Colour attraction

Last weekend, Helen of Ripples Crafts tweeted a picture of a yarn she was about to put in her shop which was so pretty I couldn’t resist buying a skein.

The colours are gorgeous, but once it arrived it realised it wasn’t entirely dissimilar to the skein of Handmaiden Casbah I bought at Loop last year.

I’m pretty sure I have other skeins in the same palette, too. Apparently the combination of teal, fuchsia or magenta and tawny yellow is one I’m utterly powerless to resist.

I suppose it’s not surprising that the colours would go together; basically, they’re the three primary colours (red, blue and yellow), shifted slightly round the colour wheel, so the effect is instantly harmonious. And it’s not surprising they appeal to me, as I prefer the complexity of secondary and tertiary colours to the simple primaries.

I have no idea what I might make with either skein. They’re so beautiful as they are, it seems a shame to wind them and knit them up into something that might not do justice to the wonderful colours.

They have answered a question I’ve been mulling over for a while, though. I have two skeins of Yarn Yard Toddy, in fuchsia and teal, which complement each other so beautifully I can’t imagine knitting either one up on its own.

I was wondering about another Daybreak, or something similar, but I’m currently desperate to jump on the Colour Affection bandwagon (well, I will be once I’ve finished Hypernova, by which point I think I might be ready for a break in the A-Z of shawls) and have been trying to think of a third colour to put with them. Obviously, it needs to be a tawny gold, and luckily, I have just the right thing (funny, that…).

Maybe this will be an incentive to get on with Hypernova. It is going to be lovely, it’s just that each row takes about 40 minutes and it’s still growing!

Preferences

It was raining when I got up today, and cool enough to wear a shawl for once.

Shawl – Abbegale
Cardigan – clothes swap
Top – M&S
Skirt – White Stuff
Leggings – M&S
Shoes – Jones Bootmaker

I’ve been thinking about what kind of handknits I wear the most lately, partly prompted by this post of Mooncalf’s, partly by the fact that I will be moving jobs in a few months and I’m wondering what changes I might need to make to my work wardrobe, and partly by plodding through the first sleeve of my Featherweight Cardigan (which is a bit wider than I expected to be, and means I’m not quite going to end up with the neat little fitted cardi of my dreams).

Mooncalf thinks of herself as a sweater knitter, and was surprised that a review of her blog concentrated mostly on socks and scarves. I am starting to think that I’m not a sweater knitter, and that that’s probably fine. I love knitting socks and shawls; socks because they’re so portable, and because handknitted socks are so lovely and cosy, shawls because they’re such a lovely way to use up beautiful yarn and – crucially – because they’re so easy to wear and a perfect way to add some interest and individuality to a work outfit. Whereas handknitted jumpers aren’t quite so straightforward for me. Partly this may just be because I’m not a good enough knitter yet, and maybe I should just accept that however tempting top-down raglans may be by the time I’ve increased enough to accommodate my bust the sleeves are always going to be too wide, and I’d be much better off with seamed patterns (I do love my Hey Teach!, after all). But handknitted jumpers and cardigans are also often very warm, and can be too much for the average office, and I don’t really want to spend months crafting a beautiful cardigan I can only wear at weekends. Even when it doesn’t end up being a not-terribly-good fit.

I’m not going to give up trying to knit jumpers, and maybe one day I’ll make the breakthrough and be able to knit nice, wearable jumpers that don’t take six months to make. But maybe I should stop being jumper-quantities of yarn, given that I already have enough for about five years at my current pace…

(Later – in fact, having just cast off the first sleeve of the Featherweight, it’s not as flappy as it looked while still on the needle. So it might be OK after all!)

Truly scrumptious

I was going to wear jeans today, but then I realised that it was actually quite warm and switched to linen trousers.

Shawl – Travelling Woman
Top – Monsoon
Trousers – Fat Face
Sandals – GreenShoes

I’m not entirely sure I like how I look in these trousers (or, indeed, any trousers), but they’re cool and comfortable and work well as weekend wear.

I was up and about much earlier than I normally am on a Saturday, as I was meeting G and driving over to the Fyberspates open day. As well as the opportunity to buy copies of the new Scrumptious Collection pattern book and see the sample garments there was a lot of yarn on sale: Jeni is moving to new premises and was looking to clear some old stock out.

