January 29, 2007

Darn mistakes.

I JUST DONT FEEL like ripping again. I hate ripping. It should be damned and replaced with magical mistake-fixing elves. Yeah.


/Lene

January 28, 2007

Hats

As can be seen in the previous post - the picture with the iced tree - it is cold here.
So, why not knit a hat?
Hats are a good thing - they can be knitted out of one ball of yarn, or some scraps. They are quick projects and you can go completely nuts with colours, yarns and shapes.

Camerons Cap. The link was in another blog, and I fell completely in love with the pattern.


First try:


Mistake! The short-rowed earflaps are twice as long as intended.

This hat envelopes my whole head, covers my neck, overlaps generously underneath my chin and only lets my nose peek out.


Little blue hat

It fits more like an aviator cap - well, it is too small for me. Maybe for nephew next winter?

Little blue hat from the side

I like this pattern. It looks cute, is quick and yet not boring.

Comparision

The hats are quite differently sized - 104 st. for one, and 84 st. for the other. Double short rows in one, right number in the other. Little i-cord detail on one, and contrast colour detail on the other one.


None of these are quite right. However, I think I can make the big one work by taking out the lower portion and reknitting the earflaps from the top down. Maybe I will just try a third one with 94 stitches. If I dont alter the large one, however, I can throw it out :-/


The pattern is a good one, though, if you bother to read it. It is not for a beginner or faint of heart, as it assumes a great deal. No problem for an intermediate knitter though. Plus that the hats are adorable and very special.


Lots of work

Crumpled mass of handspun yarn

It does not really look like anything, but this beast is over 6 hours of my life, not counting the spinning of the yarn - I CO 624 stitches with the backwards loop CO, and spent a whopping 3,5 hours knitting the first row. I had gotten as far as
row 5, but have to frog back row 5 and 4 because I made two irreperable mistakes in the set-up row. I hate set-up rows. However easy the lace pattern may be, making mistakes is so easy.



Have a really nice day


/Lene

January 26, 2007

Triggerhappy

Autumn
Organ
Snow outside my window
Mountain, Taiwan
Rose
Stream




Have a really nice day.


/Lene

January 23, 2007

Bunching on the bed.


Anyone guess what this is?
Well, spinning fibre is a quite good guess, but it is much more than that. It is two pounds (a kilo) of natural grey angora! It lies in a standard single bed, and is really an enormous amount.

One of my mothers spinning aquintances asked if anyone wanted some Angora, and well - I have always wanted some. Even though I know that I would need a face mask etc. to spin and wear it! I tried to order a pound though her, but it failed and so my mother and I decided to order two pounds on our own to share. Since I live in Denmark where the lady with the bunnies also lives, it came to my door. SO soft. I could roll around in it and it would stick to me everywhere, making me look like a snowman. I know exactly what I want to do with a little bit of it already today, and that is to start on the thrummed mittens I have procrastinated for a long time, thrummed with ANGORA. How much softer can it be?


Lace

I knitted an entire shawl yesterday, as a matter of fact. Now, that may sound impressing, but it really is not, since it is barely 8 inches wide and 5 inches tall including the edge. It was a swatch that got a little out of hand, when I wanted to see how my handspun Humbug yarn would behave with a US4, 3,5mm in lace. It does quite well, as I am pleased to report, so I proceed to cast on 624 stitches for a Three-cornered shawl (pg. 138) in the Victorian Lace Today book. I hemmed and hawed for a long time if I should make it smaller, start from the neck down or make it square. I dont want it smaller because I am not small, it would look lovely square but I do not have the stamina for it, and from the neck down would surely tire me long before I was finished.
I do not have enough yarn for the shawl, but I can buy some differently coloured shetland roving from my mother, so I will be all set for a very long-sighted project. It looks very enjoyable though, and the lace patterns are anything but difficult.


Have a really nice day here from snowy Denmark


/Lene

January 21, 2007

"Victorian Knitting Today"

For those who have read my old blog will now that I am somewhat of an avid, if lazy, lace knitter. With that in mind it surely wont surprise that the book "Victorian Lace Today" has found its way to my hands. Granted, I could not afford it, but my mother is so smitten with the lace bug too, that she ordered it from Amazon.de :-)

I must say, it is amazing!

First off, it contains a lot of little historical bits and pieces. There are wonderfull, wonderfull pictures of historical and other sites from Victorian England, for example King's College Chapel in Cambridge.

