Knits

That’s Randy the Ninja visiting Edinburgh. He’s pointing out the Scott Monument. I love that I can now visit Edinburgh as a day trip. It takes about as long to get from my flat to Edinburgh as it did to get from Oxford to London and it’s about 2.5 times as far. And the scenery is approximately a million times nicer. I’ve already planned some day trips to locations between here and Edinburgh for some walks.

I went up overnight actually to take in some of the annual Edinburgh Festivals which includes the most famous of them all, the Fringe Festival. I just wandered around taking in the sites and sounds, people watching. My weekend was somewhat ruined by some bureaucratic bullshit, but also, returning to Edinburgh on my own was probably not wise. It just reminded me of being there in May 2007 with my mom and Kristal knowing that at that time Kristal was holding onto a secret, but never let on. I hope I’ll return again soon and be able to have happier memories there.

The weather was stunning as you can see. I had no intentions of seeking out any yarn shops, but I did accidentally stumble across k1 Yarns where Ysolda works. The shop was already closed, but I spied Ysolda behind the counter tidying up some hanks of yarn. It was like celebrity sighting hehe.

I haven’t finished the socks, but I have cast-on for a scarf. A lightweight, lacy scarf that is going to be giant if I use the whole skein. I’m knitting the Strangling Vine scarf (Rav link), but have skipped the garter edge and will do something along the lines of the Flutter scarf (Rav link) for the ends. I’m using the yarn I got in my pirate/ninja swap — J. Knits Superwash Me Sock — it’s a light fingering weight. There’s no way I could’ve knit socks with this as I knit my socks REALLY tightly and I’d need really, really small needles for this (and considering I tend to knit socks on really small needles already — 2 - 2.5mm — I couldn’t do it). The skein was about 113g and so far I’ve used about 17g and it’s 14″ long unstretched. This thing might be a giant.

It’s just about to go noon and I’m still in my pyjamas. I might actually head back to bed for a wee snooze and then get up to do the domestic things that need doing. Oh it’s a bank holiday here today; I’m not skivving from work.

I had a pretty nice birthday. The Boy turned up on Sunday to take me to Kew Gardens. It turned out to be a rather warm day and I wasn’t feeling great, especially when we went into the greenhouses. I kept getting dizzy and felt a bit faint and was even sweating more than I really should have been. Once outdoors I felt better, but I suspect that I’m trying to come down with something flu-like since I’ve felt a bit off for the last 5-6 days.

If you’re into seeing flowers, well it’s not exactly the right time of year to go, is it? Many things are already dead/hibernating or on their way out, but there was still plenty to see and satisfy my photographic-bug for taking pictures of flowers and plants. And of course there were a lot of large scale sculptures on display throughout the gardens.

Last night, my real birthday, The Boy came up and we went out for a nice dinner all fancied up. I was absolutely stuffed and didn’t even eat dessert which was okay since during the day at work I’d eaten several (small) slices of cake. I did some baking on Saturday and took the results in to work. I made one small Chocolate Zucchini (Courgette) cake and some Pumpkin bread. The chocolate cake was wonderful as always — it’s pretty tough to mess up really since the zucchini keeps things moist. The pumpkin bread, well, something funny happened there. It was definitely thoroughly cooked according to the toothpick test yet when it was unwrapped and sliced the middle sort of melted out! Slightly embarrassing, but people ate it up.

I got a rather nice gift as well as being taken to Kew Gardens and a nice dinner. I was given a digital picture frame pre-loaded with a number of pictures I’ve taken. It’s pretty clever as it allows you to set a timer to turn it on/off and how long each image is displayed. I was also given some chocolates, a british food cookbook (surprisingly little boiled meat ;)), and a Doctor Who book (for children) with the lovely David Tennant in a 3-D hologram on the front. Fellow ex-pat will be jealous.

