Knits

That’s how I let my mom know I’d arrived. A friend did an enormous favour for me and picked me up at the airport despite her incredibly hectic schedule as she prepares to fly off to go adopt her baby! Knitting for the wee thing is definitely in my future.

Now, not to overload you, I’ll just tell you about two finished objects today and then sometime in the next couple of days we will document the stash additions and books that I’ve managed to collect in two days haha. Well, a lot of it was pre-ordered before I arrived, but it’s now all in my hot little hands.

First off, Clapotis aka The C. Turns out my sister doesn’t know where this blog is (apparently she doesn’t Google my name) so I could’ve just called it by what it is from the start. Anyway, I didn’t get it finished before I arrived. I somehow got a lot of it done though because I thought I was pretty close to the end when I decided to quit dropping the stitches as I went along. In fact, I waited until the end and found out I had hundreds and hundreds of stitches to drop which was no fun whatsoever.

I tried to be sneaky finishing up the last 20 or so rows and my sister went all stealth and caught me. I think it ruined the element of surprise even though when she asked what I was knitting I told her to piss off. =D I finished it up and handed it over without washing it. She likes it and ended up falling asleep with it on and then waking up baking hot. That’s what she gets for being sneaky. I’ll wash it up as it is suddenly giving off that slightly fishy smell silks sometimes do. Yuck.

And I finally finished my Charade socks on the aeroplane. Thank goodness I even brought the first one with me since my mom’s house is like a morgue. I really like these socks. I love the colours in this yarn and despite first appearances, I think I rather like how the pattern and the yarn worked out. I need to write up the full details for both of these projects yet.

I will share one stash enhancement with you. Ava of TwoBlackSheep and I were emailing back and forth and I asked her about a book. She said she had said book and was actually about to give it away to the library, but instead she’d send it to me. How completely generous! So upon arrival at my mom’s I set to opening up all the packages I’d received. There was a rather big box and I thought “Oh god, what did I order and forget about ordering?!” Alas, it was the box from Ava with the copy of Sensational Knitted Socks and this gorgeous sock yarn from an indie shop from her hometown.

 
Yarnsmith’s Casapa

Now, despite my recent post on Knitting Snobbery, I know that for the most part knitters (like all people) are kind and generous. I was completely grateful for receiving a book in exchange for some British chocolates, but to get the added bonus of gorgeous, hand-dyed cashmere and alpaca sock yarn? Awesome. And in the spirit of generosity, if you have been loving Ravelry as much as me and if you haven’t donated already (or can afford to give a little more), there’s a drive to have a whole bunch of donations come in during this Thanksgiving weekend started by an fellow Raveler who’s just very appreciative of what Jess and Casey have given the fibre community. It’s all been kept secret from them and as they’re away, being helpful in another way, they’ll come home to hopefully see how generous a community we really are for a couple of people with a fantastic idea.

Happy Black Friday or Buy Nothing Day (although I think donating is okay for buy nothing day).

My knitting-fu has had a bad week. I started the other Little Cables hat I think four times. Each time I managed to cast-on the wrong number of stitches. And I decided to double up the yarn I was using, but didn’t change the needle size so the resulting fabric was a bit stiff… I decided not to care and then I realised that I’d actually totally messed up so I have to start nearly over again, but I’ll use bigger needles.

I also started the C I dunno, four, five, six times? It just was looking awful around the edges. I figure out a few reasons for this:

1. The yarn was too thin for the needles so I changed those
2. The method of slipping stitches at the edges and how I purled that first stitch turned out to be an issue. I was slipping the stitch and then bringing the yarn between the two needles to purl the second stitch. This was creating a horrible looking bump. I have now (on another item) been bringing the yarn under the needles and voila, no bump.
3. The increases create an ugly bump so I will be doing a different increase.
4. I decided the yarn just wasn’t going to work at all, even with a change in needles.

I’ve decided that, despite the expense, I will get the recommended yarn. It should be here in the next couple of days (I ordered it Friday).

I was determined to finish, or get close to finishing, my second Charade sock this weekend and I was about 1.5 inches into the cuff when I decided to do a comparison with the finished one to see how I was getting on. The heels looked rather different. I started counting stitches and somehow I managed to forgot to decrease EIGHT more stitches before starting the cuff. Argh. It fit of course, but I knew it would drive me nuts and also end up being too big so I had to rip that out. It’s having a time out right now.

