Sock it to ‘em

A few weeks ago, I mused on whether or not I could wear leggings and Mary Jane shoes with handknitted socks without ending up looking slightly mad, and everyone here assured me that it would be perfectly fine, particularly if I was meeting knitters. Given that the weather remains a bit on the chilly side for shoes and bare feet and I have really had more than enough of boots and that I was off to the Purlescence open day where I would be surrounded by knitters I decided to give it a try.

Shawl – Brandywine
Cardigan – Cinnamon Girl
Top – Uniqlo
Skirt – Next
Leggings – M&S
Socks – Vellamo
Shoes – Greenshoes

I think it worked, and I’m particularly pleased with the way the Fair Isle bands on the feet of the socks just show above the tops of the shoes.

The Purlescence open day was good too, and I managed to get the three small skeins of Voluptuous I wanted to go with my two large ones for a Chickadee. It was lucky that I had arranged to go with a friend, though, as that meant that when I got in my car (which I think I last drove in early March) and it didn’t start* we could change plans so she came and picked me up rather than vice versa as we’d planned and I still got to go!

*A flat battery is always a possibility when I don’t use my car at all in the week and only do so occasionally at the weekends, and I suspect the fact that for a lot of the last couple of months leaving the house at weekends at all was more than I was capable of hasn’t really helped matters.

Fair Isle weekend

I haven’t had a chance to do any sewing this weekend, as I’ve spent most of the two days at a Fair Isle workshop run by Susan Crawford at Darn It and Stitch. I’d signed up like a shot when this was announced, as I’ve been wanting to improve my Fair Isle skills and having taken a finishing class with Susan a few years ago I knew that she was a really good teacher and I was likely to get a lot out of the workshop.

I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Inevitably, there was a wide range of skill levels between the nine of us who’d signed up; some people were completely unfamiliar with working in the round, and while there was another continental knitter there I was the only person already familiar with both continental and English-style knitting, which gave me an advantage when it came to working two-handed. (Talking to the others there, I have come to the conclusion that I’m just an experimental sort of a knitter; some people are happy to find a way of doing things and stick to it, whereas my reaction to hearing about a different method is to think that I’ll give that a try, in case it turns out to be better than the one I was using. Which is how I started off as a standard English-style knitter and am currently a continental combination knitter.)

We spent the first day talking about how to hold the yarn, casting on and working a flat swatch (which I found interesting, as I’m not sure I would have dared to attempt colourwork with purl rows before!) and then choosing main and peerie patterns and working out colour selections for the larger sample we were working on today. (I took the opportunity to use up some of my sock yarn leftovers!)

At 11am today I had a little bit of ribbing; by 4pm I’d knitted this much:

The course also covered steeking, although there wasn’t quite time for everyone to try it (I haven’t steeked mine yet, as I want to finish the second repeat of my peerie pattern and make it symmetrical first) so Susan demonstrated on one person’s swatch:

I suspect I won’t get round to steeking my sample until next weekend, but I think I’ll be able to remember until I get to put it into practice!

I really enjoyed having the chance to play with colours. I love colour, and someone actually told me last week that I was the most colourful person they knew, but Fair Isle is colourful even by my standards, and I was a bit worried that my combination of yellowy-orange, bright blue, bright pink and pale pink would end up looking like an explosion in a paint factory, even with a dark grey to tone it down. I needn’t have worried, I really liked the way it looks!

Now I really want to try a proper Fair Isle project, though I don’t know what and I really do have enough things on the needles for now!

Sleepy Sunday

Unsurprisingly, after being out and about yesterday today I have been tired and not really up to doing anything much. I knitted a little bit on my Lady Heather before deciding that my brain wasn’t up to it, and a couple of rows on Bigger on the Inside ditto, having picked up stitches by eye while watching last night’s Doctor Who* and somehow ending up woth 310 on the first attempt (I was aiming for 311, and it was easy enough to add an extra stitch in on the first row). I did manage to finish my Betula socks, though.

The yarn is Yarn Yard Clan, which I bought a couple of years ago and which had been sitting in the stash until I saw Roobeedoo‘s post about her Betulas and thought that the gently variegated greens would be perfect for the pattern. The colours and the bud motif made me feel as though my knitting was a little foretaste of spring as winter dragged on and on, so it’s appropriate that I’ve finished them on the first properly spring-like weekend we’ve had this year. I really enjoyed knitting them – the pattern is simple to knit and easy to memorise, but so pretty in execution, and I love the way the two socks are mirror images of each other rather than being identical. I am a big fan of Rachel’s sock patterns, and am looking forward to getting my copy of her book soon. But for now, more Earl Greys for T…

*which I actually managed to follow, a major improvement on the last few where I really struggled to work out what was going on – I suspect this week’s was wordier and therefore easier to follow without having to look at the screen all the time. Why won’t TV producers think of the knitters?