It’s fairly well documented, I think, that where yarn is concerned I tend to think that willpower is something that happens to other people, and I’m currently in love with laceweight and building up my stash of that in the same way I was building up my stash of sock yarn a year or so ago. (Almost everything I’ve bought lately has been laceweight, often paired skeins which can become cardigans; I’ve hardly bought any sock yarn.) Unfortunately for my bank balance, there was a lot of laceweight yarn on the sale tables today, and as well as a copy of the book I came away with this little lot:

From left to right: Nef Lace in green, Scrumptious Lace in blue, Elegance Lace in burgundy, two skeins of merino/silk lace in dark gold, and two skeins of merino/tencel sock in pink, blue and lilac.

Possibly a moratorium on yarn buying until Knit Nation in July might be a good plan.

Organisation

I’m not exactly the tidiest of people. I would love to be tidy, but I always seem to have too much stuff for the space available and end up with things stacked in corners or underneath furniture or piled on the corners of tables and the tops of bookcases and even on the staircase (we are having our bathroom done this week, and the need to clear the staircase to enable the workmen to carry things up and down safely has revealed that there were an awful lot of things – mobile phone boxes, old chargers and so on – which had more or less taken up permanent residence on the bottom few steps of our stairs because there didn’t seem to be any other sensible place for them). On the other hand, I am quite organised; I have a good memory and efficient filing systems and can generally lay my hands on any given item fairly quickly, whether that be books and items of clothing in my house or files and paperwork in the office.

I think the key thing to being organised when overwhelmed by Stuff is systems. As long as I have a good system then I can narrow down the possible location of the thing I want closely enough that it doesn’t take me very long to search it.

My stash is definitely approaching overwhelming proportions these days. Fortunately, when I first joined Ravelry it wasn’t terribly big and I spent a Sunday uploading photographs and logging everything on there. This has been hugely helpful; now whenever new yarn arrives in the house (which happens with quite alarming regularity) I photograph it and log it on Rav before putting it away.

As to the actual ‘putting it away’…well, jumper quantities of yarn are easy, because they can be stored in plastic bags which can be stacked up (mainly behind the coffee-table at my end of the sofa) and are large enough not to get lost. Individual skeins of 4-ply and laceweight yarn are a bit harder, because they need to be kept in something, so I have (currently) five large lidded plastic boxes which stack on top of each other and each hold quite a lot of yarn. I started with three boxes, and have bought more as I needed them, so for a while tended to simply add new yarn to the top box, but I found that it was impossible to keep track of which yarn was in which box and it was taking me far too long to find skeins of yarn I knew I had. I needed a system with more granularity, so a couple of months ago I decided to reorganise things a bit.

I started by emptying all the yarn out of the boxes onto the bed:

Even if I had ended up with a system that wasn’t any better than I had before, I think it would have been worth doing just for the sheer glory of seeing all my yarn spread out like that. Such wonderful colours and textures!

However, once I had emptied everything out I arranged the boxes around the bed and proceeded to put the yarn back according to a system. One box for laceweight, one for Yarn Yard sock yarn, one for Knitting Goddess sock yarn, one for sock yarn from other UK indie dyers, and one for commercial sock yarn, non-UK indie dyers and the few skeins of heavier yarns I’ve bought thinking that they might be nice for hats or thicker shawls and scarves.

Some of the boxes are a bit full, but it just about fits.

The left-hand stack, from the top down, is Knitting Goddess; UK indie dyers; Yarn Yard; commercial, non-UK and heavier weights. The box on the right is laceweight.

And now, whenever I want to find a yarn I know I have stashed I can go to the right box first time and find it in less than five minutes, instead of having to hunt through every box and never being quite sure I haven’t missed it without emptying the whole lot out!

Flights of fancy

This week’s post brought me a magic carpet:

(The colour representation is not entirely accurate, because purples seem to be extremely difficult to photograph. There’s another picture here but I think that’s also too blue: the actual colours shade from the blue-purple of Cadbury’s chocolate wrappers to a vivid magenta.)

The magic carpets are a new offering from The Yarn Yard (who now has a shiny new shop to replace the one that was hacked). They’re double-stranded sock blanks, which means that each 100g carpet is actually two identical 50g skeins of yarn. The obvious thing to do with them is to knit socks two at a time straight from the carpet, but I’m not completely sold on that idea; I normally use about 60g of yarn to make myself a pair of socks, but to make the most of the wonderful colours of the magic carpet I want to use it all at once. I don’t think 100g is going to be enough for knee socks, and while I think it would look amazing paired with black in colourwork knee socks I think that attempting to knit two-at-a-time two-coloured socks would probably end up with me tied up in the yarn. I’m also not entirely sure I would wear knee socks, and the colours are so beautiful I think it would be a shame to hide them inside shoes. Also, it would make a beautifully symmetrical sideways shawl or scarf. So even though it seems like a shame to wind the yarn into balls rather than knitting straight from the carpet I think I might have to do that (with some help from my friends, as it’s not going to be straightforward to wind!).

