Addictive lace

I've long avoided 'official' lace patterns because I'm not sure I would really wear a shawl or shrug, plus I have an inbuilt fear of lace - although I have knitted several pairs of socks and other garments with sprinklings of lace and am not unfamiliar with the various devices and stitches that make it up.


But I decided a couple of weeks ago that 2009 should be the year that I finally try something truly lacey, and my recent Kidsilk Haze obsession continues, so I picked out something and cast on.
I am not knitting in Kidsilk Haze, however, I am knitting in Drops Kidsilk, the cheaper version imported by Scandinavian Knitting Design. Drops seem to do a lot of similar yarns to Rowan, but generally about 25% cheaper - in this case it is £5.15 for a 25g ball as opposed to around £7 for the Rowan equivalent and so far I have not noticed any difference in quality. (I just found my first knot too, so it seems they are taking imitation very seriously, warts and all!). Drops has an excellent range of colours too, the only problem I find being that the colour charts on the SKD pages are not hugely accurate.

Having tried to photograph my knitting for the blog and having utterly failed to take a photo that gives any vague approximation of the colour, I can see what they are up against! That being said, Birgitte and Bruce have proved very willing to try and describe the colours over the phone, and of course I'm sure you can always exchange the yarn if it does not suit.

For your info, I would describe the colour of the yarn I'm knitting with as a kind of 'mushroom' - although that would be the colour of the cap, not the gills, and the colour of the cap when the mushroom is slightly past its best. Which is not the most snappy of decriptions!

The pattern is also a Drops pattern; 108-8. Drops has hundreds of free patterns (also available through the SKD website - I like the fact that they are linked directly the yarn type so that you can just click through and get dozens of choices). Do be warned though, there is a lot of dross in there too - be prepared to search through some scarey 1980s style geometric designs and see past the batwing sweaters.

The shawl I am knitting


The jumper I will never knit

Some of these patterns have been criticised for the rather jumbled way they are written - perhaps something is lost in translation from the original? In fact the last one that I used, the Felted Slippers in the bulky Eskimo yarn - I followed a version that had been rewritten by a Raveler to make it easier. This time I am on my own, but after reading and rereading it several times, I DID finally work out what I'm supposed to be doing and it HAS proved to be fairly simple so far. However I did find a lack of clarity in the pattern, and some repetition in the way it was worded which I found confusing. If you are a beginner or inexperienced knitter, you may need some help to decipher these patterns.

So far so good with the shawl, it is proving addictive and I'm loving seeing the pattern emerge. But I'm hating the rows getting longer each time - maybe next time I will do one that starts on the longest side and decreases, although it may be difficult to motivate myself for a pattern that starts 'CO 824 st' or whatever!

Well-travelled socks

I give you Queen of Cups in Cherry Tree Hill Supersock Solid (as-yet unblocked).

These socks have been around the Kent coast by bike (well in the panniers to be precise, they weren't actually doing the pedalling), to Cardiff and back by train, over to Ireland - Waterford followed by Dublin - and then across the Atlantic to Pittsburgh via Chicago and back to London. So well-travelled for such young socks!

I enjoyed the pattern although it is rather complicated and it wasn't till I was nearly finished with the second sock that I finally felt like I could do it without referring to the printed pattern. Although I knitted them on 2.5mm needles they are still a little loose and I'm afraid they might get even baggier with blocking and wearing. Also I wasn't very happy with the edge I got from my long-tail cast-on, I would probably do a different version (or perhaps a turned over picot edge) if I did the pattern again.



My work trip to Dublin also gave me some time for reflection (sorry, no pun intended!). It's now coming up to 10 years since the end of a long-term, long-distance relationship with a Dubliner, which meant I spent a lot of time and experienced a lot of emotions in this city. And it's only the second time I've been since the relationship finished, and had time to muse on my past. The first time was almost a pleasure, remembering times past, revisiting places we used to frequent and reliving shared experiences. But this time was a much more melancholy experience - so many things have changed and places have been demolished or refurbished that it is no longer the Dublin we knew. Even the Winding Stair now has a posh restaurant instead of a casual cafe where we used to spend hours. There's the tram, there's the spire, and there's the boardwalk along the Liffey. Bewley's on Westmoreland Street is boarded up. Before you know it, they'll be building a proper link to the airport...



Our annual trip to Pittsburgh was more predictable. I know this photo isn't really representative of the 'city of bridges', the now famous home of the Superbowl and Stanley Cup winning teams, and the venue for the next G20 summit, but I always stop and look at this car park and enjoy its slightly wacky curves among all the straight, tall buildings of the downtown area.

Normal service will be resumed shortly

Oysterband, Wychwood Festival

Yes I am still alive and I'm still knitting. I'm sorry about the radio silence of late - this is the result of being uninspired to write about knitting, and having a bit of a crazy social life.

A trip to the Wychwood Festival (excellent bands, superb weather!) was followed by several days of biking in Kent (Broadstairs - Deal - New Romney - Dungeness - Rye - Tenterden) and an overnight trip to Cardiff.

Best fish and chips ever? At the Ship Inn, Rye. (A great place for food and fonts too - it's got a whole Festival of Britain thing going on!)

The boardwalk at Dungeness

Tomorrow I'm off to Ireland for work for a couple of days followed by a few days in the office and then the annual trip to Pittsburgh, USA. It's safe to say that things are going to be a bit quiet around here for the next couple of weeks. Apologies for the lack of posting, hope to be back soon with socks to show you.