Fitting

Amy Herzog’s Knit to Flatter suggests that the best way to figure out your body shape and fitting needs is to take a photo of yourself in fairly form-fitting clothes, draw horizontal lines at the shoulders, bust, waist (or narrowest part of the torso) and hips, and then compare their length. Azzy has been posting her pictures, and it struck me that the pictures I took of my Birgitte tee with jeans probably showed my figure off well enough, so I thought I’d have a go.

The shoulder line is a bit approximate, but it’s clear that despite wearing a GG-cup bra, from the fron my bust isn’t a lot wider than my shoulders. My waist is (a) very high and (b) not particularly small, both of which I knew, but the bottom half of my torso is actually quite a lot wider than the top, which comes as rather a surprise when I have always thought of my chest as being far and away my most prominent feature.

Amy also suggests looking at a side view, and handily I also have this deeply unflattering picture from the Birgitte photoshoot.

Apart from showing that I should really have done a forward shoulder adjustment, I can see that my bust is far more prominent from the side (as, sadly is my stomach) and that I have a serious sway back (which probably doesn’t help with the appearance of my stomach, really).

In terms of translating this to clothing, well, I obviously need to add fabric across my front and take it away across my back, and my waist is high enough that the waistlines of most garments will be in the wrong place. And maybe I should give up on my dream of having a wardrobe full of lovely full-skirted Fifties-style frocks like Dolly Clackett‘s, which I suspect would only exacerbate my lack of waist and larger bottom half, and look for patterns with more gentle shaping that might suit my figure better.

Tuesday brights

People kept asking me today if I was trying to look springlike. I don’t actually think of bright pink as being particularly a spring colour, but it was certainly cheerful on another wet, grey day.

Shawl – Galathea
Jacket – Debenhams
Dress – Boden
Tights – M&S
Boots – Gabor

Meanwhile, I have been swatching for an orange cardigan, because I bought 10 balls of Rowan Cotton Jeans in a lovely reddish-orange years ago and thought it would be nice and cheerful. I want to make Metro from Twist Collective, because I think the open-fronted style would suit me and it’s a neat enough shape to be suitable for work, and Antje from The Yarn Cake has one and it looks lovely. Unfortunately, swatching with 5mm needles got me 16 stitches to 4 inches, instead of the 18 stitches in the pattern. I went down to 4.5mm needles and did a proper swatch which I washed and dried flat and everything (mostly because I couldn’t get the same number of stitches twice measuring the few rows I’d knitted). I’m pretty sure I’ve got 17 stitches to 4 inches this way, but I definitely don’t want to go down to 4mm needles; I think even on 4.5mm the fabric is a bit stiff, though then again I don’t want it to be too floppy. Anyway, I’ll probably cast on for a size smaller than normal with 4.5mm needles, though in fact I might do the back in the 33.5in size (in lieu of the 37in size, which works for my high bust measurement) and the fronts for the 37in size (which would be better for my actual bust). Or should I just do bust darts? I think I probably need to sit down with a pen and paper and a calculator and think this out properly. No wonder I mostly stick to shawls and socks…

A cunning cardigan

My brother’s girlfriend had a baby a few weeks ago, so I spent some of my long Easter weekend knitting another Pop! cardigan. My brother is something of an SF geek, and I suspect the girlfriend shares his interests (I know he knows her through role-playing), so I picked a colour scheme that echoed the famous Jayne Cobb hat from Firefly.

The yarn is King Cole merino blend DK, which has the great advantages of being cheap, machine-washable and coming in a range of nice bright colours, although rather sadly the local charity shop which used to sell it has changed into a vintage clothes shop rather than a crafts-books-and-bric-a-brac shop so I had to order it online.

Meanwhile my other brother and his wife are expecting their second child in August, so there may be more Pop! cardigans in my future…

I made this!

I made everything I’m wearing today apart from underwear, leggings and slippers. I’m quite impressed with that.

