Fixing the blog up! :)

Look, crochet! I have achieved slight dominion over that damn hook, thanks to the lovely ladies at Make Do Mend, whose class at the Gallery Cafe in Bethnal Green last week got me over the hump of frustration.

I’m still working on edges as if I’m not crocheting in the round – things go a bit trapezoid! But, after falling into John Lewis (perilously close to work) with one of my fellow librarians – also a beginner crocheter – to purchase some more yarn one lunch time, consulting a few videos about starting the round off, I have become a lean, mean granny square making machine.

I’m not sure what they’ll become yet but I’m enjoying seeing the improvement in shape and tension with each one – perhaps I’ll turn them into some sort of cushion or lap blanket!

How and when did you begin knitting/crocheting? was it a skill passed down through generations of your family, or something you learned from Knitting For Dummies? What or who made you pick up the needles/hook for the first time? Was it the celebrity knitting ‘trend’ or your great aunt Hilda? TAGGING CODE: knitcroblo1

My mom and her mother have always done something with yarn and I grew up with crocheted or knitted blankets – known in my family as Joseph blankets, due to their multicoloured nature – but oddly enough, I never learnt to knit or crochet from my mom or gran. I learnt to knit at Brownies in South Africa for my craft badge but never really got on with it as a kid. I picked it up again when I was about 13 and living in Ireland and knitted a few misshapen garter stitch bag-like things and scarves with random holes in them and then put it down again. Fast forward to age 22, when I moved from Manchester to the Czech Republic for a three month internship. Jam (the silent half of this blog…) had been talking about her knitting and got me interested again, so before I moved, I picked up Stitch & Bitch, some terrible acrylic yarn and some needles and started back down the route of relearning things like casting on in an actual usable fashion.

The first thing to come out of that was a two colour Garter Stitch scarf, which I no longer own and once I’d moved to Prague, I started cheerfully working my way through all the scarf patterns in SnB, particularly because my internship required spending three days a week in a town outside of Prague called Beroun, which meant a commute to knit on in the mornings. I got quite good at knitting related Czech and my knitting grew to involve hats, all done on straight needles because I couldn’t work out circs.

When I came back to Manchester, I kept knitting and moved on to shrugs, wristwarmers and socks and pretty much haven’t looked back since! My gran knitted blanket squares up to her death, although the squares from the year before she passed away show the ravages of dementia more and more and my mom tends to make crochet edged Joseph blankets for members of the family out of the many bags of squares my gran knitted before her death, which I assist with when I go home by sewing up the edged squares into strips.

A selection of early projects:

Blog about a pattern or project which you aspire to. Whether it happens to be because the skills needed are ones which you have not yet acquired, or just because it seems like a huge undertaking of time and dedication, most people feel they still have something to aspire to in their craft. If you don’t feel like you have any left of the mountain of learning yet to climb, say so! TAGGING CODE: knitcroblo2

A skill I aspire to is crochet – as I mentioned above, my mom makes Joseph blankets for the family by doing crochet edging around the squares my gran knitted and sewing them together with one big crochet border and I would like to join her in that endeavour because I like the idea of creating things that have a connection to my mom and gran and my family at large. I’ve just never got anywhere with crochet!

But, I am grasping the bull by the horns and have signed up for a beginner’s crochet class in a couple weeks! I will no doubt report back about that once it has happened.

I’ve been puttering along with my stash bust though. I’m currently knitting a Prairie Rose Shawl in some Malabrigo sock yarn in Botticelli as my commute knitting project and I’ve knitted Ysolda’s Ripley hat (I did the garter band with the closer fitting hat) in some Debbie Bliss Cashmerino aran & chunky for the gift box and a snood out of the remaining aran yarn (although, no photos of that one yet).

I’ve also finished my sewing class and the skirt that I was working on, although I need to trim the threads, wash and iron that before I can take photos. It was really good, actually to just have that safety net of someone else who knows what they’re doing being there. I’m already plotting my next skirt as my flatmate picked up an Amy Butler skirt pattern that is crying out to be made in some accidentally purchased floral cotton. I’m also planning to do some fabric buttons and a new belt for my spring mac.

And today, I started unearthing my rusty embroidery skills by making this feltcraft owl cushion. It took me about an afternoon to finish and some of that was spent youtubing things I couldn’t remember, like, uh, backstitch. My tension was also all out of wack with basket stitch so I ended up finishing the cushion off with a whip stitch.

