Spring greens

I think today’s outfit was really suited to a slightly warmer day than the mild and muggy weather we actually had, but I wasn’t actually cold and the penguins were definitely cheering on a Monday I wasn’t really looking forward to after a weekend that was considerably less relaxing than I’d hoped it would be.

Shrug – Lyttelton
Necklace – East
T-shirt – M&S
Skirt – made by me
Shoes – Jones Bootmaker

I am getting better at wearing sheer tights; I used not to be able to stand them at all but they really are a necessity if I want to be able to wear skirts for work in the kind of weather that’s too warm for opaque tights and too cold for bare legs. I did find that by about half-past four I was becoming acutely conscious of how they felt against my skin, though, and longing to get home and take them off!

Mintchoc

This week, I will mostly be wearing outfits which remind me of ice-cream. Not for any particular reason, it just seemed like a good idea last night when I was lying in bed wondering what to wear.

Shrug – Lyttelton
Necklace – East
Vest – M&S
Dress – charity shop
Shoes – Greenshoes

Blue and green

I am really coming to like the way Lyttelton shows off my figure. I might have to make another one. Or something else similar, I suppose, although I think part of it is the depth of the back and sides and the vast majority of shrug patterns seem to be much straighter across the back.

Shrug – Lyttelton
Necklace – White Stuff
T-shirt – M&S
Skirt – made by me
Shoes – Greenshoes

I’m also vaguely wondering about buying the Sewaholic Renfrew pattern to try to make really well-fitting t-shirts. But then again, I’ve also been wondering about making my own knickers, and yesterday’s post brought three metres of flowery poly/cotton from Croft Mill to attempt a wearable muslin of the Bebe. I think my ambitions may be outstripping my capacity a bit…

Monday

The trouble with having two lovely relaxing days off work is that then you have to go back to work to face a bulging inbox and a much busier Monday than normal. And that goes double if you were taking a long weekend to unwind ahead of your financial year end.

Still, I picked a nice cheerful outfit, and the first day back is always the worst.

Necklace – made by Helen
Shrug – lyttelton
Dress – East, altered by me
Shoes – Greenshoes

The modestified dress held up very well to a day at work, probably better than the dress and camisole combination I’ve been wearing up to now – the camisoles do have a tendency to bunch up at the waist if I don’t have tights on, and the necklines also slip down a bit. So this was better all round.

On a different topic, at lunchtime I wandered past the charity shop near work and spotted this little beauty:

Only £30, too, and the crank action was very smooth. I’ve reserved it until Wednesday morning so I have until tomorrow lunchtime to decide whether I want to buy it or not. It’s so pretty, and I think it would actually be useful for fiddly things where it’s hard to get my electic machine to run slowly enough…

Greenery

Despite having been somewhat dubious about my Lyttelton shrug when I finished knitting it, I’ve worn it several times, and would have worn it more often if the weather hadn’t been so consistently vile that it’s felt like a somewhat risky choice to opt for something that doesn’t actually cover my forearms.

Shrug – Lyttelton (handknitted)
Necklace and dress – East
Camisole – M&S
Shoes – Greenshoes

In fact, the last few weeks have been warm and humid enough that short sleeves are absolutely fine, and despite starting off wearing sheer tights by the end of the day I was bare-legged. Honestly, I don’t see the point of sheer tights; they aren’t actually much cooler than opaques while being about fifteen times as annoying in terms of propensity to ladder and nasty nylony feeling, although if it’s actually at all chilly they don’t offer any warmth at all. Ridiculous!

Meanwhile, anyone who follows knitters on Twitter may have noticed the outrage about the fact that it appears that the high street chain Debenhams have copied the extremely popular o w l s jumper, designed by Kate Davies (who also designed Lyttelton). You can read Kate’s post about it here. Having just taken delivery of a kit to knit Kate’s Betty Mouat Cowl (nine gorgeous shades of Shetland wool!) I’m now considering making my own o w l s jumper in the near future, maybe modified as a cardigan because I suspect that would suit me better and be easier to wear. Because obviously there just weren’t enough things I wanted to knit before…

Lyttelton in action

I haven’t been posting outfit photos recently. I’m not quite sure why, but it just felt so ridiculous to be taking photos of myself and posting them on the internet that I found I couldn’t keep on with it (to be honest, even making myself write about crafting projects has been a struggle). However, today I actually wore my Lyttelton for the first time and was so pleased with managing to do it that I even went out in the drizzle at ten to seven this morning to take photos.