Shawl – Brandywine
Cardigan – Cinnamon Girl
T-shirt – Birgitte Basic Tee
Skirt – Clothkits
Socks – February Lady Socks

K is for Katika

Two years in to my A-Z shawl challenge and I’ve reached K, for which I decided on Katika by Julie Nandorfy, a free pattern on Ravelry that I’d favourited a while ago.

It’s a very straightforward pattern, based on the same principle as the very popular Baktus scarf: you start at one end, increase until you’ve used about half your yarn, then decrease at the same rate so you end up with a long, shallow triangle. This version has a pretty scalloped lace edging, and an integral i-cord finish to the top edge which gives a lovely neat finish.

The yarn is Tenby, from the Welsh dyer Cariad Yarns; it’s a merino/cashmere/nylon blend which makes a lovely cosy shawl, and I love the mix of colours in this skein, which remind me of the colours you see shimmering on split petrol.

The shape of the shawl makes it more scarf-like than shawl-like to wear wrapped round my neck, though it also drapes very nicely over my shoulders if I wanted to wear it that way.

I’d be lying if I said this was going to be my new Favourite Shawl Ever; there are several others I like better, but this isn’t bad and is definitely nice and cosy. And it was a quick, relaxing but not boring knit at a time of year when I didn’t really have the mental energy to tackle anything too complicated.

I’m not sure if I have any more mental energy now; L is Anna Richardson’s Lady Heather which I think may take me a while. Even if I didn’t have a geeky urge to cast on for a Bigger On The Inside at 6:15 this Saturday…

Rosy toesies

I ended up frogging the Tintern Abbey socks a couple of weeks ago. Not because I didn’t like the pattern, which is beautiful, and not even because I had managed to make the foot too long twice (though that was annoying) but because I realised that I just don’t like grey, and don’t want to wear grey socks when I could have brightly coloured ones instead. Of course, that meant I needed some different socks to knit, so I grabbed some bright pink yarn out of the stash (Brown Sheep Wildfoote in ‘Rose Bud’ from Magpielly) and decided to try actually knitting one of the many sock patterns in my library, Cookie A‘s Kai-Mei.

I enjoyed knitting these. Quite apart from the cheerful colour, the leg is fantastically straightforward and the lace panel is interesting without being too difficult. I did find myself getting a bit confused about how to divide up the stitches between my needles after the heel turn, but it all worked out in the end, and the way the slanting panel creates a slight bias in the fabric at the toe makes for a really nice fit.

I could see myself using this pattern again with a different lace design for the panel.

Also, I managed to solve something that’s been bugging me lately! I’ve noticed recently that when I’m knitting in the round my k2togs have been looking rather sloppy. This is especially noticeable in the last few pairs of socks I’ve knitted (which have tended to be in fairly robust yarns on 2.25mm needles, so at a fairly tight gauge).

See? The stitches before the decreases are stretched out and the whole thing looks lumpy and not nice and neat. I tried looking online for a solution, but only found articles about problems with ssks looking loose and sloppy. Apparently everyone else’s k2togs are perfect.

Anyway, I was thinking about this while knitting away on the second sock, and also reflecting that it doesn’t seem to be a problem when I’m knitting flat. Because I knit combination (wrapping the yarn in the opposite direction when purling), if I work a k2tog in flat stocking stitch I have to slip both stitches purlwise to get them in the right orientation first, and I wondered if doing the same thing when knitting in the round would help even though the stitches were correctly oriented in the first place. And it did! I think what must have been happening is that because I’m knitting at a tight gauge it was a bit of a squeeze to get the needle through the two stitches and twist the one closest to the needle tip to the back of the decrease and I ended up stretching the stitch before the decrease stitches, which then didn’t go back into shape but stayed looking loose and sloppy. Slipping the stitches first and giving them a little pull when slipping them back to the left needle seems to loosen them up enough that this doesn’t happen. So, win! New pink socks and and knitting problem solved!

If at first you don’t succeed, dye, dye again

Given that the bright green yarn that resulted from last weekend’s dyeing experiment wasn’t really to my taste, and I suspect I would struggle to destash yarn that’s been amateurishly overdyed with Dylon, I thought it couldn’t hurt if I gave it another try. This time I used a darker blue dye (Jeans Blue) and ended up with a dark teal that I’m very happy with.

I think it might want to be a Bellevue Cardigan, although given that we currently have an inch of slushy snow (in mid-March!) outside the idea of summer cardigans does seem faintly ridiculous…