This morning I had to take Trigger to the vet because she’d injured her mouth over a week ago. She knocked herself into a chair leg rather hard in an excited rush to the door. I knew she’d hit herself hard and after she’d calmed down (initially she ran outside and pawed at her face and then hid under the bed) I had a look and couldn’t see any blood or anything else wrong. It wasn’t until several days later that I noticed her cheek had swollen up. I kept my eye on it and it wasn’t going down so in she went. The vet had to put her under in order to examine her and she’s come away with a number of dissolvable stitches in her mouth (she separated her gums from her lip! OUCH!) and well as a couple of shaved spots where the IV went in and where they made a small incision on her cheek to drain the infected area. Now she’s on anti-biotics for a week and has to return to the vet Friday for a check up. She’s been eating and drinking well and hasn’t really changed her behaviours so it was lucky I noticed her usually pretty profile was looking a bit swollen.

Oh yeah, this is a knitting blog! I’m into the third ball of Noro for the cardigan and I think I’ll definitely be getting another ball when I’m in London on Thursday although I suspect it may be a different dye lot… I may have to go on the hunt for the same dyelot. Nothing else on the knitting front happening, but I may pluck up the courage to frog a number of abandoned projects and free my mind from those weighing on them.

The full set of photos from Kew Gardens is on Flickr.

 

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.

What a good weekend to top off the week of feeling pretty crappy from a cold and exhaustion. My friend came to visit and we went and saw Travis. That makes it three times in as many months that I’ve seen them. I can’t help it! They’re just so freakin’ cute.

I gave her a tour of Oxford. The weather all weekend was hit and miss — rain one minute, bright sunny skies the next.

The Radcliffe Camera and various colleges

We visited a little village to the north of Oxford called Woodstock — it rained pretty much the whole time, but it’s small. I wanted to go to the yarn shop that is listed in the yellow pages… only I couldn’t find it. Turns out it’s been closed for two- to three years! Argh. Oh well. I don’t need more yarn, but I wanted to go in since yarn shops are a novelty for me since they are lacking in Oxford.

The Boy made us dinner Saturday night and today we headed back into London so she could get back on the train to Brussels. We only had a few hours so we just went to Westminster Abbey / Big Ben / Houses of Parliament / London Eye since they are all right there next to Waterloo station. We also met up with a girl we know from the blogging world so that was nice.

I’m off to bed now, but stay tuned for some shots of my new (maybe clever) knitting accessory for socks! Plus a totally cute, girly handmade handbag I bought from a craft fair we stumbled upon!

PS Thank you all for all the nice comments and download of the pattern! If you downloaded it the first day or two it was up, you may want to re-download it as I discovered an error in the chart that must have occurred when I converted it to a PDF (I had to use a different converter to normal) plus a minor error I missed in all the reviewing. It’s all fixed now and as far as I can tell, error free. If you do find an error, please let me know! [And I'll remember to add a last updated date to the PDFs in the future.] Links to the pattern below for your convenience while I continue to revamp this blog (soon they’ll be in the sidebar).

Download the full pattern or the chart-only if you’re more experienced.

I know it really does seem like I’ve fallen off the planet what with the lack of updates and responses to comments, etc., but I’m still here. Last week I was absolutely knackered every evening. I’ve always been a napper, but I’ve recently been in a period where I only tend to take a nap at the weekend rather than when I get home from work so I was a bit surprised to find myself taking one EVERY EVENING last week. I had to force myself back up to eat dinner and stare into space rather than sleep until midnight and then wake up and not be able to get back to sleep. Do you remember that Seinfeld episode where Kramer suggested sleeping for 4 hours and being awake for 6 or something along those lines because he was more efficient? Well, that’s how I am - I need 4-5 hours of sleep and I’m good for about 8 hours.

All of that was way more detail than you needed. I’m obviously still tired hence the rambling more than usual.

