Farewell to Arms

And back and fronts and ... (yes I know it's possibly the worst pun ever!)

Once upon a time I made this cardigan:



It's Foxglove from Rowan 41 and it is a well written pattern and very pretty. I love the colour, the yarn and the softness of the knitted fabric. I even learnt to make crochet flowers for this project.

There's just one hitch. It doesn't fit me, and I haven't really worn it. Essentially it is too big across the shoulders and it has very narrow shoulders so it was always falling off and I always spent far too long adding little buttons and tweaks to hold it in place. To suit me it needed to be double the front width at bust level and structured so that the side fixing was at empire line level; in short, it needed the fit of my Ether wrap (which I love).

Perhaps it is madness, or perhaps it is a sign of growth as a knitter that I took a long, hard look at this cardi ...


...and got out the seam ripper. That's two sleeves, two fronts, a back and a whole heap of crochet flowers.

I haven't frogged the flowers any further but the rest have had a dip with some amphibians. One a side note I found the easiest way to frog was to enlist the help of my captive slave, sorry, I mean willing husband - he pulled out the knitting and at the same time I wound it onto my swift.

All the skeins and mini skeins had a dunk in some warm water and were left to dry.


And now I have this:



Plus a ball and a half that I had spare from the original. The great thing is that I know exactly what this is going to be - the Phyllo Yoked Pullover from Knitting Nature.

I've swatched on the suggested 4.5mm needles and my gauge is a little tighter than in the pattern but I like the fabric much more than the fabric I got on 5mm needles for Foxglove so I'm just going to knit up a size and see how it fits.

My other plan is to knit the body and sleeves in the round and then join everything together for the yoke so that I can keep an eye on the fit and possibly add a little waist shaping along the way. Ideally I want the same sort of fit as my current favourite (shop bought) jumper which was a Christmas present from my in-laws and is loose without being baggy so I'm planning on measuring one against t'other as I knit to get the right fit.

If all goes well I'll end up with a jumper that I love and wear all the time, if not - well I could always frog it!

Hat today, Hat tomorrow?

I have been knitting a hat. It looks like this:

Yes, I promise, it is a hat:

Really, a hat. In fact it is the Nautilus Hat pattern which I found a little while ago on Ravelry. I've been knitting this up over the past few days as H's post-Christmas hat in Rowan's colourscape chunky, colour 432 (Heath), a mixture of red, blue, green and all the purples and browns in between.

H choose the yarn a while ago and hinted that a hat might be nice, but as I couldn't exactly ask him to close his eyes while I pinned a yarn spiral on him to get the measurements right it was never really going to be a viable option for a Christmas surprise.

Without wishing to give away too much about the pattern, you knit a long strip of whatever pattern stitch you fancy and then sew it into a spiral to make the hat. The pattern recommends starting your pinning on a foam head but acknowledges that this isn't necessarily something that we all keep around the house. I went searching for something else similarly head shape and found:

A pudding basin. Just too many jokes about bad primary school haircuts come to mind.

I set to on the winding, although I found it easiest to start the crown flat on the table, and use the basin as a mould when I was spiralling around the head. A little while later I had a pinned sort of hat which I tried on to see how it looked. It did not flatter me. At all. So I called H to try it on. He delicately positioned the voodoo doll, sorry hat, over his head and stood in front of our mirror:

"It's not too bad. What do you think? Maybe 50/100 .... 40 ...... 30...."

At this point we both started giggling and took the hat off and apart as he finished his countdown. Suffice to say that this hat, while a great idea in principle, and fantastic in the other incarnations on Ravelry, looks, on my husband, like nothing so much as a giant multicoloured Mr Whippy ice-cream scoop. It is the picture to go with the caption "Dartmoor walker suffers a slight chill after close encounter with passing Molly Macs van" (and trust me, where I come from, that would be the news)

There is no photographic evidence of the poor boy in his swirling headgear; (a) I want to stay married to him, and (b) it didn't last that long.

As fast as we could remove pins I was back to this:

However, all is not lost. All hail Ravelry because after I spent a delightful half hour perusing the hat patterns and putting the ones that I thought might work into my favourites, H reviewed them and selected the Utopia Hat.

I've done two cable repeats so far and it looks great - gently changing colours and not an ice-cream van within jingle range.

All I can say is THANK GOODNESS I didn't sew it up before he tried it on!

The uninvented hat

Is it determination, perseverance, stubbornness or obstinacy that meant I knit most of a baby sweater when my instincts told me that it wasn't good enough?

Having spent the weekend in careful consideration (and doing a lot of cross stitch) the edict has been issued:


Ribbit, ribbit:


No more baby stripes. It just didn't have the wow factor, and you can buy mediocre from a shop, I don't need to knit it. I am also reassuring myself that it is OK that my secretary, who works with me every day, is getting 2 jackets, and another colleague, who I am friendly with, but who works on a different floor, is just getting the one.

I just need to finish the tip-to-toe outfit for Baby K and the baby knitting will be done. Hurrah.

In feverish anticipation of being able to knit exactly what I want to knit, and not to any sort of timetable, I cast on this:


The Silver Birch hat from Colinette's Arboretum book, which, together with the yarn, was a birthday present from H this year. It seems only appropriate to make it this season's hat (and I have enough yarn to knit a hat to match, but more on that later). It's knit with Tao (in Florentina) and Parisienne doubled up (in Blue Jay). Together they are 'Ariel the little Disney mermaid does classy hat' colour. Seriously, compare the colours of this website to the picture.

The combined fabric is warm and soft and drapey - imagine kid silk haze with a lot more silk - anyone drooling yet.

It was only as I sat knitting away tonight that I noticed that what I am in fact knitting is a very beautiful version of our mystery autumn leaves - who says there's any such thing as a new idea?