I’ve had two skeins of Oxford Kitchen Yarn Sock yarn in Tarnished Gold sitting in my stash for ages. I’d just not found the pattern for them until Fourth Edition released her Karise pattern and suddenly, I knew where one skein would be going!

My Karise (Rav Link) used just over one skein of my yarn – I had to break into the second skein to do the bind off – and I knit four repeats of chart A and three repeats of chart B. Aside from the occasional moment of user error – I was constantly dropping unwanted YOs from beside SSKs that didn’t need them! – it was a fabulous pattern to knit. It’s modular so you can knit as many repeats of Chart A & B as you want/have yarn for. I very much anticipate knitting it again, I definitely want to try it in lace weight!

And the yarn! Well, the colour was gorgeous. It made me smile every time I took it out to knit further and it feels so nice, which is crucial when I have it wrapped around my neck! I am very pleased to see that Katie has opened her shop again and I very much recommend purchasing yarn from her!

All in all, it was lovely to knit something designed by someone I know in yarn dyed by someone I also know. It’s one of the things I really love about being crafty and having friends who are also crafty, sort of a circle of crafty life.

I’m at an awkward stage of crafting with too many things that can’t be photographed until they’re done or less piecemeal but I have spent a couple happy hours over the last weekend making the above cross-stitch. (It’s from Crosstitcher 239). I am not yet sure what I shall do with it – maybe make it into a teabag holder or frame it. But it does make me smile!

You’ll have to excuse the briefness of this post but I original wrote it through the flickr interface and then promptly lost it. And lunch hour waits for no crafter.

My Coraline [Rav link] is done! Hooray! I took advantage of my current copious amounts of free time and the recent sunshine to sit down and knit a lot. The end result being that after some disgruntled cable needle wrangling (I hate cable needles and normally do cabling without one but the smocking required it) I started the smocking yoke and finished it in fairly short order. Then, I blocked it and let it dry (took forever!) and then after a couple attempts at the sewn button loops, I gave up and did self-yarn crochet chain loops using a 2mm hook. About 7 chains for each loop and then reinforced with the sewn in ends.

And, when I haven’t been knitting like a crafty lizard in the sun, I’ve been cross-stitching. Which is probably my original gateway craft. I have picked it up and put it down multiple times over the years but very much am back in the mood for it. I’ve got a plan for some geeky charts brewing but while I work on those ideas, I’ve done some small pieces.

The Lovebirds is a mirror case that came as the free gift with Cross-Stitcher Issue 237 with a few tiny modifications and the other thing is a felt envelope that I made for my Hivemind so she has somewhere to store loose bits and bobs (heh) while she’s stitching – I may have helped get her hooked at the Stitch and Craft show, mwhahahaha! – and uses the chart that came with issue 239 of Cross-stitcher for the label.

Not yet photographed, because I haven’t assembled it yet, is the pincushion from Issue 238. Heh. Must get on with assembling it as it would be trés useful while I am stitching (oddly…)

T’bf is a massive Doctor Who nerd, so while he was tromping around the Doctor Who exhibition in London, I was busily constructing a surprise birthday cake Dalek. Dalek Cake (exterminate! exterminate!) is made out of swiss rolls, icing and minstrels, with toothpicks, tinfoil and glace cherries standing in for plunger etc. and comes from a 1960s episode of Blue Peter.

I had less than an hour to construct him, so everything was shop bought and he had a tendency to fall over (quite hard to get the bottom even) so I am propping him up for the photo. But should you want to make your own Dalek Cake, you can watch the Blue Peter clip online.

T’bf may have squealed, which, you know, job done! :D

Other baking done this weekend, although sans photo, was my first attempt at a cake made with gluten free flour to take along to a housewarming. I’m using Dove Farm’s gluten free flour and their victoria sponge recipe from the back of the package. It didn’t rise as much as I’d expected it to but it was still substantial, very light crumb and didn’t have the gritty texture you sometimes get with gluten free flour and everyone who ate some enjoyed it. Hooray! Recipe behind the jump…

Gluten Free Victoria Sponge
Doves Farm flour recipe

150 g Butter
150 g Caster Sugar
2 drops Vanilla Extract
2 Eggs
5 ml Baking Powder
150 g Gluten Free Plain White Flour
45 ml Milk
45 ml Jam
5 ml Icing Sugar
Method

Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla together until light and fluffy.
Beat in the eggs one at a time.
Beat in the baking powder, flour and milk.
Divide the mixture between 2 oiled and lined 20cm/8″ round baking tins.
Bake in a pre heated oven for 15/20 minutes.
Turn the cakes out on to a wire rack to cool.
Spread jam on top of one sponge and place the other on top.
Dust the top with sieved icing sugar.

Which is a good place to start, actually.

It’s actually even further along since that photo this morning – the sleeve is now halfway done and I’m finishing the last few rows on the back at the moment. Which will just leave me with the sleeves to do and then it’s the yoke and then I’m laughing (and wearing a v. nice cardi.) Hooray!

The finished objects are:

My Cotton Reel Mittens:

[Rav link to original pattern]

Which are also my first colourwork project. I’m quite pleased with them; my tension stayed fairly even through out, I really like the construction but I do think that next time, I’d probably drop a needle size after the start of the thumb gusset as they’re a bit bigger than I like my fingerless mittens to be.

And a stealth ‘must knit that now!’ project, also Ysolda (I’m knitting from patterns I have at the moment!), the Lee hat.

Mine was done in Rico Essential Merino Aran, in blue (Jeans) and Natural. The construction of this hat is fantastic (although fiddly at times) but generally worth it! I’ll almost certainly knit it again in other colours.

The sewing will happen, although probably not for a couple of weekends now, as my next two weekends will be spent somewhere other than my flat/sewing machine. But I do plan to do some prep work for them when I’m home.

Things, things I am making in 2011!

Cotton Reel Mittens by Ysolda, in some of my treasured Sheldridge Farm 3ply, Mash Mallow (yellow) and Pussywillow (grey). These are my first attempt at colourwork and I am enjoying them greatly. The join is a little messy but frankly, they make me smile and they’re my first two-stranded project, so I don’t care.

Also on the needles:

Very exciting photo, of course but that is the start of Ysolda’s Coraline, which I’m knitting in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino, bought in the John Lewis sales last summer. I’m now past the hem (hooray!) and knitting away at it while watching stuff, so I’m not expecting massively instant progress.

Other plans include a cover for the Kindle I’m buying shortly and some goddamn sewing, instead of suffering from Teh Fear of my machine.

Image used with permission of Homemade London

Image used with permission from Homemade London

It was a small affair but lovely, with four other crafty volunteers, we busily tried out all the stitch options on Homemade London’s sewing machines, talked about crafty things, tried our best not to freeze up on camera and discovered that London is ridiculously small for somewhere so big, with mutual friends and ‘I know you from somewhere!’ moments popping up unexpectedly.

We drank tea and champers and ate absolutely gorgeous cakes and generally had a fabulous time. Nicola, from Homemade London is a delight and I can’t wait to go on one of the classes (as a disclosure, volunteering got me a voucher for a class) – Jam has already been on one, the scent class and really enjoyed it but I’ll leave that to her to write about (HINT HINT!) – and it certainly served as an excellent kick in the rear about blogging again!

Which, in related news, you may notice a selection of linklog posts have popped up recently. I’ve been tweaking the settings and have hopefully managed to get it set up to post once a week with all the crafty links I come across while I’m meandering the web. There’s also still a few things I need to tweak on the main layout but hopefully they’ll be sorted shortly.

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.