With all the sleeping last week, I did very little knitting. In truth part of it is because I am bored as everything I’ve been knitting is in the round with no pattern to it - just an increase or decrease here and there. If I were a faster knitter, I could’ve finished these things. So instead I kept browsing through my Stitchionary: knit and purl v.1 for a pattern for my Sockapalooza 4 pal socks. I cast on and started knitting a sock more with the intention of swatching and trying out a variety of patterns. Since I’ve chosen a very variegated yarn, a slip-stitch pattern would work best. I tried three patterns before deciding on one. I meant to take a picture, but when I was nearly done ripping it out, I realised I forgot to take the picture! DAMN. I’ve decided on the Butterfly pattern - the slip stitch version as I know there is a lace version too. It goes pretty quickly so hopefully I’ll be able to finish them up soonish.

Quick comment on the Stitchionary… it’s a nice book that’s divided into sections of pattern type - e.g. Knit & Purl, Slip stitch, Lace. My problem with this book is that there is no list of the patterns contained in it and there’s 270-something patterns so this is really quite frustrating. I was browsing another stitch pattern book and came across a couple of patterns I liked, but wasn’t sure if they were in the Stitchionary. So what I plan to do, and this is definitely the librarian in me coming out, is create a list of all the patterns in the book so I can reference it. I’ll make it available on this site for others, too.

I’ve finally finished uploading all my pictures from my family visit - a few highlights below.

Rosslyn chapel (yes the one mentioned in The Da Vinci Code — Obligatory shot of Stonehenge — An elephant’s rib cage at the Natural History Museum of Oxford University¹

I also did get some new yarn from the Yarn Chef on Etsy. It’s so scrummy! I haven’t had time to take photos of it or all the yarn my mom and sister brought over for me. The weekend was way too busy and too dark and wet. Maybe it will be bright enough when I get home tonight seeing it’s still light at 930pm these days!

A couple more pictures and I’ll let you get back to your normal lives…

My sister’s (semi-)Kittyville hat and a flower she stuck in it — My favouritest band, Travis who I saw Sunday night in Reading. Oh they are so cute and put on such a great show!

The full set of photos from the family visit are available in a set on Flickr.

Oh and I am almost caught up w/ all my blog reading! I was almost there and then a bunch of new posts hit Newsgator. I will also be catching up on any comments left here!

¹ I will likely make a whole post about this museum as it is my favouritest building ever.

I’m still alive in case anyone wondered. Sorry for not getting to post a “be back soon” message before I disappeared, but I just ran out of time!

My mom and sister came over on the 10th for 10 days. It was the first visit they’d been able to make since I moved here 2.5 years ago. Initially we had a really jam packed schedule, but we rearranged some things to make it less stressful. We still managed to do A LOT and I’ll update a bit on that now and a bit later in the week.

They arrived with this giant bag of stuff for me. I mean GIANT. They packed a SCUBA equipment bag (from another life of mine) with all the yarn and books I ordered plus some miscellaneous food stuffs I missed and various goodies. And the pink converse - yes I got the pink converse. I’ve yet to wear them. I haven’t been able to take pictures yet of all the yarn they brought or the books, but those will come too. I had ordered Favorite Socks from Overstock, but despite it saying it would ship immediately when I ordered it, it was delayed a week and then a month and then cancelled! I can’t find it anywhere right now without a big wait.

I only did a little bit of knitting while they were here on the baby dress / top for my brother and his girlfriend who should become parents in the next month or so. No pictures of that either! I’m really failing at this knitting post thing, aren’t I?

Well how about this instead?

Anne Hathaway’s cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon — Edinburgh Castle and rooftops — Row boats on Lake Windermere

There’s a whole lot more to come and only a small portion of my photos have been added to my Flickr site so sit tight. Meanwhile, this is kind of knitting related, right?

Herdwick lambs - as lambs they’re black, but grow into a more grey coloured sheep!

This post is going to be long and picture intensive so 1. Apologies in advance and 2. Go get a cup of coffee / tea or glass of wine.