The patterns are very appaling, simple and yet very intriguing. Some are knitted up in mohair yarns making them light and fluffy - some are knit up in handspun, or sock yarn, cashmere yarn etc. The colours are bold, the shapes are unusual for today, and the constructions are ingenious. I especially like the large section on simple scarves with wide borders. I learned more about borders by reading this section twice than reading my HK book several times. It is described in such a visual and down-to-earth way, with colour coded charts and all, that modifying edgings, adding insertions etc. seems very easy. The Author really understands her metiér!


Most probably know the book "A Gathering of Lace", which is also a lovely book on lace. The difference between those two is that while A Gathering of Lace has many small-gauged, elaborate, well-thought out, innovatice etc. garments and shawls this book only has vintage/retro clothing style, like the "fichu", a pretty little lace collar, and shawls deciphered from old knitting books that require less skill than A Gathering of Lace, yet have a strong link backwards because of that exact reason.

For a beginner, I would recommend Victorian Lace Today instead of A Gathering of Lace, simply because the Victorian shawls and scarves are easy, yet very effective, and the techniques section is by far better in the Victorian Lace Today book.


Have a really nice day


/Lene

(Who jumps right into Bed. Weekend was hard on little Author of Blog)

January 19, 2007

Link to the scarf pattern

Marianne, I tried to post a comment on your blog with the link to the scarf pattern, but I could not work out how to do it.

I found the scarf here: Avig Maskan".

What I did was to cast on 10 lesser stitches. It worked fine with a bit of in - and de - creasing. The charts are a bit weird, but if you have knitted lace before, you should be able to work your way around the mistakes in the chart.



Have a really nice day


/Lene

January 18, 2007

Håndspundet Hundeuldshalstørklæde























Dette er resultatet af at jeg gik i gang med at lave noget hundeuldsblanding til varme sokker. Varme sokker fik jeg ikke ud af det, fordi jeg i skyndingen fik puttet lammeuld og ikke marskfår med i blandingen! Nå, men spindes skulle det jo, så jeg spandt det ret tyndt - lige som det faldt. Sjovt nok fik jeg ret regelmæssige lyserøde striber.
Nå, men så havde jeg jo et halvstort garnnøgle der duftede ret harskt og var rimeligt stift, men lidt mindre efter vask.

Så fandt jeg en opskrift på en svensk side og blev enig med mig selv om at jeg kunne da starte og se hvor langt jeg kom. Det var så et sidestykke og næsten hele midterstykket. Hvad gør man så, jo man blander og spinder mere, som desværre blev lidt tykkere. Ikke desto mindre passede det helt godt, og selvom jeg gerne ville have været færdig i 2006 blev jeg færdig 15 min. over midnat.

Et meget lækkert sjal, en lidt dårlig opskrift (Som jeg ikke vil linke til pga. kvaliteten), dejligt garn og et dejligt slutprodukt. Jeg kan dreje det en gang om halsen, slå en knude, og det når mig stadig til navlen (Jeg er 183 cm høj). Det holder mig varmt i den værste storm, hvilket jo er ret aktuelt lige nu.


/Lene

Good news

Much better than the long, broken hair! It became so thin when it was long, so I decided to do something about it and get a haircut. This is so much better, that I have (almost) shelved the plans of a 10mm haircut. If/When I go out on my future planned epic bike ride, I will do it to avoid having to brush it... (And wash it quite so often).

Have a really nice day - and yes, crafting happened today, but it was boring and not pictreworthy. And ripped.


/Lene

January 17, 2007

Almost two years


That is for how long this project has been "in the works".
It was a Shetland top, 200 gms, varigated. First it was supposed to be a single, and I spun it all up. Then I added more twist to one skein (a large one). Then I decided that one skein was far too twisty (not the large one), and plied the little one upon itself. The last few days I have added twist to, and plied, the other two large skeins. The large ones are identical by pure happenstance. 400 yards on each and 200 in the small one. Not "incredible yardage", but enough for a hap shawl.. Yeah.


Have a really nice day


/Lene

Danish Joke

Da jeg var på musikskolen i går ville min lærer kopiere nogen noder han havde skrevet ned til os, men kom tilbage med et stort grin på ansigtet og tomme hænder:

Kirkemusikskolens Kopimaskine Mangler Toner!!


/Lene


(A play on words taken from the real world yesterday, untranslateable)

January 16, 2007

You can't be too old for toys.

