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Image by epSos.de, creative commons licensed.
I’m attempting Knitting and Crochet Blog Week again, this year. Today’s topic is Colour Lovers (3KCBWDAY1), which is quite apt, given that I remarked to Jam recently that one day I would crochet something that didn’t involve cream and green but I didn’t know when that would be. Technically, the giant crochet blanket of doom did not include cream but I immediately launched into the secret blanket I’m working on at the moment which features cream and green as two of the main colours and the the first blanket I crocheted was, yes, green and cream, so I think the balance is firmly in favour there.
Green features in my knitting as well, a quick scan of my Ravelry project page flagged up at least four hats (not all knitted for me), two pairs of socks, a shawl, a pair of baby shoes and a baby cardigan. I just, I like it. It can be so many shades and moods, it’s gender neutral for babies and it makes me happy. I associate it with spring and freedom and outside. And I’m in good company there, Karie is also a green fiend!
Oddly enough though, I haven’t yet made a garment for me in green yet but I doubt that will last long. The full sized garments I’ve made so far have been neutral – Coraline is camel, Owls is dark brown – but I am definitely contemplating something green for the summer.
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Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtag! (“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming”) Or, in this case, the Cthulhu went to the beach, with a friend. T’bf is a geek (see the Dalek Cake) so I made him a Cthulhu using some of the leftovers from my Granny Stripe blanket, using the pattern from Creepy Cute Crochet (a very fun book, although do bear in mind that it uses US crochet terms) and brought it with me to Brighton over the Easter weekend, hence how the Great Cthulhu had a chance to visit the beach.
Oh, and his friend?
A brain slug dropped in from the Brain Slug planet. As you can see, I was briefly occupied but it shortly decided that it would rather stay in Brighton, so it took over control of t’bf.
The brain slug is also made from leftovers from the Granny Stripe and you can find the pattern here. Both Cthulhu and the Brain Slug were very quick to do, although I definitely recommend watching the Cthulhu head and tentacles video in order to get the tentacles right.
Rav Details: Braaaaaains & Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtag!
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With this, I am down to only one active knitting WiP and a historical WiP. It’s quite refreshing! This is Kate Davies’s O-w-l-s, which must be one of the most knitted patterns going at the moment. I started this just before my birthday in late December last year and it was blocked and being worn by February (I appreciated it a lot in the Feb cold snap!) but the Owls remained eyeless until last Friday, when I took it and the buttons down to my local craft shop (the lovely Stag & Bow) for their Friday Night Social. Several teacups of wine later and the majority of the eyes were in place, so I just carried on when I got home.
I knitted size 2 (34 inch), which fits almost perfectly (see structural modification note below), in the pattern yarn (Rowan Purelife Chunky; colourway Mid Jacob), which was a very sheepy yarn. I did enjoy knitting with it but it does need a layer underneath at the moment (I refer to it as my all-seeing hairshirt…) but is getting less itchy with wear. The pattern was very clear and I will use it to make another one in the future, although possibly with a different yoke design. The only structural modification I’ll make next time is to knit another inch or so before the back decreases, just because I have quite a long torso and the pattern as-is does mean I tug at the bottom a fair bit to bring it down to my preferred length – it’s by no means too short but just not quite long enough.
So, this now leaves me with Kate’s Hare and Tortoise Gauntlets (active WiP) and my Cherry cardigan, which has been almost finished since, er, 2010? Perhaps I will finally deal with that one now! Or rush off and cast on for new and shiny things. We shall see. There’s also some crochet FO to post about but they’re gifts that will be given this Friday, so will probably make an appearance here next weekend. And there’s also a crochet WiP that is trundling along but that is also a gift.
Ravelled here: Hoot Hoot!
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Yesterday I spent a happy afternoon dying my fingers blue helping The Make Lounge do a test run on a new vintage style cupcake decorating class (hooray for Twitter!) and by the end I had slightly blue fingers (damn you, Ice Blue paste dye!), six boxed cupcakes (plus one sacrificial cake that was eaten…) and a far better grasp on decorating with butter-cream and fondant icing. Baking is something I enjoy greatly but fancy decorations have always been something I have struggled with and while I am not going to be churning out astoundingly decorated cakes quite yet, I do at least have a few tricks up my sleeve for the future!
The teacher was the lovely Charlotte from Restoration Cake, who was an utter delight – very clear as a teacher (and very giving with her tips and tricks!) and just lovely. We learnt what you need to do to make fondant icing better for decorations, the best butter for butter-cream (Lurpak unsalted!), how to make fondant bows, buttons (must resist buying all the moulds!) and pearls. Plus, playing with paste dyes and edible iridescence paints and glitters.