And the cardigan, no progress - I seriously have 7 rows on the body and the second sleeve. I gotta do this! However, I wanted something quick and easy (not that stockinette isn’t easy). I got the second part of that in the next project I selected.

The weather has definitely become chilly and I wanted a good, warm scarf to wear since I finally got rid of the store bought one I’ve used the last three years. I chose to knit the My So-Called Scarf in some Debbie Bliss Maya — one of my first yarn purchases. The pattern is dead easy to remember and I don’t really find it fiddley as others have suggested. My problem really is that the only needles I have in the right size are ridiculously long aluminium needles and they’re a bit cumbersome and so slippery that it’s easy to drop stitches off the end. However, I cannot believe how slow this thing is moving! I worked on it a good part of yesterday and today and I’m only halfway through! A single skein of the Maya has got me 30″ of scarf though so a second skein will be perfect leaving me one skein to do a hat or something else with. I do hope that this yarn softens up once washed as it is pretty scratchy. Also, I never knit with red yarn so now I totally understand the difficulty in photographing reds! The colour really is amazing though.

I’ll have to set all these projects aside this week though when another parcel of yarn arrives. My friend bought the Lobster Claw mitten kit from Morehouse Farm Merino and I will actually be knitting the mittens for her daughter. I said I’d get them done for her birthday because I have no concept of time. The birthday is a week from today and I don’t have the yarn and pattern yet (it’s in the post). Oops. Hopefully they go fast since they’re toddler-sized!

 

Hooray! I’ve managed to finish something thanks to lots of time sitting on trains this past week. Okay so they don’t match, but it’s still a pair, no? That’s Anastasia on the left in Knit Picks Memories in Pansy and Charade on the right in Piece of Beauty in Dark Matter. I gave up with trying to use up all the Knit Picks on that sock because I was getting tremendously bored and I still have another sock to do. They’re still rather tall (9″ from the floor) and I have 11 grams of yarn left. Charade are also tall, 7.5″ from the floor, and I wasn’t sure how much yarn I’d need for the ribbing so I stopped the pattern and did the ribbing to find that I could’ve probably added another half-inch. Oh well.

When I finished casting off the Charade, I was so eager to cast off Anastasia that I got right to it. When I had 10 stitches left I realised I’d actually forgotten to do the ribbing hahaha. Ooops. So I ripped out the cast off and finished it off correctly. I can’t find a name for the bind off I used, but it is definitely very good and stretchy for toe-up socks. You k2 as usual, slip those two stitches back to the other needle, k2tog, k1, slip the two stitches back to the other needles, k2tog… rinse and repeat. When the sock isn’t on your foot it flares a bit, but it looks neat and tidy and fits great. Enough details since they’re not really done, heh.

Both of these socks fit really well - they’re snug, but not tight. I now realise that I knit my Saucy socks too loose and I’m somewhat tempted to rip them out and reknit them on a slightly larger needle so I can follow the pattern and have 3 repeats of the pattern horizontally instead of four and not have mismatched toes. Maybe some day.

Other projects? I’m doing a test knit for a cabled hat. I hope to get it done this weekend. I only started this morning and I forgot that cable patterns mean lots of purling - bah. I hate purling so much I might try to figure out backwards knitting.

 
Jaeger extra fine merino aran in peacock — Rowan all seasons cotton in native (it looks tea-dyed and I love that) — RYC bamboo soft in pompadour — Rowan calmer in kiwi (I’m not a yarn sniffer, but Trigger is)
 

I still haven’t finished uploading my pictures from Paris. There aren’t even that many. Hmm. I’ll do that today and post about Paris tomorrow.

I do have a funny story to share. Last weekend my ex-pat friend K came up to Oxford. The plan was to eat, drink, knit, and whinge as needed. We set out to a pub near the river. After walking about 2 miles, we get to the pub to find out it’s burnt down. I don’t know where I’ve been because it’s one of the more famous/popular pubs and it burnt down in May hahaha. Oops. So off we went for another mile or so to this other famous/popular pub that K went to often when she was a student in Oxford about 10 years ago. They’ve done it all up and it’s kind of sad that it’s lost it’s old pub feel — dark, low ceilings, exposed beams, small rooms — it’s now very open and bright.

