Sleevies

There's a joke about "sleevies"; I won't repeat it here for fear of a great groan of derision. But these will be sleevies quite soon. I have been knitting a jacket since darling daughter bought me the wool for my birthday in August (a "significant" one). She really shouldn't have but I had been wanting to knit up a pattern I found at a Knit and Stitch show we had been to several years ago. It was on my "when I've finished x,y,z and all things in between" list.

The pattern begins with the words "cast on 503 stitches" Not for the faint hearted then, but it is a lovely one; the body all knitted in one piece. It is the "Venus Coat" from Purl Alpaca designs. Like my previous jacket I have no illusions that I will look all sylph like, as per their model, but I thought it a lovely design and I've never knitted an all in one garment before so was looking forward to the challenge.

As I have reached the sleeves, you'll gather that the main body of the jacket is now completed. Every row of the "skirt" section took a Very Long Time, but was worth the effort. The pattern involved lots of "yo, sskpo, yo K2tog, yo ......" instructions, but the resulting open fabric will have a lovely swish to it. It was fascinating seeing how the pattern maintained the lacy open skirt while reducing the bulk up to the 3/1 rib body. The sleeves are now nearly complete and I face the final hurdle. In this case it is the fact that there are no making up instructions - no, really, there aren't. It just says "FINISHING Fasten all loose ends". I have looked and looked, and there is no small print hidden just beneath the front picture, or tucked away in the bit showing the measurements. I'm pretty sure I can work it out. At my advanced years I jolly well should be able join shoulder seams and neckband and set in a sleeve, but I think an email to the company might be in order, just in case there is a catch! 

In other news, I am considering moving all my stitch/textile/yarn related posts to my other blog - one I started in 2017 in an attempt to take part in the Year of Stitches project. (I lasted 'til May!). Perhaps that would be a better place for textile themes, leaving the current blog for my more family, garden and pondering posts. "An Elbow's Length of Thread" seems a more appropriate title for stitch related things. I wonder about the variety of posts here; perhaps the blog's title doesn't reflect content; can I manage to keep two blogs going? If I keep everything here then "An Elbow's Length" will just have to go!

What do you think?

A week of finishing

I have been busy this week getting up to date with a couple of projects. First a quilt I have been making as part of the online Studio11 workshops which Christine is running, having been rather scuppered by Covid. I blogged earlier about the project with Coronavirus as a theme; that is still ongoing as I've been doing too much thinking and not enough doing, which is often a failing of mine. However her "Potato Chip Quilt" project was straightforward, and took much less thinking about to achieve. There seem to be several variants with this name: one is a series of blocks with a square at the centre and a different coloured border on each square; another, similar to the one we made, consists of strips joined with a diagonal seam. The one Christine teaches comprises a pile of fabric strips of a consistent width but differing lengths and a pile of squares the same dimension as the width of strips. You make a long, long, looooooooong strip by alternately stitching strip, square, strip, square at random. The strip is then seamed and trimmed several times until you have a rectangle. Sounds very simple, but you have to get the maths right in order to know how big your quilt will be, and to make one that has sensible dimensions. 

It is all finished, 

quilted with a design I based on some of the fabric, 

 

with some hand dyed fabric as backing

 

I am really pleased with it, and have enough strips left (my poor maths!!) to make another of a similar size, though perhaps with less random and more deliberation.

Then there was my Noro jacket, started back in 2018. It too is finished, though currently awaiting a decision on buttons. 

 

You will see that I ignored the Noro "just make it random" philosophy (be "charmed by the non-uniformity, unevenness, & coarseness of nature"), I prefer to mirror the colour changes. This did involve quite a bit of reeling off from the start of the ball to get a match, but I used those bits in the back to vary the changes where no matching was needed. The yarn feels lovely knitted up and this jacket will get a lot of wear I hope, but I'll probably steer clear of any future Noro temptations. Beautiful as they are, with such a high price I don't like feeling that they are using a bit of marketing BS to cover flaws in both the yarn (which did sometimes fall apart in my hands as I was knitting) and the multiple knots and joins per ball (presumably because the yarn fell apart as it was being spun).