Shrug – Lyttelton
Necklace – M&S
Dress – East
Shoes – Clarks

It got me more compliments from people at work today than anything else I’ve worn since starting this job, including one from a woman I don’t even know who was walking down the corridor behind me!

I’m sorry, I haven’t a cardigan

My Lyttelton is now finished and blocked, well before any sign of the kind of summery weather I might want to wear it in.

It wasn’t as easy a knit as I thought it was going to be. The lace and cable pattern is easy to memorise, but I found trying to work out the best way to increase and decrease while maintaining the patterns a bit fiddly, and there’s an awful lot of picking up stitches involved in the edgings. The main problem, though, was nothing to do with the pattern and everything to do with my gauge and choice of yarn. The pattern calls for Rowan 4-ply Soft, which is 100% wool, and 3mm needles. I find wool much too warm for summer, even in something as light and lacy as this, so I decided to use a cotton/tencel blend which Natalie at The Yarn Yard had for a little while last summer, and to get gauge I had to go down to 2.5mm needles. I really don’t recommend knitting an unyielding yarn like cotton on such small needles – I found it very hard going and the effort to get it off the needles once I’d picked it up again a few weeks ago left my hands and wrists aching after every knitting session. I’ll stick to heavier-weight cotton yarns in future!

Still, the lace and cable pattern shows up very nicely in the crisp yarn.

Really, the main problem is that I’m not entirely sure I’ll wear it much. I’ve never been a big fan of shrugs, but this one looked so pretty, and as a lifelong fan of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue I simply couldn’t resist the Humph connection. I suspect I’d really have done better with a proper cardigan, though; I’m not entirely convinced that the way shrugs kind of frame the bosom is exactly flattering on those of us who are on the well-endowed side.

Of course, it might look better over some of my summer dresses than it does over the t-shirt I changed into after work this evening. If I was to knit the pattern again, though (which I’m definitely not going to do, because of the cotton yarn on 2.5mm needles thing), I think I’d leave out the decreases on the front and try to make it more of a cropped cardigan. Or just find a cardigan pattern in the first place…

Five-day weekend

For some reason, my work is closed on the Thursday before Easter, meaning that with the Bank Holidays it ends up being a five-day weekend. On balance, I’d probably prefer to be able to take the day when I choose, rather than having to have the time at Easter, but I’m not going to look a gift holiday in the mouth and given that the weather has returned to something more typical of an English spring than the warm sunny weather we were having a couple of weeks ago (for which read: rain, probably inevitable given that we have a hosepipe ban in response to a shortage of the stuff) I’ve spent most of the weekend crafting.

I’ve made another pair of pyjama trousers for T, to the same pattern as last time:

I finished the second front of my Lyttelton and sewed the side seams:

And then I picked up stitches and did the first sleeve edging, and started the second:

It’s tough going, though; next time I want to knit something in cotton and find I have to go down to 2.5mm needles to get gauge, I’ll look for another pattern instead. The combination of such small needles and yarn with so little give to it really isn’t good for my wrists.

On slightly bigger needles, and in wool, I’ve also cast on for the next of my A-Z of shawls, Hypernova:

I’ve worked my way through the five set-up charts this weekend and now it’s relatively easy going, though the double yarnovers do need a bit of vigilance as I can’t see how I could correct a mistake without tinking back and I suspect by the end each row is going to feel like a real marathon!

A pretty productive weekend, I think. If only I didn’t have to go back to work tomorrow, think how much more I could get done!

Works in progress

At the moment I have three knitting projects and one crochet project on the go, which is pretty much par for the course; I always have a pair of socks on the go, for knitting on the bus and out and about, and a garment of some kind, and a shawl, and some kind of more-in-hope-than-expectation crochet project (I do enjoy crochet, but have yet to manage to finish anything bigger than granny squares).

