Bag Bag and Knitting Meme

Aside from annoying things like work and sleep getting in the way, I've managed to knit quite a bit. I was going through my stuff the other day, and I found this project:

It's a bag made from bags! It's knit from strips of supermarket shopping bags which I've cut up (I'll show the technique in a future post) and knit. It's pretty easy to work with once you get used to it. It's just the rustling that can be a little disconcerting at first! When I first found it, I racked my brains trying to think of some use for the project. Then I realised - I can use it to keep my wool in! With that revelation, I started knitting. I knit til I ran out of strips, and then went looking for more plastic bags. I found a butt-load in the back of the cupboard that I had been hoarding for this very purpose.
This re-use, recycle stuff is all right.

I found this thing called a Meme on another blog:


Edit the list, bold for stuff you’ve done, italics for stuff you plan to do one day, and normal for stuff you’re not planning on doing.

Afghan/Blanket [working on]
I-cord
Garter stitch
Knitting with metal wire [not knitting but macrame]
Shawl
Stockingette stitch
Socks: top-down
Socks: toe-up
Knitting with camel yarn
Mittens: Cuff-up
Mittens: Tip-down
Hat
Knitting with silk
Moebius band knitting
Participating in a KAL [Knit ALong. Nup. That would involve contact with others. I'm a lone knitter.]
Sweater
Drop stitch patterns
Knitting with recycled/secondhand yarn [got some lined up]
Slip stitch patterns
Knitting with banana fiber yarn
Domino knitting (modular knitting) [dunno what this is]
Twisted stitch pattern
Knitting with bamboo yarn [if I ever get rich]
Two end knitting [dunno what this is either]
Charity knitting
Knitting with soy yarn [if I ever win Tatts]
Cardigan
Toy/doll clothing
Knitting with circular needles
Knitting with your own handspun yarn [if I can ever be arsed]
Slippers
Graffiti knitting (knitting items on, or to be left on the street) [why would you do that?? *horrified*]
Continental knitting [that is how I knit]
American/English knitting (as opposed to continental) [do it when the pattern requires]
Designing knitted garments [not very well]
Cable stitch patterns (incl. Aran)
Lace patterns
Publishing a knitting book [*snorts* yeah, right!]
Scarf
Teaching a child to knit
Knitting to make money [gettin' rid of stuff I don't really want, more like]
Button holes
Knitting with alpaca [do they give personal loans for that sort of thing??]
Fair Isle knitting
Norwegian knitting [not sure what this is - thought it was the same as Fair Isle]
[Actually, I wonder if they mean naalbinding??]
Dying with plant colors
Knitting items for a wedding
Household items (dishcloths, washcloths, tea cozies…)
Knitting socks (or other small tubular items) on two circulars
Olympic knitting
Knitting with someone else’s handspun yarn
Knitting with DPNs
Holiday related knitting
Teaching a male how to knit
Bobbles
Knitting for a living
Knitting with cotton
Knitting smocking
Dying yarn
Steeks
Knitting art
Fulling/felting
Knitting with wool
Textured knitting
Kitchener BO
Purses/bags
Knitting with beads [not knitting, but crochet]
Swatching
Long Tail Cast On [that's how I always do it!]
Entrelac
Knitting and purling backwards
Machine knitting [what's the point?]
Knitting with self-patterning/self-striping/variegating yarn
Stuffed toys
Baby items
Knitting with cashmere
Darning
Jewelry
Knitting with synthetic yarn
Writing a pattern
Gloves
Intarsia [isn't this the same as Entrelac?]
Knitting with linen
Knitting for preemies
Tubular CO
Freeform knitting
Short rows
Cuffs/fingerless mitts/arm warmers
Pillows
Knitting a pattern from an online knitting magazine
Rug
Knitting on a loom [working on]
Thrummed knitting [dunno...]
Knitting a gift
Knitting for pets
Shrug/bolero/poncho
Knitting with dog/cat hair [apparently that's not a hoax now]
Hair accessories
Knitting in public [not after all the sleazy horror stories I've heard!]

