Tortoise and Hare knitting

I have been thinking recently about how long it takes me to knit projects. I have it in my head, you see, that I'm a slow knitter. Recent events have demonstrated that I can in fact knit an entire decently-sized shawl in a week, which is not slow. And yet, I have some projects that are just taking forever, even though they are not that big or complicated. Let's have a look at my long-term projects, shall we?
First up is my coatigan. It's chunky yarn on 9mm needles. This goes at a rate of knots when I'm working on it. Therein of course lies the catch - when I'm working on it. I need to do a load of number-crunching to make the sleeves work, and it's tedious. The whole thing is too big to carry around, and when I'm at home I mostly want to work on simple things I can do while carrying on a conversation, listening to the radio or watching tv. So my poor coatigan gets left in its bag hibernating. I'm also not entirely sure that once it's finished I'll have the nerve to wear it. I love the colours and I love the way it fits (currently - I don't know how the sleeves will fit yet!), but it is very loud. At least compared to the rest of my wardrobe. I started it in April last year and have knit many, many projects to completion since then.
Next oldest project is actually my ripple bedspread. I started it in November last year. Its only crime is being big, heavy and hot. I got ill right after starting it and could only just manage the weight of a sock on my abdomen. By the time I'd recovered, it was too hot to sit around under a blanket. It's actually making steady progress because it lives next to my bed and gets worked on when I'm waiting for the spouse to wind down his stuff in the evening. As the weather gets cooler I'll be able to work on this more. Of course, I can't do too much crocheting at a time as it hurts my wrists.
Everything else is from this year. A pair of socks that I started in May. I can't make myself finish the heel flap. Seriously. I finished the entire cuff in 4 days and have been working on the heel flap since the 20th of May. It's so frickin' boring!
A pillow that needs decisions made about its buttonholes.
A Pomatomus sock that is starting to bore me as well. I've figured out how the pattern works, so I can just get on with it. However, now that I've figured out the pattern, it's an entire 72-stitch sock in 1x1 twisted rib.

Basically, I can knit quite quickly. But if the project is either boring, weather-inappropriate or needing more concentration that I want to provide? Well, it's going to end up just hanging around not getting much done on it. The big projects are the worst. The socks, at least, I can force myslf to work on by relying on them as my handbag knitting. The coatigan is a bit scuppered in that respect.

Mosses and lichens

Back when I was at school, I had a thing for botany. My biology teacher would provide me with woodland manuals, field guides, advanced textbooks... Anything, as long as it had stuff about plants in it. I abandoned my love of botany at A-Level because I really didn't want to have to study anything else in the biology lab. Practical experiments are not my thing, for lots of reasons.

What does this have to do with any form of needlework? Well, when I showed this to my husband, he commented that it was all the colours of lichen. And mosses and lichens were always my favourites.

Of course, if you look at it from this angle, you can just see the fabulous egg-carton effect of unblocked lace.

After a good bath and a rinse with hair conditioner*, my somewhat scratchy shawl now feels a lot softer and drapier. 20 minutes of pinning and stretching got me this marvellous thing:

And now that the ends are woven in and it's all dry, I can proudly present my finished Noro Triangle!

Pattern - Shetland Triangle by Evelyn Clark from the book Wrap Style

Yarn - Noro Kureyon Sock, 1 skein (1 golf ball-sized lump left over)

Needles - 4.5mm 1m Addi Turbo circular

Pattern mods - I knit 10 repeats of the fircone chart instead of 8 and added a single row of garter stitch to the end of the edging to help prevent curling. Bind-off was as per instructions in the Swallowtail pattern.

I loved knitting a shawl with fingering weight yarn. Unlike with the laceweight, I was never worried about it breaking or snagging. I threw it into a bag quite happily, left it on the couch, sat it on the floor, gave it a thorough scrubbing in the sink. Plus, it seemed to go much faster and I got a bigger shawl for fewer stitches. And it's a one-skein project! Love it! I have a sneaking suspicion that I may end up using my laceweight up and then knitting lace exclusively in sock yarn from now on...

I was happy to discover that the yarn seems to be colourfast. There was no dye in the water when I'd finished soaking, and none of the colours bled onto one another - not even where bright green butted up against white. I had been a bit concerned about that.

A 1m circular needle is ideal for shawl-making. It was approaching the point of being so long it was annoying, but even at the end my stitches weren't at all bunched up on the needle.

*A tip that I read somewhere suggested washing scratchy yarn in human hair conditioner. It sounded a bit weird, but it's not when you think about it. Conditioner is designed to smooth down the outer layer of the hair so that it becomes smooth and shiny. Human hair is a protein fiber. So is wool. Ergo, hair conditioner should have similar effects on both. I wouldn't want to try the theory on silk, which always seems to be the exception to the rule of protein fibers, but then I've never met a scratchy silk.