Especially not those, who appeal to the sense of logic and, by the way, are really good at doubling as squishy toys.
My Aunt, eg. my mothers older sister, has a Quilt Shop (The homepage is terrible, does not work with FireFox, and she knows it because I tell her every time we meet). Update!! One of my friends FIXED it for her!! Well. In this shop, she has lots of fabric, lots of books, and a few funny things. One of those things is an "Impossiblius" (Umulius, in danish). It is a handsewn conundrum. No matter how long you sit and fold the little squares back and forth, they will always reveal a whole side of one of the 6 colours used for the toy. You can fold... fold... fold... fold... It will always show a new face. I have sewn three of these now (A big achievement for a non-quilter). One for my nephew in pale blues and a vivid red, one for my best friend in happy and vivid colours (Both with the 2" block size). Then, I made one with the fabric leftovers in the 1 1/5" block size. There is also a 4" block size, but that one is quite huge.





















I love this toy!

I am also trying to learn how the Blogger Photo Upload works. It threw all my pictures around and made it hard to see the way the Impossiblius changes. If you look closely and have a mind that is able to think logical, you should see how I can fold it in the middle, fold it over the middle, straighten it out and smoosh it together again. If you notice my crappy stitching, just close your eyes - I was watching Tv while doing it. The others are prettier.

Should anyone be interested in also making themselves an "Umulius", it can be ordered by sening an E-mail to Kerstin from their web-page. The instructions are in German, but the pictures are very clear and looking up single words on the net should make it vrey easy to understand. She will also ship from Denmark to keep postage down for danes and other scandinaves. (This little toy started a regular craze in our family, and every female member is now making one / has made one / will make one :-)

Patchwork is fun, as long as it works out as it is meant to do. I am working on piecing the squares for my wolf fabric quilt, and just cannot get triangles and corners to work out. On the other hand, I have sewn most of a gigantic quilt top for my niece - in collaboration with my grandma, aunt and mother. It was perfect: We started late, designing it from scratch. My grandma fell and broke her arm, my aunt came down sick and my mother was as busy as never before. I faithfully paper pieced little houses and trees (And discarded more than one). I sewed tiiny little octagonal stars, and two gigantic octagonal stars. I sewed endlessly long borders on... and was free :-) The others did the applique and quilting, weee heee. I honestly would have thoght them out of their minds if they had asked me to quilt it, too.


Have a really nice day.


/Lene

January 15, 2007

...and she fell in.

The oberservant among you might have noticed that I have not joined the "Knit From Your Stash"-craze. Mainly because it wouldnt last long until I would have to resort to "oddball" projects.

I did, however, add to my (once mighty) stash :-)


"Firenze" yarn

I am planning a striped cotton longsleeved tee out of this, hopefully. There should be plenty of yarn - I have a pound - and the offwhite paired with the dusty blue should not scream "fake sailor shirt" :-O

This yarn is very funny, because is consists of three relatively thick plies of cotton that were plied with a thin sparkly thread, overplied and then plied very loosely with each other. I fear that it might pill, but the tiny swatch I made looks good - and is SOFT. Normally I would have scoffed at this yarn, but I wanted something for the summer that I would actually wear, something pretty and substantial, and besides, this yarn cost only 17,40$ all in all :-)


Have a really nice day

/Lene

Charity Knitting

First, there is a long overdue project (Related to Firefly's Gracious Parcels Project), where I knitted three squares and left another on the needles. They are knitted on the bias to be sure that they are approx. 7". They are not, but I will block them later today if I can keep up this scaring effectiveness. If I cannot make them grow to 7" all, seeing how they are a bit different, I will knit another, bigger square for Firefly and make a pillow cover out of these squares. The yarn is a 90% wool / 10% plastic yarn that was handdyed with walnut, and the needles are my very first sock needles, now converted to short straights by glueing a bead on one end.


I love this colour



A bonus picture:



What the storm did to my house. Luckily, it is not raining through.


Have a really nice day

/Lene

January 14, 2007

Snooze

How much did I knit this weekend?

Not one single stitch.

We were at our local campsite, Tydal, an old farm that was bought by the scouts in the 60's and rebuilt to be a camp site with huts, meeting facilities, and lots of space for tents. It is also really good for all kinds of scout activities. There is a little river right along the edge of the campgrounds, forests etc.

We had so much fun in our rover group, called "Garfield". Of course, we watched Garfield (2, because we watched 1 last time), played with the baby (My nephew), organized some activities for the little scouts (scared the cr*p out of them), ate pizza until we almost puked and discussed how much more it would have to rain before we would have to swim home, seeing how the little river had swallowed an area almost 10 times as wide as it is normally.