So, while I haven’t sorted them out yet, I did make something. It was a rather belated birthday present for a fellow crafty librarian, the lovely Jennie Law.

It’s a kilt/shawl pin, with vintage pearls and silver findings. I also busted out some embroidery thread and did some paper embroidery, using a modified image from What Katie Does‘s tutorial but didn’t think to take a photo of that, alas!

The Socktopus Mystery shawl is complete! I did end up casting on again on bigger needles, 6mm this time and that plus the DK-y weight of the yarn means my shawl is huuuuge. But still, lovely!

Clue one of the Socktopus Mystery Shawl

I’ve joined the knit-a-long for Alice from Socktopus’ Mystery Shawl [Rav Link] and up there you can see clue one, in its completed state. I’m knitting mine in Socks that Rock (Heavyweight) in Jaded and I’m loving both the yarn and the pattern. Although, really, I think I should have knitted the first clue on 6mm needles as the StR Heavyweight is very much a DK-y sock yarn but I do like the effect it gives now – and there’s still the blocking to take into consideration.

Hilariously, this is the first time that Jam and I are knitting the same pattern at the same time – we often knit the same things but staggered, so it’s quite nice to be able to compare and contrast as we go, particularly as we’re using very different yarns.

I was on holiday in sunny Cornwall recently and aside from the walking and the constant eating (om nom nom, clotted cream!), I got quite a bit of knitting done. Chiefly, I finished off CosmicPluto’s Milkweed shawl.

It’s an absolutely lovely pattern to knit – I had one or two hitches but it was mostly where I’d missed out an kfb a couple times and tinking back soon fixed that. Mine [Rav Link] is knitted in Fyberspates‘s BFL sock yarn (a very old sock club colourway) and I just made it on yardage – I think I stopped two rows early to make sure I had enough yarn for the bind off.

And as soon as I bound that off, I immediately cast on for the Dream in Color shrug in DiC’s Classy (Go Go Grassy), which I am juuuust about to finish, so I will save that for another post. It’s another very quick and easy knit – ideal for a holiday!

(I am trying to get back on the blogging horse, so there may well be a flurry of posts shortly as I try get into a posting routine again!)

Now that I’m done with academia and work has settled down and the summer actually feels like it’s actually going to arrive, we’ve been spending a lot of time in what passes for the garden – we do actually have bed space as well but it’s still a bit of a mess until we finish dealing with a pest problem.

But I have herbs (although my majoriam hasn’t taken, woe!) and window boxes and shortly, salad leaves!

And because it requires me to do a lot of it outside, new uses for Altoid tins which have involved spray paint and a semi-fruitless trek around various different hardware stores. Further photos to come, once I pick up the remaining bits and assemble the whole thing.

And, of course there has been knitting. Some of these are finished and others are still works in progress. And there’s more works in progress that don’t have photos yet.

I knitted Ysolda’s Ishbel in Lorna’s Laces sock weight but try as I might, the pattern and I just never properly clicked. There are some mistakes in the finished shawl but they’re all ones I’m willing to live with and it’s certainly been used often since I finished it, so it was a success in that sense! The Abby cowl is my commute project at the moment and is also using up some handspun lace weight wool that I bought off Etsy ages ago.

The socks are Mona Schmidt’s Embossed Leaves [Rav Link] from 25 Favourite Sock Patterns. They’re knitted in Sheldridge Farm Ultra in Apple and I <3 them. And the final picture is my Lace Ribbon Scarf, which was another commute knit.

Also on the needles but currently not photographed is Anna Bell’s Cherry, which is knitting along nicely in a plum Debbie Bliss Cathay and Jared Flood’s Hemlock Ring Blanket, which I attended a class for with the lovely Jared himself at Socktopus last week and look forward to having on my lap come Autumn! I’m using Drops’ Alaska in grey for it.

I’ve also been secret squirrel crafty but I can’t post pictures and talk about them until I’ve posted them all off to their respective recipients! Soon though, soon.

Oh, oh dearie me. It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? Er. I moved flat (again, still sharing with Jam), changed jobs (still a librarian but now out of the legal sector) and graduated (Master of Science, baby! Wooooo!) and blogging kind of fell to the wayside for a bit.

I have much more to show but for the moment, I’ll just point at that image there and go bweeee! My Cheshire Cat Stole [Ravelry] is done, blocked and making me grin every time I wear it because the colour is just So Damn Cheerful!

There’s a few more photos of it on my Flickr, plus some photos of the other things I need to post about. Sneak preview, if you will!