Professional finish

I thought that Lucetta deserved some professional photos - since she is my new Favourite Jumper - and so I got the talented and gorgeous Gareth Gardner to take some. I don't think he's done too shabby a job, and he didn't charge me either, which was nice ;-).

Finished object!

Lucetta
Rowan Kidsilk Haze

Knitting news

Despite the lack of posting, I HAVE been knitting. Generally as deadlines approach, blogging is the thing that has to give in my life, which is why there are weeks of silence every couple of months.


Lucetta is finished, albeit still in pieces and no easier to photograph. The finishing will begin tonight, and should be completed by the weekend - I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to look like in this.

I don't know if it's going to be a success or a frumpy failure.

And I think that's what is delaying the finishing - I'm not normally the sort of person who hates sewing up. If you never see this item mentioned again, you can assume the worst.


Meanwhile I have been amusing myself by concentrating on a pair of Nordic Star socks from Vogue's Ultimate Sock Knitting book. I idly cast them on as a way of using the single ball of orange yarn, combined with some grey sock yarn I found in my stash. Halfway down the leg I started wondering if perhaps I might need more than just 50g, considering the stranded knitting theoretically uses up to twice the amount of normal socks. What a good idea, badly thought through!

Oh well, it might make a rather fun alternative Christmas stocking if I run out of yarn after one sock!

Small steps to weaving

It's now almost a year since I bought myself a new toy, courtesy of Patricia, a fellow Raveler. At last I plucked up the courage - and found the time - to make a start!


This is a 4-shaft Dryad table loom that I bought second-hand from Patricia's friend Lily, who was selling reluctantly after years of happy weaving. As well as the loom, which was transported home in the back of the car from Loughborough, I bought a copy of Deborah Chandler's book Learning to Weave.

Back at home I cleared under the stairs, bought a new table from Ikea, and set up Crafting Corner - loom on the top, sewing machine, sewing basket and various knitting and dyeing supplies underneath - and promptly let it fester for nine months. Perhaps I should say that it was simply the gestation period?

I kept thinking about starting but kept stalling. Should I go on a course? Set aside a weekend for experimentation? Get someone round to help me?

My first hurdle to clear was to get myself some method of measuring out the warp, which is the long bits of yarn that run from front to back and which you weave through. They have to all be the same length, and have to be wound in such a way that you can lift them off whatever you have measured them on, and place them onto the loom with minimum fuss.

Warping boards can be quite expensive and are large items which take up a lot of space - if you have plenty of wall space they can be hung up, but that's not an option available to me. So I availed myself of a set of handmade warping pegs from a retired teacher selling on Ebay for £10; they can be clamped to the table at whatever distance apart you require, and the warp is wound round and measured out on them. A special figure of eight manoeuvre before the last peg keeps the warping threads in the right order and makes it easy to count them and transfer them to the loom.

One of the things I particularly enjoyed about warping the loom was the terminology associated with the process. To be able to state that I had sleyed my reed (as in a Facebook post 'The Knit Nurse has....sleyed her reed') made me feel immensely proud, as well as slightly smug, as if I had learned the password for some kind of secret society!

I allowed myself to enjoy the smugness for a few minutes, since I knew that this was only the tiniest fraction of the process - it was a great feeling that I had managed to teach myself to do this, but only a tiny step towards the summit.

For the uninitiated, sleying means threading - and the reed and the heddles are both parts of the loom which the warp passes through. They keep the warp at an even distance apart (the reed) and are raised and lowered in different orders and combinations (the heddles) to make the shed (the gap) through which you pass your shuttle, carring the weaving thread.


Check out my reed - it's fully sleyed!

Sleying takes quite a long time, a good eye (which thankfully I have) and you can also get special tools to assist with the threading. I fashioned my own version of a dual-purpose sleying/heddle hook from a bent paper clip.



Once sleyed, the warp must be tied to the front and back aprons and wound on to the starting point. Deborah Chandler's book describes several different methods of warping a loom - from the front, from the back, and another version which is a combination - in great detail. Sometimes in too much detail in fact, leaving me flipping the pages impatiently to skip whole paragraphs debating the pros and cons of each version in an attempt to get to the next set of instructions.

But with plenty of instructions, photos and diagrams, the process was fairly straightforward, albeit somewhat exhausting and time-consuming. And I made it eventually, learning quite a few things along the way (which no doubt I will have forgotten by the time I next warp a loom!).

The next step, to start weaving, presented me with another obstacle - no shuttles! Not to be deterred, and given some impetus by the success of the homemade sleying hook, I devised a couple of shuttles out of some very stiff corrugated cardboard. I wound them with the weaving thread, and started to weave 'tabby' (another secret handshake!). Unfortunately the shuttles proved to be shittles, bending in the middle after very little use (whose stupid idea to cut the corrugated cardboard that way?!) and annoying me because they were very difficult to pass through the shed without catching on the warp. I persevered for a while, until the opportunity presented itself to go to the Handweavers Studio in Walthamstow to buy some proper stick shuttles.



Please admire my first attempt (using shittles) and anticipate how much improved the next bit will be, now that I've got proper shuttles! I will do my best to live up to your expectations.

I'm not sure whether I am going to really take to weaving - I guess the real test will come when I get past the process and on to the creative side. There seems to be lots of calculation involved in designing ones own weave, and I am reluctant to let too much maths into my life. At this point I just want to explain that I have a degree in civil engineering (a large part of which was maths), but I now work in the media, where words are my daily bread. I suspect studying for the degree might have crushed any interest or expertise I had in maths and science. However, if I take to this weaving lark, I might make an exception - I'm certainly not going to let it stop me from trying!