I’ve done a couple classes at The Make Lounge before and I have always had a fabulous time, so I can certainly recommend poking about their site and taking one of their classes. And I would definitely recommend this one, once it goes live.
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I am pleased! As part of my copious free time, I am tackling the WiP pile. The majority of this blanket has been done since November but as I am known for my loathing of weaving in ends, it mostly got used throughout the winter as a computer blanket without the ends being done and thus no border. But, I sat down this month and wove them in and started the border and now it is done, in all its rainbow glory.
The pattern is a basic granny stripe, I used the one from Attic 42 and also the same yarn, which is a Stylecraft special DK, an acrylic (which for a blanket that has already had tea dripped on it, is ideal) as Lucy from attic 42 had organised a colour pack, which was an excellent price, had a lovely selection of colours and arrived really quickly. I set a colour pattern for the first repeat of the 17 colours but once that was done, I just went for random colours, trying to space them out from previous repeats (although I did stick with the dark pink and light blue together).
It is big enough to cover my double bed, I started with 240 chains – using Carina Craft Blog’s no foundation chain tutorial, which frankly, without that, I probably never would have started – and did three repeats of all 17 colours. The border is also from Attic 42, her granny square border as I liked it more than the one she finishes her striped blanket off with. I did it in four different colours but you can only really see three.
I have about 100 yards of each colour left over, aside from the border colours. I did have to by another skein of the final border colour to finish it off. Also, despite being acrylic, this yarn was a joy to work with. Not squeaky and not harsh to the touch, it has a very soft hand. I’ll def. be using it again.
I am very, very pleased with it. :D
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I have a lot of free time at the moment, due to finishing my last contract at the end of Feb, so when Karie at Fourth Edition released her latest shawl pattern, I was on it like a flash. It’s a very simple yet pleasing knit that I really enjoyed and it took me a week of my copious free time to knit.
Although it is modular, I knitted it without additional repeats, as I only had one skein of the Knitting Goddess Luxury sock yarn (A sock club colourway from 2010 called Icicle) and as it was, I had to finish a cast off with a white 4-ply alpaca. I tend to run out just at the end of a shawl if using one skein, so that was almost certainly an issue on my side.
I’ll definitely knit it again, this time experimenting with the modular nature; I really like the geometric nature of Chart B!
Pattern: Elsinore by Karie.
Rav details: http://ravel.me/halcyonday/3xzwa
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Ah, failure to update both this and ravelry. Thus begins this years resolution to update both more regularly, and so to start, this:
is a new scarf I knit for my dad with an improvised pattern.
My younger brother recently moved to Chicago -FOR SCIENCE- taking with him my dad’s Arsenal scarf. The the one he got for free from the stadium, the one made of the finest acrylics, one he wears to matches and can wave over his head at appropriate moments. This sad loss forced him to buy one of the hideous cheapo ones on sale on the stalls on the way to a game, one for cheap he was forced to wear another scarf underneath to keep warm, and that? That obviously forced me to make him one.
(Helpfully, this was about a month before his birthday, also solving the problem of trying to figure out what to give him for that. And he specifically said that he wanted one, a warm one, when I mentioned maybe knitting one for him.)
The scarf had to be red and white striped (because those are the team colours), warm because it can be pretty freezing up there in the stands), with no obvious right side and wrong side (because it annoys me when scarves have that) or ugly switching of colours (ditto) and also, not be too dull to knit.
The last bit ruled out a stocking stitch tube-style scarf, which would have been the quickest, not wanting to see the purl-colour bump ruled out moss and seed stitch, so I ended up with this, the stupidly warm herring-bone stitch alpaca double-layered scarf.
Things to note:
I used 5.0mm circs, at the upper end of the suggested size for this yarn, and I had to make a point of knitting very loosely. Herringbone makes for a dense fabric without a lot of stretch, and for a scarf, you don’t want it too stiff. I had to undo the first set of stripes because they were just too dense a knit, especially compared to the rest. And I tend to knit loosely anyway!
When I said this was ridiculously warm, I wasn’t kidding. It wraps up really nicely and stays in place pretty well.
The other thing to note is that righthand decreases (k2tog) and lefthand decreases (ssk, k2togtbl) are not exactly symmetrical. This means that the seam on the finished piece will drift slightly. The seam on this is not invisible, though you can fitz with it a little to make it less obvious. SSK is more balanced with k2tog, but slightly slower to knit than k2togtbl, so pick your poison there.