Oh! I also found something to try with the yarn I wanted to use for the Aranmor sweater. It is the beautifull red cabled sweater in the Winter IK. Something tells me that I should try to make bust shaping, well maybe, I must see.

Have a really nice day

/Lene

January 11, 2007

Why I Love Blogger

It lets me moderate my comments.

(A tool I only use to filter out my own personal spammer/stalker *laughs*)

/Lene

I'm brown...

I am still carding along on the brown wool, but there is a quite long way to go. I cannot load those fine cards with a whole lot, so I must make lots of little rolls. I take my sweet time with it. I have no idea of how much wool there is, but if there is enough (and my mother lets me use the yarn), I think I will make a Pi Shawl with it, starting with the lightest end.


This is how it looks while I am working with it. Somehow all the little piles of wool look the same colour, but it is certainly not that way in real life.

It looks glorious in my minds eye, a large, round shawl knit out of a yarn that ever so subtely changes into a mid-dark brown colour, a marled yarn where the middle section is almost one colour (it will be a long section I think), the middle will be light (Intentionally, as the rows in the middle are the shortest and will make the most out of my precious few light rolls). It will be self-edging, so no knitted-on edging. I am pretty good at estimating how much yarn I have left and hope to use up every single yard of yarn, making everything out of my precious few dark rolls, too. Maybe I should find a sheep with a darker brown and make some mixed rolls to create a really dark finished edge - the only natural brown fleece I have is coarse and very dark. Bummer. I must see what I can do with the little fleece I have. But now I cannot get the image of a beautifull round shawl out of my head.

To illustrate what a Pi Shawl is:


Blocking


The beautifull and much envied shawl

It hangs on my wall today and brightens up my living room. It is my most favourite and most loved shawl I think, even though I have knitted not a few ones.


Have a really nice day

/Lene

January 10, 2007

Post Overflow

I know this is hilarious.



In the year 2007 I resolve to:
Start wearing panties again.



Get your resolution here.




But it is also hilarious that I am on my 3rd post for today, Ooops!

But there is so much... and this new blog is so much fun.

There are now 16 little rolls of wool (my mother made 5 that came with the wool) on some finnish, incredibly fine-teethed carders a local woman gave us. That said, the rolls are not big. I estimate that I will end up past 50 (eeek) once I have sorted all the wool into 6 bunches of varying colours (six shades between almost white and coffe with a stint of milk). I swear that this sheep must have had polka dots! I would have loved to see that sheep, but since it lives (lived?) in Aus. that isnt going to happen.

I also added twist to a humongous skein of one-ply yarn, and will ply it with another ply of the same yarn when I have added twist to it. I had 200 grams of it and wanted it to be a single, but somehow it became tighter and tighter twisted for each skein, so I sighed deeply and changed plans. (Didnt come easily).

Tomorrow I wont get as much done (or post as much), as I'll go riding in the morning (weee) and in the evening, the guinea pigs and I will take the bus (ewww) home. Normally it would not bother me that much, but I must pack all stuff for scout camp, for organ pratice, and piano, PLUS hay and wood chips for the guinea pigs, their sleeping bag (They are not going to scout camp with me, though ;). All that must somehow fit into my backpack. Having two bags and the pigs in their carry on case is not going to happen.


Have a really nice.. Night!

/Lene

Aranmor is in quarantine.....

...and I am carding brown merino wool.

Lovely variegated - my mother got some untreated natural brown variegated australian merino some years ago, and never really got around to spin it. Then the grease got hard. She cooked it, and the locks were still clumps. So now I am teasing them, carding them... and will see what to do next. Spin, probably. I am having way too much fun seperating the induvidual colours, and am thinking that I might do a long thread that progressively gets darker (if I am organized enough) and ply it with the "just variegated" single my mother has already spun out of it - if it is long enough. If not, I might have to spin some "just as it is" of the fleece and ply with my very organized single.

Have a really nice day

/Lene

As time goes by...

You learn to appreciate your handknits more and more. At least it is that way for me.


Marianne

This pullover was not a favourite for some time because it always needed a cami underneath, but since I found a few right-coloured ones, it is hard to pry this sweater off my body. It is dressy, classic, unique, and the yarn has gotland-sheep character, meaning that it has a little halo (almost like mohair) and does really well when knitted loosely. It IS knitted loosely (My mother told me I was cheating, lol). It has a clean cut, clean lines and good colour. Nice hems and covers my neck.