What would you make with a magic carpet?

More FOs

My second Ravelympics project was Ysolda’s Icing Swirl Hat, in some gorgeous Fyberspates Scrumptious Chunky which was a Christmas present from my youngest brother and sister-in-law (proof that my wish list post was a good idea!):

This should have been a really quick knit, but it took about twice as long as it should have done because I kept making silly mistakes: I didn’t work enough increases on the crown and only realised once I started decreasing for the band, so I had to frog back half the hat, and then I bound off far too tightly and couldn’t get the hat on my head until the third time I tried (using Jeny’s surprisingly stretchy bind-off and a needle two sizes bigger than I’d used for the hat). Still, I’m pleased with how it turned out; it’s warmer than my Ishbel beret and a better shape than my Opus Spicatum (which I like a lot, but would like even more if it was a little bit slouchier), and it’s almost a perfect match for my winter coat.

And today I finished my husband’s anniversary socks:

Our wedding anniversary was actually back in October. When we looked up anniversaries and found that seven years was wool we agreed that if he bought me yarn as an anniversary present I would make him socks. Unfortunately, by the time the yarn (Knitting Goddess 4-ply sock yarn in semi-solid mustard) turned up I was deep in Christmas knitting and only got round to casting on for the socks on Christmas Eve, and then it took me two months to knit them because the 2.25mm KnitPro circular I was trying out proved to be so pointy that if I tried to work on the socks for more than an hour or so at a time they poked holes in my left forefinger and made knitting of any kind painful. I think I’ll be sticking to my Addi Turbos in future, even though the cables do kink horribly after a while.

The pattern is the Yarn Harlot’s Earl Grey socks, which managed to be the perfect combination of interesting and straightforward. I might use it again for husband-socks, or at least use the idea of plain stocking stitch socks with side cables.

And now the anniversary socks are done I get to start on my personal knitting club. I got my husband to rummage in the large carrier back that contains all the ‘club’ packages, and my first project is going to be Travelling Woman in the Knitting Goddess’s merino tencel from the February sock club:

We’re going away this weekend; I decided that after two cold, grey, soggy months without a break longer than a weekend I needed a change of scenery, so we’re going to Salisbury for a couple of nights. I guess that makes ‘Travelling Woman’ a very appropriate knit!

Personal knitting club

The Yarn Harlot was posting recently about her personal sock club; she’s matched yarn from her stash with patterns, bagged up the patterns and yarn and is going to choose a bag at random every month and make those socks. This struck me as a very good way to make some inroads on my stash and also make myself get round to knitting all the patterns I’d looked at and thought ‘I must make that sometime!’, so I’ve spent the last couple of hours up in the spare room bagging up yarn and patterns of my own.

I only have seven projects in my club, mainly because I could only lay my hands on seven suitable bags (leftover mailing bags from yarn purchases). And rather than limiting it to socks I’ve gone for anything that can be knitted with 100g of yarn. In the end I have three shawls, one scarf, two pairs of socks and a hat in there, all but one in a hand-dyed sock yarn of some kind. I’ve put the bags in a big paper carrier bag and every time I want a new small project I’m going to ask my husband to pick one out. Also, every time I start a project I’m going to go through the stash and identify another yarn/project combination to take its place. I’m not sure this will do very much about the size of my stash, but at least it will mean that the older things get used instead of staying there forever!

Bag lady

At this time of year it becomes very difficult to blog about knitting, because so much of what I’m making can’t be revealed until after Christmas. I did take a break from present-knitting to design a little bag to carry my phone and iPod in:

I carry a backpack to and from work; it’s hard to find shoulder bags big enough to fit all the things I carry around with me (books, knitting, lunch, spare shoes) and I find that large shoulder bags give me backache anyway. The downside is that it’s not very easy to get at things in a backpack, and I like to have both my phone and my iPod handy; I use my phone for taking pictures when I’m out and about, and if I’m listening to the iPod I want to be able to change tracks or just see what’s come on. Before I bought the iPod I just carried my phone in my coat or jacket pocket, but the two together are a bit bulky, so I thought I’d knit a little bag with a long strap I could wear across my body.