This scarf is knit as a tube, which will have a bit of a twist to it. In practice, this doesn’t make much difference (the scarf still folds flat), but the seam doesn’t stay neatly to one side. It travels across the flattened tube.
Stitch notes
Herringbone stitch in the round:
Row 1: Knit 2 tog, but only drop the first stitch off the left-hand needle, leaving one stitch on the left-hand needle (plus the new stitch on the right-hand needle.
Row 2 As above, but knit 2 tog through the back loop (k2togtbl). You can also ssk, but it’ll be slightly slower.
When you come to the end of the round, you will have to shuffle the stitches a little– remove marker, slip the last stitch held over from a k2tog onto the LH needle to join the first stitch of the next round, K2togTBL, replace marker between the stitches.
If that doesn’t make sense, there are more detailed, nicely photographed instructions over on purlbee.com, which would have been handy for me to find before starting the scarf.
Instructions
This barely constitutes a pattern, not least because I pretty much worked it out on the go. It’s really more of a general guideline that will give you a scarf of appropriate size.
5mm circs, 1 skein each Berroco Ultra Alpaca (roughly 2 x 200m worsted weight yarn).
Cast on 80 stitches on 5.0 mm circs, in Colour1. Join in a loop, being careful not to twist.
Herringbone stitch in colour1 for the next 14 rows.
Change colour. Herringbone stitch in colour2 for the next 14 rows.
Repeat until you’ve almost finished the yarn, or it’s an appropriate length. I like my scarves to be at least as tall as I am.
To finish, you can either cast-off and sew the tube sides together or (slightly neater) you can graft the two sides of the tube together or do a three needle bind off to join the sides, whichever you prefer.
At the bottom, Cast-On end, either sew the sides together or undo the cast on and graft (or three-needle bind-off) the two sides together. Since I had to unpick the starting stripe, I ended up picking up the stitches, reknitting an extra stripe at the base and finishing it with a three-needle bind off.
I also added a fringe, because it’s a football scarf.
In case anyone is curious, I gave it to him before the next match he had tickets for, where we got the winning goal in the 95th minute. I’m not saying that was the good luck caused by my scarf. I’m just saying.
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I have been experimenting with making my own laundry powder as the ecoballs I use for my normal wash are great but can only be used up to a certain temperature and I like to wash sheets and towels on a hot wash, which means using commercial laundry detergent. I am not fond of using that though as they’re often overpoweringly scented (plus additional chemicals, eek!) so I did some googling and after reading a bunch of recipes, the following is the recipe for laundry powder that I’ve used.
Ingredients:
1 bar of Laundry soap (I got Sunlight soap from the lovely Utility in Brighton but any laundry soap bar should work – some people use Ivory soap)
225g of Borax (I got mine at Unpackaged, which is where I get most of my cleaning stuff from – I’m a big bicarb/vinegar fan!)
225g of Washing Soda (I actually got this at Sainsbury’s but Unpackaged has it too!)
(Optional: a couple drops essential oil is often suggested but I didn’t add any as the Sunlight has a lemon scent already)
Cheap grater (to avoid any cheese/soap mishaps!)
Large jar (I used a 1.1l one from Ikea)
Grate the laundry soap – I used the medium side and watched a film while doing it – and then mix the grated soap, the borax and the washing soda together well in a bowl and then decant into the jar.
Et voila! Laundry powder. I’ve tried it out on a load of sheets/duvets and a load of face cloths. They came out clean and with a faint lemon scent (from the Sunlight soap – it has already faded from the towels) and not crunchy – although I did also put a glug of white vinegar in the machine as a fabric softener – so I am pretty pleased with it. I use about 1 tbsp per wash but nothing was particular filthy, so I’d probably use maybe a tbsp more in that case.
Yes, I am knitting my own yogurt, why do you ask? ;)
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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.
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About a year ago I learnt to crochet and turned into a lean, mean granny square making machine but then they lurked, quietly in a bag with possible plans to turn them into a lap blanket that never quite happened. Then, a coworker at my old job announced she was pregnant.
I pulled them and the extra yarn out and set about joining the squares up until I could start crocheting around them. And then I just did that, round and round and around at every given moment until I ran out of yarn. And then I wove in all the ends, something that took me so long that I didn’t get a chance to take a blocked photo before I gave it over to my coworker before she went off on maternity.
The yarn is Rowan Handknit Cotton and it took about 9 and half skeins using a 4.5mm hook. The joining method was Carina’s Craftblog: Granny square joining tutorial.
Day One: It ain’t easy being green