Things one can do on a 5-day weekend

Term is about to start, so I decided to take some time off before the influx of students rendered my life insane. I've discovered that I am able to do the following on a 5-day weekend:

• scrub, organize and tidy my kitchen
• wash 4 loads of laundry
• go to the cinema
• watch an entire season of the West Wing (among other things)
• knit 90% of a lace shawl

I was off Thursday-Monday. On Wednesday night, after eating dinner, I settled in with Spouse, a DVD and a skein of Noro Kureyon Sock. This was one of the skeins I acquired about a month ago with friends. I had originally intended to make socks, until I looked at the yarn more closely. It's a single-ply, so not hugely sturdy or abrasion-proof. It's not evenly spun, so in some places it's a heavy worsted and in others it's thinner than some of my laceweight. This would mean that the socks would not knit up consistently. And finally, it's really, really rough. Apparently it softens when you wash it, but the skin on my feet is very sensitive.

I concluded, therefore, that perhaps a shawl would be more appropriate for this rather lovely but scratchy yarn. A shawl is open and lacy, and so the thick-and-thin nature of the yarn wouldn't be so noticeable. It's customarily worn over other clothing, so the scratchy isn't an issue. And I just so happened to have a pattern for a lovely triangle shawl by the same designer who did the Swallowtail Shawl. The original calls for 500yds of fingering-weight yarn. The Noro was only 437yds, but according to Ravelry (yay Ravelry!), a decent-sized shawl can be produced with one skein of Noro Sock. The pattern is a single chart for the body, repeated as many times as one desires, followed by a 14-row edging chart. The pattern calls for 8 repeats of the chart; I've done 10 and am expecting to use just about the whole skein. I've got 6 rows and the bind-off left to knit, then I'm done.

I'm still trying to decide whether Noro yarns are worth the bother. They have fabulous colours and are all self-striping with long colour repeats. However, they are on the pricey side, often have breaks in the skein that throw the striping sequence off, and are FULL of vegetable matter. Picking bits out of my yarn is not fun. But this shawl is marvellous shades of green, and I don't even LIKE green! A company that makes yarn so pretty I go for colours I don't even normally like is definitely onto something...

Interim photos

I'm participating in a Stashalong, which in theory is supposed to be helping me with the not buying of yarn. I think we all know how that's going! :D Anyway, one can earn yarn purchases by participating in themed knitting over the course of a month, and I earned three skeins in August by completing some WIPs.

I was picking up some new circular needles that I needed for a couple of projects in the pipeline, and decided to pick up two of my three skeins. This one is going to become yet another scarf, and this one is going to be some over-mittens for my too-thin gloves.

iKnit Day part 2

The main part of the day was rockin'. I managed to get down to the Royal Horticultural Halls at about 10:45 for an 11am start. When I got there, the queue went around a side and a half of the block. By the time the doors opened, the queue had doubled. There were so many knitters, merrily knitting away despite the miserable weather. Just as the queue started moving the heavens opened, and I realized that I had left out my umbrella in my urge to have more space for yarn in my bag. Oops! Fortunately we all got in quite quickly, and there were plenty of convenient trees and overhangs to stand under. It didn't really start pouring until after we got inside.

After being presented with a programme and some iKnit badges the vast flock of knitters finally made it into the main hall. Since, in addition to my umbrella, I forgot my camera, you'll just have to imagine it! There were 4 long rows of stalls, plus more stalls on three sides of this enormous hall. The 4th side had a raised seating area where all of the workshops took place. Directly in front of the raised area was a catwalk where the vintage knits fashion show took place. Off to one side next to some of the stalls was a mini-theatre where there was some improv comedy stuff going on (I didn't see it, I just walked past).

The best part for me was realizing that I finally knew what I was doing. Last year, I'd been knitting for a while but hadn't done much other than working from my collection of magazines in the privacy of my own home. I hadn't really discovered Ravelry, and I wasn't participating much in the knitting group at work. Not this time! This time I spotted a shawl across a crowded room and raced over to confirm with its owner whether it was Kauni Effektgarn. (It was.) I had people come up and fondle my shawl, including one lovely lady who was also making a Swallowtail out of Posh Eva 2-ply. I gave advice on how much laceweight one needed to make a shawl. I commiserated over how expensive baby alpaca is, and pondered whether one could really justify spending one's lunch money on roving. (Not really, but fun to think about.) I was able to go from booth to booth and enjoy looking at the pretty things, but choose not to buy them because they weren't things I'd enjoy knitting.