And yes, I am decidedly less sylphlike than the model in the pattern, but hey ho, I am somewhat older than her as well, and did once have my sylphlike moments!! The cat chaps don't mind, so long as they provide biscuits their humans can be any size they like!

More sparkle

Well my first attempt at Or Nue is completed. I am pretty pleased with it, despite the slightly suggestive bulge at top left where I tacked down the thread on the back at an angle rather than across the back of the border threads - just don't think of Mick Jagger in tight trousers and you'll be fine!

It has now been tucked into a small box frame and sits on the good man's mantlepiece in his study where it catches the light coming through the bay windows and reminds him that I love him every day, not just on our anniversary. And yes, I did manage to get it finished for the special day and, yes, I did have enough of the gold thread to finish, so didn't have to investigate the scrambled muddle of "less gold" gold thread.

I really enjoyed stitching this, though I'd probably work any future projects in slightly slower time: all that peering through an illuminated magnifier and stitching for long periods resulted in a migraine and very stiff neck and shoulders once it was done. The combination of simple stitching with attention to the finer detail felt very mindful, and listening to my playlist of medieval music provided a lovely and appropriate background. However, enough stitching for now. I have returned to a knitting project that I started more than two years ago - remember that lovely Noro yarn? I lost confidence when I got to the sleeves; the increases in combination with a lace pattern, not something I've done before, so it got tucked away. But I needed something big for my eyes to focus on so out it has come again and I have promised a friend and fellow knitter that I will finish it in time for our next meeting for tea and cake, whenever Coronavirus allows.

I was right though, the increases on the sleeves are rather tricky, but I won't be beat this time!

updated yarn

A yarn can be something that you knit or weave or even stitch with, or it can be a tangled tale with twists and turns and little diversions along the way.

The first meaning is obviously what the image below is all about. Yes, a little while ago I treated myself to some lovely Noro yarn, on sale in a very fine wool shop near where I live, which was closing down. Both my loss and my gain. Then a couple of weeks ago I went out with beloved daughter to buy a dress for her for our wedding, and was lured into buying yet more yarn, as one is from time to time. 

I felt it only right that the less recent purchase should be knitted up first, so here is the knitting in progress, along with the pattern.

I have to say, I don't think I'll look anything like as fey and girlish in my version, but (and this is very important to me) the cardigan will be symmetrical across the front, not all skew whiff like the illustration in their pattern book. I have puzzled over this for some time; why oh why are all Noro patterns knitted up all any old how in relation to the (absolutely beautiful) colour changes in the yarns? A brief bit of research online found me this little gem of a phrase from the "blurb" on their website.

"Harmonize natural unevenness, asymmetric pattern and complex color to portray the beauty of the nature. Taking sufficient time to dye and yarn natural flavors and tenderness of materials to preserve their original characters"

Well - apart from the delighfully idiosyncratic translation from the Japanese, I guess the "asymmetric pattern and complex colour" explains the lack of symmetry. But when did you last see an asymmetric butterfly, or flower, or bird's wing pattern, or tabby cat's stripes? 

Nope, just can't be doing with all of that. My cardigan will have, I hope, perfectly matched colour changes across the front and the sleeves, which will give me great satsifaction. Yes that does require hunting through the remaining balls to find the one which starts as near as possible to the end of the previous one, and cutting out the excess but I can use that up in the collar, so no waste there! And what satisfaction when I finally sew it all together and the colour bands flow across my imperfect body in perfect symmetry!!

So, to my second yarn, the tale of the Damn Bloody Mouse - known as DBM hereafter. Yes, there is a link with the following pictures I promise.

We have two lovely cats, Rum and Raisin, who have shared our lives for the past ten or so years. We love them dearly, and feed them far too many biscuits but they are cats, and they do what cats do; catch things. Rum's catches ususally get crunched up on the lawn, though occasionally they are brought in for consumption overnight, with little bits left by the Man's chair in case he's peckish in the morning. Raisin, however, is a bit more squeamish. Once the excitement of the chase and catch is over, he's not quite sure what he should do with this poor wriggling furry thing. So in he comes clattering through the cat flap, a scurry, a yowl or two, and I rush into the kitchen to find a mouse (DBM) cowering under the dresser (where all good mice should hide) and a grumpy fat cat doing his best to get under the dresser. A cat and mouse impasse. I removed the cat, and found things to block up the ends of the dresser so that DBM couldn't escape. However, DBM had escaped already, to hide beneath the bookshelf in the sitting room. Aha, I thought, I can block up the wavy front esdge of the bookshelf with "more things", heavy enough and malleable enough to fit under the wavy bits and leave one small space for DBM to come out. The one small space was, of course, cleverly adapted with a humane mouse trap, baited with rather nice nuts and chocolate biscuits. No problem I thought.