There! That was rather tedious, wasn't it?

Good and Evil

I had a day off today, all to myself! So I started two projects, both fairly short ones.

1. I haven't finished sewing up the first AIDS Baby Vest yet, but I started on a second one anyway, cause I had a colour idea:

I kind of have a mean hope that I can give the knitted-but-not-sewn-up vests to Boy's Mum and she can do that bit for me. I know it's for the babies, but I hate it so much and I always stuff it up! I'm a bad, bad person! *hangs head in shame*
(The new one's really cute though, no?)

2. After finishing the B-Scarf, I decided that fun-fur is evil and I have to get rid of it all! So I went through my whole stash and I found 4 balls of the damned stuff. I immediately cast on with the ugliest one - a burnt orange:

I thought a coathanger cover would be the quickest and easiest way of disposing of this distasteful defilement of my stash! I'm working it with two strands as well, so the ball will disappear even quicker. I can only work about 4 rows before I get thoroughly fed up with the stuff and work on something else for a bit. I forced myself to do a whole ten rows in one stint, though.

This is masochistic knitting at its best!

I'm calling it the G.R.O.A.N.S. (Get Rid Of All Nasty Stuff) Cover.

I've also had some ideas over the last few weeks:
* After getting the Jean Greenhowe book Bazaar Knits, I thought of making my own stuffed goodies. I like reading, so why not make knitted books? I like Melbourne, so why not a knitted Arts Centre spire? I even wanted to make knitted cars when I saw an ad for Top Gear. (Okay, that's going a bit far, I admit it.)
* I want to make a nice, snuggly cardigan with big, wrappy-aroundy bits on the front, and I found a really good one in the Paton's Zhivago Winter Wraps book:

[Picture from: Paton's Website]

I want to add sleeves to it; I don't think that would be too hard. I just keep umming and aahing over whether I can justify the purchase of yarn when I have this in my room:

This is where I keep my wool. (Darn it, perhaps I should have put the pretty ones at the front!) See the dangerously bulging bulges? This is where my stash lives, and once it was full, I was to buy no more wool. *snorts* A while back, it must have decided it needed a beach house on my bookshelf, a wing in my wardrobe, and a conservatory on the floor next to the door. I know that some people have whole rooms full of wool, but when you live in a 1-1/2 bedroom flat with 2 other people and a face-eating cat, you gotta draw the line somewhere! Unfortunately, my policy so far when I've seen drool-worthy but expensive wool is to buy 2 balls. (If it's on sale I might buy more.) 2 balls is enough to make a scarf. I'm sick of scarves! *sighs* So the stash just sits there, festering away, and occasionally burping out acrylic clones of itself.
* I can't remember the other ideas I had right now. I'll get back to you.

Wow .. I Finished Stuff!

A Knitting Miracle has occurred - I have finished 3 projects in 2 days! One of them was really hard, too!

Firstly, I finished the Craziest Lil' Coathanger in the World:

It was the first project I started after I finished the Babe Sweater, which was very fiddly and very white. I just wanted to go nuts! It was also a good chance to experiment with what would happen if I changed colour or changed from stockingette to garter stitch or vice versa, and what kind of effects I could get from that. It was pretty fun. I decided that it finishing it would be less annoying if I just left all the loose ends hanging, and added some fringing at the end to make it look like I did it on purpose. I really like it! I don't wanna put clothes on it!

Secondly, I finished the Urban Greenery series of coathanger covers:

I started them in June last year, but there's a very good reason why I took so long to finish them. It was the one with the black ribbon and the points that troubled me so much. I'll show you why:

Do you see any points in this picture?? I think not! I had forgotten that, with stockingette stitch, the edges usually curl up, and this effect would be even worse with a lacy edging! I don't know what I was thinking, cause I must have decided that I was too far into the piece by the time I'd noticed this to rip it out and start again. I must have thought I'd find a simple, easy way of fixing it after the knitting was finished. No such luck I'm afraid. Blocking it didn't work. (It's acrylic, duh!) Attaching a piece of ribbon to the back of each piece didn't work. Poking a piece of wire down the centre back of each one didn't work. Finally I resorted to this:

Sorry the picture isn't so good (neither is my camera) but it shows a long piece of copper wire (which thankfully I had left over from a failed macrame project) which is bent to follow the 'correct' edge, and sewed in place with black sewing thread. Yes, this was a massive pain in the arse! This is the sole reason why the trio of coathangers was left unfinished for 11 months. But today, I sucked it up. I finished it! *wipes brow* Now, it only leans back slightly wierdly all along its length. And you can only look at it from one side without crying. But I guess that won't matter when it has a cardigan over it!