So, who should be surprised that I want ANOTHER one? Not exactly like this one, though, as this colour of the particular yarn is not nearly as gotland-sheepy as the green/grey (I suspect the white and grey to be natural colours).



More Evilla Yarn, in a colourway best described as "Summer, Sun and beach"

I found a very simple pattern that should bring out the best of the colour changes and the soft, yet rustic yarn.

From Vermont Fiber Arts

I am not going to buy the pattern, but will try to adapt it for a raglan-in-the-round. Yes, I am so predictable.


Aranmor


I *think* That my second swatch has 17,5 or 18 stitches / 10 inches. If I knit the smallest size (117 cm around) I will probably end up somewhere between the middle (126 cm) and the large (134 cm). I would wastly prefer to end up somewhere between the small and middle, though. I am not so into oversized sweaters (I have plenty), and would prefer one that hangs with just a tiny bit of drape - which it wont if I go further down in needle size. I was not aiming for an armour :-)

First sleeve has been started - and frogged! 51 stitches as per smallest size, 4mm/US6 needles instead of 7 - and yet it had 10 inches /24 cm circumference :-0!! I dont want a sleeve where everyone can peek up and see my bare arms. 8 inches / 20 cm would be OK. Here I go then... Frog and re-cast on... Later.

Have a really nice day

/Lene

January 09, 2007

Eh... what?

I measured both squares.

One has 23 stitches, the other 25. They both tell me that they have 17 stitches /4inches?? And 25 rows/10 inches? Yet I can see, by simple comparing, that the square with the 5mm needle and 25 stitches is 4 stitches wider than the one with the 4,5 needle? What is happening? Can't i count?

They dont even look similar - one looks and feels much more dense than the other.I have no idea what happened.

I will let them rest for today and see what happens tomorrow. Maybe the gauge faeries will change gauge on one of the squares?

Have a really nice day

Swatch swatch

Yesss, I am going to make me another sweater! After the sad disaster with the Green-white snowflake sweater ( I still cringe when I think of it, it was so pretty, and then I destroyed it. ), I did not think I would have the mojo to make another sweater for a long time. But oh, how I do!

I made a swatch out of Jaeger Shetland Aran (20% Alpaca, 80% Virgin Wool - where did the Shetland go?), that I got on Ebay.uk for 45$ /pack including shipping to Denmark :) It is a pretty sky blue, and I have a picture somewhere....

Just moss stitch on US8's, but I love this stitch so much, it might almost be considered an obsession. (I even knit my nephews sleeves out of it even though it was about to drive me batty). It looks really good, and if I knit the middle size (126 cm at underarm! wow), I should be able to eke it out of my 10 balls with 186 yards (supposedly), as opposed to the Bainin wool Starmore specifies and that is long unavailible, and that runs 150 yards to the same weight. She is using 11/12 balls, but I also want to modify the neck (It has a ridiculously large neckhole, that just looks mightily silly.

Edit: I knitted another square when the first square on 5mm/8's had a gauge of 16 st/10 cm instead of 19 st/10 cm. The square knitted on 4.5mm/7's hit the gauge exactly - prewashing! Time will show how it behaves when I have washed it. I have heard tales about weird gauge issues with AS (How funny, that's just how Aspergers is written in short: AS) pattern. I might knit it with the loose gauge, or not, because I will, as I am wont to do, knit in it round as long as I can. Edit End


I am sorry, but no picture: I forgot the cam at home! Argh!!


Have a really nice day


/Lene


PS: I have not stopped knitting lace. I just felt the need for a new sweater to comfort me after the previous desaster.

January 07, 2007

Welcome to my new home

Welcome everybody from my old blog, http://www.keepknitting.blogger.de .
It is not as though I were tired of it, but it was very inconvenient - the comments were tedious as they required an (german) registration, and there was a very nasty spammer that the software, no matter how I tweaked it, could not ban.

I am also looking forward to a more easily customized template, and a sidebat where I can finally link my most favourite blogs for everyone to see. There are some incredible, but overlooked blogs out there. Crazy as it might sound, one of those has even prompted me to make a budget and really get a grip on my own life - sheesh, the words say it all, right? MY OWN .... It is nobody elses, so why should they care? Why should anyone but myself (And those I make care because of the way I act and live) care? Uh Oh.. Rant.. *laughs*


Have a really nice day

/Lene