Two days later, having sat each morning listening to little mouse scrabbles, and thinking, "oh, he'll be out soon, tidily captured in the mouse trap" I came down to find that two of the "things" used to block all exits had been wriggeld through and there was no DBM any more. And, to add insult to injury, DBM had been very grateful for the nice feast I'd supplied him, easily accessed by nibbling through the soft corduroy cover that ennables wheat packs to be heated up in microwaves before being applied to sore necks. Perhaps not my best choice for a mouse barrier!

So what does this have to do with the pictures below?

Well, for the next two nights I was awoken several times by little scrabbles and scuttlings in my bedroom. Ye Gods, I thought, DBM has found it's way upstairs and is negotiating the maze of boxes and whotnot under my bed. This is definitely Not Good. The first task, obviously, was to buy more humane mouse traps; the second to move all the boxes out from under the bed, then crawl about, with no thought of dignity, with torch and long poky thing to find the whereabouts of the DBM.

What did I find? A great deal of dust; a pen I'd lost; a single sock; a bookmark; an empy pack of aspirin. I also reacquainted myself with the precious contents of these many and various boxes: old writing cases belonging to Ganna and Mum, stuffed with letters, diaries, account books and the like; a complete handwritten draft of one of Gannas novels, along with the typewritten version that Mum did for her to send to the publishers; a small suitcase with a set of old reel to reel tapes which I know have all of us (me, Mum, Dad, Ganna and Grandad) talking many many years ago in Petersfield when Dad was still alive and playing with his new Grundig tape recorder. And this very fine collection of rug yarns, complete with the canvas (3' x 6') and a handwritten list of the amounts of every yarn there. 

Some were easy - just count the drums and you know how many pieces you've got, but I had a vision of Mum sitting and patiently counting out 929 pieces of green, 482 pale pink, 33 dark blue, 2 khaki ...... as all those below were just small remainders, carefully packed into plastic bags to keep them safe.

They have sat there I'd guess, for the best part of the last 40 odd years, kept for "one day" when she would have time to make the next rug. One day never came - it often doesn't, so here they still are, awaiting a hand and a design to make the best use of them, along with the list of amounts, and calculations of how many pieces would be needed to fill that canvas.

But what of the DBM? Not a sign, not the merest twitch of a whisker, nothing. But still, occasionally, I hear a little scratch and scrabble in the middle of the night. Not in my room, no no, in the walls of my room. I assume the wretched creature has found its way in somehow, and is now searching the fabric of the house for more tasty morsels. All we can hope is that a) it doesn't start trying to eat the wires, b) it finds its way outside somehow, without encountering an enthusaustic feline on its journeys and c) it does so very soon, as I'm rather tired of sleeping with one ear cocked just in case it finds its way onto the bed!!

Knitting a snood

I seem to be doing an awful lot of things at the moment! One of them is catching up on this piece of knitting which has been on the needles, by my estimate, for over two years now. Two years I hear you gasp in horror! Hmmmm, yes, it is rather a long time isn't it? I know it's that long, because I was just near the start when my dear soul and I went up to his daughter's just before Christmas two years ago - where her delightful puppy, Bella, thought that perhaps she could help and the whole thing nearly ended in a dreadful tangle! In my defence, it is 11 pattern repeats, of 20 rows each, over 240 stitches, round and round and round and round. But, at last, I'm nearing the end. Do you do Ravlery? I do, and its tremendously useful, because you can see what other people have done with the thing you are knitting. This "thing" is a snood, or it will be when it is finished; my second piece of lace knitting. It has a rather lovely, but scarily complicated looking edging, intended to be knitted separately and then attached. If done this way, it means counting out 120 pattern repeats, hoping your tension in this bit allows your edging to stretch all the way round, then laboriously sewing it on. So I had a look at what others had done, and found advice to knit the edging in with the rest of the knitting. Now that sounded even more scary, so I did several test rows first to make sure I understood what the edging involved before even thinking about incorporating it into the rest of the knitting.