Thirdly, I finished the B-Scarf, just in time for Bec's birthday! Yay! Boy helped me with the fringe. And with wrapping it. She seems to love it. She put it straight on and hasn't taken it off since. Yay!
[Sorry, I don't have a picture of this yet.]

I am sooooo ready to start some new things now!

Updates as they happen.... for once!

I have been knitting away like a mad knitting thing lately! Knitting in the car on the way to/from work, knitting in spare moments while I'm getting ready for work, knitting while I watch TV with my flatmates, knitting while chatting with Boy on messenger! etc etc
I have also been knitting while I listen to............

MY NEW iPOD!!!!!(Thanks to the lovely lovely friends who put in to get me one for my birthday!)
You see, I have discovered podcasting. There are podcasts about knitting! Lots of them! It's so exciting! So far, my favourite ones are:

* Lixie Knits It Live - This English girl is so adorable, I just want to eat her up! She only started in February, and the podcasts are only every couple of weeks, so I think I can catch up pretty easily.
* Lime & Violet - These crazy girls from the US talked about testicle bags, devil-wool and yarn-orgasms all in the first episode; I knew it was the podcast for me. Unfortunately though, I have about 35 eps to catch up on, they are an hour long and they come out once a week. But I think it will be worthwhile!
* The Knitting Cook - Combining two of my favourite things! A smart idea!
Ones I want to remind myself to check out are Craftypod and Proud to be Crafty (actually, they may be the same thing, I can't remember).

I'll move on, as I can hear you all snoring, to the lovely sexy pictures!

I've been working pretty hard on my first AIDS Baby Vest [see last post to find out what the hell I'm talking about] and I've nearly finished it!:

Only about 10 rows to go, and then all I have to do is sew the sides up. The sleeves are already built in, so I don't have to worry about them, just head on down each side. It went quicker and easier than I thought, and that's because I've tried to see knitting as a slightly different concept from before. When I go across rows, back and forth, back and forth, turning and plodding and grinding away, I think of each pair of rows ('out and back', as I've been thinking of it) as a single row, or single action. And I'll mark the stitch counter or pattern after each pair of rows. I've found it makes the knitting go quicker, or seem to go quicker, anyway! This probably wouldn't work for a really large project or with a stitch where it's harder to keep track of which row you are on. But it worked for me on this project, anyway!

Also, I've been pushing away hard on the B-Scarf (see last post) and I've nearly finished it! Lucky, cause you-know-who's birthday is tomorrow! Argh! But all I have to do is cast off and add the fringe (and swear on my life never to use fur yarn again!). Boy has promised to help me with the fringe - that way we can say the gift is from both of us! So that project is well on the way to all-good status.

Today I went to the big refurbishment sale at Spotlight, and this is what I bought:

Here we have:
* Knitting Essentials magazine. It has 59 patterns, not all of which are crap, and the other 100 pages are ads for different yarns. Oh well, some nice, drool-worthy shots, and at least you know how much everything si going to cost before you go. And there were some discount coupons in the back.
* some coathangers. Coathangers covers are so quick and easy to make. Instant gratifiction! And they're useful too.
* A bottle with a pressure seal. This is for my new hobby of making my own liqueurs. So far I've made Irish cream (twice), orange liqueur, strawberry liqueur and honey whiskey (twice). It's good fun! ;)
* A large jar. I got this idea last time I was at Spotlight. They had on display a huge vase made of clear glass with lots of beautiful, sexy wool inside it. I have a few balls of sexy-wool myself, and I thought it was a shame to keep it all hidden away, so I bought this jar to display them in. It has a lid so they won't get dusty, either. Brill.
* A knitting loom - a set of 4 kind of, giant Knitting Nancys, the kind I used to make Barbie clothes with when I was a kid. You can use them to make hats, scarves, boob tubes, any kind of circular knitting. I'd been coveting it for a while. I cracked it open and started working on the hat-size one, with the recommended ply wool, but it's turning out really wierd. It's much looser than I thought it would be - it even looks a bit lacy. I dunno. I'll see how it goes....
(Ironically, the ad for it promises 'no knitting'!)
* 3 balls of wool I got from the 99c bin. There was saddeningly little yarn on sale at this so-called 'sale.' I was very disappointed. The huge sale bin only had about 6 balls of scuzzy navy blue and marone acrylic at the bottom, a whole bunch of empty ball bands, and these three. Oh well, it's probaby for the best. I'm really trying to cut back. My stash has overrun the cupboard it was meant to originally occupy, and parts of it are now lurking in the bottom of my wardrobe, on my knitting pattern shelf and on the floor, cheekily in full sight!

I have been coveting a pattern in the Paton's Zhivago winter wraps [see original post], a vest-thingy with a voluminous front that you can snuggle up in, with sleeves added, but that would involve me forking out quite a bit for the wool, and lots of work, with a cardigan that's 90% done still on the needles, which I'm too scared to finish in case I stuff it up. Is there a support group for that?? I looked for a cool, huge, 60's style button for it at Spotlight today, but I didn't find one. Is that a sign?
I need help!

Addendum: Yarn Diet

Oh, by the way, I've discovered a few things while lurking on the net in the last few days. The mag that I waxed lyrical about a few posts ago, Interweave Knits, apparently has a new editor and the latest issue is not-so-good. Hopefully it's just jitters and things will settle down.

I've also discovered an amazing new website that I heard about on the Lixie Knits It podcast - Etsy. It's a bit like Ebay, but you can only buy/sell handmade items. Everything from knitted hats to toilet roll covers to fudge to badges. I've already spent hours gazing at the most amazing handmade items and coveting them desperately. I've decided I need a new purse, a painting, a body scrub, about 5 bags, a toilet seat cover, and a car rubbish bag. I just need a car to go with it. I'm going to register tonight. *gasps* The only problem is, I'm having a lot of trouble finding sellers in Australia - the search engines are very unorthodox and require a lot of bandwidth. I'm persisting.
I'm also considering committing to:

The rules can be found here. Basically, some blogosphere members are committing to go on 'yarn diets' i.e. they buy so much wool that it's just getting out of hand and they want to knit up a significant amount of their stash before they buy more. Some even have declarations such as "I last bought yarn on 3rd/blah/2007." It's a cute idea, and it reflects how I'm feeling right now too. My wool shelf is stuffed so full that I need to push the bags in with my foot every time I want to slide the door across to get to my clothes! And it's spreading! It's like some kind insidious virus. But I'm afraid of the C-word. I don't want to commit to not buying any more wool, even for a specified period of time. What if I come across some great bargain that's irrestistable? I'd fall straight off the wagon. I just can't do it right now. I have enough trouble sticking to my limit of 12 projects sometimes. Ah well, I'll just be philosophical about it. If the stash is meant to grow, it's meant to grow.

Weddings, Parties, Anything...

I've been a bit busy lately. But it's knitting weather again, and I just had to start a couple of new projects.

This is the 'B-Scarf':

It's a present for someone I know, for his/her birthday. Which may or may not be coming up soon. It's made of chunky green acrylic, pure blue wool, and eyelash yarn held together. I can't stand eyelash yarn!!!!! Or fun-fur, or feathers, or ostrich or whatever the hell you want to call the damned stuff. I have a few balls of it floating around, mostly given to me, a few I actually bought cause it was so cheap, I couldn't resist. What an idiot I was! It's such a pain in the arse to work with! Never again!!