My first thought was to knit a rectangular bag in sock yarn, but that would have taken quite a long time and I coudn’t spare more than a night or two from the Christmas knitting, so instead I dug out half a ball of Rowan Colourscape Chunky from my stash and started making what could have been a toe-up sock for a giant, using Judy’s magic cast on and a star increase, and then instead of knitting evenly I started to decrease again four rows after finishing the increases to narrow the neck of the bag. I was planning on casting off half the stitches and carrying on decreasing on the other half so that the bag was a full circle, with the top folding over to make a curved flap, but after seeing how the shape was developing I decided to make eyelets and finish it with a drawstring instead. I still like the idea of a circular bag, so I may keep experimenting with that, but I’m happy enough with what I came up with; it’s just the right size, and the neck is narrow enough there’s no danger of anything falling out but wide enough that I can easily reach in for the phone or the iPod whenever I want them. And I really like the way the rustic look contrasts with the shiny technology inside!

Apart from that, I’m on to the second sleeve of Imogen, and have been knitting with Debbie Bliss Donegal Aran Tweed (never again! It’s been discontinued anyway, but even if it hadn’t been I wouldn’t go near it again – it feels quite soft knitted up but is incredibly harsh to knit with), Kureyon (also quite harsh, but not as bad) and have just started knitting a toy chicken for my nephew in Rowan Felted Tweed (which feels absolutely lovely; I would like to knit more things in this). And I continue to accumulate sock yarn; I was lucky enough to catch a Wollmeise shop update on Friday and am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my two-skein ‘grab bag’ to see what all the fuss is about…

A knitting outing

I met Ysolda! Which was very exciting; so exciting that I completely forgot to take any photos (Edit – but Alabama Whirly has some up – I’m in this one with my back to the camera! Edit(2) – and also in the second photo down on Ysolda’s post, which shows B’s Snapdragon hat beautifully). She was very lovely in person, though, and commented on the various items knitted from her patterns I was wearing (now I think about it, she might have been a bit weirded out by that!), and I managed not to be too overcome with awe or scarily fangirly. I tried on the original Peaks Island Hood and have got to make myself one, because I really liked how it looked. I think it would be good in Rowan Kid Classic, and was half-tempted to pick some up in John Lewis after the event, but I have enough projects in progress or lined up for now I think.

Which is not to say that I didn’t come home with new yarn: the Skein Queen also had a stall there and I seem to have acquired two skeins of Blissful BFL sock yarn:

The one on the left is in Gnatcatcher, an almost iridescent purply-grey with patches of green (it reminds me of mother-of-pearl) which immediately told me that it wanted to be an Ishbel; the other one is called Vampire and may well end up being My Vampire Boyfriend socks. Or maybe something else.

Debbie was also selling little tins (about the size of a lip balm) of stitchmarkers, and I couldn’t resist one with a pair of owls in Wedgwood blue and white. Unfortunately my camera refuses to take a photo of them that’s in focus, so you’ll have to take my word for it that they are very cute.

There was also tea and lots of fabulous cake and a chance to sit and knit and chat, and all in all I had a lovely after all – many thanks to Suzanne and the rest of the jelly team for organising it!

And the I got home to find that the new Twist Collective was up. I think Rover might end up being my nephew’s Christmas present…

I Aten’t Dead

Ooops, it’s almost a month since I last posted here! I have been knitting, but mainly either on Sekrit Projects which can’t be blogged yet or on Imogen, which is going steadily but slowly:

I did finish my Veylas, but it’s been a struggle to find the opportunity to photograph them in decent light. Also, I have yet to get around to blocking them, but as I’ve been wearing them every day I suspect that’s not going to happen until it gets too cold for fingerless mitts:

On the subject of light, I bought a couple of daylight bulbs in an attempt to keep the SAD away. They seem to be working, and have the added bonus of being much easier to knit by than our normal low-wattage bulbs. I spent the afternoon working on the Sock Knitters Anonymous November mystery sock, Miss Marple by Star Athena. I thought this was a golden opportunity to use up some of the half-balls of sock yarn lurking in my stash (an average pair of socks for me uses around 56g of yarn, so I have a lot of half-balls to use up!) and decided to go with purple and teal (possibly more Mrs Pankhurst than Miss Marple!). I’m about two-thirds of the way down the leg and really liking how it looks:

The two colours are quite similar in terms of saturation, but I think there’s enough contrast for the pattern to show clearly, although a bit more might have been better. I like the way the colours work together, anyway. And, as you can see, the daylight bulbs are also really good for taking pictures – the colours in the shot above are much more true-to-life than in this picture of the cuff, taken last week under ordinary fluorescent lighting:

I’ve also been reorganising my stash. If you click through to flickr you can see photos of the more recent acquisitions (also catalogued on my stash pages on Ravelry). It turns out that I have enough handpainted sock yarn to fill a 35-litre storage box. I think that next year I should try to only buy yarn if I need it for presents for other people. And possibly resist the urge to join lots of sock clubs, however lovely it is to get regular parcels of mystery yarn!