I headed north to Durham on the Sunday with plenty of knitting in tow. I made sure I had a variety of things to work on so I could knit depending on my mood. I knit on my socks on the way up - I hadn’t knitted on them since I turned the heel. I didn’t get very far - just one pattern repeat - before I decided to try them on. Folks, I’ve had to put them down, again, because somethin’ ain’t right. This is the first pair of toe-up socks I’ve knit. The pattern is written top-down, but I’ve followed a combination of toe-up patterns to determine what I need to do and where.

Here’s the problem. I cast on and did the toe as described by Misocrafty. I increased to 72 stitches - the pattern is a multiple of 12 - and knit the instep and foot until it was roughly 2″ shorter than my foot. I then followed the recipe for the heel from Nautilis by Anna Bell and the Generic Toe-up sock pattern because it was written in a way that made more sense to me as a novice toe-up knitter. Now, when I stuck my foot in to try it on, the thing was very tight. It could’ve done with a bit longer in the foot as the heel turned out a bit shorter, but it’s not that bad. But around my ankle (the gusset area) it is so tight. None of the recipes said to increase (in fact, the generic pattern says to pick up a few extra stitches to close the gap, but to be sure to decrease those) and that just seems wrong. Maybe I’ve totally misread something? I’d like to see a good side-view picture of a toe-up sock to see what the gusset looks like.

Has anyone reading done a toe-up sock? Did you have this problem w/ the heel/gusset? I can see that I probably need to add in an extra repeat bringing the stitch total to 84, but how? How would I go about increasing from 72 to 84 stitches? It just seems weird to have it go from foot / heel straight into leg without the taper you get doing top-down. Any and all advice is truly appreciated! I like this toe-up sock thing for the most part, but there are things I’ll change the next time around…

Up next, I started the Marigold hat (no relation to Ms Marigold, heh) from Marnie MacLean for my sister. I was nearly done when I realised that I hadn’t remember to bring DPNs to finish the crown. I’d actually tried to knit the hat on DPNs from the start, but I only have aluminium needles in the right size and the stitches kept slipping off. Anyway, it didn’t matter because I was too tired when I was in that second-to-last round of the last pattern repeat and I messed up. I started tinking to fix the mistake, but again, too tired, and I’d dropped the stitches which quickly unravelled the lace pattern and I couldn’t salvage it. Argh. I ended up ripping it out all the way to the band and started it again last night.

I kinda like green… Falling leaves socks, Ms Marigold, Marigold hat — The view from where I sat knitting until my fingers got too cold and I needed lunch

I didn’t actually touch Ms Marigold. And on the train ride home I didn’t knit a single stitch because I’d had two nights of very bad sleep and was feeling absolutely shattered so I dozed the first two- to three-hours and then I think I must’ve just stared into space the rest of the time as I listened to music.

Now Durham is absolutely beautiful. People are enamoured with Oxford and I honestly don’t know why. I guess it’s the history, but in terms of how it looks, well it really isn’t spectacular. I suppose it probably is when compared to the US, again, because of the history. However, the city centre of Oxford is ugly. It’s generic, it has all the same shops as you find anywhere, it’s dirty, it has three pedestrianised areas except that two of them actually allow traffic (one is the bus / taxi route through town and the other is a car park). The pretty bits, the colleges, are hidden behind walls and gates that only University members can enter. The rest of Oxford is total shite. Now Durham, it’s city centre is no different in terms of shops, but it’s buildings are beautiful, it has truly pedestrianised streets and a central square. It has hills and views and river that you genuinely want to walk beside and sit beside that isn’t littered with rubbish and obviously highly polluted. It was stunning. I loved it. It was a cold, wet, grey day and I just kept thinking how much I absolutely loved it and would move there in a heartbeat if I had a chance. It’s still not my preferred place to live (that’s Scotland), but it is so much better than Oxford. So much better. Nicer people, nicer buildings, nicer views, cheaper cost of living, etc.

You can see my full set of Durham photos on Flickr.