There were so many people just having a good time, and it was a lovely atmosphere. There weren't thousands all fighting over the best sock yarn, and the stalls were spaced far enough apart that it wasn't claustrophobic. There were loads of tables and chairs set up all over the hall so that knitters could actually sit down, eat a snack and do some knitting. I saw ladies winding yarn together. I saw babies. I saw proto-babies. I saw spinners and angora rabbits and knitted doughnuts. And I remembered to take snacks and drinks with me this time, so I didn't have a mid-afternoon panic attack and dizzy spell. (That was oh-so-fun at Ally Pally last year. Not.)

So many happy knitters in one place was a marvel. It was like the world's best knit night at a local yarn store, only with more yarn and not ending too soon.

My oh my oh my

iKnit Day is going to take a couple of posts to relate, especially since I forgot my camera and need to wait for my friend to email me some of her pictures! I had an absolute blast and am so glad I went. Today I'm going to relate the delights of my shopping.

Like last year at the Knitting and Stitching Show, I went yesterday with a list of things that I wanted to get. Unlike last year, I only bought things on my list. I'm really, really satisfied with my purchases as a result. Here's the entire haul:


So, bit by bit. The one things that I was absolutely commited to getting was some dark blue Wool-Ease to make my hub some socks. He's been feeling a bit left out, I think. This may be cheap not-good yarn in the US, but over here it's nigh-on impossible to find solid-coloured washable wool blends that don't feel like plastic. Discovering that there is a UK supplier of it who doesn't even mark the prices up that much was a treat.

I also went looking for scarf yarn, because clearly the 25-odd in my cupboard are not enough! I wanted something to make a very complicated number from Knitting New Scarves, since I've had that book for months and not yet knit anything from it. I also wanted to make a double-knit argyle scarf from Son of Stitch 'n' Bitch. (Double-knitting is where you knit both sides of a mirror-image fabric at one. That is, one side will be green with a black pattern and the other side will be black with a green pattern. Very groovy.) Three skeins of organic Devonshire merino will do the trick nicely! Husband was tickled to realize that the mill that made these is about 5 miles from his family's home.

I explored the lucky dip at the Knitting and Crocheting Guild stall and came away with a skein of pink and purple chunky yarn that will someday become a hat and mittens, in all likelihood. I like having the odd skein of chunky yarn around for instant gratification projects!

Two packets of the world's yummiest commercial fudge, one for me and one for husband. Unlike most European fudge, this is the crumbly kind rather than the chewy kind. I was thrilled. Chocolate for me and hot ginger for him. Mmmmmmmmm!

Then I decided to make a commitment. I am going to take up spinning. No more umming and ahhing over it. This is 100g of undyed merino. It's going to be my practice roving to get used to my spindle. And this is about 400g of what I think must be a silk/merino blend. (I forgot to ask. I was pretty excited yesterday.) It is just delicious, and smells so good!

Things I didn't buy include 2400yards of Cherry Tree Hill laceweight for £25. I was sorely tempted, but it wasn't a solid or semi-solid and I would never actually use it for a shawl. I didn't buy any alpaca sock yarn because I'd wear through it in a week. In fact, I bought neither sock yarn nor laceweight. Decided that right now I don't need anymore (especially since there are 4 skeins of sock yarn in the post to me right now!), and I'd rather have things that I want to use immediately instead of sticking them in the stash to hibernate. I did kinda regret not going back to the lucky dip and trying for some Rowan, but it's ok.

Of course, the friend with whom I spent the day offered me a ticket to come with her to the Knitting and Stitching Show next month. She has mobility difficulties and gets a free ticket for an assistant. Since her husband has no interest in fiberarts, it makes a lot more sense for me to go with. Judging from the sheer number of vendors last year, I will certainly be able to make up for yesterday's restraint!

Slowing down somewhat

September is always less productive in the world of my hobbies than any other month. This is because it's the start of the academic year, and I have always been either in full-time education or working in education. Or sometimes both! So right now at work we are rushing around trying to get everything done on time, and when I get home I don't necessarily have the energy to focus on a complicated knitting pattern. I've been crocheting my afghan and playing a lot of video games as a result!

I've also been indulging in a long-neglected hobby - my embroidery. Several friends and acquaintances have recently been spotted with embroidery in hand, and as ever, seeing someone else doing something I enjoy has inspired me to do it myself. I fished out a big pice of counted cross-stitch that I've had on the go for a couple of years and have actually been making progress. I find embroidery involves a lot less concentration than knitting, for some reason. I'm still craving yarn between my fingers, but I would like to spend the autumn working on both needlearts, not just one or the other.