We had a drink and two women stopped to comment on how unusual it was to see two young people knitting. K said “It’s the new smoking”. I was knitting Charade and they said they couldn’t believe what tiny needles I was using. It was nice to have people stop and compliment us. We then ate and set off back to the city centre. We decided to cut across Port Meadow in an attempt to cut the time it took to get back to town since the next stop was to be the QI Vodka bar for a delicious girly drink.

As we’re about 2/3 across the meadow, the ground started getting a bit squishy. You may have heard about parts of Oxford getting flooded about a month ago. Well this was part of it since it is sort of like an island between the River Thames/Isis and the canal. Now, K and I weren’t really prepared for this type of walk. She was more prepared than me since she had on sneakers and jeans while I was in a just-below-the-knee skirt and mary janes. Water started pouring into my shoes. A bit ick at first since it was smelly and dirty water (there are cows, horses, sheep, all matter of bird life that reside in this meadow). Then the land started looking deceptively solid. We’d take a step and sink to our ankles in mucky water and mud. And then midway up our shins.

This is long, but funny.

I got back from Paris Thursday evening. This will probably send gasps through the internet, but I found Paris only okay. It may have been because I really wasn’t in the best of moods despite trying to be chipper and excited to see the sites of Paris. The Boy was being really moody and that just rubbed off on me since I was already tettering on the edge of moody. It may have also been because, as I believe I said already, Paris has just never been one of those cities that I’ve been dying to visit.

It was good to get away from work (when isn’t it?) and be kept relatively busy so I couldn’t dwell on all the thoughts in my head right now. My feet and legs ached at the end of each day and outside of the first night, I didn’t sleep terribly well as it was rather warm and stuffy in our room, even with a fan on us all night (we couldn’t keep the window open for the sound of traffic and trains was too much for both of us).

I took a sock to knit — Charade — and was very determined to do it two at once, but bad me, only packed one size circular needle and it was too big. I mean, the needle is marked with the same size as the DPNs I used for the same yarn, but of course these things aren’t actually exactly the same and the fabric was way too loose for a sock. So I cast on a toe up sock on DPNs. That is not easy at all, let me tell you. I think I cast on for this sock a good seven times (on both circular, DPN, and combo) before I got it going. The pattern doesn’t quite work with the yarn, but it looks okay. It really needs more of a slip-stitch pattern to show it off, but I didn’t have any patterns with me that had those qualities (I did bring about six to choose from hahaha). I should’ve marked the blog page I found with a list of patterns for pooling yarn (mine isn’t pooling, but highly variegated and I think that page had lots of slip-stitch sock patterns — ring any bells?)

I visited La Droguerie. They have a lot of buttons and beads, and of course, some yarn. There isn’t actually a massive selection of yarn, but I did want to buy some pure linen which is actually impossible to come by here. However, the way the shop works was not conducive to the way I like to shop nor to my inability to speak/understand French. You are not allowed to help yourself to the yarn or beads. It’s easy not to help yourself to buttons since they are behind the counter in lots of little drawers. You can touch, you can pick up the jars of beads and look, but you cannot help yourself. Instead you must queue up to be helped. And as far as I could tell, for each different item, you had to queue in a different place.

It was much like a deli counter minus taking a number. Someone would come help you and pull the beads out for you or take the hank of yarn off the wall. After about 15 minutes browsing and touching yarns, and getting politely told off for picking up the jars of beads as I thought I had to pick them up and take them to the lady to be removed, I decided to leave. I sat outside for a few minutes plucking up the courage to go back in and try to buy the linen. I stood around for 20 minutes and never got helped because there were two people in front of me — one who seemed to be telling her life story to the shop attendant. So I left empty handed. It was too frustrating an experience for me. I do not have patience for that sort of thing. It’s like “I just want one hank of linen. It’s right there. Look I can take it down, you can put it on the scale (they sell it by the exact weight), write up the slip and I’ll be on my way. How hard is that?!”

Anyway, I ordered some yarn before I left to try out different yarns so I’ll actually be swatching. I did also finally buy a ball of Calmer in a colour more appropriate for my sister so I will finally, once again, try my hand at Shedir. I’ll detail the yarn buys later as well as share some pictures of Paris with you as the week goes on. Tomorrow my fellow ex-pat is coming up to Oxford so we can knit, drink, eat, and complain about England. Right now, however, I need to get myself something to eat, fix a flat tire, and go buy some damn groceries. The Boy said using Bailey’s Irish Cream as a substitute for milk in my morning coffee was not an acceptable substitute — me and my ex-pat friend disagree. Alas.