Here's how it happens. You have a little group of seven stitches on your needle (which become nine for a while). You also have the rest of your knitting, on its circular needles (that extra shiny one is one end of this bit) dangling below the bit you're working on, all wriggly ....

at the end of every other row, you knit the final stitch together with the next stitch on the main piece, so you're trying to handle three needles and two bits of knitting with only two hands to do it all.

It's all rather finicky to start with as the circular needle that holds the lace squirms about and wiggle waggles like a live thing, and the little needles that hold the edging threaten to slip out of their stitches at every turn. You also have to make sure, after the knit the two bits together bit, that you push the stitches on the circular needle right back so they don't slip off while you continue with the edging. I finally I got the hang of it and now I am almost half way there. 

It's all coming together rather nicely, and the best bit about it is that you don't have to count the repeats; you know when it's done, because there are no more stitches on your squirmy circular needle and you're back to where you started again ... or at least, I hope that's where I'll be!

A little stitched celebration

One of the Embroiderers Guild members has a significant birthday approaching and we have all been asked to contribute a flower. They will be gathered together to make a little book of floral celebration - a delightful idea, but I had been scratching my head wondering what to do. Watching Jude, Joe and others, creating cloth stories from scraps and whimsies is a huge inspiration, so I rummaged through my scrap bag to see what I could find. With hellebores in mind, I found this, a scrap from a very long ago dress that Mum made for me to go to a cousin's wedding when I was I my teens. With a little thought and a few more bits and bobs scavenged from Mum's multiple button boxes and more scraps from my stash, I came up with this, which will, I hope, give pleasure.

I may add a little more stitching just to bring the front and background cloth together, but I think it's pretty well what I want.
Behind the fabric, you can see a piece of knitting that has been on the needles for rather too long, but will be a lace snood when its finished. I'm really enjoying making it; challenging, but it always makes sense if you pay attention. As I knit, I often ponder on the hows and whens of the craft - someone a very long time ago worked out that you could make a fabric from looping thread together with needles, but from that to the sort of complex patterns that make up, for example, Shetland lace, is a very long step and a wonderful example of our very human ability to take the very simple and introduce artistry and complexity into the mix, creating beauty of all sorts.

Magic!

Tomorrow we are off the the Norfolk/Suffolk borders for a proper holiday. Best I go start packing I rather think! I'll be quite without access to the Internet while I'm away, and will, weather permitting, get wonderful views of the stars as we're in a cottage that is part of a farm complex in the middle of rural Suffolk. Bliss.

birthday snow

I have been moving house and so have no internet at home and no time to do anything but unpack boxes and wonder where to put all the stuff. It is remarkable how much stuff you still have, even after that pre move blitz. However, today is my darling daughters birthday so I am up in York, rather than down on the south coast and so have access to her internet while I wait for her to get dressed (usually a lengthy process (Oi!!! said Jen)), so we can visit the Christmas Market together and go OOoooohh at all the lovely things for sale.
I was amused during my delicious guest house breakfast this morning by a pair of Australians, visiting the UK and planning to drive to Edinburgh  today. I guess they just don't do snow in the same way down in Oz; there was a collective "whaaaaat" from the other breakfasting guests, at which they looked, it has to be said, a little crestfallen. Now this is what the world looks like outside Jen's window, I could hear the ice cracking under my feet as I walked up the road through several inches of fresh snow.

It is still snowing and there is travel chaos across the country. I suspect I may be seeing them at breakfast tomorrow as well, poor souls.

So what did she get for her birthday from me? Well, some cash - always useful to impoverished students, a little cat ornament to sit and smile by her computer because she misses our two, some chocolate, utterly necessary and these

also useful in this weather in the frozen north. I finished them on the train on the way here (NO I didn't try driving up!!) and sitting in my guest house room last night, the second pair of socks I've knitted. I wasn't sure they were going to be done in time!! So now she has toasty feet, which is a Very Good Thing.

Hope the trains are running when I go home tomorrow!!