Anyway, in order of age:

Tropical Breeze shawl, in Wendy Happy (100% bamboo sock yarn). Given that I’m pretty much a novice crocheter I was pleasantly surprised how easy the pattern was to follow. In fact, it was so easy that I’m actually finding it quite dull going and currently looking at it and thinking ‘I have how many repeats to go?’. I suspect this is because I still have to concentrate quite hard on crochet and concentrating on something not very interesting is a recipe for boredom. Also, I can’t work out how to hold the shawl while I’m working on it; if I have one hand holding the hook and the other one holding the yarn and pinching just below the stitch I’m working into, what happens to the rest of the already-crocheted fabric? I find that when I’m crocheting the longer chains the work has a tendency to spin round, which is very annoying when I have to keep straightening it out before carrying on. How do other crocheters manage? I know lots of people who crochet and don’t have three hands, so it must be possible…what am I missing?

Lyttelton, but Kate Davies, in a cotton/tencel 4-ply from The Yarn Yard. I’m really enjoying knitting this; the stitch pattern is easy to memorise and it’s surprisingly quick to knit, although the lack of stretch in the yarn and the fact that I had to go down to 2.5mm needles to get gauge means it is a bit tough on my hands sometimes. I’m also having problems with loose purl stitches in the ribbing, and had a minor fit of ‘argh, I have disastrously loose purling!’ recently before deciding that while my purling is slightly looser than my knitting it’s really not into the realms of tension disasters and that the issue in Lyttelton is just that it’s very hard to get a neat edge on a purl column which is followed by k2tog yo, especially in a slippery yarn. Anyway, I’m pretty happy with the project overall, though starting to worry that it won’t be finished in time for me to wear it this summer (then again, I’m sure it would look good over a long-sleeved t-shirt in autumn too).

My bus knitting: Wonderland Socks by Alice Bell, the second of two pairs I’m knitting as a commission for a friend.

The next in my A-Z of shawls, Daybreak by Stephen West in two colours of Yarn Yard Clan, one variegated and a toning semi-solid. I’m not entirely sure about this; I bought the two skeins ages ago and had always intended them for a Daybreak, but I’m wondering whether they’re really too similar and the stripes in the semi-solid aren’t showing up properly. What do you think? Would more contrast be better?

Swatching

I haven’t worn my Featherweight Cardigan once in the two weeks since finishing it; this is less because of the fit issues and more because actually 80% wool and 20% silk is just too warm for a summer cardigan, even in laceweight yarn. Maybe it will come into its own in September and October.

Meanwhile, I have been swatching for my next garment project: Kate Davies’s Lyttelton shrug in a cotton/tencel sock yarn from The Yarn Yard. I think the yarn should be perfect for a summer cardigan (and how lovely to have a hand-dyed summery yarn – there are very few indie-dyed yarns which don’t have a significant wool content, mainly because of the comparative difficulty of dyeing non-wool fibres) and I’ve been eyeing up the pattern since Kate released it, partly because it’s so pretty and partly because I love her inspiration for the name. Given the fit issue with the Featherweight, I also quite like the idea of knitting something which only has to fit my back to try to get my confidence with garment-knitting back.

Still, even if it only has to fit my back, it has to fit, and I’m coming to realise that my tendency to dive straight in to a project and take a rough measurement after knitting a couple of inches is probably not entirely conducive to that. So, swatching.

I knitted the top swatch yesterday, on 3mm needles as suggested by the pattern. The gauge is supposed to be 30 stitches to 4 inches; before blocking I had 27, after it was more like 20 (the swatch is 41 stitches across). So I muttered a bit, had a think and decided I’d skip straight to 2.5mm needles. Unblocked, I think I’m at about 32 stitches to 4 inches; it remains to be seen how much it will grow. If it’s still too big I may have to give up and pick a different pattern for the yarn; I really don’t think I can bring myself to knit an entire garment on 2.25mm needles!

In cheerier making news, I do love how the skirt I made in my dressmaking class seems to go with every single top I own.

Necklace – White Stuff
T-shirt- M&S
Skirt – Made by me
Sandals – Hush Puppies