Knit Nation

So this is where I was this evening…

I’ve had a bit of a hard week this week. I had some surgery to remove a cyst in April and after ignoring increasing pain for over a week, I went to the doctors on Tuesday to find out that the surgery wasn’t successful and my cyst was growing back. Faster than before. I’m on strong antibiotics which are definitely helping but I’ll have to have the surgery done all over again, which makes me unspeakably depressed.

Enough of that.

It’s times like these that knitting really helps me out. It can be incredibly soothing, thought-prokoving, distracting, creatively fulfilling and sense-of-achievement-giving, all at the same time. It’s a repetitive motion that I can do with my eyes shut but I can concentrate on it as much or as little as I feel I need to, in order to take my mind off other things. (although obviously I’m not implying that I frequently knit cobweb-weight lace shawls with my eyes shut whilst thinking of something else. Sadly.)

So I went to Knit Nation today feeling really excited and ready to be completely cheered up, ready to meet people and talk to people and take photos and gather material for this blog, and I epicly failed! I didn’t have any classes today (those are tomorrow and Saturday) so I just went for the marketplace preview. I didn’t buy very much (although what I bought I love; I’ll post about it over the weekend). My main problem though was a giant version of the crushing shyness that I appear to get whenever I walk into to any kind of knitting group! It is incredibly weird because I work as a reference librarian which means my job is meeting and talking to people, and I love it. Anyway. I talked to a couple of people, nervously fired some questions at Ysolda about her new book in the manner of a person with zero social skills, managed to give someone else the impression I was stalking her, and left feeling very awkward.

I also totally to failed to take more than 3 measly photos, all of the Wollmeise stall, at which I didn’t buy anything. The colours were arranged amazingly though. I’ll try and force myself to take more pics tomorrow.

On an unrelated note, here’s what the postman brought me yesterday…

Madelinetosh Sport in Mansfield Garden Party. I’m still thinking it wants to be Audrey in Unst… another version.

Wish me luck in my sock design class tomorrow! Good night.

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Brights

This summer I feel like I’m getting increasingly obsessed with bright colours. I’m currently making Audrey in Unst from Twist Collective in the most ludicrously bright yellow Rowan Cotton Glace (it’s shade 825 which I think is called ‘Buttercup’). It’s so bright that when people see it the main reaction is ‘wow….. yellow.’

Try it for yourself:

There you go, I bet you thought, wow, yellow, didn’t you. And not necessarily in a good way. The more I work on it, the more I feel like I’m making it as a muslin for a more wearable version. This is such a great pattern for sportweight yarn, which I have a lot of, and it doesn’t take that much yardage (just 950 yards for my size, which is a 38 1/2). As a result I have loads and loads of yarn options for another one:

• The recommended yarn, Blue Moon Fiber Arts BFL Sport, in Jasper (purple! what a surprise)
• Blue Sky Alpacas Sportweight in green, a discontinued shade
• Madelinetosh Sport in Mansfield Garden Party (this hasn’t arrived yet. It’s on preorder and I’m obsessing over it.)
• Old Maiden Aunt Alpaca/Silk DK/Sportweight in Strange Rock n Rollers (pinky orange, or alternatively, orangey pink)
• Shilasdair Luxury DK, which I can’t get to be a DK tension, it’s blatantly sportweight, pink, dyed with cochineal:

Decisions, decisions.

The Cotton Glace is not massively easy to work with and I do get the sore wrists and hands that are common with working with cotton. However it is more stretchy in the finished fabric than other pure cottons I’ve worked with such as the now discontinued Rowan 4 ply Cotton.

I’m alternating working on Yellow Audrey with this…

It makes me ridiculously happy to look at it. More on this next time…

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The beginning

I’ve resisted getting a blog for so long but I’ve just finished making something which I feel is worthy of record:

Vali

Yes. It’s a dress. Made of lace. It wasn’t actually very complicated, but I’ve been working on it since Christmas day 2007, so now that it’s finally finished I feel at a bit of a knitting loose end.

Pattern: Vali dress, from Rowan Studio 2, designed by Sarah Hatton.
Yarn: 9 skeins Rowan 4 ply soft, in ‘Victoria’.
Needles: 3.25mm Lantern Moons, in 10″ and 14″ lengths, and some random metal 2.25mms for the sleeve cuffs.

I made quite a lot of modifications to the pattern, which are described on my Ravelry page.

Here’s one more gratuitous lace shot:

It was the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace at the weekend. I went on Friday, having taken the day off work specially but I was a bit disappointed. There was too much stitching and not enough knitting. And everyone else there, who were either old ladies or textile GCSE students, seemed really grumpy. I wore the purple dress but hardly anyone else was wearing knitted creations.

I spent ages at the lovely Knitwitches stall, trying to decide between various different colours, went off for a while to deliberate, got back, picked up the skeins of choice, and then was forced to surrender them to a grumpy Austrian lady who (allegedly) was already in the process of buying them. Grr. I suppose she had come a long way. All I’d done was cross London.

So in the end, all I came away with was an Addi bamboo circular to make my Embossed Leaves socks.

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