I'm also doing a project in a charity that Boy's Mum is involved with. It's making vests for babies with AIDS in Africa. They are going to send over a shipment once they have a thousand. She gave me the pattern to make them with. Here's one I started:

They have to be made with 8-ply acrylic yarn and 4mm needles, which is a bit finer than I'm used to, and it's taking a while, but it's a worthwhile thing. I'm imagining churning out tons of them and using up my whole stash of acrylic! Yeah, right!

I'm also working on the Chunky Cardigan quite a bit, and I'm nearly finished! I'm onto the sleeves, which is the last bit!:

(I'm making both sleeves at the same time on the same needle, which is why they look like a pair of lungs!)
Well, I still have to join it all up of course, which is the hardest bit. That's where I usually end up making them look like utter crap. I really don't want to do that this time. I'm scared to finish the sleeves. The pressure is too much! Argh!

Accessories

I've bought some new things over the last few weeks. Here they are:

Here we have some things I bought from Ebay, in my first international transaction!:
* a pair of 25mm needles in a really cool, sparkly golden-yellow colour. They are not as long as I thought they would be, but oh well. They are still pretty cool!
* a set of 3 stitch-holders. You can never have too many. And these are different sizes/colours, so even better.
* 2 packets of point protectors (4 in each packet; only 1 packet shown). These are really handy! They fit over the point of your needles, and they work to: a) stop the points ruining the bag you keep the knitting in; b) stop the points from poking you at random when transporting the knitting, sticking your hand in the bag, etc; c) stop the knitting from sliding off the end of the needles - the most important function for me!! They seemed quite small, but they're made of rubber and even fit on 10mm needles, which is great. I'd been wanting some for a while, but couldn't find them in the larger craft outlets anywhere, so I bought them on Ebay! They weren't that expensive though, even though they came from the U.S. I'm very happy with them!

Also, here's an update on the pattern I've bought lately (I feel I have enough and know enough about them now to call them 'pattern' instead of 'patterns', the same way a farmer would say 'walnut' or 'head of beef'. Or maybe not...) :

* Firstly we have Interweave Knits, which I bought from MagNation, a totally cool shop in the city (I typed "titally cool" at first *sniggers*). It's fantastic! Many fantasy projects, a sprinkling of What The? projects, plus a couple of practical classics thrown in. I read on a blog after I bought it that it's very highly regarded amongst the cooler bloggers, so I was very pleased with myself. I think I'll put my name down for it at MagNation. (I already have my name down for Vogue Knitting, though I'm not the kind of girl who, as soon as she receives the latest copy of a knitting mag, jumps online and blogs all about it. Aren't you glad!)
* In the middle we have Jean Greenhowe's Bazaar Knits. It features all sorts of cute little projects, like a picture frame, play balls, a lemon-shaped pincushion, cactus figures, knitted cakes, etc. Jean Greenhowe is the master of knitted dolls. This sort of thing, normally:

But I saw this book at The Wool Shop a while ago, and it was different to her normal stuff. They were all small projects and more quirky and cool than cheesy and dorky (well, the majority of them, anyway). But it was a ridiculously exhorbitant price! So I lurked on Ebay for ages, just waiting... and waiting... and copies came up all the time, but they always ended up being exhorbitantly priced. So I waited....

I had an inkling that I would probably get the best price for it in the middle of summer, and I was right! I only paid about $6.20 (inc. postage) for it. Some of the middle pages are a little water-stained and ripped, but it's still readable. Yay!
* On the right is Paton's Zhivago Summer Knits, which I couldn't help buying on the way to work the other day, even though the season is all wrong and I already have a Zhivago book with winter knits in it. But I've decided I should knit tops, as I need tops, and this one had a lovely basketweave tank right there on the front! So I did what any pattern addict would do. I got it on the old eftpos cause I didn't have ten bucks in my purse. Hehehehe. One day, the basketweave tank will be mine. Muahauauauuaua!

P.S. Check out my new userpic! ;)
P.P.S. I'm keeping my Works In Progress page much more up-to-date than before. Check that out too!