

Woe of the Unfinished (Boring) Project!

I was doing something over summer! Really!

On a suggestion from a work colleague, I started experimenting with cotton, after complaining about how I don't knit in warmer weather because it makes my hands all sweaty. I hadn't seen many patterns involving cotton before, but I came across one for a facewasher that looked really pretty. I wanted to make a set of 3 for a friend for her birthday. Here are some pics:

Pink facewasher nearly finished; 'petals' for green facewasher

Close-up of pink facewasher
However, there is just one fatal flaw in the pattern - they are a PAIN IN THE ARSE to make! Each of the 5 petals is made separately using garter stitch, then they are attached together into a ring, and you use 5 double-pointed needles to reduce, reduce, reduce, until the hole in the middle is closed up. There are 3 main problems with this:

1) It results in a huge number of loose ends to weave in, which have to be done neatly because there is no 'wrong side' to the facewasher.
2) Working with double-pointed needles is bad enough, but FIVE of the damn bastards??!!
3) The method of increasing used to shape the petals seems very strange to me - it's one of the methods used when you want to make a decorative hole in the work. I reverted to the good old 'knit-into-front-and-back' method.

To make things worse, the author uses a special method of starting and ending each row, supposedly to keep the edges neat, but I found it made them look even worse, and was logistically almost impossible to do. I found the way the pattern was written was very wordy and confusing. Is this supposed to be for beginners? Phah!


Needless to say, my friend did not receive any home-made facewashers for her birthday. (It was last August.) So, it seems, the facewashers are destined to sit, not-quite-finished, in their little plastic bag for the rest of their days. I can't see me hating myself enough in the near future to pick up them needles again. The lady in the picture can press her own soft, springy chenille-cotton facewasher to her smug face all she likes. I'm moving on!!

On a more positive note, if not more interesting, I'm renovating my Works In Progress and Finished Projects pages in the next few days. (See the links to the left.) [this information is now defunct]

Boo!

Hi, everyone! I'm back!
I told you that as soon as the weather got cooler, I'd feel like knitting again. This is really a seasonal blog.
I don't have anything to show you at the moment, so here's a picture of me!

I just happen to be wearing my skinny scarf that I made a few months ago, though. See, not totally irrelevant!